If the comments below my last two posts (based on my “13 year-old son?” piece from Monday) seem hostile, you should see the ones that were deleted in the moderation queue. The Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) have stirred themselves into quite the tizzy, with posts like this one representing some of the more moderate response.
Leaving aside the admittedly complex specifics of the Hugo/Jill/Ted/Alastair situation, what strikes me is the way in which so many of the MRAs have framed this as a cuckolding issue. The term “cuckold” is a very old term for a man who unknowingly raises another guy’s biological children, thanks to an unfaithful wife. (See the wiki.) It’s not an accurate term to use in my scenario, but the fact that this is such a profound fear for some men is worth exploring.
One classic theory of patriarchy assumes that men’s desire to control women is rooted in the fear of being cuckolded. A woman is never in doubt as to who the mother of her child is, but for reasons of basic physiology, men can never have that same reassurance. The need to control women’s sexuality (insisting on pre-marital virginity and post-marital fidelity; female genital mutilation; the insistence on modest dress) may well all be rooted in responses to this ancient, fundamental masculine anxiety. It’s a cruel calculus: the more I can control the women in my life (and the less sexual expression I permit them), the greater the likelihood that my offspring will in fact be “mine.”
I don’t think I’d realized how alive and well this fear is. See this comment from Amir, whose words I noted yesterday:
I have a beautiful son and if he was not mine my world would end. And
yes, I would no longer love him if he didn’t have my genes. My genes
makes him my son before all the environmental influences.
Another MRA commenter at GMP compared cuckolding to rape, only worse. Daniel writes:
This is horrifying.
Cuckolding is the worst thing that can happen to a man. If my son would have the genes of another man my life would end. This is much worse than a rape and is accepted unpunished by the justice system. Rape can last for several minutes but this is years and years of deceit and lies. I despise all the men and women supporting understanding this.
If you read through the lengthy and often vile comment sections at GMP and Jezebel (or at the “Voice for Men” site), you’ll see that Amir and Daniel are, alas, far from unusual in their insistence that love depends upon shared DNA.
As a father, I have nothing but contempt for any man whose love is contingent as Amir’s and Daniel’s so clearly is. If I were to find out that Heloise was not my biological daughter, I’d be stunned (and shocked at my wife’s deception.) It might change my relationship with Eira — but it sure as hell wouldn’t change my relationship with Heloise. Coming from an extended family where half-siblings and adoptees and step-children abound, I know how absurd it is to link devotion and biology. What makes Heloise “mine” has damn all to do with my DNA — and everything to do with the energy and devotion and commitment I have put into my relationship with her since she was in her mama’s womb.
There is nothing wrong with expecting a partner who has promised to be faithful to keep that promise. (A reminder, Ted and Jill were not in an exclusive relationship when she last slept with me.) It’s perfectly reasonable to be devastated by betrayal. But there’s a world of difference between the hurt of infidelity and the fear of being cuckolded. Eira made me a promise when we were married that she wouldn’t sleep with other men. If she broke that promise, it would alter my relationship with her significantly. But Heloise made no such representations. The circumstances of her conception (and the sperm used to conceive her) have nothing — nothing — to do with my devotion to this remarkable little girl, whose sweetness would be no less delightful if she didn’t have my DNA.
It’s telling that the atavistic fear of cuckolding still runs so strong in the men’s rights activists. And given that so many of them are associated with the “father’s rights” movement, it’s telling as well that their definition of “father” is so fragile, so contingent, so limited, and so utterly narcissistic.
The extreme position on cuckolding taken by weirdos like those cited above doesn’t merit a lot of examination. I’m not sure that, aside from using as a strawman in lieu of addressing the knottier questions raised by the Hugo/Jill/Ted/Alistair quadrangle, that there’s much value in going over it. Everyone of course is speaking outside their own personal experience here, and we haven’t heard from anyone who’s actually had to deal with raising a child who wasn’t theirs. Given the degree to which adopted children appear to go to, for example, to track down their biological parents, I’d hesitate before I’d say that biology counts for absolutely nothing. Certainly, if a putative father long had reason to believe or suspect silently that the child in his home wasn’t his, I can’t imagine that having a particularly positive effect on their relationship over the long term. Not sure if anyone’s done any studies on this, but certainly it seems that there’s enough ado about biology that I’d not say it counts for nothing.
Again, though, this is all by the bye. Maybe men can love any child, theirs, not theirs, under whatever circumstances. Maybe some can, maybe most can, maybe all can, maybe only some can, who knows? The important fact though is that in this case, the child was held out as being Ted’s. Might Ted have chosen to be a father if he know otherwise? Might he have chosen to be a father to a child Jill had before she met him? Might he have chosen to be a father if somebody left a baby on his doorstep? Maybe, maybe, and maybe, we’ll never know, and perhaps neither will he. He didn’t get the choice. There’s precious enough “reproductive choice” for men as it is beyond the initial sexual act and the hope that contraception will work. We shouldn’t be adding to that the creation of parent-child relationships based on a mother’s unqualified prerogative about who a father “needs to be.”
I just happened to be reminded, Hugo, of the post you put up when Heloise was perhaps a couple of months old acknowledging that the experience of fatherhood to that point had caused to you to reexamine your absolute commitment to pacifism if she were endangered. That was when you and she had had only a few months together as father and daughter. Parental instincts are powerful stuff, and it’d be tough to say how much we can or cannot ascribe to biology.
Hugo,
You put your story online with your personal details, so you agreed to be “outed”. I did not agreed for my personal details to be published online. If you want to use this s a threat to remove my opinion from the discussion you win, I’ll stop posting regarding this subject.
Please remove my family name from this post and respect my wish for anonymity.
Tom, I respectfully disagree.
Your approach is certainly more tempered but I have the thought to take some of your comments further than you have. I think children track down their biological parents for two reasons. One is if I found out I had a different ancestor, I’d be curious. It is sort of like the greatest “what if” to wonder how much you are like your geneology or how things might have been different in a different time. Your parents and their parents sort of bridge that fantasy. The next reason is more important to me. I think there are enough people who accidentally imply that parents biologically relate to their children or go further and actively promote a nuclear only family in which there is no other right relationship than to be raised by your parents unless your parents are dead. Orphans are unlucky or cursed. Abandoning parents are a kind of criminal that got away. Abortion is out in the extreme version because the holy grail of a family is to protect and raise your children every chance you get. Some of the fears of cuckolding mentioned by the author would suggest that some of this tendency happens pre-conception.
In short, kids seek out their REAL parents because we’ve raised them to think that is important. That’s my take.
As for your second point, let Ted be a lesson to everybody. Don’t assume you’re the only potential parent. If you care about whether the kid is your DNA, you can make choices and statements affirming that wish. I certainly think if you have consensual unprotected sex with a woman who knows you will happily raise your child and you find out she’s pregnant, due process acknowledges your right to paternal testing. Then you can continue to live by your clearly articulated concerns.
But if Ted didn’t mention this before hand and Ted didn’t ask who the father was, which is possible by assumption, it’s also okay if Jill didn’t. Those things need to be figured out before it is possible for Ted to have gotten Jill pregnant or else you, sir, have fallen into a very interesting grey area.
It would make a wonderful blog post.
I conceived via sperm donor with the full participation of my husband, who is infertile. I worried that he might not bond with my newborn son, but that worry was totally misplaced. He left a friend over a careless and cruel comment, “Why do you keep saying the child would be yours? Unless you donated the sperm, you aren’t the father.”
It has been a joy for me to see my husband and son bond so tightly – our boy takes so much after me on the surface, and a lot after his dad in behavior, vocabulary, activities, etc. What makes this situation different that the cuckold situation is that my husband knew the situation from the get go. I think the deep and abiding betrayal by a spouse or co-parent could and perhaps should radically adjust the relationship between the adults, but has nothing to do with the parent/child relationship.
It takes more than biology to be a parent, it takes the will and desire to be there for the good and the bad. I think children demand love from their caretakers – whomever can be unmoved by the vulnerability of infants is not a person I would want in my or my child’s life.
@kate h “I think the deep and abiding betrayal by a spouse or co-parent could and perhaps should radically adjust the relationship between the adults, but has nothing to do with the parent/child relationship.”
Ideally, you’re right. I’ve seen too many damned cases though where a parent comes to see a child as a symbol of something they hate in the other parent, or of the parent whom they hate, until they come to resent or even hate the child. It’s terrible and cruelly unfair to subject a child to that, but people often aren’t rational and high-minded enough to separate their own resentments and insecurities out of the equation.
“I don’t think I’d realized how alive and well this fear is.”
Lulz. A perfect example of why radfems think you’re just another overprivileged dilettante. How is it that someone who TEACHES woman’s studies could be so ignorant of one of the more obvious root fears of patriarchy is astonishing. But then again, the most powerful tool of dominance is ignorance. Instead of having thoughtful, critical, and intelligent teachers of Woman’s Studies, who understand the class struggle arising from the differential relationship between men and women to the means of reproduction, Pasadena College picked you, just another overqualified superficial tool.
I think if I learned that a child was not biologically mine, my biggest fear would be that the biological father could demand rights to see them. Biology holds weight because our society decrees that it should hold weight, as Seth points out above.
Thus I can sympathise to an extent with those commenters who say that you should “formally rescind rights” to the child. I don’t know the laws involved in the relevant states. I suspect such steps would be redundant. I certainly hope they would be.
Hugo,
I believe you are seriously mischaracterizing this issue.
The reality of cuckholding, and its legal implications in many states, is far harsher than you are making it out to be here. In many cases, a man who genuinely loves a child who is not genetically his can be denied basic fatherly rights (such as visitation) while being bilked for child support payments. I would strongly encourage anyone interested in this issue to please take a look at this Times article from 2009:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/magazine/22Paternity-t.html
(Note: While my first name happens to be Mike, I am not, nor do I know the “Mike L.” referred to in the article)
By singling out men who claim that love is contingent on genetics, an obvious strawman argument is being offered up to defend what should be an indefensible position: that in some circumstances it is acceptable to cuckhold.
I will say here (as I did in the other thread) that there is nothing to be done about it at this time: too many years have passed and it is unlikely anything good would come from exposing the potential (for we don’t know for certain one way or the other) cuckhold at this time.
But to cobble together a strawman to try and defend cuckholding? That ignores the very real pain of men who love children that are not theirs, men who genuinely differentiate between the woman who hurt them and the children who are innocent. Please read the above article if you have the time.
DNA is our society’s secular soul. I don’t think you’ll get anywhere because you’re trying to have a rational conversation about something that, to your opponents, is fundamentally religious.
“nothing but contempt”
So much for Mr Senstive, non-judementeal Hugo.
A man’s only obligations are two the children he caused to exist. No man should be forced (or tricked) into loving somebody else’s child.
Suppose a woman wants to marry a black man someday. Would you hold “nothing but contempt” for her, because her love of a man is contingent on him being genetically black? Of course not. It’s her choice who she loves, and you have no basis to judge her criteria. Some people are comfortable loving children they did not breed, other’s are not. Who are you to judge?
John, Amir said he would withdraw the love he has for his son if he found out he wasn’t his biological child. That’s evil and contemptible, and I unhesitatingly name it as such.
This is the first time I post in this blog, although I’ve followed it for several months. I just want to express my gratitude to Hugo for speaking out on masculinity issues such as these with such clarity. I’ve learnt, and still am learning, so much from your writing in this website. So thank you, and keep up the excellent work.
To most MRAs that populate the manosphere: I’m sorry you feel so threatened by egalitarianism that you need to react so absurdly about issues such as the present. Your position in this precise one makes me genuinely sad for your wives and children, and for yourselves. If my father discovered that I’m someone else’s daughter and stopped loving me, you know what my reaction would be? He wasn’t fucking worth it anyway. I’d have the same reaction towards my partner, if he stopped loving our children (thus unjustly blaming them for my own infidelity).
Thankfully, my father is a very intelligent, well-read, good-hearted man. He also happens to be a feminist. And the same is true of my partner! Which gives me hope for humanity, despite your ridiculous reactions (with which you claim to represent ‘men’, whatever on Earth that might mean).
So, dear MRAs, go cry in your corner about your loss of absolute privilege in society, while the rest of us try to make it a better place for EVERYONE involved.
And please don’t trivialize rape. That man who compared cuckolding to rape clearly has never been raped. You really, honestly, don’t know what you are talking about.
There are two separate issues here that I think are being conflated:
1. The right of a minor child to the love of those who raised him/her (because of the damage done when that love is withdrawn).
2. The value people place on the biological “immortality” that accrues from having children.
Imagine as a thought experiment a tyrannical regime in which all the babies born in hospital on a given day are randomized by parent for ideological reasons. How should people react to this? How would they? Obviously we might agree that they should do the best they can with the children that they do get, including emotionally. But I really doubt that they wouldn’t suffer the constant awareness that a part of their personal “immortality” sleeps in someone else’s home.
Feministlurker has it about right: it’s a root fear of patriarchy. And it’s not a totally unjustified one. For men, with a less proximate relationship to reproduction, the nuclear family with their biological children is the means by which men are brought from the periphery to the center of social relations and can partake of a portion of the mother-child bond that is the fundamental social unit. There’s a reason why there are very few matrifocal societies left, and why patrifocal societies don’t switch easily to matrifocality on their own.
E.M., I hadn’t really thought about it in those terms before reading the other thread, but I think that’s a helpful way to think about it. In trying to make sense of JMO’s comments, in particular, it seemed there was some sort of faith-driven belief about biology and parenthood that informed her commentary, and that she would not (or perhaps could not) subject to scrutiny.
The problem here is mainly one of rights vs. responsibility. Men are responsible for their biological children. If I have a couple of children with a woman and she leaves me my responsibility remains. If I marry a woman who has children and I adopt them and she leaves me, my responsibility remains. A guy should bear no responsibility for a child that isn’t his and that he didn’t adopt. It’s the same basic principle as taxation without representation. He played no part in conception and he didn’t decide to assume responsibility so he shouldn’t have any.
The importance of fair play is more important to some people than others. It doesn’t mean anything to an overprivileged manipulator like you but some people take it very seriously. You can’t relate to the visceral responses men are having at the thought of being betrayed because you’re a betrayer. Integrity doesn’t mean much to you.
This is also a reason why ev psych, the boogeyman of the liberal feminist, holds such sway in popular media: because under all the just-so story cruft, it presents a few truth kernels that are very obvious to a large segment of the population, male especially. One of these is the male psychological investment in biological certainty.
And the long-term issue in all of this is how we’re going to arrange our social and family relations in the future to respond to these kinds of psychological investments without unduly burdening the class of women.
As an aside, this post largely answers my question from the other thread, and it’s surprising that you didn’t automatically go in this direction considering its obvious centrality, but like feministlurker, I am a little astonished that this issue was actually far from your thoughts, apparently.
John, that’s not the relevant analogy.
The relevant analogy would a woman who wants to marry a black man, and does, and loves him as her spouse for decades. Then, when she learns that her husband was actually born a blond Swede, and was (unbenownst to him) subjected to a series of physical alterations as an infant and then raised as a black man, she immediately stops loving him.
If you’re capable of love, you’re loving actual people, not abstract technical details about people. If your “love” is withdrawn so quickly, I think that reveals it was never love at all, in the sense that most people use and understand the word.
Under the Hugo theory of parenthood, a man who loves a child immediately automatically becomes the father. Now he is obligated to love the child forever. Is that theory plausible? If you love someone for a year, does that obligate you to love them for a lifetime?
No. People have the right to choose who they love, and you have no right to judge them. Even spouses aren’t obligated to love each other forever . Would you broke a woman who divorced a man, even after she promised to stay with him for “as long as you both shall live?
There’s only one type of person we’re obligated to love, and that is the people who we cause to exist. In most cases, the person who causes a child to exist is their biological parent. There are few counter-examples. For instance, a woman who is raped. She is the biological parent of the child, but she did not cause the child to exist. She is free to love the child if she wants, but she is also free to withdraw her love at anytime because she did not cause the child to exist.
So the obligation to love is not based on biology per se. But in Amir’s case, if Amir is not biological father, he is not the person who caused the child to exist. Its his choice whether to love a person he had no role in created.
“John, Amir said he would withdraw the love he has for his son if he found out he wasn’t his biological child. That’s evil and contemptible, and I unhesitatingly name it as such.”
And tricking a man into raising a child that isn’t his own, isn’t?
Re love: another major fracture that this issue reveals is how we conceive of love. That is, whether love that is contingent on other things can be called love at all. For many people, it’s the case that love that is contingent is not love.
But I’d argue that that’s a relatively new way of thinking about love. Just think of Tevye’s reaction to Chava’s elopement with a gentile in Fiddler on the Roof. Tevye comes from a world where love is always contingent on obedience to community norms.
Wow. I read one of the MRA articles to which you link, and the apelike tone reminds me of that caveman apology you cite in other places, namely that apes kill off other men’s offsprings with their female partners in order for their spawn to propsgate the genetic line.
Legally speaking, Alistair is Ted’s son if he was born during their marriage. So, Ted is his father, no matter where the genetic material ultimately came from, period.
@Matt C: they aren’t ‘tricking’ anyone. The child is already that man’s son, because that man has been his father for the past ten years, has raised and loved him as any father would. The DNA is irrelevant.
Hugo and Jill made the right decision, ensuring the child, and Jill and her husband, would have a happy family without horrible moral rules like yours.
Your logic is flawed, and so seems to be your love.
If your “love” is withdrawn so quickly, I think that reveals it was never love at all, in the sense that most people use and understand the word.
I actually agree with you here. A cuckolded man’s love is based on a lie, so it’s not real love. (If he had known all the facts, he wouldn’t have chosen to love). So even if you buy the Hugo theory of fatherhood, it still doesn’t follow that a cuckolded man is the “real” father. Unless you think that love based on lie is enough to make you a father.
“@Matt C: they aren’t ‘tricking’ anyone. The child is already that man’s son, because that man has been his father for the past ten years, has raised and loved him as any father would. The DNA is irrelevant.
Hugo and Jill made the right decision, ensuring the child, and Jill and her husband, would have a happy family without horrible moral rules like yours.
Your logic is flawed, and so seems to be your love.”
Alright, let’s throw out a hypothetical. You have a baby. The hospital get’s a couple children mixed up and you accidentally get the wrong child, one that has no genetic relation to you. You begin raising the child, and 14 years later you find out the child isn’t your genetically related child because of a mix up in the hospital 14 years ago.
How would you feel? Is it okay that this happened?
charlotte and laura, if I knock up some lady who is dumber than men and I can fool into having my child should I be responsible in any way because the child is biologically mine? If being married to a woman makes her children my responsibility does not being married to her make them not my responsibility?
Say I’m married and I have a child with the wife. I claim to love the child for 10 years but I’m lying. I could never love a left-handed child. I leave the woman and don’t pay child support because I never really loved it.
Actually, come to think of it, the very common condition of communities that discourage marrying and reproducing too far out of the group (for example, most of the South Asian cultures) are partly founded on a much larger-scale genetic anxiety, I would suggest. The older generations view it as a betrayal of the genetic trust placed in them by the generations before them, a dilution of the ancestral legacy with the blood/DNA of people who owe nothing to the ancestors. A kind of massive-scale cuckolding, if you will.
Laura,
In Hugo’s original timeline, Jill and Ted became married within 2 months of Jill discovering she was pregnant. Jill also never told Ted during this period that the baby may not be his. During this period there is no way for Ted to have “been a father” because the child simply wasn’t born yet.
If Jill pressured Ted into a marriage based on a lie, do you truly think that was the “right decision”? Wouldn’t the right decision be to tell someone the whole truth before pressuing them into marriage (please note, I do not necessarily believe that Jill applied “extra pressure” to Ted, only that in our society there is often pressure to wed the mother of your child)?
I cannot help but notice how this keeps getting swept under the rug of “But everything turned out okay!”
Is it ever truly acceptable to pressure someone (even if that pressure is from “society at large) into marriage based on a lie?
Note: As I stated in previous posts, Hugo maintains that the timeline he presented was not the true timeline, which was withheld to protect identities. If years passed between conception and marriage, obviously this comment is moot. But based on the story presented, this is a real concern.
Finally, on the matter of rape. While I do not think it is fair to compare cuckholding and rape, I will point out that it is EXTREMELY unlikely that someone named “Laura” has ever been cuckholded. As a result, it seems somewhat hypocritical to tell others not to comment on rape if they have not been raped when you yourself are commenting on cuckholding while having never been cuckholded. While you may feel that your experience with a family member gives you insight: would you accept the insight of the above poster if he told you his mother/sister/friend was raped and therefore he can comment with authority on rape?
Dear Hugo,
I think that you’ve ignored a key aspect of male psychology in your analysis of why they fear cuckolding so much – biology.
(I hope you aren’t one of those people who disagree with evolutionary theory, because in which case my argument will fall on deaf ears.)
Essentially, imagine that there is a competition between men – who can have the most surviving offspring (which is essentially what happens). In a world of polygamy, the simplest way is to have multiple wives, which did indeed happen. In exchange for security and food, women traded reproductive rights (i.e. access to their wombs, and not consciously of course). This led to the men that would defend their women the best and provide the most, being the most sexually successful, and hence also the most sexually attractive (as it is an advantage to a woman to be attracted to a man who will allow her to have offspring safely, and so there will be a selective advantage to doing so).
In the world of monogamy however, things are different. Men cannot be as prolific as they would like, due to the limitations placed by society on the number of wives that they may have (your own personal views on polygamy are irrelevant here, this is simple biological fact). Similarly, single women are relatively unable to look after children on their own (it must be stressed that I am not referring to modern society – I am talking about society for the 000′s of years in which human culture evolved, and indeed in which the human species evolved; if you recall the scorn with which loose women were treated in Medieval times, Greek times, etc.)
Therefore it makes sense for men to try to impregnate (for want of a better word) women currently in a relationship, as the man then gets all of the genetic payoff, with none of the resource cost or social stigma of having children from two different parents – assuming the cuckoldry is not revealed. Similarly, it also makes sense for men to evolve behaviourally to try to avoid raising children that are not their own, as they waste precious resources on both the child and on the women who is not prepared to raise his own children (as historically, men have also been the primary providers in the family unit).
What I’m trying to say, perhaps in a particularly inefficient way, is that aversion to cuckoldry is manifested in this “narcissistic” approach to child-raising is actually a relic of pre-modern-era times, when men were lucky to have surviving children at all. As this experience has been reinforced so much over the past millennia, it may be a little much to expect them to suddenly discard it due to the abundance of resources in the modern world.
Let me add this one final comment to explain why your attitude is not evolutionarily viable: Let it be assumed that your attitude towards cuckoldry is partly caused by your genes. If you happened to be cuckolded, then you would raise no children (or at the very least, raise less children). Therefore your “tolerance” genes would not be passed on to the next generation (or passed on less than the genes promoting cuckoldry), and so your attitude towards it would die out over time.
Just to clarify on the timeline: in terms of when this occurred in 1997-98, I’ve fudged a few things. But the elapsed time between when Jill got pregnant, when she got engaged, got married, and gave birth — those were all accurate. She and Ted did indeed get engaged when she was about two months along, and got married when she was about six or seven months along.
Mandos, I’m familiar with that anxiety in certain ethnic groups. And while we owe some things to our ancestors, it is always too great an “ask” for them to expect us to limit our romantic, sexual, and reproductive choices to members of any particular race.
Zac, I think evo-psych (Kanazawa and his minions) is mostly an intellectual dead end. But even if I grant that there is some value in it, I disagree strongly with this:
it may be a little much to expect them to suddenly discard it (the fear of cuckoldry) due to the abundance of resources in the modern world.
No, it really isn’t too much to ask. As any historian of social values will attest, human desires and human behavior is more malleable and more under the control of culture than the evo-psychers would like to admit. We are profoundly adaptable creatures, we humans. And yes, men are humans too.
