Peoples Republic of South Devon

On Love and Hypocrisy (or The Confessions of a Rubbish Anarchist)

July 5th, 2008

posted by Jess Sains

As always PRSD has had it’s finger on the pulse of Devon news this week and posted about non-church weddings in the region.

One of the most powerful texts I picked up while at University was Emma Goldman’s essay on Marriage and Love I used it as one of the main thrusts of a second year project to prove that Robert Nozick wasn’t a “real” anarchist because he did not think about collective politics, and Goldman, with her anarcho-feminism truly was anarchistic because she took in to account female and family politics, collective human societal politics.

Of course, things have changed, somewhat if not enough, since Goldman was writing. In the Western world marriage is no longer – one hopes – about the buying and selling of women, child-baring beasts, family names, it no longer means a lack of female choice. It is about “love” (whatever that means… arf arf), about choosing a person to live with, about paying less tax, about making provision for your kids if one of you should die… Who says romance is dead? So, perhaps Goldman doesn’t apply any more?

Not so, still marriage is used to belittle women, even today. Apparently ‘all little girls dream of their wedding day’, they all know what dress they’ll be wearing (and it has to be a dress, the outfit, historically, of female repression and servitude), what the ‘colours’ will be. More and more money is spent on one day, with the average in Britain now being £25,000. This, in a generation that can’t afford their own houses, of course… One day costing that much, one day when you are no doubt too tired and too stressed out to enjoy it. All this rubbish is laid at the feet of women. They want marriage, to protect them and their babies (so, we’re still assuming we don’t have proper jobs and merely wish to cement our man so that your babies are his number one off-spring – all sounds a bit Tudor-ish to me, that) and men acquiesce, turning their eyes to heaven and shrugging with all their mates, because that’s what women want.

But surely almost everyone wants love? Companionship? Another half, partner, lover of some description? Even blokes seem to want that most of the time… Love is about support, love is about the collective, love is about society, love moves us away from selfishness.

Goldman says: ‘Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?’

Love, in all its thousands of forms is life, then. The love for our children, the love for our pets, the love for our property. Hang on, that’s the problem love and property have been confused! At first women were the property, then it was about protection of property, joint property! And there it is, the reason I got married, despite being a anarcho-feminist. Having lived with my partner for four years, having been in love and secure for all that time, we got married to protect any children we might have from the ridiculous co-habitation laws in this country and because my in-laws expected it.

How hypocritical is that? Very. It is the most hypocritical thing I’ve ever done, but as a friend, and anarchist, said to me on the day “love is good”, even love sanctioned by the state…

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