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"heterosexual marriage benefits men and tends to harm women but it's culturally framed as something women want and men resist"

from: https://twitter.com/KHandozo/status/1046184193955418114


One thing I can't stop thinking about lately is how heterosexual marriage benefits men and tends to harm women but it's culturally framed as something women want and men resist.

*slaps roof of American culture*
this bad boy can fit so many misogynistic scams in it

Ah, well, once it starts moving it's probably best to cite. This isn't just like ~my opinion~ or something. In fact I've been in a largely happy hetero marriage for eighteen years. But anyway, some receipts tk.

This is a meta-study of 18 studies, which show that women become unhappier with marriage faster than men. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22059843

Women initiate the vast majority of divorces in the U.S. - 70% in 1995, according to this 2000 paper. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=713110

When a marriage ends, for any reason, men are more than twice as likely as women to remarry.

Happiness is notoriously hard to quantify, so I feel more cautious about this, but there have been a lot of studies suggesting married women are less happy than their single counterparts, and that unhappiness as a single woman is often due to societal rejection of singlehood.

One thing that is quantifiable is age. I'm still looking for the sources of studies (rather than the media reporting on the studies), but married men live longer than unmarried men while married women do not live as long as single women.

The statistic that sticks with me: per a 2009 study in the journal Cancer, 21% of women got abandoned by their husbands while sick. Just 3% of men. Control group was 12% divorce rate. Cancer made husbands more likely to GTFO, women more likely to stay.

Now, while this isn't just my opinion, it's also important to understand context, because there's never just one way to interpret data. So it's not like there's a clear cut study that will definitively prove than hetero marriage is better for men than women.

But we can see that American society, a sexually stratified society with a lot of structural issues that disadvantage women, lends itself to particular associations.

So, for instance, not teaching men to cook, clean, etc. has consequences for bachelors in the U.S., consequences ameliorated by hetero marriage. Not thinking of individuals here, but broad societal gender expectations.

Having kids is a major negative factor for women's happiness and health. But it's also generally expected, even in households where both parents work, that women will do the bulk of child rearing as well as domestic chores.

Individual people and partnerships can and do defy these statistics, but even largely egalitarian marriages take place in a culture that places different expectations on men and women.

A small example that has long stuck with me: once my husband was at the market with our baby. I was not there. While he was pushing our son in the shopping cart, a lady came up to him and said, to the baby, "Oh, look, your mommy forgot to wash your face."

There was no evidence of a mommy anywhere, just a baby with a slightly messy face and a man pushing that baby in a shopping cart. But it was still absent mommy's fault, because even though my husband and I both did those tasks, they were seen as my duties by people around us.

So a baby with a messy face is a dereliction of duty on my part. My husband taking the baby shopping with him was construed as a favor to me rather than just doing his job.

When was the last time you saw people praise a woman for spending time in public with her kids? How many times have you seen people be hypercritical of a woman parenting in public?

And doing the memory work of a family, which is also societally tagged as feminine, is a lot of work in itself, but not one socially recognized as work.

You can have a great heterosexual marriage and you still exist in a society in which hetero marriage primarily benefits men while societally insisting that it's what women want and what men resist.

Here's some Pew Research data on chores put into a chart by Today's Parent: https://www.todaysparent.com/modern-marriage-till-chores-do-us-part/

Things are different than they used to be! But still gendered. And even if you leave chores aside, parents now spend more time with their kids than in the 1960s in the U.S.

And even though men and women both spend more time with their kids than people did in the sixties, women spend around twice as much time with kids as men do.

This is true even in households in which women are the breadwinners. In fact, men do FEWER chores when women earn more than them. https://riviste.unige.it/aboutgender/article/view/176

There's tons of this stuff and it's not particularly hard to find. Marriage, whether it is about property rights, lineage, or love, tends to be patriarchal in a patriarchal society.