Hugo,
“John, Amir said he would withdraw the love he has for his son if he found out he wasn’t his biological child. That’s evil and contemptible, and I unhesitatingly name it as such.”
I don’t think that’s what Amir meant in the sentence. I don’t think he meant actively and consciously withdraw his love. But such a revelation may indeed have that consequence for him. I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to tell him that he’s contemptible *if* such a revelation would cause him to stop loving his non-biological son. We don’t rationally control what makes us love. I think he wouldn’t be able to stop loving his son if he ever did love his son, but neither you nor me are in a position to judge him *if* such a revelation would cause his love to end. We don’t control if/when/how we love. Don’t make it sound like we do.
Sam, I couldn’t disagree more. “I would no longer love him” is not an ambiguous statement. And it will deprive the child of something he desperately deserves, which is the love of the parent who raised him (not necessarily the parent who was merely the sperm donor.) If Amir’s feelings did change, he’d damn well suck it up and deal with it and not make his son pay the price. That kind of commitment is completely within his control.
What fascinates me about this discussion the most is the continued focus on genetics and DNA. Many commenters have already mentioned how the insistence on the child “being mine” or the child’s need to “find out his REAL parents” is likely cultural and I would have to agree (I put very little stock in the “knowledge of medical history” explanation since, apart from any known significant genetic diseases, the need to know one’s parent’s medical history is of limited use.)
I can’t help but think that there are two cultural aspects at play here. The idea that genetics are determinant and the idea that a person is not ‘whole’ without knowing who provided their genetic material. These ideas are then used as fuel for the ‘betrayal’ fire. Alastair was betrayed because he has been denied understanding of his genetic destiny and is therefore not a whole person. Ted was betrayed because he is unaware that he may not have contributed said genetic destiny.
I don’t really buy the betrayal. I’m betting that Ted went into fatherhood willingly. Would he have decided otherwise had he known that Alastair was possibly not his? Maybe. But at the time a young woman realized that the decisions she needed to make weren’t just all about her, they were about the child she was going to give birth to. It was probably not an easy decision, but she weighed the possibility of a stable family with the possibility of chaos and likely heartbreak. There was no right answer.
Moral outrage assumes that one has a position of authority and does no good here. We should be discussing the cultural and social implications of situations such as these, attempting to reach a kind of understanding of the complications that arise between philosophical morality and physical and cultural realities, not attempting to lambaste a single man’s past through the safe anonymity of our computers.
Although it is silly to suggest that humans are incapable of being malleable, there are some reasons behind certain behaviours that will take more than a few generations of abundance and lack of selection pressure to overcome.
A perfect example is incest. Why is incest taboo? Well, the psychologist would argue that it is because of various attractions formed during childhood, as well as cultural dependence. Of course, there is a much more obvious and concrete reason – incest creates no genetic variation, and increases the likelihood of harmful genes being replicated, causing genetic diseases. Of course, the individual may be completely unaware of gene theory, yet still despise the idea of incest. Why? Because he has evolved to do so, and it would take a gigantic amount of time, effort and reasoning to even begin to explain to him why incest may be acceptable.
It is important to understand that what is and is not socially acceptable is not determined by morality, but by genetics, and that all other things are secondary (or derived from it). Why are women more likely to be given help (by men) if they need it than men? Because all men are historically competitors for the same resource (women), whereas women have not competed in the same way for men.
Just to put in a little more context, you may be interested to note that when chimpanzees (one of our closest genetic neighbours) invade another tribe of chimpanzees and kill or drive off all the males, they kill all the children there too before capturing the females. Why? Because it makes no sense for the males to look after children that are not theirs.
Please don’t fall into the trap of crying “We are not animals! Humans have transcended that stage, and are now capable of higher reasoning, empathy etc that frees them from this pressure”. Yes, it may be true currently, but over the last 100 years? Nope – in the early 1900s gender roles were as strong as ever. Over the last 1000 years? Definitely not. What about 10,000 years? Let’s not even mention that. Also, it makes no sense unless you believe in some sort of human exceptionalism, which seeing as we are 94% chimp, would be hard to explain from a scientific point of view.
Consider that the human race was formed 200,000 years ago, and that the freedom from such pressures has only been available for the last 50. Consider also that the “Homo” genus first appeared some 1,200,000 years ago, and so our evolutionary ancestors have been developing in such a way as to make cuckoldry taboo for 99.99996% of the time that we have existed. And you want to overturn that in just 0.00004% of the time that our genes have been evolving?
You have a hell of a mountain to climb.
“our evolutionary ancestors have been developing in such a way as to make cuckoldry taboo for 99.99996% of the time that we have existed.”
Actually not true. For most of human existence, paternity was an irrelevant issue. Small bands and tribes shared mates, children, and responsibility without the concern over who specifically was the bio-parent. The phrase “it takes a village…” was not invented by Hillary Clinton in the ’80′s. It’s an old, honored concept, existing in tribal culture for many thousands of years.
It was with the rise of patriarchy and the destruction of goddess-based matriarchal culture that paternity became of concern. Why?
To control women? Sort of.
More importantly to control PROPERTY and resources. Prior to the concept of individual ownership, the idea of “passing things down” had no meaning. But once we as a species decided that we “owned” things; i.e. land, waterways, valued minerals, etc., THEN what we do with what we OWN became important.
To pass it to our “heirs” developed into a highly important cultural concept, taking on “moral” implications (morals and biology being two completely unrelated concepts). Owning women and controlling their sexuality became a by-product of this.
That is when the concept of another man “ursurping” what is rightfully mine took on the deep, psychological significance we see today.
If your interest is not in what belongs to YOU, but in what belongs to your group and hence your survival as a whole, there is less interest in biological paternity.
Sorry to dull the histrionic talk with science, but thought it might be good to throw some in there.
It would be nice if the environment was the only thing that made us who we are, but sadly that’s not the case. Genes matter, and as any psychology student will tell you, they are the predominate determinants of how we develop as humans, from a biological, social, and psychological perspective.
If a genetic bond between you and your kid doesn’t matter to you, Hugo, then that’s fine. I think that’s easy for you to say, since you’re not the one being taken advantage of, but I won’t judge you. But you have absolutely no right to consider someone “evil” for realizing the biological truth: that genes DO matter.
And as I’m sure you know, it is our evolutionary imperative to bear healthy children and see them grow up to find success. Small wonder, then, that hundreds of thousands of years of evolution have wired us to place importance on a genetic bond between ourselves and our kids.
In my world, love is not something that you can withdraw for cause. You can withdraw the support (physical and emotional) that a child depends on for it’s physical and psychological wellbeing. Such an act of aggression against a blameless child marks the perpetrator as a deeply flawed human (if I may use the term in its broadest sense). You can reject someone.
The woman’s choice was unethical if freely made. But to conclude blameworthiness, you would have to assume that her actions were entirely voluntary and free from the risk that a patriarchal society puts in play. Women, sadly, can expect that a certain number of otherwise normal men will suffer from some form or another of toxic masculinity and leave her holding the bag if their feelings or assumed privileges are not put foremost.
If you don’t mind about DNA, power to you. You go ahead and adopt a child. Similarly, if you are a woman, and your husband brings home his secretary’s baby for you to take care of. Or if it makes no difference if there is a mixup in the hospital and you get the wrong baby
BUT
who are you to tell others that DNA makes no difference. That they should devote their life and income to a lie. To someone else’s child. You don’t mind to be deceived, cuckolded, cheated. That is you. Others do. Please respect that.
http://human-stupidity.com/stupid-dogma/mens-rights-feminism/paternity-fraud-is-rape-paternity-rape-is-worse-then-rape-rape
“More importantly to control PROPERTY and resources. Prior to the concept of individual ownership, the idea of “passing things down” had no meaning. But once we as a species decided that we “owned” things; i.e. land, waterways, valued minerals, etc., THEN what we do with what we OWN became important.
To pass it to our “heirs” developed into a highly important cultural concept, taking on “moral” implications (morals and biology being two completely unrelated concepts). Owning women and controlling their sexuality became a by-product of this.”
Morality is genetically developed not culturally developed: http://blogs.psychcentral.com/forensic-focus/2010/03/mit-researchers-find-the-location-of-morality-in-the-brain/.
Your argument is baseless.
I think one of the reasons that the emphasis on DNA being necessary to really love your children bothers me is that we don’t share DNA with our spouses, and no one questions our potential to love another non-genetically related human being. I’m not saying every loves their spouse, but people don’t believe that they CAN’T love their spouse because they don’t share DNA.
I think many people have a tendency to assume that there are different kinds of love, and that the rules are different for each – I don’t personally subscribe to that idea. Some people also treat love like it is a finite resource – love I give to a child that isn’t mine biologically is love taken from my future or potential biological children.
Shared DNA also doesn’t mean that you will love someone – my husband did have a biological son many years before we married that he never bonded to. I think plenty of family members, including parents and children don’t bond. Some people’s behavior makes it really really hard to love them.
Holly,
Fears about paternity led to cultures punishing women’s infidelity. People choose to make more children rather than adopt. Plenty of adopted children seek out their birth parents. Biology matters to a lot of people.
If Ted would not stay with Jill if he knew about her other partner, then he did not go willingly into fatherhood. She tricked him into fatherhood, a rather evil and contemptible thing to do. Yes, given that Hugo’s contempt for boys, Jill likely picked the better person. However, the decision Jill made is still selfish. She potentially lied to Ted for apparently no other reason than that Ted could afford to support her.
This is not a wiggle room scenario. There is a right answer to the question of whether it is okay to tell a man he is the father when he is not: It is wrong. Period.
This reminds me of Hugo’s post last year when he accused a child rape victim of being a rapist because his parents were well-off, and several people had to tell him that was wrong. You should not need one person to tell you that, let alone dozen. Likewise, you should not need one person to tell you that it is wrong to trick someone into loving a person. You certainly do not need five posts and hundreds of comments.
It is wrong. Period.
All the “Well, you already love ‘em” excuses do not change that the love was built around a lie. And it is quite odd that people assume that if Alastair found out Ted is not his father that Alastair would not withdraw his love. It is understandable that someone would react that way to this kind of deception.
That said, this discussion shows how readily people condone immoral acts.
“I don’t really buy the betrayal. I’m betting that Ted went into fatherhood willingly. Would he have decided otherwise had he known that Alastair was possibly not his? Maybe. But at the time a young woman realized that the decisions she needed to make weren’t just all about her, they were about the child she was going to give birth to. It was probably not an easy decision, but she weighed the possibility of a stable family with the possibility of chaos and likely heartbreak. There was no right answer.”
You know, the whole problem here is not just one of love, but one of obligations. Everyone here focuses on love, which is freely given and not binding, and completely forgets about obligations. Except of course Holly here, who thinks that to bind someone into the obligations of paternity without his fully informed consent is merely a though decision. Sorry, but that’s horsecrap.
So in these scenarios the man loses his human condition and becomes merely a convenient source of money, protection, and surely, love. And no one here finds any trouble with that? What kind of sociopathic mindset must you have to find that acceptable? Is it because most CEOs are men and because women are slut-shamed or victims or rape are blamed for their calamity that any random guy’s freedom should just be considered collateral damage, and become so unworthy of sympathy that he doesn’t even have the right to feel betrayed?
Not that I don’t find the beauty in eternal, unrelenting love, but you shouldn’t completely blame a man for feeling conflicted about a child borne out of betrayal, even if you (and I) must condemn arguments based on… genetics.
@Holly:
Again, keep in mind that if Ted believed that he was the biological father but he wasn’t willing to be a father and husband yet, or was ambivalent about it, then it follows that if Jill had decided to carry the child to term and hold him responsible for child support, whether he wanted to marry her or not, he’d have been shit outta luck. He very well could have decided to might as well make the best of it. Jill still had a choice whether to carry or not.
If one thinks having biological children is completely valueless, they can tell that to the public that spends billions of dollars a year on fertility treatments. Of course one can adopt, or pursue surrogacy, or other alternatives, but having one’s one children if one can is preferred. Part of the issue I think that men have with this is that being tricked into thinking that your children were biologically yours when they were not has an opportunity cost. If you find out in your 50s or something that the kid you’ve spent 18 years worth of effort and resources raising isn’t yours, and you’ve been married to the mother for however long, it’s probably too late to go out and have a biological child.
This isn’t a problem in general that women are ever going to have to face, so let me respectfully offer the suggestion that their opinions on the matter deserve the same consideration due men’s opinions on abortion. Never the less, I’ll try for a plausible gender-reversed analogy, difficult as it is given the biology involved in the sex differences. Suppose that Ted knew for a fact that he was a carrier of the gene for Huntington’s disease, and he keeps that from Jill when she gets pregnant and they get married when they’re both in their mid-20s. By the time they get into their late 30s, Ted starts to show symptoms and this is the first time Jill finds out. They have only one child, the one Jill was pregnant with when they got married, and whom Jill now finds out has a 50% chance of being a carrier as well, which would mean Jill would probably outlive them both. By now, Jill’s in her 40s and likely past her childbearing years. How should she respond? Should she disown the child and divorce Ted? Stop loving her child? Does she have a right to be angry at Ted? Which of these responses would we consider understandable? If love is all that matters and genetics mean nothing… Consider what that means here.
Oops, typo, I meant to say “By now, Jill’s is approaching her 40s and likely past her childbearing years.”
Hugo,
“If Amir’s feelings did change, he’d damn well suck it up and deal with it and not make his son pay the price. That kind of commitment is completely within his control.”
agreed, the committment is under his control, but not the feeling. You’re right, he then better suck it up. But if such a revelation would indeed change his feelings, that would suck for him, too, but he probably still couldn’t do anything about it. And I doubt anyone should be judged for not loving.
“Morality is genetically developed not culturally developed: http://blogs.psychcentral.com/forensic-focus/2010/03/mit-researchers-find-the-location-of-morality-in-the-brain/.
Your argument is baseless.”
sigh…The ability to reason, one part of which is morality, has been long-known to be a physical part of the brain, subject to physical change and damage. This wasn’t just discovered, all due respect to MIT. E.g. someone’s head injured in a fall can result in a change in the ability to morally reason.
This is completely different than morality being “genetically developed.” One is the capacity to, the other is HOW it is expressed.
The former is genetic, the latter culturally influenced. For your statement to make sense, then every culture throughout history would have exactly the same moral standards. We know this to be patently false.
Your argument is baseless…but the ball is yours.
Human-Stupidity.com sez: “Similarly, if you are a woman, and your husband brings home his secretary’s baby for you to take care of.”
Some of this reminded me of the backstory for Don Draper in Mad Men, who grew up as a “whorechild” his father had had with a prostitute that was left on their doorstep. As he put it on finding out his father’s wife had died, he said “Not my mother, she never let me forget that.”
I just hope Jill keeps her secret from Alastair, or they could have the *White Ghost* episode of Cracker all over again.
We can quibble over whether or not what happened between you, Jill, and Ted was cuckolding or not, but that’s just deflecting from the real issue, which is that Ted made a choice to marry Jill and raise Alastair without knowing the whole story. Whether or not they were exclusive at the time she last slept with you, Ted had a right to know that she was sleeping with someone else and that he may not have been the biological father.
Ted may have decided to raise the baby as his own anyway, or he may not have wanted that. But Ted had the right to make an informed decision about something that would ultimately shape the whole course of his life.
I know that if I knew that the woman I was romantically and sexually involved with were having sex with another man at the same time, that would definitely inform my decision of whether or not to marry that woman. To be blunt, there’s no way in hell I would marry such a woman. Throw a baby into the mix, and it becomes an even more complicated issue. Maybe Ted would have chosen otherwise, but he was never given the chance to make that informed decision.
Hugo,
You said if you found out that you were a cuckold you would be devastated from the betrayal. Enough so that you would leave? What if both of your daughters were not yours biologically?
Was Maria justified in taking their minor children away from their father, Arnold, because of his bastardy? (is bastardy the mirror opposite of cuckoldry?) Arnold tried in his way to provision for his bastard kid; it’s just too bad his unique looks gave away the secret.
Hugo –
It occurred to me tonight while at youth group (we painted the youth room then went out for chinese food), that the response to these posts has been so visceral, so strong, because what happened offends an innate sense of right and wrong, but also confuses that innate sense.
Marc Hauser’s book Moral Minds poses a series of scenarios and explores why people think which are right and which are wrong. The basic outline is a street car is out of control and you can stop it. In one case, you stop it by rolling a boulder onto the track. That’s okay. But, the next case, you push a large person onto the track; most people think the second scenario is wrong. Where Hauser’s scenarios get interesting is in one case you can throw a switch and it will send the streetcar down a track where it will hit a large boulder and stop – but just as you do, a man steps onto the track and he will be killed. In that case, the man’s death is sad, but not morally wrong. it has to do with the way people perceive intentions.
I think the situation you described feels more like pushing the man onto the track than switching the train and running him down. In the first, his death is intentional, in the other accidental. As reasonable as the outcome really is, it feels morally compromised in a very real and profound way. Reading it, a person feels without knowing or naming why that it’s outside our moral framework. No matter the biological father, it feels as if you and Jill were intentionally dishonest and dishonest for selfish reasons. I think that’s why there’s such a strong response to these posts.
it feels as if you and Jill were intentionally dishonest and dishonest for selfish reasons
Gosh, I couldn’t disagree more.
Glenden, I’m often hard on myself. You read my blog; you know that. But in this case, I think Jill and I committed a sin of omission for the best and most generous of reasons. There is so much in my past of which I am not proud, but the way in which I kept my pledge to Jill is something that I am very proud of — and you know, frankly, it’s been the huge blow-up of the last two days that has really reminded me that damn it all, sometimes I did do the right thing.
My compromised moral calculus pre-sobriety meant that I did things like have unprotected sexual intercourse. Often. It also meant that I didn’t step up and insist on a paternity test at the time. But when Jill made it clear what she wanted, and when I saw that what she wanted was clearly in the best interests of the unborn child, I think I did the best possible thing I could do at that moment.
I’ve been a very selfish man in my life. But what I did with Jill in terms of keeping my trap shut? Not selfish at all. I’ve never called myself a “generous man” on my own blog before, but in this instance, I will.
Honestly, I’m grateful that “spermgate” has blown up like this –= not because it’s generated lots of nice traffic, but because it has allowed me to put to rest any lingering doubts I might have about what was decided so many years ago.
FWIW, Hugo, I think what you did amounts to a moral “speeding ticket,” at most. I suppose before the kid was born, you could’ve gone to Ted and just given him the heads up that you’d recently been sexual with Jill, or prevailed on her to be honest about things. I probably would’ve done either of those things, but you were where you were then, and of all the adults in the scenario, you were the least responsible, I think (even less than Ted).
I still think Jill had a responsibility to tell him, and I think she still does to this day if she hasn’t. Looking out for the best interests of her child is one thing but she has an independent responsibility to be honest to him, even today. He has an independent moral (and legal) responsibility too, certainly at this point, to be a good and loving father to the boy he’s raised as his own for 13 years, but it’s not on Jill to keep him to that responsibility on his part through deception. It would be hypocritical to claim that men ought to be held to high expectations regarding their responsibilities while at the same time approving of inveigling them into assuming or keeping those responsibilities through deception.
The hypocrisy of this thinking is revealed immediately by the physical expression. If in fact the perception of an ethical imperative held governance it was expressed as a gesture to conceal the occurrence. Projecting some nascent self justification as an ethical imperative is the worst kind of idyllic ideology and intellectual imperialism. The union of biology is representative of a fundamental collaboration. It is the basis of a chemical union and wedding and in fact transcends the political and it’s motivations. What is much more relevant and enduring is the application of choice. Which apparently the author holds as an exclusive right and privilege. It is by the extension of this very privilege that a mother is handed her biological offspring at birth. If your position in fact had any weight in your own mind, you would quickly perceive that by extension the very ethic which you attempt to manipulate would equally be expressed in awarding a child to a father exclusively and that biology in and of itself plays no role at all. Although it is wondrous to intellectualize paternity it is multi-dimensional. Biology does express itself fundamentally and sympathetically.
“But when Jill made it clear what she wanted, and when I saw that what she wanted was clearly in the best interests of the unborn child, I think I did the best possible thing I could do at that moment.”
And Ted didn’t even enter the calculus.
Suppose a man cheats on his wife or girlfriend and impregnates that woman.
He then brings the baby home, and hypnotizes his partner into believing the baby is her biological child. She raises the child for years thinking it is hers, and loves it as any good mother would.
Is this an ethical thing to do?
The question scarcely survives its statement.
For the people who talk about “tough choices” and “patriarchal oppression” – are you insane? Do you actually believe the drivel that comes out of your mouth to justify such a harmful act?
Ergh. Suppose suppose suppose suppose suppose…
This has been a fascinating discussion and exploration of ethics and morality as concerns biological and relational responsibility, and I haven’t gotten much work done today following the various threads and convos on the different blogs.
Can we be done now?
“The Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) have stirred themselves into quite the tizzy, with posts like this one representing some of the more moderate response.”
You know damn well it’s not just MRAs who have a problem with your pro-cuckolding views. We didn’t even discover your piece until a full 24 hours after it had been posted. r/mensrights broke the story the morning of the 12th, by which time your essay had already accumulated plenty of negative comments. AVFM’s post came a few hours afterwards. To date, those are the only MRA sites that linked to your post.
During that first 24 hours, the majority of GMP comments expressed shock, horror and anger. These were not MRA’s (who would arrive later), these were regular readers of the GMP. These were the men who should have been the most receptive to your message. Most were progressives, many were feminist. And they were horrified.
Let me repeat that only one MRA blog has linked to your essay. The other two trackbacks came from Clarissa (feminist) and Susan Walsh (neither feminist nor MRA). Both were appalled by your behavior.
Stop pretending this is Hugo the Good Feminist those evil, misogynistic MRA’s. You have opposition all over the board.
Having read both the GMP and Jezebel threads, I think you’ve picked a rather a unrepresentative selection of posts. Very few (evidently not none) of those expressing indignation at Jill’s behaviour (whether or not they referred to it as cuckoldry) actually stated that they wouldn’t love a child whose DNA they didn’t share (and the majority who did bring up DNA did in the context of medical issues), but an awful lot were nonetheless outraged at the dishonesty of such behaviour and the sense of betrayal it would engender. If you’re looking to analyse people’s reactions, that would seem the more pertinent place to start: with the morality or otherwise of Jill’s deception. If you think her actions were for the “best and most generous of reasons” do you think Ted would see it that way? Are you confident you would in his position?
But as far as the DNA issue is concerned, there’s a bit of a fallacy of the excluded middle going on here, given that there is a very substantial middle ground between “I couldn’t love such a child” and “Biology, who cares?”. As others have noted, the extent infertile couples will go to conceive rather than adopt, the indignation most would feel at having their baby mixed up with another by a hospital, the urge to seek out their biological parents that many adoptees feel: all these point to the idea that there is a very common (not necessarily universal) sense of a bond people feel to those to whom they’re biologically related. That doesn’t mean it’s an essential prerequisite to loving someone, but it hardly follows that it’s an irrelevant thing to care about. I have, for example, no doubt that someone who adopts a two year-old can love them as their own child. I don’t therefore think someone who for some reason misses out on the first two years of their child’s life has no cause for complaint.
