Free Pussy

I continue to mull over what gay marriage means to me, and find that so far it means what straight marriage always meant: something I wasn't interested in.  I was there at the Stonewall the night the New York vote went down, and saw how happy lots of people were.  It was peculiar that the crowd was a merging of two very different groups: the drag march had just wound up at the Stonewall, as usual, and by chance pro-marriage people were converging there to wait for the vote -- the crowd of faeries and queers in drag mixed in with the people who wanted to get married.  I was there in one of my better drag costumes, feeling distinctly schizophrenic.  It's always wonderful to be with a crowd of gay people when we get something we want -- recognition, acknowledgment, legitimation.  But like many faeries, I have never felt a need for marriage.  And as a woman, I think that's even more so: since when has marriage ever been good for women?

Marriage commodifies pussy.  Marriage harnesses the free expression of sexuality into a legal structure.  And it's no surprise that the legal structure has always worked in favor of those who made it: for many, many years, adultery was a main reason for divorce, but in practice only the woman's adultery counted.  Have sex outside your marriage, get thrown out -- and lose your children, your property, and any means of support.  So married pussy is never free.

I understand that queers with kids want to get married, but what they want doesn't look very similar to the way I wish to construct my relational landscape.  So I think it's time for a proliferation of terms here: we need to go back in history to an older concept that makes sense out of the different things gay people might want.

Before 1700, in western Europe and America, getting married meant setting up a household: it was a social construction that provided a legal and physical haven for parents, children, relatives, apprentices, and servants.  Living together under one roof, the members of the household worked to make a livable situation: the father was the legitimate head, the wife managed the household, different members made or grew necessary materials (soap, chickens, vegetables, bread, fabric).  Apprentices and servants came to live in a household as children either to work or to learn a trade, and in exchange were supposed to be taken care of.  Unmarried or widowed relatives might join the household and contribute as possible.  It was an economic unit, and it provided social cohesion in the larger world.

Then along came the middle classes, and a new idea that you were supposed to romantically love the person you married.  The self-reliant household gave way to splintered wage labor, the extended household gave way to the nuclear family.  Everything narrowed down: you were supposed to find all your material and emotional sustenance in a tiny nuclear group of parents and children.  The village-like commonality of life shrank behind walls -- in urban London, where it used to be that everyone knew her neighbors' business and much of life was lived in the streets, boundaries arose between "private" and "public": now you were supposed to keep your sexuality in the bedroom.

The one thing that didn't change was gender inequality, so the new form of marriage didn't do much for women.  In fact, you could argue that new rules of respectability made things even harder: women still could not own property or sign a contract, but they were supposed to love their husbands now instead of just tolerate them -- more ideology, more rules of behavior.  And the new system still provided a large sexual arena for men -- prostitutes proliferated, and there were no punishments or opprobrium for men who visited them, while women were no longer supposed to exhibit any sexual desire at all.  Now women were supposed to be "nice," and men got to have sex with prostitutes.

Fast forward to now.

So here's the problem: free pussy.  Many, many people (straight and gay) are falling over themselves to suggest to any gay person in a relationship that it's time to get married -- if you're in that position, count the times you've been asked the question, "So when are YOU guys going to tie the knot?"  This suggests that marriage is assumed to contain sexuality, and that straight people are very anxious for gay people to be as sexually contained as they are.  Marriage is assumed to fix people's sexual behavior like a dead butterfly pinned to a board.

Traditionally, there's one period when people are sexually free: after they become adults, and before they get married (which is supposed to happen after a reasonable amount of playing the field).  It's assumed that women want to get married sooner than men do, and are more willing to give up sexual freedom; and that men are more reluctant to exchange the free bachelor life for the demands of conjugality.  Parent blogs in Park Slope even suggest that women's erotic drive becomes attached to their children after they have them, which means they do seem to be creating the old-style "household" rather than a romantic coupling.  In other words, the sequence of modern life suggests that people might have a short period of sexual freedom, but that it lies outside marriage.  

Dan Savage has tried to address this with his vision of "monogamish" marriage, which attempts to maintain a stable household while allowing both partners to negotiate acceptable external sexual encounters.  Savage's style of marriage probably works better for same-sex couples than it does for straight ones, who have a harder time blocking the world's gender stereotypes.  But what Savage offers is an updated vision of a "household": a stable environment for raising children while acknowledging the real sexual needs of both partners.  None of this does much to challenge the notion that people do best in pairs, as opposed to some other configuration, or that the financial ties that come with marriage may be problematic, or even that health insurance is best conceived of as a perk for married spouses.

Marriage implies that sexuality can be fixed, resolved, channeled, etc.  It implies that this is for the social good.  One of the old arguments about why homosexuality was bad was that gay sexuality threatened marriage and society, that gays couldn't be controlled sexually -- that they would be off having sex in bushes or back rooms, or jumping from lesbian bed to straight woman's bed, etc.  Queers weren't good for the family, and the family was necessary for stable society.

So I'm wondering why so many queers are now jumping on the marriage bandwagon.  Just when it seemed possible to question those old assumptions, we've been derailed by marriage. 

Let's put children aside, because that's a different issue -- maybe it's true that "households" are the best place to raise children, but for those of us who don't have children, the question of sexuality -- free pussy -- is a pressing one.

The right to control our own sexuality keeps slipping away from us: look at the assault on women's reproductive rights in this country (access to abortion and birth control, to non-judgmental sex education and decent health care).  Look at the surveillance on public space, which makes public sex harder.  Look at the gentrification of New York, which means leather bars and clubs are closed and knocked down, leaving little space for those who want to practice any alternative sexuality.

Where's the public discussion that tries to de-couple health care benefits from marriage?  Where is any questioning of the couple as the pre-eminent acceptable relationship?  Why do we want to insist that sex and emotional relationships have to go together -- and that they all have to look the same?

Gay men seem to have an easier time side-stepping the traditional view of sex, so this is a call-out to lesbians: let's talk about free pussy! 

And here's a link to Alexis Pauline Gumb's comments on marriage abolitionism:

http://www.thefeministwire.com/2011/07/27/%e2%80%98keep-your-sorry%e2%80%99-on-slavery-marriage-and-the-possibility-of-love/