Reading this completely bonkers New Yorker article about marriage counseling and the eugenics movement, two things I had not previously realized were related. Apparently one of the leaders of the American eugenics movement, this psychopath named Paul Popenoe who admired Mein Kampf, was also the founder of couples counseling? Because if you think feeble-minded people and brown people are breeding too much and taking over the world and destroying the “Nordic” race of superior people, I guess you’re going to be super committed to blue-eyed literate people getting married and making loads of babies. BABY PANIC!
The anti-gay-marriage people cite this guy’s “work” a lot, although they appear not to have actually read any of it. I’m not sure they know how to read, which, ironically, would have made them prime candidates for Popenoe’s doctrine of forced sterilization!
His ideas on marriage are predictably hilarious. I mean, it was the 1920’s and 30’s, it’s obviously not going to be enlightened whatever it is. But it’s even funnier (to me) than you’d think. This guy deals with issues like “Are homosexuals necessary” (hint: the answer is no) and recommends that a husband determine whether his prospective bride is “frigid, normal, or ardent,” with both frigid and ardent being problems, since ladies aren’t supposed to love or hate sex but just kind of like it okay (Mrs. Spoon: “I’ve been married to my Walt for forty years and I swear in all that time I’d just lay there thinking about my canning.”). It’s especially necessary that the husband determine if she is frigid, because if she is she may need “surgical treatment” (the mind cringes from contemplating what this might entail).
But man, this eugenics stuff!! You think it’s just a bunch of crazy people–that era’s Tea Party movement–until you learn that the United States Supreme Court passed, by an EIGHT TO ONE MAJORITY, legislation mandating that “imbeciles” and “inferior” humans be FORCIBLY STERILIZED. The case is called Buck v. Bell, 1927. Oliver Wendell Holmes supported that shit! What the fuck?
The “evidence” presented to the court included a psychologist testifying that a 7-month-old baby “just didn’t look right” and that there was something “not quite normal, but just what it is, I can’t tell.” THAT’S SCIENCE. CASE CLOSED. Thousands and thousands of “mentally defective” and “mentally diseased” people were then given vasectomies and tubal ligations by these random dudes who could tell just by looking at you if you were smart or dumb or black. Dumb and weird looking and ugly and brown-eyed people, or people whose foreheads seemed too small, or people who couldn’t read because they were coal miners and had never gone to school, all were institutionalized, for years and years, so they could be studied and kept from dirtying the good white smart people outside. Truly amazing. And anyway, this is the guy who invented marriage counseling in America.
Couples counseling is often pretty dumb and futile, in my opinion, but if I had to choose, I would choose the kind where the therapist isn’t a raving Goebbels-esque madman.
There is a really weird part where the article describes various modern marriage counseling sessions. There’s one where all these couples who hate each other have to watch “the Full Monty” together. One couple’s main problem is that the husband is gay and the wife is a woman. But then they have a baby together and everything is great! By the end of their time in group therapy, “Michael and Rachael ‘wondered whether they’d still be married without the group.’ I wondered about that too.”
Is just “staying married” the only goal?? If so, then that is easy. Just stay married. But shouldn’t the goal be to like being married? Not according to Paul Popenoe. According to him we’re all race warriors who are supposed to be valiantly procreating to save our beleaguered race from becoming the “slaves” of the brown people, who will keep a few of us around just because of our “technical skill,” just like “the Romans did with the Greeks.” OUCH! Well, that doesn’t sound fun. SOMEBODY MAKE ME PREGNANT QUICK. Except I have brown eyes so maybe I am not supposed to have babies?? It is confusing.
there’s also a very strong school of marriage self-help in which women are instructed to abandon their bullshit feminism which has only gotten them into trouble. This echoes directly shit Popenoe said in the 20’s about “coeds” and how they get “too uppity” with their education and how this makes it “impossible” for them to find a man “willing” to spend the rest of his life with them. OUCH.
Some crazy lady who hates being 40 wrote a book about computer dating in which there is a chapter titled “How Feminism Fucked Up My Love Life.” In this chapter she says women are better off getting married in their 20’s before their “market value” plummets, instead of getting an education and a career. The author is apparently a real woman and not Newt Gingrich or a caveman, which blows my mind.
My feminism has enriched my love life by leaps and bounds, because it has caused me to be shunned by the very type of guy who would make me most unhappy. Plus it means I don’t have to do the dishes very often. Everybody wins! Especially the dishes.
This whole marriage therapy movement that is swamping America is also tied up with our gross fetishization of “science.” All these people cite “top scientists” and “scientific findings” that apparently prove you ought to lose 8 pounds and then your husband will love you again or whatever. Or “science shows us” that within the first 3 seconds of an argument we can predict if the couple will get divorced or stay married. Is that useful to me? I am going to say no. Also science can’t predict shit. People stay with horrible assholes who hit them for their entire lives: WHY? Couples stay together even though they aren’t happy and fight all the time. People have babies when they don’t actually want to parent. WHY WHY WHY? Can science answer these questions? No. Science needs to stick with colonizing Mars and finally curing cancer and stopping global warming, and get its butt out of things like “Love.” What the hell? There’s this lady who cites scientific evidence about ovulation and how many tips lap dancers get (?) in order to “prove” that if you’re “husband-hunting,” you ought to go off the Pill because ovulating lap dancers get more money than non-ovulating ones. WOW.
She also claims that the “housework gap” (meaning how men won’t clean the toilet or whatever) is BECAUSE OF HEREDITY. Literally natural selection. Natural selection resulted in “neurobiological differences related to domestic skill.” Ah yes, domestic skill. Ten million years ago when our ape ancestors were bickering about the household chores, the man apes who refused to vacuum the living room carpet were 10% more likely to be successful hunters than the emasculated man apes who let their wife apes boss them around. THAT’S SCIENCE. It’s proven fact too, because my old man does the dishes and has never once killed a gazelle.
Our shameful secret.
The American public is very afraid of science/math in general, so that is where the danger comes from in their thinking “well, a scientist said it, so it must be true”. People are far too easily impressed by the SCIENCE without realizing that, at the end of the day, all research is kind of talking out of your ass while standing on the shoulders of other people who may or may not have been talking out of their asses, too, only time tells!
Unfortunately, these scientists publishing these crazy papers are probably causing way more damage than some man proclaiming there was no self in the Iliad.
I was going somewhere better than that, but it’s nearly 3 in the morning and science + research