I have a hypothetical here: What about a woman who is given a child by the biological mother, who insists that this woman should raise her son, only to discover once the child is grown, that her husband (the supposed adoptive father) was the biological father and that is why the biological mother wanted her to have the baby. Should she then love the child less because it was born to another woman as the progeny of her husband’s infidelity? So instead of it being a shared adopted child she was ‘tricked’ into raising his child by another woman? This hypothetical may not appeal to the same issues of patriarchy and patrilineality (which underlies a great deal of the historical reasons for women’s oppression and peripheral roles in society) but it is comparable. What if this woman refused to have the tests done to see if the child was her husband’s because she didn’t care and it would not change how she felt about her adopted son? Ultimately, I think that if you love a child or anyone it doesn’t matter if they have your DNA or not (or your husband’s when the child was adopted) because love isn’t based on contingencies. Only someone whose love was not true love, but selfish or narcissistic (need for supply), would automatically withdraw their affection from a child they raised.
I would like to weigh in for a moment if I could
I have watched with interest the reactions of people from all sides -except the child’s
I am the child of a situation very similar to that which Hugo (and others) have described. My mother slept with two men – one of them is a man I call Dad, one of them is a man I call Dave.
The man who raised me. Above all else. Is my father -we share many common interests, we speak alike, we share behaviours, our logic is similar -I have learnt to be who I am through him.
There is noone else who I can laugh with, joke with, cook with and make fun of, that I would ever consider calling “Dad”
Physically I actually resemble the other man more
This has never bothered me
I have never used this in an argument against either of my parents
This has not changed the love I have for my parents
AND I Do Not believe that this changed the love my father has for me
Right and Wrong are not black and white here – If anything I love my parents (or whomever DID make the decision) MORE for having opted to make a decision for my benefit above all else – wether they were right or not, they made a decision, they stuck to it.
My Mother informed me of her “indiscretion” after I turned 18 because it was something that weighed on her mind, and as something I should be aware of for health reasons-Both physical and emotional.
It has never been a discussion I’ve had with my Dad, or with Dave. Sure I could ask for a paternity test
But I have a dad
Dave’s healthy -if there were any physical concerns regarding the DNA I might have or might not have inherited – I’m sure it’ll all come out in the wash – I mean really, how does the rest of the world live?
Day by Day
If Dave is my biological father – What happens if I have a disease!? I go to a Doctor
and if my Dad is my biological father?
I still go to a Doctor
I have seen biological parents who despise their children – surely, if the child is in a loving home. This is the best place. Irrespective of any decisions made prior to his entry into the world.
Does Dave have a 27 year old Daughter?
No Idea
Is that right?
No Idea
Wrong?
again – No Idea
Do I love my Dad?
You betcha
Awww poor men and their sperm. I started thinking this from the point of view of the child. Probably because I don’t have my own children. If I were to find out that my father isn’t my father, I’d be curious to know who it is. And I might be angry to my parents, but really how I would react would be a lot about how they would deal with it. I think I’d be more disappointed and angry at my father if he then would decide that well because there is no dna between us, he doesn’t love me anymore. He is my father because he has been there all those years and it does matter a lot. Yeah I might be interested in forming some kind of relationship with the biological father (depehding on situation), but it doesn’t mean I want to lose my real father. Of course if the love of these “My precious sperm” -fathers is so shallow, it’s probably better they get away from child’s life.
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Again, it shows that MRAs are wrong about cuckolding. According to them, the woman always know who the biological father is and deliberately want another guy to raise the child while in most case the woman simply doesn’t know who is the father.
Anyway, I think that Jill should have tell Ted about her doubts before getting married. Marriage is a serious business and people should be honest with each others. But now it’s too late.
Hugo – I chose my language carefully. The situation somehow feels dishonest without being dishonest. The responses are all over the map because the situation you described confuses the normal moral calculus most people do automatically. What happened was messy and complex, filled with ambiguity.
I run a different scenario in my head. She was pregnant and said “You’re a mess, not husband material and I’m raising this baby on my own.” Then meets Ted and tells him “I’m carrying Hugo’s child.” He marries her anyway and raises the child as his own. We can all grok that scenario. But, what actually happens throws us for a loop. So you get responses ranging from confused to annoyed to angry to full on panty sniffing moral scold.
Both you and Ted have equal possibilities of being the father but Ted wasn’t told about that. That’s the part the confuses the normal moral senses, moral calculus. I go back to Hauser’s book – people distinguish between incidental and intentional. I can’t push the fat man into the path of the oncoming streetcar but if I can’t avoid the streetcar running him down even though the outcome is the same the moral understanding of the situations is very different. It’s difficult to get a handle on whether the outcome was incidental or intentional with regard to Ted. He may be the father – in which case, no harm no foul; he may not be but may not know it, in which case we’re suddenly not sure. It’s the ambiguity we can’t grok, that scatters our normal responses which is why so many of the responses are tedious, legalistic and nitpicky.
I stand by original response – at some point your daughter may want an explanation and there’s a good chance that will be a complex conversation. It could also be very easy – I remember a conversation with my mother where I told her it was okay with me if she had an affair – children surprise parents all the time. It’s also true that as children we don’t have the right to know everything about our parents, a hard lesson many of us never learn. I think you did the right thing in respecting Jill’s wishes and stepping away.
The longer this story goes on, the more it feels like a veneer of superficial feminish-ism plastered over a creamy center of asshole conservatism.
You complain about patriarchy trying to control women in order to avoid cuckolding. But your problem with that isn’t that it treats women like mindless wombs who can’t be trusted to just TELL you who they’ve been sleeping with, it’s that worrying about cuckolding is bad. As far as we know, you’d be totally fine with FGM if it was targeted at a fear you didn’t feel was quite so misguided.
More problematically, in your book Jill IS a mindless womb that can’t be trusted to behave like an adult. Ted hadn’t “claimed” her properly, therefore he has no right to feel betrayed when she refuses to treat him like an equal participant in their relationship.
I can’t condemn you for following Jill’s (asshole) lead on this, or sticking with that (asshole) decision now that it’s too late to give Ted any of his agency back, but I’m happy to condemn you for defending the concept that it’s OK to lie to 2/3rds of a relationship if that’s what it takes to hammer it in to the “correct” mother/father/biological child mold. Which is what this story is actually about, once you cut through the veneer.
“A reminder, Ted and Jill were not in an exclusive relationship when she last slept with me.”
The deception by omission is not excusable because of the fact that there was no expectation of exclusivity.
Anyway this post is kind of pointless. Myself and all of the commenters, except for one (Amir), agree that DNA does not have any bearing on the father child relationship. The outrage the original post has generated revolves around the deception.
glendenb said
“He may be the father – in which case, no harm no foul”
Even if Ted is Alistair’s biodad, he is still the victim of wicked act.
Hugo,
The outrage is not about your decision. It is directed at Jill’s betrayal of her husband and son. For you to say “I’m a mess, I can’t raise a kid” is a fair decision, one that lots of men (who get blasted as deadbeats) and women (who get heralded as saints) make. However, for Jill to say “I’m not going to tell the other man that this kid might not be his” is a selfish decision. It does not feel intentional, it is intentional. She intentionally denied Ted the chance to choose his involvement probably because if he knew he might not stay with her. That is not the best and most generous of reasons. It is the worst and most selfish of reasons.
My foster parents’ oldest child is not biologically related to his father. His biological father died, and since his parents were together by the time of their son’s birth they decided not to tell him. When he got into high school they told him and it did not go well. It damaged his relationship with his parents, especially his father. They were very close, but finding out the truth made him pull away. Their father and son relationship is better now, but if you know them well you can tell that the hurt is still there. His parents decided to keep that information secret for the best and most generous of reasons, and it still winded up causing pain.
Just because you intend to do a good thing does not mean what you do is good.
The only thing I have to say is that Hugo has GOT to be pro-life. If he’s not, he’s the biggest hypocrite on the planet.
(Protip: he’s not)
And I’ll be the four hundredth to point out that if “sperm doesn’t matter”, there would have been no need for the deception in the first place.
Actually, since- unlike all of Hugo’s other shit- this is in fact an ON-GOING crime, I’m wondering if it could be pursued legally.
I have found this moral and ethical dilemma a fascinating one and appalling.
I have never been promiscuous, and I have always practiced safe sex, so I can’t even relate to this type of pregnancy scare, but I do believe I have a strong sense of ethics. What would I have done if I were in this situation?
I would have wanted to adhere to my strong sense of ethics and morality, which would have been to be scrupulously honest with Ted that I had sex with Hugo the same week he and I first had sex, that I was pregnant and that I did not know who the father is.
I might have been willing to break up with Ted because it would not have been right, in my mind, to do something so unethical as to know that I could be passing off another man’s child as the child of the upright “good guy” I was dating. To that extent, I feel for the “good guys” who get caught by some woman’s duplicity and promiscous behavior. The New York Times once had an article about that.
If he wanted to continue dating me, my conscience would have been clear. If he did not, what would I have been willing to do? Put up the child for adoption? Be a single mom? Have an abortion? I hope I would have done the first, especially if I were a white woman pregnant with a child who would be in high demand in the adoption market.
I understand Hugo’s ethical decision to go along with what Jill wanted, but I can’t tell whether he ever challenged Jill to do the right thing and tell Ted 14 years ago what was going on.
As for the “friend with benefits” who could also have been the father, if I thought for a moment that I would not tell the other putative father, I would have wanted him to be a true friend and challenge me on my ethics, but not just respect my decision to indulge in such a serious ommission.
On another note, this story reminds me of a song by Everclear: Volvo-driving soccer moms, about a wild girl who goes straight and becomes a bland suburban housewife, a volvo-driving soccer mom.
“In exchange for security and food, women traded reproductive rights (i.e. access to their wombs, and not consciously of course).”
Why not consciously? Because women just aren’t smart enough to consider the implications of their actions or because women have no right to drive the best bargain they can?
John,
Granted people have the right to choose whom they love when you’re talking about romantic partners. But it’s a whole other ballgame when you’re talking about an innocent child who, through no fault of his or her own, inherited half of their DNA from a man their mother cheated on her husband with. To have the only father the child has known to suddenly withdraw his love for the child is incredibly cruel and selfish.
By writing this piece Schwyzer is trying to rationalize away his own guilt and his own sadness. If he can convince himself that he has done the right thing and that Ted is the father because fatherhood isn’t about biology then Schwyzer can continue thinking that he didn’t have a hand in fucking someone over.
Another thing. Schwyzer, if that kid is yours, how much do you think you owe Ted for all of the $$ he’s spent raising your son? It must be hundreds of thousands of dollars. If that is your kid Ted really bailed you out. I’d love to have seen how much of a feminist you’d be if you’d have been taken to the cleaners for child support.
Wow.
I am loathe to agree with MRA’s about much…but…
It is my personal opinion that any woman who KNOWINGLY pulls this shit and lets a man raise a child that is not or may not be his biologically WITHOUT telling him that is a World Class Scumbag. It is JUST as shitty as Amir’s withdrawing love or whatever, and often means the foundation for a variety of relationships such as that between the man and the child, and the man and the woman, is a big fat lie. If a man knowingly chooses to raise a child who is not his own- fine and good on him. If he is lied to or tricked about it, well seriously, shame on her. It is a seriously low down thing to do and has ramifications for both the man and the child. Talk about the height of dishonesty and selfishness. Ew. Just…ew.
Wow. I have to wonder how Hugo’s pre-sobriety moral universe differs significantly from his current one, in which he claims, without irony, that conspiring with a woman to trick another person into believing he’s the father of a child that very likely is not his amounts to a “generous” act.
My curiosity is purely academic at this point, of course. I don’t really think there is any grounds for debate or discussion on this topic.
Either you find what Hugo and “Jill” did to “Ted” to be self-evidently horrifying or you don’t.
“But it’s a whole other ballgame when you’re talking about an innocent child who, through no fault of his or her own, inherited half of their DNA from a man their mother cheated on her husband with. To have the only father the child has known to suddenly withdraw his love for the child is incredibly cruel and selfish.”
There are plenty of innocent children waiting to be adopted. Would you be okay forcing a woman to adopt one?
Suppose some tyrant forces a woman to adopt a child that isn’t hers. Ten years later, the tyrant is out of power, and the woman is free again. Would you judge her for taking back her life? If someone forces you to take care of their kid for 13 years, do you now have a moral obligation to take care of them the rest of their life?
It’s really weird reading all this evo psych and genetics worship in the comments when my family is composed of two biological and two adopted siblings. There is no heiarchy. There is no special value to our genetics. Our biological relationship to our parents is meaningless to the makeup of our family.
When my adopted brother sought out his origins, he was not seeking his “real” family but the reason why he was given up and where he came from. Things that people who know their biological families take for granted. My sister, who knew her biological mother until she died of TB when she was 8, does not seek out her family in Vietnam or even her culture of origin.
Genetics only seems to matter in finding your own identity, not in the composition of your family. Which seems obvious despite all the evo psych and ignorant historical lessons posted here. 70% of families in america are nontraditional (two married biological parents with biological children). Even other animals adopt non biological (and other species) children.
There is only value to genetics when we associate children and families with ownership and property. When you remove that, you just have love. So to answer Matt C’s question above – if I found out my child was switched in the hospital 14 years ago, she would still be my child and nothing would change that.
I’m a mother who went through something not dissimilar to what Jill went through with my first child. The timing wasn’t so close, however. I slept with an ex-boyfriend about three weeks before I had sex for the first time with the man who would become my future husband. The ex and I used a condom, however hubby and I didn’t.
When I found out I was pregnant, I worried that it might be my ex’s. The gyno assured me that based on my last period timing, there was NO way. But it still haunted me. When our daughter was born, I studied her face for weeks looking for signs that she looked like one man or the other. Unlike Jill, my two men looked nothing like each other. It was obvious my daughter was my husband’s, just as the gyno had said she had to be, but it helped to see how much she looked like my husband.
My point is, I understand completely why Jill did what she did. I understand why she told Hugo (the friends-with-bennies whom she probably was in love with first). I understand why she didn’t feel she could tell Ted. I understand why she made Hugo promise not to get involved.
Hugo, she showed you Alastair so you could think about what you had walked away from. I bet Jill knew you couldn’t be the father that Ted could be. But she wanted you to see what you were giving up. She didn’t mean it in a harsh or spite-filled way. Just wanted to let you know she would have picked you if you’d been more available. That’s my hunch and intuition as a woman.
Alastair is the big winner in this whole situation, and we shouldn’t forget that. Ted has lost nothing. And Hugo is completely right, it’s Jill who is the one who is suffering most, because she is the one who has to live most intimately with this secret that can’t be told.
“Suppose some tyrant forces a woman to adopt a child that isn’t hers. Ten years later, the tyrant is out of power, and the woman is free again. Would you judge her for taking back her life? If someone forces you to take care of their kid for 13 years, do you now have a moral obligation to take care of them the rest of their life?”
I believe if the woman has been raising the child as her own and the child sees her as their mother, then it would be wrong for her to suddenly turn her back on the child. Also, I’m willing to bet that in most cases the woman COULDN’T turn her back on a child that she was helping raise and presumably loved. And I would say the same of a man in the same situation.
Gigi: You’ve bit the bullet:
“If a woman has been forced to be a mother for 10 years, we should force her to be a mother for another 10.”
If you believe that, I don’t know how you can yourself a feminist. I guess I thought it was self-evident that we shouldn’t force people to adopt children they did not create.
“If you believe that, I don’t know how you can yourself a feminist. I guess I thought it was self-evident that we shouldn’t force people to adopt children they did not create.”
You were the one who brought up a hypothetical case, John. Don’t do that and then blame a person who responds honestly to your hypothetical question. That is not fair.
bekabot: “You were the one who brought up a hypothetical case, John. Don’t do that and then blame a person who responds honestly to your hypothetical question. That is not fair.”
I’m not blaming her for anything. All I’m saying is that if Gigi accepts that premise,* there’s nothing else I can say to her. All I can ask is that Gigi be consistant from now on, and continue to defend her pro-forced-parenthood views even when this discussion closes.
*The premise being: “If a woman has been forced to be a mother for 10 years, we should force her to be a mother for another 10.”
I honestly don’t see what’s incompatible about the view that Hugo and Jill wronged Ted and the view that Ted should absolutely still love Alastair. I’m a lot less sanguine than Hugo that he made the right choices in this situation (I think old Hugo probably made the wrong choice in making the vow in the first place, and new Hugo probably made the right one in sticking to it), and I definitely think Jill’s once and continued lying to Ted is pretty rotten. If I were Ted, I would be pretty pissed at both of them, though I’d also find it pretty easy to forgive Hugo once he explained his role in the situation.
But that has nothing to do with Ted’s relationship with Alastair. That is an established fact, and for Ted to abandon that were he to know the biological truth would be the most despicable act in the whole situation. In fact, if I were Ted, I’d be most concerned that Alastair would turn his back on me and decide that Hugo was his “real” father and I didn’t matter in his life. The last thing I’d question is my love for a boy who was my son from when he was in the womb; whether he was at conception is completely meaningless.
So I find myself in the position of being slightly troubled by Hugo’s position on the situation as a whole (though glad he brought it up so we could think it through with him), but wholeheartedly in agreement with this post in particular. Anyone who thinks the Ted-Alastair relationship should change if they found out about the biology isn’t capable of being a real father.
Jeremy – thing is, barely anyone (yes, Hugo did manage to find and quote the sole example) has claimed otherwise. Contrary to the post’s claim, the comment threads are not at all full of people claiming that “love depends on shared DNA”, which makes the lengthy focus on this idea (rather than Jill’s deception) in this and the previous article rather bizarre.
“Ted has lost nothing.”
Nothing…except the right to father his own biological child, and the right to know whether a child he raises is his own biological child or not.
“it’s Jill who is the one who is suffering most, because she is the one who has to live most intimately with this secret that can’t be told.”
This is one of the stupidest statements made, analogous to Hillary Clinton’s “women are the primary victims of war…for they must live with the aftermath (while the men are dead).
Are you kidding me? Jill (and Hugo) are the perpetrators and scumbags here. The fact that you can rationalize this into Jill’s victimhood is astounding, but not surprising for a feminist.
Yes, but it was a horrifying comment, and worth singling out.
Jeremy, thanks for commenting. And thanks for your thoughtful take, which is really helpful in the midst of all of this.
Hugo:
Do you or do you not see something wrong with Jill not telling Ted that the kid might not have been his 14 years ago? If this same situation were to happen today do you think that Ted has the right to know that there is a good chance that he is not the father of the child, or will it forever and always be a woman’s decision to choose paternity for her child?
Hugo,
A sin of omission would have been if the two of you got a paternity test, determined that the son was really Ted’s, not yours, and then the only details that Jill left out from her husband and child where some minor sexual indiscretions that they didn’t need to know about.
You said that things would be 100% different if you knew that the child was really yours. Well, why didn’t you find out? Why not? You were in the position to get tested so that if it was really Ted’s child, Ted would have been none the wiser and his marriage to Jill would proceed as planned. That paternity test, that would have been the right thing to do. But you did what so many other men and women throughout history did… you screwed around recklessly, hid the truth from your families and the world, and contented yourselves to live a lifetime of lies in exchange for the easy way out, making a pact to offer yourselves financial security at another man’s expense.
You could have gotten that test Hugo, but I get it. It was easier not to. Because if that child was yours, it would have made it all the more uncomfortable to look at yourselves in the mirror knowing that Ted is raising a kid that is 100% definitely not his. Yes, I can see how it’s easier for the two of you to sleep at night not knowing the real truth. And there isn’t a single honorable thing about it.
Hugo, how dare you comment on the concerns of other men who want to know the truth when you yourself have a conflict of interest of epic proportions? Here you are, taking up an argument on the wrong side of truth in the name of feminism and the coddling of liars. And you want men to be feminists? Really? You want men to accept as a matter of course that ineffable bastards such as yourself are going to irresponsibly get woman after woman pregnant while other men come around and pick up your mess? It’s not the men who worry about cuckolding who are the problem with patriarchy, it is men like you and women like Jill that have over time turned entire societies against women.
Yes, men worry about being the real father of their child, and the fact of the matter is that our own genetic makeup tells the tale of human history: we carry genes from twice as many women as we do of men. Only 40% of men manage to reproduce, while 80% of women pull it off. Do you know what category of men that puts you in, then? It puts you right in with the men who practice polygamy, rape, sexual slavery, harems, all of that. You’re part of that group. The men who care about being the real father of their child – they are not a part of that group. To say that this shouldn’t be a concern to men who spend a lifetime lovingly raising a child is one of the most disgusting things I have ever heard. You have given me a new understanding of the feminist notions of patriarchy, one that is wretchedly self serving and subservient to people who do not respect the truth. You have to take a long hard look at yourself and your feminism. Without truth, there will never be equality.
I hate the word cuckold even more than I hate the word “panties.”
It’s an ugly, grotesque word.
Hang in there, Dr. S, you did the right thing. I’m proud to look up to you as a mentor. You don’t deserve all this hating from these weird men.
But I’m glad I’m your student now and not back then!
Hugo, not a problem! I’m a regular reader and infrequent commenter, but I always find what you have to say thought-provoking, even though I don’t always agree with you.
Hugo,
Given that I basically agree with your position here, I’m still finding more sympathy for your critical commentators than I sometimes do. I’m trying to figure out why. Here are a few thoughts. (This is long, so I’m breaking it up into three parts.)
1. While I agree with you that love *does* make one a father — so that it would be unconscionable for a man who has loved and raised a child to abandon it — I’m not sure that I agree with (what I take to be) your implication that *only* love makes a father. Don’t you think that a man has a responsibility to love (as best as he’s able) and raise and support a child once he finds out that a woman is pregnant with his (from a DNA standpoint) child? Nor can you say that this is simply a matter of responsibility. If a woman sleeps with two men, and gets pregnant, and neither man particularly wants to raise a child, so she has a paternity test… then I think the one who is (DNA-wise) the father has a responsibility to step up, even though they have both been equally irresponsible (sex without precautions) up until this point. So I think that in your haste to say that love *does* make a father you have overly-quickly claimed that sperm does *not*. (This doesn’t mean that I think you should unsettle an established situation, which is to say, I don’t think sperm *always* makes a father. But I think in some cases it *can*.)
(Part two of three)
2. I think you’re being overly hasty in dismissing the health history issue. At this point, given the role that direct ancestors’ health plays in modern medicine, I think that people have an affirmative right to be certain (if its possible) who their biological parents are and know their health histories. If something happens to Jill, Alistair will make health decisions as if Ted’s his biological father, without any doubts… perhaps wrongly. Continuing the deception in this case constitutes an actual, ongoing harm.
(Part three of three)
3. I think that I, like many people, think you aren’t being quite forthright in your refusal to condemn Jill’s decision not to tell Ted. I totally get why you don’t want to: she’s an actual person, you also behaved questionably (not in not telling Ted, but in having unprotected sex without thought for possible consequences), etc. It’s hard to condemn real people. But for most of us, she doesn’t feel like a real person — we don’t even know her name — she reads (emotionally) like a hypothetical. And you do condemn people for hypothetical conduct all the time. (For instance, you said in this discussion that you’d condemn a man who’d stop loving his child because the child wasn’t biologically his (and, incidentally, I agree with you.)) It’s part of your writerly persona. Now, as far as I can recall you’re usually careful to say things like (“although there may be exceptional individual cases…”), and, since you’re thinking of this individual case, that falls (in your mind) under that heading. But for us, the readers, it feels like you’re not willing to say that there is an affirmative duty for someone in Jill’s position to be proactively honest to someone in Ted’s position (i.e. not just rely upon not having broken promises, but to actively explain the full situation). Sure, there’s a cold utilitarian calculus that said she did the right thing. But I never thought of you as the type to let utilitarian calculus override what seems like a pretty straightforward affirmative deonotological duty. All of which boils down to the fact that I think a lot of people would agree with you (and that you did the right thing letting Jill make up her own mind, since personal autonomy is important) if you’d acknowledge that what Jill did was — in the abstract — immoral.
Stephen
Haha Gioia! That last sentence says it all doesn’t it?
