722358 by The Warrior:

Patriarchal values remain strong in Turkish society and girls and women are expected to conform to traditional gender norms and expectations. Violence against women and girls is high and tolerated and school attendance remains low for girls. Girls are often valued for their ability to be good wives and mothers and little importance is placed on their education.

But that is orthogonal to this issue. Forbidding young marriage doesn't magically make girls and women more valuable nor the society fewer patriarchal. (Indeed, the combination between a high legal marriage age and a patriarchal society is probably the reason for the prevalence of sex selective abortion and infanticide in India, China and Korea.)

Economic considerations along with concerns about girls’ safety and family honour are also drivers of child marriage.

Why is this wrong?

Economic considerations should always be important in the decisions both to marry and not to marry, and whom to marry. As far as you can, you would want better to marry someone who isn't going to economically drain you. (This is also true for non working females: you want a husband who, at least, doesn't keep you and your children poorer than your parents did).

And what is wrong with worrying about her safety? Or with family honor in societies where this is something regarded as important?

Child marriage increases dramatically in emergencies due to increased poverty levels and a need to reduce household expenditure as well as parents wanting to protect their daughter’s honour and avoid sexual harassment and violence in an increasingly fragile environment.

A UNHCR survey conducted in 2014 revealed that the average age of marriage for Syrian refugee girls in Turkey was between 13 and 20 years with many respondents saying if they had the money, they would not have resorted to marrying off their daughters at such a young age.

Why is this wrong?

All this means is that marriage provides an option to give young girls a better life than they would have if they remained single. You don't like that option? Fair enough, then create other options. Removing that existing option doesn't create other options: it only removes the existing one. Which leaves those girls in greater vulnerability. Yes, they may wish they had the money; but they don't.

722369 by The Warrior:

(General reply to the concept of sex based division of labor)

It isn't that girls and women are "not considered suitable" -- it is that biological realities make them, on average, inferior workers at the fields or other jobs based on human strength. Girls are stronger than boys... before puberty. After puberty, adult males are stronger than women due to our differences in hormonal environments. You want the stronger worker if the job is based on strength. Not just are adult males stronger; male physical ability is overall constant all the way between ages 15 and 55. Males do not get pregnant; pregnant females are risking both their own and the baby's health and life if they do strength intensive things. And this lasts for months; it may throw a whole growing season away. Males do not get menstrual cramps; although only a minority of adult females get menstrual cramps every time or close to every time, almost every one of them experience them some time in their adult life, and a significant number experience them frequently. Menstrual cramps incapacitate a female for a few days at a time; and are largely unpredictable (except, ironically, the more frequent they are...). And finally, strength based work tends to have more labor accidents than other jobs. This doesn't affect females more than males, but the reaction is different from co workers. A male having a labor accident will rarely cause other male co workers to be reckless with themselves trying to save them. A female having a labor accident will often do; males will endanger themselves and possibly others to save her.

Maybe none of these four factors would be an absolute deal breaker by itself; but their combination truly makes adult females an inferior choice over adult males for strength based work. What could (and historically does) change this are extraordinary events and situations: a surplus of females makes the costs of females over males more bearable (See: WW2, WW1, Napoleonic Wars, Thirty Years War); mechanization has brought females into male lines of work easily by making the more strength based parts depend on machines rather than broad backs and shoulders. And since forever individual females have bucked the trend; though always dependent on assuming male types of behavior, such as making themselves as disposable as males and choosing not to get pregnant.

722394 by Dissident:

why do so many of us continue to jump for joy and consider it a positive development whenever child marriage is allowed in some nation where women and girls are not valued?

First, because the two things are separate issues. You can recognize a positive thing about a country without saying that country has a perfect culture.

Second, because actually young marriage gives girls a higher value than being forbidden to marry. If your culture doesn't value girls, a girl's best ticket to a better life is not a university education that she's never going to have. It is to marry a good husband. Why take that chance away? And when you forbid young marriage, all you do is tell the family that they have to delay marrying her off. For some families, this doesn't matter, and won't harm the girl. For other families, they will be faced with having to take care of the girl for more years than otherwise, even when they're poorer than the potential husbands; or even when external events (such as the Syrian war) make them unable to properly care for them -- while a husband could do it better. And in the extreme, some families will foresee all of this, and will simply abort or infanticide girls and cut down on the losses earlier on.

Do we feel our attraction base somehow makes it obligatory for us to support any type of situation for girls that allows for sexual contact?

No.

But it makes it obligatory for us to look past blanket condemnation of arrangements which include sexual contact just because they don't meet the Western (really, Anglo-Saxon) mores of underage chastity at all costs.

