but you don't get, you don't get me

Talk around Dylan Farrow's recently-published account of Woody Allen's sexual abuse of her during her childhood is bigtime reinforcing my opposition to marriage, and my belief that it's an institution that should be discarded rather than adapted. The creation of a legal category of family implicitly defines other situations as not-family, when in fact kinship structures are more complex and evolving than "marriage" can account for. There's a lot of chatter right now over whether your mom's long-term boyfriend is your dad or not, with reference not to Dylan but to Soon-Yi Previn, her sister-stepmother, in service of what seems to be the very dodgy claim that if she's only your long-term partner's teenaged daughter it isn't incest or abuse and doesn't establish a pattern of sexual predation on daughter-figures. Because Mia Farrow and Woody Allen never married, the kids are being tacitly denied the protection from parental abuse that we offer marrieds' children. We recognize that the family is a place of intense feeling that can become very unsafe in conflict - but what legal measures we have against familial violence seem kind of distressingly heteronormative. It's a problem that legal relationships and actual relationships don't always match up.

I look at the families around me and I see a lot more going on than mama+daddy+offspring. It's not just that marriage prioritizes reproduction over love, although the current heteroitude of the institution does indicate that - it's that marriage prioritizes sexual partnerships over non-sexual ones, reinforcing the fiction of the nuclear family and denying people the right to name their own kinfolk.

Anyway, I've been having really intense responses to the whole thing - maybe because I connect to the way that it's hard to admit that abuse can come out of cool nontraditional families without seeming to reject them/re-establish the norm as the best and only way. I need to take an MPEG Streamclip hacksaw to Midnight in Paris, the only Woody Allen movie I give a damn about, and cut out all the angsting and nebbitude and subtle misogyny and just keep Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway.