Women Never, Ever Need to Legally Marry
Who wants to be legally bound to someone who might be an ass?
Women do not ever, ever need to legally marry. Let’s explore why:
1. A lot of women like to marry men because they feel it will make them stay. If you need to make someone stay, they aren’t interested (or aren’t interested for the right reasons, or aren’t acknowledging their interest), and you won’t have their full commitment. Even if they stay in body, they aren’t there in spirit.
(Buy me a coffee)
2. Sure, there are a lot of perks and benefits from the government and society when getting married, but these exist in order to entrap women and make it so we cannot live without being stuck to men. Get help from other community members and family so you don’t need to depend upon the legal marriage.
3. Our set up, in which a woman is financially and socially abandoned when she breaks up with a man, including by his family and friends, and where separated partners are expected to never, ever see each other again, creates an all-or-nothing scenario in which it seems there are dire consequences for breaking up.
The husband can use the excuse that the consequences are dire for him as well (such as “never seeing his children again,” etc), to force her to choose the other extreme option, which is to be stuck- preferably living- with him, giving him constant service so he’s not the one who wants to leave next time.
4. The convention that married partners must live together, in an isolated house, away from other couples, family, and friends, is part of this black-and-white set up, which makes it harder for a person to get rid of a bad partner. Sometimes people do not want a stark, divisive breakup, and would prefer some vague time apart to think things through. Sometimes people work better living apart, even if there are no problems and it’s a good relationship.
The expectation that relationships be on-or-off makes it harder for women to leave because they feel the options are to completely lose access to him forever over what may be only suspicions, or go on being too closely tied to him indefinitely.
Freedom-oriented living arrangements would also discourage abusive partners from feeling “shut off” because victims would be able to gradually step back rather than be forced to officially break up, which abusers may use as an excuse to react explosively.
The current socioeconomic set up also encourages hobosexuality, in which people, consciously or not, shack up with people in order to not be homeless. Our society already encourages this to a small extent, even if most people don’t do it deliberately or as the only purpose for getting together. We encourage children to get married in part so they can weather the burdens of life and share economic resources. However, others deliberately take advantage of this and straight up lie to partners in order to have a place to stay, whether it’s because they are selfish and entitled, or desperate, and truly cannot survive in this economy – or perhaps a bit of both in some cases.
There are actually laws in some US states preventing a certain amount of unrelated adults from living together, even if they’ve paid for the house. (So much for a free economy, right?) Discouraging or making it difficult for people to live with friends, relatives, etc, is a deliberate and contemptible scheme to force women to rely on men upon threat of homelessness and death.
Ditto for being financially tied to him. Capitalism is set up so that people have to “earn” money and goods. Since babies cannot earn goods, therefore, their mothers rely on capitalism – which usually requires a relationship with a man who has a job– to allow their babies to survive. After a difficult pregnancy, a woman might not be able to work, or work as hard. She must also depend upon the man for her own survival.
The economy is set up so that tax benefits, financial arrangements, etc., are much easier for couples than for siblings, friends, and whole communities. Capitalism encourages the monogamous, heterosexual relationship, especially one in which the wife does free, unpaid labor, which allows the man to go off and work for a rich boss and discourages him, or the rich boss, or the economy, from reciprocating her labor.
Considering the fact that it is very difficult to leave a marriage without consequences such as financial abandonment, lack of access to the children, not being survive alone if disabled, and loss of social ties, we can see that marriage actually enslaves women.
In the USA, it was illegal for women to have their own credit card or resist marital rape until well within living memory. Many people who lived under these types of laws, and perhaps even some who authored or upheld them, are still alive and it is naive to think their attitudes aren’t still influencing how society runs, even if things have gotten better on the surface (and it appears even that’s turning around). Regardless of how many laws there are against abusing women, men who hate us will always find a way around them.
5. The assumption is that a married heterosexual couple will be having sex, and that sex always equals PIV (penis-in-vagina), which has the greatest potential of getting the woman pregnant and therefore even more dependent upon the man, legally and also physically if she has a hard pregnancy.
This is a conveyor belt designed to force women into the eventual wood chopper/meat grinder of “sex with a man,” which is often as degrading to her and “beneficial” to him as possible. It also focuses as a kind of barrier door; if you want to be loved and cared for, not homeless, successfully have a child and provide for them, or not be lonely, you have to vow lifelong service to The Dick.
