For what, you ask? Oh, just about everything, usually, but today we’re blaming feminism for ruining marriage. And not just for straights — feminists ruin gays’ chances of getting married, too!
Oh, and feminism causes divorce, which causes explosions.
Amanda points us to this opinion piece by Maggie Gallagher about Dr. “Boom-Boom” Bartha, who blew up his UES townhouse to keep it from being sold so he could pay his ex-wife her divorce settlement. Maggie’s opinion is pretty clear from the headline, a sentiment which is repeated in the body of the piece, so it’s not like the headline writers did her wrong:
DIVORCE, NOT TERRORISM, CAUSED THIS EXPLOSION
Well, Maggie, actually, it was the gas that Dr. Boom-Boom piped into the house from the main gas line in the front. But we’ll get to that later.
Maggie, who usually advocates marriage uber alles (except in her own case when she fell pregnant while single), and even took money on the DL from the government to propagandize for the government’s marriage initiative, sees Dr. Boom-Boom’s boom-booming of his townhouse to be the act of a desperate man, the inevitable outcome of something she sees as all-too-common:
But New Yorkers were quickly reassured: No, it was the work not of an enemy of the United States, but of one of our most common domestic products: divorce.
Now, bashing divorce pays the bills for Maggie, but I have to think that her heart wasn’t really in this one. After all, the guy blew up his friggin’ house. In New York. Where we’re a bit sensitive about buildings blowing up these days. So she gives some space to the bad stuff about Dr. Boom-Boom:
Even before the divorce, he was impossible to live with. The court that granted his wife, Cordula Hahn, a divorce on the grounds of cruel and inhumane treatment made that clear. “Defendant intentionally traumatized his wife, a woman of Jewish origin born in Nazi-occupied Holland, with swastika-adorned articles and notes affixed around their home, and became enraged when she removed them.” Nicholas ignored Cordula as she underwent surgery for cancer, cut off her access to marital funds, and eventually quit speaking to her entirely.
He soon became impossible for anyone just living nearby, posting angry notes to his stoop, bothering his own tenants. “Very mean, very obnoxious,” said a neighbor. After the divorce, Cordula fought for her share of the marital assets; when a court ordered the townhouse sold and the proceeds divided, Nicholas Bartha hatched his demented plot.
He sent a long, rambling e-mail that made his mental illness, and his rage, perfectly clear. It was all HIS money, not hers. “There should be no economic incentives in the (divorce) process. … If I had a prenuptial agreement, Cordula would have never divorced. … I am not continuing what I am doing to give you more money. Cordula, my further staying alive does not make any sense.”
But Maggie’s just the piper here, and someone else calls the tune, so having established that Dr. Boom-Boom was abusive and unpleasant from the get-go, she calls for sympathy because, well, his wife dared to repudiate her marriage vows and leave his abusive ass:
The saving grace, the thing that makes you preserve a tiny piece of sympathy for the man, is that as he descended into his own black pit of rage, he turned suicidal, not homicidal. He was the only one in the building at 8:30 a.m., before his medical secretary had arrived, before patients began to fill the waiting rooms. The strange thing is that, even as neighbors, friends and family report a mean, vengeful man, his fellow doctors and patients recall a caring doctor. He held on to that fragment of his identity, even as the rest of his world collapsed around him.
This is where Maggie starts becoming incoherent. Oh, poor suicidal guy. He never meant to huuuuurt anyone else, he was just suicidal.
Yeah. So he decided to BLOW UP A BUILDING IN MANHATTAN DURING RUSH HOUR.
And he did hurt other people, including a 22-year-old Parks Department employee who’s still hospitalized, other passersby and 10 firefighters who responded. And since this is, you know, a town house in Manhattan, there were some rather close neighbors that needed to be evacuated. Like the people in the apartment building next door, some of whom still can’t return to their boarded-up apartments. And the private club on the other side. The street itself will be closed until next week.
But we’re supposed to forgive this because he had a nice bedside manner and his wife left him. Or something.
Maggie, however, has a more personal reason for wanting to be sympathetic, and it’s a doozy:
But there is another thing that makes me pause to offer a moment of human sympathy amid the evil this man did. My grandfather did exactly the same thing: At 67, upon learning that his wife of 30 years was leaving him, he burned down his own house, and died of the self-inflicted flames. We were not close. I hardly knew him. He, like Bartha, first destroyed his marriage by descending into paranoid rage, and then destroyed himself rather than face old age, alone, unloved, disconnected, publicly pronounced a failure as a man by his own wife.