About the word cuckold, perhaps it’s an ugly and grotesque word in the same sense that rape, molestation, pedophilia, or incest? Because that’s the family of words it belongs to. All of these words have something to do with violating another human being’s autonomy in a very fundamental way that can haunt them for the rest of their lives.
What Hugo and “Jill” did to “Ted” was paternity fraud. Full stop.
If present legal codes do not quite codify the nuances presented in this story (do they?) then they would need to be updated appropriately.
Nobody, but nobody, should be knowingly deceived into parenting a child which is not biologically his own.
And failure to take a paternity test, in this case, was an omission tantamount to deceit.
Ted ought to get some remuneration if the child is not his.
(This is a PS to Part Two (posted above), which I guess makes it part four of three.)
I think in this case you could argue that the plausible harm from telling Alistair overwhelms the affirmative right to know one’s biological family’s medical history. But it’s a balance of real rights, in which one is violated, not a case of “no harm no foul” or “no reason to worry unless Jill asks”. (Again: what if something (chas v’shalom) happens to Jill?) What you’re doing may be the best thing to do all things considered, but there’s still an ongoing, actual harm.
“2. I think you’re being overly hasty in dismissing the health history issue. At this point, given the role that direct ancestors’ health plays in modern medicine, I think that people have an affirmative right to be certain (if its possible) who their biological parents are and know their health histories. If something happens to Jill, Alistair will make health decisions as if Ted’s his biological father, without any doubts… perhaps wrongly. Continuing the deception in this case constitutes an actual, ongoing harm.”
THANK you!
“(This is a PS to Part Two (posted above), which I guess makes it part four of three.)
I think in this case you could argue that the plausible harm from telling Alistair overwhelms the affirmative right to know one’s biological family’s medical history. But it’s a balance of real rights, in which one is violated, not a case of “no harm no foul” or “no reason to worry unless Jill asks”. (Again: what if something (chas v’shalom) happens to Jill?) What you’re doing may be the best thing to do all things considered, but there’s still an ongoing, actual harm.”
Hugo has posted on this blog that he has a history of mental issues including rampant substance abuse, reckless sexual behavior (I would label it sex addiction but I don’t think he ever called it that, and I don’t want to put words in his mouth, and severe depression. Hell, he tried to kill himself, and was so sick (in a psychological sense, nota moral one)! I know you’re busy and swamped with comments, so I don’t begrudge you not tackling my posts before, but if you have reason to believe that your sick, dangerous years stemmed from genetics them I really believe your children have a right to know. You’re going to tell Heloise at least an abridged version, right? At the least, if Jill doesn’t know the extent of it (not sure about the timeline and how much you shared with her) I believe you should tell her. She needs to know what to look out for. This information has the potential to save a child years of suffering.
I know I’ve been harping on Hugo, so let me shift gears. The assertion made upthread that finding out you’ve raised a child that you didn’t father is as emotionally painful as rape is so, so, ignorant and misguided. To the point of being disgusting.
Numerous typos, perhaps it’s time to put my posts through MS Word first.
Gioia! Glad to see you here. (And I remember your hatred of the “p” word from last fall.)
No, Stephen, I won’t condemn Jill or judge her. She was in an imperfect situation where there was no easy and clear solution, and she made a choice. It was her choice to make, a choice that was her right to make as the one who carried a potential child within her. In a perfect world, should she have brought out the truth at once and arranged for a test of some sort? Sure, and if wishes were fishes they’d swim in the sea. I’m not being glib – I’m deadly serious.
I’m not not judging Jill just because she was my friend, or because I was an addictive insecure deadbeat when she and I were sleeping together. Rather, I’m not judging her because I don’t think what she did was fundamentally wrong given the circumstances in which we all found ourselves.
When Ted and I ejaculated inside of her without a condom, at that moment we were “signing on” for the consequences of what might happen. A pregnancy happened. Ted already loved Jill. Jill loved (I really do believe) Ted. I was out of the marriage/partnership picture for a host of unhappy reasons for which I take full responsibility. And so my friend Jill made the best possible decision she could make with the information she had.
Did Jill make the right choice? I don’t know. What I do know is that she made a choice she was morally entitled to make, and to the best of my knowledge, it has turned out happily for one and all. More than that, it seems to me it has turned out right.
Should I be contacted by Jill or Ted or Alastair and asked to take a test or provide a medical history, I will do so. But I will not disturb this happy family. (And let me reiterate, enough has been disguised/altered here that there is no way this story can “leak” to Ted or Alastair. Only the basic timeline of events in terms of elapsed days and months is accurate. Alastair could be 13… or 14… or 15. You get the idea.)
Hugo, I think you exaggerate that genes have no bearing on being a dad. Look at your situation; if genes did not matter at all, why did you choose to have a biological child? Why not be more selfless and only adopt and/or provide foster care to children who are already born?
“When Ted and I ejaculated inside of her without a condom, at that moment we were “signing on” for the consequences of what might happen.”
First, you don’t know that Ted did it without a condom. You do know that Jill is a liar, however.
Second, Tim only signed on for the consequences of HIS sexual actions, not yours. If you got Jill pregnant, YOU are responsible for the consequences, not Ted.
Hugo,
You have convinced me. The MRAs are right and feminists are wrong.
I didn’t want to believe it.
People who don’t see that Ted was wronged are dehumanizing him. One might even say they’re objectifying him.
And yet you have no problem judging Amir for saying that he doesn’t want to take care of a child he did not create.
an imperfect situation where there was no easy and clear solution
Flapdoodle.
“easy”!= “clear”
The solution may not have been easy, but it was clear (at least to the non-sociopathic), Hugo. It was to be honest.
But you and Jill chose the easy, self-serving way out that allowed you to shirk responsibility and avoid any unpleasantness that followed with acting like a human being. All at the expense of an innocent person.
I don’t think what she did was fundamentally wrong
Again, I am morbidly curious about the moral framework that allows for there to be nothing “fundamentally wrong” with actively deceiving another human being into believing a child belongs to them when you know it very possibly does not. “Sociopathy” is the only appropriate name for it.
It was her choice to make, a choice that was her right to make as the one who carried a potential child within her.
It’s a pregnant woman’s “right” to trick a man into believing he’s the father of her child?
And Hugo, why no mention of Ted’s choice? You know. The one you and Jill decided he didn’t deserve to be able to make?
The fact that it turned out happily ever after assumes is only relevant if everyone is a…what’s the term? Utilitarian consequentalist? Not everyone is. I know *I*’m not.
The moral entitlement part is the sticking point here. Does a women have the moral right, for the sake of her and her child’s well-being, to assign paternity in a situation where it would be ambiguous? It has nothing to do with the love that is owed the child well after the fact. At *that* moment, does the man in question have the right to expect that he will be consulted on whether he wants to raise a child that is not DNA-his?
This is a medical decision, ultimately, that Jill made for Ted and for Alastair. Did she have the moral entitlement to make that medical decision? Does Ted not have a right to know that his physical genes may not be carried into the future? (Unless she decided to “compensate” for it by having later biological children unequivocally by Ted—but then, that brings up a host of other psychological issues…)
Last of all, Hugo, can you at least empathize with the fear that some men have that their chance at “immortality” may be taken from them or rendered less than certain without their consent?
I’d like to suggest that Hugo subscribes to a very specific version of feminism that relates (and focuses on) his conception of personal relationships, and I don’t think that his particular practice of feminism is that widely shared even in feminist blogs.
Many/most/all feminists criticize the desire for male control over women’s fertility, but I can’t think of very many who would condone deliberate collusion to obviate consent under these kinds of circumstances.
@scolopendra:
“You have convinced me. The MRAs are right and feminists are wrong.”
Scolopendra, I congratulate you for this “crack of dawn” epiphany that you have just experienced. I hope that you will not roll over and go back to sleep, but get up, go outside, and embrace the growing light of a new day.
“Alastair is the big winner in this whole situation, and we shouldn’t forget that. Ted has lost nothing. And Hugo is completely right, it’s Jill who is the one who is suffering most, because she is the one who has to live most intimately with this secret that can’t be told.”
-MegX.
This. So true, so right, so simple.
Mandos, I’m familiar with that anxiety in certain ethnic groups. And while we owe some things to our ancestors, it is always too great an “ask” for them to expect us to limit our romantic, sexual, and reproductive choices to members of any particular race.
I agree with you, Hugo… but (and here’s the catch) the playing field is not level, and you have to recognize your own privilege here. You’re a white man – and this gives you a big advantage in terms of interracial dating (or any type of dating, really).
Also, my observations are that usually it’s men trying to limit women’s choices in this regard a lot of the time; men of all races tend to be guilty in this respect (whether it’s via white men lynching black men for looking at a white woman the wrong way, or asian men complaining about “their” women dating white men or black men doing the same when black women date out). So it’s actually a feminist issue!
Of course, this may be off topic in this post.
There’s a nasty nasty agenda being pushed here: that the preference of men for their own actual children is somehow wrong, “patriarchal”, a malleable product of culture, etc. But note that it only applies to men: no-one seems to object to couples spending money on infertility treatment instead of adopting. And, tellingly, no-one has answered the “switched baby in the hospital” scenario.
Yes, Ted has lost. He’s invested in and bonded with a child that is not his own under the false assumption that the kid was, something he might not have chosen to do had he known at the time. Comparisons to cuckolding are quite apt.
Hugo:
Rather, I’m not judging her because I don’t think what she did was fundamentally wrong given the circumstances in which we all found ourselves.
When Ted and I ejaculated inside of her without a condom, at that moment we were “signing on” for the consequences of what might happen. A pregnancy happened. Ted already loved Jill. Jill loved (I really do believe) Ted. I was out of the marriage/partnership picture for a host of unhappy reasons for which I take full responsibility. And so my friend Jill made the best possible decision she could make with the information she had.
Did Jill make the right choice? I don’t know. What I do know is that she made a choice she was morally entitled to make, and to the best of my knowledge, it has turned out happily for one and all. More than that, it seems to me it has turned out right.
My reply:
What I find deeply troubling here is that this perspective creates an incentive to act in opposition to how a woman should act if she is promiscuous. One of the first rules of female promiscuity, it seems to me, is to avoid such consequences, unless one wants to create such a quandary and “trap” somebody.
So in this moral universe, Ms. Promiscuity only has to let/persuade more than one man to have sex with her in one week; she then gets to choose who will be the father and she need never tell all of them what was going on, ie., that some other man/men might be the father. Ms. Promiscuity gets over big time, like Jill did here. “Way to go,” I suppose?
How does this type of moral universe affect other women, ie., decent women who wouldn’t dream of behaving this way? Will they be met with suspicion when they really don’t deserve it, because others will presume they are like Ms. Promiscuity?
The argument about a man having unprotected sex and then being on the hook for fatherhood works in most people’s minds if a man knows he is “the one,” ie., that the woman he is sleeping with is sleeping with him only. Most decent men who are as you described Ted as doing, “falling in love with Jill” would be happy to step up to the plate.
But here, Ted was not the only one, and he had a right to know.
A brief word on “slut shaming.” We must realize that the moral relativism that leads to a disinterest/distaste for judging lest we “slut shame” leads to this sort of justification for blatant unethical behavior. If a woman wants to sleep around, that is her business, but when she indulges in behavior that leads to the sort of problem here, letting two men have unprotected sex with her on in one week and then becoming pregnant, again, I remain baffled at the depth of irresponsibility and lack of ethics. Ted found himself in a situation in which he did not know who all the actors were, and that is shocking.
“As a father, I have nothing but contempt for any man whose love is contingent as Amir’s and Daniel’s so clearly is.”
Because clearly, if you want to fuck Amir or Daniel’s wife and have them raise your kid, that is your God Given Right as the biological father to decide for them. How insulting is it that some other guy wouldn’t just DIE for the opportunity to raise one of Hugo’s spawn?
You’re obviously the same irresponsible lunatic that you always were because you really don’t have an ounce of remorse or guilt for anything you did. Here you are writing about your fucked up decisions as if they were the right thing to do.
“It was her choice to make, a choice that was her right to make as the one who carried a potential child within her.”
Really? Are you a sociopath? So it was her right as a woman to be a morally corrupt coward who shirks responsibility for her own actions? If a woman fucks a different man every other day without protection and the chickens come home to roost, this gives her the moral authority to decide which man should unknowingly raise the other man’s kid? All of it based on whatever is most convenient for her? Her actions were just some sort of a fucked up situation that no one is to blame for, right? Certainly not her and certainly not you? I didn’t know!
Why are you even writing about this? You live a life full of lies and deception and all of a sudden you can’t understand why people get pissed at you? You really do fit the profile of “that guy”, having inappropriate relationships with your students, passing off your kids to other men, going from one failed relationship to the next, and treating it all as some sort of science experiment. You don’t seem to understand how anything you’ve ever done is fundamentally wrong, do you? I really don’t think you’re done with the substance abuse and broken relationships. I’m pretty sure you’re going to end up as a broken old man wallowing in sorrows that you can’t understand.
So here’s the thing, Hugo. Your position on this matter as, let’s face it, someone who has a high profile as a public face of male feminism has broader consequences. With this episode, you’ve basically confirmed the worst MRA fears about feminism—that it’s an elaborate self-justification exercise for women who want to deceive and manipulate men.
But I know that even the most radically utopian lesbian separatist is not literally in favour of deceit or concealment from men—rather, they would prefer to have an honest separation: men should not be involved in or necessary at all. This is a somewhat idiosyncratic position you’re taking, and I think you sort of owe it to your readers to put it in context what point you’re trying to make.
Gotta say this for Hugo – he is not nearly the censor he could have been here. A lesser person would have closed comments a long time ago.
Hugo:
“Rather, I’m not judging her because I don’t think what she did was fundamentally wrong given the circumstances in which we all found ourselves.”
But don’t you see that lying to someone- period- is wrong? Ted right now has been fed a lie and is believing a lie- flat out- wrong. And I am sure I am gonna take shit for this, but, say, oh, a girl passes out at a party and two men have sex with her while she is out. One then steps up and admits he did it, the other does not. Both men are wrong of course to have done so, but that girl then thinks she has been violated and wronged by only one person and only ever has a chance of closure with one person- even though TWO people wronged her. WHile not violated in the same sense- Ted has been wronged by TWO people, and NO One is admitting it, instead they are both justifyng it. Like the passed out girl- his choice and consent has been eliminated, he has unknowingly been mistreated and taken advantage of- and because NO ONE is fessing up, he has no chance for closure or to even voice his discontent. Face it, y’all violated his rights and utterly removed his choice in the matter.
If what Jill did is morally okay, considering the situation and all- then morals as they stand are a fuckin’ joke.
@PM, yeah I agree. I would have never been able to divulge this sort of information and leave it up for comments without a psychiatrist standing by my side, pharmaceuticals at the ready. It just seems like a really risky thing to do especially for someone who has had mental health issues in the past. I hope Hugo is taking good care of himself, no matter how absolutely wrong he is about this issue, I wouldn’t want him to suddenly grow a conscience and decide it’s time to hit the bottle.
@Ren,
I’m at an absolute loss as to how anyone thinks that the possibility that the kid you’re raising and loving might not be yours biologically is even remotely analogous to rape. I just don’t see it. Whatever harm has been done to Ted is at most hypothetical. He has a son whom I am assured he loves and who loves him. What on earth does that have to do with being raped? I guess I’m a bear of little brain, but I just don’t see it.
@Mandos, I’m one of a group of public male feminists (perhaps one of the better known ones; we are a small band.) I don’t think any reasonable person will filter every decision I’ve ever made through the lens of my feminism. The original piece was not “How it was inherently feminist of me to honor Jill’s request not to give full disclosure to Ted” or “How Jill was justified in making the decision she did from a feminist perspective.” It was an anecdote about a moral dilemma that I thought would be interesting to read and share. (I confess I didn’t anticipate HOW interesting or controversial it would be.) Shall I put a disclaimer saying “Hugo’s opinions in this instance are his own, and not reflective of male feminists in particular or feminism as a whole”? That seems a bit much.
@dungone, thanks, but I’m fine. It’s been a tough week but I have a huge and wonderful support system. (I’m ignoring the concern trolling about the conscience, just like the rest of the cheap psychoanalyzing about whether I’m an alpha or an omega, whether my relationship with my dad was healthy, or whether I’m just a sociopath.) I am very much at peace.
“I’m at an absolute loss as to how anyone thinks that the possibility that the kid you’re raising and loving might not be yours biologically is even remotely analogous to rape. I just don’t see it. Whatever harm has been done to Ted is at most hypothetical. He has a son whom I am assured he loves and who loves him. What on earth does that have to do with being raped? I guess I’m a bear of little brain, but I just don’t see it.”
It’s not rape and it’s not directly analogous to rape, but it does belong to the same broad category of things such as rape and thus, many parallels exist and need to be examined.
Like rape, you and Jill have violated Ted’s self-determination and reproductive rights at a very fundamental, human rights level. If that seems a little too abstract to understand, consider for a minute just how similar your stance on this issue is to Pro-Life activists who would deny women the right to an abortion even in the case of rape. It’s very analogous. You say that whatever happened happened, now there’s a baby and it doesn’t matter if Ted knows that you fucked her the day before or not because he’s stuck with it and it’s his responsibility.
Let’s say that instead of you sleeping with Jill the day before, she had been stranger-raped and she wasn’t sure whose baby it was and had no way of tracking down the rapist. That’s a very analogous to the position that you put Ted into. Let’s say that Jill had told Ted that she had been raped, but in Ted was pro-life and refused to get a paternity test, telling Jill she doesn’t deserve to know who the real father was and that they will raise the baby together as their own because that’s the right thing to do.
In other words do you believe that women who were raped deserve to know who the father of their baby is and make an informed decision on whether or not to abort the baby, or is it okay for someone else to decide for them whether or not they have to raise it? What you and Jill have done is make a similar decision for Ted, denying him the right of knowing whether or not Jill’s child is really his or not, and placing him in a predicament where he has to raise that child whether he agrees with it or not.
How is cuckolding like rape? It’s all about consent.
No one should be forced to adopt a child they did not play a role in creating. They need to give their consent first. How is this difficult to understand? Do you seriously believe we should force people to adopt kids without their consent?
Is cuckolding as bad as rape? That’s a subjective question. Ask some random people if they would rather be forced to adopt a child for 18 years, or be forced to have sex. My hunch is that some people will say forced adoption is worse, and some people will say forced sex is worse. Respect their opinion.
I think the analogy between cuckolding and rape is dubious. If you’re going to make a comparison, it should probably be with the “bed trick” variety of rape, whereby a woman (say) consents to sex with someone she believes is someone else. Thus she is raped without knowing it.
TBH, I think the hospital mix-up scenario is a much closer analogy.
I’ve been generous with the moderating, but yes, at this point, I’m blocking any comment that compares rape to cuckoldry (or to the specifics of the Ted sitch) as in any way equivalent. Blocked. Done. Over. Take it to one of the many MRA blogs at which that comparison is made gleefully and enthusiastically.
To John, Ren, et al,
Please stop comparing cuckholding to rape.
You may or may not have valid points. However, the discussion does not serve the fundamental point you all seem to be making: that it was wrong for Jill not to let Ted know about the possibility of another biological father.
Already Hugo, and a small number of commenters, have tried to use wedge issues to drive people away from the obvious conclusion that Jill was patently dishonest in her dealings with Ted.
The more people take sides over rape vs cuckholding, or DNA vs love, or legitimate concerns vs MRA fear mongering, the more the central issue being commented on is obscured.
Cuckholding does not have to be analagous to rape in order for what Jill did to be wrong.
When Ted had unprotected sex with Jill, he signed up to be a father. He did not sign up to participate in an untrusting, and thus disrespectful, marriage. Alastair is fortunate for having two parents that love and care for him. Yet Ted is unfortunate for having a spouse that did not recognize honesty is an integral part of marriage.
Believing we can trust our intimate partners is a fundamental aspect of human dignity, and it is something that Jill stripped from Ted when she convinced herself that saying “I do” does not mean “I am honest and open with you.”
We do not need to worry about what crimes cuckholding is analagous to in order to accept this basic truth.
Okay, I submitted a comment about it that I expect to be blocked, but I did not see Hugo’s message as I was writing it. Please go ahead and remove it, I understand your decision. I don’t particularly care about the analogy, I was answering in good faith because Hugo said he did not see how the comparison can be made.
I don’t want to push this too far, but I will just say that just because something makes you extremely uncomfortable and you don’t want to hear about it, it does not mean that the comparison is wrong. People who really want to know the truth will not hesitate to destroy sacred cows and tread into topics that are taboo to others. You have to weigh the argument on its merits, and I’ll leave it at that.
“First, you don’t know that Ted did it without a condom. You do know that Jill is a liar, however.”
Oh, John, stop. The reason Mr. Schwyzer knows that Ted ejaculated inside Jill without a condom is that if that Ted had ejaculated inside Jill with a condom there would have been no chance that Ted was Jill’s boy’s father, and the mainspring of this entire narrative would have been lost. If Ted had always used a condom with Jill (since, contrary to popular opinion, birth control actually works pretty well) Mr. Schwyzer would have been clearly identifiable as the boy’s Dad*, and Ted, presumably, would have been alerted by the chiming of the biological bell and would have escaped into single blessedness. (I.e., an innocent BetaMale would have been spared from the clutches of the Witch and the Devil, otherwise known as the Woman and the AlphaMale.)
This is an obvious inference and not the kind of thing which is the province of rocket scientists. So could you please cut it out and stop acting as though you thought the rest of us can’t count to five? Remember, our high school debate team beat your high school debate team for a reason. Jeez.
*always supposing that Ted and Mr. Schwyzer were Jill’s two sole sexual partners. Since I haven’t heard of any others, that’s the supposition I’m accepting. But YMMV. However, if you think the solution to the riddle Mr. Schwyzer poses is to absolve Mr. Schwyzer from blame while memorializing The Victimization Of Ted by saying “Jill is a promiscuous skank”, thus transforming her into the Official Sinner of the morality play, pray braven up and spell that sucker out.
(Based on some of the stuff I’ve come across in the manosphere, I can’t help thinking that had Mr. Schwyzer chosen to write a column along those lines ["once I was with a woman who deceived her fiancé and me at the same time, which just goes to show you what terrible company you start to keep when you drink too much; oooooohhh, when I think now of how fond of that rotten woman I used to be, it makes me shudder"] instead of the column he actually did write, the same hordes who are now execrating him for all they are worth would have fallen upon him and embraced him like a long-lost brother. But, there’s going to be none of that here, obviously, b/c Mr. Schwyzer neither repents nor selects a scapegoat; consequently the religious satisfactions implicit in good preaching are absent from his work. Fellow-males who have become used to deriving those satisfactions from their own meditations and from those of others are no doubt right to be irritated.)
Hugo,
you judge your former self by saying that you were a “deadbeat”, yet you don’t dare offer judgment on Jill. you pretend that she was just making her life decisions in a vacuum and that another person – Ted – wasn’t impacted by her decisions.
Hugo:
Its not the same, but a parallel CAN be drawn. Choice was withdrawn from Ted without his consent. The violation aspect is NOT the same, but having ones choice completely removed is…at least IMHO.
I dont even think anyone involved is a horrible person or whatever, but I do think LYING is wrong- even when it seems “best” or “better” for others…because lying is wrong. And IMHO, more of it falls on Jill than you- because hey, guess what I am a woman, and when women DO things like this- there are affects.
I feel bad for ted. He got hosed, period.
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Hugo, Ren never said cuckolding was the same as rape. That’s the straw man you saw fit to invite to the party in yet another attempt to distract from your own appalling behavior.
Ran’s example merely highlighted the fact that in both situations, some people decided, for their own self-serving reasons, the nvegate the consent and agency of another human being.
Agreed, Sagredo.
