Jennifer Roback Morse’s views on sex and marriage are worth reading if you are interested in what happens when natural law theory, evolutionary psychology and conservative family values are stewed together and left to simmer in a base of visceral disgust toward homosexuals. I leave it to legal scholars to explain what’s wrong with arguments from “what nature intended.” Feminists can take Morse’s complaint that “we have already redefined the social context of marriage in the name of equality for women” and invite her to pine for the days before the Married Women’s Property Act. And the political theorists amongst us can discuss how Morse manages to get from the premise “Sexual activity and childrearing take place inside the private spaces of the home, far outside the reach of the public-enforcement power of the state,” to the conclusion that it’s “utterly reasonable” for the law to ban homosexual unions.
I confine myself to a sociological observation. Morse claims that a central feature of heterosexual sex within marriage is that it is “an engine of sociability that calls us out of our self-centeredness.” If anything, the opposite seems to be the case. A long-standing idea in sociology is that as you meet someone and later marry and have children, your social network will tend to get smaller. It’s called dyadic withdrawal. The married couple looks within itself for its sociability. Your spouse is usually around and you already have their phone number. Beyond that, kids keep you pretty busy. Recent research confirms the basic tendency. So, natural or not, I wouldn’t rely on the idea that sex within marriage “builds up community, starting with the spousal relationship and adding on from there.”
{ 46 comments }
rilkefan 12.19.03 at 2:56 am
Far as I can tell this is about as related to evolutionary psychology as astrology is to astronomy.
raj 12.19.03 at 3:45 am
Um, arguments from what, uh, nature intended? Nature? Intended?
You (or someone) really must be kidding.
“I confine myself to a sociological observation.”
Oh, sorry, missed this. Sociology. Another pseudoscience. When sociologists are actually able to make it into a science, intelligent people might take them seriously. But otherwise, no.
raj 12.19.03 at 3:45 am
Um, arguments from what, uh, nature intended? Nature? Intended?
You (or someone) really must be kidding.
“I confine myself to a sociological observation.”
Oh, sorry, missed this. Sociology. Another pseudoscience. When sociologists are actually able to make it into a science, intelligent people might take them seriously. But otherwise, no.
raj 12.19.03 at 3:55 am
Oh, by the way
“A long-standing idea in sociology is that as you meet someone and later marry and have children, your social network will tend to get smaller. It’s called dyadic withdrawal.”
Oh, wow, the “sociologist” practitioners named a phenomenon that has been known for quite some time. Big deal.
chun the unavoidable 12.19.03 at 4:06 am
Raj, if you could write up that argument, Isis would print it tomorrow. People have been dancing around this notion for years without being able to formulate as clearly as you did.
Nedra Pickler 12.19.03 at 4:11 am
When Mr. Healy defends gay marriage, he fails to mention that God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.
raj 12.19.03 at 4:16 am
Nedra, if there was a god that created anything, he, she or it created Adam, Eve, Adam and Steve, and all those people in the Land of Nod that supposedly provided wives for Able and so forth. A fact that people who are apparently are your side apparently ignore. BTW, what is the evidence that this god you mention ever existed?
(I won’t hold my breath waiting for your response).
Carlos 12.19.03 at 4:33 am
Remind me, when I start my blog, to disable the comments immediately.
raj 12.19.03 at 4:37 am
Well, Carlos, consider the following: when you start your vanity blog (a term that I use for blogs that don’t provide for comments) why do you believe that anyone would give a tinker’s damn to read much of anything that you want to bloviate over?
Nedra Pickler 12.19.03 at 4:45 am
Nedra Pickler is an Associated Press reporter who wrote a wrap-up on the most recent Democratic debate that a lot Democrats thought was rather bizarre and aggressive. For example:
“Several of the nine candidates criticized the tax cuts Bush pushed through Congress. But none mentioned that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who has served both Republican and Democratic presidents, has cited those cuts as a reason for the recent economic growth.”
