Monday, July 27, 2009

The Great Murkan Marriage!!!!

I'm listening to this program on the local public radio. It's all about whether marriage is dying or not, whether it should or not and so on. The two women discussing it are my personal favorite female misogynist Caitlyn Flanagan and a comedian called Sandra Tsing Loh. Both of these women have written essays on marriage, and their views are presented as opposite ones and the listeners are asked to take sides! Sandra Tsing Loh thinks that marriage is no good for women (but she'd like to have a 1950s type husband who wouldn't know how to boil water) and Caitlyn Flanagan thinks everything wrong about marriage is up to women, men don't even exist as the objects of the women's choices).

Fuck it. I'm going to have a debate here between two people, one of whom thinks that broccoli is an alien from outer space and the other thinks that broccoli is a cancer on earth. You must take sides.

I hate badly framed debates. I also hate the kind of setup where neither of the so-called experts actually appears to know much about the history of marriage in general or how long the average marriage used to last (hint: not that long in many cases as mortality rates were rather different).

OK. My wrath is probably misplaced, because what's being said isn't that extreme. I just hate the idea that real information is not provided. For instance, Flanagan keeps on talking about the poor not marrying as if being poor isn't part of the reason for that. And then there's the final caller to the show who argues that men are looking for Mom2.0 in their wives and that women are looking for a better mother than theirs was in their husbands!!!! Notice how fathers just disappeared there altogether.