I see that none of those who disparage the significance of the biological link between father and child — and who defend Jill’s actions* — have taken on the ‘babies switched at birth by the hospital’ scenario. As they say, ‘the silence is deafening.’
So a hospital discovers after the fact that they switched the babies of two mothers. If we were to use an analogous moral calculus and demonstrate an equivalent amount of empathy for mothers in such situations as Hugo and a few others are expressing for cuckolded fathers, the hospital shouldn’t feel too badly about the error. Apparently the hospital doesn’t even have a moral responsibility to inform the mothers of the mistake. (After all, each mother received a baby, right?) What is clear, though, is that no particular harm has been done to those mothers, and if the hospital does inform them, they have no reason to feel particularly angry or upset.
Hmmm … trying to imagine the phone call in that universe …
~ wavy screen ~ wavy screen ~ wavy screen ~
“Hello, Tricia?”
“Yes?”
“This is Darlene from the H. Schwyzer Medical Center. How are you today?”
“Oh, I’m just fine, Darlene. How are you?”
“I’m good. Listen, I just wanted to give you a heads up about little Billy.”
“What?” (Suddenly concerned.) “Is there something wrong?”
“Oh no, nothing is wrong. It’s not like we found that he might not be healthy or anything, but … well, just to let you know: he doesn’t actually have any of your DNA.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah, it turns out things were a little hectic that day, and we sort of switched a couple of babies around in the ward.”
“Oh.” (Relieved.) “You had me worried there. I guess that kind of thing happens in a big medical center.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that!”
“Hey, no problem. Look, I’m glad you called … I always was a little puzzled about Billy’s red hair.”
“There you go.”
“Look, Darlene, I’m in the middle of making dinner … is there anything else?”
“No, just wanted to let you know. Enjoy your dinner, and have a good evening, Tricia!”
“Thanks, Darlene! You too!”
~ wavy screen ~ wavy screen ~ wavy screen ~
Yeah, I’m sure that’s exactly how that kind of phone call would go … assuming, of course, that the hospital would make such a call (which we know would be completely unnecessary or even an act of self-indulgent disruption on the hospital’s part).
* I may have missed something, but it’s not clear to me that we know that Jill has, in fact, deceived Ted about the possibility of Alastair not being biologically his.
I wonder if I were to impregnate another woman, and that other woman decided she didn’t want the baby(for whatever reason) and I could have it, what would happen?
What would happen if I came home to my wife/girlfriend and said; “look baby, I impregnated this other girl and she said you and I could keep the baby. I know I’ve kind of been cheating on you, but aren’t you glad you get to be a mother?!”
Oh, how joyful I’m sure all the women who made comments to this article would be if their boyfriends/husbands did that to them. They wouldn’t love the baby any less then if they had personally given birth to them. “Biology isn’t important” they would say. “My eggs aren’t important” they would say.
…….
If biology isn’t important then no man should be forced to pay child support for simply impregnating a girl. Since it isn’t his sperm that makes him the father, as you have all pointed out. And contradictions don’t exist in reality. So which one is it?
Actually a more accurate analogy would be that the hospital mixes up children and assigns to the parent(s) as they believe is in the best interest for a particular child.
John,
You’re putting words into my mouth. I never said anybody should be “forced” to do anything. I said I BELIEVE it’s unethical for a person (male or female) to turn their back on a child they’ve been raising as their own.
And I call myself a feminist because I’m consistent in what I believe a woman should do and in what I believe a man should do. (Not that you’re the arbiter of who is and who isn’t a feminist, as you seem to think.)
Just to make sure things clear, when I typed the following I meant “mixes them up on purpose”.
Hey, assholes. If you really can’t handle fatherhood then fine, don’t be a father. If you become a father and find you can’t handle being loved with all the intensity a child feels for her (or his) father (her real father, the one who’s there for her every night, the one calls you crying in the middle of the day because he or she misses you so much, the one he or she will bathe and bury and cry bitter tears years after everyone else alive has forgotten you) then let me raise him or her. Because there’s so much more, start to finish and end to end, to being a father.
What really makes me want to vomit is that these poor self-hating men imagine themselves such lowly pieces of shit that the only measure of their worth in a family, the only thing that counts or matters, is a single half spoonful of spunk.
And they stride the earth imagining feminists hate men!
You know what happens to a man who “cuckolds” another man’s wife? He dies alone and unloved, he misses holidays, he misses birthdays, he misses graduations, he misses grand children. He misses everything. Meanwhile, you know what a “cuckolded” man gets? Someone who’d give them a lifetime of love so unconditional they’d lay down their life for him. And the man who’s only contribution to the “cuckolded” man’s family is ~3.45 picograms (picograms!) of DNA? On average he got between two and seven and a half minutes of friction, three to eight contractions, and then? Nothing.
I mean for crying out loud! Turn the tables the other way, gang! I know self-esteem problems make it seem unlikely but imagine it was you who cuckolded someone else. Would you sit around evenings chortling away that someone else was raising your child? Would you still be chortling on your death bead when your own biological flesh and blood was out caring for (and as often paying from their own pockets to care for) their real father in his old age? Is your dying thought going to be “look at those suckers caring and weeping over their cuckolded father instead of me!”
I mean, no offense to accountants but are the ones who think this way really men? Or are they just effectively dickless beancounters?
A real man always tips the bellboy, never counts his change, and never worries that his children aren’t “his.”
figleaf
p.s. And yes, I have thought this through. While I have no objective reason to imagine my partner ever had sex with anyone else, when my first child was born I took one look at him and said “where the heck did he come from?” Because he sure didn’t look like me! Same with our second child. So the idea really did briefly cross my mind but you know what? At those moments, when I was holding those real-life, human beings in my arms? Nothing mattered to me more than being right there with them because where ever they came from they were mine!
But guess what? Years later our oldest looks so much like me it’s not even funny. And my daughter? A dead ringer for her mom except… when I wake her up in the morning, as I have every day of her life, and I see her eyes first open? I always knew there was something familiar about them and it finally hit me: she’s got my father’s family’s eyes. But as I say I didn’t really start to see that in either of them till each was nearly 10 years old.
And if they hadn’t? My daughter still lives for me and would gladly die for me. They both still love me with a love that passeth understanding. If some kind of Darth Vader wannabe came up to either one of them and said “I am your (biological) father” they’d vomit on his shoes.
That’s what being a real father is. If you can’t get that then you’re not a man at all.
Figleaf, God love ya. Thank you.
Oof. Sorry for my intemperate remarks! It’s just that as usual the foundation of evil is so startlingly banal I lose perspective.
figleaf
“Hey, assholes. If you really can’t handle fatherhood then fine, don’t be a father.”
Ted never had the opportunity to give informed consent. And given the context, your harangues about what constitutes a “real man” mean less than nothing.
There have been several well-known instances of fertility doctors impregnating women with their own sperm. Those doctors shouldn’t have been sanctioned because, after all, the biological aspect of paternity doesn’t matter. Right?
Figleaf
Hoenstly, sound and fury signifying nothing. The argument is about riding roughshod over somebody else’s rights as regards their intimate relations. I’m tempted to make a hiding behind figleaf pun but I guess I’ll leave it.
Figleaf, since you don’t have the self esteem to capitalize the first letter of your name, I thought I’d do it for you.
I personally don’t care if I would end up loving the child regardless. That’s putting the cart in front of the horse. What women who “loves” her husband, couldn’t do him the service to slip a condom on the other man she was fucking? Even if the man had been snipped, you think she would do it to avoid potentially giving her husband an STD, or herself for that matter.
“My daughter still lives for me and would gladly die for me.”
I honestly couldn’t imagine a loving father ever saying such a thing about his daughter. Or saying something as stupid as “real men don’t ever count their change.” If that’s your criteria for what a real man is, then a girl, dog, 2 year old boy can all become “real” men.
You know, my biological dad wasn’t perfect, he was an abusive alcoholic for a time being, but you know what? If I could do it over again, I’d choose him over men like you any day.
Figleaf
Have you not read through the argument or are you consciously attacking the same strawman that Hugo is?
And whats with all the not a real man crap?
Your subjective experiences of irrational suspicion about the paternity of your own children are not the same thing as a man being manipulated into “doing the right thing” for a woman that is deceiving him and people like Hugo refusing to admit that deceiving people into marrying you is wrong. The argument is not about the paternity, its about the deception.
So, figleaf, you’re saying that a hospital has no moral obligation to inform mothers if they’ve inadvertently switched their babies, is that what you’re saying? And a mother who has experienced this glitch really has no particular grounds for complaint or upset, right? Because, after all, she does have a baby, and her feelings for that baby must of necessity crowd out any and all other feelings towards other entities in her life, and entirely eclipse whatever dreams she may have entertained of bearing and raising a child of her own flesh. And if they don’t crowd out those other feelings — if, in fact, she experiences feelings of profound anger and betrayal at the hands of an institution in which she placed her trust — well, then she’s an asshole.
Do I have that right, figleaf?
Figleaf, from your comment, you show an incredible lack of basic logical reasoning and basic moral principles, as well as self-delusion.
Let’s agree that a person who discovers the child they are raising is not, as they thought, their biological child should continue to raise and love the child. We’ll agree and get that out of the way.
Now, please address the issue of those who knowingly commit paternity fraud.
Is this a moral action in your eyes? If so, how?
Further, how do you justify portraying someone who willingly committed immoral acts as a victim? That is no different than saying “the murderer is the true victim, for he must live with what he has done.”
@Figleaf, if you weren’t already taken…damn, son, that’s the hottest thing I’ve read in a long time. Thank God a real Dad got on here to give Hugo some back-up.
My brother-in-law adopted my sister’s kid that she had from before and then they had two more that were his sperm too. He loves them all equally and it shows. He doesn’t distinguish what’s biologically his from what isn’t. Real men don’t care about those picograms of DNA , and women love them for it.
@Figleaf 2: you taught me a new word: picograms is awesome.
Alexa
In the situation you describe, you brother in law hasn’t been deceived and choose to father children that weren’t his biological children. His marriage and fatherhood isn’t based on a deception. You’re comparing apples with oranges.
Arguing with feminists is too often like eating soup with a fork.
Gotta love how no one’s responding to the ‘switch the bassinets’ situation. Because the link between a mother and her biological child is special and sacred, but the link between a father and his biological child is a terrible artifact of the patriarchy that men should not be allowed to express.
@Alexa
What your brother in law CHOSE, is not the same thing as being tricked into fathering a child that isn’t your own.
Honestly you people treat babies like pizza pockets. “It doesn’t matter which one I get, I’ll love it the exact same.” Adopting a child, and getting cheated on/tricked into raising a child that isn’t yours are two completely different things.
Do you and Hugo really advocate adultery and paternity fraud? Two things that could easily be avoided, especially the second one if a girl just uses a condom?
Would you be overjoyed if your brother-in-law cheated on your sister, and got another girl pregnant? What if the other girl didn’t want the baby and decided after birth that your brother-in-law could keep it. Would your sister be overjoyed at raising this other woman’s baby? I somehow doubt it.
“Gotta love how no one’s responding to the ‘switch the bassinets’ situation. Because the link between a mother and her biological child is special and sacred, but the link between a father and his biological child is a terrible artifact of the patriarchy that men should not be allowed to express.”
You know, I have an answer for this, even though it may not be an answer which satisfies everybody. I belong to a superseded generation and I grew up reading Ann Landers and Dear Abby regularly. (This was back in the day when the Lederer sisters reigned unopposed. They were household fixtures. The possibility that either one of them could ever be replaced would have been rated as about on a level with the possibility that lamps would eventually end up fitted out with swirly light bulbs or that phone calls in the few-chah would be typed out on a keyboard.)
Once in a while, regularly though not too often, both these columnists would get letters confessing to this exact worry. (Given the nature of the venue, the letters would usually come from women, though occasionally a man would give vent to the same apprehension.) The letters would mostly go something like this: “Dear Abby, when I was 19 I gave birth to my first son, who is now 16 and has never been anything but trouble.* The thing is, I’ve never been 100% sure he’s mine. After the birth had taken place and after I’d woken up from the anesthetic they put him into my arms and he felt so…unfamiliar. And it’s never gotten better, however much I’ve wanted it to. The question I keep asking myself is, could he be somebody else’s son? I sometimes wonder whether he’s mine at all. He doesn’t look much like me and he looks even less like my husband. He doesn’t understand us and we don’t understand him. Dear Abby, I am haunted by the idea that my real child is wandering around out there loose in the world and that I’ll never get to meet him. I hear that people now can have themselves tested genetically to see whether or not they’re related; maybe I should have this done? At least that way I’d know for certain and then I’d get some peace.”
(This is not as goofy as it sounds. The women who were writing to Ann Landers and Dear Abby circa 1975 were women who had their kids at a time when women who were giving birth were routinely knocked out cold so as not to bother the doctors during the delivery. The babies were then taken away from their mothers and placed in a kid depository with a bunch of other newborns, and were only introduced to their Moms after their Moms had come to. My mother was awake when she had me, but that was because her doctor was a somewhat unconventional dude: he had refused to induce labor in her even though her delivery was late, which was not standard practice in 1962. Anyway, when you take all these circumstances into account you can see how they might have given rise to a fear which not very widespread but which gained a real hold on a few people, whose qualms, if it comes to that, may not have been entirely unfounded.)
What was the Lederer Sister response to this plea? The response was unvarying and completely predictable. Upon receipt of such a letter, either Ann Landers or Dear Abby would reply: “You know your own business best, and I would be hesitate to advise you in such a case. The one word of counsel I have for you is that you should be very sure of what you want before you embark on your course. Don’t take the first step without thinking of where the path might lead. There is such a thing as too much information, my dear.”
There you have it. That’s what Ann Landers/Dear Abby would have told you had you approached either one of them with the Puzzle of the Switched Bassinet back in the day when they were both still doing a thriving business. There’s not much coddling of A Mother’s Doubts there, just an acknowledgment that, though knowing that your kid might not be your kid is bad, knowing that your kid is not your kid could be worse.
As Ann Landers and Dear Abby used to say, guys, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I respect your efforts to assure your genetic succession and to maintain your families, but if you try to accomplish these things with too hammy a hand you may end up pulling apart what you’re trying to knit together.
*for some reason, none of the letter-writers ever said: “When I was 19 I had my dearly beloved son who has never given me and hour of trouble in his life and whom I can’t imagine existing without but about whose specific origins I’ve always been confused”, though I can’t imagine why.
This is just silly. Cuckolding is being tricked, deceived or lied to. If a man is told that he “might not be the father” (some people are trying to weasel out of this by saying that no woman is 100% sure that she’s lying about paternity) he can make an informed decision about whether or not to raise the child and devote resources. Cuckolding is when the man finds out years later or is never told that there is a possibility that the child isn’t his. Why the hell would anyone defend this deception/withholding of the truth?
I like the message about parenting not being based on biology. That’s a great message.
Bekabot, your story sheds light on the issue of whether to tell Ted now. Certainly, I don’t have a clear answer to this. Maybe at this point it is, as you imply, better to leave alone.
But the question we’re trying to answer is, did Jill behave ethically at the time? Or by analogy, would it be ethical for a hospital to surreptitiously switch babies?
“As Ann Landers and Dear Abby used to say, guys, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”
Bekabot, sorry, but your arguments are stupid.
That may have been what Ann Landers said 40 years ago, that applied to a situation 40 years ago. Nowadays, you can bet that if a mother found out that the hospital had in fact mixed up her child, there would be no one who would say “oh, no big deal, don’t even talk about it, just STFU.”
There would in fact be hell to pay.
“I like the message about parenting not being based on biology. That’s a great message.
I agree. However, what the paternity fraud apologists fail to mention, is that a man who is not the biological father (but has been raising the child all along thinking he is in fact the father) IS SCREWED BY THE COURTS WHEN IT COMES TO CUSTODY.
As in, since he is “not the father”, HE CANNOT GET CUSTODY OR VISITATION in the event of a divorce. However, he must continue to pay child support.
Father enough to pay child support, but not father enough for custody or visitation.
That is the reality of the misandrist legal system.
Anyone care to defend that? Rhetorical question – no one can defend it.
It’s just that Hugo and his allies don’t care a whit.
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figleaf,
your entire comment is premised on a man – Ted, here – making a choice of his own accord and with honest information from Jill. the man was not given full information to make a decision that he deserves to be able to make.
nobody gave him that opportunity. it doesn’t matter how things are now; this is a moral question, and it should be thought of as a hypothetical – as in, what would you do right here, right now if the same situation presented itself.
Hi MC,
Actually they do not adhere to that philosophy. The simple matter is, if they truly believed this, they would not try to have biological children themselves, but would rather adopt or take care of foster care children.
Here are a couple of people who actually believe this by judging from their actions…
Sœur Emmanuelle
And
Mother Teresa
What they are arguing is they would not stop loving a child, if they found out they were not the biological dad later.
The thing is Hugo and others are defensibly deflecting this issue on purpose to make it seem like most of the male posters/mra would stop loving the child, when only a couple of them said they would.
The bottom line is twofold…
A person, if possible, should still be a parent to a child they raise even, if they found out they were not genetically related with in some time period (I do not an exact range myself).
Second, I personally do not judge Hugo to strongly because I believe because of medical reasons that I’m currently not capable of taking care of children myself (at least primary parent) and I can’t rule out that I may have done the same thing, if I were in his situation. There is one difference; however,
I do believe Hugo is at peace with this issue because he decided to post it; however, I know that if I were in that situation I would still feel guilty about and would not post it. I understand that he felt that he made the best decision in his case, but IMO it would not be good enough for me.
Finally, I think Hosea kind of goes through somewhat of a similar yet even rougher situation. Here is a quick summary from the wiki link…
Thanks for reading,
Harold
Oops here are the links re-posted.
Sœur Emmanuelle
And
Mother Teresa
And
Hosea
Speaking of links, did you see this from Twitter? http://www.crimeandfederalism.com/2011/07/hugo-schwyzer-alpha-of-the-century.html
It’s supposed to be sarcastic, but so much of thei r hatred of Hugo obviously can be seen to be rooted in sexual jealousy. Male feminists are supposed to be these limp-wristed effeminate gamma males who can’t get laid. And Hugo,a famous male feminist is a man of only slightly above average looks but tremendous presence and charm. He not only got laid but was and is remembered fondly by the women he hooked up with.
Another link: http://hugoschwyzer.net/2010/12/15/the-right-to-pursue-not-the-right-to-have-a-response-to-miguel-on-sexual-entitlement/ I wrote this comment (I needed to go to Miguel’s blog to find it again):
I know a woman who was one of Hugo’s lovers back in the day, and I don’t think Hugo will mind my paraphrasing her description of him as a “hot nerd, sexy but borderline neurotic.” Her view is that Hugo is way too hard on himself for how he acted. She never saw his sexuality as predatory, but more as fun-loving and playful. Absolutely not aggressive. Her view, which I have permission to put here, is that Hugo tends to paint a darker picture of his own behavior than is accurate. He doesn’t always realize it took two to tango, and he has this habit of exaggerating his own faults.
Hi Alexa
I read that as your pro-paternity fraud arguments failing followed by you falling back on an attempt at sexual shaming, rather than conceding that paternity fraud is wrong.
Hi Alexa, I’m not sure if you are addressing the following comment to me directly or just giving link for everybody at once.
Alexa type:
Is this just information for everyone, or do you have a specific question that you want to ask me about it?
(Note: Despite being involved in IT, I do not use twitter)
Thanks,
Harold
Alexa,
Get real. I see you’re just trying to marginalize those that are criticizing Hugo’s and Jill’s immoral behavior.
People are coming out of the woodwork to criticize him *specifically* for this incident which shows that this has nothing to do with whatever charm or ability to get sex that Hugo may possess.
My thinking is that the people that are defending Hugo – and you, Alexa, may be included here, I’m not sure – are former students of his. Which speaks highly of his “charm”, as you call it, but very little about whether we can objectively say that he resembles a good person in all of this.
And there you have it folks, it turns out that it’s perfectly fine for Hugo to impregnate other men’s wives because Hugo is a hot and sexy college professor and other women on this blog want to boink him too. I’m heading over to Feminism 101 today because I obviously need to review where it says that all the problems with the Patriarchy are caused by fugly men at the bottom of the food chain.
Oh, and anyone who has a problem with that, you’re just fugly and can’t get laid. So you better feel lucky someone tricks you into raising Hugo’s spawn thinking it was your own. Because nobody would ACTUALLY want to have sex with you if it really came down to it.
Most people are missing the point here bc most people are stupid and self serving. The completely amoral and selfish ways women and feminists think are always amusing and entertaining. The real issue is NOT whether a man should completely accept a child he found out is not his. That is a different subject and it is being used to deflect the real issue which is being honest about paternity.
When it is convenient for women, biological paternity is one of the MOST important things. If a woman does not have or does not deceive another man to raise a kid, they will move heaven and earth to make sure the biological father pays for “his” child. He is VERY important. If he isn’t involved she will scream to the heavens what a horrible father he is. If the circumstances happen to benefit her to not have him involved, suddenly biology counts for nothing and he shouldn’t even be considered the father.
To generalize it more, whenever men deceive, are dishonest or do even the smallest things women do not like they are evil and exerting the horrible patriarchy over the innocent women. When women do the most immoral, deceitful things it is always rationalized away in some illogical claptrap of bullshit.
Can and do men raise kids willingly that aren’t biologically theirs? Sure, it happens all the time. The point is they have the right to know upfront so they can willingly make their own decision to do so. Anything else is just dishonest and wrongheaded.
Or perhaps it is because of the intensity of that love that a man would want to choose to form that bond with a child rather than be conned into it. I am not a father, but I am a godfather. I have been with my godson every day of his life. I could not imagine I could love anyone I had not grown up with as much as I love him, and it took me years to get used to how unconditionally he loves me. It took everything I had to finally accept that this person who has no reason to like me literally considers me his second father.
For someone to play with that love, to trick me into feeling this way, to con me for their own selfish benefits, to toy my feelings and make me go through all the emotional upheaval it took for me to overcome the crap I grew up with, there is no justification for that. It is sick on the most fundamental level. I was abused for fourteen years, literally half my life, and that would be nothing compared to the hurt that tricking me into a loving a child would cause me.
It would make it worse if the person who would do this did so because she thought I would make the best father. If I am such great fatherhood material, do you not think I am good enough tell that the child might not be mine?
Honestly, no one should have to explain why this is wrong. Men are not hypothetical anecdotes. They are real-life human beings, and no father or man I know would be fine with his wife or girlfriend or some woman he screwed lying to him about whether it is his child. There is no amount of “real men” and men or “real fathers” bull that will change that. A man and a father would want to know because he would want to willingly father the child, not be tricked into it.
Okay, so what really bothers me about all of this is that, I think, cuckolding is an issue that should be right up a feminist’s alley (to be fair, to the enlightened feminists it is). Not only is it a pretty straightforward matter of social justice, but it’s clearly linked to the theory of patriarchy. After all, from an ontological perspective, patriarchy comes into existence from actions such as Hugo and Jill’s. It’s not as if anyone really believes that one day in a prehistoric cave the men had a leadership meeting and decided to convene the patriarchy in order to oppress women. While some feminists seem to recognize that men’s fears of cuckolding have something to do with with how patriarchy comes into existence, they seem to fail to recognize the wrongfulness of cuckolding itself, as if that were somehow besides the point.
