There is a vile article on Vox.com, “My husband pressured me into sex for years. #MeToo must include sexual assault in marriage,” which I’m not going to link but you can find if you must hate-read it. You get the basic idea from the headline.
The article dovetails nicely with Rollo Tomassi’s point, “You cannot negotiate genuine desire.” Any man who attempts to negotiate genuine desire to destined to fail, as the writer’s husband should realize. But like most guys he’s probably never been taught as much, and he probably thought that marriage is a contract or system involving reciprocal obligations and duties.
In modern marriages, that isn’t true. A marriage is a one-sided contract in which a man serves at the whims of a woman. Smart guys realize that marriage is a terrible deal and refuse to enter it. Guys like the one married to the anonymous Vox writer get shat on in public.
There is a concept in engineering called “The Five Whys” that are designed to get beneath the apparent surface of a problem. In the Vox worldview, the problem is the man’s behavior towards his wife. And to be fair, his behavior might be very bad (though we can’t tell from the article). But the deepest root cause of this situation is biology. A couple levels up from that, however, is marriage. Take this guy out of the marriage contract and he’d likely realize “his” woman isn’t into him and he needs to find a woman who is. That’s at least three levels down from the Vox article, however. You’ll never find an honest exploration of male-female relationships in Vox.
Strangely, you will find many honest explorations in other female-centric publications like New York Magazine. But those explorations won’t be framed the way I frame them.
In a Tweet, Vox’s editor Ezra Klein called it a “searing read.” It is searing, but not for the reasons he thinks. It’s a searing indictment of marriage as an institution and that guy for being dumb enough to fall for it.
I propose men start a hashtag, #DontGetMarried, pointing out the reasons why smart guys don’t contort themselves into the horrible position that is marriage.