Working Arrangement

Tags:: gay marriage,; Justin E. H. Smith

In the end, perhaps the only question that really matters is whether the new marriage employees are happier than the old units of marital exchange. It is of course difficult to take the measure of premodern happiness, but one thing of which we may be fairly sure is that no one of any social class nor, evidently, of any culture, ever placed any significant portion of their hopes for happiness in life in the work of marriage, for marriage was not yet work. Certainly, countless young people throughout the generations have hoped and prayed that fortune would shine on them and they would be blessed with a rich, strong husband, or with a buxom, fertile wife. But this was a question of fortune, not of work, and if one ended up with a lout or a hag for a spouse, this seems to have been interpreted mostly as a matter of fickle fortune, not the mark of an underdeveloped work ethic.

Where then was happiness? In lovers, in extended family, in nature, in God. Today, by contrast, there is an expectation that a stable partnership must be a sine qua non of happiness in general, that if happiness is not flowing from the work of marriage, a life cannot be said to be happy at all. But such happiness is never less precarious than a 401k, and in a world in which marriage is a sort of work, and in which work is conceived as something that we variously succeed or fail at depending on the strength of our characters and the rectitude of our choices—in such a world it is no wonder we find so many people who believe they have, themselves, failed to attain happiness.

And again, it is at just this stage that gay marriage comes to seem such a hopeful thing: marriage, that is, of the people whose very categorization derives from that state of the soul that seems constantly out of the reach of straight married couples. Perhaps, the thought seems to have been, the synecdoche can be transferred, and the advent of gay marriage will usher in a bright new era of happy marriage. But what this thought might miss is that it was precisely same-sex desire’s position outside of the marital work-unit—in a word, gay freedom—that made the label “gay” seem so fitting in the first place.

Gay love, gay sex, and gay relationships used to be countercultural, subversive, and explicitly noncapitalistic. Although not always the rebellious and even criminal act that it was for centuries, gay love has always stood on the margins of the economic contract that is heterosexual marriage. Gay love and sex force us to see another way of being, and history is ripe with examples. There is paiderastia, a fundamentally unequal relationship, a nonpartnership, in which a younger man played bottom to an older man’s top, in the classic pair of contrasting roles of erastes and eromenos, the lover and the beloved. There is the Byzantine institution of adelphopoiesis, literally, “brother making,” which was a sort of spiritual marriage between two men, though which gives us very little evidence of the thing our simultaneously prudish and prurient age takes to be the singular marker of the erotic. And outside of these and other complex institutions through which history leaves us traces, there is always, of course, that broad buffet of sexual activities that was long designated not by a Greek term but by a name deriving from an Old Testament city destroyed by God in his wrath: sodomy, which Michel Foucault famously argued was a mere form of behavior before it was medicalized and essentialized in the nineteenth century into a type of person—the sexual deviant. Without deprecation, we may qualify the forms of expression for gay desire that were available in the West from at least the late Middle Ages until the past few decades as decidedly sodomitical. The bathhouse, the nightclub, the urban park at night: all exist as social spaces where the ordinary bonds and long-term commitments of “real” lives are suspended.

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Fascinating. I'm not sure that you would be able to sustain premodern marriage as a site of non-work for anyone other than particularly privileged males, however. I thought immediately about Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition while reading this essay, specifically her argument that the Western idea of a political sphere in which reasoned debate could take place required its participants to be free from necessity and self-interest, and was thereby dependent on its counterpart, the private sphere, in which women and slaves performed all economic, productive, and reproductive tasks.

This division was explicitly evoked by European aristocrats and early American plantation-owners until the capitalist middle-classes began to challenge the positive connotation of the term "luxury" that was associated with this position (I'm pretty sure I picked up this argument from Harold Perkin's Origins of Modern British Society). This coincided with the idea that women should be able to work outside the home and that slavery was deeply immoral. At the same time, marriage came to be imagined as a place in which work was escaped- the home to which a man could return to for shelter from the necessary moral compromises of the public sphere. So even as it came to be expected that a man would work, his wife was simultaneously required to continue to perform the economic tasks of the household itself and nevertheless understand work as inherently inimical to femininity.

I'm pretty sure all this could be integrated into your argument without fundamentally changing its conclusions, but it does complicate some of the distinctions you make along the way.

Posted by Hodge on Sun 18 Dec 2011
Brilliantly argued and includes some things I have thought about too (in a much less vigorous way) and takes those thoughts much further and weaves them into a fantastic essay. By the way, "donserly light" made me spit the fennel seeds I happened to be chewing all over my keyboard. Bravo!

Posted by S. Abbas Raza on Sun 18 Dec 2011
Gave up when it became apparent that the author had never read any Marx but had just made stuff up. What is the point? Invalidate the whole article on a subject well worth discussing.

