Welcome to part three of my live-blog reading of David Blankenhorn’s The Future of Marriage (2007). You can read part one and part two here. 

Following his introduction, defining his core question (“what is marriage?”), and a romp through prehistorical mating and family formation, David B. turns his attention to two case-studies, if you will, of cultures in which marriages serve an important role in family formation. We’re moving, in this case, away from the entirely speculative to slightly firmer ground, as the primary source material for early human civilizations is a bit more robust. In chapter three (“The River Valleys”), Blankenhorn draws on art and artifacts, and the work of historians and archeologists who study the ancient world. In chapter four (“The Trobriand Islands”), he turns to the work of ethnographers (from the West) who have studied the lives and culture of the native people of the the Kiriwina islands in Papua New Guinea over several generations, beginning in the early twentieth century with Bronislaw Malinowski’s work. We’ll return to chapter four below, but first let’s take a look at chapter three.

Chapter Three: “The River Valleys”

• This chapter opens with a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, and two plaques from lower Mesopotamia, circa 2000-1000 BCE. One plaque depicts a female-male couple in the midst of penis-in-vagina intercourse. The other shows a couple, clothed and facing one another in an intimate embrace. Blankenhorn’s interpretation of this plaque is one of an early image of social (rather than sexual) couple intimacy. I’m comfortable with that interpretation. What I’m less comfortable with is his dismissal of the sexually-explicit plaque, and others like it, as “almost pornographic,” (almost?) “as if intended for entertainment and (primarily male) sexual arousal” (43). I’m — what? First of all, I’d call a plaque depicting naked fun sexytimes as straight-up porn. I mean, I suppose you could quibble that the term is anachronistic, okay, but it’s certainly sexually explicit. And wherefore have we suddenly decided it was designed for “primarily male” arousal? Sounds to me like the lady in question is having a fairly good time — from David’s description, she’s on top/in front of the standing male partner, with her legs wrapped around his hips as she rides him. That takes initiative, and would be a fairly good angle by which to have one’s ladybits stimulated. So I’m not sure why the imagery suggests men only — except if you assume porn is an all-male preserve. Which in turn tells me something about your perspective on gender and sexuality.
• Exploring the Code of Hammurabi (circa 1750 BCE) and other ancient marital practices, David B. dismisses the notion of women being bought and sold as wives to be “nonsense,” and the notion of a “bride price” to be “misleading” (50). He contends, instead, that gifts were exchanged between families and therefore … equality! His point here is, I think, to push back against a narrative of marriage that some political activists and scholars, including many feminists, put forward which is that it is inherently an oppressive and patriarchal institution. The origins of marriage, some feminists conclude, is so corrupt that it cannot be redeemed as a social practice that embraces gender equality and diverse family forms. I have two thoughts on this push-pull undercurrent (which will resurface again, with more virulence, in later chapters):
• First, I think that David B. has an exaggerated sense of how widespread anti-marriage sentiment is in the present day. I think he’s cherry-picking again. Yes, obviously, you’re going to find scholars and activists who rail against marriage as tantamount to sexual slavery or indentured servitude. In some eras, and in some cultures, that charge holds more weight than in others. American women in the 1840s, for example, had a case to make that the laws of coverture — which legally erased their independent existence — were unjust, a violation of their dignity and worth as human beings. But America as a nation is one of the most pro-marriage cultures in the world, so the fact that he’s writing as if he’s discovered a great conspiracy of scholars to make marriage seem evil is kinda undermining his case. It cues into right-wing accusations of liberal bias within the academy which just aren’t all that persuasive without much more evidence than David B. provides. 
• Second, I am concerned that his sense of marriage being under siege from some anti-marriage lobby is causing him to ignore certain historical evidence that doesn’t fit with his own desire for a history of strong marriage culture in the river valley cultures. History is complicated, and always a matter of interpretation on some level. Obviously. So he’s free to make the case that Mesopotamian marriages show signs of a more egalitarian principle than other scholars have argued. But he needs to make that case: acknowledging what other scholars in the field have said before him, and articulating where he thinks they’ve gone wrong based on the evidence. This chapter is full of vague references to “some scholars” and “others have suggested,” none of which references are directly footnoted (50). I know I’m a footnote-crazed historian, but I like my sources documented. And as a feminist, I’m also concerned that in the interest of his pro-[a certain vision of]-marriage agenda, he’s glossing over ways in which some marriage practices in some cultures over time have, indeed, been extremely patriarchal and have absolutely involved “bride price” tributes between families. To call the identification of such material exchange “nonsense” erases the experience of women whose marriages were (and in some cases continue to be) subject to such arrangements. He describes such non-egalitarian practices the “patriarchal distortion,” a turn of phrase that suggests the original, the real form of marriage (this river valleys model) was, in fact, gender-egalitarian. I’m unsure how this helps his case with marriage skeptics, since however pure the original model might have been, the derivatives still existed (and continue to exist) and are still frameworks for coercion. To erase the coercive forms from history is an act of violence toward those who had to live within them.
• Throughout this chapter, we see again the desire to come up with One True Definition of Marriage for All Time and in All Places, despite the earlier acknowledgement that there has never been one. On page 55, for example: “We moderns often seem to assume that couples long ago were not as emotionally aware as we are today … For almost all of humanity, marriage has always and in all places ‘really’ been about the male-female sexual bond and the children that result from that bond. That was certainly true in the two river valleys where this distinctive way of men and women living together became a vibrant public institution.” In my chosen field of history we like to quote L.P. Hartley: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently here.” This doesn’t mean we are incapable of understanding, on some measure, what human beings of hundreds, thousands of years ago might have experienced or felt. It does mean that we must always be aware of the dangers of presentism: the inclination to interpret the evidence of the past through the paradigms of the present. To some extent, presentism is unavoidable — but it is also important to acknowledge it as one of our limitations. I am hardly arrogant enough to imagine the people living in 1750 BCE were “not as emotionally aware as we are today.” But I am wary of assuming they were emotionally aware in the same way I am; that they made sense of the world in the way I would. 

