From: rburns@key.amdahl.com (Randy Burns)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: "sexual favors" as a "pow
Date: 3 Sep 1992 19:47:35 GMT
Organization: Key Computer Laboratories, Fremont
Distribution: world
Reply-To: rburns@ferris.key.amdahl.com (Randy Burns)
NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu
Originator: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu

In article <92Aug29.220126edt.11957@zooid.guild.org> goid@zooid.guild.ORG (Will Steeves) writes:
>muffy@mica.berkeley.EDU (Muffy Barkocy) writes...
>MB> Now, in the context of "modern relationships," things change a little.
>MB> Women can now have sex with one or two people before getting married.
Oh, I think they can get away with a few more encounters than that :).....
Do you honstly think that the number of sexual encounters a woman may have
had by age 25 reduces her eligibility for marriage(assuming a degree of
descretion and health precautions)?

>MB> They can also support themselves to some degree, so that getting married
>MB> is not a necessity.  However, once they *are* married, things are often
>MB> much the same.  Once they have children, it is much harder to support
>MB> them on their own, so they are again compelled to attempt to stay with
>MB> the man for financial reasons. 
In a state of nature, there is no AFDC. The relative financial support women 
now get outside of relationships with individual men is pretty generous by
recent historical standards(though it is in some respects less that what may
have existed in a hunter-gatherer society). The real question is why are
there increased demands on social arrangements like AFDC?

>MB> In addition, while women can support
>MB> themselves better now, the situation is still not good.  
This may relate to economic situations that have little to do with gender roles.
America started as a frontier society. In frontier societies, labor is generally
valuable and social position is less significant than in centers of civlization.
The closing of the American frontier has created a situation in which social 
position and politics have played an increasingly significant economic role
because the frontier no longer provides the econonomic and social safety valve
it once did.

>MB> The slight
>MB> improvement is that they have less trouble getting child support when
>MB> divorcing.  So, now men can find many more women to have sex with
>MB> without marrying them.  Meanwhile, once in the context of a marriage,
>MB> men still have more power.
     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Question: do men have more power within marriage because men as a group have more 
power or is it related to a tendency for modern society to concentrate the power
that is a prerequisite for sustaining a marriage into the hands of fewer people?
I tend to think the latter. The statistics I've seen indicate men are much more 
likely to remarry after a divorce than are women. Marriage and paternity, for an 
increasing proportion of men is simply a spectator sport to which they have little 
or no connection/identification. Both the number of never married men and men
who marry at later ages has increased dramatically. I think this phenomena is
at the heart of the differences that we are now seeing in the views of marriage
and gender roles commonly voiced by members of both sexes. The phenomena they
are both looking at do exist, but they exist for subsets of the population-
a really comprehensive view has yet to emerge.


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