Posted by Bob Shepherd on Wed 21 Dec 2011
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE BOTTLE AND THE WINE

Interesting article, but it overlooks a couple of basics, presumably because of looking at the subject through a slightly leftish prisma. In 'pre-civilizational' cultures, like the Cretan and other pre-Greek cultures, which were predominantly 'pastoral', it was woman who was the dominating force in society; as archeological founds show, homosexual activity was then a minor but normal part of human intercourse. With the conquering tribes from the north, a male-dominated society came into being developing into the Greek civilization, in combination with the attempt to 'domesticate' woman - i.e. straight sex - and get her confined to the home and domestic tasks. The institutionalization of homosexuality in Greek culture, also surrounded by taboos which seem odd to us now, probably had to compensate for the restricted type of marriage where women were a 'second-class' being and thus not 'suited' to a more rewarding relationship.

Indeed premodern marriage has been a contract between families and clans, as it still is for instance in Asian cultures, but this does not exclude individual choice, affection, love. The desire to share one's life with another human being on all levels, including the physical, is one of the strongest drives of the species, and in different situations and different periods the form it takes changes. The 'institution' of marriage is not a capitalist vehicle, though it can ALSO be that, but it is the bottle which holds the wine at a particular period and place. People are always, in various degrees, different from the superficial conventions which form the framework of social behavior. Seeing marriage as a political and exploitative form, is missing the point entirely. The modern emancipation of women is a further stage in the development of a more humane and just society, as is the acceptance of homosexuality which is merely a normal and natural variation of human nature. There will be happy and unhappy couples in pre-modern type marriages as can be found in immigrant communities, as in modern western marriages, as in gay marriages, as in ANY type of personal relationship. It depends upon the quality of the relationship as such, and so much less upon the outward form.

The idea that gay marriage would be, in some way, 'undermining' the heterosexual marriage as an 'institution', is absurd: the majority of people wishes a life partner of the opposite sex and will always be drawn towards that form of co-existence. A minority who prefers a same-sex marriage is not taking something away from heterosexual marriage but simply adding an alternative option. And of course there are people who do not want to be married at all, so what? It all changes when the discussion is about children and adoption: then other factors come into play because we are responsible for the next generation of the species.

The fear - from the straight field - for gay marriage is, as can be suspected, rooted in quite another thing: gay men, or partly gay men, entering a heterosexual marriage because of being ashamed or frustrated by their homosexuality, DO undermine their marriage, and this is thus projected as 'gayness' undermining 'the institution'. If homosexuality as such would be totally normalized in society, the taboos surrounding it broken, it would no longer be seen as a 'threat' to the institution of marriage and the decadence which often characterizes 'gayness' would - as an expression of subverted frustration - gradually disappear.

Capitalist exploitation and absorbtion by the market of behavior as a commodity, etc. etc., is a problem on an entirely different level.

Posted by John Borstlap on Wed 21 Dec 2011
nicely done and, indeed, people like to ignore the evolution of marriage in fighting off gays as supposed attackers of a god-given institution. i also have to chuckle when it's a conservative mormon in particular, acting as if marriage in this country had never changed . . .

something like 66% of long-term gay male couples have worked out some degree of openness in their partnerships, from occasional "nights off" to "what happens in vegas" to sustained threesomes and open relationships. that compares with about 15% of married heterosexual couples, and about thirty percent of cohabiting heteros. gays allow each other to have extracurricular fun, it seems, four times more often than do married hets.

so, you're right, sir, in that mainstream marriage is co-opting gay may partnership at its margins. but if gay men have already figured out how to accommodate some degree of openness within "monogamish" partnerships (dan savage's term), might they also pioneer a different model of marriage, one that admits we want the romance, but also some wiggle-room within the exclusivity entailed in "'til death do us part"?

~peace

Posted by adam on Wed 21 Dec 2011
The year of your birth was the year I met My lover Bill. We are still very much together and despite your hostility look forward to the repeal of Proposition 8 in the state of California and the repeal of the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act" (about which you unsurprisingly have nothign to say) nationwide. I also suggest you check out this article on "New York" magazine

http://nymag.com/news/articles/reasonstoloveny/2011/gay-marriage/

Posted by David Ehrenstein on Wed 21 Dec 2011
Interesting article with an interesting perspective. I am not sure I caught the hostility to gay marriage referred to in another comment as much as a general hostility to marriage of any kind. I would note, however, that the concept of romantic marriage at several hundreds of years old is ancient in this time of rapid change. I also wonder how a long essay on marriage can exclude any discussion or even mention of the raising of children?

