Marriage lets society wash our hands of our worst men

Freddie de Boer just wrote something about education that points at something that’s been rattling around in my head for a few days now about marriage. 

Our education system is presumed to serve the essential function of sorting high school graduates into colleges and college graduates into jobs commensurate with their ability, but modern norms prevent us from acknowledging that for this system to work, there must be students who are at the bottom of the distribution - that is, bad at school.

Compulsory, monogamous (for women) marriage norms exist to make a society’s worst men a problem for our least powerful women so they’re less of a problem for the rest of us.