Apparently, Carina Kolodny was placed in a time capsule in 1958…
…and it was just opened.
On her release, she appears to have made the happy discovery that gay marriage is here, and that furthermore it will save us in the following manner:
As same-sex couples marry, they will be forced to re-imagine many tenets of your “traditional marriage.” In doing so, they will face a series of complicated questions:
Should one of us change our last name? And if so, who?
Should we have kids? Do we want to have kids? How do we want to have kids? Whose last name do our kids take?
How about housework, work-work, childcare? How do we assign these roles equitably? How do we cultivate a partnership that honors each of our professional and personal ambitions?
As questions continually arise, heterosexual couples will take notice — and be forced to address how much “traditional marriage” is built on gender roles and perpetuates a nauseating inequality that has no place in 2014.
Having just arrived in the year 2014, Carina can be forgiven for not realizing that these are topics about which heterosexual men and women have been duking it out ad nauseam, with great and voluble intensity, in speech and in print, for over fifty years. Despite this, there has been no unanimity or resolution on the subjects, although one can hardly say the issues are the least bit unexamined.
I know quite a few gay and lesbian couples, and I can’t say I ever noticed they don’t fight over the usual things like who will do the dishes and which name to give the kiddies and whose job should take precedence. What’s more, when I studied domestic abuse in grad school I learned that—somewhat surprisingly, since gender differences were originally thought to be part of the impetus—gays even have very similar rates of domestic violence compared to heterosexual couples. We are far more the same than we are different, it seems.
But Carina believes that gay married couples have a magically better approach to the questions she lists, because there will be no gender-based power struggles between them, and their wonderful influence will seep into the lives of heterosexuals and affect them for the better, ushering in the Brave New World of which Carina dreams.
And that’s why Carina has never before admitted that yes, gay marriage will influence straight marriage:
So yes, I told a white lie while soldiering on toward this inevitable outcome. I bit my lip in favor of dignity and equality — not just for the LGBTQ community but for heterosexual women. I have done nothing for which I am ashamed.
…I believe that marriage equality will stomp out the remaining misogyny that you call “tradition.”
And that’s a win, not just for the LGBTQ community but for heterosexual women and the heterosexual men who see them as equals.
Carina Kolodny isn’t a writer for the Onion. She a real live person and she’s very, very serious. What she doesn’t know about marriage—heterosexual and gay—could fill a book. And it probably will some day.
She makes misogyny (her word) look attractive.
ErisGuy:
She makes misogyny look obligatory. 🙂
“So yes, I told a white lie while soldiering on toward this inevitable outcome.”
Wow. What a brave and unexpected move coming from a leftist. She’s got guts.
Maybe next, she can celebrate this victory in an equally unexpected way. Maybe say, by dressing up as a giant vagina.
all new ideas are good ideas. all old ideas are bad ones. you can tell because they have been around for millenia, ergo: bad.
QED
Somebody turn off the Twilight Zone program for once in a life time.
For Marxists, there is only Subject/Object, Reified/Alienated, Oppressor/Oppressed, Normal/Stigmatized – Creation/Destruction.
There can be only one.
Unexpectedly.
Yet another shoddy example of Humpty-Dumptyism (she defines the full dimensions of “traditional marriage” by referring to one ancient English legal doctrine?) and grievance-mongering passing for thought among the feminist Left. It is completely unpersuasive outside the social bubble in which she lives. And of course she presumes herself fit to judge when she isn’t prevaricating. This is arrogance in action; or perhaps just Womyn Privilege.
On choosing family names…
I had college friends who married some years ago who went to Bryce Canyon for their honeymoon. It was beautiful. It was magnificent. It was majestic. It was everything they wanted their marriage to be. So together they decided to change their family name to Bryce, so that they would signal to the world their new identity together.
A mutual friend said, “It’s a good thing they didn’t decide to honeymoon at Lake Okeechobee.”
There are more cooperatives and associations in this world than couples and couplets. Why stop with those two classes? This ignores both the biological and social impetus for marriage. Ironically, the proponents of homosexual marriage are now guilty of arbitrary discrimination. With the normalization of abortion, and corruption of evolutionary fitness, there is no defensible argument to oppose other coupling arrangements.
That said, the material difference between members of any cooperatives is not gender but ego. The material difference between men and women is circumstantial and limited. That does not mean we should morph them into asexual blobs.
I’m in a “traditional” marriage. I’ve stayed home with my children managing that home. I do my husband’s washing, cleaning, cooking and errand running while he works 50+ hours a week. His generous paycheck is deposited in the bank in accounts that all have my name on them. For some reason this uninformed woman thinks this “gender roll” I’ve played has some how resulted in “nauseating inequality.”
She is very confused. If any one is suffering inequality around here it is my husband, not me! I have a fantastic, fulfilling occupation–probably more so the he. The only misogyny I see here is the feelings this woman has for ME and my choices.
Susan, they need women to feel weak and unsupported, so that they can join the Obama cult and hire the fed government as the sugar daddy.
As a feminist, I expect Colodny believes that men should have no right to an opinion on abortion, not having a uterus. I therefore want to know if she is married, and if she is not, I ask her by what right she expresses any opinion on what marriage is or is not or should or should not be.
Do homosexual marriages have any rules on relatedness, as do heterosexual unions? (restrictions such as parent/child, siblings, first cousins, etc.). If so, why?
I have posed this question to many proponents of homosexual marriages but nobody has an answer.
Will homosexual marriage open the door to incestuous couplings?