I posted the following in response to a reader comment on my previous entry about whether Jessica Valenti is hypocritical for getting married:

Nicole, I think you bring up an interesting point here, which was precisely what I was trying to get at when I explained why I didn’t see Valenti as a hypocrite:

“Does this mean I was influenced by society? Yes, of course - if I didn’t live in a culture where it was common (and yes, expected) for me to change my name, would it have occurred to me to do so? No. But does that mean the patriarchy is getting me down, or that I feel coerced into this decision? Hell no.” [link to her full comment]

We can recognize that our decisions are informed by the society in which we live while still choosing to make “traditional” decisions. (I should add, however, that I’m wary of “choice” feminism since the things some women view as their own empowered choices — think: Girls Gone Wild — are very much motivated by their existence within a male-dominated society.) But while I agree that it’s nonsensical for anyone to expect you/Valenti to not get married (it’s not going to make marriage less patriarchal if you opt out anyway), I think more people should think about why it’s even important to be able to call ourselves “married” or to call each other “husband and wife”. If not for the existence of the State, there’d be no recognition of those titles, but it wouldn’t make our relationships any less important.

Ultimately, my problem with marriage isn’t that it’s a gendered institution. That’s secondary to the fact that it’s an institution whose function is not to magically enhance our relationships but rather to act as an instrument for promoting state interests, namely to generate wealth. To name a few examples, procreation, division of labor, and inheritance (i.e. reproduction of wealth) are all influenced or directly controlled by marriage, whose boundaries are oh-so-conveniently defined by the State. Governments don’t just issue marriage licenses out of benevolence. Marriage is used as an instrument with which to organize society and promote productivity (often at the cost of economic equality). Today, marriage in 21st century America may be a more equal institution in that women aren’t stripped of any and all rights, but a more equal instrument of societal control is still an instrument of societal control. And while it might be worthwhile to work toward a less gendered notion of marriage, you can’t really change how people perceive the institution itself unless you change the (capitalist) conditions in which we live.

In other words, Valenti didn’t lose the good fight because she got married. She was just fighting the wrong battle to begin with.