Welcome to part two of my live-blog reading of David Blankenhorn’s The Future of Marriage (2007). You can read part one here. Even though the Family Scholars Blog has gone on hiatus, I have decided to complete this live-blog series (and the book!).

According to Blankenhorn’s introduction, the first five chapters of his book focus on a single question: “What is marriage?” (9). He argues that existing histories of marriage are either so narrowly focused as to “tell us little or nothing about marriage as a cross-cultural institution,” or overly-broad, necessarily “superficial and unsatisfying” in their attempt to provide a trans-historical narrative of a diverse institution. Not himself a trained historian, David B. does not attempt “a history of marriage, but [does] aim to capture the essence of marriage as a human institution” (10).

So as a historian — one who finds both narrowly-focused monographs and ambitious synthesis histories to be of value — I am naturally interested in Blankenhorn’s alternative approach: what sources does he use, what bodies of evidence does he draw on, and what analytic tools does he employ, to answer the question “What is marriage?” in a meta-historical, essence-seeking sense?

To begin answering these questions, let’s take a look at chapters one and two.

Chapter One: “What is Marriage?”

Chapter one, a mere 11 pages in length, seeks to establish that the status quo in marriage understanding is deficient — is too vague. In order to wrestle with the question of whether or not same-sex partners can or should be granted social and legal access to marriage as an institution, we need (David B. believes) an “adequate answer … a working definition of marriage for our time” (21). I have three observations about this opening salvo:

• David Blankenhorn’s sources, ranging as they do across time and space and context (Andrew Sullivan op-eds, E.J. Graff’s book-length history of marriage, legal decisions from the U.S. and Canada, a Mae West quotation…), are cherry-picked soundbites that don’t offer us any sense of the cultural specificity. In what historical or social context were these observations made?  An opinion piece by a gay marriage advocate like Sullivan, for example, is a different type of source than is a quip by Mae West than is a court decision in a specific case, than is a journalist’s argument about the historical meaning(s) of a social institution. To pick out the one source I have recent knowledge of, David argues that E.J. Graff’s definition of marriage is, “a commitment to live up to the rigorous demands of love, to care for each other as best you humanly can” (12). This may be technically accurate, as a quote, but it is misleading. Graff actually lays out a detailed set of interlocking answers to what marriage has been for: it has been an economic arrangement, a sexual arrangement, a way to organize procreation and parenting, a way of creating kinship networks, and a way to exert social control over individuals through institutions (the church, the state). Using Graff as an example of modernity’s squeamishness over providing concrete responses to the question “What is marriage?” is a poor choice at best, and intentionally misleading at worst. 
• Even if we were to accept that modern definitions of marriage are vague (historians might argue they are going through a period of flux — something marriage definitions have done before, and will no doubt do again), I find myself wondering what’s so bad about vague? Does that make marriage any less real to you and me? As you all know, I just went through the process of getting married myself. It didn’t feel vague. It felt concrete, it felt real. Hanna and I made specific promises — promises drawn from legal and religious tradition. We signed our marriage license paperwork and our own marriage contract. We had interlocking webs of meaning — religious, legal, social, political, historical — with which to make sense of what we chose to do. Just because Joe Schmoe down the street or Mary Smith up the hill might have radically different conceptions of what it means to marry, or be living out radically different married-life arrangements than Hanna and I are currently living, doesn’t make our marriage less meaningful or specific than if we were all living cookie-cutter replicas of one anothers’ lives. We live in a pluralistic society, and as long as people aren’t stabbing one another with olive forks, and are responsive when I shout out the window to turn-the-music-down-please, I’m pretty okay with that.
• Along those lines, I found myself thinking about E.J. Graff’s multi-strand approach to marriage definition(s), and I wonder why we need to reduce marriage to a single “working definition” in order to move forward. Marriage, as David B. acknowledges has never had “a single, universally accepted definition of marriage — partly because the institution is constantly evolving, and partly because many of its features vary across groups and cultures” (11). That’s certainly a statement I’d be willing to get behind! So why, then, are we immediately turning around to search for an “adequate….working definition”? Surely we might more usefully observe that there are a cluster of marriage behaviors  or meanings that can be seen across many, if not all, marriage relationships historically and globally. Within that cluster of behaviors and meanings, some will be more constant than others, some will crop up in some cultures and historical periods only to fade away … and then to return. Some might be said to fairly reliably appear in most marriages — sexual intimacy, for example — although we would be inaccurate to say such a behavior was a requirement of marriage; very few cultures police their married members’ sexual activities and some people who marry never or cease engaging in sexual intimacy with one another (or altogether). This more fluid, descriptive approach may be entertaining and illuminating, without the strain of requiring such human diversity to fit into a single concept across all time and space. 