(That’s a real quote.)
Atrios declared a “Write Like Nedra Pickler Day”, and while it didn’t really take off, a lot of blogs have had absurd “he neglects to mention” caveats in their comments from “Nedra Pickler”.
In short, it’s a blog nerd joke.
Matt Weiner 12.19.03 at 4:47 am
I confine myself to a literary remark: According to Google, it was Chaucer, not Shakespeare, who used the phrase “making the two-backed beast.” I couldn’t stand to read any farther into the article, and don’t even want to think about the second part.
(BTW, any comments you see from “Nedra Pickler” are a parody of a certain AP writer.)
Katherine 12.19.03 at 5:03 am
Well, I’m pretty sure that is a line in Othello.
But, how does this:
“Two people become, if only for a short while, one flesh”
follow from this?
“As far as I know, humans are the only animals that copulate face to face.”
Do humans ONLY copulate face to face as far as Ms. Roback knows? Someone should introduce her to Dr. Ruth. And what does that have to do with whether you’re “one flesh” or not?
Nabakov 12.19.03 at 5:17 am
Halfway into Morse’s piece, I had the compelling urge to expand a social network…so I went out and committed adultery.
And I believe the range of sexual activity among animals that extends well beyond just breeding is pretty well documented.
And also, is Raj is drunk? And if not, why not?
Rv. Agnos 12.19.03 at 6:04 am
This article, I can certainly confirm, is made up of words. And those words are strung together into grammatically correct sentences.
What these individual sentences mean, let alone how they go together into a logical argument, is anyone’s guess.
Take this one:
“And if it[sexuality] is the latter[self-centeredness], are there any automatic correction mechanisms that check our excesses the way market competition directs our self-interest into socially responsible channels?”
Is this a moral argument or an economic argument? Is she saying that within marriage, you can have sex however and whenever you want, but outside of marriage, you are limited by how much you can afford to pay the prostitute, and the prostitute will charge more for “socially irreponsible” extras? The mind reels.
Or this, discussing sexuality:
“We are more likely to be satisfied with the outcome, if we work with our biology rather than against it.”
One might think this is common sense advise: If it hurts, try something else. Apparently, however, this sentence has something to do with opposition to gay marriage. Or, rather, she seems to not have anything against gay marriage. Instead, as far as I can tell, she merely objects to the gays (individually and collectively) who might want to get married, and probably wouldn’t be happy with them trying to get into a heterosexual marriage either, because they’d just screw that up, too.
Immediately after, she says:
“We will be happier if we face reality on its own terms.”
Yet it is unclear who, other than the author, is actually unhappy here. And on whose terms are we mistakenly facing reality at present?
And finally, consider two sentences that manage the exquisite feat of being both individually false and mutually contradictory.
“Sexual activity and childrearing take place inside the private spaces of the home, far outside the reach of the public-enforcement power of the state.” [Written as an eternal truism, mere months after sodomy was finally legalized.]Then, “The law of marriage is not the only social structure that creates the context for socially acceptable sexual behavior. But the law does play a key part.” [So state power DOES reach to sexual activity. The law tells us what is acceptable, but we can’t legalize gay marriage because it is unacceptable, but it would become acceptable if we legalized, but we can’t . . .]
One wishes that opponents of gay marriage would just fall back on what they really mean: Gay sex is gross and the Bible says No.
It may be a bad argument, but at least it’s an argument that is internally coherent!
dsquared 12.19.03 at 7:27 am
Dyadic withdrawal is actually the reason behind the tradition of the stag night. In Victorian middle-class England, it was taken for granted that once a man married, he would no longer associate with his old unmarried friends, so he would hold a party for them to say goodbye …
mattH 12.19.03 at 8:58 am
Just a side note: whereas dyadic withdrawl is pretty much a foregone conclusion, marriage also strengthens social bonds between families within societies, so that while social relationships between individuals often weaken, marriage improves the chances that family groups survive in lean times by presenting new resources to exploit, so to speak. It also helps maintain society as a whole if more exogamous patterns are encouraged.
