[Crossposted on “Alas” and on “TADA.” Any comments against same-sex marriage should be put in the “TADA” thread, please. –Amp]
Noah Millman is a conservative blogger whose argument against same-sex marriage I’ve occasionally seen cited on discussions of the best anti-SSM arguments (such as this thread on Crooked Timber).
Noah has since changed his mind and now favors marriage equality. Interestingly — especially from a feminist point of view — he now explains his former opposition to SSM as mistaken concerns about manhood — what I’d call gender insecurity. In his anti-SSM argument, he wrote:
How do you explain to an ordinary straight 14 year-old – not explain; how do you build it into his deep assumptions about the world, such that it is second-nature – that he will fully become a man not when he beds his first woman but when he weds her, if we can no longer talk about weddings in terms of men and women, but only in terms of people in love?
Responding to himself, Noah now writes:
There’s no magic man-dust you can sprinkle on yourself, no path of life that will make you a man if you aren’t one. I understand the intentions of the marriage ideology in this regard. Its adherents just want to raise the psychic rewards for being good, for being true, to stand some ideal up against the myriad other false ideas of manhood that seduce young men, ideologies that can be more directly destructive. But the only effective opposition to these false ideas is good people. You can’t make men of these boys by saying: here, do this and you’ll be a man. You can only make men of them by showing them actual men, and giving them the time to learn from them, and from their own experience, how to be one.
I’ve got a son myself. I want him to grow to be a man. I hope to do my small part to teach him what that means, by example. I want him to marry when he already knows he is a man, and ready to make mature choices and assume mature responsibilities, not to marry in order to prove to himself that he’s a man.
I’d like to move away from the ideology of manhood altogether — this idea that we have to teach boys how to be men. Men are the grown-up form of boy; if boys are kept healthy and physically safe, they become men automatically. So unless Noah’s son is transgendered, he will grow into a man.
Framing manhood as something which can be achieved, or not achieved, or lost, is in my view inherently destructive. It teaches those who don’t measure up to common conceptions of manhood — those who are bullied, those who are sexually insecure, those who earn low incomes, those who need help — to damage themselves with self-contempt. It also encourages some guys who are determined to prove their own manhoods to act in destructive and violent ways towards others.
Nonetheless, I admire Noah’s willingness to change his mind for the better.
There’s a lot of gender insecurity in arguments against same-sex marriage. Listening to folks who oppose SSM, it seems like a miracle that anyone grows up to identify as a woman or as a man. Elizabeth Marquardt, for example, argues against equal rights for lesbians and gays because it might lead to changing how birth certificates are worded, which, she suggests, will make it unlikely that children will understand how to be mothers and fathers:
In Spain birth certificates for all children, not just for those raised by same sex couples, now say Progenitor A and Progenitor B. […] Will today’s children be inspired to grow up and be good Progenitors “A” and “B” for the next generation? Or will it all be a little too vague for them to figure out?
This is, frankly, a ludicrous straw to clutch. Heterosexual marriage — and good parenting — existed long before birth certificates. But both Elizabeth’s and Noah’s positions indicate the extreme gender insecurity at the heart of the anti-SSM position. Well, I can relate to that; lots of us grow up with gender-related insecurities. The problem is, anti-SSM folks deal with their gender anxieties by insisting on saddling queer people with second-class citizenship. That’s deeply unfair.
In his current, pro-SSM post, addressing the argument that straight marriage cannot survive without a ban on SSM, Noah writes:
…honestly, if our own marital commitments really did depend on excluding gay people, that would just mean we’ve got a whole lot of work to do in our own corner of things; we can’t ask gay couples to bear our burden for us.
Let’s hope that Noah won’t be the last SSM opponent to realize that.
You’re being awfully charitable, Amp, at suggesting that Noah’s former arguments against SSM make sense. I recommend that you learn from my example and NOT drink a beverage while you read the bit about how a sexually active women in her 20s and 30s is almost certain to contract a fertility-destroying STD, and how women’s fertility falls off a cliff in their 30s. Let’s not even discuss Noah’s sympathy for the argument that when a man gets to a certain age, “any uterus will do” for marriage.
Family Scholars Blog, while often a good place to have a civil discussion, has a terrible problem with intellectual honesty. There is no fact Brad Wilcox cannot bend to try and support his claim that women belong at home in the kitchen, and they do not enforce their own comments policy across the board.
I do agree with your larger point, which is that opposition to SSM is based on gender anxiety; this is David Blankenhorn’s schtick too. Men are manly, women are sweet and feminine and want babies, and SSM just messes that all to hell. If you have two people of the same gender in a marriage, how do you know who does the driving on family vacations and whose job it is to do the dishes? Without the guiding lodestar of separate spheres, they’re lost. Pat Califia also famously pointed out the erotic component to the separate-spheres folks.
Boys do not just automatically become men when they achieve a chronological age. (Nor do girls become women.) Becoming is a process of experience and choice.
