Who benefits from marriage? Part I

Who actually benefits from marriage? Is it the men, as feminists say, or is it the women who benefit, as Men's Rights Activists like myself assert?

Due to my upbringing and feminised education, I had never questioned the idea that women don't benefit in marriage, and that marriage is a social construct designed to give men a slave and a cook, nothing else. However, hard as it was, after growing up and seeing the evidence around me, I began to question the popular belief. When I started reading the father's rights and anti-feminist websites, I threw the belief that only men benefit from marriage in the trash.

Now, after reading the article in the NY Times about the marriage strike, and the comments associated with that article, I decided to rethink my beliefs.

First of all, let's tackle the issue of whether men benefit from marriage. According to feminist dogma, marriage serves the man by having the woman serve him.

Here's a quote: "If a woman can earn her own living, the idea of working outside the home and then coming home to do the lion'’s share of the domestic duties loses its appeal pretty quickly. And she is less likely to be forgiving and tolerant of the kind of machismo that her grandmothers accepted as the price of being supported. While this may seem to represent a kind of evolution, the evolution is social, not biological. Men aren'’t necessarily sharing in this social evolution; women have changed the rules on them and they don'’t seem to have caught up with it -— or perhaps they are not interested in catching up with it!"

Leaving aside the heavy dose of shaming and blaming in the quote, we see that the message is that the man is a drag on the household.

Here's another quote: "Marriage is an outmoded, feudal institution no longer relevant for women. The feminist critique of marriage from the 1970s is still germaine. Marriage is a bad deal for women who are expected to work outside the home, plus raise the children, plus clean the house, plus be available for sex. Men, on the other hand, benefit tremendously from marriage for the same reasons. They work only one job, get a maid, a nanny, and a sex partner. When women have actual economic options, they are clearly chosing to remain single. It'’s better for them financially. Women will still be fine emotionally outside of marriage because they know how to create emotional support networks; they give and receive comfort on a daily basis. As a society, however, we raise men who cannot meet their own emotional needs outside of leaning perpetually on a wife. Marriage as an institution, if it is to survive (and the need for that is debatable) must become equitable for both women and men"

According to the author of this quote, women don't have a sex drive. They only have sex because the man wants it, and since they were dependent on the man financially, the woman does not have sex according to her own free will - in short, all sex is rape. What seems to be common among feminists is that they believe that women can not give consent. They seem to think that women don't really want to have children, keep a clean house, take care of their children and their husband, essentially they think that all women are like themselves - fat, lazy lesbians who live in filth and don't care about anyone but themselves. (Cheap shot!)

There are a couple of points in the post that I do agree with - society does encourage women to create support networks while men are supposed to be the problem solvers. If a woman goes to another woman with a problem, they might chat about it and not solve it, but if a man goes to another man with a problem, his masculinity will be questioned and he will be seen as inferior as the other man will solve his problem. And of course, there's the old double standard of men being afraid to be seen together for fear of being labeled homosexual while society encourages women to hang out together.

Now, does marriage benefit women? Continued in Part II...