anthurium

I was reading Marie Claire and I stumbled across this article, The Starter Husband.

I wasn’t terribly surprised at the somewhat sexist tone of the article.  The premise of the article, however, isn’t entirely cringeworthy.  In summary, the article explains that it’s common for women to end their first marriages rather quickly, and there is far less stigma surrounding divorce than there was twenty years ago.  Shocking, I know. </sarcasm>

Snarkiness aside, encouraging women not to feel ashamed about their “failed” first marriages is a positive thing.  Unfortunately, this article embodies the “empowerful faux-feminism” which is so prevalent in mainstream women’s magazines.

Now that my stint as a TA for Introductory Women’s Studies is through, I won’t waste my time arguing about whether or not Marie Claire is “empowering.”  However, some of the ramifications of the aforementioned article are worthy of analysis from a queer theory standpoint.  Although the mainstream gay rights movement’s single-mided focus on marriage is problematic, the concept of “starter marriages” brings up some questions.

Since studies show that around two percent of the population identifies as LGBT (Bohan and Russell, 1999), and the divorce rate in the United States is around thirty percent then shouldn’t conservatives be more worried about heterosexuals eroding the sanctity of marriage?

Furthermore, since cohabitation rates have increased, marriage rates have dropped. Perhaps the Church of Latter-Day Saints should pledge millions of dollars to stop those wily breeders from engaging in lust and fornication.

According to this site, straight married couples who identify as religious are more likely to get divorced than atheists or agnostics. The validity of non-academic statistical analysis is always debatable, but interesting nonetheless. The variability of human behavior is boundless; thus, a strict interpretation of moral dictates is bound to beget some degree of hypocrisy.

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