I know 20-year old men and women who have stepped up to accept responsibility as parents, soldiers, employees, students, etc., and I know 20-year old male and female humans who still have the psychology and morality of a child.
Successful moral and psychological development is not an automatic process; ovaries mature at 11 or 21 or somewhere in between, and that does happen automatically, but our gender identities are more than our gonads. The ovary or teste may mature on a chemical schedule uncontrolled by man, but the mind/brain a few feet up – you know, the important part of the self – develops both organically from its own interior process and in response to the external world.
What the 11-year old hears, sees, does, matters to the question of what the 21,31,81-year old is.
I didn’t mean to suggest that; I don’t think they make sense at all. (Although I have seen even worse ones.)
There’s a difference between saying that someone must strive to become a morally and psychologically mature adult and saying that they must strive (or else fail) to become a man or a woman. A 20 year old man is not literally a child, no matter how immature he may be. In that sense, he is automatically a man.
If you choose to define a “man” by some criteria other than age, it’s up to you. But there are plenty of people for whom maturity is not gender specific. As a trans person I’m inclined to believe that designation of “man” and “woman” shouldn’t be prizes awarded for mature behavior that is, essentially, gender neutral.
I don’t see why you’re referring to these as two separate groups of people. The opposite often occurs; being burdened too early can often stunt one’s ability to mature in other ways.
The idea that manhood and womanhood are two different spheres is manifestly irrational; if you start with the premise that there’s a level of responsibility and morality that we desire all adults to exhibit, why would this level differ between men and women? Why would moral behaviour be gender-segregated? Why would any form of behaviour (including good parenting) be good and appropriate for male adults but not for female adults, or vice versa? Doesn’t make a blind bit of sense.
Currently, I’m waiting for all these anti-SSM folks to explain to me how exactly the values of marriage and parenthood have collapsed among the 250 million people who live in places that have SSM. You’d think by now they’d be showing us some evidence of their claims, right? I mean, some of those places have had SSM for a while now. Surely if SSM causes societies to gradually collapse due to a lack of gender essentialism, they’d be showing us proof of this by now? It’s almost like they think that places other than Real America (defined as: parts of America that do not have SSM) don’t really exist, or don’t have cultures.
My husband forgot to run an important errand today. Damn you, gay people!
Muahahahahahaha.
I agree with Jay. The whole problem here is that Noah conflates maturity with masculinity. This is a problem, because it makes people think that gay relationships are less adult. Less deep, durable, caring, responsible, thoughtful. It also makes people think that gay men, being less adult in this essential gendered way, may be less adult in all those other ways.
I don’t know if this seems apparent to you at all, Robert, but I think the gay-manchild is a pretty common trope, actually. The idea that gay male relationships are just “mutual masturbation,” if you want to get a little retro about it. Hell, the oft-repeated ex-gay smear about how one simply ages out of the hedonistic gay male community and into sagging, lonely, sexless middle age.
We consider love itself–the greatest of these–to be a sign of mature personhood. To tie it to being a guy or a lady means that people who don’t fit into those templates have less right to claim love, or respect for the loves they feel.
Particularly in the context of the OP – people aren’t worried that their children will fail to age, but that they’ll grow up into something that isn’t recognizable as a “man” or a “woman”, ready to assume male and female roles in a traditional relationship.
Since they equate adherence to gender roles with morality – ie a woman is moral if she is a virgin til marriage*, and submissive after marriage – it’s hard for them to envision what adult maturity and morality look like.
I personally would like to hear fewer parents going on about how their end game is to raise men and women. My parents were pretty focused on THAT, but paid absolutely no attention to teaching me life skills. If anything, their interpretation of my gender caused them to try to limit my development.
*Jessica Valenti’s book “The Purity Myth”
Minor nitpick. Transgender is already an adjective, no need to “adjectify it” by adding -ed onto it. Just like white, black, gay, lesbian and bisexual are adjectives (even if we may sometimes forget to add “person” after the adjective, by using shorthand or slang, it’s heavily implied to be there).
I also find the obsessiveness on raising men or women, as opposed to mature adults without segregated characteristics, to be outdated and often oppressive in even obscure ways (like having low expectations of someone because of their sex (or anything, like say autism) doesn’t prepare them to the high expectations of the world at large, conversely, too-high expectations will drive someone into depression).
My parents weren’t THAT bad thankfully, and it *still* hurt like heck to grow up. Can’t imagine how it would be with conservative religious parents.
Thanks for the nitpick, Schala — correction made.
Any of the “arguments” against same sex marriage make any sense.
let’s be real: there are all base in PREJUDICES. I was ashamed to hear the anti same ex marriage “arguments” of the senators that vote against the law in my country, Argentina. “not natural” “against god’s will” (¿¿¿???) The unnatural thing is to deny rights to someone because your imaginary guru is telling you.
And, come on, if you think gay people don’t deserve the same rights that heterosexuals you are homophobic. Don’t hide behind your religious beliefs!
Luckily, democray won and same sex marriage is law.