The emails continue to flow in to my in-box in response to Sunday’s Glenn Sacks show. Right now, they’re running about 5-1 in favor of Glenn and against me. Sample:
Whether you are an evil man or merely a wretched
brainwashed void I do not know. But I know without doubt that your cause
is repugnant and wrong. And whether you are eventually made accountable in
some way only time will tell.
Matilde the chinchilla has been reading some of these impertinent missives and is becoming rather cross! (I can tell by the way she nuzzled close to me while she had her almond this morning that she was feeling protective.)
To be fair,that invective is characteristic of most, but not all, of the criticism I’ve received. Some has been more eloquent and civil, like this recent comment by Stanton.
Anyhow…
I’m not going to become a one-issue blogger. By tomorrow, I promise something on a topic other than men’s rights and pro-feminism. But there is one topic I wanted to touch on today. When we were first chatting about doing his show, Glenn asked me if I ever read Men’s News Daily. I admitted I was familiar with it, but rarely visited. Given that our topic for the show was the men’s rights movement, he asked me to take another look at it. I’m told that MND is perhaps the single most important website for men’s rights advocates. (I have no way of knowing whether that is true or not, but given the look and feel of it, I suspect that Glenn is right.)
In preparation for Sunday, I spent some time reading the various articles and following the various links at Men’s News Daily. The topic of the site never came up on the show, but I do have some reflections to share. MND has an eclectic list of articles, some of which have precious little to do with men’s rights issues. (Today I find links to articles on China, Iran,guns, and Social Security, for example). Not surprisingly, the politics of the site are solidly right-wing. Many columnists from the likes of Townhall or the National Review can be found spouting their consistently conservative views at MND. That’s not surprising, of course. To the extent that they share a political vision that transcends anti-feminism, it would seem safe to characterize most men’s rights advocates as right of center, though with libertarian rather than authoritarian leanings.
Now, I’ve spent many years in friendship and dialogue with conservative men. But most of the conservative men I’ve worked with on male issues come from a different strand of the men’s movement than the rights advocates do. I’m talking, of course, about Promise Keepers. Back in June of last year, I posted a brief summary of the men’s movement. I argued that there are actually four distinct groups with radically different approaches to men’s work:
1. The Men’s Rights Advocates, represented by everyone from Glenn Sacks to Warren Farrell to Men’s News Daily to Stand Your Ground.
2. Pro-feminist Men’s Groups are where my heart lies. They include the likes of NOMAS, Men Can Stop Rape, and XYOnline. Important leaders include Michael Flood and Michael Kimmel.
3. Mythopoetic Men’s Groups, represented by the important work of Robert Bly and the Mankind Project.
4. Christian Men’s Groups, represented most famously by Promise Keepers. (Others include International Christian Men’s Institute, and New Man Magazine.)
The first and fourth groups have much in common. Both Men’s Rights Advocates and Christian Men’s Groups take a variety of traditionally conservative positions. Both are highly critical of the feminist movement; even the briefest visit to the websites of their various affiliates will make that much clear. Frankly, I’d be willing to bet that most of the American membership of both strands of the movement voted for President Bush.
But pro-feminist men and Christian men’s groups also, surprisingly have something in common: they both place their emphasis on the ethical and behavioral transformation of men. If you go to Men’s News Daily or any other Men’s Rights site, you won’t read much about the responsibility of men to change. Men’s Rights Advocates believe that men don’t need transformation, they need defending! The enemy of the MRAs is feminism and those who have helped to spread feminist influences through our courts, our schools, and our culture. But the MRAs don’t believe that their members ought to engage in critical self-examination. They don’t believe that MRAs primary responsibility is to help other men grow and mature. They rarely mention discipling or mentoring other adult men. In the MRA world, men are victims of both a feminist hegemony and individual women. Blame is never placed on men themselves.
Christian Men’s groups, as I’ve said, almost always share that same hostility to feminism. But visit their websites, and you will see that the emphasis is NOT on defending men but on changing them. Read, for example this article from this month’s New Man magazine: Talk Your Walk. It briefly tells the story of a man learning to become more humble and learning to better express his feelings to his wife and daughter. It’s also a lesson about the real goal of the Christian Men’s movement; as the article says:
Jesus sets the standard as the perfect role model, the only example necessary… It’s a wise man who practices the character of Jesus in order to develop gentleness and self-control in speech.
Now friends, that’s a tall order. Whatever else may be said of Christian men’s groups, they are most decidedly not "defending men just as they are"! They are not interested in blaming men’s suffering on women. Rather, they are interested in guiding men to become ever more Christlike, a process which surely is long, intensive, and requires much in the way of mutual support and hard work. Most pro-feminist activists are also interested in helping men develop some of those very same characteristics cited in New Man; most of us (regardless of faith) are big believers in "developing gentleness" in men!
And over at Men’s News Daily, I find many things that Christian men’s groups would find objectionable. To give just one example, at the top of the page, there’s a link to poker babes. In two words, we’ve got sexual objectification of women and a promotion of gambling. That’s not a link you’ll ever find at Promise Keepers! The Christian men’s movement, as one might expect, places a huge emphasis on male sexual purity. For example, helping men win the victory over porn addiction is a critically important, perhaps even central, focus of the movement. But to put it mildly, I haven’t found anything negative about porn at any of the men’s rights sites. Indeed, to the extent that they are discernible, the sexual ethics of most Men’s Rights sites are decidedly libertarian if not positively hedonistic. (For a blunter example of what I mean by the connection between MRAs and hedonistic exploitation, check out this blog hosted by Men’s News Daily. Warning: not entirely work safe.)
I am an evangelical of a sort, though with fairly progressive views compared to the stereotype. Over the last few years, I have been to one rally and a couple of small group meetings of Promise Keeper (PK, as it is called). Though I disagree with many of the conservative social positions of its members, I have far more respect for PK and its allies than I do for the men’s rights movement. That respect is rooted in the understanding that the fellows in the Christian Men’s Movement are, like pro-feminist men, doing the hard work of individual and social transformation. Pro-feminist and conservative Christian men are both committed to ending the sexual exploitation of women. We are equally committed to creating "new men" of character, self-restraint, courage, and gentleness. We have much about which we disagree, but we do agree on the need for men to be transformed. In that, we share something that our MRA brothers do not.
I’ll have more on the similarities between pro-feminist men and Promise Keepers another time.
UPDATE: Men’s News Daily has a link back to this article with the charming headline:
AMBUSH: Pro-Feminist ‘Girlyman’ Hugo Schwyzer Takes Potshots at MND’s Politics, "Hedonism"
Ambush, huh? Where can I get the pro-feminist "girlyman" t-shirt? Oh, and I am not a miltary historian — what exactly is a "potshot"? What’s the etymology? I’d like to know, so I can know whether I am being accused accurately.
And they have another banner linking to Glenn’s site which reads:
Glenn Sacks Gores Misandrist and Feminist Apologist Hugo Schwyzer…
Huh. Gores. I’ll go inspect my torso for signs of injury. (Oh, and I like the play on Glenn’s name — "sacks" can be a fine verb in that sentence,if only you add a comma after it.)
*offers more almonds for Matilde’s obvious distress*
Matilde, as a rodent, does not normally like felines. But you are obviously a discerning and special Kat.
The comments and emails you’ve been getting are simply astounding.
Your graciousness is equally fairly impressive too!
If you go to the blogs of these self-proclaimed men’s rights activists, you’ll see all sorts of pin-up pictures of women, usually with hostile captions.
Oh if only women would STOP posing for all those “pin-ups” then men would have nothing to exploit.
I certainly share with you, Anne, an eagerness to provide women with well-paying alternatives to selling their bodies in any of the facets of the sex industry, from “pin-ups” to prostitution.
But the fact that some young women make poor choices out of economic necessity does not mitigate in any way men’s responsibility to not objectify them. I have a far higher opinion of male self-control than that.
You’re right. And if women started wearing burquas, men wouldn’t stare at their cleavage. Once again, we must remember that if it has a penis, it’s blameless.
I see cleavage, I stare. Discreetly. I’m a normal male, I like to look at pretty women.
Am I “sexually pure”? I have thoughts about sex just like any other man I know. I don’t cheat on my wife, and wouldn’t dream of doing so.
So, are you now going to tell me that I need to change?
Men objectify women because there have always been women who let them.
No, Scarbo, not necessarily. But there’s all the difference in the world between a momentary appreciative glance at a woman on the street and lustful staring. (If you aren’t sure of the difference, ask a woman — most know the distinction between a complimentary look and the penetrating gaze).
If your staring is perceptible either to the woman at whom you are gazing, or to your wife, you bet your boots you’ve got a problem.
And if you’re buying magazines to look at ‘em, or going online to look at ‘em — yup, you’ve got work to get done. And brother, it can be done.
Hugo,
I don’t beleive you really understand the men’s movement. I think you’re trying to put people into neat little boxes and label them.
For instance: Mens news daily. Most of my mens activist friends loathe this fascist site. Its by no means a loved site amongst vast swathes of us. Of course Glenn would cite it as being important, he used to write there (maybe he still does, I dont know).
Secondly, you only seem aware of a very small number of men’s websites. This is not entirely surprising, as some of the more important ones are hidden. Nevertheless, you can’t characterise a movement based on such a limited view of it.
Thirdly, the men’s movement isn’t really a top-down, ideologically driven movement like the feminist movement is. Its very much a grass-roots uprising. Most of these guys are not making money out of it, we don’t have professorships in posh universities that pay us to talk about these things all day long. We do it because we’re sick of men like us never having a voice in the media on gender issues, we’re sick of being constantly characterised as rapists and abusers, and we’re sick of the injustices we see happening around us.
Lastly, I am bisexual. And I’m a very commited men’s rights activist, and I don’t think you have the first understanding of men like me so stop spreading bigotted views about people you don’t understand. I don’t think you are a hateful man, but I do think you are planting seeds that can grow into hate.
I don’t think you see us as individual human beings. I think you’re more dedicated to upholding an ideology, whatever the costs. Please Hugo, don’t put an ideology before real humans.
I’m leaving now because I know you’re all going to start pissing on me and I’m really not in the mood for it.
Sorry to see you piss and run, David.
Hmmm…I didn’t see David’s post as a “piss-n-run” affair. Some generalizations can go so far before they’re no longer applicable, right?
Not that I disagree with you, Hugo, but the first question that came to mind after I read David’s comments was, “Is he an exception to the rule?”
If none of this makes sense, I blame it on work.
Well, as someone who has been teaching courses on men and masculinity for years, has worked with groups ranging from Men Can Stop Rape to Promise Keepers to Big Brothers to the Boy Scouts to NOMAS, David doesn’t get himself off on the right foot with me when he questions whether I know much about the men’s movement. Again, as my post pointed out, the men’s movement is multi-faceted, in ways that go beyond the capacity of any blogger to describe.
For the record, Michael Kimmel’s “Manhood In America” provides a very similar encapsulation of the men’s movement as a whole, though he and I interpret things a bit differently. (That could be a whole other post.) Now, if David doesn’t think Kimmel has any credibility on men’s issues, that’s another matter — but it’s a bit like saying that Phil Jackson doesn’t know basketball.
Men’s News Daily receives an astonishing number of hits and is regularly cited as representative of the men’s rights movement. The fact that David doesn’t list any of his “important but hidden” websites makes it impossible to respond to him as to whether there are other segments of the men’s rights movement that are in complete disagreement with the MND crowd. If you have a men’s rights site that is demonstrably more influential than any of the ones I listed, send it on over!
Obviously I can’t list every men’s website out there. I carefully picked just a couple that would be representative. Warren Farrell is one of the fathers of the men’s rights movement; few would argue that. And Men’s News Daily gets cited frequently and gets more hits than any other men’s rights site out there.
…And while David demands respect for the complexity of the men’s rights movement, he is dismissive of the feminist movement, calling it “top-down”…
I’ve also, as even Glenn Sacks pointed out, taught Gay and Lesbian history. As a straight man, I’ve worked as an activist on gay issues for years. (Hello? All Saints Pasadena? Flagship church of GLBTQ affirming Episcopalianism?)
Are there gay and bisexual men in all four groups of the movement? You bet. There’s no question pro-feminist men are the most publicly receptive to gays and lesbians, but I am well aware that gay and bisexual men, both out and closeted, can be found throughout the entire men’s movement.
I couldn’t help myself, I had to come back. I guess I hoped for some kind of bridge to be built between my world and yours.
I have to say I’m feeling more depressed than ever. I didn’t demand respect, I just was pointing out that I exist. But you only seem to want to think about things that can be neatly labeled, categorised and simply placed into groups. Anything outside of those top-down imposed labels and you don’t seem to show any interest in it.
I don’t care how many degrees or fancy-sounding groups you are a member of, you clearly don’t understand me or my friends and you clearly show no interest in understanding us either.
The fact that MensNewsDaily.com gets a lot of hits has no relevance to whether it speaks for the men’s movement. Its primarily an American conservative website, and I guess it gets a lot of hits from conservatives. So what? I’m not an American, and I’m not a conservative. And guess what: there are lots of us non-american non-conservative out there lol
Equally, the fact that its been cited as being representative of the men’s rights movement just shows that there are others out there with an equally narrow view.
If you are a scholar you should greet something that doesn’t fit into your current model with interest, not dismissal or distain. To embrace the new and the unknown is the only way we grow.
Then help me, David — give me one of your important but hidden websites. Prove me wrong! Please, with all respect, I am interested. But simply telling me you exist without providing much else is not enough to help your cause.
“Men objectify women because there have always been women who let them.”
Really, there’s nothing that’s not women’s fault. Even if one man shoots another, I’m sure a woman is to blame somewhere. His mother?
It’s the women of Afghanistan’s fault that they have to wear the burqua. If they wanted to, they could just take it off, no? Sure, they’d get killed, but they still have a choice.
*kindly offers Matilde some more almonds*
No one, of any complexity, can be slapped with a label and put in a box. No one. To me the most important thing is to listent to each and try to understand. I don’t think David is doing that very well. But, I’m new here, so I’ll stop with that.
I don’t think David is doing that very well. But, I’m new here, so I’ll stop with that.
I don’t agree with your criticism of David. However, Hugo doesn’t listen very well. When a man posts something Hugo doesn’t like, he just labels the man a “misogynist.” Most of the feminist dweebs here behave similarly.
Um, where did I label David a misogynist, Jeff? Help me out, my friend.
And as always, Jeff, try and restrain yourself from using even mild epithets like “dweeb” I’m sure it’s just code for “misguided and wrong”, but still… I do want to keep even this heated and difficult discussion reasonably civil.
My understanding of potshot is that it’s a classist insult against those who hunt for food (thus, the pot), but those who hunt for sport. Could be wrong.
that’s by those who hunt for sport..
DJW is basically right, although the language of class war is profoundly unattractive. The expression is in common use here, to “take a pot-shot” is to snipe at someone. As for the whole “Mens’ Rights” mess, I’ve posted a tangential response on my weblog.
I don’t agree with your criticism of David. However, Jeff JP doesn’t listen very well. When a liberal posts something Hugo doesn’t like, he just labels the liberal a “conservative.” Most of the conservative dweebs here behave similarly.
Well, sneering at people who have a compelling reason to hunt from those who do it for the sheer fun of it ain’t too pretty either
Of course, this ugly form of classism is pretty much entirely antiquated here in the states.
We have the same common use meaning as in NZ.
Well Amanda, I live in America, not Afghanistan. And do you think that its men’s fault that women allow themselves to be photographed in “sexually objectifing” ways to be displayed anywhere from porn magazines to suggestive billboards on the freeway?
Come on now, feminist women have to take some responsibility for your “sisters” who are doing absolutely NOTHING but harm to your cause.
And Hugo, as for finding alternative well-paying jobs outside of the sex industry for these “ladies” – maybe they should try to get some self respect first. If a man is falling on hard times, he usually gets a “real” job – perhaps low paying, but generally respectable. I have yet to hear of an epidemic of men selling their bodies out of economic necessity.
And what is with all of these labels all the time? Does it really matter how many gay, lesbian or bisexual people support one cause or the other? Aren’t we all humans? Why do these “groups” find it necessary to point out their “differences”. I think many people couldn’t give a damn who you go to bed with.
I have yet to hear of an epidemic of men selling their bodies out of economic necessity.
May I recommend John Preston’s book Hustler as a starting point?
David, here’s Getting People to Listen To You 101: the ‘no tagbacks’ game will not get you any respect. If you think that you will be screamed at, go elsewhere. If you have something to say, by all means say it–but “Here’s what I think, now I’m running away so I can’t see you reply, haha I’m back again!” is ludicrous.
I don’t agree with your criticism of David. However, Jeff JP doesn’t listen very well. When a liberal posts something Hugo doesn’t like, he just labels the liberal a “conservative.” Most of the conservative dweebs here behave similarly.
When you can support your nonsense with facts, come back, “zuzu”.
Well Amanda, I live in America, not Afghanistan.
It doesn’t matter, Ambrose. Amanda is a professional victim. How dare you question her victim status, even by implication?
And do you think that its men’s fault that women allow themselves to be photographed in “sexually objectifing” ways to be displayed anywhere from porn magazines to suggestive billboards on the freeway?
According to Amanda, Hugo, and most of the goofs who post here, everything is the fault of men.
Come on now, feminist women have to take some responsibility for your “sisters” who are doing absolutely NOTHING but harm to your cause.
No, they don’t, and you can’t make them! Nanner, nanner!!!
And Hugo, as for finding alternative well-paying jobs outside of the sex industry for these “ladies” – maybe they should try to get some self respect first.
Sadly, you’re missing the point. The “patriarchy” prevents those women from getting self-respect.
As a side note, I’ll say that I find the entire sex industry appalling and I don’t support it economically.
If a man is falling on hard times, he usually gets a “real” job – perhaps low paying, but generally respectable. I have yet to hear of an epidemic of men selling their bodies out of economic necessity.
And what is with all of these labels all the time? Does it really matter how many gay, lesbian or bisexual people support one cause or the other? Aren’t we all humans? Why do these “groups” find it necessary to point out their “differences”. I think many people couldn’t give a damn who you go to bed with.
My friends who have a homosexual orientation don’t buy into the whole “agenda” that is spouted on this blog and in other places. They don’t see themselves as helpless victims, and I don’t see them that way either. They are friends and I love them as much as I love any other friends.
Hugo, in the bible isn’t there a phrase that says: “Seek and you will find”?
I beleive that is a fundamental law of our world. But if one seeks understanding, you can’t cross your arms skeptically, roll your eyes and defy people. You have to seek with an open heart. Thats just my view anyway. I’m not a scholar.
Hugo, there is a window opportunity here, you could have acted as a great healer between two groups, but you can’t heal and reconcile through confrontation. Look at what has happened in Northern Ireland with the wonderful, albeit shaky, efforts to reconcile the Protestants and Catholics. The only way to begin true healing is to first take a realistic stock of the situation and take into account people’s strong feelings. One of the parts of that is dropping the inflamatory jargon, badges, codes and identifiers from the era of confrontation, they have too many bad feelings attached to them.
Reconsiliation also comes through emphasising common ground. There is a great more common ground between our views and yours than I expect you might think.
I really dislike labels for people (straight, bisexual, catholic, protestant, consevative, liberal etc). I beleive nothing promotes conflict and hate in this world so much as this tendency. I beleive it also diminishes people’s complexity and depth; it turns people into 2-dimentional characters who then become easy targets to hate by members of a different group.
I know I’m loosing here. I don’t have any fancy theories or credentials to back up what I’m saying. And I don’t actually think I have the rhetorical skills to convince any of you guys of my point of view. But I just wanted to make my voice heard. Thanks for that opportunity.
I really dislike labels for people (straight, bisexual, catholic, protestant, consevative, liberal etc). I beleive nothing promotes conflict and hate in this world so much as this tendency. I beleive it also diminishes people’s complexity and depth; it turns people into 2-dimentional characters who then become easy targets to hate by members of a different group.
Amen, brother. At last, someone posts something sensible here!
I know I’m loosing here. I don’t have any fancy theories or credentials to back up what I’m saying. And I don’t actually think I have the rhetorical skills to convince any of you guys of my point of view. But I just wanted to make my voice heard. Thanks for that opportunity.
Don’t sell yourself short, brother. All their supposed “fancy theories,” “credentials,” and “rhetorical skills” are like cow dung, only a lot useful.
You have spoken the truth. You have demonstrated wisdom. Thanks for shining light into this infernal darkness.
Jeff JP
Hugo,
Have you heard of this site. I wouldn’t say its an important but hidden website, but it certainly doesn’t noticed as Mens News Daily does.
http://www.mensactivism.org/
Defining Misogyny Dr Hugo Schwyzer
http://www.kittennews.com/cgi-bin/kn_opinion/opinion.pl?topic=999944
Hi Hugo; nice site. I appreciate a man that takes sides without regret or hesitation. It is important for men to make clear where they stand at all times.
Unfortunately for most men, they are unable in the current matriarchal totalitarian system to take a stand outside of the values and belief-systems that you propagate. You have a professional value to guard as well–you wouldn’t be working in a community college as a ‘professor’ without towing the feminist angle. So this site of yours is as much a reflection on your professional dogmas as it is on your personal belief systems.
The ‘men’s rights’ movement isn’t anti-female, it is anti-feminist. It is important to make that distinction. The modern feminist is the individual on a vindictive mission to marginalize men and men’s rights. To think that feminism in its current totalitarian form wouldn’t expect a political backlash to its ongoing war against men is pretty laughable. I, like you, am highly educated. I went to the best schools. As a military historian, as you claim, you should know that when you have a population within a nation-state exposed to decades of oppression that eventually that population is going to rise up and unify to stop it. When someone is constantly slapping you across the face, eventually something is done to stop the slapping.
Hence the new men’s rights movement.
Look at some of these statistics (I didn’t make them up, honest):
+ Over 92% of all divorce filings in the United States are initiated by women using “no-fault” legal venues. Why are men found at fault in the clear majority of these cases and punished for decades over them when the marriage contract is severed under “no-fault” conditions? That is blatant anti-male discrimination.
+ Over 96% of all child-custody cases default to the mother. Why is that? Again, anti-male discrimination at work. Add to that the clever marketing feminist jingoisms like “single-mother”, or “single parent”, and that is no different than dehumanizing the Jews, Blacks or other human groups by a totalitarian political agenda. If men are not parents to the children they have with their wives/girlfriends/lovers, then just say so. Be honest and tell men they have no parental rights because in the current feminist fascist system, men have no such rights.
+ There are over 35,000 male suicides every year related to divorce/child-custody issues. I don’t see one single article on your website addressing this national epidemic.
Modern feminism is radical anti-male oppression. That is what modern feminism is. There is no other way it can be explained. When you take colleges like yours and look at enrollment, 8 out of 10 students are female. This is the national trend. Where are our young men?
The Pendulum has swung too far into the corner of radical feminism and that is why websites such as Men’s News Daily have begun to appear. I have been tempted to start submitting articles to Mens News Daily for publication, a position that I wouldn’t have even considered five years ago. But today, the purposefully irreconcileable nature of modern feminism demands that men form their own groups to counter the new evil brought upon them by modern feminism. There is no other way to describe the system of ideology that modern feminism is in regards to men and men’s rights.
This means I have taken a side too. I choose freedom from modern feminist perversion, the goal being to distance men from modern feminism in all of its forms. That is the healthiest choice for men. For men in America today, men are the breast, and the modern feminist is the breast cancer. That may help clarify to some of your feminist readers how men feel about this important male issue of our day.
Obtestor
Hugo, one more thought. What does your modern feminism do for men?
I look forward to your reply.
Obtestor
It doesn’t matter, Ambrose. Jeff JP is a professional victim. How dare you question his victim status, even by implication?
…
According to Jeff JP and most of the goofs who post here, everything is the fault of feminists.
…
Come on now, men’s activists have to take some responsibility for your “brothers” who are doing absolutely NOTHING but harm to your cause.
No, they don’t, and you can’t make them! Nanner, nanner!!!
On to Obtestor:
Look at some of these statistics (I didn’t make them up, honest):
So where are the links to peer-reviewed studies?
+ Over 92% of all divorce filings in the United States are initiated by women using “no-fault” legal venues. Why are men found at fault in the clear majority of these cases and punished for decades over them when the marriage contract is severed under “no-fault” conditions? That is blatant anti-male discrimination.
I’m sure Trish Wilson, who’s more familiar with family law than I am, can address this more thoroughly, but you do realize that “no fault” means that no one is found at fault. New York, which surely accounts for more than 8% of all the divorce filings in the country, does not have a no-fault system, meaning you must sue for divorce on certain grounds, and someone does lose. That’s not the case in no-fault states.
But I suppose if you think of child support awards as “punishment,” you’re going to think of a no-fault system as one where there’s a winner and a loser.
+ Over 96% of all child-custody cases default to the mother. Why is that?
Maybe because that’s the way the parties worked things out. Many grown people manage to come to their own arrangements about child custody based on what’s going to work best for them. And, perhaps you got the statistic from pulledoutofmyass.com, but last I heard, joint custody was quite a popular arrangement.
Again, anti-male discrimination at work. Add to that the clever marketing feminist jingoisms like “single-mother”, or “single parent”, and that is no different than dehumanizing the Jews, Blacks or other human groups by a totalitarian political agenda. If men are not parents to the children they have with their wives/girlfriends/lovers, then just say so. Be honest and tell men they have no parental rights because in the current feminist fascist system, men have no such rights.
I think I hear violins.
+ There are over 35,000 male suicides every year related to divorce/child-custody issues. I don’t see one single article on your website addressing this national epidemic.
Perhaps you could point some out. Is this a common thing written in suicide notes?
It doesn’t matter, Ambrose. “zuzu” is a professional victim. How dare you question her victim status, even by implication?
…
According to “zuzu” and most of the goofs who post here, everything is the fault of men.
I’m sure Trish Wilson, who’s more familiar with family law than I am,
That’s a laugh.
And, perhaps you got the statistic from pulledoutofmyass.com, but last I heard, joint custody was quite a popular arrangement.
Hey, Hugo,
Are you going to admonish “zuzu” about such comments, or do your rules apply only to men?
Jeff JP
Again, anti-male discrimination at work. Add to that the clever marketing feminist jingoisms like “single-mother”, or “single parent”, and that is no different than dehumanizing the Jews, Blacks or other human groups by a totalitarian political agenda. If men are not parents to the children they have with their wives/girlfriends/lovers, then just say so. Be honest and tell men they have no parental rights because in the current feminist fascist system, men have no such rights.
I think I hear violins.
Thanks for providing such a blatant example of your misandry. I guess you support paternity fraud.
No, but I do not support whining.
No, but I do not support whining.
So when men voice legitimate grievances, you call it “whining.” Who cares?