The evidence base for chapter two is archaeological, anthropological, literary, philosophical, with a liberal dose of evolutionary psychology thrown in. I will admit to a strong bias against any theory that tries to account for human behavior through narratives of human physical evolution. Quite simply, as Blankenhorn himself acknowledges, human prehistory “is a time about which we can only speculate, based on sparse and fragmentary bits of evidence. Yet scholars have speculated on the subject for more than two millennia” (23). Given the dearth of evidence against which to reality-check one’s work, it’s all too easy to read into our pre-human ancestors and our bodies a biological determinism that — presto! — just happen to fit with our own dearly-held desires for what human society or human beings “naturally” are, or what we are “hard-wired” to do. It’s a situation ripe for confirmation bias. And obviously, cultural conservatives are not the only culprits: there have long been feminists arguing the case for a prehistoric matriarchy, and anyone who bases their case for queer acceptance on a “born this way” platform is standing on similarly shaky ground.

However, in this instance we’re talking about a narrative of prehistory that suggests that marriage was developed by humans “to increase the likelihood of survival and success [of] the infant human,” because human young “need a father and the human mother needs a mate” (35). It is because of this survival strategy (keeping male humans involved in parenting their young) that relational sex, rather than simple procreative sex, developed: “A lot more sexual intercourse among the humans, not so as to make a baby, but to make a couple to raise a baby” (35).

Which … okay. Like, if that’s the (pre)story you want to tell yourself? But human biology and human behavior interact in really complicated ways, as any responsible neuroscientist will tell you. This all makes for a great story (if you find that kind of gender-essentialist shit attractive, which I don’t, but we’ll get to that later) but it doesn’t really tell us much about how humans might best respond to their current environment.  Because here’s the thing about evolution … it’s evolutionary. We keep on changing. So the way human societies worked in the past tells us about the past, not so much about the present and what our present-day needs and desires might be.

Two additional points before we close this post:

• I’m not trained in the fields of evolutionary psychology, human neurology, or prehistorical anthropology. However, it is my understanding that the theories that David B. uses to sketch out his prehistorical narrative are deeply contested by feminist scientists and others. Yet this chapter reads authoritatively — despite its opening caution about speculation. It reads, quite frankly, like the work of someone who has recently read some stuff in the field and is wowed by its arguments. There is little critical analysis of the researchers’ potential bias or the quality of their work. All of this gives me pause, and would give me pause even if the person was arguing for something I might philosophically be disposed to want evidence to conclude: for example that humans sexual variety was “hard-wired” or that early human males were “hard-wired” to wash the prehistorical dishes and offer to do the laundry when their prehistorical female partners were busy lactating for the youngins.
• Blankenhorn posits that the sexual division of humans (male and female) is “the primary division in our species,” and argues that long-term coupling created a “new way of living [that] bridged that divide” (30). I am skeptical on two levels about this assertion, which is presented as uncontested fact. First, I question whether sex differentiation is, in fact, the primary division of the human species. Certainly, in our modern world, sex (and its kissing-cousin, gender) feel like a primary division. But we could just as well imagine that rather than sorting by male/female we might sort by left-handedness and right-handedness. Or by skin tone or eye color or height or any number of physical characteristics. We have chosen to over-determine peoples’ lives through gender expectations. Second, I am uncertain what he means when he argues that coupling “bridged that divide.” Did it need bridging, particularly? Are female and male humans naturally at odds with one another? Would our agendas really be so dissimilar if we were not drawn to one another in sexual desire (setting aside, for the moment, procreation)? After all, other species have solved the care and keeping of infants problem in other ways: human females might have surrendered care of infants to the males (a la sea horses), or might have banded together to care for their young while keeping a few males on hand for procreative purposes (science fiction is rife with such scenarios). It is not a biological imperative that we exist heterosocially — only that we make arrangements to procreate sexually. And yet, we do. Presumably because we have more in common as a common species than we do differences as a species with two general sex-types and all the lovely variation that comes around and between.