Marriage: Institution of Male Private For Profit Ownership of Women
Marriage is a key institution for the gendering and privatization of care work that discourages social investment in basic human welfare
Patriarchy is the social system of male private for profit ownership of women as a dehumanized means of production.
In addition to creating life through pregnancy, women are expected to produce all of the foundational needs of life - domestic labor, emotional labor, care work, and the administration of households - for men and society at large to consume and build upon.
Marriage was created to institutionalize this system through a contract of sale where a man purchased a girl or woman from her father.
Let’s talk about the roots of marriage and why it’s a pillar of patriarchal extraction designed to subsidize the lives of men without any considerations or provisions for welfare and wellbeing of girls and women.
We’ll also explore how this foundational institution creates a larger social logic where we do not expect our social structures or government to facilitate meeting human needs as their primary mandate for existence.
This core belief is an application of patriarchal expectations that society should only center and serve men, under the assumption that every man privately owns a wife to produce the needs and desires of his life and household.
Wife is a labor role and Husband is a title that grants entitlements
Marriage is a critical institution for maintaining this patriarchal effort to gender and privatize cooperative care work as a commodity embodied by girls and women.
Society and men alike rely on consuming women’s unpaid labor without participation, compensation, or reciprocity towards women.
In contrast, matriarchal social logic organizes society around cooperatively meeting the needs of children and investing in rising generations, and, as a result, social investments and institutions are designed to facilitate humans meeting needs as their primary purpose.
Patriarchy organizes society around the fears and desires of adult men, assuming that every man privately owns a women to produce the needs of life outside of society and structures of social investment.
This standard excuses men and society writ large from cooperatively contributing to the fundamental needs of others, instead, relying on entitlements to consume that work from women by birthright. This enables men and society to instead focus near exclusively on competition, pleasure seeking, and material and social status accumulation.
This is the root of why our social systems do not serve the needs of life and human life is expected to serve the needs of these systems instead. Ask yourself - does the economy exist to facilitate humans cooperatively meeting needs through exchange? Or does human life exist to meet the needs of our economic system?
Considering that in America, there is no state where an individual working full time for federal minimum wage can afford a market rate one bedroom apartment, I’d say we expect human life to serve capitalism.
When women are exclusively expected to meet the needs of others without receiving reciprocal care, investment, and structural support in return, we all suffer the consequences of ruthlessness, alienation, and exploitation as the standard for human connection and social currency.
Marriage: A Sales Contract
Marriage was established as a contract of sale where a man purchased exclusive rights to a woman’s sexual labor, reproductive labor, domestic labor, and creative labor.
Originally, the man purchased the bride from her father. As Frederick Engels explained in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, the best option for a girl was to be sold into marriage by her father. Otherwise, she would have to sell herself as a prostitute.
The choice was being sold to one man or having to sell herself to many men to access the resources necessary to survive. Put another way, women could be private or public property, but never human.
Already, we have the social logic that men are entitled to profit from a girl or woman’s existence and that it was her responsibility to become the most valuable commodity possible. Her critical value - outside of proximity and usefulness to a man - was being virginal and innocent, of having no experience or education to judge her husband by.
We still see this fear of being held to any standards or accountability amongst red pill men who fixate on body count as an indication of a woman’s worth and obsess over teenage girls as the most desirable partners.
The fear is two-fold. One, these men fear feeling inadequate and seeking out inexperienced girls or women soothes their fear of being judged and compared to other men. Two, these men fear adult women because adult women aren’t as easily manipulated and “trained” to perform exclusively for the benefit of the man.
The logic is similar to training puppies. Adopting an adult dog can be more challenging because they’re established in personality and have a worldview informed by experience - for better or worse. Puppies are much easier to train!
Also, many theories suggest that the domestication of wolves into dogs required removing pups from the mother and pack to keep them in a permanent state of adolescence. Instead of maturing into adult wolves, pups removed from the pack never fully matured, living indefinitely in a state of pleasing arrested adolescence.
This seems very applicable to grown men who seek out teenage girls as the most desirable partner, and why, historically, girls were considered ready for marriage at puberty (12-14 years old). These child brides were often sold to men 20, 30, or even 40 or more years older.
Pubescent boys were generally not considered ready for marriage - unless a political alliance was being arranged. Marriage was designed for adult men to consume girls.
