This is a restored post from my WordPress, originally posted on August 3, 2022. I still agree with what I said here.
Several years ago, while writing my “Rebellion vs assimilation” post, I referred to gay marriage legalization as an example of rebellion – because for me, with all my Russian social experience, it seemed like something outstanding and very not in line with what the normative society is ready for.
Since then I learned more about the West, as well as about the institution of nuclear family, and I lean towards regarding gay marriage as assimilationist. A two spouse household with a common budget, detached from a larger community, greatly reduces diversity and flexibility that could exist in a commune. It also creates a wedge between queer people who can fit in and mimic straight couples and queer people who cannot.
But, of course, the original queer activists campaigning for gay marriage weren’t just motivated by wanting to fit in. First calls for gay marriage legalization appeared during the AIDS crisis in USA. Death of your partner became something more close and real, and many had to deal with losing any economical stability, after their dead partner’s relatives would inherit everything and kick them out. So, the main reason for gay marriage was economical. However, since the first calls for this law, a lot has changed in the LGBT community, and queer people who could make themselves more palatable to the straight society now actively punish and push down queer people who are “too weird”.
Last year I’ve been seeing calls for child/adult marriage, largely from youjo users. The underlying justification is quite simple: everyone else can marry people they love, why can’t we? And this is where it gets fully assimilationist, without any ifs and buts and additional reasons – because under current social conditions children do not have their own property and can’t inherit any without adult legal representatives.
Child/adult marriage would not solve mapmisia.
If you are pro contact, you might consider acceptance of child/adult relationships to be a sign of progress, but even then you should understand that marriage is something different entirely. Gay marriage did not solve homophobia. There is still violence against queer people, and it falls much more severely onto those who are worse at imitating straight norms. If the map community went LGBT route, only a minority of maps would benefit, the ones that are better at reproducing teleio norms. Other maps, more deviant, with more trauma from the teleio society, more paraphilias, they would gain nothing from it – and the first group of maps would be afraid to associate with them, suspecting this association might move the normative society to revoke the marriage right.
Child/adult marriage would not solve child abuse.
If you are anti contact and pro youth liberation, like me, it might seem self evident. The largest source of child abuse nowadays is nuclear family, and the primary abusers are parents. If you pass over the legal control of a child from parents to an adult spouse, it will be the exact same problem. Nuclear family is a powerful institution for trapping vulnerable people.
Of course, one could say they wish for something like this in an ideal world, not our world with all its bigotry and legalized inequality of children. But why one’s image of an ideal world includes marriage is another question. Because outside of economical benefits, marriage is just a relic of an older era, where men owned women.
Child/adult marriage would only benefit a small group of maps and disadvantage everyone else. If you support child/adult marriage, it is reasonable to assume you are enchanted by traditional lifestyle.
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