What’s just mind-boggling is that she seems to think it was worse for her grandmother to leave her grandfather — thereby “publicly pronouncing him a failure” — than it was for her grandfather to so abuse her that she left him.
Or, perhaps, not so mind-boggling, if one considers that the theocon view of marriage is that it has as its foundation an enforcement of strict gender roles and power imbalance. And that divorce is a repudiation of the man’s power and of the proper wifely role as subservient:
Their chief problem with same-sex marriage is that they can’t figure out who wears the pants in the family. Someone’s got to be in charge – and (by their theological lights) that’s the job of the man of the house. This is why TheoCons (especially the male variety) are rightly threatened by same-sex marriage. If Larry and Barry can marry, then marriage isn’t about preserving gender roles, with manly men providing for the family and meek women being the submissive nurturers at home, barefoot and pregnant. “Horrors!” thinks the TheoCon man. “What if my wife finds out about that? How will I keep her in line?” It gets even worse, if he thinks about himself: “What if they’re right? What then is my role in a marriage?”
Unfortunately, it’s not just theocons who are making this kind of argument against gay marriage; Robert Farley has a link to this ridiculous Slate piece by Richard Thompson Ford about the recent New York Court of Appeals ruling that same-sex marriage was not required under the state constitution:
But what if these gay-marriage bans were not animated by anti-gay bigotry? What if they represent a deeper-seated anxiety about gender and gender roles? What if popular aversion to gay marriage has less to do with hating same-sex couples than with a deep psychological attachment to a powerful symbol of sex difference: the tulle-covered bride and the top-hat-and-tails groom?
How to reconcile the growing support for equal rights for gay Americans with the seemingly hardening opposition to gay marriage? It certainly suggests that homophobia is only part of the explanation for the widespread resistance to same-sex marriage. A lot of the resistance is less about sexual orientation than about sex difference. In other words, it’s not about the difference between gay and straight; it’s about the difference between male and female. By this logic, conventional marriage doesn’t exclude gay couples from a special status reserved for straights; it excludes women from a special status reserved for men—that of husband—and excludes men from a status reserved for women—that of wife.
If I’m right, there are two reasons someone might oppose same sex-marriage: anti-gay animus or a desire to protect traditional sex roles. It’s no secret that traditional sex roles are in crisis. They’ve been battered by feminism’s attacks on male privilege and feminine mystique. Macho women have mocked female virtues (consider the gun-toting Thelma and Louise, the oversexed Samantha Jones of Sex and the City, or the wooden-stake- and holy-water-wielding Buffy). And house husbands, Mr. Moms, and “metrosexuals” have similary rejected or lampooned traditional masculinity. Today both men and women reject the constricting and unequal sex roles of past generations, but most still desperately want meaningful sex identities. So they cast about, all too often buying into crude stereotypes, such as those offered in books such as The Rules, which counsels the single girl to deploy the catty feminine wiles and emotional manipulation learned in junior high school; or The Game, which counsels the single boy to use psychological manipulation and deception to wrangle sexual favors from reluctant women. Marriage fills that gender gap: It is one of the few social institutions left that rigorously and unapologetically divides the sexes into distinctive, almost ancient, gender roles.
It should go without saying that the state should not advance anti-gay prejudice through the force of law. And as far as I’m concerned, the state has no business propping up distinctive sex roles in any context—that’s a job for Wonderbras and Viagra. But a hunger for distinctive sex roles is just not the same thing as anti-gay bigotry.
In other words, it’s the fault of feminists and Joss Whedon that same-sex marriage is unpopular. Why, marriage is the last refuge for reinforcement of strict gender roles! We can’t have the queers taking that away from us!
As Rob points out, Ford never does explain why defending traditional gender roles is such a good thing, nor does he seem to understand that homobigotry springs from the same well as misogyny: that of a highly-ordered, strictly-gendered traditional mindset that puts the white straight male at the apex of society and does not tolerate questions or challenges to privilege.
And that’s probably, at bottom, what makes Maggie Gallagher’s comments about Dr. Boom-Boom and her grandfather’s suicide-by-arson so odious: it’s just another reminder that feminists are the scapegoat for every damn thing that goes wrong in society when it’s really the anxiety and fear of those who want to cling to their traditional gender roles without question that cause the real damage.