The interesting thing about this is that it’s quite torturous to disallow gay marriage in light of these functions of marriage, seeing as how they could just as easily provide these same benefits.
bjm 12.19.03 at 9:43 am
Actually, humpback whales are exclusively face-to-face copulators. I remember seeing Ben Elton do a fairly lengthy bit on the wonders of humpback whale sex. I don’t think this tidbit will have any impact at all on Morse’s argument until we can find some gay whales, though.
Nabakov 12.19.03 at 1:00 pm
Will gay penguins do?
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2002/03/08/gay_penguins/
raj 12.19.03 at 1:13 pm
nabakov
“And also, is Raj is drunk?”
Uh, no.
Carlos 12.19.03 at 1:49 pm
Because I already know people like reading my stuff, silly. I don’t need the good opinions of uninformed anonymous cowards to stroke my ego.
Ayjay 12.19.03 at 2:18 pm
To Morse’s claim that sex within heterosexual marriage is “an engine of sociability that calls us out of our self-centeredness,†Kieran replies that the phenomenon of dyadic withdrawal tells us that “the opposite seems to be the case.” That is only true only under the assumption that it is the size of social networks that determines the strength of community. But a moment’s reflection will show that that is not the case: we don’t build communities simply by knowing and socializing with as many people as possible. Married people could have smaller social networks whose bonds are stronger than the more expansive social networks of singles. I don’t know whether Morse’s argument has any validity or not, but dyadic withdrawal doesn’t help us to decide the matter.
Ayjay 12.19.03 at 2:22 pm
Sorry, I hit “Post” too soon.
I meant to add that the married couple does not look only “within itself for sociability” — at least, not in the long term. (Newlyweds may do so.) It is true that kids keep their parents pretty busy, but kids also keep parents in rather constant contact with schools, other parents, and often churches or other places of worship. And these institutions and persons obviously are opportunities for community-building, since a range of shared interests and commitments is available through them.
Invisible Adjunct 12.19.03 at 2:49 pm
Re: the family as “an engine of sociability that calls us out of our self-centeredness.â€
This idea has been around for a very long time, and has the patina of tradition that appeals to “conservative” family values types. What’s interesting is that they combine it with a relatively recent (and, when viewed historically, really quite radical) notion of the family as a purely private realm of voluntary relations of affection and cooperation that has nothing to do with economics or politics. The putatively natural domain of the family is supposed to function (as if by magic) as a refuge from another putatively natural domain of autonomous individuals competing on the basis of self-interest. In the tradition that family values people like to selectively invoke (eg, in natural law theory), the family is not only the primary realm of sociability but also the primary economic unit: “family” is not separate and distinct from economy and polity; rather, society (including economy and polity) is the sum total of interactions that begin at the level of the household and spread outward.
The debate over gay marriage reveals the basic incoherence of the family values position. It’s quite true that there’s no support for gay marriage in the tradition of writings on household, marriage and family that they like to invoke. But it’s also the case that there’s no support for the idea of the family as a purely private realm in that same tradition.
Barbara 12.19.03 at 2:55 pm
Kieran and Ayjay are both right, at least if I’m a prototypical married person: one’s social network shrinks numerically, and the network tends to consist of more focused and fewer casual relationships.
FYI, this article was only the first of a two-part series, and if you think the first was a hallmark of bad logic, you should read the second, which is an incoherent jumble of self-referential extrapoloation from the author’s experience of infertility to the universal meaning and purpose of marriage — with the same refrain, of course.
Jeremy Osner 12.19.03 at 3:25 pm
Yabbut, if you go at it a tergo then you are not the “beast with two backs” are you now? (apropos of little)
Rv. Agnos, thanks for the laugh — I have not seen as good a takedown since Mr. Holbo’s piece about the Donner party last month.
