Message from ritow

[Anonymous]

In pre-modern Korea, a man and woman would have an arranged marriage, have sex (presumably for procreation sake), and eventually they would come to care for – and maybe even love – each other. As I do not know anyone who has had an arranged marriage, I must defer to the great scholars, Joseph Stein, Sheldon Harnick, and Jerry Bock. I am reminded of Tevya in Fiddler on the Roof when he asks Golde “Do you Love me?” and they decide that, after living together for 25 years and going though all the trials and tribulations life brings, they do in fact love one another. This is a beautiful moment in the musical, and I was happy to learn that arranged marriages really could end in a caring for the other person.

As time went on, however, society changed and so did the values of marriage and the order in which these three basic elements occur. Men, according to Prof. Jung-Kim, responded in a survey that they fall in love, have sex, and then get married. Women, too, started with love, but then reported it was only after marriage that they had sex. Hmm. Something is rotten in the state of Korea. I would take a wild guess and say that the order is as the men stated: love --> sex --> marry. (I might even contest the order of love and sex, but let us keep this a focused response.) Why, then, would women change the order? I think it goes back to pre-modern society when a virtuous and desirable female was one who was a virgin. The ideal is so ingrained in their value system that a “good woman” is a virgin that these Korean women even feel the need to prove that they are virtuous in an anonymous survey.

And of course this is not exclusively Korean. We saw the same issue this morning when discussing the trafficking of women, and we see it today in America. Even if a couple has been living together for years, at a wedding many women still feel the need to wear white and use a veil. What for? The white dress was a sign that the bride was pure – a virgin – and the veil was there to keep the identity secret. Time may have passed, technology may have advanced, but there are some traditions and values that have not left us.
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