But it’s not besides the point! When we talk about the qualities that we as a society want to bring with us into the future, who would feminists choose – someone like Hugo, or someone like Ted? Notwithstanding that Hugo seemingly straightened himself out in later years, at the time the choice was between a mentally unstable, self destructive, reckless man, and a man who was a loving, nurturing, fit father. Even from a feminist perspective, it seems completely outrageous to think that a suitable father should unwittingly raise the children of a completely unsuitable father. This has nothing to do with passing on the DNA of one versus another and everything to do with the immediate social values encapsulated by the transaction. It says to every man in the world that, hey, it’s okay to be a reckless fuck-up, a drain on our society, an absentee father who would completely fuck up the lives of women and their children. That, my fellow gentlemen, is perfectly fine because as long as you can still fuck, women will take it upon themselves to find a much better man than you to raise your kids for you and none will be the wiser
So what happens when feminists themselves defend the practice of cuckolding and fall completely silent when someone points out that, hey, you know, it’s actually morally and ethically wrong? What happens is that feminism defeats its own purpose.
As I said earlier, sorry about my intemperate remarks. They distract from positive, purposeful things I could be saying in regards to…
@Mike (Jul 13th, 2011 at 12:30 pm) “The reality of cuckholding, and its legal implications in many states, is far harsher than you are making it out to be here. In many cases, a man who genuinely loves a child who is not genetically his can be denied basic fatherly rights (such as visitation) while being bilked for child support payments.”
Now this is something I think we all need to get behind. It’s wrong from an MRA perspective, it’s wrong from a feminist perspective, and it’s wrong from a justice perspective.
There’s simply no reason on earth why the justice system should either give preference to a non-custodial male over a non-custodial female, any more than they give preference to a non-custodial relative (like grandparents) over a custodial mother. Furthermore, that the courts should dunn a custodial father for child support rather than, say, requiring the biological father to pay back child support to the custodial father is just crazy.
The way to fix that, though, isn’t egg each other on to see who could most ruthlessly shatter the life of an innocent child who loves you unconditionally. While I may have overstated it above I think anyone with the will, the power, and intensity to do that has the power to change the world. So why get unnecessarily lost in anger, alienation, and powerlessness?
Instead it’s, you know, putting together cases, forming credible organizations, forming credible alliances with groups that don’t believe one gender should be treated differently from another either under either law or tradition, and mounting legal challenges and lobbying initiatives to change laws that not only pre-date feminism but predate the invention the printing press, the crossbow, the steam engine, and the germ theory of disease!
I’ll go one step further and say that based on mainstream feminist legal theory going back at least to the early 2000s the kind of reductio ad absurdum, “zero tolerance” of child-support laws that are a product of adherence to gender-neutral language rather than gender-neutral outcomes, you’d find there’s already a fair amount of feminist-forward law review articles, policy recommendations, and even case law that could be marshaled to bring an end to these sorts of egregious injustices.
There’s nothing wrong with getting angry (goodness knows I get angry.) But the old 70s feminists were mistaken that the best course of action is to stay angry. Staying angry closes rather than widens paths to success.
Which is why, once again, I apologize for my intemperate remarks above. I’d much rather end this particular class of very real injustice rather than score points: the (previously unaware) custodial father of a child should always receive far more consideration than a biological but deliberately or even inadvertently absentee one. Particularly in instances where divorce and child-custody are concerned.
figleaf
Also, regarding paternity fraud? Let’s just be clear about that: the guilty party or parties should be held accountable for their disgraceful, unethical, and immoral acts. Furthermore, I believe society should insure that the wronged, custodial father’s relationship with his child should be protected, preserved, and supported. Definitely at the expense of the biological father, and on exactly the same standing in terms of custody with the mother as if he was the biological father instead.
In other words the people who should be punished for paternity fraud are the biological mothers and fathers who perpetrate it, not custodial fathers and their children who are joint victims of it.
figleaf
figleaf, you’re still deflecting. This has nothing to do with the moral gray areas that come up decades after the fact. It has to do with the fact itself. I think that what you’re failing to recognize is the direct link between how much harm could be done were the truth to come out with the sheer wrongfulness of cuckolding. Everything that you’ve said is actually an argument against cuckolding, against letting it happen in the first place. So the solution has nothing to do with sitting around a campfire singing kumbaya and letting bygones be bygones.
It’s obvious now that your recognize the real harm that can result from cuckolding – the lives of fathers and children can be ruined in numerous ways because of a deceitful woman. It’s also heartening to see you recognize the injustice of the justice system in our society that punishes the victims, not the perpetrators, were the truth about cuckolding to come out.
So here’s a solution that I’m wondering if you could get behind. If a woman cuckolds, then in the event of a divorce, the legal system addresses this by depriving her of her parental rights and giving the child over to the loving parent who was tricked into being a father. Cuckolding a man should be seen as the reckless endangerment of a child’s future, which is what it is. It is NOT in the best interests of any child to withhold the truth from the potential father. It is a clear demonstration of an unfit parent. Just as Hugo was an unfit parent, so was Jill. They were both reckless individuals who really put a kid’s future in jeopardy by the entirety of their relationship together and its outcome. So, can you get behind that?
@Dungone: “Not only is it a pretty straightforward matter of social justice, but it’s clearly linked to the theory of patriarchy.”
This too. In cases of bassinet switches and IVF/egg/sperm mixups can happen where none of the parents involved are responsible and thus navigating an optimal solution is going to be tricky.
Those cases aren’t directly relevant, though, to cases where paternity is deliberately obscured from the caregiver father by the mother and/or biological father.
That’s because in “cuckoldry” cases, and unlike hospital mix-up ones, at least one of the biological parents is culpable and is knowingly allowing a… well.. inviolable bond to form between a parent and child while failing to disclose it’s foundation. (As numerous people on both sides have pointed out, there’s no real controversy men being fathers to children they know aren’t biologically theirs.)
In in these cases the only claims a biological father has over a caregiver father are Old Testament, Capital-P, men-with-long-beards-and-tall-hats-patriarchy patriarchal claims. On any other planet, in any other universe, where the old guys with beards and hats didn’t make shit up about “bloodlines” custody disputes that tried to privilege a biological father over a caregiver father wouldn’t make it through a Xerox machine, let alone the court system.
figleaf
“But the question we’re trying to answer is, did Jill behave ethically at the time?”
No, I don’t think so, b/c we all need access to information in order to make decisions, and Ted was denied access to information which was important to a decision he had on-hand at a critical point in his life. Ted should have been told. I think that maybe the reason he was not told is that Jill didn’t want to have an abortion, which would have been a likely consequence of her cluing him in, but she should have told him nevertheless.
“Or by analogy, would it be ethical for a hospital to surreptitiously switch babies?”
You know, one of the reasons this analogy doesn’t hold up for me is that it’s so improbable that a hospital would do that. They’d have nothing to gain, much to lose, and the whole damn thing would be more trouble than it’d be worth. OTOH, it’s not that unlikely that a hospital might mix babies up by accident, especially under a rubric which says that mothers are amateurs and that doctors are professionals, and that the preference is to be given to the priorities of the professionals. I do understand you thus far: if you want to focus on the consequences emanating from the Phenomenon of the Switched Bassinets, you will approach the Switched Baby Problem from the standpoint of the second situation, but if you want to underscore the villainy practiced by the Bassinet Switchers, you will approach it from standpoint of the first. My problem with that methodology is that I don’t see what good it does. Jill and Mr. Schwyzer are the Witch and the Devil if you like. That changes their mutual brangle exactly how?
“Bekabot, sorry, but your arguments are stupid.
That may have been what Ann Landers said 40 years ago, that applied to a situation 40 years ago.”
I fail to grasp the difference here. A switched (misassigned) baby is a switched baby, 40 or 100 years ago, or in the Paleolithic or the Neolithic, or today, or 1200 years from now.
“Nowadays, you can bet that if a mother found out that the hospital had in fact mixed up her child, there would be no one who would say ‘oh, no big deal, don’t even talk about it, just STFU.’
There would in fact be hell to pay.”
If your point is that our society has gotten steadily more litigious during the last half-century or so then, yes, I’ve noticed that, and I don’t think it’s a good thing.
“When we talk about the qualities that we as a society want to bring with us into the future, who would feminists choose – someone like Hugo, or someone like Ted?”
But the thing is, dungone, Jill did pick Ted. That’s what’s gotten all you guys so knotted up, remember? Jill–ultimately–picked Ted, thereby saddling Ted with obligations of which the thought causes you to wince, whereas Mr. Schwyzer got to put in a few additional years of knocking-around. Apparently, this makes Mr. Schwyzer the winner. If that’s your take on the matter and if your take provokes you to outrage, please bear in mind that you are the one doing the scorekeeping, not me.
I mean, their answer is that men should be told and expect at the beginning that they won’t necessarily have relationships with their biological children a la Mosuo or other “avuncular” societies where the male “parents” are the nearest male blood relatives on the mother’s side.
In these situations, the concept of cuckolding doesn’t even exist. No obligations are created by sex.
The problem with this, of course, is that men now *do* know and expect to have some connection to their biological children, widespread implementation of this particular utopia is not really in the cards.
Figleaf:
How about that whole, oh, LYING thing? There are just as many folk upset about that as the whole “conditional love” / DNA garbage. Hell, my brother adopted and raised a child that was not his, and loved her regardless, but he did so KNOWINGLY and no one lied to him or tricked him. Ted had no choice and no consent or any other such thing. Oddly enough, as a woman, a great many folk here would champion my right to choose to be a mother, or NOT choose to be a mother, and if being a mother was forced on me or I was tricked into it, folk would be in a uproar…well, if feminism is going for equality- Ted should get the same consideration and choices I would…and if those things are taken from him, it should earn the same outrage it would earn outta folk that I would earn.
This is a bit disingenuous because you’ve made the “confessional style” to be the primary mode of your “online” advocacy, and your take on male feminism is very clearly in almost all your recent writings focused on self-improvement. This is in the manner that places like the GMP are largely focused on advocacy through self-improvement.
It sounds like a sort of equivocation to decide that in some circumstances but not others your writing about men, fatherhood, marriage, sex, relationships, self-image, roots of violence, etc, etc, are a legitimate portion of your advocacy. (Which they are, considering that they are the bulk of your writing.)
You have made your story about your recovery, your sobriety, your previous relationships, and the dividing line between then and now (e.g., “Eirasexual”) into a metaphor about pre- and post-patriarchal manhood. So to forgive yourself (and Jill) about something that happened in the past is to move those actions from “before the line” to “after the line”.
So yes, if it is the case that you don’t think that this is how male feminists and feminism “think”, you should indeed put in a disclaimer about it. Otherwise, dragging out for several threads voluntarily suggests that you have a point of principle to make from your position of privilege.
I’ll say this: this episode has been invaluable to me in exemplifying and explaining to myself my own discomfort with the “confessional” and “self-help” styles of political/social online advocacy—as opposed to the broad-sense “cynical”, cui bono style that I definitely favour. For one thing, it enables the equivocation in which you are now partaking. For another thing, advocacy for social justice necessarily involves making normative statements about ethics—but it’s not clear the normative ethical statement you are making other than a nearly inarguable one that young children deserve the care of those who are raising them.
figleaf,
your recent comments here seem a far cry from the one you left yesterday that Hugo is toting around the internet as evidence that someone “gets him”.
you seem to agree that Hugo and Jill are the jerks here and they deserve moral condemnation for their behavior 14 years ago. and that Hugo gives all decision rights to Jill rather than Ted is also striking. Hugo, conveniently, wants to ignore the moral questions and only address pragmatic issues such as what is best for the kid now?
Hi Mandos,
I just want to credit you for thinking of the best analogy first. I thought I had figured it out, but you beat me to it… rats reminder #24343098 that I’m not as clever as I believe:).
Mandos analogy:
Regards,
Harold
“When Ted and I ejaculated inside of her without a condom, at that moment we were “signing on” for the consequences of what might happen.”
Imagine that, a feminist that’s against abortion! That’s what happens when you apply the same logic when you reverse the genders.
“It’s supposed to be sarcastic, but so much of thei r hatred of Hugo obviously can be seen to be rooted in sexual jealousy. Male feminists are supposed to be these limp-wristed effeminate gamma males who can’t get laid. And Hugo,a famous male feminist is a man of only slightly above average looks but tremendous presence and charm. He not only got laid but was and is remembered fondly by the women he hooked up with. ”
Alexa: Leaving off the fact that this is irrelevant to whether paternity fraud is ethical or not: All this happened BEFORE Hugo saw the light and found religion – i.e. feminism.
“I fail to grasp the difference here. A switched (misassigned) baby is a switched baby, 40 or 100 years ago, or in the Paleolithic or the Neolithic, or today, or 1200 years from now.”
Bekabot – Here are the situations:
A woman writing to Ann Landers 40 years ago saying “My child sucks he’s not mine right lololol”; Ann Landers tells her to fuck off.
A man finds out his wife lied to him about his child; it in fact is not his biological child. Alternatively, a woman is told by the hospital: “Oops, we switched your kids, you’ve been raising someone else’s kid for 8 years.”
And you are saying you don’t see the difference between the two situations? If that’s the case, you lack basic reasoning.
“If your point is that our society has gotten steadily more litigious during the last half-century or so then, yes, I’ve noticed that, and I don’t think it’s a good thing.”
Sorry, but in fact a woman who found out she was accidentally (or worse yet, deliberately) lead into raising a child she thought was hers but actually wasn’t would still have been horrified and upset.
You’re simply deluded if you think otherwise.
And you’re disgusting in proclaiming that “Ted is the winner here; he got picked!”
As if being “picked” by a lying and selfish woman is such a good thing.
Hi Ren, your statement rocks!
Here is the direct link to it…
Ren rocks!
Two thumbs up!
Regards,
Harold
“So in this moral universe, Ms. Promiscuity only has to let/persuade more than one man to have sex with her in one week; she then gets to choose who will be the father and she need never tell all of them what was going on, ie., that some other man/men might be the father. Ms. Promiscuity gets over big time, like Jill did here.”
Hence why all men should require a paternity test at birth. I’d go so far to say it should be mandatory. Cost is negligible, doubly so compared to the mass of bills already associated with child birth.
I personally feel paternity fraud should be formally criminalized, just as all fraud already is. It’s theft of resources, not to mention the emotional and psychological damage it does to men and children when they find out. (often when the child falls seriously ill–thanks for the double whammy mom!) And then there’s the reproductive opportunity cost for duped men. To put this into perspective, it’s like if a woman was raped and forced to have the child and then raise it. THAT is what cuckolded really means.
“Hence why all men should require a paternity test at birth. I’d go so far to say it should be mandatory. Cost is negligible, doubly so compared to the mass of bills already associated with child birth.”
I don’t think this is an entirely bad idea, b/c if such a practice were put in place all the MRA/MGTOW-type men (the ones born with their scorecards in their hands, the it-better-share-my-eye-color-or-I’m-sending-it-back-to-the-warehouse guys) would have one less thing to crab about. (And the others would be given some extra reassurance to be getting on with.)
Beka, please stop promoting the disgusting lie that MRAs are the only men who care about paternity, or that men who do care about paternity are selfish / evil.
Unless you also believe that women, who are just as concerned with genetics (that’s a fact by the way, evidence below), are likewise disgusting, selfish, and evil?
http://whatmenthinkofwomen.blogspot.com/2011/07/not-mothers-child-hell-breaks-loose.html
Right. I think what is driving many of the men here (not all of whom identify as MRA/MGTOW btw) to distraction is Hugo’s claim that Jill behaved ethically. Actually, Jill did Ted a great wrong, but Ted’s rather stuck in it now even if he did find out.
I think we might connect the two situations by looking at liability. Hospitals do mix babies up by accident occasionally apparently, and we might ask, how much liability should they bear legally? This will give us some insight into how much wrong has been done to a mother (and typically father also) to be given someone else’s child to raise.
@Ren: Not sure about Hugo and all these other folks. It only just occurred to me a few minutes ago that everyone was talking about a real scenario, let alone that Hugo Schwyzer was involved.
I may or may not go find out what all that fuss is about, but since I wasn’t even marginally aware of it it obviously has zero bearing either on my initial, visceral anger or my subsequent attempts at moderation.
Instead what set me of hard enough to break blood vessels in my eyes was this sentence from someone named Amir:
Sorry. Whatever Hugo did or didn’t do, whatever his partners or their partners did or didn’t do, has no, zero, none bearing on the sheer vicious inhumanity and unmanliness in that single sentence.
My reactions were all to that sentence and the mindset it represents. That’s it. One sentence (plus maybe a little to much enthusiasm for the sentiment in comments) set me off and, to be honest, as a man and a father still has me upset.
That said, the points I said about how caregiver vs. biological fathers should be ranked still stands, even if it’s this guy Ted who’ll reap the benefits of fatherhood and Hugo who’s relinquished them. And the points I raised about how society and the courts should favor caregiver fathers over biological fathers and in equal accordance with the biological mother in questions of custody and support when custody is demanded still stands, even in the unlikely event Hugo were to attempt to intrude into the lives of Ted and Ted’s son. And finally, it remains the case that rather than grant Hugo custody but require (!?!?!?) that Ted pay child support anyway (#?#?!?) as has evidently happened elsewhere, there’s literally no reason why men’s and women’s rights activists and any gender activist should cooperate to overturn the bonehaded thing.
Anyway, turning your back on a child who knows no one else but you as a father? Socially, morally, and legally sanctioning duplicitous biological parents for deceiving a caretaker parent? Those are two incredibly different things, and therefore there’s no reason why I can’t hold equally different opinions about them.
figleaf
Huge difference between a hospital’s accident, and Hugo’s collusion to engage in a conspiracy to commit paternity fraud.
Hugo has an enormous conflict of interest here. There is no way to take his statements here as anything other than self-serving.
Hugo potentially still has an enormous financial liability to take care of Alastair that might be exercised should something happen to Ted.
And frankly, if I read a followup story of Ted going after Hugo? That would be a nice way to start the day.
As to the question of withdrawing love from an unrelated child one has cared for under the misapprehension of paternity, I’m going to take a middle view. But I don’t believe a child’s rights a paramount, everyone has rights and interests, and they should be balanced fairly.
There is a fair amount of variation in how much genetic parenthood means to different people, both men and women. Some couples choose to adopt, and I doubt they love their adopted children any less. Other couples spend vast sums on infertility treatment in a desperate hope of conception. And plenty of women choose the pain and risk of childbirth.
But what about discovering a child one has already invested in is not one’s own? For some men it might make little difference. Maybe for some it might mean a total withdrawal of all love and commitment, and that’s contemptible and even inhuman. For others, though, it might make some relative difference, and even though the child might proportionally suffer, I don’t think that’s necessarily entirely wrong. Instead, that blame should be shared with the child’s actual father who owed his child years of love, support and investment but gave nothing.
By the way, I think this genetic paternity thing runs both ways. If I discovered I had a 13yo child I’d never known about, for instance, I’d want to get to know them and even work towards a parental relationship.
As for Hugo’s self-forgiveness, if he is Alistair’s father, he acquired parental responsibilities towards him. Has he ethically discharged those responsibilities by allowing another man to unwittingly raise him? Again, let us assume that the child is not the only one with rights and interests.
“It is love, not sperm, that makes a great dad.”
If genes are truly that unimportant Monsieur Schwyzer, then you should recount the whole story honestly to Ted, face to face. I suspect he’ll have a different take on the matter though.
I wonder why when hospitals mix up babies, it leads to huge lawsuits? I guess they never got the “sperm doesn’t matter” memo either…
Since this has been outed, I’m not sure what outcome to root for. On the one hand Ted might finally get some justice if you’re busted, but on the other hand Alistair would discover he’s the spawn of a clownish, and nauseatingly self-righteous weasel.
A simple observation: Hugo is an unreliable narrator.
A longer reply:
My wife is not a genetic contributor to our oldest son’s 23 pairs o’ chromosomes. She has been his mother for 95% of his life. She has done all the work of mothering him.
That’s neither here nor there when it comes to her parental rights. Since my ex- has never been deprived of parental rights, my wife has none. She has court outlined responsibilities, as my wife and because I’m still in debt to a lawyer who fought for them, but none of the rights immediately associated with and assigned according to genetic consanguinity.
My ex-, who has little involvement with our son (as in, next to none), can make educational, medical and religious decisions which my wife is not allowed to make. My wife, who has been our son’s active mothering parent for as long as he can remember, cannot legally sign a permission slip, consent form or even take him out of state without prior written permission.
Like it or not, genetic consanguinity does not define a merely moral or personal set of preferences.
It is a function of the state we have. That environment may be unjust, and wholly a function of oppressive relations enforced by culture, law and punishment. But it is nonetheless the environment in which most of us have been formed.
To assume that people are wicked, inhuman or cruel for taking their moral and material environments at face value, or to assume that because matrifocality once existed it ought to immediately persuade people who have no experience with it, is to gild the lily on the way to missing the point entirely.
None of which even begins to address the vile deception which is being justified, here, in the name of a skin thin feminism.
How is this a ‘moral dilemma’? I don’t see it. ‘Moral dilemma’ implies there are two valid sides to the question. There isn’t, there’s a right side and a wrong side, and Mr. Schwyzer is on the wrong side. He’s no better then all the other promiscuous, drug-addicted babydaddies out there who use women for sex, and then let some other luckless schmoe deal with the consequences.
It’s hilarious to me that the usual cultural-liberal, California feminist peanut gallery is hastening to defend Mr. Schwyzer’s outrageous sexual promiscuity. I suppose as long as you defend the right of women to murder their unborn children, everything else is forgiven you.
Dungone is dead right here, as well as the fellow who called Mr. Schwyzer a ‘clownish and nauseatingly self-righteous weasel’. I wonder what Pasadena College authorities are going to think, after all I don’t believe tenure protects you in cases of gross moral turpitude, which this certainly qualifies as.
Re: Hence why all men should require a paternity test at birth.
Never going to happen, because most men are decent enough to assume their wives or girlfriends aren’t sleeping around with promiscuous, hypocritical, feckless drug addicts on the side. And to be honest, most women (outside the nihilist circles that Mr. Schwyzer seems to frequient) don’t cheat on their partners, either.
Hector, I’m charmed both by your devotion to commenting on the blog of someone you despise, and by your insistence on using the honorific before my surname. You’re a gentleman, lad, a misinformed and rage-filled gentleman, but a good sport nonetheless.
“Anyway, turning your back on a child who knows no one else but you as a father? Socially, morally, and legally sanctioning duplicitous biological parents for deceiving a caretaker parent? Those are two incredibly different things, and therefore there’s no reason why I can’t hold equally different opinions about them.”
/agree, this is basically the gist of it.
Wow! Hugo (and so many others on this thread) seem to have the rationalization hamsters on full revs.
The point is, Hugo, that it ISN’T just love that makes a child. A whole heap is down to DNA whether you like it or not. I’m a passionate believer in equality of opportunity and equality of responsibility and you provide a get-out clause for all mothers. The reductio ad absurdum of your assertion is that women should be able to claim any man as the father, as genetics are irrelevant and women should be able to sleep with anyone they choose, whether in a relationship or not.
Ironically, it is your reasoning that is truly patronizing towards women as it absolves them of all responsibility for their actions. Imagine another scenario. You were sleeping with two women at the same time and got them both pregnant. You decided you were only in love with one so you chose to keep quiet about the casual affair and never tell your wife to be. How would women react to you now, Hugo? Would “Laura” above find you so compassionate and understanding or would the invective directed at you make any MRA pale in comparison? This is good old radfem double-standards at full bore. As for Laura equating egalitarianism with cuckoldry, words (and worlds) fail me.
There’s a problem going on here in a lot of the criticism. The truth is that Jill didn’t know which one of us was the biological father. But some of what I’m reading is written as if she and I knew that I was the one who had impregnated her, and we colluded to deceive Ted into thinking he was the baby daddy.
That would be unquestionably unethical. It isn’t remotely close to what happened. Jill didn’t (and perhaps still doesn’t) know who Alastair’s biological father is. In the rare instance where it was equally likely that two very different men might be the daddy, she made a decision to choose the one with whom she could build a life. Deception involves promoting an idea you know to be false. Jill had no such knowledge. Neither did I. There’s a colossal distinction there.