Matt Weiner 12.19.03 at 3:53 pm
Katherine, you’re right–“making the beast with two backs” is in Shakespeare, and Rabelais before them. I can’t find it in Chaucer (though perhaps it might help if I looked in Chaucer rather than Googling, which I don’t seem to do too well at).
DocG 12.19.03 at 5:05 pm
Can’t resist pointing out that taking what you find written the National Review seriously is a complete waste of time. The writers and editors there are “serious” only in the sense that they aren’t at all intentionally funny. But if anyone hopes that the execrable NR will produce anything beyond ideological screeds, they will always be disappointed. These people already know exactly the outcomes and viewpoints that are desired, the words they write and print are just filler.
JP 12.19.03 at 5:20 pm
Everybody take cover! Raj is firing in all directions!
Crazy Eddie 12.19.03 at 5:39 pm
One wishes that opponents of gay marriage would just fall back on what they really mean: Gay sex is gross and the Bible says No.
Gay sex is icky (unless it’s two lesbians!), and the Bible does take a dim view of it, but that’s still not a good reason to oppose gay marriage.
Ophelia Benson 12.19.03 at 5:47 pm
Is that what it’s called! There’s actually a name for it, whaddya know (and I’ve been speaking prose all this time, too). Dyadic withdrawal; very useful. I’ve been kvetching about it for years without knowing what it was called (time to read some sociology then), and kvetching all the more as the family values crowd gets (in the US) louder and louder and louder, to such a degree that the word ‘people’ has been pretty much made taboo. Political rhetoric used to talk about working people, now it’s working families – I always picture them all trudging off to the mine or the office together, swinging their matching lunch pails.
Anyway – sure, families bond at the PTA and all, but who doesn’t know that single people are more available for friendship?
(It’s funny about the phrase. I was just browsing a sociology dictionary I have, and in a space of about thirty seconds found three lovely phrases, only one of which I was already familiar with: moral career, degradation ceremony, and deviancy amplification. Sociologists can be considerable phrasemakers, if you ask me. I was already planning to do a brief comment on the subject at B&W, and now with dyadic withdrawal – I am all the more resolute.)
decono 12.19.03 at 8:27 pm
Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. I never thought I’d see the day when the National Review was advocating group sex. Sex for community building and sociability! I really should sign up for one of those NR cruise ship trips.
Bob 12.19.03 at 8:38 pm
Add to the legal scholars, feminists, political theorists, and sociologists the evolutionary biologists, who might take issue with Morse’s conflation of consequence and purpose. That particular conflation is the sort of thing that religious creationists point to in order to paint Darwinism as circular, only it’s people like Morse, not people like Darwin, who fall into that circularity. Long-term care by both parents might indeed be a trait that could persist in a population, but to call the increased probability of offspring survival the purpose of parental care (or of long-term bonding between the parents) makes evolution teleological and makes it just seem like another trick in God’s creationist toolbox.
The thing is, if you grant babymaking as the purpose of coupling, there are plenty of things that lead to even more babymaking that I’m sure Morse wouldn’t endorse. Murder of step-offspring, abandonment of offspring during times of short-term stress, sexual bribery, and sexual infidelity are all behaviors which would be justified by Morse’s uncareful invoking of evolutionary theory.
Ophelia Benson 12.19.03 at 8:48 pm
“I leave it to legal scholars to explain what’s wrong with arguments from “what nature intended.—
It’s not only legal scholars who are good at that, by the way. There’s Janet Radcliffe Richards, for instance – or Richard Dawkins, who is very firm on the distinction between Darwinism as explanatory, and Darwinism as normative. He is, he says, an ardent Darwinian in the first sense and an equally ardent anti-Darwinian in the second sense. As was Darwin, of course.
Ophelia Benson 12.19.03 at 8:49 pm
Oh – oops. That’s what Bob just said. Er – ditto, then.
