Post
Modern
Blues
by adrien
rain burke
February 14,
1999
THE ANARCHISTS WEDDING
GUIDE:
11 Reasons
Not
To
Go Through With It
1. The Ceremony
Besides
costing enough to feed a village in
Madagascar, the traditional wedding ceremony
is a
conglomeration of ancient leftovers from
every culture we've destroyed, absorbed,
aped,
or
inherited on the way to our present pinnacle
of enlightenment. The wedding party, the
ring, little things like the placement of
large numbers of ceremonial people around the
altar where the joinery is executed - all
symbols: remnants of forgotten cultural
baggage - much of it quite unpleasant. The
ring - was it originally on the bride's
ankle? All those people - weren't they
really
guards?? Marriage by capture,
marriage by treaty, marriage by arrangement,
marriage by purchase:
it's all there, silent, deadly, in the
"modern" wedding.The gown
is white - for virginity - but the only
virgin
likely to show up at this shindig is the
flower girl. Even in the fifties (which
idealized virgins) a virgin bride was rare.
Now she may actually be in need of surgery.
In fact, most couples have been living
together - very sensibly
- for two or three years, and have decided
under societal pressure to abandon the
ecstasy of illicit love for the mundane and
lasting materialistic joys of joint checking
accounts. But some of the symbolism is more
sinister. The veil, covering and hiding the
bride's face, is a token of the woman's
former submerged status in law. The fact that
she is
"given in marriage" by a male relative
signifies her lack of will. Stripped of its
burden of sentimentality, this is quite
clearly a device by which the ownership of
the female in question is transferred from
her father to
her husband. The starry-eyed, deluded bride
has been
seduced by yards of tulle over satin and
re-embroidered lace (I am familiar with such
details because I used to write stories
for the wedding page) into
thinking she is the Star of the drama rather
than the sacrificial lamb or object of
sale.
2. The
Contract
At
first glance it may seem a very romantic
thing: two lovers so reckless of the outcome
of their passion that they are ready to sign
a contract that neither of them has even
seen. But wait! The author of the document is
not Cupid or Venus, not
their own families,
not even God. This contract my darlings is
drawn up by The State.
But there is more - a
lot more. This contract is subject to change.
Should you decide to visit a less enlightened
country, your status could be reduced to
chattel and your legal rights nil. But you
don't have to go that far - your marriage
contract may be radically
altered if you merely relocate to another
state, and even if you stay put, its terms
are
subject to every political
wind that capers through. For instance, when
I got married, women were quite literally
the legal subjects of their
husbands, even
when the
ceremony didn't include the traditional
woman's vow of obedience to her new lord and
master
(which vow was never imposed on the man of
the house). I won't recount the marriage laws
of that bygone era, but when I got divorced
fifteen years later, all had changed -
radically.
Now it so happens that I approve of most of
those changes - but what if it had gone in
another direction? I would have been subject
to the terms of a contract I'd never even
been consulted on. Outrageous.
3. The License
License to
what???
This may be just another bureaucratic ruse
for getting a $4
dollar fee out of us, but I see no reason
to grant the State the privilege of
permission in this matter. After all, if I
allow them the right to say yes to my choice
of partners, am I not also granting them the
power to say no? And just why does
the State
take such an interest in the intimate lives
of its citizens, anyway? No! I don't want to
tell
them who I'm sleeping with, and I'd be
infinitely happier if I never had to hear
another word about their
sordid, overpublicized sex lives,
thank you!
4. The
Vow
Consider for a moment just the
WORDS: For better or worse? Till death do us
part? A simply-worded questionnaire would
determine just how many people were seriously
prepared to
stay married to an abusive, drunken slob, an
habitual gambler, a victim of multiple
personality disorder. Very few. In fact, you
don't need a questionnaire; just look at the
divorce statistics. But they all take
the oath, because a real oath, one which
allowed for all the sad possibilities still
recited in places where one must show "cause"
to get a divorce, would make a mockery of the
ceremony. The simple fact is that 50% of
those marrying in America today will get
divorced - many for reasons far more vague
and of
less consequence than the sickness and
poverty they solemnly swore to stick through.
That
easy lie cheapens their sacred oath, and
cheapens all of our oaths.
5. The
Name Thing
I don't remember when I
agreed to changing my name on marriage. I
wasn't asked. I
signed nothing to that effect, I'm sure of
it. It wasn't in the ceremony.
But it happened anyway. And the horrible part
is I liked my "maiden" name. It was a nice
name, I liked the sound of it and it
connected me to a large group of people much
friendlier to me than my in-laws. Now I would
back the
almost-lost common law right to change one's
name - but that isn't what happens when a
woman marries. She is quite eradicated, and
to make it worse, her proper name is now Mrs.
John Something, or Mrs
Harold Whatsis. What was so terrible
about her first name that it had to be
submerged under some masculine appellation?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued that this
de-naming of women on marriage was very like
the naming of slaves in the south, who had no
surnames of their own. I am quite adamant
on this point. After thousands of years of
women changing their names when they marry,
it is definitely THEIR TURN.
6.
The Husband
A "husband" is the keeper
of livestock, and I don't have
any.
7.The Morality
Now
don't laugh - morality can be inserted into
any argument on any side: that's the chief
usefulness of morality. Mary Wollstonecraft
argued passionately that the married state
led to immorality. She and her lover Godwin
lived in separate apartments and managed to
produce two children without indulging in
whatever immoral acts she feared might result
from marriage, so she ought to
know.