Hypothetical: had this happened in a world without DNA testing, what then should she have done? Had us flip a coin? Be serious, people.
“I think we might connect the two situations by looking at liability. Hospitals do mix babies up by accident occasionally apparently, and we might ask, how much liability should they bear legally? This will give us some insight into how much wrong has been done to a mother (and typically father also) to be given someone else’s child to raise.”
Fine, Sagredo, but first you’re going to have to find Ted (whoever Ted is), then convince him that Mr. Schwyzer is his son’s BabyDaddy, then persuade him to sue.
I wish you luck with your quest.
Actually, the distinction is not as stark as you are putting it. Of *course* it could be either you or Ted. The question is, does Ted know that it could be either, and accepted it freely? If so, then no problem. If not so, then it remains deeply unethical. The entire issue revolves around Ted’s state of knowledge *before* he accepted the responsibility.
Most of your critics have been focused unambiguously on *that* from the very start. Are you now saying that the very basis of the criticism was a miscommunication?
Hugo, I think of all the rationalisations you’ve made in defence of Jill’s behaviour, this has to be the most ridiculous. Most people consider deception to be promoting an idea you don’t know to be true.
For instance, supposing I convinced you that the government owes you money, you’ve got cancer and your teenage daughter is pregnant. Is that deception? I don’t know any of them to be false. Or more prosaically, maybe I just tell you who won a football game when really I have no idea. Is that deception?
Oh no no no, there’s no recourse for men who’ve been deceived so. I’m merely trying to establish responsibility for this mess; I don’t have an answer for what’s to be done now.
The exact same thing: told Ted the truth.
“Deception involves promoting an idea you know to be false. Jill had no such knowledge. Neither did I. There’s a colossal distinction there.”
Damn, Hugo, who could guess you were an academic? This kind of logic-chopping equivocation is risible. She was sleeping with two guys at the same time; you were too selfish to take responsibility for raising a kid. There’s a word for this and it isn’t love; it’s convenience.
You’re rationalizing an extremely dubious moral decision. Technically, you didn’t know who the father was, so you did nothing wrong, right? British civil servants used to call this “being economical with the truth” or “terminological inexactitude”. You BOTH knew there was a 50/50 chance it wasn’t Ted’s child. You BOTH knew she was sleeping with two men at the same time. I’m guessing Ted wouldn’t have been quite so thrilled about the “friends with benefits” relationship. That’s why you didn’t tell him which, of course, implies that you had something to hide. You and Jill were operating in full knowledge of all possible outcomes, Ted was not. To pretend “There’s a colossal distinction there” is the captious cynicism of the shyster (Schwyzer) lawyer.
Besides, all of this DID happen in an era of DNA testing. Be serious Hugo, but more importantly, stop being disingenuous. There wasn’t a trace of nobility in the actions of either Jill or you, just amoral pragmatism. The only one who comes out of this well is poor Ted.
So let me ask a question to all the Hugo-haters. Two questions, actually.
#1. What should Hugo do about Ted and Jill now? Explain your answer.
#2. Back when Jill told Hugo that she was pregnant and was going to marry Ted even though she was not sure about the baby’s father; what should Hugo have done? Should he have told Ted anyway? Should he have said, “No, marry me” even though he was both unwilling and obviously incapable of being a husband?
He already screwed her without a condom, wouldn’t it be screwing her over more to ruin this chance of happiness she had? What exactly should he have done, given that he was morally responsible to Jill for the child that might have been his.
So what should he have done when Jill told him? Explain yur answer.
Coming from an extended family where half-siblings and adoptees and step-children abound
Perhaps that’s your problem.
“Hypothetical: had this happened in a world without DNA testing, what then should she have done? Had us flip a coin? Be serious, people.”
How is this so hard? She should have told both men the truth and consigned herself to the possibility of raising the kid as a single mother or getting an abortion. Are you going to ask what if there was no abortion? What are we getting rid of next, penicillin? She acted against the best interest of her child the moment she had unprotected sex with several men to whom she wasn’t married. No one owes her a marriage. If she really cared about this then she would have acted responsibly from the beginning. And FYI there are other ways to at least rule out paternity, for example blood type.
But let’s say we really had absolutely no way to find out who the real father was and she just decided to do the right thing and tell everyone the truth. And let’s say everyone was pissed and didn’t want anything to do with her and she had to go to court to figure out who was on the hook for child support. Do you honestly think that if all 3 of you were standing in front of a family law judge, she would say that well, alright, since Ted has his shit together and Ted is rich, then in the best interest of the child we’ll just make Ted the father and you get off scot-free. Is that really how “best interest of the child” gets determined? Or did I miss the part of the story where they were handing out black robes and gavels to you and Jill to make up your own family law decisions?
Yet, all of that is just entertaining your hypothetical. The reality you actually have to face is that you did not get a test in spite of them being available. So your entire argument is moot. Everything about Jill not knowing the real father completely falls flat on its face. Here’s what would really happen if Jill told the truth to everyone involved and got you guys tested. Either one of you could have forgiven her and married her anyway, whether or not the child was really yours. And if Ted really was the father but no longer wished to marry her, he’d still be on the hook for child support. If you were the father, you’d be on the hook. To the government, the people who actually have the right to arbitrate what the best interest of the child is, the only thing that would have matters is who the biological father is.
3) If I had your moral compass then the last time I had a condom break I should have told the girl to go fuck a rich dude and tell him he’s the daddy to get me off the hook. Best interests of the child, no? If the girl was anything like Jill I’m sure she’d think that was a splendid idea and go for it. (But that’s not me. I had a baby scare from a condom that slipped off a few months ago and I secretly hoped it was true because I’d love to start a family, but I respected that my girlfriend wasn’t ready for that so I was prepared to support whatever decision she made.)
Alexa,
Give Ted the choice. Ted was deliberately denied all choice. Perhaps he would have been willing to raise a child not his biological own. Perhaps not.
But, with collusive effort and deliberate forethought, Hugo and Jill deprived Ted of the opportunity to make his own choice.
Whether or not we live in the sort of society which encourages men to view the proceeds of a woman’s uterus as property, based on familial heritage, is a separate issue. Taken as a separate issue, it’s certainly reasonable to argue that not treating children as possessions, and women as their manufacturers, is preferred to the current set of enforced norms and cultural conditions.
But to confuse that with the planned deception of Ted, and the denial to him of any choice, is to degrade the value of the greater social issue.
Ted should have been given a choice to pursue testing, to consider whether he was ready or willing to parent a child, and to base his marriage upon full disclosure, instead of lies.
@Jack, wrong. Remember the original post? Hugo wrote that Jill told Ted first, because they got engaged at Christmas but Hugo didn’t find out until New Year’s Day. I know Hugo tweaked the dates, but I’ve read the post over and over and over and it is clear to me Ted knew Jill was pregnant before Hugo did. (Hugo, correct me if this is wrong, please!)
So given that they were already engaged what was Hugo supposed to do? Break up the engagement? How was he colluding with Jill based on the timing of this?
You guys are so eager to nail Hugo you make up a whole new timeline and story that wasn’t in the original essay.
Alexa,
You are entitled to believe I’m wrong, but I don’t believe you are responding to the argument I actually made.
Ted’s engagement to Jill is not an actual marriage. It’s an informal, wholly unbinding decisions to enter into an actually binding contract at some later date.
It doesn’t matter who knew Jill was pregnant first. The knowledge of that pregnancy isn’t the issue. The knowledge of which man was legally and morally obligated to support the issue of that pregnancy, should Jill exercise her choice to carry it to term, is the issue.
As for some imputed eagerness to “nail” Hugo, I have never commented on this blog before, and don’t know anything about him. I followed a link here from “Renegade Evolution” and decided to comment on the story in question because I found the deception reprehensible.
The timeline of discovery has no bearing on that. The knowledge that before Jill and Ted entered a legally binding contract, and Ted undertook to support a child, the two parties with fuller knowledge deliberately deprived the third of that information.
Ted was never given a choice to be a full faith participant. It doesn’t matter one whit penny if he knew of Jill’s condition before Hugo was notified. It matters only that, upon knowing that Jill was pregnant and possibly carrying a child not his own, Hugo colluded with Jill to deny to Ted the knowledge he would need to be a full participant.
They chose concealment instead of disclosure, with Jill undertaking a marriage on the commencement of a lie.
Hector, I’m a “cultural-liberal, California (southern in fact) feminist” and I can see how this is just silly.
Hugo, you’ve said that the following situation is not deception: sleeping with more than one man within the same week, conceiving a child, letting one of the men raise the child as his own while WITHHOLDING the fact that he MAY not be the biological father. What does actual deception look like to you?
“she made a decision to choose the one with whom she could build a life” and she made it without Ted having a fair say. I get that her decision wasn’t biologically based. That’s a different story. But she made the decision without saying “Hey Ted, don’t think that we have to build a life together because of this pregnancy. I might have conceived with another man.” That is so messed up.
As someone else said, a woman could just sleep with her long-term partner shortly after cheating, put a bit of doubt in her own mind, and claim that she isn’t lying about paternity because she isn’t 100% sure who the father is. That would be a nice loophole if paternity testing didn’t exist. BTW I’m not assuming that Hugo is the biological father. It’s the fact that Ted was never told and that this is somehow OK in Hugo’s community that is… silly.
“#1. What should Hugo do about Ted and Jill now? Explain your answer.
#2. Back when Jill told Hugo that she was pregnant and was going to marry Ted even though she was not sure about the baby’s father; what should Hugo have done?”
1) Completely irrelevant! Hugo claims that he and Jill both made the right choice at the time. Now, what should he do? Well he’s a Christian now, so he can always try praying and hope it really works. He should sit around and pray that Jill never gets the sudden idea that Hugo is the better “father” should something happen to Ted or a bitter custody battle ensues between the two. Now, he should hope that when Alastair and his siblings get old enough, their physical differences don’t look so blatantly different that Ted decides to get a paternity test himself, finds out a shocking truth, has his marriage fall apart and his life ruined, etc., because of things that could have been easily mitigated years ago. And he better pray that when Alastair gets older, he doesn’t miss out on some potential cure or early diagnosis of a medical condition because his doctor didn’t know who the real father was, possibly sending Alastair to an early grave for which Jill and Hugo would be entirely at fault. I guess that’s what Hugo can do now.
2) He and Jill should have discretely gotten tested and found out for sure if Ted was the father. If Ted wasn’t the father, then who the fuck cares how much Jill loves him and wishes she could marry him? Honestly, what does love have to do with it? If it’s not Ted’s kid, then it’s not his fucking kid and she has no right to present it to him as such and pressure him into marriage. Do you disagree with that? And if she refused to get a test, he should have gone straight to Ted to tell the truth. She would not have refused.
Perhaps one of the underlying assumptions which informs the pro-deception line of argument is that the promise to marry is also equally and immediately a promise to care for all offspring.
If that’s the case (and I don’t honestly see any reason why it must necessarily be so), then Ted should still have been told that Jill’s pregnancy and child, should she chose to birth it, might not be his own.
Then, he would have the opportunity to avoid a marriage which obligated him to care for a child to whom he could not feel the appropriate loyalty.
Especially since we are discussing an actual instance where he could have been given this information far in advance of the birth of that child, which would have prevented what now might occur – a revelation which troubles and maybe even threatens a thirteen year old relationship which was built upon a deception.
I will speak only to personal experience to illustrate how devastating this can be: I did not find out until I was thirteen years old that the man whose name I bore, who raised me, who taught me the local plants, and the stars of the night skies, was not by biological father.
He didn’t cease to be my father – but our relationship was never the same (and nor was it with my mother), because I knew I had been told a lie. That deception didn’t rewrite our history. It didn’t change the fact that he had been a capable parent. I had all the same memories. Only now – and at a terribly vulnerable age, right in the midst of intense social and peer pressure, and during the height of puberty – they were irrevocably colored by the knowledge that my parents never trusted me with a truth that, if I’d been raised with it, would have been no big thing.
The failure of trust is the failure of familial loyalty, love and affection.
And it doesn’t stay contained within the original family unit. We carry our memories and wounds with us.
Which is why this ought to also be a feminist issue. I am reminded of a co-worker who, after being abused by her boyfriend, could no longer trust any man. The failure of her capacity to trust did not remain isolated within the original relationship. It, following a perfectly understandable course of development, extended to her relationships with all men.
I felt the same way, as a thirteen year old child. If my parents could lie to me about this, what else did they find worthy of deception? Were all adults cheats and liars? Could I trust anyone, if not my parents?
From Alexa,
It turns out that the original post is very explicit that Ted was in a state of ignorance about the ambiguity of his paternity:
Whether Ted knew or didn’t know that Jill was pregnant before Hugo did is besides the point. There was a point at which Ted was in a state of ignorance about the reasons for and nature of his commitment to Jill—that is unequivocally true.
There was even a point, before any legal commitments had been raised, and certainly before the child was born and became a social entity in his own right, that both Jill AND Hugo were in the know, and Ted was in a state of ignorance.
The question remains whether this it was ethical of Jill and Hugo to let Ted make a commitment to Alastair while Ted was in a state of ignorance.
This is, as I said way upthread, a matter of informed consent. Not consent as such: informed consent.
@Alexa:
“He already screwed her without a condom, wouldn’t it be screwing her over more to ruin this chance of happiness she had?”
Gotta LOVE the entitlement. She’s screwing two different guys at the same time, but she has a RIGHT to be happy, irrespective of her actions. Hugo was “morally” responsible, you say; not her, she has no responsibility here, just the RIGHT to be happy.
It’s the way you phrase the questions that fascinates me. Hugo has the “responsibility” for telling Ted. Hugo should potentially “man up” and offer to marry her. Why? Let’s re-phrase your questions from the others side:
#1. Didn’t Jill have a responsibility to tell both men she was sleeping with (contemporaneously) that she had become pregnant?
#2. Didn’t Jill have a responsibility to tell Ted (at the very least) the Truth?
#3. Wasn’t Jill “morally” responsible for her actions AT ANY POINT?
#4. Didn’t Ted have a right to be happy or at least in possession of all the facts, just like Hugo and Jill?
OK, now to answer your questions (because we all have to think about Jill here. She’s the REAL victim – somehow.)
#1. Tricky, because so much time has passed because neither Hugo nor Jill were courageous enough to face the consequences of their actions 13 years ago. I think Hugo should approach the boy when he reaches 18 (having told Ted what he and Jill had done. Yes, Ted deserves to know the truth AND SO DOES THE BOY). There will be a lot of fallout because of this; tough. The young man will be better off in the long term knowing the truth and as an adult will be better able to handle it. Imagine finding out when he’s 35? You think THAT won’t be 10 times as devastating? As for Hugo and Jill, the fallout will be entirely their responsibility.
#2. Yes, obviously he should have told Ted. Jill knew he wasn’t marriage material when she got involved with him, so she could hardly have realistic expectations of him popping the question. This is presumably why she was screwing multiple guys in the first place.
If you conclude that I’m not feeling the love for Hugo and Jill, you’d be right. Their actions were cowardly and contemptible. The ONLY people I feel empathy for are Ted and the boy. Each year when he reaches adulthood that he is not told the truth will make it all the more ruinous when he does find out (AND HE WILL). Actions have consequences; facing up to them might be painful but it’s all part of the human condition. Pretending this is a victimless crime is truly delusional and dishonest.
I don’t have an answer for this.
He should have said “Jill, you need to tell Ted”. Then between the three of them, they could figure out what to do.
Well, Alexa, this is elementary honesty and communication. It’s part of being an adult, I guess. I certainly can’t imagine any kind of sexual ethics without it.
I wonder what you lot would think about a woman who has a child from one man, but will absolutely refuse him access, whilst she ran off with another man who was a willing cuckold? She then lies to welfare about who the father is to get more money from them, and lies to welfare about her newfound marital status. Well, that man is me, I am the man who has been denied his own flesh and blood. I have spent over 10,000 dollars to get access to my child. The desire to care for ones children is what helps perpetuate the human race and ensures that we do not end up extinct.
“I’m merely trying to establish responsibility for this mess; I don’t have an answer for what’s to be done now.”
I’m a utilitarian; in my world, people who who take it upon themselves to go to the trouble of establishing responsibility for a mess ought to do so with a view toward setting the mess right and/or cleaning the mess up. Establishing responsibility for a mess can be an arduous and taxing process. If you establish responsibility for a mess while leaving the mess in place, you’re using up resources to no purpose. This is a self-defeating game b/c afterward, you find that the resources have been depleted, but you’ve got nothing to show for it. You’ve incurred a net loss. Not a great plan.
“Bekabot – Here are the situations:
A woman writing to Ann Landers 40 years ago saying ‘My child sucks he’s not mine right lololol’; Ann Landers tells her to fuck off.
A man finds out his wife lied to him about his child; it in fact is not his biological child. Alternatively, a woman is told by the hospital: ‘Oops, we switched your kids, you’ve been raising someone else’s kid for 8 years.’
And you are saying you don’t see the difference between the two situations? If that’s the case, you lack basic reasoning.”
I wish you would go back and read the post I was originally responding to, Cel, b/c in that post, a claim was made that, while the male angst connected with doubts about paternity is given short shrift in our society, any female equivalent would be handled with kid gloves, since “we think motherhood is sacred”, etc., etc. I didn’t think that was true and wrote a lengthy post explaining why.
As for the rest, of course I see the difference. In the one case the kid-switching is deliberate* and in the other case it’s accidental. In both cases a wrong was done but in the second case a greater wrong was done than in the first. Still, I think it’s important to bear in mind that we’re dealing in both instances with the same material residuum — a child who is being raised by people who are not its biological parents. That makes it easier to realize that what differs in the two situations inheres in impalpabilities: intentions, ideas, and plans. Which is what makes a set of circumstances like Ted’s/Jill’s/Mr. Schwyzer’s (for the moment I’m accepting your interpretation of those circumstances) perfect for guys like you, and it’s why you jump all over it. Finally, finally, you’ve been handed, as on a silver platter, a quandary within the bounds of which it’s possible to convict someone of a thoughtcrime without looking like a creep. Congratulations, dude. You saw your mountain and you climbed it. (I’ve already pointed out that such people as were interested in dwelling on the villainy of gil-tayyyyy bar-stidddds would be the ones eager to glom onto the version of The Puzzle of the Switched Bassinets in which the Bassinets are Switched by design and not through mischance. Thanks for bearing me out and for doing it well.)
BTW, once again, I wish you’d go back and read the post to which that statement (“a switched kid is a switched kid, 40 years ago or 400 years ago”) was a reply, b/c the guy who wrote it seemed to think for some reason that because a letter was written 40 years ago, the letter should be ignored. The forty intervening years seemed very important to him (as they do to you; maybe you were that guy, now that I think about it. I wouldn’t know, at this point my recollection is shot.) What I was trying to say is that the value of any communication lies not in its age but in the issues with which it deals. We still care about the issue of whose babies are whose; if we didn’t, there wouldn’t be 218 comments, and counting, in this thread.
“And you’re disgusting in proclaiming that ‘Ted is the winner here; he got picked!
As if being ‘picked’ by a lying and selfish woman is such a good thing.”
Once again, please go back and check the context. The person to whom I was responding (I believe he called himself ‘dungone’) had already posted comments in which he made it clear, intentionally or not, that he thought that Mr. Schwyzer had done Ted a grave disservice when he brought Ted’s days as a single man to an end. (If Mr. Schwyzer brought Ted’s days as a single man to an end; it hasn’t been settled definitively that he did, which seems to be part of what’s got you fellows so upset.) Then dungone went into a spiel in which he claimed that women are at fault in preferring men like Mr. Schwyzer to men like Ted; if women knew what was best for them, he said, they’d dump all the Schwyzers and mate with the Teds. I perceived an inconsistency and employed a rhetorical tool of which I am fond and of which you may have heard (it’s called “irony”). At no point did I state that Ted was the winner in this match; to the contrary, I have stated, over and over again, that I don’t think there are any winners in this match.
“Beka, please stop promoting the disgusting lie that MRAs are the only men who care about paternity, or that men who do care about paternity are selfish / evil.”
Now, come on, Cel, where did I say that? I just flat-out never said that, and I can’t be made to appear to have said that even to the most untidy mind. Stop scraping at a barrel which doesn’t have a bottom. It’s undignified.
*the Puzzle of the Switched Bassinets fails to provide even an approximate description of the Jill/Ted/Professor Schwyzer relationship, which is one of the many reasons I think it makes for a lousy analogy. It’s quite possible that Ted is, as of this very moment, busy raising his own true-born biological child. This is a prospect many contributors to this thread tend to overlook, as can be seen in their attachment to the Switched Bassinet illustration.
Beka, you are just wrong.
You claimed that I was wrong when I said that any case of mistaken maternity would be treated as extremely important and serous.
I’ll now provide many examples showing that is in fact the case:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/678489.stm
http://www.netnewspublisher.com/mothers-reunited-with-their-correct-sons-2-years-after-accidental-baby-swap-in-russian-clinic/
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,510957,00.html
http://www.postzambia.com/post-read_article.php?articleId=6728
“Finally, finally, you’ve been handed, as on a silver platter, a quandary within the bounds of which it’s possible to convict someone of a thoughtcrime without looking like a creep.”
Actively deceiving someone into raising a child that he thinks is his, knowing that it likely is not, is just a “thoughtcrime?”
“Now, come on, Cel, where did I say that?” [i.e. that MRAs are the only men who care about paternity, or that men who do care about paternity are selfish / evil.”
Now you just seem to be straight up lying.
Your words:
“all the MRA/MGTOW-type men (the ones born with their scorecards in their hands, the it-better-share-my-eye-color-or-I’m-sending-it-back-to-the-warehouse guys) would have one less thing to crab about.”
You are arguing dishonestly and in bad faith. Shame on you.
Sometimes messes don’t have easy solutions. That doesn’t mean there isn’t utility in figuring out who was responsible, since we can at least show What Not To Do for future situations. I believe Hugo is claiming that Jill behaved ethically, but that’s not so, and wouldn’t be for any future “Jills” in this situation.
Women are attracted to dominant men when they are ovulating, and attracted to the “providers” when not.
The logic behind is to seek the best genetic material available, but raising kids with the more submissive and stable man possible.
This fact has been proven scientifically time and again. The type of men for whom a woman is attracted to vary according to their menstrual cycle.
I ask, from the point of view of a man, what is the best? To be the reliable, loving husband, or the lover?
99.99% of men will agree what is better, haha
Hugo may have simply made this story up. I noted that he talks about the increased traffic to his site since this thing and that some people don’t use the correct “honorific” (I guess his important doctor title). That also fits in with what a psychopathic personality would do to get attention.
I’ll post my guess at what you’re doing on other Web sites, Hugo, so you don’t really have to publish this here. You’ll read it.
Sagredo, I am wary, b/c in my experience “let’s establish who’s responsible” often turns out to mean “let’s find a sinner to thrust into the stocks as attention-bait for onlookers while we go ahead and do what we want”*. That having been said, I agree with you in the sense that I think there are genuine pointers which can be picked out of the Jill/Ted/Schwyzer schmerzfest. “Don’t stay drunk and high for years at a time” is one, and “If you are female, don’t get too involved with a man whom you know to have been drunk and/or high for years at a time, because he may not be in shape to deal with the outcome, if there is one” is another. And there are more.
Unfortunately, as is frequently the case, the signal is in the process of getting drowned out by noise. Eagerness to condemn malefactors is much more highly valued (and more fun) than the desire to avoid bad results; with the consequence that the type of person who tends to prevail in discussions like this one is more often than not the loudest scold in the room, the one who can repeat the expected thing the largest number of times in the most threatening or portentious tone of voice. (Which is understandable on the basis that show trials are sexy and circumspection is not.) I am at a loss as to what to do about this; what I remain convinced of, though, is that finding more lay-figure Sinners and stoning them in the public square is not going to prove useful. That’s what we’ve been doing since Forever, and look how it’s worked out.