There are legitimate grievances, Jeff, and then there is whining about the totalitarian feminists and how the term “single parent” is somehow equivalent to lynchings or the Holocaust.
Now, which of those do you think I was addressing?
There are legitimate grievances, Jeff, and then there is whining about the totalitarian feminists and how the term “single parent” is somehow equivalent to lynchings or the Holocaust.
Now, which of those do you think I was addressing?
Be clear next time.
Interesting comments from all. At risk of being labeled a troll, I’ll post my $0.02.
I think both sides need to work toward the middle. I think the “Save the males” movement is backlash for the blatant anti-male tone in this country. Nearly everything in the media from commercials to TV shows has many anti-male biases. Males are depicted as bumbling fools, who without their motherly females, could not find their posterior with both hands. Example: their is a commercial for Dodge Caravan with a motorcyclist being picked up after it ran out of gas and his motorcycle being stored in the van. The catch line is “Dad just had to have a motorcycle.”
On the other hand men need to remember what their role is (which is difficult vis-a-vis above). Their role is to be the missing part of their woman. Men are here to complete and not compete with women.
Did we have sexism against women in America? Sure. Is it still that prevalent. No more than sexism against men, and I would submit that women are discriminated against quite a bit less than men. If women truly wanted men’s repsect, then they would try to level the playing field. Which the playing field is level. A woman applying to professional school (post-graduate) has a better chance of being accepted than a man.
In closing, I happily accept equal rights for race, gender, sex, sexual orientation, etc. I will always reject preferential treatment.
+ Over 92% of all divorce filings in the United States are initiated by women using “no-fault” legal venues. Why are men found at fault in the clear majority of these cases and punished for decades over them when the marriage contract is severed under “no-fault” conditions? That is blatant anti-male discrimination.
It’s true that mostly women file for divorce, but men are not found at “fault” nor are they “punished.” What do you mean by “punished”? Not getting custody of their kids? It’s not “blatant anti-male discrimination” that women file for most divorces. It’s simply a fact.
+ Over 96% of all child-custody cases default to the mother. Why is that? Again, anti-male discrimination at work. Add to that the clever marketing feminist jingoisms like “single-mother”, or “single parent”, and that is no different than dehumanizing the Jews, Blacks or other human groups by a totalitarian political agenda. If men are not parents to the children they have with their wives/girlfriends/lovers, then just say so. Be honest and tell men they have no parental rights because in the current feminist fascist system, men have no such rights.
The reason mothers most often get custody of the kids is because most often parents settle out of court, deciding on their own that mom should have custody because these parents recognize that mom had been the primary caregiver of the children and that she should continue in that capacity. Of the 10% of divorces that go through court, more than half of the fathers who contest custody get some form of it, most often joint legal custody.
There are over 35,000 male suicides every year related to divorce/child-custody issues. I don’t see one single article on your website addressing this national epidemic.
Straw-man argument I often hear from men’s/fathers’ rights advocates. You forgot to mention the men who kill their wives, ex-wives, and children every year related to divorce/child-custody issues. That’s a part of the “epidemic” that is also blamed on dads not getting their way in divorce and custody hearings.
“It’s the women of Afghanistan’s fault that they have to wear the burqua. If they wanted to, they could just take it off, no? Sure, they’d get killed, but they still have a choice.”
I think that has more to do with religion than being a woman.
And if you think that the dangers of Islamic oppression relates only to women… ask the family of Theo van Gogh.
“The reason mothers most often get custody of the kids is because most often parents settle out of court, deciding on their own that mom should have custody because these parents recognize that mom had been the primary caregiver of the children and that she should continue in that capacity. Of the 10% of divorces that go through court, more than half of the fathers who contest custody get some form of it, most often joint legal custody.”
I hear this argument made very often regarding the custody issue and I have to ask: do you really believe this yourself?
Parents decide out of court. Here’s the common scenario: Since women stand a 90% chance of winning custody and men less than 5%, any decent lawyer will advise his male client that he’s wasting his time. The reason that in contested cases men win more than half is that in these cases the mother is a clear danger to the kids rather than that there’s some bias in favor of men. When women have custody 90% of the time, to suggest such a thing is simply ludicrous! Men settle for what they can get now only because they have no money and no chance of winning.
Second, in most states — like my home state of NY — there is no such thing as joint custody. There is an intention that will state under what conditions the NCP can have input in decisions and a generous visitation schedule, but there is no mention of the term “joint custody” in any law book or case law anywhere. Either you have custody or you don’t — simple as that.
By George I think he’s got it!
(If accused of agreeing with Prof. S on anything I’ll DENY it)
“MND has an eclectic list of articles, some of which have precious little to do with men’s rights issues. (Today I find links to articles on China, Iran,guns, and Social Security, for example).”
After all, it’s called Mens News Daily nnot Mens Rights Daily.
“Not surprisingly, the politics of the site are solidly right-wing. Many columnists from the likes of Townhall or the National Review can be found spouting their consistently conservative views at MND.”
Safe bet! Bear in mind those columnists “spouting” are linked to, not AT MND
That’s not surprising, of course. To the extent that they share a political vision that transcends anti-feminism, it would seem safe to characterize most men’s rights advocates as right of center, though with libertarian rather than authoritarian leanings.”
Unsafe bet.Mens Rights Advocasy comes from a broad range of the political spectrum, including those disillusioned and disenfranchised by the strange bedfellows that hihacked the desired equality (or at least parity)of the Womans Movement into what has beome modern Feminism.
aj, Islam does not require women to wear burqas; that’s a Taliban rule, not an Islamic one.
And keep in mind, that Christian fundamentalist oppression is definitely something to fear; ask (the late) Matthew Shepherd’s family.
There are over 35,000 male suicides every year related to divorce/child-custody issues. I don’t see one single article on your website addressing this national epidemic.
Straw-man argument I often hear from men’s/fathers’ rights advocates. You forgot to mention the men who kill their wives, ex-wives, and children every year related to divorce/child-custody issues. That’s a part of the “epidemic” that is also blamed on dads not getting their way in divorce and custody hearings.
Just because you
a) can’t address the merits of his argument, and
b) change the subject,
doesn’t make his argument a “straw-man argument.” Thanks for your fine example of femi-dweeb diversion tactics.
Go back to your stupid hate blog and post there.
But I suppose if you think of child support awards as “punishment,” you’re going to think of a no-fault system as one where there’s a winner and a loser.
Where did I ever mention child-support? That is your dogma, not mine. I am talking about the ability of a female to walk into any lawyer’s office in the country when she has a bad hair day and sue for divorce. As for the New York State divorce industry, show me one case, even pro-bono cases, where a female is denied a divorce that she requests. The intent behind that paragraph I wrote was that the marriage contract on its face today is an anti-male legendary scam and has no inherent pro-male value, and it is also a legal instrument to provide a vehicle of racketeering against men. So let me guess–you are an anti-male right’s feminist and that is why you threw in the child-support snip into your reply? The child-support racket is another topic entirely, but it certainly aired your biases rather well. That is the nature of a system of fascism. The oppressed have no voice and are dehumanized by the oppressors as the Jews were dehumanized by the Nazis. This is how men are treated today in matriarchal totalitarian America.
No-fault divorce laws must be changed to fault-specific to protect men from (RICO) racketeering and corrupt organizations (divorce courts and divorce lawyers). Organized crime could only dream of having such a racket at their disposal. Tort reform must be mandatory to protect men from further terrifying anti-democratic abuses. This means scrapping the current divorce racket entirely, sending in the FBI to lock down the criminals involved and then rebuilding it from scratch using democratic reforms. You know, eliminating the matriarchal fascist legal-components of our current system. If men wanted to live in a police state, we would all move to North Korea.
And, perhaps you got the statistic from pulledoutofmyass.com, but last I heard, joint custody was quite a popular arrangement.
You obviously aren’t paying attention to the facts. Joint custody is popular? That is pretty laughable. How many men in this country have joint-custody of their children through the American matriarchal totalitarian family courts? Men in America do not benefit whatsoever from joint-custody because it is a myth. A lie. There is no such thing as joint-custody in this country for men. Radical feminists have fought against joint-custody for men and their children from day one and they continue to do so. The only joint-custody relationships that men enjoy are those they can work out themselves with a non-hostile spouse out of court. Do you have any more lies to send our way? Check out your feminist debate handbook again for help.
I think I hear violins.
Of course you do. That is why the new men’s rights movement is becoming so powerful. Soon, you will hear nothing but a pro-male anti-feminist orchestra drowning out your violin.
Obtestor
La lubu,
Point being…its not a woman / feminist thing.
Straw-man argument I often hear from men’s/fathers’ rights advocates.
Really? Those figures on male-suicide in America are 100% fact, not logic-fallacy. Too bad the so-called domestic violence industry (feminist myth) can’t produce similar facts to support domestic violence funding.
Did you know that in Massachusetts that the state legislature passed a law to keep domestic violence statistics out of the hands of the people? You can no longer get that information via Freedom of Information requests.
I can see why too. When you make $billions of US tax-dollars a year to suppor the myth of domestic violence, they have an urgent agenda to keep those statistics hidden from honest citizens.
Obtestor
Straw-man argument I often hear from men’s/fathers’ rights advocates.
Really? Those figures on male-suicide in America are 100% fact, not logic-fallacy. Too bad the so-called domestic violence industry (feminist myth) can’t produce similar facts to support domestic violence funding.
Of course they are 100% fact. However, please consider the source of the complaints about your statistics. The person who posted them spends huge amounts of time bashing men and fathers at her hate site.
Parents decide out of court. Here’s the common scenario: Since women stand a 90% chance of winning custody and men less than 5%, any decent lawyer will advise his male client that he’s wasting his time. The reason that in contested cases men win more than half is that in these cases the mother is a clear danger to the kids rather than that there’s some bias in favor of men. When women have custody 90% of the time, to suggest such a thing is simply ludicrous! Men settle for what they can get now only because they have no money and no chance of winning.
Any good lawyer will tell a nonprimary caregiving father that a judge will recognize the parenting arrangements already in place by the parents, and with the best interests of the child in mind, that judge would likely award custody of the children to the parent who had taken on that role. Most often, that parent is mom. The lawyer is trying to prevent a costly custody battle – which is in dad’s best interest.
It’s not correct that dads who win custody win because mom is unfit. Most often, it’s because he has the money to fund litigation until mom is forced to give in to his demands. Plus, with the advent of “conciliation courts” in the U. S., parents who contest custody are put through a battery of custody and psychological testing, parenting classes, mediation, and other costly add-ons to divorce that make money for professionals who make their living from divorce and custody cases. These kinds of divorces and custody cases cost in the six figures – and dads aren’t happy with the results because they either did not get the sole custody or 50/50 custody they went after.
Trish: Straw-man argument I often hear from men’s/fathers’ rights advocates.
Obtestor: Really? Those figures on male-suicide in America are 100% fact, not logic-fallacy. Too bad the so-called domestic violence industry (feminist myth) can’t produce similar facts to support domestic violence funding.
Men who commit suicide in the midst of divorce or custody hearings have had problems in existance during the marriage such as depression, personality disorders, and alcohol and drug addiction. Don’t blame the divorce for the suicides.
By the way, you’ve said nothing about the men who murder their wives, girlfriends, ex’s, and children and then take their own lives. There were two recent cases of men in the midst of custody battles killing their children. One set his child on fire. Would you blame mom and the divorce for that, too?
Still don’t see any links to these statistics you’re throwing around, Obtestor.
“Any good lawyer will tell a nonprimary caregiving father that a judge will recognize the parenting arrangements already in place by the parents, and with the best interests of the child in mind, that judge would likely award custody of the children to the parent who had taken on that role. Most often, that parent is mom. The lawyer is trying to prevent a costly custody battle – which is in dad’s best interest.”
I’m afraid it’s just not that simple. Here’s my story:
I’ve been married for several years to a woman who has bouts of violent rage. At the urging of our counselor I began to simply try to distance myself from her to avoid violence during these times — trouble is we have a daughter together. Oh yeah — we both work and both share quite equally in our daughter’s care.
Anyway, two years ago I made an attempt to extricate myself from one of those situations and when I did, she first stood behind my car holding our then 2 year old daughter and then laid her in the driveway behind the car to prevent me from leaving. So I shut off the car and got out at which time she punched me in the head.
I talked to four lawyers to see what my options are and every one of them told me I didn’t have a chance of gaining custody despite the danger she place our daughter in, despite her violence and despite the fact that we equally care for our daughter.
That’s four lawyers — two men, two women.
So tell me how that fits into your paradigm?
That fits because your experience is not the universal. You’ve also left out several facts, such as who is the primary caregiver now, when these rages began occurring (and what the caregiving arrangements were after they began), whether you’ve made a record of these incidents, and how much of a fight you’re going to have on your hands, because litigation is really damn expensive.
Because if she’s the primary caregiver and has remained so in the face of incidents which cause you concern, but maybe not enough to report to police or take over caregiving duties, yes, you’re going to have problems convincing a judge to award you sole custody.
Of course, even though you live in a non-no-fault state, you don’t have to go through the courts to get a divorce if you can get both parties to come to a mutual arrangement.
Trish: “Any good lawyer will tell a nonprimary caregiving father that a judge will recognize the parenting arrangements already in place by the parents, and with the best interests of the child in mind, that judge would likely award custody of the children to the parent who had taken on that role. Most often, that parent is mom. The lawyer is trying to prevent a costly custody battle – which is in dad’s best interest.”
Craichead: I’m afraid it’s just not that simple. Here’s my story:
The plural of anecdote is not fact.
OK, I’ll bite (I know, I know)…..How can we say with such statistical certaintly precisely how many suicides are caused by one particular kind of problem?
I mean, most of those poor souls have multiple problems, right? How do we know with the kind of certainty you’re asserting that the child custody situation was the issue that broke the back of these people’s will to live?
Men who commit suicide in the midst of divorce or custody hearings have had problems in existance during the marriage such as depression, personality disorders, and alcohol and drug addiction. Don’t blame the divorce for the suicides.
By the way, you’ve said nothing about the men who murder their wives, girlfriends, ex’s, and children and then take their own lives. There were two recent cases of men in the midst of custody battles killing their children. One set his child on fire. Would you blame mom and the divorce for that, too?
Hey, keep blaming men. The professional men-blaming game here is epic. The system has been so grossly unfair to men that it creates in them a feeling of hopelessness and despair that they cannot legitimately seek relief. I am not a psychologist, but that is what I view is the main mechanism pushing men to such desperation. If you were forced into such a system where you knew before going into it that you would lose no matter what the result or circumstances leading up to it were, you would become desperate too. That is what ‘no-fault’ divorce does.
That is not dismissing the horrible reality of realistic violence situations occuring around divorces today, but merely recognizing that divorce and child custody must mean more than “prizes” for one side (the ultra-majority of cases being women). Men don’t like to lose their children any more than women do, but women are vindictive in stealing their children away from fathers in divorce and custody cases. The deaths of women, children and men themselves could be prevented if a fair and equitable divorce system was put into place and the current system scrapped completely. You can’t complain about violence via fascist oppression if you do not recognize the very evil that creates the conditions of violence in the system your ideology created to work against men. Again, that is not excusing the violence by no means, merely recognizing that there is an underlying causal factor to the violence. We know that a very small percentage of men (and women) become violent during divorce, so why do they do so? Most men just ‘suck it up’ and take it, examining the statistics.
The reason why ‘domestic violence’ is so suspect is that domestic violence figures are covered up intentionally so funding for massive domestic violence socialist programs are not lost by the states. It is an industry like any other Marxist entity. Some stats beyond government control that we do know about are that 30% of women admitted to hospitals every year with injuries do so to themselves–ie…slipping and falling accidents. Domestic violence figures are grossly misrepresented by the domestic violence industry on purpose, and that is to keep the dehumanizing aspects of their anti-male, pro-feminist totalitarian agenda steaming along without interference.
Now, if you look at the violence figures for divorce and custody phases, it is clear they are probably much greater because the male citizen finally realises the con-job they are under and becomes desperate as the divorce industry system of fascism works against them. I can understand why those figures are probably greater because men have no stake in the system and they are not equally represented whatsoever. You can’t steal from people and then expect them to smile about it, I suppose. If you do, then that is a moral relativist position and logic fallacy. In conflict resolution both parties have to be convinced that they have won something, not one party winning decisively over the other. Modern feminism teaches not to negotiate with the modern male and to ignore conflict resolution. When you create such a system of irreconcileability, violence may result. Just look at all the other systems of violence created by governments around the world that stem from state-defined conditions of irreconcileability.
This has to do with feminist lies as well. Lies for example that women are a ‘minority’, when in fact they represent a clear majority voting block at 52% of the total registered voting population. You can’t take a population within a nation-state that is the majority voting population, give them special rights which separate them as citizens from other populations and then call it ‘democracy’. No, democracy doesn’t work that way, well, not if you want a system that isn’t a perversion.
So the politicians know that women are not a true minority but they play the game to get women to vote for them. Politicians promise women minority status and protections and all the related schemes and perks that go along with that status. Think about it. If a majority population promised to vote you into political office election cycle after election cycle just because the politician promised to keep your special rights going, would you do it? Of course you would. This is what currently occurs in America even though men are the true minority in the country. White American women are the most overrepresented majority given special rights in America than any other group. Vastly overrepresented and a tyranny of the majority.
So you can blame men for their post-divorce violence all you want to, but that is just like telling black people to go back to the back of the bus and use black-only bathrooms again. If blacks were told to go back to the back of the bus and use black-only bathrooms, I would expect them to revolt. I wouldn’t sit there and wring my hands and histrionically and with great feminist exhibitionism whine that they were revolting. Common-sense tells me that we don’t tell blacks to go to the back of the bus anymore.
Then why do feminists do it to men who are the true minority in America, while women are the clear majority and yet get full minority privileges?
That is fascism. Think about that truth.
Obtestor
For the most part, everyone is doing a very good job of keeping it civil here. Thanks.
For the MND defenders, I am interested in your response to my criticism regarding the “pokder babes” and the pin-up pics, as well as my defense of Promise Keepers. That was the largest point in my post, and the one no one wants to talk about. Somehow we’ve ended up batting statistics around again…
“That fits because your experience is not the universal. You’ve also left out several facts, such as who is the primary caregiver now, when these rages began occurring (and what the caregiving arrangements were after they began), whether you’ve made a record of these incidents, and how much of a fight you’re going to have on your hands, because litigation is really damn expensive.”
The situation is status quo. If I have no chance of gaining custody then I’m damn well not going to leave a little girl at the mercy of someone with no self control.
Yes — it’s all documented, several pages. I’ve been back to see two of those lawyers so far and both stand on their original prognosis.
You know, we’ll probably agree on most gender issues, but I can’t for the life of me understand how anyone can think that there isn’t massive bias against men in the family court system.
For the MND defenders, I am interested in your response to my criticism regarding the “pokder babes” and the pin-up pics, as well as my defense of Promise Keepers. That was the largest point in my post, and the one no one wants to talk about. Somehow we’ve ended up batting statistics around again…
Hi Hugo, here is my spin on that issue. I think the feminist movement parades a set of double-standards regarding shantily-clad women in all forms of advertising and media.
You have one feminist angle proclaiming that the modern female should be ‘free’ to do what she wants to do, express herself, have free sex with anyone and everyone she wants to, parade nude on television and in advertisements and never regret doing it for the ‘greater good’ where the good is the advancement of women.
Then you have the second group of feminists that views such instances as the ‘exploitation’ of women and wants to stop it.
I don’t have a problem with MND using those advertisements because feminism has not drawn up a consensus on the issue themselves. Why should men take a beating anymore than we are by opening ourselves up to defending chivarly?
Imagine that. On one side of the feminist political spectrum you would have a militant feminist group proclaiming that men were trying to subdue women, preventing their ‘sexual identity freedoms’ and on the other side of the feminist political spectrum you would have feminists celebrate it and then try to use it to their advantage somehow to marginalize men in some way. Both sides would take advantage of men on the issue so it is best left alone.
In America today, those advertisements reflect the true relationship men have with American women anyway. We should make prostitution legal, because it appears that any relationship with most American women is a form of prostitution right now. It may not be formal, but it exists. At least if prostitution were formal, men would know where they stood within the system.
That’s all for me. Thanks for allowing me to post my thoughts here and I can be contacted at the e-mail address provided in my handle if anyone wants to chat further about these important issues.
Obtestor
Obtestor, you’re right that the feminist movement is divided on these issues. But again, I’m struck by the absence of a coherent sexual ethic among men’s rights’ defenders. I know what PK’s sexual ethic is — could someone from MND defend theirs? How is my use of the terms “hedonistic” and “objectifying” NOT applicable to what is found at Men’s News Daily?
Hugo-
Please read my last one or two posts and show me how that fits into your view that the reason men lose in family court is because they don’t parent directly enough.
The oppressed have no voice and are dehumanized by the oppressors as the Jews were dehumanized by the Nazis. This is how men are treated today in matriarchal totalitarian America.
I’m sorry to go off-topic, but does anyone else find this incredibly offensive? Feminists are characterised as whiners and perpetual victims, but I’ve certainly never heard a feminist use such a offensive analogy.
thisgirl, I’ll see that and raise you a
So you can blame men for their post-divorce violence all you want to, but that is just like telling black people to go back to the back of the bus and use black-only bathrooms again.
Think about that one. As far as I can tell, the claim is that holding violent people accountable for their violence (if they are men) is the moral equivalent of a return to Jim Crow.
I’ll repeat my previous query: Anyone whose trumpeting that 35,000 suicides caused by family court claim want to explain the methodology that discovers this causal link?
Good point, thisgirl. Let’s all leave Holocaust analogies out of this. It’s easy to get swept away on the wings of self-righteous rhetoric (I am guilty myself from time to time), but as the great-grandson of Jews killed in the Shoah, such references have no place in a debate on contemporary gender issues — from either side.
Obtestor: The oppressed have no voice and are dehumanized by the oppressors as the Jews were dehumanized by the Nazis. This is how men are treated today in matriarchal totalitarian America.
thisgirl: I’m sorry to go off-topic, but does anyone else find this incredibly offensive? Feminists are characterised as whiners and perpetual victims, but I’ve certainly never heard a feminist use such a offensive analogy.
Not to mention it’s time to invoke Godwin’s Law: the first person to bring up Nazis officially loses the debate.
“I’ll repeat my previous query: Anyone whose trumpeting that 35,000 suicides caused by family court claim want to explain the methodology that discovers this causal link?”
Whether it’s been demonstrated as causal I kind of doubt since at best it could probably only be demonstrated as sequential. The studies I’ve seen — and I’d have to go looking — report them as suicides occurring among divorced men within a short timeframe afterwards. These are also usually compared with women of a similar population who show a much lower rate of suicide.
On the other hand, men in general show a hugely significant risk in terms of suicide which is pretty much ignored as a health issue.
Craichead, are you familar with the logical fallacy of
“post hoc ergo propter hoc”?
I’m listening to Glenn Sacks’ show now. Hugo, you are doing a great job staying above the sarcasm. I hear a lot of “men are victims” mentality coming from Sacks and some of the callers. I agree with Barry (Ampersand) that the men’s and fathers’ rights movement operate from a zero-sum stance. I’m glad you had a chance to get the pro-feminist male point-of-view out there. More people listen than call into radio shows, so there’s no telling who actually heard what you had to say.
What struck me the most are the commercials. They’re all services for men designed to part them from their money, especially regarding divorce and custody services such as lawyers and private investigators. Rather than try to help men work towards finalizing their divorces and moving on with their lives, the people who make money from these kinds of cases will keep the animosity alive, all in the name of making a buck. It’s disguised as fighting for their “rights.”
Here’s a quick article on male suicide:
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/03/15/divorce.suicide.wmd/
Also, Glenn keeps putting words in your mouth and misrepresenting what you are saying.
Obtestor, you’re right that the feminist movement is divided on these issues. But again, I’m struck by the absence of a coherent sexual ethic among men’s rights’ defenders. I know what PK’s sexual ethic is — could someone from MND defend theirs? How is my use of the terms “hedonistic” and “objectifying” NOT applicable to what is found at Men’s News Daily?
I think that the term ‘hedonism’ applies moreso to modern secularism than it does the traditional Christian male viewpoint. I am not a representative of Men’s News Daily, am just a reader of the site, but I do like MND because much of the information that MND posts can’t be found in the mainstream media. Sites like MND are becoming more popular because the mainstream media ignores issues important to men. MND fills the information gap that existed for so long as the feminist-dominated mainstream media sought to control all information flows.
Now, getting back to the term ‘hedonism’, as I said, I am thinking that hedonism today is best defined as “secular hedonism”. We bombard our young men with scantily-clad images of women day after day after day, and our young men are taught not to be loyal to women today because women find overt male loyalty to be a hostile, oppressive act.
Nearly 29% of all single women in America aged 18-39 have one child or more and are alone. Our young men are taught to not pursue these women but rather engage in secular hedonism where there is no price for the ‘pleasure’. The bombardment of anti-Christian messages today, messages that make any Christian male out to be a ‘kook’ and their values ‘suspect’ and ‘extremist’ does nothing more than pad the statistics of these single women. If we force young men away from moral values, they will absorb feminist secular hedonist values. If some fantastic-looking feminist female is giving a young male free sex and then she becomes pregnant with a child, what benefit does a young man have to engage with her as a family unit? None, whatsoever. The male candidate has no legal standing whatsoever. These single women are single with children because they decide to be, not because men do not want to have families. It is politically and economically dangerous for men to engage the modern female in marriage today.
So MND’s use of those advertisements, to me, is nothing more than a website using a venue where the consumer finds them to be popular and that draws income to the site. Our young men today like advertisements such as those because that is what they are bombarded with in films, television and print media. There are females more scantily dressed on MTV than the advertisements used on MND, in my opinion. But we don’t hear too much about MTV’s ‘glamour girls’, perhaps because they are a left-wing site. Young men are trained today, ‘resocialised’ to engage with that form of advertising.
I would rather see our young men marry, but that is counter to modern feminist theory. As long as there is a war on marriage, men will seek shelter in secular hedonism, the closest viable form of marriage that they can hope to possibly acquire in the modern state.
Obtestor
Craichead, that article also pointed out this fact: “[Howard Markman, Ph.D] pointed out that men tend to have a higher suicide rate because they are more likely to use guns to kill themselves, whereas women attempt suicide with less lethal methods, such as poisonings or cuts.” The real key would be to ascertain suicide attempts. Women attempt suicide at higher rates than men, but are not as successful in killing themselves. Otherwise, the study doesn’t prove anything we already know – men overall have not formed the social/familial supports that women have formed, and that leads to isolation in the worst of times. Rather than blame divorce for male suicides, it would be a good idea for men to learn to gather support systems around themselves so that they are not so isolated in times of great stress. The pro-feminist men’s movement has addressed the cultural conditioning men have to be “strong” and “stoic,” and it works towards helping men learn to create better support systems. That’s the “patriarchy” Hugo had talked about extensively on Glenn’s show.
