Elsie’s Reviews > Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defense of the Marriage-Free State > Status Update

Marriage
presents and represents a particular symbolic meaning that transcends individuals’ subjective self-understandings and experiences. Instead, it appeals to supposedly shared social understandings of value, understandings that can fail to respect minority and historically-oppressed groups.

this line of argument can be separated into practical and symbolic
strands. Practically, marriage privileges heterosexuality if it is denied to same-sex
couples and if the law is structured so as to give married couples particular rights
that are denied to unmarried couples. Such laws discriminate against not only
same-sex couples but all unmarried individuals (whether single or in a relationship).

of women’s self-respect, and the benefits which are associated with marriage, are
all dependent on participation in a particular form of sexual relationship.

The
persistence of cultural pressures on women to get married means that women are
much more likely to feel that they have to get married in order to be valuable. But
it is unjust if women’s ability to combine work and motherhood, the social bases

First, like prostitution marriage is an institution that is
largely based on ancient and enduring inequality between women and men, one
that stems from and reinforces a gendered society in which women are viewed as
objects for male ownership and use.

State-recognized marriage shares many of the meaning-based features of prostitution, even though marriage is not nearly as unjust as state-mandated prostitution would be.

considered as objects for use. Even if men were also required to take such jobs where possible the situation would still be unjust, because there'd not be such a demand for male prostitutes as female prostitutes (and so it'd be less likely that men would in fact have to take such a job), and because a
prostituted man is not regarded as a debased object for use and abuse in the same
way as a prostituted woman

For all these reasons, it would not be acceptable for the state to require people
to take jobs in prostitution or else lose benefits, even if prostitution were fairly
paid and properly regulated. State-mandated prostitution would worsen and not
mitigate the idea that it is appropriate for men to use women’s bodies for sexual satisfaction, and it would not undermine the idea that women’s bodies are appropriately

Improving conditions for prosti-
tuted women, though laudable in and of itself, does not change the context of
inequality that makes prostitution exist as a gendered phenomenon.

Paying prostituted women fairly does not undermine those deep-seated cultural meanings of the practice. Second, prostitution makes sense only in a context of wider gender inequality, one in which many women lack
realistic alternative options for achieving financial independence such that pros-
titution may appear the best, or only, option.