#anti marriage

[misandresther]

Being strangled for just 15 seconds can lead to an increased risk of strokes, seizures, loss of bodily functions, and potential death days after the incident.

Normalizing strangulation as a kink is harmful. It's putting men's pleasure above women's safety.

[feministfang]

Men keep blabbering about how the real luxury in life is getting married and growing a family and every fool on this planet praises them for thinking like a good family man when the actual fact is having a family of their own is literally only a luxury for these men. It builds their social status, builds their legacy, gives them more credibility in society, makes them the authority figure which gives them a sense of manlihood etc. Whereas for women, it’s all about being a servant, being a sex slave, creating and raising kids only to name them after their useless husbands, receiving endless judgemental remarks from the society, having problems in working environment etc. Having a family is only the most luxurious thing for these men that’s why even the wealthiest men are desperate to find a perfect wife who can give them all of it and that’s why men are so flashy about it.

[bckalleycat]

i never really understood marriage but everyone's enthralled with the idea of it

the only difference between married and unmarried couples are the titles and now there's a piece of paper legally binding you to one another. but outside of that nothing actually changes.

i need a piece of paper to make you commit to me? i need a fancy ceremony to express how much we love each other? you wanna make out in front of our friends and family? no thanks, gag. also you can't testify against your spouse and that kinda gives me blackmail vibes

it's giving yet another capitalistic scheme for cash flow (just like valentine's day) and also it does feel like being leashed and collared. except instead of both the man and woman wearing the collar, it's just the woman. i think i understand where the phrase " the old ball and chain" comes from now (it's plagued me for ages)

[eclecticwordblender]

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A post shared by ⊹ ꜱɪᴅʀᴀ ⊹ (@ninja.mommy)

this video is genuinely so funny because the things she says about the hijab and motherhood trying to be sarcastic are the only two things on her entire page that make sense

[balkanradfem]

I was thinking the other day about how often biblical stories imply that any sort of species can be started with just one and one female of the species, and sells this as the correct (maybe only correct) way to start things. Like Adam and Eve, they're supposed to be the starters of humanity, one (presumably young) male and one again, presumably young woman.

It repeats again with Noah's ark, where two animals of each species are collected, one male and one female, so they could all 'start their species anew'. Noah's family also is presumed to be the regular, one male + one woman, enough to re-start the humanity.

I understand that these stories were written to establish and force the idea of nuclear family being necessary, good and the start of everything, and if you don't think further than 'oh yeah one male and one woman are capable of making a baby' and you stop thinking there, you might be sold with these stories. But if you think about it for a second further, the implications of this are absolutely atrocious.

One young male and a young woman, are never accompanied by their parents or their grandparents in the stories. They're purposely isolated from their families, or are presumed to not even have family, which means none of them has any support, anyone to go to for advice or help, nobody to rely on to do the massive amount of labour of having and raising even one child. This is already where it falls apart, two young people do not have the knowledge, experience or wisdom to raise a small child, alone. They need their mothers, they need their grandmothers, they need elders and community in order to be able to function - first of all tell me who is delivering that baby they're having? Where is her midwife? It's never mentioned how she gets through childbirth in those stories, apparently she just 'figures it out', while in reality birth is dangerous, and women need both emotional and physical support during labour. There's nobody in this story who knows how to deliver the child safely, or how to save one or both of them should the things go wrong. They both have a chance of dying and then the species is dead. This is all ignored and pretended not to be an issue.

So next in the story we're led to believe that these two young people have made a (mistake) baby and are raising it alone and this is fine. Even funnier is that they often first have a male baby, as an effort to repopulate their species, I mean yeah thats gonna do you a lot of good for sure. Two young people of the opposite sex, without any elders, community, family or support, have one significant power imbalance - the male will usually be physically more powerful, while the woman will be more intelligent, resourceful, adaptive, thoughtful, resilient, and infinitely more vulnerable during the times of labour. It has been shown again and again, that in these circumstances, males do not find it appropriate to protect and treasure the women, but they use their physical advantage to overpower and control her, and her reproductive abilities. But in the stories this is 'fine' because she should 'listen' to this dumber, bigger, less intelligent, more aggressive, more demanding, more exploitative, more dangerous, less useful creature who is completely parasitic and depending on her kindness, intelligence, ability to make food, reproductive abilities and sense of forgiveness of his crimes towards her, to survive. Women are apparently just supposed to be hosts for parasitic males, while isolated, not given a way to overpower him except poison, which is then again depicted as 'bad' because she should just resign to live in servitude to the creature if she wants to prove that she is 'good'. This is bullshit.

