Recently, the wildly out-of-touch rag, Cosmopolitan released an article on why men should stop asking their girlfriend’s fathers their permission to marry their daughter. The article claimed, “…those of us who want a more egalitarian society must take a hard look at how wedding rituals undermine that goal.” The author claims that much of what gets pegged as romance in today’s society is actually undercover sexism. She also claims that the only thing more sexist than asking for a woman’s hand in marriage is for a woman to take her husband’s last name.
Before I get into how truly incorrect the author of this article is, let’s get one thing straight: We do not live in a society where once a man is given approval by a woman’s father, that woman is forced against her will to marry the man her father has chosen for her. The only way this article might have a shred of accuracy to it would be if we had some sort of bride/groom slave trade going on with fathers across the country, and the majority of women in America were being forced into these arrangements against their will. Unless I have missed something serious, that is not the case.
As I’ve prefaced, the article is grotesque and deeply inaccurate. It is directly representative of the exact problem that women today claim to have. They claim that all guys are self-serving pigs who care only about their own opinions and no one else’s. I don’t think most guys today are like that at all, and I will defend my assertion until I am proven otherwise. Of course, there are certain men out there who are scum, but it’s absolutely inaccurate for her to claim that asking for a woman’s hand in marriage is a “deeply sexist act.” It comes back to mis-defining gender roles again.
Gender roles are extremely well-defined in biology, in natural acts that we can see and interpret clearly. The diversity of the different gender roles is a beautiful thing that needs to be highlighted and celebrated, not blurred and combined so much so that we begin (or shall I say, continue) to deny the individual characteristics of both genders and the great things they have to offer. A man is inherently built to protect his wife, while she is inherently built to nurture him. Later on, when they have children, the woman is built to protect those children while hopefully relying on the man to protect her well-being. Throughout a woman’s life, the strongest protector in her life is her father–that is, until the day she is married.
A father is the person in a woman’s life who she respects the most. She, usually, has the most love for her mother but the most respect for her father. This goes back to the difference between protecting and nurturing. When a man asks the father’s approval for his girlfriend’s hand in marriage, he is showing respect not only for the woman he is about to vow to love, protect, and provide for until death, but also for the person who has loved, protected, and provided for her up until that very point. It’s a way of showing the father and the mother, and the rest of that family for that matter, that he wants to know if he’s worthy to love and protect her by the standard of the people who love her the most in the world already. If a woman thinks that’s sexist, she’s got some serious issues.
It is more of a burden on the man than anyone else. It is one of the most submissive acts a man will ever show a woman in their life together. He’s submitting himself to the mercy of her family and their approval of him and his relationship with their precious loved one. The original Cosmopolitan article was written by someone who has clearly been groomed by our society to find misogyny in everything they can and if they can’t find it, then they create it. It’s what I call manufactured misogyny–do not be fooled by it or sucked into that rhetoric by these wicked feminists.
Millions of divorce lawyers are counting on you!
Marriage is between families. It will be their grandchildren.
This is why “nontraditional” families are intrinsically broken. There is supposed to be a Mother and Father. For single moms, or divorced, etc. who is the suitor to ask? And with smaller families, there will be fewer uncles or cousins which might substitute.
Do this.
It’s a matter of tradition not misogyny. Today, you would probably take it on a case by case basis. If the girl and her family are pretty non traditional, you may want to skip it. If they are very traditional, go ahead out of respect.
I agree. This is something I would expect. Not only as showing respect for my, but also for my family. One of my Uncle’s by marriage and father did this. As did my brother-in-law. I think it is a tradition deeply seated in showing respect to the prospective bride and her family.