The Property Model of Marriage

The Denver Post just ran an article about The Scarlet Ranch (a Denver swinger club). It was a pretty good article. Normally I don't ever read comments on public sites, because The Internet. But I was curious if anyone was having the same mixed feelings as me - More public exposure and acceptance is good, but it already gets way too crowded on special events and this article was liable to make that even worse. :/ It's the classic trade-off of fringe culture.

Of course I should've been expecting this, but a lot of comments were of the "Ew, wtf?" variety. There were several that mirrored this line:

"Why are they even married?"

Um... how about for love? Look, I'm on board with the whole "Marriage is a bad idea and we shouldn't do it" thing. But quite a few people seem to believe that the entire purpose of marriage is to secure access to someone else's genitalia. I want to ask - why are YOU married? Is it to assert your ownership of someone's body? To restrict what your lover can do for pleasure? To prevent others from enjoying an intimate relationship with them? Because those are TERRIBLE reasons. That's just the Property Model of marriage again. Christ, who the hell said we don't need feminism anymore? And this is extremely damaging to both sexes.

I want to strangle people who equate love, sex, and ownership like this. People are not things, and the person you love most shouldn't be a thing to you most of all. Maybe this is what comes of living in a society based on a "jealous god" who has the morals of a spoiled five year old. /frustration