Tongue in cheek venting

[joni]

http://science.martianbachelor.com/Divorce.html

"What's hell but a cold heart?" - Theodore Roethke

"A good divorce is about as much work as a good marriage."
- Judith Wallerstein

"...[from a woman's perspective] the ideal divorce. . .looks a lot like a great marriage, minus sex."
- Maggie Gallagher

"...one of the persistent demands of feminists is that the woman's emancipation from control, by divorce, shall not emancipate the man, but obligate him to make her 'independent' of him by giving her alimony and child support money."
- Daniel Amneus (source, long)

"The present destruction of the father-headed family is felt to be justified by the sacredness of motherhood, which causes judges and lawmakers to acquiesce when women demand that their marriages be terminated and that they be made heads of families. Female headship of families is disastrous. ... The willingness of ex-husbands to pay child support money to ex-wives is comparable to the willingness of blacks in the South a generation ago to sit in the back of the bus."
- Daniel Amneus (source, long)

"Child support and alimony convert marriage into a long-term contract for prostitution."
- unknown (Andrea Dworkin? coulda sworn she said this on a "Donahue")

"Sole custody awards are tantamount to legalized kidnapping." - Douglas O'Brien

"Child support is court-ordered objectification of men to benefit women and their rent-a-kid businesses. Non-custodial fathers have not only lost the most precious asset of the marriage, but then they've been given the shaft a second time by being made to pay for the privilege."
- Terelli Whisch

"Divorce is a word which means to pull a man's genitals out through his wallet."
- Robin Williams

"Divorce is the best reason for not getting married." - unknown

Divorce: Don't Be Naive-- It Could Happen to You
"In a divorce you are attending your own funeral with your lawyer officiating. There is really nothing you can do. Let him take charge, and play it cool like a good corpse should. It will be easier for you to come back to life after the wake is over."

From Chapter 8, entitled "A Man of the World", in the book Sex in Human Loving, which is attributed to Cyprian St. Cyr and/or Dr. Horseley.
"This reminds me about how the suicide rate for men following divorce is very high. Sure, the society at large doesn't care about this at all. So the key word in the quote is "play". Don't cave in to any temptation to become a real corpse. It would probably only give your ex the immense satisfaction which she in all likelihood no longer deserves or even wants from you, without you getting any of the benefits. And it might make everyone think that you really were guilty of being a bad guy..."

If the quote doesn't register fully you may want to try reviewing marriage, since obviously there can be no divorce without a previous marriage.

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The Shotgun DivorceTM
[Callahan GIF cartoon, 5.7K]

    "We now live in a country where 60% of marriages end in divorce and half the kids are being brought up without dads. This is not men's fault. This is women's fault. Eighty-five percent of divorce actions are filed by women. This does not mean that 85% of men are assholes. It means that 85% of women are profoundly unhappy with life.*

    "When a woman divorces her husband, he doesn't work for her anymore. A lot of women don't seem to be able to get this straight. They want the kids and the house and the money; they want bozo out of the house, but they want him to keep paying the bills. What kind of feminist outrage is this?"

Rich Zubaty, from the first chapter of Surviving the Feminization of America. [ Rich's Website ]
Later, in the fifth chapter, there's a little more:
"Probably the most extensive and outrageous manifestation of anti-male prejudice is in divorce. Divorce courts are like slaughterhouses, with about as much compassion and talent. They function as collection agencies for lawyer fees, however outrageous, stealing children and extorting money from men in ways blatantly unconstitutional. Men are regarded as mere guests in their own homes, evictable at any time on the whims of wives and judges.

    "Men are driven from home and children against their wills, then, when unable to stretch paychecks far enough to support two households, they are termed `runaway' fathers [nowadays: deadbeat dads -i nobody with half a brain is buying the cover-up euphemism deadbeat parent]. Contrary to all principles of justice and laws against debtors prison, men are thrown into prison for inability to pay alimony and support, however unreasonable or unfair the obligation.