The idea that there even has to be a child in the first place, that it is seen as the ultimate or even only fulfilling thing in a woman’s life, also serves the purpose of getting her to bow down before Dick.
With these types of men, the child also serves as an anchor baby to force his way into the woman’s life.
6. Socially-enforced monogamy is when society only allows monogamous relationships. While both monogamy and nonmonogamy are valid relationship styles, enforced monogamy comes with a host of different societal practices and assumptions that can allow abuse. For example, it can be used to prevent women from comparing and contrasting relationships with different men, leading her to stick with an abuser. Of course, non-monogamy should not include toxic hierarchy, comparing one partner with another, or dumping one partner for a “better” one (those are actually monogamous concepts). People are not interchangeable objects. But it allows someone who is being mistreated to see that there are other ways a relationship can look, and also allows for a wider network of close relationships that can help protect the victim, which is why capitalism and misogyny hate it.
Enforced monogamy also encourages men to ignore, mistreat, and cast off everyone but “the chosen woman.” If you have one favorite, then there is an excuse to treat everybody else poorly, while looking like you are a swell guy for the supposedly Herculean task of being ‘faithful.’ You can also provoke other women to chase you by implying that if they were “the favorite woman,” they would have access to your heart.
You can triangulate women against each other by picking one as the wife and the other as the mistress, and convincing each one that the other is “the favorite,” and hide the fact that the real favorite is yourself.
Enforced monogamy as it currently is allows men to go on having sexually degrading attitudes toward women because it is supposedly a plug to limit those attitudes, which would supposedly be acted upon the masses of women if not stopped up by the relationship with the one worthy woman. No one questions why those urges should be there in the first place or why sexuality should, or even can, be mixed with hatred and indifference.
Enforced monogamy does nothing to say that men should not sexually abuse women; it only states that sexual abuse perhaps shouldn’t, but still can, be acted out upon the multitude of “whores“ (unchosen women) who are juxtaposed with the saintly wife. It naturalizes, even if it is clever enough not to overtly encourage, male sexual degradation of women en masse, by saying that a woman’s qualities – this time her NUMBER - justify this abuse, rather than what she was wearing.
It implies that male sexual deviance is so natural that one need only add multiple women in order to activate it.
Monogamous commitment and marriage serve as a “stamp“ of approval that allows chosen women to appear “better“ than the multitudes of women who were not chosen, leaving the majority of women feeling like crap and thinking they have to earn the man’s approval somehow, or at least find another man who will approve of them. This sends them right back onto the aforementioned meat grinder/wood chopper conveyer belt. Naturally, falling off of (escaping) this conveyor belt is painted as not being picked, and, therefore, a bad thing.
A woman who wasn’t officially chosen by a man actually has a different label (“side piece,” “other woman,” “mistress”…) than one who was chosen, cementing the idea that a man’s interest, even if it’s secretly just for the women’s sexual and domestic labor, literally changes a woman’s identity. This encourages the unchosen woman to believe she is being shut out from what is otherwise a great man and that she is missing out on all this love and commitment, rather than realizing that a man who treats most women like shit isn’t a great guy, regardless of how well he may (appear to) treat one singular partner.
It also allows men to turn into social shutoffs and misers, who now have an excuse not to interact with anybody except perhaps the wife and kids- if even them…
7. “Till death do us part,” sounds like it’s about romance and commitment, but what it really means is that she has to die to escape. Married men live the longest and married women die the soonest. I can’t think of a starker and more obvious proof that marriage is not beneficial to women, and that it is set up for men to leech off of us.
Instead of marriage, let us put focus on bonding with community friends, family, and other relationships. Buy a house with a couple of best friends. Live with a sibling. Build a community with other mothers who all live within walking distance. If you have children, there will be somebody who you know will actually help raise them properly. If the man is interested, and a proper parent, he can always come visit. Even if you do go off to live with him, keep one foot in the original house, so there is always somewhere to escape.
In short, marriage is not beneficial to either sex, but is especially degrading and enslaving toward women, and was deliberately set up this way. The sooner women realize this, the safer we and our children will be.