Hugo,
I studied psychology in college and what you were discussing Sunday night with Glenn Sacks is just your own unprovable musings to discredit the men’s movement. Furthermore, if you want to further discredit the movement then you would say they are not religious based. Another falsehood. The Pope has spoken out publicly against feminism. A minor detail you seem to have forgotten or missed. Who is the Pope? He’s the leader of the largest religion on earth: Catholicism. I’m sure you’ll dismiss this out of hand like you did with the statistics that went against your belief system on Sunday night.
And finally, if you are indeed a proponent of Zero-Sum-Game, then why the strong negative opposition from you? Can’t we all just get along?
Wow, you really do know how to flip the blame, Obstetor:
“our young men are taught not to be loyal to women today because women find overt male loyalty to be a hostile, oppressive act.”
????
Find me one feminist who considers LOYALTY oppressive.
But even if what you said was true, it wouldn’t excuse men’s bad behavior from a Christian perspective. As Christians, we are called to be salt and light. If folks don’t like our salt and light, that doesn’t mean we can say “oh, the heck with it, I think I’ll go and play in the cesspool with you.”
I think the sexual ethic of MND can be pretty much summed up by one of their bloggers cropping the head off the picture of the woman modelling feministing.com tshirts (sorry, I don’t know who the picture is of!), then using it as an example of how feminists are hypocritical and objectify themselves. Because, of course, any picture with breasts covered or uncovered is inherently sexist.
Good point, thisgirl. Let’s all leave Holocaust analogies out of this. It’s easy to get swept away on the wings of self-righteous rhetoric (I am guilty myself from time to time), but as the great-grandson of Jews killed in the Shoah, such references have no place in a debate on contemporary gender issues — from either side.
But we are dealing with an inherent anti-male form of fascism today. It is a statistical probability that as this system evolves it will seek to expand its efficiency and ultimately begin liquidating its political opponents. Some may argue that this is already occuring via rampant domestic violence claims that seek to swell the ranks of our prisons with men that do not belong in prison. Prison sentences are also being readily dished out to men today over non-payment of child support, and yet our own written constitution forbids such activity as activity of the police state. Our forefathers specifically stated in the US Constitution that peonage was not an imprisonable offense because the crown used that venue as a means to imprison the very men that created our Republic. That said, the analogy that I used to describe the efficient disposition of humans in the fascist nation-state is not only accurate, but a potential political forecast for the future. You must excuse my post-grad education when I discuss certain issues and refrain from making popular generalizations regarding the disposition of men. I take the disposition of men very seriously because I see a pending danger to men in this country. If it makes folks uncomfortable that I use such analogies, that is a good thing. I am pleased that it makes you uncomfortable. Only with your help can we protect men from the scourge they face today–modern vindictive feminist fascism.
Obtestor
I’m interested, Obtestor, as to why you seem to think the state is both fascist and feminist; assuming you are from the U.S. I think you’ll find a whole lot of feminists wishing to disagree that the administration is pushing a pro-feminist agenda
Not to mention it’s time to invoke Godwin’s Law: the first person to bring up Nazis officially loses the debate.
Trish, do you think I want to be here spending my time explaining this to you? My purpose is to resolve conflict, not produce conflict.
Why did the Nazis dehumanize the Jews? Think about that. Be a good student.
The reason they dehumanized the Jews was to make the Jews less than human in the eyes of the people within the Nazi Socialist nation-state. I lived in Israel for a time where I learned about their history and one of my college degrees is in history.
So the point to this is not to create conflict, but to explain that when there is a dehumanizing effect in the nation-state, the folks being dehumanized generally have bad things, sometimes very bad things, happen to them.
Since men are regularly dehumanized today, I am concerned about their future fate in this country.
Obtestor
Trish, do you think I want to be here spending my time explaining this to you? My purpose is to resolve conflict, not produce conflict.
Perhaps, if you don’t want to be discussing here, you should go? Please don’t make out like educating us is such a chore for you; we all choose to do this.
Craichead, are you familar with the logical fallacy of
“post hoc ergo propter hoc”?
That would be true if a recent study hadn’t proved that suicide wasn’t linked to intelligence. IE.. hence my concern about young men not attending college, ad infinitum. I am concerned about their perceived stake in the system.
Obtestor
Trish-
You touch on a couple of points (at least) that I’d like to address:
First men commit suicide more, but women make the attempt more often. I’m not sure what your issue is here, whether it’s guns or women’s more frequent attempts, but what I will say is that isn’t it usually held that most attempts are more cries for help than serious attempts to die and that those who actually kill themselves fully intended to do so? To me, use of a gun is to ensure a higher success rate, meamning that the men were more desperate.
On the second point regarding social support systems: I couldn’t agree more! Women have a very broad range of contacts with whom they can form deep friendships without stigma. Men usually have only their wives and mothers. But as a friend has pointed out to me lately, I don’t think this is characteristic of a patriarchal culture. If one looks at intensely patriarchal cultures — like the Greeks and Romans — there is no stigma against men forming deep bonds with other men. It almost seems that the less patriarchal the culture, the more stigma.
However, I would point out that regardless of support systems, to lose one’s family and children would send anyone into deep despair.
Isn’t it a characteristic of a patriarchal culture to have rigid ideas of gender, nice neat little boxes into which men and women are supposed to fit? I’d suggest it is these stereotypes of what it is to be “masculine” that contribute to men’s apparent lack of social support systems; talking about your feelings isn’t “manly” after all.
“If one looks at intensely patriarchal cultures — like the Greeks and Romans — there is no stigma against men forming deep bonds with other men.”
Is there stigma in our society against men forming deep bonds with other men?
Please enlighten me.
If folks don’t like our salt and light, that doesn’t mean we can say “oh, the heck with it, I think I’ll go and play in the cesspool with you.”
I completely agree. The problem however is that people want and need interaction with others. They want love, they want to have families and they want stability. If the ‘system’ continuously reinforces within them through gross mischaracterizations that their belief-sets are fundamentally flawed (that religion is a flawed belief system), peer pressure will dictate terms of surrender and that surrender will be to commercialized secular hedonism.
There are political reasons that marriage is not protected in this country anymore. We must stop ignoring it and stop throwing our hands up into the air claiming that we ‘expect’ better from others and yet on the flipside stand idly by as the institutions they attempt to build (marriages being one of them) are annihilated upon the altar of political correctness.
As an educated man I want marriage, but I fear it because the instant I marry I know that organized groups will seek to destroy it to profit from it, and my potential mate has the option to bow out of it at will without justification. Secular hedonism exists because of these factors.
Obtestor
“As an educated man I want marriage, but I fear it because the instant I marry I know that organized groups will seek to destroy it to profit from it, and my potential mate has the option to bow out of it at will without justification.”
How sad to be so fearful. Have you no trust in the woman you would pledge to spend the rest of your life with?
Obtestor: Some may argue that this is already occuring via rampant domestic violence claims that seek to swell the ranks of our prisons with men that do not belong in prison.
They can argue it all they like but it simply isn’t true. False allegations of abuse are not rampant, nor are men “swelling the ranks of our prisons” because of false allegations of abuse claims. Pauline Quirion, Esq. wrote for the Women’s Bar Journal in 1999 that ”
[t]he high frequency with which RO’s [sic] are issued might lead some skeptics to assume that these orders are granted too easily for minor offenses and almost any man is at risk of being a defendant. The data from the new RO database in Massachusetts reflect otherwise. Men against whom RO’s have been used are clearly not a random draw from the population. They are likely to have a criminal history, often reflective of violent behavior toward others.”
Obtestor: Prison sentences are also being readily dished out to men today over non-payment of child support, and yet our own written constitution forbids such activity as activity of the police state.
Wrong again. Debtor’s prisons are not re-emerging in the U. S. Men are not imprisoned for not paying child support. They are imprisoned for willful refusal to follow a court order – refusing to pay child support that they owe. All other avenues to collect child support owed are undertaken before jail time even becomes a possibility. Those avenues include property liens, seizing tax refund checks, and garnishment.
craichead:
On the second point regarding social support systems: I couldn’t agree more! Women have a very broad range of contacts with whom they can form deep friendships without stigma. Men usually have only their wives and mothers. But as a friend has pointed out to me lately, I don’t think this is characteristic of a patriarchal culture. If one looks at intensely patriarchal cultures — like the Greeks and Romans — there is no stigma against men forming deep bonds with other men. It almost seems that the less patriarchal the culture, the more stigma.”
I am talking about this culture; modern, American culture – men are taught from the time they are boys to be tough; to hide their emotions; to not bond in meaningful ways. Ancient Greek and Roman cultures really don’t have anything to do with this. The modern culture that encourages men to keep everything to themselves is a product of patriarchy. Patriarchy hurts women, but it is also harmful to men. That’s what the pro-feminist men’s movement addresses.
“Is there stigma in our society against men forming deep bonds with other men?
Please enlighten me.”
Sure there is. For openers, deep emotional connections with other men are immediately discouraged by characterizing them as sexual and are immediately ridiculed.
Second, the highly patriarchal cultures like Greece and Rome also had rigid ideas of gender, but no stigma attached to deep emotional connections among men.
This is I think an important distinction between modern society and those patriarchal societies. In a truly patriarchal society men don’t rely on women for emotional connection — they rely more readily on other men. Though women’s power is often characterized as sexual — which it is to some extent — to me women’s power is much more a power gained from a monopolistic control of the access to emotional intimacy. I see this changing slowly, but still true for the most part.
One of the things I notice among most of my married male friends is a strong resistance on the part of their wives to “hanging out with the guys.” I don’t mean all the time, but even once a week or less. I think that many women like this are attempting to discourage their men from forming emotional bonds with other men and threatening their power.
“I am talking about this culture; modern, American culture – men are taught from the time they are boys to be tough; to hide their emotions; to not bond in meaningful ways. Ancient Greek and Roman cultures really don’t have anything to do with this. The modern culture that encourages men to keep everything to themselves is a product of patriarchy. Patriarchy hurts women, but it is also harmful to men. That’s what the pro-feminist men’s movement addresses.”
How do you explain the general trend then that the more patriarchal a culture is, the more men are encouraged to form meaningful emotional relationships with other men?
And on a side note I meant to mention in my last post:
It’s not a simple patriarchal characteristic to assign rigid roles to genders — in fact it’s a very common practice in most cultures, primitive and otherwise.
I’ve been reading “Male and Female” by Margaret Mead and she makes the statement that there’s never been a successful society in human history whose culture didn’t make distinctions between male and female roles and meanings.
How do you explain the general trend then that the more patriarchal a culture is, the more men are encouraged to form meaningful emotional relationships with other men?
I’m not sure you have established it is a general trend
“deep emotional connections with other men are immediately discouraged by characterizing them as sexual and are immediately ridiculed.”
Immediately discouraged and ridiculed by whom?
“strong resistance on the part of their wives to “hanging out with the guys”
Maybe the wives just don’t feel comfortable in that situation. Why does that have to relate to power? Are your friends “allowed” to hang out with just other men? I would think they would welcome the opportunity.
Gosh, I still can remember the verbal abuse and concomitant threats of violence I took from the guys in high school after one of my friends and I were seen hugging in the parking lot.
Wrong again. Debtor’s prisons are not re-emerging in the U. S. Men are not imprisoned for not paying child support. They are imprisoned for willful refusal to follow a court order – refusing to pay child support that they owe.
You have to educate yourself to the truth. Men are not overtly denying their child support obligations. The men that are not paying child support are too poor to pay it. Child support collections are well above 95%. The remaining 5% are a majority of men who are too poor to make the payments. They are thrown into prisons to ‘coerce’ them into paying by whatever means necessary. Politicians get reelected by throwing them into jail. That is peonage and a form of fascism that our founding fathers warned us about.
Even the ACLU is looking at this issue now, which is pretty remarkable. The ACLU sees the police state danger in imprisoning men over debt.
As for your ‘wrong again’ comment, that is rather sophomoric of you. Nothing I have posted is wrong nor deceptive.
Obtestor
Men are not overtly denying their child support obligations.
*spits coffee over keyboard*
I’ll tell that to all those MRAs emailing me waving manifestos that include the removal of child support.
Oh dear, coffee on the keyboard is such a nuisance.
My keyboard is about ready to give up, I’m thinking of suing whoever owns this intermaweb thing for a new one.
What struck me the most are the commercials. They’re all services for men designed to part them from their money, especially regarding divorce and custody services such as lawyers and private investigators. Rather than try to help men work towards finalizing their divorces and moving on with their lives, the people who make money from these kinds of cases will keep the animosity alive, all in the name of making a buck. It’s disguised as fighting for their “rights.”
That is a sign of a dangerous deterioration in our justice system. When men have to seek relief ‘outside’ this system by hiring agents tied to the very industry that is hostile to them in order for them to think they are getting justice, we have allowed our collective propelling into the ranks of the 4th world.
Ask yourself this, in our country the foundation of law dictates the right to appeal. Why can’t men appeal family court decisions?
It is because family courts are not democratic; they are indeed fascist.
Obtestor
How sad to be so fearful. Have you no trust in the woman you would pledge to spend the rest of your life with?
There is no pledge. That is the point. Men participating in the system as it is currently structured would have to be insane to marry. I am talking about very questionable judgement.
That is why secular hedonism is the only safe refuge for men in the modern state. This is because the system is now designed to be hostile to the Christian definition of marriage and relationship longevity.
In short, women cannot be trusted because the system rewards them for their lack of material trust. If we are married, the system in its current form will give you up to 90% of everything we build together if you decide to call it quits after 5 years and then attempt to coerce me into paying you up to 20% of my salary to you for the rest of your life or until you remarry again.
Is that just?
No, it is not. As I mentioned above, it is racketeering that the mafia itself would certainly be envious of.
Recently there have been many feminists questioning why men are opting out of ‘their’ system. The reason why men are opting out of your system is because the feminist system is inherently dangerous for men. That is why men are opting out in record numbers, numbers that even have the White House itself alarmed. The con lasted for 30 years. Men are now educating themselves to this con. In the current system, women cannot be trusted, and the safest place for men on the chessboard is simply not to play the game.
Obtestor
As an educated man I want marriage,
That’s a very odd statement. Why would education have anything to do with the desire to marry?
but I fear it because the instant I marry I know that organized groups will seek to destroy it to profit from it,
Names, son. Give us some names of the hit squads monitoring your every move and ready to move into the church the moment you say “I do.”
and my potential mate has the option to bow out of it at will without justification.
As do you. Would you prefer that you and your wife be trapped in a bad marriage, unable to leave it?
Secular hedonism exists because of these factors.
Right. Edumacation, feminist hit squads and those disloyal, inconstant wimmins, always just taking off without justification.
The men that are not paying child support are too poor to pay it. Child support collections are well above 95%. The remaining 5% are a majority of men who are too poor to make the payments.
No, if they were truly too poor to make payments, they would be judgment-proof. I have friends whose fathers gave up their jobs to be judgment proof. I also have met people who really, truly couldn’t pay. Those who say they’re “too poor” to pay generally would just rather have the money to pay for other things.
Men are not overtly denying their child support obligations.
*spits coffee over keyboard*
I’ll tell that to all those MRAs emailing me waving manifestos that include the removal of child support.
thisgirl, you spewed your coffee to hard it landed on my keyboard.
Why can’t men appeal family court decisions?
It is because family courts are not democratic; they are indeed fascist.
Boy, you sure like that word, don’t you? Guess what? Family court orders aren’t appealable because they’re not final orders. The parties can apply for modification — yes, Virginia, even men can seek modification.
If we are married, the system in its current form will give you up to 90% of everything we build together if you decide to call it quits after 5 years and then attempt to coerce me into paying you up to 20% of my salary to you for the rest of your life or until you remarry again.
I know of very few women who haven’t been homemakers most of their married lives who actually get alimony payments. Where are you getting all these ideas, movies from the 50s?
Hugo, I have been browsing this blog and the comments for a couple of days now, while I admire your ambition I believe your ideology is seriously flawed. First, being pro-feminist male is nothing short of sleeping with the enemy. Are you even remotely aware that The National Organization of Women considers you the enemy?
“Don’t be fooled by the media coverage of the group’s (Promise Keepers) religious faith,” said NOW Action Vice President Olga Vives, “This organization breeds bigots. Underneath the façade of Christian religion are the workings of the radical religious right, mobilizing men against the rights of women, lesbians, and gays. Let’s remember they blame women’s equality for society’s ills.”
She goes on; “In encouraging men to “take back” their role as head of household, the group promotes an ideology placing women in inferior positions. The organization’s leaders advocate the submission of women with a much-quoted biblical passage, “Wives must submit to your husbands, as to the Lord.”
What part of Feminist Ideology don’t you get that believes that the only way for women to inherit the earth is through pathogenesis or the utter gendercide of all men and heterosexual women. Have you not read the trash these “equity feminists†spout and celebrate? Read Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin Eleanor Smeal, Gloria Steinem et al, then tell me what the benefits of being pro-feminist male are.
It doesn’t matter how in touch with your feeling you become you are slated for extermination. I was very in touch with my feeling when they tore my son away from me, the son I raised on a daily basis for the first three yours of his life. I was very in touch with my feelings for the next five years of dark depression, tears would well up every time a saw a little three year old with his mother. These equity feminists worked their magic on behalf of my wife citing baseless and blatantly false accusations such as; I was going to kidnap and murder him, and that my father had molested him. They used restraining orders that were rubber stamped by judges that weren’t interested in getting to the truth and not even investigated. I lost my child to a system that has been built, maintained and led by the nose by Feminists because I didn’t have the financial resources left to fight them.
And while your citing the anger of the MRA’s maybe you should take a step back and actually look at what Feminist ideology has done in the name of equality maybe you might just realize many of them have legitimate complaints, many of them already are in touch with their feelings like sadness, fear, depression and desperation, feelings from the result of their abuse suffered at the hands of a one sided and unjust feminized judicial system.
Obtestor: The men that are not paying child support are too poor to pay it.
That’s not true. Men who are truly too poor to pay child support are shunted into “male involvement” and other fatherhood programs by the state. These programs have not been shown to result in any real help for men, nor have they resulted in an increase in child support collection. They are make-work and sources of funding for the states, on the backs of the poor. That’s your tax dollars at work.
Child support collections are well above 95%. The remaining 5% are a majority of men who are too poor to make the payments.”
Source, please. A real one, not something from a men’s rights site.
“That is why secular hedonism is the only safe refuge for men in the modern state.”
Could you please explain what you mean by secular hedonism?
I think that what obtestor is trying to point out is that regardless of who you marry there is always a chance that the marriage will fail.
But for women, if that happens, they stand to lose a spouse and perhaps some standard of living which is difficult enough.
Men stand to lose a spouse, children, standard of living, and in fact some very basic liberties that most married parents take for granted.
And it’s not that men want to opt out of supporting their children, it’s that men want to support their children without the oversight and interference of the state.
I understand about the arguments regarding primary vs non-primary caregivers. But doesn’t that sort of mean that any man who leaves the house everyday to give a good life to his family is basically out of his skull? And then there’s the problem of finding a woman to start a family with who’s looking for a man to be a primary caregiver. Even the ones who say that want that I’ve found often to be looking for a highly motivated assistant rather than an equal partner.
The irony is that as women move closer and closer to virtual equaliy, the tyranny of the family court system will harm them more and more.
And Hug0….you’re still avoiding the question I asked you a while back.
With all respect, craichead, it takes a longer answer — and lots of folks have been asking questions these past few days.
Convenient.
Boy, you sure like that word, don’t you? Guess what? Family court orders aren’t appealable because they’re not final orders. The parties can apply for modification — yes, Virginia, even men can seek modification.
All court decisions should be open to appeal. We let murderers appeal. If a female reopens a case against a man, it doesn’t matter. That reopening should also be open to appeal if the defendant disagrees with the outcome of the case.
As for men trying to shirk their responsibilities to support their children, that is just feminist propaganda. Why is it that the only issue feminists concern themselves with regarding divorce and family court issues are resources? It must be that way so that the dehumanizing of men can be self-justified to the shallow feminist intellect, you know the ‘deadbeat dad’ labels and other fascist feminist proganda. You may think brown-shirt activity is ‘cool and fashionable’, but honest people know it is a perversion.
You gals prove my points everytime you open your mouths. The divorce industry trap cannot shed its relentless assault over the victimized male’s resources. That is all feminists concern themselves with. That is also why men are thrown in jail now from that fascism so that they can be coerced and bullied by your system.
It is your system because it is not their system. Men, as the only true minority in America, are victimized by that system of terrorism.
Obtestor
if your potential mate would consider bowing out of her marriage at any mere whim, without bothering to justify this decision, then she must clearly be an emotionally very unstable person. you should take better care to select more mature, responsible mates.
or perhaps you’re afraid you might inadvertently provide her with some reason. i won’t stoop to speculating about that latter possibility, as such would clearly constitute sniping.
(i wonder, though – which organized groups out there would materially profit from destroying your, or anyone’s marriage? in what way? i was not aware of any such organizations, and if there are any, i would very much like to be – i’m married myself, and would like to remain so.)
The government is one such institution that gains from it.
All child support is collected through state governments and for each dollar they collect, they receive federal money.
A second group that benefits are groups that run supervised visitiation centers. Their fees are astronomical.
Then you have guardians ad litem
Custody evaluators
lawyers
judges
Why should a man (or woman) get married?
There is no justifiable reason, other than children. I cannot speak for women, but more and more men see marriage as a trap. Why should a man get married to women, who will turn out to be a shrew? If the wife chooses to stay home, the kids are in public school, she has a housecleaner, takes the clothes to the cleaners, does not prepare meals, why would any man stay in that relationship? Maybe he is scared to death of losing his kids and his finances.
If the wife works, then someone else raises the man’s kids.
I think the real topic should be why would a man marry?
Could you please explain what you mean by secular hedonism?
I would be happy to. Secularism is the development of human ideological belief systems outside a church or religious authority. What that means is that religious dogmas are disgarded in favor of human definitions of moral behavior. The Ten Commandments for example, would have no intrinsic value to the radical secularist because moral values such as “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” interfere with the secular feminist interest to destroy the family unit. If many men prey upon another man’s wife, the secularist will not find any immoral behavior in that act because the laws governing the coveting of another man’s wife are religious laws which the secularist detests. That is one example.
Hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure, the pursuit of maximized pleasure. An example of hedonism would be the illegal use of narcotic substances by a citizen of the state. The citizen knows before they engage in that behavior that the behavior is immoral and unlawful, but the citizen is concerned only with the pursuit of personal pleasure. So the hedonist is also the narcissist, an individual or group that places greater value in the pursuit of pleasure than they do with the community or greater good, a counter-productive self-love.
Secular hedonism then is a combination of those ideologies. Secular hedonism is the pursuit of endless “pleasures” completely and utterly outside any moral foundation of the church or religious teaching regardless of the costs that it inflicts upon populations within the nation-state or even the nation-state itself. Western civilization as a whole is moving towards secular hedonism collectively to its own detriment.
Obtestor
The government is one such institution that gains from it.
I thought that the current US administration was actively promoting and “protecting” marriage? Silly me.
If the wife works, then someone else raises the man’s kids.
Or, SHOCK HORROR, he might do some childcare himself. Just a thought y’know.
Why should a man get married to women, who will turn out to be a shrew?
Awww. That’s sweet. I can see you’re quite a catch.
If the wife chooses to stay home, the kids are in public school, she has a housecleaner, takes the clothes to the cleaners, does not prepare meals, why would any man stay in that relationship?
Oh, I’m sorry, I was just here wondering where it is that everyone has a stay-at-home wife plus maid and eats out every night.
If the wife works, then someone else raises the man’s kids.
Well, if this is a concern, perhaps he could stay home and raise the kids.
Craic, hate to break it to you, but judges don’t get paid by the case, so they’re not really profiting by divorce. And even without divorce, there are a lot of other issues family court deals with — and in many places the courts could use a few more judges in other areas — so it’s not like they’d be out of work if divorce were suddenly outlawed.
“I thought that the current US administration was actively promoting and “protecting” marriage? Silly me.”
If you look you’ll find that many of the “pro-family” legislations are actually laws to strengthen and further brutalize child support enforcement.
In truth there is no political party or point of view that really protects the peoples’ right to their own family membership. I’ve often thought that the only “family value” that means anything is to “value the family” and its limited sovereignty.
“Or, SHOCK HORROR, he might do some childcare himself. Just a thought y’know.”
As a highly involved father, I find this attitude to be insulting.
Nomen Nescio:(i wonder, though – which organized groups out there would materially profit from destroying your, or anyone’s marriage? in what way? i was not aware of any such organizations, and if there are any, i would very much like to be – i’m married myself, and would like to remain so.)
Craichead: The government is one such institution that gains from it.
All child support is collected through state governments and for each dollar they collect, they receive federal money.
A second group that benefits are groups that run supervised visitiation centers. Their fees are astronomical.
Then you have guardians ad litem
Custody evaluators
lawyers
judges
Craichead, you are dead-on right.
You forgot the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts. The AFCC is in large part responsible for the creation of those cottage industries that make their money from divorces and custody cases. You also forgot to mention mediators and parenting coordinators (they are the ones who take money from parents to set up parenting plans).
Note that the Children’s Rights Council (a fathers’ rights group) put together a lot of those supervised visitation centers. There is a lot of money to be made in divorce and custody cases.
“Craic, hate to break it to you, but judges don’t get paid by the case, so they’re not really profiting by divorce. And even without divorce, there are a lot of other issues family court deals with — and in many places the courts could use a few more judges in other areas — so it’s not like they’d be out of work if divorce were suddenly outlawed.”
Yeah well how about the rest of it?
You know it wouldn’t kill ya to acknowledge that there are some very serious civil liberties being infringed on. Won’t be too long before women start to feel it too.
I know my mother does.
there are some very serious civil liberties being infringed on. Won’t be too long before women start to feel it too.
Sorry, but this made me chuckle. What are feminists doing but acknowledging the fact they feel their civil liberties (and rights) are being infringed?
thisgirl: “I thought that the current US administration was actively promoting and “protecting” marriage? Silly me.”
Craichead: If you look you’ll find that many of the “pro-family” legislations are actually laws to strengthen and further brutalize child support enforcement.
You’re right again. Every study of those marriage and fatherhood programs has shown that they really haven’t helped fathers that much and that what little child support they do manage to collect isn’t enough to cover the costs of the programs. They are make-work and money-makers for the states. States also get grant funding from conservative family foundations for these programs.
dangling italics closed as a public service.