This is true historically and today. Globally, millions of girls are forced into marriage before the age of 18, and within the United States it’s estimated that over 300,000 child brides were forced into marriage between 2000 and 2018.
Please note that when a minor is forced into marriage, they legally cannot get divorced because they are not adults. Legal loopholes that allow the forced marriage between child brides and adult men are often used to cover up statutory rape and molestation crimes.
Apparently, it’s only a crime to rape a child if you do not forcible marry her after.
Child brides aren’t just for rural cults, as we can see from Courtney Stodden’s harrowing experience as a child bride in early aughts spotlight. At 16 years old, Stodden’s parents agreed to allow her to marry Doug Hutchison, a 51 year old TV actor who appeared on Lost.
Hutchison was older than Stodden’s father.
He proposed marriage after 6 months of online communication with the teen, following an introductory visit to her Washington state hometown.
Marriage is About Male Subsidies, Not Cooperation
Patriarchal men reject cooperative standards and prefer the control that absolute leverage affords instead. Cooperation requires standards of contribution, mutuality, and reasonable compromise.
Cooperation doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone is performing the same roles or contributing in the same realms, but it does mean that there is a fundamental spirit of reciprocity and genuine care for another person as a fellow human being, equal in value and autonomy.
Consolidating leverage is a lot easier than developing cooperative skills and perspectives. Seizing total control of all resources and financial access enables men to avoid cooperative endeavors entirely by responding to criticisms or bids for equity through withdrawal or stonewalling.
Whether that’s withdrawing money and resources, withdrawing protection, withdrawing the self-control to refrain from violence, or withdrawing emotionally through cold neglect.
Maintaining resource leverage enables men to refuse cooperative participation within their own relationships and households.
Relying on leverage to dominate is what transforms the role of wife and husband from a cooperative partnership into an engine of male welfare.
Wife becomes a labor role, a work horse, and a scapegoat to absorb the shame and blame of any and all disappointments and failures. Husband becomes a title granting welfare entitlements with no mature vision for contribution or stewardship. Husband becomes sadistic consumer and wife becomes the scapegoated and exploited producer.
We are all familiar with the extensive unpaid and unreciprocated labor expectations the role of wife invokes:
Domestic manager: daily cooking, cleaning, and all efforts related to creating and maintaining a well organized household physically, emotionally, and administratively
Caretaker responsible for nurturing the young, nursing the elderly, and caring for the sick and vulnerable
Primary caretaker to children, nurturing and investing in their educational, emotional, and physical needs
Assistant that proactively anticipates the needs and desires of others - especially men - and supplies those needs and desires through independent initiative
Therapist, life coach, and career strategist for men
Sex worker who satisfies a man’s sexual desires on demand without standards of pleasurable reciprocation
Social Manager who invests in social bonds, kin keeping, and community building
Budget Extender who creates more with less through research, couponing, and labor tricks to increase how far a dollar can stretch
When we consider what the role of husband offers in exchange, we’re left wanting. Patriarchy instructs men that the role of husband and father is about protecting property investments and claiming entitlements. This is essentially the basis for provider and protector mythos.
While providing and protecting are valuable roles of contribution, if inadequate in exchange with wifely labor expectations, narcissistic standards of patriarchal entitlement twist providing and protecting into antisocial points of leverage and domination.
Provider Myths
Within patriarchal culture, providing economically isn’t about understanding and contributing to the needs of a household through thoughtful investment. It’s about maintaining the exclusive leverage of resource control - and by extension leveraging control over every member of the household, most notably, the wife.
This is why the rise of marriage as an institution corresponded to women being denied social participation - and thus social autonomy - by intentionally excluding women from market places and political power.
There is no evidence that any matriarchal culture ever barred men from political power and social participation.
Patriarchy, on the other hand, is the intentional exclusion and erasure of women from political power and social participation
The purpose of leveraging indoctrinated shame and organized violence to deny women autonomy - bodily autonomy and productive autonomy where a woman is able to independently sell her products and control the resources yielded - was about consolidating men’s power to use and profit from women as subhuman means of production.
Despite the mythos, historically, most women have economically contributed to their households despite not having control over their contributions.
Marriage has never offered women a soft life - it just promised men total control of women’s contributions and the creation of male leisure by offsetting the daily productive work of life onto women exclusively.
