It's also a deeply-ingrained legal construct that serves a number of vital purposes within most societies worldwide. At a base level it's a civil contract allowing for partnership benefits and legal shelter for raising children, AKA 'future taxpayers', that has no easy replacement. You can think "everyone should" but nobody will. The discussion here is not "marriage is dumb" the discussion here is "partnership is faltering." Right but that's no different than it's ever been. I grew up with "real men don't eat quiche" and ten years before that we had "The Lumberjack Song." That's not about partnership, that's about gender identity. This is about partnership: This is about partnership: This is about partnership:I think everyone should give up on marriage. It's a silly tradition with legal implications that can range from extremely helpful to financially catastrophic.
I don't really know what being "grown up" as a man means today or in the past, but a lot of the men I know have never done it. I know guys in their mid 30s who don't think twice about skipping showers for a week, who get in brawls with the homeless after leaving the bar, who are visited by the police a few times a year for getting wasted and causing a domestic disturbance while living in their mother's home, who think cooking on things that aren't a barbecue "is gay".
Pardon my poor attempt at being snarky about marriage. I also write that legally it's legally extremely helpful. My comment is about partnership. The views and expectations of modern women have evolved and as you note, most men continue acting from the same frame of view. That's fundamental to whether or not a successful partnership can be made. It's not very surprising that both men and women are struggling to deal with this. As an aside, because as you point out this discussion is not about "marriage is dumb", one interesting thing that's taken some getting used to in the Nordics is that it's very common to never get married. Couples will live together, have children together, and somewhere in there _maybe_ get married (maybe half of them or so?). There is a legal framework that works for this and it differs a bit whether or not children of come about in the partnership.
Back in the '00s, in the midst of the Defense of Marriage Act, the line not even the Democrats would cross was "civil unions." The reasonable thing would be to ban legal recognition of religious marriage at all and just create a civil construct that serves the same legal purpose. That was howling-at-the-moon territory. So while I'm a fan of the idea? And have been for 20 years? It ain't gonna happen in the US at least. I have seen exactly zero evidence to back this up but I'll hypothesize it anyway - in addition to greater cultural acceptance for transgender youth, it would not surprise me to learn that an increase in dissatisfaction with gender roles and gender identity was playing a part in the increase in gender dysphoria. It's an incredible challenge to jump out of society's expectations and take on an entirely new identity. Maybe people just feel freer to do it now than they did 30 years ago? But also maybe people feel more impetus to do it because we're getting stuck.
this is insightful. the pandemic was the "egg cracker" for a lot of trans people - lots of time alone with yourself, having to deal with being in your own skin without distractions, not having the daily pressure to keep up appearances - i think in our "atomized world" or whatever people call it, this is common. it goes for more gays in general too: if you're a prospective lesbian and you don't get instalocked by Some Guy because you got teen pregnant and you can't open a bank account by yourself, you actually have the chance to develop your own identity instead of just repressing all your lifeBut also maybe people feel more impetus to do it because we're getting stuck.
There was a hell of a Frontline backintheday that they've never released for streaming, maybe because it essentially concluded that gender politics in general were essentially how repressed people expressed their self-control. They listed a bunch of studies in which those found guilty of hate crimes against homosexuals tended to score higher on clinical evaluations of homosexuality than violent criminals in general, and ploughed through interview after interview about how the perpetrators committed their violence because their gender identity was threatened by witnessing homosexuals enjoying their homosexuality. A number of them were big fans of gay porn... but they weren't gay because they were in prison for beating gay men to death so how on earth could they be homosexual? It would not surprise me at all if a study were to find that all this LGBTQ backlash was a bunch of closeted, repressed conservatives who need external reinforcement to keep from enjoying themselves. Because a whole bunch of people started to have fun for the first time in a long time? And we can't have THAT And I think it would be less of a problem if we weren't so busy being siloed with our clones by social media. If the only people you ever interact with are the 3Pers who are also secretly watching futanari you're never going to have a reason to re-evaluate your shit. But then, would there be safe spaces where people could explore gender without judgment and reprisal? I dunno.