Engels suggests that the concept of marriage developed out of a man's desire to control his property. ?

Question

After all, how else would any man know that his children are truly his, unless he 1) married a virgin and 2) insisted his wife practice monogamy? Here's my question for you. Now that society has DNA testing, how will this impact marriage?

Answer 1

Both man and woman gain some control over their "property" via marriage.  Go far enough back (to the time before animal husbandry when humans didn't even get the link between mating and children) and you find matriarchal tribes more common. In that situation, men lived with their sisters and mothers, not their wives and children.  Once people understood that mating of their cattle produced offspring, they (men) exerted ownership over their own offspring, then their wives.

DNA won't change anything.  There has always been suspicion about how to prove paternity.

Answer 2

Why is it assumed that marriage is an institution framed by men to control women?  Isn't it much more for women to control men, assuring their own safety and well-being? After all, it is the man that goes out to hunt the mammoths and protect the cave from lions and tigers and bears [oh my!], while Mom stays home tending the fire and the kids.

Somewhat more seriously [which doesn't mean I abandon the above position], you must remember that Engels, as a framer, with Marx, of strictly materialistic Communism, will attempt to explain everything in terms of property and exploitation.  Do you really believe that your parents' union was nothing more than an economic arrangement? [Well, I'll concede that this does happen, but when it does it's usually a very obvious partnership that gets snickered at from behind covered mouths.]

His philosophy just doesn't allow for something as insubstantial as love to be a factor in human society: which is one of many areas where Marxism/Communism falls completely on its face in an EPIC FAIL

  

Answer 3

Come on now! Show me one instance throughout history where man tried to control something!

Answer 4

maybe it will make men less defensive and protective when they have dna evidence that reveals with a high degree of accuracy that the child or children are their's. Also, maybe domestic violence against women will decrease as the age old caricature of women as deceitful (remember witch burning) and conniving can be dispelled by scientific fact. I heard in a gender theory lecture while i was at uni that the misogyny of men against women was based in this root suspicion that a man never know's if he is the real father of his children. Hence the family unit as such is always riven with suspicion and psychological as well as physical violence. This desperate need to control, forces man to pursue and arrange, collect and organise everything in his life - hence aggressive capitalism is born out of the anomie of the industrial revolution. In smaller tribal communities women were unable to hide lovers as they are in the highly mobile and populace modern world.

Answer 5

I suppose Engels also created the world?

Folks, we have to stop contradicting ourselves here.

The concept of marriage came from God.

Now I find it odd people don't believe in the Word

because it was "written by man" but believe in a

philosophy because it was thought, spoken, written

and accepted by man. That's just flat out hypocritical

if you would ask me. But, of course you won't..ask me,

that is.

To answer your question: DNA testing has only been used

sparingly. Usually when a father is trying to get out of paying child support. None of that is even the issue. If man had conceived marriage

and defined it therein; 1) Women would have been disposable property.

Man would have allowed himself to have 100 brides. Or better still; why even bother to marry at all? Man would just go from woman to woman getting each one of them pregnant without ever holding himself accountable for the welfare of the children he would father.

So, this blows that theory right on out of the water.

The only impact that would be established through DNA would be that

the fathers who learn they are not the biological father of the child or children they thought were their own..for this would prove infidelity.

Peace

Joy