Zuzu,
I think I am one that made those comments.
The point being that if both parents work, then someone else has to raise the kids. The kids will miss out. Example, how can someone, who gets off work around 5:00 get a child to a 4:00 swim practice, baseball practice, cub scouts, girl scouts, ad infitum? The parents have to choose. The kids have to miss out. OR, someone, other than the parents become the de facto parents.
If the wife stays home to fulfill a more traditional role, yet does not do housework, fix supper, nor do laundry and the man works 50+ hours a week to support his family, what is in it for the man? In other words, the man has sacrificed by becoming overworked and stressed out while his wife does not hold up her end of the bargain. Is it sexist to ask the wife to clean, grocery shop, prepare a meal and do laundry? No. The man sacrifices his health and sanity to provide for his family; the wife should sacrifice more than going to the mall.
The above applies to men, who stay home.
I thought that the current US administration was actively promoting and “protecting” marriage? Silly me.
To be very precise, the only interest that government has in marriage is to dupe men into marrying mentaly ill single women with children so that when those marriages break down the government can then cast off the full brunt of responsibility for the concubine onto the duped male. That is what the new promotion of marriage is all about.
Funny thing is, men aren’t being conned this time. I find that to be a very positive development in assisting the collapse of the secular hedonist feminist system in this country.
Obtestor
darnit, didn’t work! eh, well, i tried. :-/
Ack! Someone forgot to close a tag!
Craic, I’m not familiar enough with the other groups to comment. But judges draw a salary that does not change based on how many men they screw over that year.
Certainly there are those who stand to profit when a marriage breaks up. But the claim was that at the instant of marriage, organized groups sweep in and break up the marriage just to make a buck.
As for the rest of it, what civil liberties are you so darkly referring to?
if “men” are that easy to “dupe” into entering horrible, negative marriages, then perhaps it’s these men who have some shaping up to do? a little bit more maturity and perspective to gain, maybe?
though you say they’re not falling for it, this time. i find that remarkable. the term “men” refers to a generic class; as such, it can’t gain any experience or develop any wisdom collectively. only individuals can learn from past experiences in that manner. are you perhaps speaking of something a little bit less than entirely general, there?
Sorry, I’m the one who incorrectly closed the italics tag. My bad.
I thought this was worth repeating:
Nomen Nescio:(i wonder, though – which organized groups out there would materially profit from destroying your, or anyone’s marriage? in what way? i was not aware of any such organizations, and if there are any, i would very much like to be – i’m married myself, and would like to remain so.)
Craichead: The government is one such institution that gains from it.
All child support is collected through state governments and for each dollar they collect, they receive federal money.
A second group that benefits are groups that run supervised visitiation centers. Their fees are astronomical.
Then you have guardians ad litem
Custody evaluators
lawyers
judges
Trish: Craichead, you are dead-on right.
You forgot the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts. The AFCC is in large part responsible for the creation of those cottage industries that make their money from divorces and custody cases. You also forgot to mention mediators and parenting coordinators (they are the ones who take money from parents to set up parenting plans).
Note that the Children’s Rights Council (a fathers’ rights group) put together a lot of those supervised visitation centers. There is a lot of money to be made in divorce and custody cases.
—
I think the damage created by and the money made by the divorce and custody-related cottage industries, especially the role the AFCC has in all of it, is something that men’s/fathers’ rights activists and people who work on the behalf of mothers should concentrate more than all the usual talk about “equal” rights. The AFCC took all the fathers’ rights talk about “equality” and the push for joint custody to usher in those reforms, and they are happening all over the world, not just in the U. S. Those reforms are the reason that divorces these days are costing in the six-figures – it’s the add-ons from people who make their money from divorce and custody cases that is the real problem, not alleged opposition from “feminists.”
Hate to break it to you zuzu but your sadly mistaken.
Dickens’ observation “the one great principle of the law is to make business for itself” could hardly be more starkly validated. Nothing requires judges to grant the divorcing parent’s request to strip the other parent of his children. Yet they invariably do. One need not be cynical to recognize that judges who failed to reward the divorcing parent would be rendering themselves redundant and denying earnings to a large entourage of lawyers, psychologists and psychiatrists, mediators, counselors, child-support enforcement agents, social workers, and others — all of whom benefit from the ensuing custody battle and also have a strong influence on the careers of judges.
Family court judges are generally appointed and promoted by commissions dominated by bar associations and other groups with an interest in maximizing the volume of litigation. The politics of court appointments operates according to patronage principles that Richard Watson and Rondal Downing, in The Politics of the Bench and the Bar, describe as “cronyistic.” Political scientist Herbert Jacob has demonstrated how “lucrative patronage positions . . . are generally passed out to the judge’s political cronies or to persons who can help his private practice.”
Like all courts, family courts complain of being overburdened. Yet it is clearly in their interest to be overburdened, since judicial powers and salaries, like any other, are determined by demand. “Judges and staff . . . should be given every consideration for salary and the other ‘perks’ or other emoluments of their high office,” suggests Judge Page, who urges divorce court judges to increase their business. “As the court does a better job more persons will be attracted to it.” A court “does a better job” by attracting more divorcing parents with advantageous settlements
Example, how can someone, who gets off work around 5:00 get a child to a 4:00 swim practice, baseball practice, cub scouts, girl scouts, ad infitum? The parents have to choose. The kids have to miss out. OR, someone, other than the parents become the de facto parents.
So, you’re equating one hour of chauffeuring a kid to practice as raising the kid?
Here’s something that might interest you: parents of both sexes have always worked outside the home (remember, it’s a mark of a certain socioeconomic status not attained by many that one spouse can stay home). Children have always been raised, or cared for during large chunks of the day, by people other than their parents. Civilization has not come to a screeching halt as a result.
As for the 1950s-vintage housewife eating bon bons and watching soaps while her husband slaves himself into an early grave, just how many of these are out there? Certainly, neither partner in a marriage should be asked to shoulder all of the financial burden except in rare instances (illness, exceptional wealth, etc.). I’m sure we all agree on that, though frankly, whatever divisions of labor people work out between themselves all of their own free will are not my concern.
Life is not “Desperate Housewives,” after all.
“As for the rest of it, what civil liberties are you so darkly referring to?”
When a marriage involving children breaks up, there are several things that happen pretty much automatically today.
Most judges will not be comfortable signing a divorce decree unless some sort of custody arrangement has been made. By that I mean a primary custodian and non-custodial parent must be named. When that happens, the NCP for all intents and purposes loses his/her basic rights as a parent. This is an infringement of the right to life, liberty and property without due process since there was no crime committed. It could also be considered unconstitutional according to the 10th amendment that rights not specifically outlined still cant be infringed.
Once the custody determination is made a support order follows. Support is garnished now automatically from paychecks by the state and the state distributes it to the obligee. The judge determines exactly how much money the NCP will spend on his children every month. This is unconstitutional according to the 14th amendment(equal protection) since it denies equal protection — custodial and married parents make these decisions without government interference. It’s also an infringement of the right to property without due process.
If the NCP experiences a loss of work or under employment for whatever reason he must go back to court to seek a reduction. Very often these are denied. This is also an infringement of the 14th amendment since coustodial parents don’t need permission to spend less on their children.
Also the statement Trish made about debtor’s prison is not entirely accurate. People who owe debts based on civil judgements also aren’t sent to jail. I think there was a recent supreme court decision regarding this that called it unconstitutional. I mean, OJ had a civil judgement he hasn’t paid and he’s still out free, right?
“To be very precise, the only interest that government has in marriage is to dupe men into marrying mentaly ill single women with children so that when those marriages break down the government can then cast off the full brunt of responsibility for the concubine onto the duped male. That is what the new promotion of marriage is all about.”
Give me some proof to back up this ridiculous statement. And for the record… are you a woman hater?
Craichead: “Also the statement Trish made about debtor’s prison is not entirely accurate. People who owe debts based on civil judgements also aren’t sent to jail. I think there was a recent supreme court decision regarding this that called it unconstitutional. I mean, OJ had a civil judgement he hasn’t paid and he’s still out free, right?”
You missed my point. Men who are sent to prison aren’t sent for not paying a debt. They are sent for violating a court order to pay child support – they refuse to pay, not that they can’t pay. They are sent to jail as a last resort after all other options are exhausted because they willfully violated a court order.
the child support system, family trial lawyers, guardians ad litem, &c., may all very well profit from divorces. but none of them come into the picture until the divorce has been filed; hence, i don’t see how they actively destroy marriages. at most, i could agree that they help make divorce proceedings more adversarial and heated, lessening the chances for a reconciliation — but if there wasn’t already a break-up in progress, i don’t see how any of them would create one.
moreover, this argument essentially runs counter to the other argument that has been stated here, viz. that the easy availability of no-fault divorce is a threat to marriage. if all these third parties want to get their pound of flesh out of the divorcing parties, and profit from drawing that proceeding out further than would otherwise be needed, then clearly divorce can not be such an easily accessible, painless option after all.
really Nomen?
we now find divorce being forced on not only one parent but both. Mothers are not simply being enticed into divorcing with financial incentives; they are being forced into it with threats against their children. Last February, the Massachusetts News broke the story of Heidi Howard, who was ordered by the state’s Department of Social Services to divorce her husband or lose her children, though the department acknowledged neither parent had been violent. When she refused, social workers seized her children and attempted to terminate the Howards’ parental rights. Massachusetts News reporter Nev Moore reports hundreds of such cases.
we now find divorce being forced on not only one parent but both.
The alternative to “forcing” divorce on a spouse who doesn’t want it is to force the spouse who does to stay in the marriage. That’s hardly just.
I await your link to the Massachusetts News story with bated breath.
http://hugoboy.typepad.com/hugo_schwyzer/2005/01/the_emails_cont.html
http://www.massnews.com/2002_editions/02_Feb/202how2.htm
here’s two,
sorry I screwed that up
here they are again;
http://www.massnews.com/2002_editions/02_Feb/202how2.htm
http://www.massnews.com/2003_Editions/1_Jan/011503_mn_howards_again.shtml
Those who say they’re “too poor” to pay ["child support"] generally would just rather have the money to pay for other things.
Those horrible, nasty men! How dare they spend money on food, clothing, and shelter for themselves, rather than subsidize their ex-wives’ and paramours’ spending on who knows what?
No zuzu,
The fact of the matter is neither party wanted a divorce. These aren’t wrapping correctly, I will break them up.
http://www.massnews.com/2002_editions/
02_Feb/202how2.htm
and
http://www.massnews.com/2003_Editions/
1_Jan/011503_mn_howards_again.shtml
Jonru, I looked at the site and, to say the least, the Mass News is a bit biased.
I also noticed that not one of those articles mentioned why DSS was looking into them in the first place. There are a lot of references to how thoroughly the News looked into the story, checked the documents, etc., but there was no attempt to present the documents or even contact anyone from DSS or the court.
Also, if you google Heidi Howard, the same piece keeps coming up, and it’s pretty much THE GAYS ARE COMING FOR YOUR WHITE CHILDREN!!!
Any mainstream press articles? And no, Fox doesn’t count.
Oh no, Wendy Mcelroy (an ntionally syndicated columnist) isn’t being fair and balanced.
Obviously you didn’t read the articles, it stated quite plainly that there was construction going on in the kitchen and a visiting nurse made the accussation, “it was the biggest pig stye she had ever seen”.
So in other words if you have children don’t repalce your kitchen cabinets or try to increase the value of your home in any way cuz DSS is watching.
I love how anything people disagree with the opinion of their opponent is always Biased, or Homophobic or Bigoted. Try the Boston Globe, hardly a bastion of conservative conspiracy theorists.
If you really are capable of Googling do some real reaearch before calling everyone involved in the stories liars just to suit your own predjudices
Here’s the flip side to the “why should men marry” argument:
Why should a woman marry? After all, as soon as she gets married, she has to support some drunken and/or stoned out deadbeat bum who just lays about on the couch while she goes to work, busts her ass all day, then comes home and has to do all the housework, yardwork, and childcare. Then when the drunk bum wakes up, she has to be his emotional, verbal and physical punching bag. What’s in this for the woman? Occasional sex? Not with his alcohol/drug induced erectile dysfunction! Besides, who wants to go to bed with an unwashed, sweaty slob who doesn’t bathe?! I mean, geez!
See? Selfish, lazy golddigger does not have a gender.
Personally, I think marriage is an intensely personal decision to make. There’s no advantage in pushing anyone to get married, or stay married….in fact, that attitude will do more harm than good. But let’s get real….bad partners come in both genders, and no one really wants to be chained to one, much less for the rest of their lives.
But….it’s not feminists, and certainly not any feminists around these parts, that advocate for mandatory albatrosses around the neck. Nor have I heard that feminist beck and call for “secular hedonism” (which in active use tends to translate as: “you don’t hold my beliefs, therefore you are a secular hedonist!”)
Which brings me to: Obtestor, do you really believe that it is impossible to hold ethical beliefs without belonging to an organized religion? And if so, whose organized religion provides the only ethical beliefs? Are you coming from the perspective that without fear of eternal punishment (Hell), that humans would otherwise naturally revert to stealing, murder, incest, etc.? I ask, because my father is an agnostic, yet holds himself to the highest of ethical standards and takes great issue with those who think only believers are moral beings. Besides, there’s plenty of evidence that holding a particular religious belief doesn’t necessarily mean that one acts on those beliefs.
craic, I know I’m coming in late here, but you and your friends really aren’t ‘allowed’ to socialize with the ‘boys’? I’m not trying to be catty, I just find that bizarre. Maybe this is a cultural, or geographical, or class thing? Every single one of my union brothers has an active social life with his “buds”, and it’s an accepted way of life here! Hunting, fishing, bowling, skeet-shooting, shooting pool, playing darts, or just hanging around somebody’s basement rec room drinking beer and watching the game are all typical “boys night out” activities. This hasn’t been the only thread that referred to how men aren’t allowed to socialize, and it just leaves me shaking my head and thinking I must live in an alternate universe.
Hugo writes, “…rarely mention discipling or mentoring other adult men. In the MRA world, men are victims of both a feminist hegemony and individual women. Blame is never placed on men themselves….”
IMHO this statement is an outright lie. The vast majority of men’s issues groups do hold men responsible where they are wrong, and they do in fact tell men to change when necessary.
However, men’s issues groups do not look to Marxist-Feminist’s for values that would define how men should change for the better. Doing so would be like praying to Satan for direction on how to be a better man.
Hugo is clearly part of a larger Marxist-Feminist agenda to criminalize men’s issues groups and dissolve their free speech rights. That’s his real agenda.
Warble
I love how anything people disagree with the opinion of their opponent is always Biased, or Homophobic or Bigoted.
Hey, look, the Mass News masthead says it plain as day: it’s a conservative paper. I did not read the columnist page, but I did go to the Mass News site and looked around the archives (I can’t spend all day on this; I *am* at work). And I stand by what I say about the bias and the columns warning that the DSS people wanted to snatch all of her white children away to give to gays and lesbians. So, yeah, I discount the story, particularly because it didn’t show much in the way of research.
Now, if you’d like to provide a direct link to the article you’re talking about, please do. Because none of the ones I read — and I read some from early 2001 as well as wrap-up pieces — went into why the children were taken away. I’d be interested to see if there were pictures, if there were interviews with contractors working on the house, etc.
Warble, is Promise Keepers Marxist-Feminist?
From anger to action. Joseph P. Kahn, Boston Globe, February 9, 1999
Families readies federal suit against DSS
By David Pratt The Barnstable Patriot
Worcester Voice, Patriot Ledger, almost every State Newspaper carried the stories of not only this woman but Nev Moore as well and the two hundred other families that have filed class action suit against DSS.
And how would interviews with contractors have any bearing on the actions taken. If you don’t have time to do some homework don’t get into a ludicrus debate and discount a nationally covered story just because it wasn’t broken by Dan Rather.
Which brings me to: Obtestor, do you really believe that it is impossible to hold ethical beliefs without belonging to an organized religion? And if so, whose organized religion provides the only ethical beliefs? Are you coming from the perspective that without fear of eternal punishment (Hell), that humans would otherwise naturally revert to stealing, murder, incest, etc.? I ask, because my father is an agnostic, yet holds himself to the highest of ethical standards and takes great issue with those who think only believers are moral beings. Besides, there’s plenty of evidence that holding a particular religious belief doesn’t necessarily mean that one acts on those beliefs.
You can’t deny that the United States is becoming radically secular. Christianity for example, is ridiculed as ‘right-wing’ extremism now. The secularists and humanists have an agenda and that agenda is to redefine what the traditional ideas of good and bad are.
Marriage was important before secular hedonism took root because the survival of couples required marriage. Men married women to raise families and women in the marriage shared as much of the burden as men did. That said, marriage today for women isn’t necessary any longer. Women today can garner the support they need from the ‘state’ since the expansion of the radical socialist bureaucracy was established in the 1970s. What that means is that the individual citizen was no longer required to maintain a certain level of self-sufficiency anymore, the forcing of couples together, and instead could find in government itself the tools to remain independent of such social relationships.
That means that women know today that they do not need husbands to win the breadbasket. One of my neighbors is a classic case of this. She is a single female with two children and she is also twenty years old. The ‘state’ takes her to all her doctor appointments, they pay her rent, give her money for food when she needs it, provides her with her babies’ formula and diapers and everything else from my point of view that she ever asks for. The ‘state’ became her ‘daddy’. She knows that if she has more children, they will be cared for outside of marriage by the ‘state’. This frees her to have children with multiple different men in the secular hedonist lifestyle, which her social pathology has proved to be what she desires and pursues. The kicker is that government is trying to ‘marry off’ these women onto unsuspecting men so they can pass along the responsibility of the numerous children onto the male candidate.
So the modern male is no longer needed to ensure the independent survival of the female in the sense that the male and the female work together to build a relationship and family of longevity. If you are a female considering divorce, you know that the ‘state’ is right there to help you every step of the way and the ‘state’ is there for you. The state becomes the new marriage of convenience and the male that you are married to is sent a summons to have his day in court to pay the bills that he will owe to the state for the vast ‘services’ given to you on demand.
That is why secular hedonism exists today. It is much easier today to pursue pure pleasure without the confines of morality today because no matter what poor decisions are made by the female in America, the female is taken care of completely by the state. There is no penalty for that bad behavior, only deep rewards at the expense of men.
Obtestor
You missed my point. Men who are sent to prison aren’t sent for not paying a debt. They are sent for violating a court order to pay child support – they refuse to pay, not that they can’t pay. They are sent to jail as a last resort after all other options are exhausted because they willfully violated a court order.
You are missing the boat again. It is unconstitutional to put any US citizen in prison for debt. Child support is debt.
Obtestor
i’m a lifelong strong atheist. i’ve lived in the USA for about six years now; prior to immigrating, i was born and raised in a european country which only recently dismantled its formal state-church relationship. (recently as in, within my own living memory.)
even though i’ve never been near the so-called “bible belt” — not even to visit — it’s as plain as day that this country is not a secular nation in any pragmatic sense of the word. any accusation of “radical secularism”, against the USA, is beneath even ridicule.
Obtestor,
The state as daddy isn’t even limited to the poor and downtrodden single mother. A friend of mine is a personal injury attorney in Mass who represented his close friend in his divorce. While both parties made around $80,000 a year,the State of Mass represented her FREE of Charge and did everything they could to squeeze every penny they could from the husband, he was of course compelled to hire his own attorney
I mean WTF
Wow. Where to start.
First of all, most Christians and agnostics in the U.S. hold the same beliefs about right and wrong. Really. Believe it or not, most totally secular, nonbelieving folks still believe that stealing, lying, assault and battery, murder, etc. is wrong, even though they don’t believe in a God who will punish them for that behavior if they choose to engage in it. You seem to take a dim view of humanity in general.
You seem to differ from some conservatives, in that they believe radical socialism took hold in the U.S. during the Rossevelt administration, and you think radical socialists didn’t take over till the sixties. No matter. Again, most women in the U.S. have what we have because we earned it, through our own work. Even most poor women work for a living; there are more working poor women than there are on welfare, and that was true even before Clinton’s TANF. For the vast, overwhelming majority of people, including women, welfare is a last resort.
Like you, I am against marriage initiatives, but for different reasons; I think education and the higher-paying job opportunities an education opens up are the solution, not marriage. Unlike you, I believe in giving people a helping hand when they fall on hard times. There are people who fulminate against welfare, but who wouldn’t hesitate to accept an unemployment check if they were laid off. Unemployment is really no different from welfare; it is a temporary assistance, and you are required to seek work. Actually, welfare is stricter; it requires work (they will find you make-work if you can’t find a job) for able-bodied adults whose children are over a year old. Even if a person is in school full-time, that person is required to work twenty hours a week or lose benefits.
I don’t know what state you live in, but here in Illinois welfare pays less than $400 a month for rent (maximum benefit, and even with this the person receiving benefits has to pony up 30% of their income); rent on cheap apartments in my city is around $500 a month. A person with two children, like your neighbor, would get…oh, I forget the exact number, but it’s around $350, in food stamps. The big help is with child care, and child care remains the biggest obstacle in the transition from welfare to work. And yes, persons receiving benefits must also pay a percentage of their income for that also.
Persons on welfare are on a time clock. They have 60 months of lifetime benefits. The clock is running each week they aren’t working. They must adhere to the plan formulated in conjunction with their caseworker, or be removed from the rolls. Caseworkers receive bonuses for lowering their caseload. So, I don’t know your neighbor (perhaps you don’t either), but I find it incredibly hard to believe that she is living high on the hog.
If welfare is so easy, why aren’t you on it? Men are entitled to benefits also, y’know. Methinks its because (a.) welfare is humilitating and (b.) it isn’t easy.
Anyway, have you been reading this thread? Look at the story of your fellow man, craichead. Do you want him, and people in similar situations, to have to go through the time and expense of “fault” divorce? How would you suggest craic go about proving that he was abused? Hire a private detective? Remember, when you want to draw the “hard line” around marriage, this is just another way of bringing in more state control, that you claim not to like. And it could turn around and bite you in the ass too, if you ever ended up married to a sociopath. There is no compelling state interest in keeping two people together who don’t want to be.
Obtestor, are you really claiming most women in the U.S. don’t want to be married because they’d rather have welfare benefits?! And that radical secularism brought this about?!
Funny, I thought most adult women in the U.S. either are or have been married, and the large number of books and magazines marketed to women that focus on “how to find a husband” speaks to the fact that marriage is hardly going out of style.
And most women aren’t entering the workforce because they “don’t trust a man” or “don’t need a man”, but because they went to school, increased their knowledge and developed their talents, and actually want to enter the workforce….just like the men do! Many women see their jobs as part of having a holistic, well-integrated life, the same as their male counterparts. And job dissatisfaction is just as prevalent between the sexes, too.
No radical secular conspiracy here, just the natural outgrowth of industrialization and increased education for women. Are you advocating abolishing education for women, and a return to the pre-industrial era, a la the Taliban? (then again, the Taliban digs modern weaponry, so they’re not sold on the whole back-to-the-Stone-Age idea, either.)
“Did you know that in Massachusetts that the state legislature passed a law to keep domestic violence statistics out of the hands of the people?”
That’s an interesting point. I do volunteer work for a men’s crisis organization in Maine and a few years back they passed a law requiring the law agencies gather domestic violence information.
I started keeping my own data that year.
Maine being a small state, typically has 5-10 domestic violence murders a year. My stats for the year (2001) were 9 domestic violence murders – 5 female victims, 3 make victims and one child (killed by her foster mother.) To my surprise, the 55% female victim stat was so out of line with the claims I had heard from the women’s groups that I followed up on it.
Well, surprise, the agency that was assigned the task of keeping track of the information did not issue any information that year. When we went to the state legislature for services for men later we were met by a lot of angry women from the Women’s Center who complained that we were trying to take “their” funding (We would have settled for one percent of their funding, but they were outspoken about the idea that any of “their” funding be used for a group that supports men.)
During one of the committee meetings a fellow was testifying about domestic abuse of men . A “women’s advocate” interrupted and waived a list around, supposedly of victims, and (without offering the list) she insisted that it was almost all women.
I was sitting next to a reporter who was scribbling notes. I got her attention, and wrote out the domestic violence stats for that year, and told her she shouldn’t print what was being said, instead she should “look it up”. The sensational claims made by the women’s advocate did not make the press.
A month or so ago the Washington Posts ran did a series where they claimed that the single biggest cause of death for pregnant women was domestic violence. This was based on a re-heated and inconclusive 2001 AMA study. The only problem is the conclusion is false – after exhaustive research of state data the Post investigators identified about 1200 murders of pregnant women in the US over 12 years. That comes out to only about a hundred a year – in a population of about 4 million. Anyone who has worked with mortality tables will instantly see that this, while each is tragic, is not a significant problem. (Without going into the details – there were some other data issues that caused the WP to overstate the number, but they will still unable to get it to a significant amount.) That did not prevent the paper, who clearly wanted the story to be true, that although the evidence contradicted it, the “violence was the leading cause of death for pregnant women.”
Like Dan Rather’s Texas National Guard memos, this survived only a few days before serious criticism of the article surfaced, even from the relatively centrist “Slate”. The Washington Post ombudsman eventually acknowledged the criticism, and backed of on the claim ever-so-slightly, (which for the Washington Post is a big deal. )
Anyway, despite the problems, this factiod has now become another “fact” caught in the echo-chamber of feminist myth.
You are right to challenge the information given to you, especially when it is presented as a feminist “facts”. More often than not you will find those “facts” to be half-truths, distortions and even outright fabrications. But then the scientific method and logic were only created by the patriarchy society to oppress women, isn’t that true? It’s feelings, not facts, that are really important.
And don’t waste too much energy worrying about our friend Hugo here, I’d venture that he is a fine fellow, but, please, how long would he last as a “gender-studies professor” if he deviated far from the dogma in the silly texts he is required to present in class? I actually admire Hugo, I think he is expresses himself well, is well-written, thoughtful and I am sure a fine fellow that one might like to go hiking or kyaking with.
And, as you can see, there are so many young women who lap up the “women as victims” line who just seem to fawn over the guy, as you can see from the posts in this board.
Hey…. wait a minute…
Hugo!
You old DOG!
I think whether child access is fair or not cannot be decided without figures available for the norm , standard deviation , mode and the access for the 90th percentile .
From abasic calculation and assuming that women work 40 hrs week , men work 50 hrs week and children , men and women sleep 78 hours a week.
In intact marriages we expect that men spend aorund 40 hrs a week and women 50 hours a week with children out of which 40 hours is joint.
To maintain a similar standard of affection from both parents one would expect around 50 hours after taking care of childs 40 hours of school / day care time . and maintaining the similar ratio we would expect the norm for the child access to be centered around 22 hours /week for men anf 28 hours a week for women of the waking time .
