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He man netflix remake1/16/2024 The book on matrimony was not her idea, she explains in the first line: ‘someone eligible proposed it to me and I said yes.’ The book explores marriage from multiple angles, legal and political, social and narrative, its interminability and its dailiness. I am not confusing the two as much as recognising what Devorah Baum delineates in the introduction to On Marriage, that ‘marriage is so fundamental to shaping our ideas about what it means to get attached that one often finds it involved when thinking about all manner of other attachments as well.’ Despite being so persistent, marriage is actually little explored in philosophy, writes Baum, an author and professor of English literature, who has also collaborated with her filmmaker husband Josh Appignanesi on directing two documentaries focused on their own partnership, The New Man (2016) and Husband (2022). Perhaps it is due to this ‘ideological bone’ that I am writing about marriage when what I’m really interested in is love. A page later: ‘Who can resist the thought that love is the ideological bone thrown to women to distract their attention from the powerlessness of their lives?’ Perhaps that is what love is – the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.’ But power is impossible to sidestep. I think about Phyllis Rose discussing this in the introduction to Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1983): ‘When we resign power or assume new power, we insist it is not happening and demand to be talked to about love. When I speak of marriage, it is not love I think of, but power. Quite the opposite – it is marriage’s function as an organising logic that I fear, that I believe does not work for anyone (especially not women). I don’t mean to conflate marriage and love. Love is the subject, by which I mean, love is something we want to narrate and discuss, because words make this inexplicable and incomprehensible thing – other people – feel less ambiguous, perhaps closer to certainty. And yet, I am always interested in love stories: I listen to my friends talk about their love lives and when they apologise for dwelling on something – ‘is this boring?!’ – I answer, ‘love is the subject.’ I am interested in how we organise our lives by connection with other people, in how we live alongside others, in how love is a social construct and a form of relation. Marriage falls into a specific category of things I don’t want to think about because their meaning swells the more you do. ‘It’s kind of crazy to shop at Target, watch Netflix, drive a Honda, and still have a husband.’ On Marriage, Netflix, and Other Things I Hateġ.
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