*”All clear? Very well; carry on then; debauch away.”
“You are arguing dishonestly and in bad faith. Shame on you.”
You are pretending to a level of incomprehension which is not human, and in which I don’t believe. I’m not going to say “shame on you” but I am going to hint that the way to sell more Boy Scout cookies is not to smear an ice-cream cone into your forehead while doing the Chaw Bacon Shuffle. That may work as an opener, it may initially draw the eye, but it needs better follow-up. (More Of The Same is not a good enough follow-up.)
This has ceased to be fun. This has ceased even to be coherent. As I know myself to be a plain speaker and perhaps somewhat too blunt a communicator, I know the fault for that does not lie with me. You need to refine your routine, Cel. Quit walking the wrong way into the revolving door; pratfalls eventually get tiring.
@bekabot: “schmerzfest” is way better than “spermgate.” Great comment.
Women are attracted to dominant men when they are ovulating, and attracted to the “providers” when not.
The logic behind is to seek the best genetic material available, but raising kids with the more submissive and stable man possible.
This fact has been proven scientifically time and again. The type of men for whom a woman is attracted to vary according to their menstrual cycle.
Prove it. Only the guys in the manosphere say that. You think that a dominant man cannot be a good provider ? Why ?
Thank you, Alexa, for the encomium. I wasn’t really trying to come up with a term that was better but I was trying to come up with a term which was more accurate. This whole ruckus is less about whose sperm ended up where than about the Invisible Frame which encompassed the deposition of the sperm. IOW, this is story in which impalpabilities rule, b/c so many of its plot points depend on who was carrying around which intentions in his or her head at what time. Sussing out intentions is always tricky; the only way you can indicate what they might be is through inference: they don’t leave behind the kind of producible-in-court direct traces you can point to with a flourish the way you’d indicate a wet spot on a hankie. That’s why all the comment-writers for whom this story translates into a parable about a Scheming Delilah and her Diabolical Abettor are wallowing like pigs in slop; theirs is at base a religious conviction, and a narrative shot through with imponderabilities feeds right into that.
Once again, thanks for the thumbs-up. (Know that I feel great relief in advance because I can take it for granted that you will not pretend not to understand me.)
Beka, are you kidding?
Are you pretending that this quote:
“all the MRA/MGTOW-type men (the ones born with their scorecards in their hands, the it-better-share-my-eye-color-or-I’m-sending-it-back-to-the-warehouse guys) would have one less thing to crab about.””
does not imply that MRAs are the only men who care about paternity, and does not imply that men who do care about paternity are selfish / evil?
Wow….just wow.
Great links, Cel! Strong effort, Sagredo.
Unfortunately, it’s blazingly clear that none of the people here who sneer at men’s paternity concerns will ever acknowledge that men’s concerns about the biological link to their progeny are just as valid as women’s nor will they admit that it’s fundamentally immoral for a woman to deceive a man about his possible role (or non-role) in her pregnancy.
“Are you pretending that this quote…does not imply that MRAs are the only men who care about paternity, and does not imply that men who do care about paternity are selfish / evil?”
Cel, I am willing enough to be brought to book on the basis of what I did say. But I am not willing to be brought to book on the basis of what I did not say. Demonstrate the implication, prove something for a change, and I’ll bite. Until then, no sale.
(This time, you do the work.)
@bekabot and @Alexa “Scheming Delilah and her Diabolical Abettor” is awesome too.
DA is in the house.
“@bekabot and @Alexa “Scheming Delilah and her Diabolical Abettor” is awesome too.”
["oooooohhhh, Mr. Grant"]
Glad you like it.
Maybe you could use it as a now=&=then AKA? I mean, now that you’re a criminal, you need an alias, right?
(for the record, this is snark, not slander…)
bekabot: you’re making this out to be some kind of vague thing about stuff in which something happened, allegedly. It’s pretty simple. The fact that Jill was having unprotected sex with Hugo while also having unprotected sex Ted was relevant information in his decisions to marry Jill and raise Alastair. This information was withheld and it shouldn’t have been, as people require relevant information to properly consent.
It certainly is unreasonable for people to get all worked up about actual acts of deception when there are hypothetical acts of non-biological child abandonment stalking our streets.
Bekabot, I am proud to be the diabolical abettor in the service of the Feminist High Command of Greenwich Village (or is it Berkeley? Or Tallequah? One forgets.)
Hypothetical: had this happened in a world without DNA testing, what then should she have done? Had us flip a coin? Be serious, people.
Um, I don’t know, maybe sit down with everyone involved, have everyone share the relevant/known facts with each other, fully discuss the situation and proceed from there?
You know, like grown-ups (at least non-sociopathic ones)?
But that would be hard, right?
Better to just conspire to prevent one of the parties from knowing the whole truth, in order to ensure he comes to the decision that will benefit the other two the most.
And yes, Hugo, conspiring with other people to prevent someone from discovering the full truth about something is EXACTLY the same thing as actively lying to them about it.
Hey, I’m all for keeping sinners from the stocks, but they might at least, you know, show a little repentance, at least a little acceptance of the harm they caused. Of course, in this case, it’s Hugo’s defence of Jill’s appalling behaviour that’s the problem.
As for Hugo, if it turns out he does have a son he has made no kind of financial or emotional or parental investment in, he’s really not in a good place to be accusing anyone else of being a bad father.
And who’s being put in the stocks here? Hugo seems to be denouncing anyone who cares about genetic paternity to any degree as somehow part of the Big Evil Patriarchy, despite folks pointing out various examples illustrating the importance of genetic maternity, which nobody seems to deny.
Those “pointers” are rather different, I think, in they largely aim to prevent hurting oneself. I’m more interested in the ethical dimension, especially concerning how people hurt others. Really, this is a very ordinary calling out of unethical behaviour. That doesn’t go away just because nothing can be done about it now.
machina, I said that myself. Check up the thread.
Jebedee, that’s scary news. Are acts of non-biological child abandonment stalking the streets? I have yet to meet one. Do they proceed at a slow or a fast walk?
“Hey, I’m all for keeping sinners from the stocks, but they might at least, you know, show a little repentance, at least a little acceptance of the harm they caused.”
Well, maybe at some point Mr. Schwyzer will stage a performance in sackcloth and ashes which will satisfy* both of us, but if he doesn’t, that will be a disappointment with which we’ll have to live. I for my part am not going to base my actions on whether or not I think somebody else has sufficiently repented. To do that is to give away too much power.
“Those ‘pointers’ are rather different, I think, in they largely aim to prevent hurting oneself.”
Yes, exactly. That’s the precise idea. Those are the grounds upon which the convictions of conservative utilitarians and liberal utilitarians meet. What we have in common is that we all think that one protects others best by learning how to protect oneself. Of course, we differ as to how to go about it.
“I’m more interested in the ethical dimension, especially concerning how people hurt others.”
The two realms are not mutually exclusive, which is as it should be. This would be much sloppier universe if they were.
“Really, this is a very ordinary calling out of unethical behavior.”
I don’t accept it as such (sorry) b/c language has been used in this case which is absent from ordinary callings-out of unethical behavior. I’m not going to quote the language here, but I know what it is and so do you. Do you think that most of the people who’ve had recourse to it talk the same dialect in the ordinary course of their lives? I sure don’t. This thread, Sangredo, which numbered 218 comments when I last checked, is now 239 comments long. Do ordinary callings-out of unethical behavior merit blog threads 239 comments long? Since when? You’re entitled to your own opinion, naturally, but that seems like a stretch to me.
*not to mention entertain
I’m totally in agreement with all of you who seem to think cuckolding and DNA are no big deal. Unfortunately, I’m also a believer in equality and fairness. So here’s my proposal. How about when a woman gives birth, we just have the hospitals randomly mix up the newborns before they give them back. That way it would be equal. No one would know whether or not their children were biologically theirs. Not the “father” OR the “mother” No big deal, right? I mean, since DNA should have no relevance on whether or not you love your child. I’m sure none of the women who posted would have a problem with this. I mean, if you did, that would make you a hypocrite. And I’m sure there aren’t any hypocrite’s here. Right?
@bekabot
I don’t accept it as such (sorry) b/c language has been used in this case which is absent from ordinary callings-out of unethical behavior
Those two things are not mutually exclusive. If you hear sidebars and spin-offs that arise from an ethical concern, it does not invalidate the core of the concern. It’s very disingenuous for Hugo’s side to claim that the original act of deception was just a harmless little white lie on the very basis that it makes lots of people extremely uneasy in a myriad of ways. Lots of people, including myself, are starting to conclude that there is some degree of sociopathy at play for the men and women who feel that Hugo and Jill’s behavior was beyond reproach and cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that what they did was wrong and harmful. They hide behind the mantra that it was in the best interest of the child and feign outrage when they find out that a deceived man might feel hurt and push his wife and children away were he to find out the truth of what happened, as if it’s in the best interest of the child to build a family based on lies.
There is something else that is pertinent here, which is the bait and switch that Hugo uses in his defense. When examining his role as co-conspirator to Jill’s lies, Hugo claims that he wasn’t in the position to judge because he was really fucked up at the time, but yet here he is now claiming that lying to Ted was the right thing to do after all. If he was not one to judge back then because he was fucked up then what does that make him now? Why can’t he say that what she did was wrong? Why does he skip forward and ask what anyone could do about it now when talking about what she did back then? The fact is that he still defends her actions to this day and denies the insidious moral hazard that they thrust onto an innocent man.
So there is, as a matter of fact, a clear and present unethical behavior that needs to be redressed. Tot his day he’s defending the actions of two very fucked up people as if they were actually right in any of their actions, especially Jill’s. So what would Hugo say if Jill had gotten drunk, got in his car and drove over Ted? He’d probably say that she was swerving away from Alastair and that it was the right thing to do in the best interest of the child. He would say “No biggie folks! I was also drunk at the time so I’m not one to judge Jill’s actions. She made the best choice in the best interests of the child! What are you going to do now, like, punish her or something and ruin what’s left of her family? What’s wrong with you evil no-good fathers to even suggest that they wouldn’t want to be a part of Jill and Alastair’s life if they knew for sure that this would happen? It’s the past folks, let it be! Na-na-na!”
@Travis
I would only get behind that idea if the Hospital keeps a permanent record of who the real mothers are. That way they can keep telling the parents that their baby is really theirs but get all pissy and launch personal attacks against any parent who is horrible enough to ask to see those records.
@Travis,
Also, I don’t agree that it should be completely random. After all, if a black couple received a white baby then they might know and get mad. But then again… maybe we should make it completely random just to see if Hugo calls them racist in addition to being patriarchal Evo Psych DNA freaks.
Or, you know, maybe he’ll just say “if she didn’t tell him, he might have been fooled into raising my kid, and that’s appalling”. Or something?
Actually this happens all the time in call-outs when people defend entitlement. I’m horrified by the number of people who consider Jill’s entitlement to happiness more important than Ted’s right to choose whether to raise a child that isn’t his. And also how this seems to apply only to men: it’s not the best equivalent but no-one denies the damage a hospital mix-up would cause, for instance. But I’m not that surprised.
dungone, honestly. What part of “I was fucked up and she was fucked up and the whole thing was fucked up, but we were very fortunate in the sense that the whole thing turned out better that we had a right to expect” do you not understand? Or is it just that you resent the “we were very fortunate” part, because sinners are required to expiate, suffer, and atone? Now I know that your comeback is going to be “but their good fortune was achieved at Ted’s expense”, which is true, but even so, neither one of us knows for sure that Ted’s post-Jill life has been one of unending misery. Maybe Ted benefited too.
I know, I know, a life and a household built on lies can come to no good, blah, blah, blah, blah. But lots of households are “built on lies”; they have to be, b/c so many people have skeletons in their closets. I once went to school with a kid who looked just like his Dad, nobody who ever saw them together would have taken him for anybody or anything other than his father’s son. But just before I moved out of that neighborhood I found out* that he was not the son of the man he called his father; that man was his uncle; he was that man’s sister’s illegitimate kid. Oddly enough, though he was not related to his adoptive mother at all he somewhat resembled her as well, so the whole family had gotten into the habit of keeping their mouths shut and of letting the neighbors come to their own conclusions. I am not here to make a speech about how the terrible mistake they made or about how awful it was that they did the wrong thing. Hot me.
Sangredo, I’d like to emphasize once more that it is your own expectations which are letting you down. It’s true that your expectations don’t tower over the horizon but all the same, that doesn’t mean that anybody else is obligated to meet them. That sucks, I know, but there’s nothing I can do to change it.
*because my mother was his (adoptive) mother’s confidante
“I am not here to make a speech about how the terrible mistake they made or about how awful it was that they did the wrong thing. Hot me.”
I meant “not me”; obviously, darn it. Now there’s an embarrassing typo. So, if you find that kind of thing humorous, enjoy.
bekabot,
The problem is that Ted did not give informed consent. It sounds like the people in your anecdote gave informed consent. If that’s true then you haven’t made a meaningful comparison.
When I see you and Hugo dodging(or not understanding?) this simple issue, my reaction is not a desire to see anybody burned at the stake. Frankly that’s a ridiculous place for you to take the conversation and it reads as an attempt at redirection away from the simple issue of informed consent.
No, what I’ve learned from this discussion is that you and Hugo represent an ideology which would gladly deny my humanity and agency so long as it’s convenient.
One more thing :
If it would be so incredibly harmful for Ted to find out the truth – whatever that may be – then why did Hugo write about what happened in the first place? Surely he’s increased the chance that Ted or Alastair will stumble upon the truth one day.
dungone, honestly. What part of “I was fucked up and she was fucked up and the whole thing was fucked up, but we were very fortunate in the sense that the whole thing turned out better that we had a right to expect” do you not understand?
How about the part where Hugo actually said that? But you know what’s also not there? The part of Hugo’s post where he says “I really fucked over Ted and that was wrong.” Yeah, he feels bad that he fucked up for screwing without a condom and for being a loser in general. But that’s ALL that he feels he did wrong. The only thing he feels “fortunate” about is the fact that Ted was there for the two of them to pin the pregnancy on him. He actually uses the term “best interests of the child” when what they did was anything but. He’s got enough excuses and smoke screens to hide a battleship.
Now I know that your comeback is going to be “but their good fortune was achieved at Ted’s expense”, which is true, but even so, neither one of us knows for sure that Ted’s post-Jill life has been one of unending misery. Maybe Ted benefited too.
Hugo can’t even admit that his “good fortune” (a.k.a shirking responsibility) was achieved at Ted’s expense. He downplays everything that Ted might care about at length, from having a self-serving liar for a wife to spending his life raising his own kids instead of some loser that his wife was fucking when they met. I’ve long past come to the conclusion that Hugo is pathologically incapable of empathy towards other men.
Obligations are tricky things, bekabot. I mean, in the absence of expectations, is anyone obligated to do anything?
My expectations are really along the lines of not to defend unethical behaviour. I think it’s a reasonable expectation in the context of the post, the blog, and the way Hugo presents himself with regard to gender-related ethics. In fact you might profitably consider it as an expectation of consistency more than anything else, and ultimately no more than for the purpose of determining a consensus of ethical norms.
It might be a life of blissful ignorance of his own non-paternity of Alistair. But does that make it ethical?
For comparison, someone might do all sorts of things to you in your sleep, or while you’re unconscious, and you might be none the wiser. Is that ethical? No harm done, right?
It’s nursing that makes a mother, not DNA, right?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43798938/
http://www.smh.com.au/victoria/switch-shock-as-newborns-go-to-wrong-families-20110718-1hkqw.html
“The problem is that Ted did not give informed consent. It sounds like the people in your anecdote gave informed consent. If that’s true then you haven’t made a meaningful comparison.”
The anecdote was meant deal with the issue of deceit, not the issue of consent. I must say that I agree with you about the issue of consent; humans need information the way cars need gasoline. Still, there are lots of women who have been pressured into doing things by means of misrepresentation and even lies (the case of a young woman who has been dissuaded from having an abortion through scare tactics would be one, and I’m sure you can think of others) but whose actions, though driven by misrepresentation, have led to a good outcome in the end. (As in: the girl forgoes her abortion and ends up with a kid she adores.) I’m not saying that this always happens or that it can be depended upon to happen. I’m saying that it’s the way things work out sometimes.
“If it would be so incredibly harmful for Ted to find out the truth – whatever that may be – then why did Hugo write about what happened in the first place? Surely he’s increased the chance that Ted or Alastair will stumble upon the truth one day.”
Which clues me into the possibility that both of them may already know or, even if they don’t officially “know”, may sorta-kinda know and may have made their peace with the idea.
dungone, you may maintain that there’s a magic formula Mr. Schwyzer could hit upon, then repeat, which would get you to forgive him (“I’m so sorry I hurt Ted — and, incidentally, screw Jill;I’m an ethical dude, see, and I just can’t stay friends with a woman who acts like that”*) but, really, dungone — be honest with yourself if not with me — would you forgive him? Hasn’t he committed more gender treason than you can stomach?
Sangredo, life is exhausting enough already, you know? I don’t have the time or the power to figure out what your ethical expectations are and then live up to them, and neither does the man on the street, and neither did your parents, and neither do your kids (if you have any); in fact, neither your nearest and dearest nor the most distant and preoccupied have the time or ability to find out what your expectations are and then fulfill them. Which includes Mr. Schwyzer. That’s what’s consistent.
You are entitled to your own morality but you are not entitled to insist that other people accept it. You may think that, since your morality is a pretty good morality, other people should accept it, and you might even be right, but (this is the deeply sucky part) the other people are not going to care. They’re going to go ahead and live their own lives, because those are the only lives they have and they consequently don’t have any choice. Sad but true. You Have Been Warned.
*this is the post Mr. Schwyzer might have written but did not write, and which, IMO, would have caused guys like you to fall upon his neck, sob on his chest, and greet him like the Savior.
“dungone, you may maintain that there’s a magic formula Mr. Schwyzer could hit upon, then repeat, which would get you to forgive him (“I’m so sorry I hurt Ted — and, incidentally, screw Jill;I’m an ethical dude, see, and I just can’t stay friends with a woman who acts like that”*) but, really, dungone — be honest with yourself if not with me — would you forgive him? Hasn’t he committed more gender treason than you can stomach?”
There’s nothing magical about ethical behavior, nor is there anything gendered about it. And whether or not I “forgive” Hugo for all the issues that he is wrong about has nothing to do with it. Would it be okay for you to steal your neighbor’s car because she won’t forgive you for the time your dog pooped on her lawn? And holding someone accountable is not “screwing” them. I don’t get “screwed” if I don’t go out to steal a car any more than Jill would have gotten “screwed” if she didn’t get to marry Ted had the truth come out. You can’t get “screwed” out of something you haven’t earned.
But that brings us back to the crux of this issue: the self-serving sense of entitlement that people sometimes dress up in feminist garb, or any other garb. You can try to re-frame things as many times as you’d like to make it sound like doing the right thing is next to impossible or that one person’s convenience carries an equal weight to another person’s rights, but it won’t get you very far when people have already been onto you for doing that.
“Would it be okay for you to steal your neighbor’s car because she won’t forgive you for the time your dog pooped on her lawn?”
Well, no. Why would you think I’ve implied such a thing? On the basis of what?
“And holding someone accountable is not ‘screwing’ them. I don’t get ‘screwed’ if I don’t go out to steal a car any more than Jill would have gotten ‘screwed’ if she didn’t get to marry Ted had the truth come out.”
dungone, are you genuinely unfamiliar with the concept that more than one demotic usage attaches itself to the word “screw/screwed”?
Perhaps if I’d used the phrase “the heck with Jill” instead, you wouldn’t have gotten so confused.
“You can’t get “screwed” out of something you haven’t earned.”
Matter of opinion. It depends on what you think you have or have not “earned”. This is a much more subjective statement that it sounds at first.
“You can try to re-frame things as many times as you’d like to make it sound like doing the right thing is next to impossible or that one person’s convenience carries an equal weight to another person’s rights, but it won’t get you very far when people have already been onto you for doing that.”
It’s true that when I feel that I’m going around in circles I try to look at things from a fresh perspective. But when did I “make it sound like doing the right thing is next to impossible” or pretend “that one person’s convenience carries an equal weight to another person’s rights”? Point to it, dude. If you can do that you can be onto me all you like.
dungone, just curious; are you a libertarian? You write like one.
Well, no. Why would you think I’ve implied such a thing? On the basis of what?
In fairness to you, it was rather tangential. I was pointing out that my forgiving Hugo for anything is, likewise, besides the point and shouldn’t have anything to do with his views and actions. But I don’t want to dwell on that.
Perhaps if I’d used the phrase “the heck with Jill” instead, you wouldn’t have gotten so confused.
My reaction would have been almost exactly the same. I would have stated that Ted’s rights have nothing to do with whether or not Jill is happy about them, so an ethical person wouldn’t have even considered her a part of the equation as if this was some sort of a moral dilemma. On the other hand, here is Hugo’s take:
I was (and still am) in no place to criticize Jill. The only people who are are women who have found themselves in similar situations. She was the pregnant one, and she had the moral authority to call the shots on what was disclosed. I didn’t have the right then and still don’t now to override that decision, and I’ll place my entire reputation as a writer and a husband and a father on that.
For a man who teaches women about sexuality, to have him teach this philosophy to class after class of future feminists, that turns this into a continuing miscarriage of ethics.
If you can do that you can be onto me all you like.
I would only have to point as far as your comment to which I was replying and your choice of wording in it.
dungone, just curious; are you a libertarian? You write like one.
Is this a political discussion? Is that relevant? You sound like some of the guys who keep going on about Hugo being a Hollywood Liberal. Irrelevant. For what it’s worth, I’m worse – I’m a born and raised in Europe by French loving pacifist liberals. I take a nuanced view on everything. For example, here’s a real moral dilemma from my own life… ~fuzzy screen~ ~fuzzy screen~
I had an on again, off again girlfriend when I joined the Marines.. She had a physically abusive father and her family pressured her to marry a religious guy of their choice (she was atheist), which she finally did while I was deployed to Iraq, literally to get out of the house. She wrote me a letter asking me to write back if I loved her, telling her not to do it. Problem is I didn’t get that letter for 3 months and couldn’t make a phone call for another. But she thought it meant that I didn’t want her. She cried on her wedding day and her mother When I came back, we had an affair. Which I don’t regret at all – I don’t think either of us ever did. A while later I got deployed back to Iraq and she got pregnant. But being in love with me and having no way to talk to me, she sat alone in front of the TV waiting to see my name read aloud as a casualty. The stress was getting to her, she risked losing the baby. Wondering what to do with herself, she decided that the right thing to do was to tell her mother and her husband everything. They forgave her and she promised her husband to never speak to me again. She wrote me an email after I returned from Iraq, explaining what had happened, and asked me to understand that she wanted her baby to be able to grow up with his real dad. So we both kept the promise she made to her family, and that was 7 years ago.
~fuzzy screen~
I have real experiences to inform my world view, I think at least as real as Hugo fucking college students on his office desk. I don’t think that makes me a libertarian, unless it does then I’ll gladly stop considering myself a social democrat. Compare my story to Hugo’s. Unlike Jill, this girl, let’s call her Victoria, had a moral compass. It took a lot of courage for Victoria to risk her marriage in order to get the support she felt she needed to save her baby. She did the right thing, she realized that she couldn’t be a good mother or a good husband if she was living a lie, and if her children ever grow up to hear the truth about their mother, I am pretty sure that they would be proud of her. Jill? I wonder what her kids would think of her if they ever found out…