Even taking into account all the leisure time and all the other overheads. The norm for men should not go below 15 hours of waking time per hour . 90 percentile would be based on the standard deviation . Is the current norm of childs access anywhere close to it . Does anybody have figures on this ? IF it is SAHM Same figures would not vary for school going children . But you can do the maths of hours using similar methododlogy. Though love and affection cannot be measured etc etc. but some basic standard of time needs to be provided for the child to have some quality of interaction.
Anyway, have you been reading this thread? Look at the story of your fellow man, craichead. Do you want him, and people in similar situations, to have to go through the time and expense of “fault” divorce? How would you suggest craic go about proving that he was abused? Hire a private detective? Remember, when you want to draw the “hard line” around marriage, this is just another way of bringing in more state control, that you claim not to like. And it could turn around and bite you in the ass too, if you ever ended up married to a sociopath. There is no compelling state interest in keeping two people together who don’t want to be.
Divorce is a legal-binding contract. In contract law, it is in the interests of the state to ensure that the parties that enter into contracts together fulfill those contracts. If I hire you by contract to build me a swimming pool in my backyard, I pay you for the work up front and then three weeks later there is nothing but a deep trench to show for it with no pool and you have left town, I can take that contract and sue you for relief. It is in my interest to find ‘fault’ and that is what the American legal system is designed to do.
Now, imagine if we did that same contract, you and I, only this time we treated the contract like a modern marriage contract. Instead of building the swimming pool, you go to court and declare ‘no fault’ on the contract. You seek to sever your relationship with me under no-fault terms meaning you are not only not at fault for failing to complete your end of the contract, you feel that you are entitled to special rights to sever it. The courts will side with you as a woman every time and women know this.
Marriage contracts, like any other form of contract law, should be taken very seriously and every breach of the marriage contract should be made by ‘fault’ only, regardless of the time and expense involved.
Why have marriage and have the ‘married life’ if the contract itself isn’t worth the ink that it is printed on?
It is for this reason that men marrying in the modern matriarchal totalitarian nation-state of America should have their collective heads examined. Men are signing away 40 to 50 years of their labor into a contract that the female they marry is not bound to from day one. That is a perversion of the law and a deterioration of the American system. If women do not intend to bind themselves by a contract that they sign, don’t sign it. Don’t marry.
Do you have any idea what a marriage contract entails, in detail? Do you know what the marriage contract was designed to do, what rights it gives to the individuals that ratify it and what their responsibilities are in the marriage itself? I doubt that your secular hedonist feminism ever taught you about that important contract law, not that it matters to you.
Here is my view on no-fault. Any no-fault decision made involving men is, in fact, ‘no-fault’. That means men can completely sever any previous relationship they had with the co-signer of the contract as they see fit to, and are relieved with prejudice from any further responsibility to the contract in all of its forms. If the ‘state’ declares a contract is ‘no-fault’, the ‘state’ can then assume full responsibility.
To protect men this is what must occur.
Obtestor
Obtestor, are you really claiming most women in the U.S. don’t want to be married because they’d rather have welfare benefits?! And that radical secularism brought this about?!
Absolutely, but there are more pieces to the puzzle than just ‘welfare’ entitlement programs.
The key here is to examine the female interest in remaining in a marriage today. The modern female watches television and sees 90210 and all the other secular hedonist television programs, films and print media, ad infinitum, and the modern American female is attracted to that lifestyle. Marriage prevents the wandering promiscuity that American women embrace today, or it restricts it to a degree and American women are not interested in the moral foundations of marriage anymore.
So all the American female has to do is have one child with an upper-middle class American male, sue for no-fault divorce, and then the gravy train rolls in. I know that secular hedonist feminists will try to dismiss that by saying that no female in her right mind would want to latch onto welfare because the ‘state’ doesn’t provide her with very much resources. That is a half-truth, or more leaning towards a lie, which feminism itself is famous for in their linguistics anyway.
For example, if you take a 25 year old American female and she marries a computer programmer and they have a child and she divorces that unsuspecting male two years after the child is born, here is what happens:
1) The very first thing that will happen is the female will reach out into the community for free services to guide her through the divorce. All that she has to do is go see a ‘state’ employee at a so-called ‘battered women’s shelter’ and within 24 hours she will have legal representation.
2) Once she has legal representation, her attorney will advise her to seek custody of the child immediately. That is the financial prize.
3) If the unsuspecting male resists this, her attorneys will then compel her to file ‘abuse’, ‘neglect’ or ‘sexual assault’ claims against her husbund, false claims that will not only instantly give her custody of the children, but send the police to the unsuspecting male with a restraining order preventing him from seeing his family ever again or until the ‘state’ decides he able to after years of interviews with agents of the ‘state’.
4) After that occurs, she is golden. It is payday. Not only does she get custody of the children and virtually every asset in the marriage, she now has government employees who are paid by tax-payers at no expense to her to go into court during her divorce to explain to the racketeers how much of a ‘victim’ she is so she can seal no-fault divorce.
5) The male is then instructed by his attorneys, who are in the bag with his soon to be ex-wife’s attortneys so they can maximinze their own paydays together, to sign off on the no-fault divorce with the carrot being that they will try to ‘expedite’ the removal of the false assault, abuse, neglect or other feminist claim against him.
6) Then the judgment comes, which will obviously not be in the male’s favor.
7) Once this occurs, then the divorce industry takes the female and gets her housing, free medical care if the former husband cannot afford it, free shooling, free food, free things for the child and all necessities including furniture and even a car in some states.
It’s payday! The payday is maximized of course based solely upon who the female marries. If she marries a male who is not a large wage earner, she obviously will not do as well as she could if she married a professional male, for example. But either way, it’s payday because now not only does she have custody, she has her ex in a sling and she can pursue her secular hedonist lifestyle at will, independent of feminist-defined ‘male-oppression’. You know, the oppression that comes to any female the ‘instant’ they marry. Women in America mysteriously become ‘victims’ the first day they are married, as defined by the state.
Every female like the one described above could go to school for free at Hugo’s college. Can Hugo admit this?
So it isn’t just the welfare assistance that the female wins, she wins a host of services paid for by US-taxpayers just for divorcing. The best part for her though, and this is the true payday, she gets full custody of the children (women get full custody regardless of the custody definitions given to deceive men in divorce hearings), full legal protection, and is no longer bound to her ex whatsoever for the rest of her life. Her ex, however, is forever bound to her in the aftermath of this process.
It is because of this racketeering that men should avoid marriage in the United States as any healthy person would avoid a person with Smallpox.
Obtestor
And how would interviews with contractors have any bearing on the actions taken.
Let me explain this in little words for you: they claim that the conditions in their house were caused by construction. A contractor does construction. A reporter is supposed to ask questions and verify facts. A contractor would know whether the conditions were in fact caused by construction. See?
If you don’t have time to do some homework
Hey, you’re the one who brought this up. You plead it, you prove it — that’s the way it works. If you’re going to cite something to prove your point, link it.
don’t get into a ludicrus debate and discount a nationally covered story
National? All your links were to one local paper that says right out it’s a vanity project of a conservative. Your later list of papers (but not links) were all local. Where’s the national coverage?
just because it wasn’t broken by Dan Rather.
It’s really touching, seeing how much you guys obsess about Dan Rather.
Crap!
I thought I’d closed that tag.
now?
The question is not why the Men’s movement is so right wing. The question is why has the Left abandoned men?
As a thinking man, I also get tired of the decidedly right wing rhetoric of the men’s movement. I am left of center, and decidedly libertarian. I read MND because it is the only source of news that does focus on men’s issues like divorce, child support, etc. I tried PK and other Men’s Improvement groups. The problem is that none of these groups recognize that men are not always the problem. Why should I feel that I should apologize for being male?
The truth is that men are increasingly being marginalized in favor of women in this culture. Literally and metaphorically, as we hold the door open for women, they turn around and lock us out. The men who don’t see that are either in denial or have some other personal agenda (such as a polticial, marketing, or social agenda) that requires them to support anti-male behavior. (Read: John Kerry and the Dems).
Obtestor, you are coo-coo for cocoapuffs. Everthing you posted about the so called “free ride” that comes by virtue of being female is patently false. There are strict qualifications for who gets state aid, and very, very few people in the United States qualify. And remember, men can apply for state aid too. If it’s so damn easy; if it’s such a gravy train, why aren’t YOU on it? Answer: because even if that was where your thoughts lay, you don’t qualify….and neither does your ex wife. If you have a job, and/or assets, you don’t qualify. Hell, in most cases even if you’re unemployed you don’t qualify.
I can see that you have a firm belief in Magic. You seem to believe that if you use a special incantation (“secular hedonist”), and repeat it enough times, you’re going to turn me into one. Sorry Charlie. I’ve been accused of being a “secularist” from the right-wingers before, for my pesky insistence on that most American of institutions, the separation of Church and State, but no matter how many times they repeat it, I haven’t quit my belief in the Almighty. I just think it works out much better when I don’t force my religion on you, and you don’t force your religion on me. “Hedonist”? You must be joking.
Marriage is not a swimming pool. You can build a swimming pool. You cannot build a marriage without the other person’s cooperation. I know—I’ve been there. Do you really want the state to mandate that you stay married to a woman who hops from bed to bed, gambles away your life’s savings, drinks and drugs her way into oblivion (or worse–into an abusive rage)…etc.? The reason no-fault divorce came about was because people who were in situations like these had a hard time getting divorced!!
This is a question of character. If you get stuck with a bozo (and I have, and so perhaps have you), NO amount of law is going to change that person into a responsible human being. It just isn’t. And any effort to “punish” that person by keeping them married isn’t going to punish them, it’s going to punish YOU. You can’t force a person to build a life with you if they don’t want to. And any effort to keep them locked in, is going to make their behavior that much worse. And guess who gets to pick up the pieces? That would be YOU, the responsible party.
‘nother words, when the ship is sinking, get in the damn lifeboat.
Now, I’ve never watched 90210, but I do know it was something about Beverly Hills, which goes along with my general observation that TV reflects the lives of the rich and famous, not the Average Joe and Josefina. Still….look at the number of women pursuing higher education! And the number of women working throughout their lives! Those numbers are up, not down. The numbers of never-married women are up. This would lead me to postulate that perhaps more young women who grow up seeing this opulence on the screen figure the best way to get it is to work for it.
But like I said before, you seem to have a dim view of humanity in general, not just women. You already believe that without Big Daddy Church standing over us with a whip, we couldn’t possibly come to the conclusion that the Golden Rule is a great idea…we need a little hellfire under our feet to coax us in that direction. Bah! Admit it, Obtestor, you’re a misanthrope!
Marriage is not a swimming pool. You can build a swimming pool. You cannot build a marriage without the other person’s cooperation. I know—I’ve been there. Do you really want the state to mandate that you stay married to a woman who hops from bed to bed, gambles away your life’s savings, drinks and drugs her way into oblivion (or worse–into an abusive rage)…etc.? The reason no-fault divorce came about was because people who were in situations like these had a hard time getting divorced!!
I snipped this out of your anti-male feminist rant because it has the most utility in regards to what we are talking about.
Now, if you sat and thought about what I had written about the marriage contract, you would conclude as I had written it that the purpose of a ‘contract’ in any form is to make the breaking of it difficult. That is why contracts are used in business and other venues.
No-fault divorces should be nixed completely from US courts as a legal venue and replaced with 100% ‘at-fault’ venues instead.
In this country, divorce is a final separation for women from men and then these women reap rewards for divorcing men. For men, divorce is not the final separation from the male’s spouse. No, divorce for men in America is fascist slavery. There is an entire nefarious multifarious industry making oodles of money preying upon innocent men in America via the divorce industry.
In order to effectively dismantle that industry and marginalize it, men must simply take one simple step to protect themselves. Never marry and isolate their resources from all women.
Bah! Admit it, Obtestor, you’re a misanthrope!
No, to be clear, I am a meninist and a genius intellectual. The work I now contribute to men’s rights groups and others in the movement is now emanating across the political spectrum. I am a General within the movement, a key architect and I will assist in the dismantling of radical feminism in the United States.
Obtestor
Here is one of my personal heroes of the Men’s Rights Movement and a recent article that he has done on Government Vs. Marriage:
Government vs. Marriage
No reasonable person denies the value of marriage to adults, to children, and to society. But Wade Horn never answers the question promised in “Closing the Marriage Gap†(June 2003): How specifically can the government save marriage?
Even granting the efficacy he claims for various marriage-saving schemes (a large concession), what precisely can government add that couples and counselors cannot do on their own? More importantly, what dangers accompany government involvement in the most private sphere of life? Government’s role is to coerce, on pain of incarceration or death. Not surprisingly, this seems to be precisely what it is doing.
Helping troubled marriages is a valuable activity of churches. But federal funding is a formula for turning pastors into policeâ€â€and at precisely the time when many churches have abdicated their role as the guarantors of the marriage contract. Initial measures indicate this is already happening.
In January, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced $2.2 million in grants to faith-based groups to “promote fatherhood and healthy marriage.†Horn said the grants “reach out to those who need help in acquiring the skills necessary to build relationships.†Yet only 25 percent of the funds are earmarked for marriage; the rest will deputize private groups to collect child support, though the therapy and the policing are not strongly distinguished. The Marriage Coalition, a “faith-based organization†in Cleveland, is to receive $200,000 to assist child-support enforcement.
In May, HHS was again conflating therapy and law enforcement, announcing more grants “to support healthy marriage and parental relationships with the goals of improving the well-being of children.†Here again marriage promotion is a smokescreen to collect child support. Almost a million dollars is going to Michigan’s child-support enforcement agency.
“The policy is designed to mobilize the entire communityâ€â€including clerical, political, medical, business, and judicial leadersâ€â€to support children by strengthening marriage,†according to the Michigan agency. These measures follow more forthright expansions of police power, wherein HHS revealed that its principal method for rebuilding marriages and “parental relationships†is by arresting spouses and parents. Under a Clinton administration initiative called “Project Save Our Children,†HHS last year announced mass arrests “reminiscent of the old West,†as the Christian Science Monitor described it. “Most Wanted lists go up, and posses of federal agents fan out across the nation in hot pursuit.†Among “the worst of the worst†was James Circle, earning all of $39,000 a year and ordered to pay $350 a week for one child, about two-thirds of his likely take-home pay.
Dr. Horn has revealed that promoting marriage effectively means collecting child support: “These projects are a sensible government approach to testing and evaluating creative approaches that enhance the overall goals and effectiveness of the child-support enforcement program by integrating the promotion of healthy marriage into existing child support services.â€Â
How? How precisely can law enforcement agents improve anyone’s marriage? It is likely to have the opposite effect, since any bureaucracy develops a stake in perpetuating the problems it ostensibly exists to solve.
Child-support enforcement is actually a mechanism for destroying marriages by subsidizing breakups and enticing mothers to divorce. Bryce Christensen points out a “linkage between aggressive child-support policies and the erosion of wedlock.â€Â
In her new book, Stolen Vows: The Illusion of No-Fault Divorce and the Rise of the American Divorce Industry, Judy Parejko exposes how government-funded marriage therapists in fact destroy marriages. Parejko was locked out of her office as a court- affiliated mediator for trying to reconcile couples. Now she is challenging no-fault divorce, the legal basis for the decline of marriage. Her group, Defending Holy Matrimony, is unlikely to receive federal funds.
Child-support enforcement is corrupting government throughout America (see “The Politics of Family Destruction,†Crisis, November 2002). HHS now promises to spread this corruption to the churches and to the institution of marriage itself. Recently, the American Prospect castigated the administration for “promoting religion.†But they are missing the point. By recruiting churches and citizen groups to collect child support, HHS is profaning religion. It is turning the clergy into informers and churches into extensions of the federal government.
Horn also invokes the bugbear of “domestic violence,†implying that government agents are necessary to make marriage “safe†(from husbands, of course). In fact, marriage is already the safest environment for women and children, since most domestic violence takes place after separation and involves disputes over child custody.
In short, the government destroys marriage with one hand, and claims to rebuild it with the other. And whenâ€â€inevitablyâ€â€it cannot rebuild it, it takes the “batterers†or the “deadbeats†away to jail, thus fulfilling the true function of all government.
If Horn confronted the question honestly, he would find there is a great deal government could do to preserve marriage without destroying what it touches. It might begin by adopting the Hippocratic precept: First, do no harm.
As Allan Carlson recently said in a lecture at the U.S. Senate (with Horn as a respondent), if the government is serious about reviving marriage, it must roll back no-fault divorce. At the federal level, it could also rein in the federal divorce enforcement gestapo created in the name of child support and domestic violence. Putting more therapists and now churches on the government payroll will merely expand the gravy train of those that benefit from broken marriages.
Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.
Department of Political Science
Howard University
Washington, D.C.
With men like Stephen behind the movement, we will do well in the coming months and years.
Obtestor
Obtestor…or may I call you Obtuse? Your insistence on your “genius” status reminds me of all those never-been-in-the-service guys who insist that nevertheless they are Green Berets, or Navy SEALS, or top-secret CIA operatives, doing important work to keep America free. Oh, and they have handfuls of Purple Hearts, Silver Stars, whatever….that they bought at the local military surplus. Yawn.
Point out just one “anti-male” comment I’ve made. Just one! Not a comment directed toward a specific male individual, but towards men as a group. You can’t. You can call it “anti-male”, but that doesn’t make it so. You can claim the sun rises in the West, too.
No fault divorce serves the needs of both men and women. What’s your dog in this fight? Did your ex screw you over? Well, well. Join the club. Most of us get over it, and *gasp* don’t blame the whole other half of the species for the actions of that one person! Give that a try, sometime.
In the meantime, I doubt your strategy of not marrying is going to cause any blip on the radar of women. Or men. Most people manage to have equitable, rich, loving relationships that aren’t governed by manipulation and greed. Sorry it didn’t work out that way for you, but as long as you’re carrying that steamer-trunk of anger and resentment around with you, it never will.
At least you won’t be foisting on anyone else though; you’ve at least got that part right.
At least you won’t be foisting on anyone else though; you’ve at least got that part right.
That is classic feminist dehumanizing of concerned meninists in the Men’s Rights Movement. You must be drooling over your keyboard trying to figure out exactly what my ‘stake’ in the ‘movement’ really is. You immediately fall in line with the feminist party line and have administered your perverse preconceived notions of my ‘motive’. Guys like me drive feminists crazy, highly-educated men that don’t toe their fascist lock-step (goose-step).
I knew that it would only be a matter of time before you radicals started to attack me personally so let me tell you what my ‘motive’ is. My ‘motive’ is not derived from previous relationships (to which I have never been married and have no children), my motive is simply to confront fascist evil.
As the Nazis began to dehumanize the Jews and then send them to concentration camps and then the gas chambers, very few Germans stood up to stop that evil and the ones that did took great risks in doing so.
I see that level of evil being waged against American men and I know that the most just thing to do is to educate men about feminist evil so that they can better protect themselves from its predatory nature. Basically the work the Men’s Rights Movement is trying to do is simply catch feminist evil in time before it does begin mass-killings and slaughtering of men using the ‘state’ as the vehicle of genocide. If you don’t think that is where matriarchal totaliarism in America is headed, you also deny the Holocaust because a Holocaust is unfolding against men in modern America.
I hope that answers your leftist conspiracy theories about the ‘motives’ of men like me in the Men’s Rights Movement. Many men in the Men’s Rights Movement haven’t been assaulted and harmed by the perverse feminist system but know others that have. In political systems of evil, it is only a matter of time before ‘the people’ rise up to change them. I am certain that the Jews who were put in Nazi death camps wished they had someone to save them before it happened. You should thank me instead of assaulting me with your anti-male rhetoric.
Obtestor
Hugo, I would like to ask you a question. Aren’t feminist linguistic marketing terms like “dead-beat dad”, “domestic violence”, “breast cancer”, “child’s best interest” and “let’s do it for the children” simply sophisticated tools used by radical secular feminists and the media to dehumanize men?
As a military historian, you know that populations within nation-states that are dehumanized are dehumanized because of pre-planned violations soon to be brought upon them by the ‘state’. I was just wondering what your thoughts were on the matter. Since men are being made out to be less than human in America, what will be our collective fates?
Obtestor
Given the other comments here, I should probably wait until you make a full post about the similarities between pro-feminist men and Promise Keepers, bue…
I think this listing of the men’s movement is slightly flawed, because it has an organizational bias (i.e., we’re defining “men’s movement” by organizations and their actions and positions, and ignoring unaffiliated persons). I believe contemporary feminism and contemporary anti-feminism are both movements primarily for social change rather than legal change, and as such a lot of work gets done on a level that’s not as noticeable as group activism, and there are tenable (and in some cases rather widely held) positions that have influence without being organized into activist groups.
The pro-feminist men’s groups may be focused on men’s power to change, but as they tend to get organized around hot-button issues they only represent specific positions – those for which both the need for and possiblity of change is greatest. For instance, you can easily find pro-feminist men’s groups that are against prostitution and pornography (and to a lesser extent, casual sex), but I’ve never seen a “sex-positive” (I know it’s a loaded term, but it’s the only one I’ve heard used to describe the position) men’s group. I suspect that this is because it’s seen as the default position for a man to hold, because it’s very hard to distinguish between supporting these things as a feminist and supporting them as a privileged male, because there’s less of a perceived need to organize, and because of the fear that such a group would quickly be co-opted by anti-feminists.
The import of this is that many (if not most) pro-feminist men *aren’t* adequately represented by the pro-feminist men’s groups (or any of the other sets of groups) on this issue, and the ones who aren’t tend to be the ones who have the least in common with the Christian men’s groups.
obtestor thank you i have been feeling overwhelmed with all that goes on in the world and in particular all verbal vomit spewed at feminists. Sometimes I wonder are my beliefs in femnism worth being constantly ridiculed, constantly blamed. I feel exhausted at having to explain and defend. But then someone such as yourself comes along and I am reminded just how important it is that I do hang on and believe and that I do stand up to those who ridicule me. So thank you for reminding me that I am doing the right thing to keep fighting.
And thanks too – I have not laughed out loud in ages
b
Wiiiile E. Coyote, SUper genius!
obtestor thank you i have been feeling overwhelmed with all that goes on in the world and in particular all verbal vomit spewed at feminists. And thanks too – I have not laughed out loud in ages
Hey, I am pleased I was able to brighten up your day. Let me brighten it up a bit more since we are on a roll.
Unlike modern feminism, men have only one primary goal which they are very open about regarding the new Men’s Rights Movement. We are opting out of your system. We want to be free from all of you. All of you are on your own. It is that simple. There is no mysterious agenda, no secret handshake and no covert deception. We choose freedom from your perverse ideology. Every single day we inch closer to those goals. It is the masculine male’s choice.
You should be like Steinem and bail out of feminism and get married, hopefully long before she did at age 60. It must really be troubling for her to finally recognize at age 60 that her entire life hating men was a lie. I hope that at least one of the architects of the feminist movement finds peace and serenity in her marriage.
The feminists who do not marry will be given a different fate, a sort of justice that only victimized men in our current political system can appreciate. Think about it. When all of these childless career women get older, they will have no one but each other as company as they are stacked like cordwood in nursing homes prancing around in geriatric diapers. That is actually a pretty ironic and inescapable justice.
I am not a mind-reader, but maybe Steinem thought about that.
So keep right on laughing. Men can find mates at any time at any age. Men have American women figured out. American women are so secular hedonist, all it takes is a little money and a 60 year old American man can marry a 20 year old American woman and have a family. The career feminists stacked like cordwood in nursing homes in the future will never have that advantage.
So who will really be doing the “laughing”?
Obtestor
We are opting out of your system. We want to be free from all of you. All of you are on your own.
Don’t let the door hitcha on the way out!
Don’t let the door hitcha on the way out!
Jesus, if only that was the true reality for men in America.
Obtestor
My comment pertaining to Dan Rather is by far the most egregious example I could think of at the time but from years of consuming News from both liberal and conservative sources I can honestly say this one example has persistently been representative of the whole.
While all the local papers I listed no longer carry the original articles, they do carry them in their archives I’m not about to pay to browse their archives to supply you proof that they exist. If you are so intent of denying the validity of the original story or it’s wide spread coverage throughout Massachusetts I suggest you whip out your credit card and pay for the articles I listed from the multiple sources I cited.
Concerning my claim of wide national coverage for the story was a mistake, which I readily admit, and was resulted from a quicker response than I intended and failure to proof read the post. My point was that it garnered the attention of a nationally syndicated feminist columnist who you will undoubtedly pass of as blatantly biased because her article in question was featured on Fox News, as well as, the multitude of papers and online journals that carry her work.
Putting aside the absurdity of your irrational claims and misguided accusations, as well as, your obvious unwillingness to constructively debate with verifiable sources to the contrary of your own; lets consider cold hard facts pertaining to the disposition of the total Child Protective Services cases that this one story, that you deny could have happened, came from.
Look at the DHHS website itself, Don’t worry ZuZu I did the math for you so you won’t have to strain yourself, but you will have to read the actual studies to see that I neither skewed facts or inflated figures. I merely reported the numbers exactly the way they are listed.
So, lets start shall we?
Child Maltreatment 1998
Reports From the States to the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System
http://www.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/cb
/publications/cm98/high.htm
(Yes its outdated but it’s the only numbers they provide, I provide more current numbers for Mass. further down.)
Of the estimated 2,806,000 referrals received,
Approximately one-third, 34.0 % or 954,040, were screened out as unsubstantiated.
Two-thirds 66.0% or 1,851,960, were screened in as warranting investigation or assessment.
Slightly less than one-third, 29.2% or 540,772.32, of investigations resulted in a disposition of either “substantiated” or “indicated” child maltreatment.
More than half of investigations, 57.2% or 1,059,321.12 resulted in a finding that child maltreatment was not substantiated.
More than a tenth (13.6%) received some other disposition. (Whatever that means, I’ll dig further)
So lets say that only one percent (a conservative estimate) of unsubstantiated investigations were overzealously investigated and prosecuted that would lead one to conclude that 10,593.2 families were subjected to State Intrusion in 1998 with little or no justification.
In Mass the exact numbers:
Department of Social Services Statistical Information
http://www.mass.gov/Eeohhs2/docs/dss
/quarterly_fy04_q4.pdf
During the 4th Quarter of FY’2004, there were:
Total 51A Reports: 18,492
Reports Screened in: 11,834.88
Screen In Rate 64 %
Supported Investigations 10,058.9
Support Rate 85% (actually that would be a 65% increase from ’03 as you will see)
So, 6,658 reports are deemed to be false from the beginning, 1,775.98 are investigated, prosecuted and later dismissed for a total of 8,433.98 in one Quarter of the fiscal year. If the 15% that are unsubstantiated is representative then one could reasonably conclude 33,735.92 cases would have been dismissed during the year 2004, which is pretty close if you take a look at the totals for the previous year.
