Marriage Is A Mess
If we no longer bother with ‘until death do us part’ — should we let this outdated institution die of its own accord
If you asked a whole bunch of African American folks to hold mock slave auctions, or got an entire synagogue of Jewish men and women to wear striped pyjamas I suspect you’d get pushback. This, you’d be told fairly quickly and uncertainly, is not how society should choose to reflect on either the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade or the Holocaust.
But, given enough social messaging and capitalist guff, it is more than possible to make a young Western girl giddy about wearing a white dress, changing her surname and being given away by her father to a man being defended by his ‘best men’. He might even get to put his finger in her ring — innuendo ahoy-hoy.
This is the cornerstone of romantic love in the 21st Century.
And sure… as this is indeed the 21st Century you don’t have to actually DO those things anymore but my question is why would you choose to? And even if you don’t choose to do those things exactly, why would you buy into the validity of a social contract which endorses both the historical and continuing social oppression of women?
Buckle up folks… this is Ben vs The Peng part one — and we’re talking about the…