Shouldn't we be concerned about what the consent of the girls in question might be under these circumstances? Is the legal allowance of sexual contact between man and girl the sole reason we should be applauding such liaisons?

Yes, we should be concerned about their consent. Which is why opening up an option to girls who have none is a positive thing. That it will presumably involve sexual contact does not invalidate its inherently desirable effects in protecting and sheltering girls from the worst aspects of war, displacement and destitution. That is good enough to support it. The legal allowance of sexual contact is just the icing on the cake, to me.

722407 by Dissident:

And that starts with the following words: Opportunities and Choices.

[...]

However, if choice is not offered to these girls, then things are pretty bad.

How does removing the option to marry create more opportunities and choices?

But the question is, do they care about their wives and daughters as much as they do their own authority? Do they respect their wishes and feelings? If they make all the decisions for them, then I see many very bad outcomes, and all the good ones happen largely by accident or luck.

If she has her own agency overridden by a husband, then she is going to have her agency overridden by her birth family. The husband does not introduce a worse culture. If the husband has a bad culture, it's because the bad culture was there before any of them were aware of it. And it would manifest itself in other ways if it didn't in a marriage.

The "norm" is based on the demands of the system in which we live in, not something integrally embedded in our species.

Well, specific forms of norms are often cultural. But pregnancy and white knighting are biological. And they two impose limits on where the norm can lie.

What I am talking about is making sure that these child marriages are based on what the girls actually want, as opposed to what the father wants, plain and simple.

What would you want? The physical unsafety and material deprivation of a refugee camp; or taking a chance at a better life with a husband who offers you a way out of there?

Sure, you may want to have instead 3, 5, 10 different options. But when you have the options you have, it is just wrong to take one away because it isn't the absolute optimal one.

Forget about traditional gender norms, because they led to the age-based norms and expectations that turned kids into property--much as they turned women into property--and then turned us into monsters because we are threaten to undermine that tradition.

Um, no?

Anti ideology was unknown, even in the West, before 1861. And even so, after the Progressive Era ended it went into slow motion until the anti cult movement from the late 1960s. (Later on, the anti cult movement took the backseat while the new wave of fundies led the charge, and then the 3rd wave feminists). Even in the West, anti ideology is largely an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon and has had to be pushed down the culturally Western countries outside the Anglosphere.

Traditional gender norms have existed in the West since the West exists (at least, since the Greek, Roman, Hebrew and Christian cultures which share the credit for creating the West). Anti ideology is a phenomenon with very tight constraints of time and geography. And if I may add, most other cultures in the world (certainly most of the bigger ones!) are both more patriarchal than the West and less anti than the West.

If society collapses, then I say good, let this damn joke of a society collapse and be replaced by a better one.

I'm not afraid of societal collapse. But beware. Transitions are painful.

You can't have it both ways: defend the traditions of this society, and then expect them to bend those traditions to allow us to fit in.

I defend the traditions this society had until 1861. They are the ones destroying traditions.

If gay men or gay women can be both a provider and homemaker, then why can't straight men and women vary the role?

Gay men and lesbians do not differ from each other on their capacity to get pregnant. Either both can or both cannot. The bargain is much different than when one can and one cannot.

Speak up for girls? Speak up for us? They are doing neither of those things!

Where is a girl who wants a relationship with an adult better off? In the country where she can marry him, or in the country where she would be sent to therapy for this heresy?

Where is a girl lover engaging in a romantic relationship better off? In the country where he can marry her, or in the country where he would be incarcerated for this resistance to Modern mores?

It is that simple.

And if a girl is as unlucky as to have a father or whole family who wouldn't respect her wishes and autonomy, then the absence of legal marriage won't make them respect them either. It will just change the ways in which she would be abused.

722395 by Dissident:

shouldn't you, as a GLer, be questioning the situation that will be endured by the girls in these marriages instead of simply single-mindedly cheerleading the measure and declaring it "civilized" solely because it legally allows such a union?

It is an improvement over being displaced, exiled, homeless, AND deprived of this way out.

It sure is more civilized than sending them back to the place they're escaping from because the marriage isn't recognized, as the rest of Europe and the US would do.

Are these girls given a choice? I didn't see you address this anywhere in the post.

The only way to know is to open the choice for them. Am I concerned that some of these may be forced marriages? Yes. But it is absurd to pretend that by banning marriage then the girls who would be forced into marriage by their families wouldn't be abused in other ways or otherwise deprived of opportunities. It is also absurd to assume that all marriages will be forced.

But I'll be sure to tell you when I ask my new wife!



Cuteness is to die for
Cuteness cannot fail
Cuteness knows no limit
Cuteness will prevail