Department of Social Services Statistical Information CY2003
http://www.mass.gov/Eeohhs2/docs/dss
/annual_report_cy2003.pdf
Total 51A Reports (CY’03) 68,404
Reports Screened In (CY’03) 44,672
Screen In Rate (CY’03) 65.3%
Supported Investigations (CY’03) 21,834
Support Rate (CY’03) 56%
In other words out of 68,404 total 51A reports filed by DSS employees in 2003 23,732 aren’t worth further investigation, 22,838 are investigated, prosecuted and dismissed for a total of 46,570 reports
In all only 32% of all reported cases of child maltreatment in Massachusetts are supported by evidence.
Even if only one percent of the 22,838 reports that were investigated, prosecuted and eventually dismissed, 228.38 families have survived a nightmare of having their families lives turned upside down by an intrusive DSS investigation. (Pretty close to the 200+ families that filed a class action suit against the department that same year.)
If you think that The Child Protective services are infallible one need only look at the story Rilya Wilson missing for 13 months before the Department even knew it, 13 months of falsifying reports and outright lying by department employees in a futile attempt to cover their asses.
http://www.sunsentinel.com/news/local
/southflorida/sfl-dcfstorygallery.storygallery
But let’s not be too concerned about Florida children. On average, DSS in Massachusetts “loses” around 400 foster children a year, according to the Legal Services Reporter. Sorry I lost the link and am in no mood to continue trying to justify a position that you will undoubtedly dismiss as hogwash no matter what facts are presented. The truth is that the system is replete with under-trained, fanatical and often flawed individuals who use the power of the State to intrude unjustifiably in the lives of nearly 1,059,321.12 families nationwide. That’s over one and a half million families that had to fight the State from irreparably traumatizing their children and undoubtedly spent billions collectively to do it.
And before you write me off as some right wing wacko I can assure you that I am neither right wing nor left, I am dead center on the political spectrum and sick of the stupidity of both sides of the aisle. I just want to show that before you dismiss the validity of any argument because the conservative press reported it and the liberal press didn’t, I suggest you go straight to the source, do a little vetting of your own and pull the ideological blinders away from your eyes. It’s easier to see.
I will continue to investigate further to be sure, my initial findings could probably be refined but it has sparked an interest in just what the hell is going on in this agency.
If you think that The Child Protective services are infallible one need only look at the story Rilya Wilson missing for 13 months before the Department even knew it, 13 months of falsifying reports and outright lying by department employees in a futile attempt to cover their asses.
Oh, I never made that claim. There are lots of egregious examples of children being lost in the system by overloaded caseworkers. I worked as a reporter in Connecticut 15 years ago, and through a call about a raccoon during the raccoon rabies alert, I learned that the house the raccoons were living in was abandoned because of a huge DCYS scandal several years earlier (a building inspector called to the house by a neighbor declared it unfit for human habitiation, and then learned that a caseworker had been out several times and somehow didn’t seem concerned that three young boys were living there in conditions of “indescribable filth” while their parents lived in a nice little house on the same property).
So, yeah, I’m familiar with the concept. But the cases of lost children you describe, as well as the case of the children I cited and the foster children in New Jersey who were starved and chained, arise from UNDERzealousness. That’s a very different thing (and a probably more horrible thing) from overzealousness, and when you link only to news sources that take up the cause of WHITE CHILDREN ARE BEING TAKEN FOR ADOPTION BY GAY COUPLES, I’m a bit skeptical. Especially when, as I said, the articles seem a bit one-sided.
What part of the article ever said the children were being farmed out to gay couples? In fact, had you even read the story you would have gleaned the fact that two of the children were put into foster care with a female Lowell police officer and her boyfriend Charlie. The only reference to homosexuality was the fact that the person filing the 51A report was an overt Lesbian. Did you read any of it or did you just dismiss it because it was followed by a Conservative Newspaper?
What part of the article did you read over that the father was a machinist and former carpenter doing the work on the family house on his own (hence, no interviews with contractors)
If you were a bonified reporter you would be able to vette any story with more that rhetoric and insults.
Is this the best you’ve got, where the hell are your citations? Tell you what, go back, reread the entire article and all supplemental materials and you justify your baseless accusations.
I feel for all children that are killed, maimed, abused, molested or maltreated in any way. but the numbers show concluslivley that DSS employees are over worked and up to 68% of all actions taken by DSS are needless and sometimes frivolous.
Come on ZuZu prove me wrong and don’t rely on feelings, or like you are so apt to shove in my face, obscure and outdated refereces. I gave you my research, I cited government studies up to and including 2004. Tell me where I am wrong.
What part of the article ever said the children were being farmed out to gay couples?
Gee, I don’t know, maybe this article entitled Could Your Children Be Given To Gay Parents? tipped me off:
Almost no attention has been devoted to what may be the more serious political question of who will supply the children of gay “parents,” since obviously they cannot produce children themselves. A few will come from sperm donors and surrogate mothers, but very few. The vast majority will come, because they already do come, from pre-existing heterosexual families. In Massachusetts, “Forty percent of the children adopted have gone to gay and lesbian families,” according to Democratic state Sen. Therese Murphy.
…
Sorry, posted too soon. There’s more:
Howard Children Were Lucky
Among the states that have taken fullest advantage of this gravy train is Massachusetts. A typical case is that of Neil and Heidi Howard, whose children were seized by the state’s Department of Social Services (DSS) with no charge of abuse against either parent and no evidentiary hearing. DSS tried to put the children up for adoption and were prevented only by lengthy court proceedings and extensive publicity in the Massachusetts News. Other families are not so fortunate.
This traffic in children has been in full flow since well before gay marriage. Belchertown attorney Gregory Hession alleges a “child protection racket” rife with “baby stealing and baby selling.” Hession describes courts where the hallways are clogged with parents and children being adopted. “You could hardly walk. You had never seen such mass adoptions before.” Reporter Nev Moore of the News describes the auction blocks for children operated by DSS:
By the way, isn’t Nev Moore one of the people whose children were allegedly taken away from her by the state? And here she is reporting on it without disclosing her connection.
I’ve since read additional stories in the Mass News, none of which cite multiple sources. A 51A deals with both abuse AND neglect, and given that their child Faith had a disability, bringing her home to a construction zone (I notice there was no mention of whether there was a permit for the construction or whether it was being performed to code) might be a bad idea.
So what I’m saying is that you’re not getting the whole story from these sites, because they’re not interviewing anyone from the other side or trying to verify claims.
I mean, if you’re really logical and dispassionate, you’d think you’d recognize that.
Where in the hell did that story intersect with the story we originally began debating, is it referenced in the article in any way? Does it have any bearing what so ever to the subject at hand? I could really care less about homosexuals marrying or taking care of children, one of my close friends is married to another woman and raising 5 children and doing a damn good job of it. My favorite uncle Paul is a homosexual; I breed birds with him and have the utmost respect for him and am proud that he takes a serious role as an educator in the Cambridge public school system.
Like I said, don’t throw obscure references at me. Debate the original point or get off your homophobe kick. I never said that Mass News were representative; however, had you followed up with any of the information I provided you would realize a diverse crowd of intellectuals investigated this story and found the basis of the case farcical, including a famous feminist writer who you would dismiss because of her affiliation with Fox News.
No , they requested that the child be held at Spaulding Rehab until the renovations were complete but were told they had to take her home due to risk of infection at the hospital.
Did you also read that the Howards decided that all family members (except the fahter) would stay with a family member until the work was done?
Let me ask one question; are you of the mind that one innocent man on death row is one too many and therefore we should abolish the death penalty? Please answer the question honestly.
I read it, but as I keep saying, the article was one sided and didn’t verify the story with the DSS.
It’s a pretty basic thing, to get a quote from the other side, even if that quote is “no comment.” I indeed was a reporter after college, but have since gone to law school; I would be absolutely filleted by my boss if I accepted what our own clients say as true without trying to check it out and see what’s on the other side, and we make no pretensions of objectivity.
It’s pretty basic, people will put themselves in the best light when telling their own stories. When those stories involve conflict, it’s a good idea to interview the person(s) on the other side of the conflict.
Where in the hell did that story intersect with the story we originally began debating, is it referenced in the article in any way? Does it have any bearing what so ever to the subject at hand?
Well, as I recall, you didn’t link to any particular post. And since I did my own research and found these homophobic articles — some by Dr. Whatshisface that you cite so approvingly — right on the MassNews site, as part of the archive of articles, it does have bearing. Because, frankly, there’s little mention of this case other than the Mass News coverage, Dr. Whatshisface’s coverage, and links to both. Combined with the basic fact-checking issues in the articles, that’s a pretty good reason to be skeptical.
Now, mind you, I’m not discounting the possibility that overzealousness could have happened; I’m just suspicious of the source, particularly given these homophobic articles AND the vanity-project, one-sided nature of the paper.
Let me ask one question; are you of the mind that one innocent man on death row is one too many and therefore we should abolish the death penalty? Please answer the question honestly.
Yes. And for the further reason that I don’t believe that the death penalty accomplishes any of its stated purposes, like deterrence.
So you would agree that the financial, mental and spiritual well-being of 1,059,321.12 families aren’t too many because it accomplishes a stated purpose? What purpose?
So as a law sckool graduate you are fully objective and don’t rely on reports from expert witnesses that validate your case? What courtroom have you ever entered? Hey, I can go over to B.U. or the Federal courthouse and shepherdize case law with the best of them, but I can guarantee I have seen the inside of far more courtrooms than you will ever see in your entire illustrious career.
Where did I cite Dr. Anybody? You mean Dr. Braver? Where in any of my posts did I reference Dr. Sanford Braver? I referenced DHHS, Mass CPS, in not one of my posts did I link, reference or cite Dr. Braver. And you are seriously mistaken, the Dr. Who-or-whats-it you are referencing is Steven Baskerville no with NO PHD.
I apologize, you are correct. Upon further examination I must grant you that Stephen Baskerville does indeed have a PhD. However, regardless of the credentials of one particular personality to which you are attributing to my citations (one that I never eluded to in any of my posts) the fact remains the same;
Every time I read your posts I think to myself; Here we go again; if you can’t win ‘em over with your wit, then baffle ‘em with your bullshit… and my personal favorite, “The problem with our friends on the left is that they know so much that isn’t so.†Ronald Reagan
Not once during this debate have you offered anything constructive, objective or factual. In fact you have gone completely off topic, made groundless and brainless accusations and cited anything that would detract from the foundation of the debate at hand. You argue like a twelve year old girl having a hissy fit because her parents won’t let her date the boy she wants. Even in the face of well-researched and rational logic you remain dumbfounded by basic numbers. You allude to gray arrears, where DSS failed children. I admitted as much, yet brought before you cogent reasons why some children are left to the wolves while others are needlessly torn from the loving embrace of responsible and giving parents on nothing but utter hearsay, and yet, you continue to deny the accuracy of my argument. I am done with any attempt to elucidate reason on your obviously steadfast stupidity. You are the epitome of why Ann Coulter wrote a book on how to talk to you imbeciles (if one must).
I do wish you well in your law skool degree, perhaps one day we will argue in front of the bench. One can only hope, it would be nice to represent a man with twelve children against a lawyer who is completely oblivious on how to argue based on substantive fact.
I do wish you well in your law skool degree, perhaps one day we will argue in front of the bench. One can only hope, it would be nice to represent a man with twelve children against a lawyer who is completely oblivious on how to argue based on substantive fact.
Good work, Johnru. You impress me with your comments and critical thinking.
I have read some articles on DSS-type abuses and rather than rehash them case by case, we need to look at them for what they are collectively–police state activity.
When you create a bureaucracy and “do it for the children”, you are effectively disarming a domestic population that has already been bombarded with feminist matriarchal police state messages and exposing them to police state controls. That is what DSS is all about.
Do you really want to get to the heart of the matter? Look at what they “do” and not what they say. What does DSS do that is different than other government entities? Well, for one, they have virtually no oversight. That means they operate with pure and many times dangerous government power without ‘civilian’ elected oversight. If elected politicians can’t maintain authority over these organizations, ‘the people’ sure as hell can’t.
Looking at the statistics you posted about the intrusiveness of DSS as a police state organization is terrifying. When over 33% of all so-called professional claims made by DSS upon American families in Massachusetts are proven to be false, we see mechanisms used in the former Soviet Union and East Germany to terrify the citizen into feminist matriarchal totalitarian compliance, not democracy.
DSS is a compliance organization that uses political coercion via unaccountable judges and other legal instruments to terrorize American citizens with families. That is what DSS is designed to do. DSS cannot enforce its will over single individuals without children, so their function is directed only at one targeted population while claiming they are operating under equal protection of the law. We know this is a lie.
DSS employees drive around in their state-owned vehicles spying on local communities within the states that they operate, in effect becoming the notorious ‘block commanders’ of the old Soviet, snitches and spies upon a free people that simply attempt to exist in the modern American matriarchal totalitarian nation-state.
I say that because to the radical leftist feminist ‘it takes a village’ now to raise children, and in the feminist redefinition of the legalese of citizen’s rights, no one can raise your children better than the ‘state’ can. This fits in with the basic Marxist-Leninist feminist pathology as well.
Check the accountability of DSS. Who is accountable for them? What elected political wing has authority over them? I would hint that none do. I am firmly convinced that DSS oversight is internal and within the reigns of the courts only, separating the perverse organization from any civilian oversight and control. This is how police state activities work.
The matriarchal structures of organizations like DSS are deliberately created to be unaccountable. This must occur so that it falls in line with the unaccountable ‘state’ efficiencies of no-fault divorce, the family court extortionist racket, the domestic violence racket and the voluminous other matriarchal totalitarian fascist rackets that are bombarding the American people today. They are all the part of the same parasite feasting upon the soul of this nation.
If you are a lawyer, I hope that you recognize this new evil. You have the power to change the system. Always remember that when radical secular political ideologies like feminism approach ‘the people’ and tell them they are going to ‘protect’ them from something, they are creating police state controls.
And to zuzu: I apologize, you are correct. Upon further examination I must grant you that Stephen Baskerville does indeed have a PhD.
Credentials are also the tyrannical mechanism of the radical feminist. If Stephen didn’t have a Ph.D, would his arguments be ‘less’ credible than they are? They would be just as credible.
Obtestor
So as a law sckool graduate you are fully objective and don’t rely on reports from expert witnesses that validate your case? What courtroom have you ever entered?
Plenty. And you don’t have to visit the law library to sheperdize anymore; it’s all done on-line.
Of course I rely on expert witnesses. But I also have to look at the other side’s expert reports and evidence. If I don’t do that, and simply ignore problems in my own case, I’m not being very effective, am I?
If you can’t come up with any further proof of this story than some highly-biased, one-sided stories, homophobic columns and ad hominem attacks for daring to question you about this stuff, I have to conclude that things are not as you say they are.
If you can’t come up with any further proof of this story than some highly-biased, one-sided stories, homophobic columns and ad hominem attacks for daring to question you about this stuff, I have to conclude that things are not as you say they are.
Jon provided more than enough evidence to prove to you that the majority of cases investigated by DSS institutions have no merit. Since he did that, the weight of evidence falls into line that the Howard case was another DSS mistake, or worse, a police state abuse.
Jon also said he is not homophobic, yet you continue to label him as such. You might as well call him a ‘dead-beat’ too, since that is what all men in America are made out to be by women like you. Jon isn’t homophobic, you are being heterophobic.
Obtestor
le sigh – i miss the good old days before parody was superfluous.
sidenote: is it just me, or are these self-proclaimed ‘meninists’ analogous to white power advocates who dubiously claim the white race is oh-so oppressed in modern american society? i’m sure the good general will have much more to say on the subject, as he apparently has no life beyond trolling pro-feminist blogs (and fighting for the liberation of white males from the oppressive north american matriarchy).
btw i highly enjoy your site, hugo – hopefully you’ll continue to stand strong in your convictions despite the deluge of hostility the misogynist camp has directed towards you and your regular commenters.
Thanks, Matt. It’s comforting to know that these meninists, despite the tremendous abuse that they have taken at the hands of feminists and their pro-feminist allies like me, nonetheless have their ego structure firmly intact. Really, it’s remarkable.
Matt, I think your analogy is dead on. Their logic that men’s every want must be fulfilled before women’s needs are reminds me of the pictures from the early 20th century of people holding signs that say that every white man should have a job before any black man.
is it just me, or are these self-proclaimed ‘meninists’ analogous to white power advocates who dubiously claim the white race is oh-so oppressed in modern american society?
I think there’s more than analogy going on there.
The term “meninist” keeps setting off a little “By….MENnen!” earworm for me.
yes, i too have always been most impressed by grand gestures of self-congratulation in the face of merciless ridicule from those mean ol’ feminazi’s.
precisely.
i get very queasy when those who wield the most power in a society (in this instance, white males) make specious claims of victimhood.
hmmm…i smell a potential cross-marketing bonanza.
‘speed-stick MRA – for the most odious meninist’.
btw, i must add my accolades to both amanda, whose blog is one of my favourite online discoveries of the past several months (and your taste in music is impeccable;)), and to zuzu, whose insightful comments posted at this forum never fail to both amuse and enlighten.
[/blatant arsekiss]
“Matt, I think your analogy is dead on. Their logic that men’s every want must be fulfilled before women’s needs…”
That isn’t the logic. MRAs want equal rights and courtesy, not more. Please pay attention.
“i get very queasy when those who wield the most power in a society (in this instance, white males) make specious claims of victimhood.”
It’s nice when arguments I’ve already refuted get rehashed. Really, it is.
it’s even nicer when deluded men’s rights activists believe their ham-fisted pseudo-arguments against feminism (and women in general) hold any more credibility than those of a white supremist with me.
really,
it’s true.
it’s damn true.
now, why don’t you go visit your local chapter of the he-man woman hater’s club, get sloshed on cheap domestic lager, and preach your misogynistic hate rhetoric to the converted like a good wittle meninist fool.
*pats on head*
“it’s even nicer when deluded men’s rights activists believe their ham-fisted pseudo-arguments against feminism (and women in general) hold any more credibility than those of a white supremist with me.”
I haven’t MADE any damn “arguments against feminism and women,” ya twit. I’m not misogynistic or anti-feminist in the least. I’m egalitarian. Pay attention or don’t bother posting.
“now, why don’t you go visit your local chapter of the he-man woman hater’s club, get sloshed on cheap domestic lager, and preach your misogynistic hate rhetoric to the converted like a good wittle meninist fool.”
I’ve connected with more than one regular poster here and have complimented them for their fair, open-minded view of male/female relations. Trust me; you’re not one of ‘em.
and thus the apes get creepy…
are you also an ‘intellectual genius’ and a ‘general’?
how sweet. i’m sure being informed of your admiration is a defining moment in their lives.
the fact you’ve chosen not to bestow the same accolades upon me (with good reason, considering the vitriol i’ve spat in your general direction) wounds me deeply.
anyone who knows me knows i live for gaining the approval of wingnuts.
btw – sorry hugo…
i shall behave myself from now on.
must learn to refrain from whizzing on a gracious host’s carpet.
sidenote: is it just me, or are these self-proclaimed ‘meninists’ analogous to white power advocates who dubiously claim the white race is oh-so oppressed in modern american society? i’m sure the good general will have much more to say on the subject, as he apparently has no life beyond trolling pro-feminist blogs (and fighting for the liberation of white males from the oppressive north american matriarchy).
The level of feminist anti-logic at this site is legendary. Since 8 out of 10 children born in America are bastard-children (the female doesn’t even know who the daddy is in most cases or pops kids out of wedlock), that fits with the latest contributor. Look at this one appeal to popularity logic fallacy in particular:
sidenote: is it just me, or are these self-proclaimed ‘meninists’
Hugo, you should pack all of these folks into your logic class. They need it desperately.
None of the men who are for men’s rights that have posted at this site have delved into the gutter like you feminists have. Jon for example, took considerable time explaining to Zulu what the human rights abuses were by the DSS in Massachusetts, and yet she dismissed ‘every’ fact he presented under the feminist delusion of ‘homophobia’ in one article.
Then we get to read about feminists who claim, like in the post I highlighted above, that men’s rights advocates are ‘white supremacists’. Huh?
The only thing that men’s rights advocates want is freedom from all of you. We want freedom for all men, regardless of circumstance. That isn’t ‘white supremacy’ as bastard-matt thinks it is, but a male god-given right. Men don’t want ‘supremacy’ over you, we want nothing to do with any of you, ever. We want complete and total separation from your perverse and irreconcileable ideology. The feminists are the ‘supremacy’ fascists, not the men in the Men’s Rights Movement.
Before I leave this pit of anti-intellectualism and extremist feminist hate against men, let me post an article from Men’s News Daily that sums up the feminist delusion fairly well and makes for an interesting read:
Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa: Confessions of a Misogynist
January 29, 2005
by Paul C. Robbins, Ph.D.
On his Web site, Hugo Schwyzer, self-proclaimed “pro-feminist male,†writes the following:
“Much of the misogyny of the men’s rights movement is directed towards feminists…To be hostile to the movement that seeks to liberate women is enough…to merit the charge of misogyny.”
Feminists have made a similar claim for so many years that the intellectual and moral arrogance of that claim today passes unnoticed. But no movement, neither feminism nor the men’s rights movement, is above criticism. Dr. Schwyzer would ask us to believe that he can justly criticize the men’s rights movement, but the men’s rights movement cannot justly criticize back.
As far as I can tell, feminists believe all men are guilty of being men, an original sin no amount of virtue can erase. So I confessâ€â€I’m guilty. First, of being a man, second, of not being a feminist. If that makes me a misogynist, so be it.
I’m a man and I make no apologies for being a man.
I am not a feminist because I believe society must balance the inter-related needs, rights, and interests of men, women, and children, while feminists believe the needs, rights, and interests of women always outweigh those of men and children.
So here, Brother Hugo, is my mea culpaâ€â€read it and weep.
I respect and acknowledge Condoleeza Rice for being the first black woman to be confirmed as Secretary of State.
Feminists oppose Dr. Rice because she’s a political conservative. Barbara Boxer all but called her a liar during her confirmation hearing. So much for the sisterhood.
I deeply admire and respect Mother Teresa, a Catholic nun who felt called to spend her life comforting the dying untouchables in India.
Feminists dislike Mother Teresa because she opposed abortion. Germaine Greer wrote a snippy, catty critique of her life when she died. Feminists admire Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood; Sanger was a racist eugenicist who wanted to sterilize blacks to limit their numbers.
I believe the only difference between The Vagina Monologues and a blue movie is that the blue movie has better monologues.
Feminists believe The Vagina Monologues is the greatest piece of literature since Medea.
I’m not a male feminist. A male feminist believes all men beat their wivesâ€â€except himself. A male feminist believes all men rape womenâ€â€except himself. A male feminist believes all men oppress womenâ€â€except himself. He’s half right–he doesn’t, but neither do most men.
Female feminists believe all men beat their wives, rape women, and oppress women–except for Bill Clinton.
I believe men have made enormous contributions to civilization and that absent those contributions civilization itself would disappear.
Feminists believe men are good for three things: donating sperm, changing the oil, and paying child support.
I believe women have made enormous contributions to civilization and that absent those contributions civilization itself would disappear.
Feminists believe women would have made enormous contributions to civilization if men had not oppressed them. Since their liberation, feminists have made up for lost time by giving us Women’s Studies.
I’m a misogynist because I believe most women are fair-minded individuals who seek fairness and equality for both men and women.
Feminists seek fairness and equality for women but not for men.
I believe when the Titanic goes down without sufficient lifeboats, women and children should share the lifeboats.
Feminists believe women should share the lifeboats with the childrenâ€â€if there’s room.
I believe children need both mothers and fathers.
Feminists believe children need mothers and child support checks but not fathers.
I believe most men truly love their children and their wives and that most men behave responsibly and lovingly towards their wives and their children.
Feminists think women are good, men are bad. Well, except for the evil Dr. Rice and Mother Teresa, of course.
I believe a father who loses his kids in an unfair and biased custody decision suffers an injusticeâ€â€and that his pain at losing his children is real.
Feminists believe his pain is real but deserved. If he didn’t want to lose his kids in a nasty divorce, he shouldn’t have married. You know, kind of like the black slave who objected to being whipped–if he didn’t want to be whipped, he shouldn’t have run away in the first place.
I believe children deserve both a mother and a father in the event of a divorce.
Feminists believe children deserve only a mother and a child support check in the event of divorce. Whether children ever see their father again should be left up to mom.
I believe no man should be forced to support another man’s child.
Feminists believe women have the right to lie to their children about who their
fathers are, lie to fathers about who their children are, and to jail any man
who refuses to support the child the woman said was his–even if the DNA proves
she lied.
I believe both fathers and mothers should have both rights and responsibilities when its comes to their children.
Feminists believe mothers should have rights to children, fathers should have responsibilities.
I believe that marriage benefits men, women, and children and deserves widespread societal support.
Feminists oppose heterosexual marriage but think homosexual marriage is the greatest thing since Roe v Wade.
I believe in the event of divorce, the state has an obligation to treat both the husband and wife fairly and equally and to mitigate the damage to all parties, but especially to the children.
Feminists believe the purpose of divorce is to allow a woman to end a marriage but
keep all its benefits, including the children and her former husband’s money.
I believe the destruction of the family is a result of ideas and policies advanced largely by feminists.
Feminists agreeâ€â€and they’re proud of it. According to Germaine Greer, widespread divorce is feminism’s greatest achievement.
I believe most divorces are filed and initiated by wives because they know they’ll receive the children, the bulk of the marital property, and a sizable share of their former husband’s income.
Feminist believe women file most divorces because the husband deserves it. He’s a man, after all.
I believe divorced fathers are justly angry at a family court system that routinely deprives them of their children, their property, and their rights–and that calling these men “misogynists” will not suffice to silence their anger and their cries for justice.
Feminists call these men “misogynists” to silence them so that women’s gravy train will not be derailed.
I believe domestic violence is a human problem, that women are as likely to resort to violence in an intimate relationship as men, a conclusion supported by numerous scientific studies.
Feminists believe that only men resort to violence and a woman who appears to resort violence is actually defending herself. Feminists have no explanation for intimate violence in lesbian relationships, so they don’t talk about it.
I believe most child abuse and murder is committed by mothers, not by fathers, a conclusion supported by solid evidence.
Feminists avoid dealing with this issue. When confronted, they say it’s because mothers spend more time caring for children than fathers, but feminists do not make the same effort to prevent mothers from abusing their children as they do to prevent men from abusing their wives.
I believe abortion should be limited to certain situations and that 45 million abortions since Roe v Wade is a stain on our collective conscience.