Let's look at the next stage, where even more disasters await us. So they raised their child, or children, who have only had these two people to look up to, so they've likely picked up the patterns of 'male is to be served or violence happens, women need to keep their head down and obey or the violence happens', and now the children are supposed to repopulate the species. With? whom? This concept relies entirely on incest? With children who have been raised on learning the massive power imbalance? We're supposed to have sisters accept sexual slavery from their brothers at this point, if we want to have a species of humans? The bible is promoting this?

The bible at this point realizes they've fucked up and write down 'well the sons just went to the nearest village to find girlfriends' OH YOU NEED A VILLAGE NOW DON'T YOU? Now you remembered that actually no, you will now rebuild a species without just one male and one woman and in fact, villages are necessary, and your story leads straight into incest and sexual slavery of women. Presumably the women in the village have whole families and not just two people put in this unnatural position of parasitism and power imbalance. But we don't know, we're supposed to remember 'one male + one woman is correct and nothing else is okay', when the concept is fucked up from the starts and they eventually cave and introduce a village, but do it casually like it doesn't really matter and the story totally wouldn't end up in forced incestuous pregnancies and making a mess of human gene pool.

It was so important for the bible to establish, and re-establish this concept because that is the only way for males to be able to isolate, use and control young women. The concept where women don't have their own mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, families, friends, and villages to protect them from abuse, that is the only scenario where one male can sit on his butt, call himself the 'provider' and then raise his voice and his hand whenever she doesn't do exactly as he says. It's disgusting, and there's nowhere else this can go except abuse. Males will never be unwilling to use their physical advantage to hurt and control women, and we've watched it for centuries, they were more willing to kill women than to accept that we have the right to vote,, the right to divorce them, the right to abort at will (they're still more willing to kill us than to accept this right). No woman is safe in an union with one male, without her family, friends, and a network of support. To live her entire life normally, she needs to rely on the knowledge, experience and wisdom of her elders, so she wouldn't have to do everything alone, and learn everything alone. Male, in return, usually learns all the tactics of manipulating and isolating a woman and will use those, so she needs to be ready and have strategies to defend herself, to be able to escape if it comes to that.

And sometimes, even when the woman has all the support in the world, the male still ends up killing her, because he gets a chance to do it, and it's always at the distraught and horror of everyone who loved her.

Thinking back, the concept of nuclear family had to be invented because males didn't feel like they were able to control the women enough. They likely needed to establish this because they noticed that women were able to go on uncontrolled, they were too 'free', too supported, too resourceful to just trap and control. They needed to convince women that the right thing to do was be alone with one male person who just happens to be stronger and that in fact, not doing so is dangerous and wrong. The concept of nuclear family put the control right in their hands where they wanted it, and it's still ongoing, and we're sick of it. It's a trap.

If you don't believe these stories have influenced our views, think about how males sometimes dream up concepts where they're the 'only male left on the planet', in company of the woman who they're interested in. They relish in these fantasies because they believe in that scenario, they're entitled to rape her. She isn't entitled to resist because then she's responsible for the downfall of humanity, for not repopulating the species, and they feel that this responsibility has to fall so heavy on the woman's shoulders that she will not possibly try to resist him. Women still do, women say right away that if they were the last one, they'd kill themselves instantly. Because we know and understand there's no repopulating the planet with just male and one female. There's just female sexual slavery and incest.

Possibly even the story of Adam and Eve is just a fantasy concept of one male who looked at a woman who was able to say no to him, and thought 'well, what if we were the only humans existing. How would she be able to refuse me then'. And he realized she couldn't. So he wrote it down and sold it as the ideal utopia created by god himself. And we've all been hearing his fetish fantasy like it's gospel. And then the rest of the story is focused on how wrong Eve is for resisting the rules of the male, and the even more powerful male god, how she'll be punished for eating a piece of fruit. We should have never fallen for it.

[swagging-back-to]

so more than 50% of marriages end in divorce, the other 50% by death (of which, a considerable amount would be familial homicides. 63% of female homicide victims---killed by an intimate partner--were murdered by CURRENT husbands. 92% by a male they knew.)

70% of divorces are initiated by the woman

60% of divorces are because of infidelity.

and yall still tryna romanticize coupling with males and marriage in general?

[philipkindreddickhead]

Its so strange to see so many pro-marriage radfems.

Like a lot of yall will rightfully mock people who tell women oppression isn't oppression if you just *feel differently about it.*

Then you'll turn around and talk about how you can't wait to someday participate in an institution where men bought and sold women like cattle, keeping women trapped, constantly giving birth, impoverished, raped, abused, worked without pay, and like a host of other subjugations.

And why? Because you just feel differently about it 🥺

[blackpilledkremlintsarina5294]

Governments really cater to people who are married, with kids, than the people who aren't married, with kids. It's unfortunate. I don't wish to bring anyone in this harsh world. It's not worth it, in my honest opinion.