Roback Morse 12.19.03 at 9:02 pm
Dyadic Withdrawal. That’s some sort of new-fangled birth control method, isn’t it?
ayjay 12.19.03 at 9:42 pm
Re Ophelia’s comment “Sure, families bond at the PTA and all, but who doesn’t know that single people are more available for friendship?” Right, but the issue wasn’t friendship, it was community-building. Related topics, but quite distinct.
Ophelia Benson 12.19.03 at 10:18 pm
Um – was it?
“I confine myself to a sociological observation. Morse claims that a central feature of heterosexual sex within marriage is that it is “an engine of sociability that calls us out of our self-centeredness.†If anything, the opposite seems to be the case. A long-standing idea in sociology is that as you meet someone and later marry and have children, your social network will tend to get smaller. It’s called dyadic withdrawal. The married couple looks within itself for its sociability.”
Sociability, social network – I take that to be about friendship at least as much as it is about community. That’s the part of the post I was addressing, anyway.
H 12.19.03 at 11:03 pm
Some years ago, an acquaintance of mine wrote a dissertation on Catholic ideas of marriage, and I am trying to remember when he said that “spousal unity” joined up with procreation as a purpose of marriage. It may be late 19th century, but I don’t remember.
I also think the Church prohibited infertile people (such as post-menopausal women) from marrying at one time, but again, y’all should poke around and see if I’m right here.
Anybody know what Morse’s religious schtick is? I found a similar article by her and Chuck Colson (an Evangelical) in Christianity Today (also Evangelical) at:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/010/32.156.html
Once these folks have “spousal unity” as a reason for marriage, they have a hard time keeping out the same-sex couples. They have to reach into a different bag of proof-texts to hang on to the homophobia.
Well, gotta go socialize and prevent that dyadic withdrawal from happening.
– H
nitpick 12.19.03 at 11:26 pm
The author quotes an oft-repeated falsehood — that humans are the only animals which copulate face-to-face. Simple googling reveals that (a) it’s oft-repeated, and (b) it’s false.
Bonobos copulate face-to-face, as do dolphins.
Also, there are quotes around “making the two-backed beast”, implying that it is a in fact a quote, rather than a paraphrase of “making the beast with two backs,” (which doesn’t seem to me to specify position anyway).
Wait, I’ve got it! Bonobos, since they use sex (or other genital-genital contact) as a greeting, must be the subject of Morse’s essay! That is, all your talk of dyadic withdrawl doesn’t apply to bonobos, and they do the face-to-face sex thing. When Morse says “we”, she clearly implies that she is in fact a monkey.
Ophelia Benson 12.20.03 at 1:21 am
No, not a monkey, a great ape. Monkeys are a different genus from apes. Bonobos, like humans, are a species of great ape, not a monkey.
Here endeth the lesson.
raj 12.20.03 at 4:06 am
raj is adverse to stupidity, even when it hides behind–uh–nice language. Raj has noticed such stupidity too many times before.
raj 12.20.03 at 4:11 am
Oh, and, by the way, just because a bloviator like Morse is able to get her bloviations reproduced on a publication like NRO doesn’t mean that it has anything to do with reality. It would be nice for you–uh, whatever–to understand that.
I might have a slightly–slightly–different opinion if a work were subjected to peer review. But not something from a catholic production like “National Review.”
Ayjay 12.20.03 at 1:46 pm
Ophelia, I took Kieran’s comment about social networks to be about community building more than friendship beacuse of his concluding sentence: “So, natural or not, I wouldn’t rely on the idea that sex within marriage ‘builds up community, starting with the spousal relationship and adding on from there.’â€
Ophelia Benson 12.20.03 at 6:20 pm
Yeah, I figured that, ayjay, but I took Kieran’s comment a different way. These things happen – reader response, you know.
Ayjay 12.20.03 at 9:48 pm
Absolutely. Reader response happens.
Ophelia Benson 12.21.03 at 1:53 am
Well now what the hell do you mean by that?!
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
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