In the old days societies put a huge amount of effort into trying to make sure that teenagers had sex only within the context of marriage. A Facebook friend, however, recently posted “Banning child marriage in America: An uphill fight against evangelical pressure” (Salon). He and his friends heaped derision on the idea that it was okay for a woman under the age of 18 to be married (the laws will be gender-neutral, but these Facebookers envisioned only female teenagers being married and/or they didn’t care what happened to male teenagers). Here are some samples:
Religion has been responsible for scams, unhappiness, fear, and murder over the centuries. Religious leaders scare people into the belief that there’s an invisible man in the sky…and other ancient fairy tales…for their livelihoods.
it has always amazed me when a fair number of people, at this point, have asked me (upon discovering my absolute lack of any belief system whatsoever) what stops me from killing people – ? To which I’ve always responded, if your belief in some invisible superpower’s book is all that stands in the way of you doing so, there’s something seriously wrong with you.
It seems that we’ve gone from “casual sex bad; marriage good” to “casual sex good; marriage bad” in not all that many years.
Readers: Can you explain the passion of middle-aged Hillary-supporting Facebookers for preventing young women (as noted above, they don’t care about young men) from being married? It doesn’t seem to be personal. None of these folks have daughters, nieces, or other relatives who are getting married as teenagers.
[Separately, I’m not sure why it matters whether young people can get married. All 50 states offer no-fault on-demand (“unilateral”) divorce. A teenager who is married on June 1 and doesn’t enjoy the union can file a divorce lawsuit on June 2 and, with or without a lawyer, be guaranteed to win (see Real World Divorce to figure out if there will be any cash proceeds as well!). Unless the teenager wants to be remarried immediately, it isn’t clear why a divorce would be urgent. In California, for example, a 12-year-old can file for a restraining order that would keep the new spouse from contacting him or her. If a teenager has a child, he or she can file for sole custody, child support, etc. See “The Domestic Violence Parallel Track” for more on what the law professors call an instant de facto divorce. Depending on the state, all of this may be accomplished with preprinted forms designed for laypeople without lawyers. In the litigation-heavy/lawyers-more-common states such as Massachusetts, a plaintiff can usually rely on the defendant being ordered to pay the plaintiff’s legal fees. Marriage isn’t like a tattoo that is hard to undo, so why restrict Americans from getting married at what would have been a normal age not too long ago?]
It’s like family courts citing “best interests of the child”: they don’t really care about the children. Family courts use “best interests of the child” to justify huge anti-men sex discrimination in child custody decisions. Any such discrimination that hurts men and helps women garners praise in the NYT, etc. Your facebook friends pretend to be concerned about children so that they can demean people they hate.
Feminism seems to be largely about encouraging women to:
1. Have as much sex as possible with men other than their husbands (before, during, and after the marriage)
2. Have as little sex as possible with their husband during marriage (never after marriage)
3. Extract as much money as possible from the husband (during and after marriage)
4. Shame men for lack of enthusiasm toward modern “marriage”
40 year old women hate the idea of men having sex with women in their prime (17-22 yrs old). That’s the simple reason that your FB friends don’t want them married.
I think the issue isn’t a teenage girl marrying a boy her own age, rather it is with her marrying a much older man against her will.
Scarlet: How does it work “against her will” in a no-fault divorce era? Most teenage girls can run faster than a “much older man”. What stops her from running away the day after the wedding?
The reason why the atheist never kills anyone is because he only lives under the rosy glow of every day rich, western life. Barring psychopathy or severe impulse control issues we wouldn’t expect him to kill anyone.
philg: «How does it work “against her will” in a no-fault divorce era?»
Why do victims of domestic abuse continue married to abusers?
Some testimonials:
– «I met him when I was 14 and going through a difficult time. My father had recently deceased,” she recounts. “He was my mental health counsellor and he acted like I could trust him. He convinced me that we were in love and he said: ‘If we get married when you turn 16, you will have all this freedom and your mum won’t be able to control you any more.’ So I thought I was taking charge of my life by agreeing to this.” Her mother had no problems with her daughter getting married at 16 and readily gave her permission. “She was glad to get rid of me.”»
– «Johnson says that “marriage put a definite end to my childhood. I was expelled from school and by the age of 17 I had six children. There was no way I could escape. You are not allowed to sign legal documents when you are under 18, so I couldn’t file for a divorce. For seven years, I was stuck with the man who damaged me and continued to do so.»
Then there are religious and societal pressures:
– «Reiss, who was born in an ultra-orthodox Jewish community, and was herself coerced into marrying when she was 19, says it is “extremely ironic” that laws make exceptions when parents consent to a child marriage or when an underage girl is pregnant. “Because, in many cases, the pregnancy is the result of sexual abuse and the parents are forcing the girl to marry to prevent a scandal.»
– «She was 16 and pregnant. Her Christian community in Green Mountain Falls was pressuring her family to marry her off to her 19-year-old boyfriend. She didn’t think she had the right to say no to the marriage after the mess she felt she’d made. “I could be the example of the shining whore in town, or I could be what everybody wanted me to be at that moment and save my family a lot of honor,” DeMello said.»