The provider role is essentially a rebranding of consuming control over the productive work of women to augment men’s individual contributions.
The provider role encourages men to claim exclusive credit and control over collective efforts - those of his wife and those of his own.
Being the provider is about consolidating leverage to refuse cooperative participation and to instead extract needs, desires, and profits from women without any meaningful reciprocation or consideration.
This is why red pill men and conservatives are focused on dismantling public education, banning abortion healthcare, and revoking no-fault divorce laws that enable women to leave bad marriages and develop economic self-sufficiency.
The goal is to restore men’s leverage to consume from women without reciprocating loving investment in kind. The goal is restoring male welfare entitlements, to ensure that every man has ease of access and minimal barriers to consuming women as a subsidizing resource.
Recent NBC polling shows that white men without college degrees overwhelmingly approve of Trump’s chaotic destructive initiatives with a 69% approval rating, while white women with college degrees overwhelmingly disapprove with a 67% disapproval rating.
The implicit promise of electing President Trump - an adjudicated rapist - was to force women back into manufactured dependence on men to ensure men continue to access marriage subsidies without having to offer anything beyond being employed.
As we’ve previously discussed, when patriarchal fantasy birthrights to own and exploit women for profit and pleasure are violated, patriarchal men respond with violence and sabotage. The total destruction of American democracy and the federal workforce is retaliation against society at large for these men not receiving a wife to submissively subsidize and pleasure them by birthright.
Protector Myths
Protector myths encourage men to protect women they feel ownership over, not women and children in general. It’s about protecting production property the same way a person would protect profitable factory equipment from theft or sabotage.
If fulfilling the role of protector was actually about protecting the wellbeing of women and children, then men would have a cultural standard of holding each other accountable. Which is not the case.
Patriarchal culture of male narcissism actively discourages men from holding each other accountable - it’s not seen as a man’s business to comment or challenge the decisions and attitudes of another man.
Plus, when other men behave with greater depravity against women, it implicitly boosts the value of “good” men in comparison while requiring nothing of them.
If we cannot trust men to - at the bare minimum - socially disengage from known abusers, then we cannot trust men to protect anything outside of their own self interest and pleasure seeking.
Labor and Entitlement
Marriage bestows a role of labor onto women and a title onto men. Husband and father are titles with very limited expectations for the mature performance of said role. Husband is a title and titles grant entitlements.
It’s similar to aristocracies where inherited titles convey entitlements, not roles of responsibilities or standards of competencies. The title of Duke conveys entitlements to own, use, profit from, or destroy the property associated with the title - whether that’s land, farming serfs, castles, or entire villages or regions.
The title is the institutionalization of irrational authority. Irrational authority, remember, is generated by making the other emotionally smaller and dependent on the dominant role. Which makes the dominant role equally, if not more, dependent on the submissive role.
It is the codependent fusion of authoritarian dynamics, an ideal of narcissist and scapegoat fused into one whole that is less than the sum of its parts. (Check out the this article for deep dive into those dynamics).
Rational authority, on the other hand, is a demonstration of competency and proficiency. Irrational authority cannot exist on its own two feet, on its own merit because it is dependent on extracting control from the other to exist. Rational authority only exists by virtue of its independent merit and competency.
Husband is a title of irrational authority that conveys welfare entitlements. A husband does not need to cultivate or demonstrate knowledge, respect, or routines of care towards his wife or family to be considered adequate.
However, a wife must be competent in executing a variety of labor roles with no expectation for support or reciprocal care and investment to be considered adequate.
In Conclusion…
Listen, I’m not against longterm partnership and creating families - if that’s what each party so desires. Our current expectations for marriage, though, is objectively harmful to women and beneficial for men.
It doesn’t have to be this way - cooperative paths, genuinely loving paths, are available to us all - but it requires men to cooperate with women as equals in partnership and to choose to release patriarchy’s fundamentally immature, irrational, and anti-social concept of masculinity.
There is a mature vision of masculinity that doesn’t hurt and exploit life by definition. I urge all women to refuse to settle for anything less than a mature and joyfully competent man - because anything less will literally drain the life right of you to make him thrive.
As we heal the logic of connection and cooperation within our homes, between men and women - intentionally and thoughtfully - we begin to rewrite the foundations of our social logic at large. We are capable of investing in and creating social structures and currencies that honor and invest in life and the wellbeing for all.
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