Feminists believe women should have an unlimited right to abortion because an unborn child is mere fetal tissue with no Constitutional rights. Too bad for it.
I believe men and women are born with innate sexual desires.
Feminists believe heterosexual desire is the result of social conditioning but homosexual desire is innate.
I believe empowering women means giving them choices–and expecting them to take responsibility for the consequences of those choices.
Feminists believe that a woman who chooses to teach French in New Guinea should be paid the same as the president of GM.
I believe the pay gap between men and women is caused primarily by choices women make–to work fewer hours, to take time off for raising children, and to work in careers that pay less.
Feminists believe the only cause of the pay gap is that companies want to decrease their profits by paying men more than women.
I believe that when Nancy Hopkins claimed she would either black out or throw up when Larry Summers suggested innate differences might be the cause of women’s comparative lack of success in science, she demonstrated she prefers emotional blackmail over science.
Feminists believe the only purpose of science is to support the preconceived conclusions of feminismâ€â€and they’ll gladly use a classic feminine ploy straight out of Gone With the Wind to be sure it does.
I believe feminism’s constant portrayal of women as victims is demeaning to women.
Feminists portray women as victims to elicit chivalry in men, to avoid responsibility for their behavior, and to portray themselves as always innocent.
I believe what men and women share in common is more important than what divides them.
Feminists believe men and women are just alike, except that women are good and
men are bad.
I believe men and women come from the same source, a source I call God. I believe God loves us all equally, man or woman, black or white, red or brown, and that God’s gift of life is an opportunity, not a guarantee.
Feminists believe the Goddess created a world in which women are always victims
and men are always villains. They have no idea why the Goddess did this to them,
but they’re really pissed about it.
I believe women were one of God’s better ideas and that women deny their unique gift to the world when they try to be men.
Feminists think men should be like women and women should be like men.
So there, Brother Hugo. I’ve bared my soul. My conscience is clear, my penitence
complete.
Ave Maria, gratia plena…
I shall go and sin no more.
(PS: My comment about The Vagina Monologues was suggested by George Harrison, the late Beatle, who sardonically remarked: “The only difference between a Spice Girls movie and a blue movie is that the blue movie has better music.†Thanks, George.)
Paul C. Robbins, Ph.D.
Dr. Robbins has all of you pegged pretty well. Do us all a favor and stay on your current feminist anti-logic course. It makes it so much easier to be victorious over feminist evil, as we consistently prove month by month now.
Peace to male freedom!
Obtestor
and apologies for the ad hominems, bmmg39.
whatever our differences in gender ideology, my juvenile conduct was completely unwarranted.
must learn to refrain from whizzing on a gracious host’s carpet.
Since you are a feminist, do you keep the toilet seat down when you pee-pee? You wouldn’t want to be politically incorrect and anti-feminist.
lol
Obtestor
Feminists oppose Dr. Rice because she’s a political conservative. Barbara Boxer all but called her a liar during her confirmation hearing. So much for the sisterhood.
Feminists oppose Condi Rice because she’s been incompetent as National Security Adviser. And yes, she has lied. Mushroom cloud, anyone?
LOL obtestor, you must be a pisstake.
admit it – you’re really susan faludi in sock-puppet drag.
Feminists oppose Condi Rice because she’s been incompetent as National Security Adviser. And yes, she has lied. Mushroom cloud, anyone?
Feminists oppose Dr. Rice because she is a black Conservative Republican. Feminists are the only group that can be racists and get away with it.
That is what happens in America when you have a tyranny of the majority (women).
Obtestor
Gee, and here I thought it was liberals who were responsible for all the racism and ills of the world.
LOL obtestor, you must be a pisstake.
admit it – you’re really susan faludi in sock-puppet drag.
You should abandon everything that you were taught at Feminist Reich University. Everything you know is a lie.
Obtestor
keep it up, ms. faludi.
i’m on to your game.
I think it’s performance art.
well, i consider pro-wrestling to be performance art, and obstestor’s chest-thumping, testosterone-infused rhetoric is not that far removed from that of the average steroid-infused mat-general (minus the grunting and gobs of spittle).
so perhaps there’s merit in your theory, zuzu.
hell, there was even a grappler named ‘the genius‘ back in the day.
by george – that’s not susan faludi mischievously hiding behind the obtestor moniker;
it’s leaping lanny poffo!
“Sorry to see you piss and run, David.”
That was pretty funny…
“Oh if only women would STOP posing for all those “pin-ups” then men would have nothing to exploit.”
Yes many New York City police officers have the same attitude regarding criminal or deviant behavior…
Everytime somebody gets robbed or mugged they say: well why were you wearing that expensive piece of jewelry or coat on the subway, don’t you know better…Or, you shouldn’t be riding an expensive bike like that in the park, I mean you’re just asking for trouble, what are you trying to make my job harder…
So Anne just because it’s there doesn’t mean you need to take it, or look at it or whatever…it’s called self-restraint…
Can men practice it?
“Men objectify women because there have always been women who let them.”
Yes, as any New York City police officer will tell you, criminal rob you because you faciliate it by wearing, showing, exhibiting expensive jewelry, clothing, electronic equipment, etc., that tempts them…
The proper response is to go out everywhere looking like a homeless person with no jewelry, and not more then $10.00 in your pocket…just a little something to give a criminal so they won’t get mad that you have nothing and hurt you anyway…
What ever happened to self control…just because it’s there to take, doesn’t mean you have to take it OR LOOK AT IT…Do you eat until you throw up just because the food in on the table and is that your hostess’s fault for not removing it or yours for being such a glutton in the first place…
“As a side note, I’ll say that I find the entire sex industry appalling and I don’t support it economically.”
But many of your brothers do since it’s not called the world’s oldest profession for nothing…and as one of you said, take responsibility for your sisters, so now back to you: take responsibility for your brothers who keep this industry going…
“If a man is falling on hard times, he usually gets a “real” job – perhaps low paying, but generally respectable. I have yet to hear of an epidemic of men selling their bodies out of economic necessity.”
Because women are better then that and would NOT buy them…actually even male hustlers sell themselves to other men…
So we’re just better then you okay…that’s why men do NOT have to go into the sex industry, women save you from that…
But don’t bother thanking us…
“+ Over 96% of all child-custody cases default to the mother. Why is that? Again, anti-male discrimination at work. ”
No…it’s because most parents usually agree, without going to court, that the situation that existed before the divorce vis-a-vis the children should continue after the divorce…and 96% of the time obviously that’s the mother since she was apparently the one the children were spending MOST of their time with prior to the divorce…
It’s simple…
In litigated custody cases, fathers do VERY well, probably too well, since many of them win custody in spite of the fact that only the most troubled of families litigate custody…and most of that ‘trouble’ is domestic violence…
“In litigated custody cases, fathers do VERY well, probably too well, since many of them win custody in spite of the fact that only the most troubled of families litigate custody…and most of that ‘trouble’ is domestic violence…”
And domestic violence, for those of who just coming in, is committed equally by women against men as it is the reverse.
“Hugo, one more thought. What does your modern feminism do for men?
I look forward to your reply.”
It allows you to have sex without responsiblity and live a relatively decent life w/o marrying if you chose not to…you can even adopt children as a single man if you really wish…
BTW, although many men fought, tooth and nail, for that option most of you rarely do single parent adoptions anyway…so I don’t think most men were ever as interested in children as women are, I think mens’ interest in children is related to women, ie., how many different ways you can jerk a woman’s chain by holding her kids as hostages…
Thus the adoption minus the woman part has no meaning for most of you…
Just my opinion, others might feel differently…
But feminism gave you freedom from having to marry; along with the ability to enjoy sex outside of marriage…no strings attached…you know the classic three:
feel em, f*ck em, and forget em…
“And, perhaps you got the statistic from pulledoutofmyass.com, but last I heard, joint custody was quite a popular arrangement.
Hey, Hugo,
Are you going to admonish “zuzu” about such comments, or do your rules apply only to men?
Jeff JP”
I liked her comments…leave her alone…
“Nearly everything in the media from commercials to TV shows has many anti-male biases. Males are depicted as bumbling fools, who without their motherly females, could not find their posterior with both hands. Example: their is a commercial for Dodge Caravan with a motorcyclist being picked up after it ran out of gas and his motorcycle being stored in the van. The catch line is “Dad just had to have a motorcycle.”
How is that anti-male bias…
Actually it paints ‘bikers’, many of whom are criminals of the worse kind, as just ordinary guys with wife and kids at home, nothing for women to worry about if you pick one of these freaks up in your car on the highway…
What are you talking about?
That commerical HELPS men…it’s one of your propaganda tools that paints you all as far better then you really are…
“Second, in most states — like my home state of NY — there is no such thing as joint custody. There is an intention that will state under what conditions the NCP can have input in decisions and a generous visitation schedule, but there is no mention of the term “joint custody” in any law book or case law anywhere. Either you have custody or you don’t — simple as that.”
That’s not 100% true…custody in New York is set by statue…and there is Joint Legal and Physical…but often in Joint Legal, one parent is designated as primary…so it’s almost like Sole Custody…but as you said with a better visitation schedule…
“”Nearly everything in the media from commercials to TV shows has many anti-male biases. Males are depicted as bumbling fools, who without their motherly females, could not find their posterior with both hands. Example: their is a commercial for Dodge Caravan with a motorcyclist being picked up after it ran out of gas and his motorcycle being stored in the van. The catch line is “Dad just had to have a motorcycle.”
“How is that anti-male bias…”
It’s not, in and of itself. But it’s one of a long line of commercials and television shows and movies and greeting cards that treats men like childish fools, rescued and scolded time and time again by their intelligent, long-suffering wives/girlfriends. The most innocuous comment made about women will get a man into hot water, while there seems to be no limit to the horrible things that are said about men.
“That commerical HELPS men…it’s one of your propaganda tools that paints you all as far better then you really are…”
First off, it’s W-0-R-S-T and T-H-A-N. Has the “patriarchy” prevented you from learning proper word choice?
Second off, knock it off with the blatant sexism.
In litigated custody cases, fathers do VERY well, probably too well, since many of them win custody in spite of the fact that only the most troubled of families litigate custody…and most of that ‘trouble’ is domestic violence…
You’re nuts.
Obtestor
Oh my God, I’m exhausted with this…
This blog used to be such a quiet little place where I often just read and looked at the delightful pix…now it’s morphed into an emotional-charged snipe fest…
I just can’t keep up with it…
Where in the heck did all these people come from…
I have to take a nap and return later…as I feel obligated to not let any of the usual suspects get away with posting their unsubstantiated charges and lies about women here, as they do everywhere else…
“You’re nuts.
Obtestor”
I’ll have to respond to your various nutty comments later…as I need to recharge my batteries…
This place is draining the emotional life out of me…
feel em, f*ck em, and forget em…
Those are the tenets of modern feminism. If you stick a vagina in a man’s face and tell him it is ‘free’, as feminism does, the man will stick his penis into that vagina and then walk away. You know that human beings don’t appreciate ‘free things’. They appreciate things they work for.
So it is the feminist who promotes that behavior, thinking they are embracing a supremacy agenda over men but all they are really doing is disassociating men from feminism with the feminist free sex ideology. However, another more important problem with spoiling men with free sex emerges when men view all American women (which they can validly do now because of feminism) as informal prostitutes.
That means that women are not prizes. To make things equitable for women, you have to give women back their self-esteem and that means pulling women away from feminism. Women that are not adherents of feminism are the true prizes, not in the male sense as a purely male benefit, but as a benefit to the woman herself.
Why should men marry if they are getting hundreds of different vaginas thrown their way every week? American women are secular hedonists and are addicted now to giving themselves away for free. At least formal prostitutes have enough self-respect to charge for their services, a personality trait lacking in modern feminism.
Obtestor
I’ll have to respond to your various nutty comments later…as I need to recharge my batteries…
This place is draining the emotional life out of me…
Make sure you take your rose-colored glasses off before taking your nap.
lol
Obtestor
“Why should men marry if they are getting hundreds of different vaginas thrown their way every week?”
Men who think of women only as vaginas shouldn’t get married.
NYMOM, i wouldn’t know what this blog used to be like — i was lured in by Ampersand’s referencing his call-in to the radio show — but personally, i can’t even take most of the, ahem, less sociable commentators here seriously. some of the things that’ve been said just on this thread alone, mostly by people opposed to our host’s viewpoint, well… they don’t even make sense.
i’m sorry you’re feeling drained by it all; myself, i react more with a feeling of disconnection. if i can’t respect somebody’s arguments as even sensible, i can’t bring myself to care enough to read them, and then the blog becomes pointless.
with no offense to Hugo, i think i’ll go back to lurking at Ampersand’s place pretty soon. he gets trolls too, even offensive ones at times, but at least his ones seem marginally coherent…
Men who think of women only as vaginas shouldn’t get married.
Men are trained by feminism to think women are nothing more than vaginas.
Obtestor
with no offense to Hugo, i think i’ll go back to lurking at Ampersand’s place pretty soon. he gets trolls too, even offensive ones at times, but at least his ones seem marginally coherent…
Removing groupthink fallacy from debate can be annoying for the feminist majority. If only ‘everyone’ just cow-towed to your belief system. It would make things so much easier, huh. Just ‘go along’ with the feminist evil because it can’t be ‘that bad’.
You folks also did the inviting. If you wanted to remain a strictly feminist groupthink organization, you wouldn’t have challenged the MND readers and Men’s Rights folks to come on over.
So are we no longer welcome? Just say so. I guess what I mean to say is don’t rag on non-feminists and then delude yourselves into thinking they won’t come over to your forum to ask you why you are ragging on them. We have just as much of a right to voice our political concerns as you do. We know that feminists are trying to make the criticizing of their perverse ideology illegal, but that is beside the point.
If you are too thin-skinned to handle the critique of feminism, just say so and we will take the victory and move on. I am thinking that Hugo recognizes the importance of academic freedom, but with you people, who knows?
Obtestor
“Men who think of women only as vaginas shouldn’t get married.”
“Men are trained by feminism to think women are nothing more than vaginas.”
But, seriously, I don’t know anyone who thinks of ANYBODY this way…what a sad way to go through life that would be…
that’s part of my point, bmmg39; it’s tricky to argue with somebody when, internally, you keep going “you poor, poor thing, you really WERE last in line when (insert deity) was handing out the mental faculties”. even if their arguments were worthy of my respect, i’d keep getting sidetracked by alternating pity and distaste for the people delivering them.
you can’t, really, even crack jokes at their expense. partly because this isn’t that kind of blog, and Hugo might object, and partly for the same reasons one doesn’t utter jokes about special olympics contestants in polite company.
with that, i believe i shall sign off. hope your forum improves, people.
“Why should men marry if they are getting hundreds of different vaginas thrown their way every week?”
Men who think of women only as vaginas shouldn’t get married.”
Thank you Amanda as it would have taken me many paragraphs and probably four posts to make the point you made in just one sentence…
I would have started with Augustus and ended with OJ Simpson…so thank God you just saved me all that…
“Warble, is Promise Keepers Marxist-Feminist?”
Please don’t tell me you are directing communicating with Warble on your own blog…
Please…
“First off, it’s W-0-R-S-T and T-H-A-N. Has the “patriarchy” prevented you from learning proper word choice?
Second off, knock it off with the blatant sexism.”
Can I be allowed my small idiosyncrasies with language and if I wish to say better then as opposed to worse than, let me say it…
BTW, it’s poor manners to be constantly correcting someone’s use of grammer on blogs…it’s condescending and probably sexist…implying my ideas aren’t as good as yours since my grammer isn’t as good…
So knock it off…
Save that crude behavior for mensnewsdaily’s forum….
“For the MND defenders, I am interested in your response to my criticism regarding the “pokder babes” and the pin-up pics, as well as my defense of Promise Keepers. That was the largest point in my post, and the one no one wants to talk about. Somehow we’ve ended up batting statistics around again…”
This is a good point…Any site that I’m embarrassed to let my granddaughter look at on my computer something’s wrong with it and sadly I had to lock that site from her visiting due to never knowing when she would come upon some filth like that…
Chapin’s Nation is the same way another link on mensnewsdaily and Gonzo Bar and Grill can be somewhat dicey, not as bad as the other two, but definitely not always. appropriate to discuss serious issues…
“The only thing that men’s rights advocates want is freedom from all of you. We want freedom for all men, regardless of circumstance. That isn’t ‘white supremacy’ as bastard-matt thinks it is, but a male god-given right. Men don’t want ‘supremacy’ over you, we want nothing to do with any of you, ever. We want complete and total separation from your perverse and irreconcileable ideology.”
Oh please…like you’re not looking for women’s attention with all that mens rights crap…how come you have all those pix of women over there, if you’re not looking for attention from women…
Tell me that?
“I guess what I mean to say is don’t rag on non-feminists and then delude yourselves into thinking they won’t come over to your forum to ask you why you are ragging on them.”
To be perfectly honest you don’t know the meaning of ‘ragging on’ since I’ve been lying ‘on simmer’ just to be polite to you, due to the host here, nothing more…
I mean even using the term ragging on could be considered an insult to some women, but you appear to be too dense to realize that…
You’re like a bull in a china shop…
“And, as you can see, there are so many young women who lap up the “women as victims” line who just seem to fawn over the guy, as you can see from the posts in this board.
Hey…. wait a minute…
Hugo!
You old DOG!”
This is the sort of comment I was talking about before Fido…you are slyly disrespectful of people…
I just didn’t want anyone thinking I was out of line with the blockhead comment to you before, as it was justifiable…
It’s not, in and of itself. But it’s one of a long line of commercials and television shows and movies and greeting cards that treats men like childish fools, rescued and scolded time and time again by their intelligent, long-suffering wives/girlfriends.
There are SO MANY problems with commercial advertising and their depictions of men and women. Men are shown as bumbling fools, women are shown happily performing all domestic tasks if they’re not half-nude and draped across some piece of machinery or jiggling in beer commercials. All the white children are blond, and if there are groups of children (or adults) of different races, the white, blond child will be in the middle. And when was the last time you saw anyone in an ad who was, say, South Asian?
Much of it is sheer laziness on the part of the advertisers, because there are some interesting ads and TV shows out there which avoid these stereotypes. But a lot of it is just playing to prejudices and stereotypes (as well as, in the case of bumbling-dad stereotypes, trying to recreate “The Honeymooners” and failing miserably).
I suppose an active thing to do would be to write to companies which used advertising you object to and explain why, and mention that you will not be using their product.
“To be very precise, the only interest that government has in marriage is to dupe men into marrying mentaly ill single women with children so that when those marriages break down the government can then cast off the full brunt of responsibility for the concubine onto the duped male. That is what the new promotion of marriage is all about.”
These are the sorts of comments that are exhausting me…I can’t believe that any logical person could believe this, yet I feel compelled to respond in a five para. post to disprove it…and there are over 200 posts on here, many with similar ridiculous items posted…
I think I’ll go take another nap…
One thing before I leave, I think I have a little more respect for Glenn Sacks now seeing the ‘posse’ he placed himself at the head of…I mean it must be exhausting trying to explain even the simpliest most obvious things to such a group…
Sigh…
Why should men marry if they are getting hundreds of different vaginas thrown their way every week?
Gosh. That sounds dangerous. And how would you have time to take a shower, much less get a few minutes of sleep, with all those vaginas raining down on you?
“The truth is that men are increasingly being marginalized in favor of women in this culture. Literally and metaphorically, as we hold the door open for women, they turn around and lock us out. The men who don’t see that are either in denial or have some other personal agenda (such as a polticial, marketing, or social agenda) that requires them to support anti-male behavior. (Read: John Kerry and the Dems). ”
No. The truth is that men have to learn to share now with equals…they can no longer expect to get the best of everything first and others (ie., women and children) then pick up your leavings…
You know I was raised at a time when a father came home and ate the only steak in the house…his wife and children ate chopped meat…
I went through the same things with nuns and priests by the way…since I was raised by nuns since about the age of five or so…anyway where the priests always got better treatment then the nuns…
So it’s called sharing…all the good things that were exclusively JUST FOR MEN before and whatever woman you felt like sharing with for a while, all of these things now must be shared with others…
So clearly there is less around because of this…but it’s not a planned shortage, it’s just that obviously when more people have to share things: like college education, professional licenses/degrees, housing, elite jobs, etc., then there is less to go around for people (men) who previously had first choice of everything…
Well you all are just going to have to learn to share…
It’s that simple…
Thank God I came to the last post in this avalanche of words that I’m going to respond to…
AND it’s only 3:00 in the morning…
“…No. The truth is that men have to learn to share now with equals…they can no longer expect to get the best of everything first and others (ie., women and children) then pick up your leavings…”
I finally came to that conclusion, and I feel ashamed for ever believing otherwise. They’re just whining and throwing a temper tantrum. Just like when Southern Whites were infuriated by the idea of their precious pearly white children sharing a school house with Black children.
The MRAs whining (which is just whining about loosing male privileges) sounds very similar to the time when I had to teach my toddler neices how to share a toy. Damn was that hell.
But yes, the propaganda of the MRAs is based on the lose of male privileges. Though they never come out and say it out right, but that’s the subliminal message of their so called “grievances”. Especially the one which you touched on with the reference to the father coming home to a fine steak dinner–the father is no longer head of the household, which is a patriarchal sacrament.
It’s all about the lose of male privileges, just as the Southern Whites (and whites everywhere within USA) lose their own societal/racial privileges. Hopefully, they’ll get over it. Or keep digging themselves a deeper hole.
Crap. That’s n-i-e-c-e. Sorry for the error.
It’s all about the lose of male privileges, just as the Southern Whites (and whites everywhere within USA) lose their own societal/racial privileges. Hopefully, they’ll get over it. Or keep digging themselves a deeper hole.
You have got to be joking. You think men are all born with silver spoons in their mouths? Let me tell you something honey, in the real world no men are born with silver spoons in their mouths.
If men have all these ‘privileges’ as you say we do, where are they? I want my share!
You know how I went to college? I had to go to war twice. I had to serve as a light-infantry soldier in two wars to go to college. So honey, where was my silver-spoon? At the same time, females my age, my peers, they went to school with the gravy train following them from behind. You women have the greatest racket going on ever in history and the only ‘complaining’ is from you women as men rise up to detach themselves from that feminist racket.
Why is it that you women never talk about anti-male discrimination? It’s because you are the discriminators. You are the ‘precious whites’ that don’t want to share the schoolbus with subhumans (all men as your ideology has already defined us).
When a US male turns age 18, he has to report to his local post office to fill out a Selective Service Card. If any US male aged 18 does not go to the post office to fill out the selective Service Card, they lose all federal benefits for school, they lose all student loans or whatever other mechanism the government has created to be applied towards the left-wing American university system. To top it off, the male that doesn’t register for the Selective Service can also be charged with a felony crime and sentenced to years in prison with a $10,000 + fine.
So the American male that turns 18 years old that doesn’t fill out his green card at the US post office ‘instantly’ becomes a felon.
American women that turn age 18 don’t have to go to the post office to fill out a green card for the Selective Service. Hell, women don’t even have to participate. Women get all the student loans, all the federal aid, everything. They don’t have to do anything but show up to the college of their choice. That is anti-male discrimination.
So who really has the silver spoon in their mouth? It certainly isn’t men. The sooner that men get all women into the Selective Service, the sooner that men can end the anti-male terrorism currently in effect in the United States. The sooner that women are sent into infantry units to carry their full share of the burden of their outrageous societal demands, the better. I hope I am instrumental in getting women to do that, and breaking the anti-male discrimination construct of the modern feminist at the same time.
Obtestor
Gosh. That sounds dangerous. And how would you have time to take a shower, much less get a few minutes of sleep, with all those vaginas raining down on you?
No, what you describe isn’t dangerous. What is dangerous is when women blame men for that bad behavior, behavior of the modern secular hedonist American female. Women blaming men for the modern American secular hedonist female lack of self-respect is like the Nazis blaming the Jews for the construction of the death camps at Berkinau.
Obtestor
Dammit, I *just* got my wingnut detector reset!
Why aren’t the oppressed men voting to amend the Selective Service Act?
Men are trained by feminism to think women are nothing more than vaginas.
Agreed. After all, there is no better example of this than that feminist program “The Man Show” that used to air on Comedy Central.
Damn, that Nazi comment is a good one. Who knew that having sex with a man outside of marriage is similiar to gassing him to death?
I feel sick now and want to throw up. Sometimes I wonder if people even realize the horror that was the Holocaust.
They’re too solipsistic to perceive it. Any pain they perceive must be the worst thing in the world, you see, because it happened to them (or at least to people in a group with which they identify). Therefore, any awful suffering–like the Shoah–is a perfectly good analogy.
“They’re too solipsistic to perceive it. Any pain they perceive must be the worst thing in the world, you see, because it happened to them (or at least to people in a group with which they identify). Therefore, any awful suffering–like the Shoah–is a perfectly good analogy.”
Sounds like a good synopsis of commom feminist analysis. Germaine Greer recently compared her experience on the game show Big Brother to holocaust. Interesting that the fringe of men that make that comparison, yet its the founders and leaders of feminism that do it too. Hmmmm?
Germaine Greer makes a stupid Nazi analogy, and that becomes a “common feminist analysis”?
“So who really has the silver spoon in their mouth? It certainly isn’t men. The sooner that men get all women into the Selective Service, the sooner that men can end the anti-male terrorism currently in effect in the United States. The sooner that women are sent into infantry units to carry their full share of the burden of their outrageous societal demands, the better. I hope I am instrumental in getting women to do that, and breaking the anti-male discrimination construct of the modern feminist at the same time.”
Well I’m for it as the sooner we get women more involved, the sooner we’ll start losing all these damn mini-wars you all keep starting all over the place. Ultimately, it will probably stop American MEN from poking their noses in everyone else’s business all the time…
Modern war appears to be evolving into a series of mini-wars against small, but ferocious statelets. So basically we are not fighting a centralized nation like ourselves with a traditional army, navy and an airforce but thousands of decentralized street fighters each with his own leader, agenda and reason for hating us…
Thus instead of a war, it’s closer to a huge open ended riot with no rules of engagement and lots of one-on-one combat…
Well guess what, women do NOT do well with that sort of street fighting…actually the best women with special forces training can ONLY hold their own against the average man, not overcome him, but keep from sustaining serious injury herself for some period…
So keep working on getting women in the services in combat and maybe we can finally end this fixation with the US acting as the world’s policeman…
We’ll have our missile shield here so our homeland will be in no danger, but this democracy in action crap will finally come to an end as we lose a couple of big ones and finally decide to retreat back home and mind our own business…
AND by the way, MOST MEN do not go into the service today so the great suffering you all ‘collective’ do is basically standing in line at the Post Office to register…
The Spartans considered women delivering children to be equivalent to men fighting on the front lines in wartime…
NOW I know how much more suffering the average American male goes through today compared to the ancient Greeks in times of war but I thing the analogy still holds true to a certain extent…
AND since MOST women still become mothers and have to deliver babies ‘collectively’ in the same messy, painful, and bloody manner versus MOST men never going to war today, I think we could safely say that womens’ voluntarily sacrifice is of more benefit to society TODAY then the one you all make by standing in line at the post office…
BUT that’s just the opinion of the Spartans, I’m just conveying it to you… feminists didn’t think that one up…since it was way before their time, like Augustus trying to force you all to have children within legal marriages…feminists didn’t mess up marriage either, you all have been trying to mess it up long before a feminist or social construct even existed…
“One of the things I notice among most of my married male friends is a strong resistance on the part of their wives to “hanging out with the guys.” I don’t mean all the time, but even once a week or less. I think that many women like this are attempting to discourage their men from forming emotional bonds with other men and threatening their power.”