Some numbers in the USA (out of 198,729 total minors, 40 states and one county, from 2000–2015 – http://apps.frontline.org/child-marriage-by-the-numbers)
– 87% of minors married were female
– 33% were 16 or younger
– 68% of the marriages were between minors and adults (although only 15% were older than 24)
We don’t have a statistics on how many of those marriages were happy marriages, and how the age factor influenced those that weren’t. And, as Scarlet says, the issue, most likely, isn’t a teenage girl marrying a boy her own age or slightly older, that happens to cross the threshold (but that’s a consequence of defining thresholds). We can even assume, it’s only a minority of these cases that are problematic. «The youngest wedded were three 10-year-old girls in Tennessee who married men aged 24, 25 and 31 in 2001. The youngest groom was an 11-year-old who married a 27-year-old woman in the same state in 2006.» What capabilities have those male and female not-even-teenager children to act on their behalf, if in an abusive relationship (and I’m not saying these are abusive relationships)?
The question is rather when there’s asymmetric power balances that effectively curtail the actions you may be able to take. And yes, even if there’s no-fault divorce, if there’s a large financial, professional, or educational gap, as well as emotional, familial and societal pressures, the dependencies are not trivial, and it’s not as black or white as just going out the door .
Coward:
That’s a very US centric perspective.
«In Europe, feminism is not lower or less active and regarding marriage:
The number of weddings has fallen to historical lows in France and Spain and has tumbled in other Catholic countries such as Italy, Ireland, Poland and Portugal, according to national and European data. But people have also fallen out of love with marriage in countries as varied as Greece, Denmark, Hungary, the Netherlands and Britain. Only in parts of Scandinavia, the Baltic republics and Germany is the institution retaining its allure.
In Italy there were fewer than 200,000 marriages last year, the lowest number since the first world war. Numbers have fallen by 24% in the past decade and halved since 1965. Preliminary data indicated that the rate of marriages in Italy last year was 3.3 per 1,000 citizens, said Istat (Italy’s National Institute of Statistics), compared with 4.6 in 2003. It was, it said, “the lowest in modern history”.»
So, the plan for extracting money is not as productive in Europe. How does feminism relate to that?
Francisco: I’m not sure that it makes sense to talk about “Europe” as a single legal environment. The UK and Ireland have a completely different system of law than the rest of countries. Then there are huge variations among the countries, even those that share Civil law. Germany and most Scandinavian countries are terrible venues for an alimony plaintiff, for example, while Italy, until recently, was a wonderful place to sue (2017 was a tough year for alimony plaintiffs, though; see https://www.marzorati.org/en/standard-living-influence-alimony-italy-legal-advice-italian-qualified-lawyer-specialized-family-law/ and https://www.reuters.com/article/us-italy-berlusconi-divorce/italys-berlusconi-wins-alimony-case-ex-wife-told-to-pay-back-millions-idUSKBN1DG2D9 for example). The briefly-married UK plaintiff gets half of the defendant’s premarital savings (see http://www.realworlddivorce.com/International ). Assuming a “separate property” box is checked on the marriage license, the decades-married German plaintiff gets none of the defendant’s assets, premarital or post-marital.
philg: I agree, and not trying to say it is. The EU’s legal uniformity is mostly related to commerce regulation, allowing the intra-block free trade, and commerce-related topics, like environmental protection. Civil unions is hardly a topic of uniformity! Here’s a small example of differences (in 2009), if one’s in a hurry and can’t read your publication:
http://media.economist.com/images/20090207/CFB013.gif
I was just merely commenting on Cowards explanation of Feminism’s goals, and how they conflict with a decrease in marriage in Europe.
Francisco: Is it obvious that the “feminism” of which Coward speaks is (a) the same concept in the US and in Europe, and (b) equally popular in the US and Europe? Even in the U.S. there have been multiple waves of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism and the ideas of the various waves contradict each other to some extent.
https://frenchly.us/what-french-feminists-know-that-american-feminists-dont/
says “French feminism looks nothing like American feminism.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/16/sunday-review/angela-merkel-feminist-germany.html
suggests that “feminism” (whatever that refers to over there!) is not popular among Germans. Contrast to
http://time.com/2864425/hillary-clinton-hard-choices-feminist/
(“Hillary Clinton Wants You to Call Her a Feminist”)
So maybe this is a case of people using the same word to mean different things? (Just as “divorce” is used by both Nevada and California, but the concept is actually completely different when you travel 1 mile across the state line (capped child support versus unlimited child support; 50/50 shared parenting versus winner-take-all parenting; lower-income spouse lives by working versus lower-income spouses receives lifetime alimony; etc.)
Francisco: Also, the push to outlaw teenage females being married seems to stem from the idea that young women need to be protected. But the concrete scenarios that you cite show that there are teenagers whose parents don’t want to deal with them anymore, e.g.,
“Her mother had no problems with her daughter getting married at 16 and readily gave her permission. ‘She was glad to get rid of me.'”
If the 16-year-old in this example needs adult supervision and the mother refuses to provide it, why block the 16-year-old from being married to an over-18 man or woman? Then the nominal adult can take care of the 16-year-old for the remaining two years of official childhood.
If you’re saying “It would be better if the mother continued to care for and supervise her offspring,” I think that few people would disagree with you. But there is no way to force a mother to care for her teenage child beyond the barest essentials such as food and shelter (oftentimes actually provided by unrelated taxpayers!).