LIZA MUNDY in the June issue of The Atlantic argues that homosexuals will make marriage better for everyone because they will free society at last from the burden of traditional sex roles. This is a remarkable piece even in a world of remarkably vile nonsense. Mundy writes:

What if same-sex marriage does change marriage, but primarily for the better? For one thing, there is reason to think that, rather than making marriage more fragile, the boom of publicity around same-sex weddings could awaken among heterosexuals a new interest in the institution, at least for a time. But the larger change might be this: by providing a new model of how two people can live together equitably, same-sex marriage could help haul matrimony more fully into the 21st century. Although marriage is in many ways fairer and more pleasurable for both men and women than it once was, it hasn’t entirely thrown off old notions and habits. As a result, many men and women enter into it burdened with assumptions and stereotypes that create stress and resentment. Others, confronted with these increasingly anachronistic expectations—expectations at odds with the economic and practical realities of their own lives—don’t enter into it at all.

Same-sex spouses, who cannot divide their labor based on preexisting gender norms, must approach marriage differently than their heterosexual peers. From sex to fighting, from child-rearing to chores, they must hammer out every last detail of domestic life without falling back on assumptions about who will do what. In this regard, they provide an example that can be enlightening to all couples. Critics warn of an institution rendered “genderless.” But if a genderless marriage is a marriage in which the wife is not automatically expected to be responsible for school forms and child care and dinner preparation and birthday parties and midnight feedings and holiday shopping, I think it’s fair to say that many heterosexual women would cry “Bring it on!”

And it goes on and on. This is the sort of baloney one finds in a supposedly intellectual American magazine. We are living through the most lavishly documented period of social breakdown in history because of articles like this. Mundy, a typical urbane feminist who couches bitter resentment toward men and children in elevated sociological rhetoric, hails a revolutionary innovation which deliberately deprives children of one of their parents and she hails it because it might, in her wild dreams, free a woman from making dinner so often or filling out so many school forms. Here is a woman who views domestic work as if it were a gaping abyss into which she may fall and be smashed into smithereens. She believes it’s okay for a child never to know a father or mother but it’s not okay for a woman to do more than 50 percent of the laundry. She seriously believes despite the long history of sisterly squabbling that two lesbians, each with her own set of mood swings, can more amicably raise a child than a man and woman. She welcomes the obliteration of sex roles, the very distinctions which equally divide up the work of marriage and parenthood, because she considers childrearing tedious and burdensome to women, flatly contradicting the widespread evidence that marriages conforming to traditional sex roles are longer-lasting and happier. She seems unaware that homosexual couples often voluntarily mimic traditional sex roles. And she fantastically believes men will be inspired to marry more often when they see two men marrying each other.

But it is her feminist resentment of children that is most glaring. It is children after all who create all this work and this necessary, tedious negotiation. Let them live with it! Who cares if they’d like a father!

Mundy, who is a graduate of Princeton, is so removed from real life, from the emotions and motivations of normal human beings, that it’s fair to see her as inhabiting a separate planet, an arid place where strange creatures devoid of fellow-feeling, but perfectly capable of sentimental imitations of it, live and somehow survive. She cares so little for the most vulnerable, she has so lost the basic nurturing instincts of normal women, that she is arguably not a woman at all. She’s the end-product of the soulless, selfishness of feminism. And of course she is painfully stupid about the reality of homosexual relationships, which often end in violence, alcoholism, drug addiction and bitter division. On her planet, none of this exists. It doesn’t exist because she says so! She went to Princeton, so she must be right.

— Comments —

Dan R. writes:

Before her Atlantic article there was a book, The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love and Family, and before that was the Washington Post and a fellowship at the New America Foundation. And let me not forget a biography of Michelle Obama and an earlier book on assisted reproduction. Should I feel I guilty that I’m not more familiar with her name? In any case here’s journalist Liza Mundy (somewhat older than I expected) appearing on the Stephen Colbert show last August. A thoroughly modern feminist, attractive, personable, even wearing a marriage ring (it was eleven months ago, so I’m assuming it was a “traditional” marriage). She probably even has kids (maximum of two, unless artificially conceived, in which case one) being raised under the best daycare providers money can buy. If she truly represents what a substantial number of Americans believe I can’t help but hark back to the idea that “red” and “blue” America need a divorce!

Just spotted this on Amazon: “She lives in Arlington, Virginia, with her husband, Mark Bradley, and their two children, Anna and Robin.”

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