I’m not delving into the back and forth on arranged marriages and coercion argument, since I don’t care enough to read through it all to see what’s going on there, but I just cannot see how this assertion could be true. In fact, just last night there was an NPR story about women in Shanghai who are pressured to marry before they turn 30, or otherwise they become “leftover women.” The social pressure is so great in fact that there are times and places where parents gather together with what are essentially written resumes about their unmarried children, where they try to match their kids up in marriage with with other resumes.
I cannot fathom how the level of coercion to get married to someone you wouldn’t otherwise want to could be the same in that culture as it is in ours. In fact, the parents in the NPR piece made the opposite argument. They blamed the values of the west for altering how young women are thinking about marriage in China.
Why not? Yes, in some cultures, it may rise to the level of force, as in we’ll kill or disown you. But in other cultures, they’ll probably end up setting you up with people of the same ethnicity because that’s who they (the arrangers) know and are familiar with. In my own family, my cousin really wanted to get married and was asking my mom to set up some meetings with guys, which would have entailed looking for guys with a good family background/good job/nice/whatever other criteria my cousin considered important. It wouldn’t have mattered if in the end my cousin chose some guy who was of a different race/culture, but most likely the guys my mom knew of would have been of our same background.
ETA: Hentor–that’s true. What I mean is that arranged marriage doesn’t always equal that level of coercion, like the example I mention. Obviously, there are times when it is forced, but there are differences between forced and arranged marriages.
Yes, in that it highlights what is stupid about the statement of yours I quoted. See, this is the problem with your “yelling is coercion / hotdogs are murder / parking is theft” school of peppering flat pronouncements throughout a thread. Not only are they invariably wrong (although I’m sure they felt meaningful and important when you typed them), they contribute nothing to the conversation beyond distraction, as everyone stops to marvel at the naive simplicity of your apparent worldview. When you can then later deny two pages later when you actually write out your opinion.
If I walk up to an Indian friend and say “my marriage was arranged,” they are going to picture my parents freaking out that I’m approaching 30, going on Shaadi.com, and setting me up on dates that I grudgingly go on to please them, until I find someone who I actually hit it off with and we decide to make a go of it,
They are not going to picture whatever situation you are imagining.
The only meaning of a word is the way people use it. What you imagine the word must mean has nothing to do with anything expect the bizarre world you have inside your head.