Posted by Jeff on Wed 21 Dec 2011
J.E.H.Smith writes: "The nuclear family is a recent invention. As an arrangement that, ideally, isolates a man, woman, and a few children within a single, economically autonomous domestic unit, with only casual or symbolic ties to friends and extended family, it does not seem to predate the Industrial Revolution. . ."
He offers no evidence, and ignores evidence we can be sure he knows (in the history of 17th century settlers, Domesday Book, classical literature and the Bible.) Yet more seriously, he writes as if unaware this error fatally discredits his other special pleading

Posted by Don Phillipson on Wed 21 Dec 2011
He was also a closet homosexual.

Posted by Sam Mendes on Thu 22 Dec 2011
Open the Hebrew Bible, which was written at least 2500 years ago and you'll see descriptions of both the nuclear family (although there were also men with multiple partners) and love.

Posted by Carl on Thu 22 Dec 2011
David, I also look forward to the repeal of Proposition 8 and of the Defense of Marriage Act. I believe gay and straight couples should have exactly the same legal standing. At the same time, I am interested in exploring historically and critically why it is precisely *this* standing we are interested in having.

Posted by Justin Smith on Thu 22 Dec 2011
I've been thinking about this essay for a day, mulling it over and correlating it with other essays on modern love and the upheavals in how we structure our lives, notably "A Polemic Against Love" and the recent Atlantic article "All the Single Ladies." As someone living a nontraditional lifestyle, after many years of painful attempts to fit normality, I have particular reason to examine the ways that society forces us to fit a particular mold.

I understand the urge to bemoan the domestication of those who once lived on the wild fringes of life and thus created brilliant, raw art. In a way it is sad to think about turning tortured, misunderstood, gay geniuses into Prozac-taking PTA members with safe, tamed, culturally conventional lives. Maybe today's da Vinci is instead an accountant in Ploughkeepsie, boringly tending to his herb garden while his male partner picks up the kids from soccer. What art might we have lost by allowing him the option of boring domestic happiness?

I prefer to think of it in a more hopeful way. Perhaps rather than safely taming the tortured gay creative genius and turning him into just another grinding cog in the economic machine, the current upheaval can free more conventional breeders to follow their own creative geniuses and loves.

My choice of life partner and father-of-my-child is mine to make now (and not my family's to make for me), and my choice of friends and lovers, and what artistic and creative projects to pursue, is my choice to make now, too. Certainly that is a good thing for me. And call me countercultural, but I also think it's a good thing for society as a whole to loosen up and let people make the choices that work for them without harming others. I'm allowed more space to be creative than many women throughout history, who were stuck at the job of household management with no choice about it one way or the other.

I want a society that allows space for life stability and creative genius to flourish together in any kind of person. Society should not assign the "domestic stability" role to breeding women, and the "wild creativity" role to gay men, and disallow all other combinations.

Posted by dianasquiver on Thu 22 Dec 2011
Interesting article.

However, it misses an extremely important factor at work - Technology.

Technological advances and pervasive mechanization from Industrial Revolution onwards has done two things - creation of surplus goods and reduction in the amount of work to be done by human beings.

The first effect, creation of surplus goods, necessiates creation of a class of consumers willing to gobble up everything churned out by the factories. Right about this time, the notion that marriage should have "passion" and should be based on "love" was given birth to. A marriage where both spouses are "working hard" to keep up the passion and love will remain in "an excited, abnormal and exhausting condition" till they have taken out three mortgages on everything they own and maxed out all their credit cards.

The second effect, reduction in the amount of work to be done by human beings, meant that alternative "work" had to be found out. You see, most people in the world calculate their self-worth and self-satisfaction based on the work they do. So finding "work" for someone is essential. This, in my view, is what gave birth to the idea of a "work-marriage" where both spouses are working on their marriage. Where "chores" of yesteryears like babysitting, dishwashing, eldercare become "work". Quite aside from the topic, the amount of time that people are spending surfing the net, playing video games, texting, talking on phone and on social network sites is clear evidence of the paucity of real work.

Posted by Sameer Gupta on Thu 5 Jan 2012
Who says the younger of the couple is the bottom; there are bossy tops and passive tops where age can be irrelevant or even fluid in relation to roles. And of course this isn't analogous to lesbians.

I lso differ in the notion that gay men are only now comforting straights; they've decorated, mothered, cottled, taught, mentored, coached, and comforted strights with a good meal as long as those emotions have been around.

Posted by dean on Mon 30 Jan 2012
I am sick of the current trendy notion that nuclear marriage is a new unnatural invention. According to historian of medieval Europe Pieter Spierenburg, Europe has had nuclear families since during the dark ages; men left their parents and married couples lived away from both sets of parents. Usually also, the grand parents lived separately from their children even in old age.

Posted by Rose on Sat 26 May 2012