8. The Divorce
It's
crude to mention it, but splits happen.
When it happened to me, I elected to "do" my
own divorce (which is one of the things
Californians "do" besides lunch). Had my
employer not unwittingly contributed the
copying and the time I spent typing
the forms, I probably wouldn't have saved
much over the cost of a lawyer. Everything
seemed to require at least five copies and if
a sentence was minutely different - not
different in meaning or incorrect in syntax,
just different - from the current form, only
a complete retyping of the form would do. I
had married at fifteen, and all I remember
being asked was whether I did or didn't. Now
here I was at 31 - all grown up and far
better qualified to know my own mind and look
out for my interests; you'd think they'd have
taken my word for it that this
marriage was
history - but no, suddenly the welfare of all
concerned was the intimate business of
government! A "divorce" in my present
situation would require little more than a
packing of bags. No sneaky serving of
summonses, no "petitioning" the court, like a
beggar, rather than an autonomous being. No
legal fees to further encumber the partners.
The
property settlement would be made while one
partner was somewhere else - and probably
would be as fair as many that require a court
date, the serving of papers and a detachment
of lawyers. Justice is no more a function of
present-day law than animal rights are in a
slaughterhouse.
9. The
Children
If a marriage produces
children, just think of the trauma produced
by divorce - especially when the child never
considered the possiblity. Then consider
the trauma produced by the tensions between
bitterly warring
parents who stubbornly will not divorce for
"the sake of the children." Ponder the
trauma produced by miserably mated parents
who would never even consider divorce! You
see? Childhood is traumatic and this may well
explain
the sorry state of the world. Further, most
of us are
the products of this existential trauma, and
our children are destined to
suffer however desperately we try to avoid
it. Even
if we manage to give our children a perfect
and idyllic
childhood - imagine the trauma when they
discover the truth about life. Perhaps we
should instead prepare our kids for the rough
and tumble reality, by letting them know
that, although their parents are delightfully
living in sin, there are no certainties,
except that we will always love them. And
that will be difficult enough when they're
fifteen.
10. A Numerical
Problem
I am very suspicious of any
important list that ends in Ten. Too pat. The
Ten Commandments and the first ten amendments
to the Constitution (the Bill of Rights) both
suffer from a certain ambiguity between the
ninth and tenth items, which has given rise
to a great deal of ridiculous speculation as
to their intent. Clearly, each of these noble
lists should have ended in nine!No, I
will not end this list
with ten just to achieve a round number or
because the human race is endowed with ten
fingers to count upon! To do so may be an
invitation to great mischief. If
you want to memorize my arguments, I
suggest
that 11 is as good a mnemonic device as 10.
Deal with it.
11. The
Romance
In the twenty-three years my
lover and I have been sharing quarters, we've
been asked some pretty silly questions, like
(to HIM) "When are you going to make an
honest woman of her?" To this I take extreme
umbrage; I have not lied about our lack of
marital status (at least, no more than
he has). Or, "Are you afraid of commitment?"
The answer is no, we are committed to staying
together for love - not property, or
convention, or because the State or Church
demands the appearance of fidelity. But the
most important
one that has come up from time to time is:
"Are you afraid of losing the romance?" Well,
I like to think that our relationship could
survive even such a blow as marriage, but
who'd want to take a chance on a thing like
that?
30
The Gay Addendum
I wrote the following addition to the Anarchist's Wedding Guide In response to a paragraph that Justin Raimondo devoted on Antiwar.com to a repudiation of gay marriage.
Thank you, Justin Raimondo, for your timely and pleasantly cynical assessment of the gay marriage controversy! I've been wondering when someone would question the issue – or non-issue – of gay marriage from a gay perspective. As the author of The Anarchist's Wedding Guide I have long looked to my gay sisters and brothers to LEAD, not merely to follow us breeders into wherever that goat is taking the herd.
First of all, most essential benefits of the married state – the visiting rights, the health insurance, whatever – could be acquired (now that you have got our attention) by a simplified civil contract, lacking only the word "marriage" ... and the necessity of the expensive device of divorce to dissolve in a civil manner. It might even be good for us breeders. I certainly don't want to deny anyone the right to visit a dying paramour or to bestow on a beloved partner the benefits of medical insurance.
In spite of all the impassioned arguments made for the right to "real" marriage, the current institution of marriage is in fact a civil contract, cleverly concealed under 35 yards of ivory tulle, and I can prove it: no matter what soulful and saccharine oaths a couple takes, in a gold-encrusted cathedral or homely wooden church, before God, Shiva, or the Holy Goat, the only terms they will ultimately be legally bound by are the ones the state enforces. And those are subject to vast change on little or no notice. The state's contract is not negotiable and it is not sacred; it is the legal instrument expressing the moral standards or biases or toxins of the day.
For those who insist that only the law can make them whole, a great deal of furious flap could be skirted without putting those right-wing Christians' knickers in a twist. If a cheaper, more flexible, and reasonable contract were given legal weight, most of the bureaucratic needs of any couple could be accommodated. And NOTHING could stop them from throwing their own nuptial bash in whatever holy place or country club their consciences or social aspirations demand.
God help me, I never want to be guilty of standing in the way of a great party.
30
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