No… that’s called doing their job as a wife Craig…you see one role wives have been assigned is keeping their husbands home at night and off the streets…
Why…because when you hang out with the ‘guys’ Craig, many men wind up engaging in mischief of some kind…they could commit a crime or even join some subversive group of other men also hanging out with the guys and eventually you’ll all do something stupid that’s going to cause other men to have to leave their houses and form a posse to hunt you down…
So not only does your wife not like it, but many other men don’t like it either… they’d rather you’d stayed home with your wife and kids so that they could do the same and not have to worry about you and the guys causing them unnecessary aggravation…
Okay…
Well I’m for it as the sooner we get women more involved, the sooner we’ll start losing all these damn mini-wars you all keep starting all over the place.
Translation: “If we put women in the Selective Service Program and end the discrimination against men, this will bring women closer to true equality in America, rather than the absolute power that women hold now. As women, we cannot lose this absolute power over men, as the Nazis had absolute power over the Jews. Therefore we will propagandize against adding women to the Selective Service Program under the guise that ‘America’ will lose all future wars. It is normally not in our interest to promote female weakness, but in this case the benefits outweigh the costs to our ideology as women.”
Ultimately, it will probably stop American MEN from poking their noses in everyone else’s business all the time…
Translation: “If women aren’t in charge of everything, hold absolute power over men, then men will start wars that might place women into the position where they have to serve their country, rather than not having to serve while claiming dictatorial status over men in the United States via anti-male discriminatory law. The free ride for women will end. We must do everything in our power to prevent this from happening. Wars only happen because men start them.”
Modern war appears to be evolving into a series of mini-wars against small, but ferocious statelets. So basically we are not fighting a centralized nation like ourselves with a traditional army, navy and an airforce but thousands of decentralized street fighters each with his own leader, agenda and reason for hating us…
Translation: “Our modern wars are transnational wars not supported by any nation-state or group of nation-states against us, but just angry individuals. Women had absolutely nothing to do with these wars and so women do not need to be in the Selective Service Program. If women were in the Selective Service Program, that would justify America’s self-defense against terrorist organizations and the nation-states that sponsor them. As women, we must ensure this does not happen. After all, American men are to blame for them hating us and killing us. Let them kill our men overseas, while we terrorize these same men with feminism at home.”
Thus instead of a war, it’s closer to a huge open ended riot with no rules of engagement and lots of one-on-one combat…
Translation: “Because men started this war, it is different than other wars, in a woman’s perspective. There should be ‘order’ in this war, not chaos, and there should be a liberal feminist solution to this war. Why do they hate us? It must be something that we did to those people, not purely any aggressive act against us that started this war. Since America did something to start this war, it is not the fault of women, but must be the fault of American men.”
Well guess what, women do NOT do well with that sort of street fighting…actually the best women with special forces training can ONLY hold their own against the average man, not overcome him, but keep from sustaining serious injury herself for some period…
Translation: “Women can do anything that men can do in America, and we will ensure men agree with this feminist agenda or we will get soldiers of the state to arrest and imprison them. There is no such thing as a man and a woman anymore. We are a genderless society. However, when it comes to war and serving in the defense of the American nation-state, we must promote the biological truth that women are weaker than men so that we do not have to go fight for our country. Let men do the fighting. Feminist dictators do not fight, we rule. We rule over men. Men do the fighting for us and bleed for us for free, while women can sit it out. This is a very important feminist agenda, but we must play on our weaknesses and let men think of us with chivalry only in these war-situations and no other in the nation-state itself. Let them slave for us on the battlefield, and remain our slaves at home.”
So keep working on getting women in the services in combat and maybe we can finally end this fixation with the US acting as the world’s policeman…
Translation: “If you men dare to try and put us women in the Selective Service Program, we will do things to help your war effort to defend America fail.”
We’ll have our missile shield here so our homeland will be in no danger, but this democracy in action crap will finally come to an end as we lose a couple of big ones and finally decide to retreat back home and mind our own business…
Translation: “Spreading democracy hurts our Marxist-Leninist ideology as feminists and simply must be stopped! Wars are risky for feminist causes because wars cause men to think about the inherent anti-male discrimination involved in the Selective Service Program and the defense of America. We have emerging technologies such as the Missle Defense System that allow women their right to discriminate in such circumstances because the technology itself makes up for the physical and other biological inadequacies of women on the battlefield, inadequacies that we feminists have made serious crimes to discuss in America itself by men that seek equality. Wars threaten us, even the defense of America, so maybe we can hope our enemies do seriously hurt us somehow so that we can stop the external wars and our war against men in America can return to business as usual and our feminist dictatorship is no longer threatened by those ‘men’ that start America’s external wars. We by no means can allow American men to spread the idea of America outside of America’s borders.”
Obtestor
AND by the way, MOST MEN do not go into the service today so the great suffering you all ‘collective’ do is basically standing in line at the Post Office to register…
Question: If it is that ‘easy’, why aren’t women in the program?
Answer: Because the program discriminates against men.
Obtestor
The Spartans considered women delivering children to be equivalent to men fighting on the front lines in wartime…
Translation: “The fact that women are biologically designed to produce children entitles them to special rights which make them superior citizens to men, and men the subhumans.”
We men know this already.
Obtestor
Why…because when you hang out with the ‘guys’ Craig, many men wind up engaging in mischief of some kind…they could commit a crime or even join some subversive group of other men also hanging out with the guys and eventually you’ll all do something stupid that’s going to cause other men to have to leave their houses and form a posse to hunt you down…
Translation: “When men forms groups without females in them, they must be criminals. If they are not criminals, they soon will be, so it is important for feminists to have large police forces ready to deal with them. These police forces that we recruit can also assist us in enforcing our feminist police state agenda against men at the same time.”
Obtestor
Jesus, NYMOM is by far the most obtuse of the lot.
…you see one role wives have been assigned is keeping their husbands home at night and off the streets…because when you hang out with the ‘guys’ Craig, many men wind up engaging in mischief of some kind…they could commit a crime or even join some subversive group.
So that’s why Martha Burke insists on waging a futile war against Augusta Country club – Its not about discrimination it is the fear that all those bad men are out there abusing little white balls and somehow the women must be allowed in to stop the mischief.
So, I guess I should just accept that my ex-wife was only doing her job when she sent me to the hospital for stitches when she bounced an ashtray off my forehead. After all I might be out there terrorizing small animals instead of watching a football game with my buddies as I claimed.
If I were to discourage my wife from hanging out with the “girls†I would be labeled an abuser and control freak. My fear that she might run up our credit card bills or god forbid the homophobic horror that she might engage in some kind of lesbian orgy is irrational. After all it is her absolute right to do whatever she wants with her body and who the hell am I to tell her she can’t. Hell, even she is laughing her ass off as I write this.
But once again, the majority of men are bad and it is the role of women (and the few good feminized men) to keep us in line or they are compelled to form posses to hunt us down and punish us for playing pool or, gasp, playing cribbage or even watching a sporting event. God save us all!!!!
I think it’s important to note that one of the common behaviors of the abusive partner is to limit or destroy the other person’s social circle so they don’t have the support they need to escape the relationship.
They’ll go to extremes of fear, obligation, and guilt to justify this behavior.
That is, when men do it I mean. When women do it it’s for a higher purpose. At least, that was my experience with four different relationship couselors.
“I think it’s important to note that one of the common behaviors of the abusive partner is to limit or destroy the other person’s social circle so they don’t have the support they need to escape the relationship.
They’ll go to extremes of fear, obligation, and guilt to justify this behavior.
That is, when men do it I mean. When women do it it’s for a higher purpose. At least, that was my experience with four different relationship couselors.”
Okay Craig…you see you DO understand it…
So just accept it okay…
…or stay by yourself and be miserable, like you obviously are now…
Since even though you HAVE Joint Custody and get your child one-half the time, you work and have friends, and have ties within your community with this whole MRA movement which you do volunteer work for…YOU ARE STILL BITCHING AND FREAKIN MISERABLE…
So what would make you happy Craig, can you tell me…you were miserable married, you’re still moaning and groaning now even as a ‘single dad’ as you have your kid one-half the time, so what exactly do you want?
BTW, it’s not just feminized societies where this ‘hanging out’ of men is discouraged…Actually in the great patriarchal societies of Asia if more then three men are congregating on the street, the state, represented by the police, start getting edgy…they want to know what’s going on…why aren’t you in your house with your family drinking coffee or playing checkers whatever they do over there at night…
So don’t act like feminists are responsible for this attitude…it’s obviously your brothers who are concerned when too many of you are free-floating out there…
Which is interesting too about you, most men AFTER they have children get MORE conservative…since they realize how vulnerable children are and then THEY TOO usually don’t like groups of unattached males floating around their neighborhoods, probably a holdover territorial, protective instinctual thingy, which you appear to lack…
So I’d think about that a little bit too…maybe hanging out with these MRAs is dulling your normal thought patterns…
“…or stay by yourself and be miserable, like you obviously are now…
Since even though you HAVE Joint Custody and get your child one-half the time, you work and have friends, and have ties within your community with this whole MRA movement which you do volunteer work for…YOU ARE STILL BITCHING AND FREAKIN MISERABLE…
So what would make you happy Craig, can you tell me…you were miserable married, you’re still moaning and groaning now even as a ‘single dad’ as you have your kid one-half the time, so what exactly do you want?”
It’s amazing how wrong you are. I’m not divorced — I’m still married to the woman who laid our 2yo daughter down in a dirty driveway behind a running car so the focus of her abuse couldn’t escape for 20 minutes until things cooled off.
I’m not a single Dad. I’m a man who understands that it’s not just about me, but that I’m part of something much bigger than myself, that I’m a leader to a little one who depends on me and that to be a leader has much more to do with service and sacrifice than power and privelege.
Thing have gotten somewhat better — she hasn’t been truly violent in a while, though still emotionally and verbally abusive when the cues are right. But one thing I’ve developed is a deep understanding of where I fit in this picture and a strong development of personal responsibility.
And I had to do it on my own. Most family counselors — or four for four that I know of — are completely poisoned by the Duluth model of family violence and abuse. The fourth one didn’t really get it until one day when we were in a session and my wife lunged at me, grabbing for my throat and pulling my hair. But even so, as we were talking about separation after the car incident she said “well you both seem like good parents.” Hmmm, can anyuone say “astounding gender bias?”
craichead: “That is, when men do it I mean. When women do it it’s for a higher purpose. At least, that was my experience with four different relationship couselors.”
NYMOM: “Okay Craig…you see you DO understand it…
So just accept it okay…”
You see, craichead? You cannot parody someone who is a living parody!
And your wife could not possibly have done the things you say. As NYMOM knows, it’s the men who do those things, and the women who love and protect THEIR dear children from us nasty guys. But she is correct that in a divorce the best your child could hope for is to have her exposure to her mother’s abuse be limited to half of the time, and NYMOM resents even that limitation. (In reality, you would probably get your daughter every other weekend, though.)
And my wife ex couldn’t possibly have run out on her family with a cute younger guy, leaving behind four children and a bewildered husband. And could it be that no attorney would take my case since I was broke, it being all I could do to feed us and pay the rent and daycare costs? And could it be that my ex would take the kids for a visit (more than a year later) and then file for a divorce and custody, claiming that the children live with her, and get the court to order me to pay the fees for her lawyer? And she WINS?
Now that my kids are adults, and their mother basically ignores them, I would enjoy hearing NYMOM try to tell them how the system doesn’t discount fathers and favor mothers. Then she would really hear some ranting.
“BTW, it’s poor manners to be constantly correcting someone’s use of grammer on blogs…it’s condescending and probably sexist…implying my ideas aren’t as good as yours since my grammer isn’t as good…”
Correcting your grammar is “probably sexist”? I can’t WAIT to hear this one. How is correctly grammar sexist?
“Save that crude behavior for mensnewsdaily’s forum….”
I don’t post there. What’s it like?
Oh, and “crude behavior”? I haven’t said anything to malign the female gender at all. You, on the other hand, malign the male gender at just about every opportunity.
“Just like when Southern Whites were infuriated by the idea of their precious pearly white children sharing a school house with Black children.”
Don’t you DARE compare us in this way. We want — we DEMAND — equality with women. Nothing more, nothing less.
“The MRAs whining (which is just whining about loosing male privileges)..”
Again with the so-called loss of the so-called male privileges. Some of you must figure that, if you keep repeating a lie, people will begin to believe it.
“I think it’s important to note that one of the common behaviors of the abusive partner is to limit or destroy the other person’s social circle so they don’t have the support they need to escape the relationship. They’ll go to extremes of fear, obligation, and guilt to justify this behavior….that is, when men do it I mean. When women do it it’s for a higher purpose. At least, that was my experience with four different relationship couselors.”
NYMOM: “Okay Craig…you see you DO understand it…”
Yup. Irony is wasted on the obtuse.
bg
“It’s amazing how wrong you are. I’m not divorced — I’m still married to the woman who laid our 2yo daughter down in a dirty driveway behind a running car so the focus of her abuse couldn’t escape for 20 minutes until things cooled off.
Thing have gotten somewhat better — she hasn’t been truly violent in a while, though still emotionally and verbally abusive when the cues are right. But one thing I’ve developed is a deep understanding of where I fit in this picture and a strong development of personal responsibility.”
It sounds like you have gone through — and are still going through — hell. Have you checked out the website for my anti-abuse group? Stop Abuse For Everyone — http://www.safe4all.org — recognizes that ANYONE, regardless of size, strength or gender, can be a victim of abuse. There might be people at that website who can help you, or find the facilities in your area that will serve you directly.
“And I had to do it on my own. Most family counselors — or four for four that I know of — are completely poisoned by the Duluth model of family violence and abuse. The fourth one didn’t really get it until one day when we were in a session and my wife lunged at me, grabbing for my throat and pulling my hair. But even so, as we were talking about separation after the car incident she said “well you both seem like good parents.” Hmmm, can anyuone say “astounding gender bias?” ”
Yup, because, after all, a woman “needs” to let that out of her system once in a while. They’ll watch her try to hit you and scratch your eyes out and then look at you and say, “Have you thought about maybe not making her so upset?” But at http://www.safe4all.org we don’t subscribe to the sexist Duluth model.
Yes I’m familiar with your group — I think I may have even spoken with someone there a while back. A woman named Jan maybe? Though I thought she was based in New Hampshire. There’s also a group here in Albany where I live organized by a woman named Karen Clay.
It’s my impression that people like Hugo don’t really seem to understand what it’s like out there for guys like us. I don’t for one second want to control any women, nor do I wish to take away any of the resources they have for domestic abuse. It’s not so much that there’s a lack of services for a man like myself, the real problem is how it’s made the problems of guys like me totally invisible.
Here’s some nuggets from my days with family counselors. I have to admit I’m somewhat embarrassed when I think back on my own naivete, but that’s an important point for another post.
First there was Gayle. Gayle was the most vociferously feminist counselor we had. My then live in girlfriend and future wife had already been seeing her for personal reasons. Once she talked me into going shortly after she attacked me and gave me a nice shiner. She also threw my Fender Telecaster guitar at me and missed. She sucker punched me as I bent to pick it up.
Gayle’s advice: we should get married. The reason she struck me is that she’s acting out because she’s insecure in our relationship. If you marry her, she’ll be secure and won’t act out anymore.
Then there was Phil. Once she took my glasses, my contacts, and my car keys (we lived in the country 5 miles outside of town) so I couldn’t leave. I told him also about the shiner and a lot of other things. He said, “Now Jen you realize that’s not OK.” We came to the conclusion that if I could learn to pick up after myself better, she wouldn’t have to act out.
Next was Diane. She couldn’t do much damage because when I started going to her she neglected to tell me she was leaving town in three weeks. I guess she just needed moving money.
Then there was Jane. Jane’s the one that said she was a good parent even though she deliberately placed her own child in harm’s way. She also threatend to run me down with the car in a parking lot. I was walking away and she came screeching up behind me. When she cam to a stop, the bumper was about four inches from the backs of my legs. Jane said she’s been having inappropriate behavior with cars. She also reccommended that I move out for a while. Great advice! I guess she didn’t realize that advice would result in total disaster.
By the time we’d started seeing Jane, I finally realized that I needed to take responsibility because no one was going to do it for me.
Jane was shocked when I suggested that if the gender roles were reversed, she would have given much different advice.
“Yes I’m familiar with your group — I think I may have even spoken with someone there a while back. A woman named Jan maybe? Though I thought she was based in New Hampshire. There’s also a group here in Albany where I live organized by a woman named Karen Clay.”
Jan Brown is what we call “good people”. She’s been instrumental with the Domestic Abuse Helpline For Men up in Maine. I’m sure Karen is the same.
“It’s my impression that people like Hugo don’t really seem to understand what it’s like out there for guys like us. I don’t for one second want to control any women, nor do I wish to take away any of the resources they have for domestic abuse. It’s not so much that there’s a lack of services for a man like myself, the real problem is how it’s made the problems of guys like me totally invisible.”
It seems like no matter how many times you say “I don’t want to have control over women,” some people here will still make the smear that you do.
“I told him also about the shiner and a lot of other things. He said, “Now Jen you realize that’s not OK.”"
Hey, you’re lucky you even got THAT out of him…
“Then there was Jane. Jane’s the one that said she was a good parent even though she deliberately placed her own child in harm’s way. She also threatend to run me down with the car in a parking lot. I was walking away and she came screeching up behind me. When she cam to a stop, the bumper was about four inches from the backs of my legs. Jane said she’s been having inappropriate behavior with cars.”
“Inappropriate behavior with cars” means playing the radio too loud.
“By the time we’d started seeing Jane, I finally realized that I needed to take responsibility because no one was going to do it for me. Jane was shocked when I suggested that if the gender roles were reversed, she would have given much different advice.”
I would have loved to have heard her response. These people need to understand that their monopoly is coming to an end.
bmmg39: “These people need to understand that their monopoly is coming to an end.”
As Hugo has said, a good first step would be for them to acknowledge the gender-based privilege, and then be willing to relinquish it. As Ampersand says, the privilege of being blind to ones own privilege is real. Forums (fora?) such as this blog are useful for raising awareness to some extent, though the blind rage I have seen is probably not penetrable by truth, kindness, civility, or anything else. Fortunately, not everyone is like that.
These ultra feminists on this site refer to statements made by males within the men’s rights community represent a feeling of lost privilege; their language reflects the fear that it is indeed them who feel their privileged status threatened by those who still believe in the notion of equality and justice for all; regardless of sex, orientation, creed, color of skin or a multitude of characteristics that make us all unique individuals.
My sister and I grew up in the same home with a mother who interfered with our relationship with our father, it wasn’t until later in life that I realized her meddling was a result of her own spite and resentment at her own failures as a mother and had nothing to do with anything my father had ever done or didn’t do to or for her.
My sister went on to college an innocent unselfish young woman, she came out a rhetoric spewing self-aggrandizing shrew that would make any Nazi Youth member envious. While I too went on to college and career and eventually marriage and family I could hardly accept her notion that I deserved special treatment due to some perceived injustice to my great great grand mother.
While I welcomed the freedom to openly compete with boys and men that the early days of the feminist movement provided, my sister advocated that men and boys needed to be marginalized to guarantee her victory. If I lost I accepted my disappointment and allowed myself to establish a sense of character that I find missing in most of today’s wymen.
To her, I have sold out to the patriarchal conspiracy because I don’t believe that I should disenfranchise my son to benefit my daughters. She can hardly believe my inclusion, or the many other women who have joined with the men in the men’s rights movement; the sisters, mothers, aunts, daughters and second wives who have witnessed first hand the devastating effects of feminists abuse of power and reject it.
One other thing that made me finally post here was a statement pertaining to the fact that after most men have children they become more conservative; to which I would have to respond, so do most women. Once they realize the danger posed by stark liberal ideals and the effect on their children a great many of us cast off our idealistic naiveté to support policies that better the world for our children regardless of their sex rather than continue to parrot utopian rants of our college professors.
My coworker, a 50 year old male, had a wife who was mentally ill and had become increasingly violent to him and the kids. He’s a pretty big guy, but I work in mental health, so I know how strong someone can be in a manic rage. So he went to the local domestic violence shelter and they put him and his kids up in an apartment for free for 3 months and gave him a lawyer. He won full custody of the kids (she has supervised visits only until they are 18) and obtained a divorce with no financial obligations to his ex (even though she stayed at home all the time) basically because she had bankrupted him and made no contribution whatsoever to the marriage plus he needed the money to take care of his kids. And we live in a backwoods rural area in the Deep South.
So I don’t really see where all you guys are coming from. Move you and your kids and your crazy lazy violent wives on down here, then get a divorce, and you’ll come out okay, and can devote your energies to more enjoyable pursuits than this argument.
Well that’s one of the problems.
Where you live has a great deal to do with what to expect in the course of something like that.
Myself — I did mounds of research, visited four family counselors and four lawyers along with corresponding with a friend who is a domestic relations lawyer. After covering all the bases I received a virtually consistent message: you’re better off staying because you don’t stand a chance.
In fact, I was told by the lawyer friend that the best thing I could hope for was that she’d finally go far enough to cause fairly dramatic damage to my person that could be shown in court. Until then, the best thing I could do was to stay to protect my daughter.
“I feel for all children that are killed, maimed, abused, molested or maltreated in any way. but the numbers show concluslivley that DSS employees are over worked and up to 68% of all actions taken by DSS are needless and sometimes frivolous.”
Doesn’t it seem strange that overworked DFCS workers would invent frivolous cases so they could…what…be more overworked? Something there just doesn’t seem logical. I am much more willing to believe that DFCS errors result from underzealousness (not removing children who ARE being mistreated) as burnout and apathy are two of the most common symptoms of being overworked. So I don’t think the argument (about kids being taken from women to force them to divorce their husbands in order to get them back in the absence of any abuse or neglect on the husbands part) rings true.
You seem to miss the point Anonymous. My charge of over zealousness by the bureaucracy charged with the care of children is that they use every bump, bruise, scrape and missing tooth to justify their bloated budgets, while truly mistreated children are being neglected as a result. Don’t see my point? Well look closer at the numbers again, this time I included the totals for year DSS’s fiscal report for 2002: You can verify my calculations and supporting documents here: https://home.comcast.net/~ciannakystudios/
The first thing I noticed was that DSS inflated their own figures 7 percentage points for both closing years ‘02 and ‘03 without justification. In 2002 they claimed that their supported rate was 55% when it was only 48% and in 2003 they claimed it was 56% when the actual percentage was 49%. Obviously no one in the MGAO bothered to check the mathematical skills of the person writing the report.
You will notice the number total 51A reports filed;
’02: 67,366
’03: 68,404
‘04(Q3) 18,466
‘04(Q4) 18,492
Now look at the actual supported investigation rates;
’02: 48%
’03: 49%
‘04(Q3): 47%
‘04(Q4): 50%
It’s almost uncanny that so far all the numbers are nearly identical isn’t it?
However, the part of the reports that are missing is the actual rate of substantiated cases of child maltreatment compared to actual 51A investigations:
’02: 31%
’03: 32%
‘04Q3: 30%
‘04Q4: 32%
While Q4 contains incomplete data with 1,361 cases pending; If one were to at use the law of averages and include a +/- 3 % margin of error then Q4 actual support rate would once again be only 31%.
Go figure, a bureaucracy whose goal is the well being of “children†refers to “children†in their own reports not as children or families but as consumers. My charge is that human beings are often subjected to the most intrusive arm of the state frequently without just cause, and in many cases, without due process. (It all depends on how much money they have to expend on lawyers or the amount of lawyers willing to work pro bono). Often times these actions are based on the frivolous accusations of under trained, over worked and some times bigoted, and biased DSS employees that are working under a quota system.
I never claimed that it was all “about kids being taken from women to force them to divorce their husbands in order to get them back in the absence of any abuse or neglect on the husbands partâ€Â. I merely alluded to a case of documented abuse and used DSS’s own numbers to show that it is quite possible that abuse of this kind is possible. What I found in the process disturbed me.
In two and a half years there have been 172,208 DSS 51A complaints and investigations out of which only 54,474 were supported by any evidence what so ever; that’s only 31.5%. Are you trying to tell me that out of the 68.5% of unsupported investigations there is no chance that some mishandling could or has occurred?
“To her, I have sold out to the patriarchal conspiracy because I don’t believe that I should disenfranchise my son to benefit my daughters. She can hardly believe my inclusion, or the many other women who have joined with the men in the men’s rights movement; the sisters, mothers, aunts, daughters and second wives who have witnessed first hand the devastating effects of feminists abuse of power and reject it.”
Well, LoraR, I give you credit and support for doing the right thing and sticking up for the male gender when you deem it appropriate, and on not deciding to take out misogynist transgressions committed in 1898 on your sons.
sisters, mothers, aunts, daughters and second wives who have witnessed first hand the devastating effects of feminists abuse of power and reject it
Interesting how it’s always second wives.
I note with some irony that you condemn your sister for being an ‘ultra feminist’ and stereotype all feminists based on her experience, yet you insist that your own political views are a broad rainbow spectrum of men and women working together.
And interesting, again, that you don’t give a moment to wondering what turned your sister into a fire-breathing dragon. Do you really think she was stupid and brainwashed by unnamed professors? Most kids who try out extreme views do so IN college, then settle down afterward. Did you ask your sister what changed her mind?
It takes two to make a sex object.
We are masters of your own destiny. l cannot change you, but l can change myself. l am not a slave of perception nor social expectation. l will not yield to that which l deplore, nor will l rationalise ‘copping out’ because the world ‘makes’ me. l can’t go through life whipping myself.
Abdicate responsibility for your thoughts, emotions, actions and choices in life and you have sold your soul.
Politics and its attendent ideology strikes me as a land inhabited by those who have sold out.
Sorry Hugo, but some of us just aren’t buying. Let alone window shopping.