[elisabeta-darling]

RIP wedding dress😂

[certifiedcatgirl]

marriage and patriarchal symbolism

Clare Chambers points to the sexist traditions surrounding marriage and weddings; she writes:

Symbolically, the white wedding asserts that women's ultimate dream and purpose is to marry, and remains replete with sexist imagery: the white dress denoting the bride's virginity (and emphasising the importance of her appearance); the minister telling the husband "you may now kiss the bride" (rather than the bride herself giving permission, or indeed initiating or at least equally participating in the act of kissing); the reception at which, traditionally, all the speeches are given by men; the wife surrendering her own name and taking her husband's.

[misandresther]

[ohheyguyss]

What is this BS I've just seen?

[witchesbeangry]

My music teacher told me he mentioned me in a conversation because I'm learning my instrument real fast. It's true that it's simply because I practice a lot. The response he got was something like

"it must be because she probably doesn't have a husband".

Gotta love the assumption that if I were married I'd dedicate all my free time to my husband, like I wouldn't be able to take an hour a day to practice an instrument, or have any other hobby for that matter.

Reason #9374910 for me not wanting to get married.

[strideofpride]

Oh this whole interview is so good

[neurotypicalabusesurvivor]

In Rome full service sex workers were more respected then being someone's wife. Many women choose to be full service sex workers to escape marriage. Marriage has always been about sexual and domestic slavery of women by men.

The patarachy demonizes sex to protect the social construct of marriage. It demonizes sex work, it demonizes homosexaulity, it demonized pre martial sex, it demonizes none monogamy as these things naturally threaten the social construct of marriage.

Marriage was always about entitlement, and control, it never was about love.

[qwilanikan]

On Marriage in Fandom (with specific emphasis on Good Omens)

I’ve been reading a lot of GO fan fiction recently, and mostly I have been loving it! There are some amazing writers in this community and I’m so grateful to be able to benefit from their time and skill and imagination! But… I have a lot of cognitive dissonance when it comes to shipping Azicrow, and others, and the romanticization that fandoms put on marriage and them being married/husbands.

Some context:  I am a relationship anarchist.  

I wrote another post with more details about what this means to me, including my opinions on marriage as an institution, with a bunch of links to articles and resources if you are interested in digging into this a bit more.

So, I mentioned some cognitive dissonance.  I am pretty obsessed with Good Omens and with Aziraphale and Crowley and their relationship.  But, the fact that they rely solely on each other, does not align with my own values.  I don’t think it is healthy for them to have no other sources of support.  

And, of course there is a lot of discourse about them being ‘husbands’, what with the ‘ineffable husbands’ thing and such. 

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while and felt compelled to try to express after encountering it over and over. Even though there are things about their relationship that don’t align with my values, I gush over Azicrow since they are not real, it’s a fantasy.  I have lifelong friends that I rely on and trust and care about deeply.  And so I can admire that in their relationship.  But once it enters the realm of marriage it gets harder for me.  

I see a lot of idealization of marriage in fandom without reflection or critique.  This is not unique to fandom by any means, it’s ingrained in our socialization.  

I am uncomfortable with so much emphasis on marriage (and hierarchical romantic relationships). I think organized monogamy and rule-based relationships (especially marriage) are about control and ownership, not love and respect and trust.  I don’t find that appealing at all. I wish the focus was on their love for each other, rather than creating a rule-based relationship between them and idealizing that.

I try to suspend my disbelief and just enjoy the warm fuzzies of Aziraphale and Crowley being cute. I love Aziracrow because I see their love and care for each other and their care for the world and humanity.  I want to celebrate that love and I don’t want to imagine that they are trying to control and coerce each other.  I don’t think that supports their love, I think it supports unhealthy systems in our society. 

notes:

* I want to acknowledge that this is not specific to Good Omens.  For instance this has been very present on the OFMD fandom since season two, and is just everywhere all the time.

* I have historically mostly lurked, and consumed fandom, rather than engaging publicly myself.  But this is something that I really care about and I want to be able to discuss. (Please feel free to engage with me about this!)

*I read one fic, (To reveal my heart in ink by chaoticlivi), which I loved. And something that I really appreciated about this fic is that even though Az and Crowley’s relationship was definitely sexual, and probably romantic (whatever that means… but that’s another topic), Az still continued to call Crowley ‘friend’ the whole time.  I loved that so much! There’s no reason they can’t still call each other ‘friend’ regardless of the ways that they relate might shift over time.

* Also, as occult/ethereal beings there is no practical advantage of them getting married, as they don’t need the financial or governmental benefits it gives you, so the only reason to do it is to idealize the idea of it and its hierarchical nature