Another Insane Devotion by Peter Trachtenberg

Author:Peter Trachtenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2012-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

There’s no archaeological record of when men and women began to marry. Given that some form of marriage exists among nomadic peoples like the Tuareg, Kham, and Warrungu, it’s likely that humans were marrying before they had much in the way of property. So much for Engels’s view of marriage as a bourgeois institution. Say in the beginning its chief purpose was the protection and rearing of small children and the formation of alliances among people who might otherwise be enemies. That rangy fellow with the dead eye and the necklace of dog’s teeth wasn’t so menacing when you discovered he was the husband of your wife’s sister, and you were grateful to be able to call on him when other nomads tried to drive you away from the watering hole. Marriage extended kinship beyond biology, connected you to people who didn’t share your blood. In all the early accounts of marriage, the idea of connection is paramount. When God gives Adam a mate, it’s not in the interest of his sexual fulfillment. It’s because it is not good that the man should be alone.

This period of companionship lasted only a little while. Perhaps it ended with the Fall. Having seen each other turned inside out like flayed skins, could the man and the woman stand to look at each other again? Could they stand to be looked at? In Masaccio’s painting, they walk side by side but don’t touch. Both of them are encysted in their shame, and one wouldn’t be surprised to learn that once they had wandered a distance out of Eden and begotten their unhappy sons, they parted ways and had nothing more to do with each other. It established a pattern. Men labored with men and went off to war with them; they feasted and got drunk together and sang the kinds of songs men have been singing since they discovered that they sounded better when they were drinking. The women served them, first the food, then the bowls of wine or beer. There was no pretense of fairness. Afterward, they went off by themselves and ate and drank the women’s portion and sang songs of their own. At a certain hour of the night, the men and women lay down together. Things went on in this manner, with variations, for the next 10,000 years.

Societies that observe this arrangement are described as homosocial, with men and women inhabiting separate spheres that only narrowly coincide.

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