    "In custody disputes morality and fitness are insignificant. Sex-gender is the primary criteria. We do not start from the position that a man has completely equal rights to his children. We start from the position that he might get custody of one of his kids if he battles like hell for it and completely trashes the personality of his ex-wife in court. [Warning! - this last link contains explicit language and graphics]

    "Women are routinely awarded custody in 95% of the cases and this is wrong. No one has proven severe psychological repercussions when siblings are split up. Everyone has proven severe repercussions when kids are removed from their dads. If dads had automatic rights to their kids, fretful egocentric wives would think twice about filing for divorce. They wouldn't just preen and sneer their way through mediation. They would become part of the solution, instead of posing as the perennial accusers.

    "Judges are not making decisions. To protect or shield 5% of the kids they are destroying 95% of the families where the father has been falsely accused of abuse [link #2]. I am not advocating child abuse; I am advocating fathers seeing their kids. Fine these women who bring false charges. Fine them heavily. Put them in jail. What we have done here is akin to making a law against peeing in somebody else's flower pots, without making any penalty whatsoever for doing so. Fine them. Jail them. American women, the most pampered creatures on the planet, must begin being accountable for their outrages.

    " `Once you are a non-custodial parent you are a non-parent', says Michael Diehl, an advocate of divorce-law reform. "Non-custodial parents simply have no enforceable rights. We have made men the Disposable Parents, and we have done it in the last 100 years."

Deadbeat Dads More Myth Than Reality, by Kathleen Parker.

Restraining Orders, by Cathy Young.

I've actually heard feminist types say, without realizing what they were saying, that if men don't like all this then they should just not get married.

* - Anybody who looks around a little will more typically see numbers for the proportion of women filing for divorce closer to around 65 or 70 percent, so perhaps Zubaty is exaggerating a little to make a point. There are two aspects to this. First, who actually files for divorce may tell us less about who is more to blame, or who is less happy, than it does about who has the upper hand. If men could file, get the kids and house, and get her to pay child support with an equal chance of success, the numbers might easily swing the other way because men generally lose more in a break-up under the current system, even before one takes into account emotional assets. The revolution of the last generation has been the granting to women of the power to break up families on pretty much a whim. At the very least we need to resist the idea of boiling complex relationships down to a single number, which we then invest with too much meaning, however natural the tendency to do so. But that women are the ones who predominantly file for divorce does tell us that they can do so when they see it to be to their benefit, which it must be, in spades.

Second, there's John Gordon's point (which I paraphrase) that bias in favor of women always allows the following no-win bind for the guy to sound plausible: "If he walks out, it demonstrates what a cad he is; if she does, it's a testament to what a loser he is". So the numbers can always be interpreted accordingly, whatever they actually are.

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It's Not Your Fault
[GIF text, 1.9k] "Today's Dads are little more than walking ATM machines. . .Like blacks in the Old South, they are deemed fit for just one thing: making money. . .the idea that children are female chattel must stop. . .it's sexist if less than 10% of CEO's are women, but `normal' when just 10% of divorced men get custody."
- source

Fred: On Divorce

A relatively decent book in the area of divorce is Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's Divorce Culture. Don't get me wrong, this book does not represent men's point of view. But in its attempt to come to grips with why we have such a high divorce rate these days it does provide a pretty good roadmap of how we got to where we are today: since marriage was always one of the things feminists harked on, as the way men oppressed women, it's interesting to read the book as a history of the way men have liberated women while at the same time continuing to be enslaved to them.

I learned a lot: it was in the 1920's that it first became acceptable for a woman to divorce a man simply because he wasn't providing for her to the level of her expectations -- or just about any other reason for that matter. Previously, it was only serious cases of abuse, adultery, or desertion, or infertility, that were grounds for divorce. Remember, the 1920's was the decade of the first women's vote and the invention of the assembly line, mass consumer culture, and advertising -- in short, the beginning of the feminization of America.

There's nothing in the marriage vows on the subject of the expected standard of living, and divorcing because your house isn't big enough seems to go against the "for better or worse" clause. In one of the footnotes in the book we learn that research determined that a woman's expectations were in the main set by the standard of living she had experienced as a child. In other words, a husband had to exceed the father's ability in "bringing home the bacon" in kind of a transgenerational arms race of financial competition between males to provide a financial womb for the father's "baby". This seems rather old fashioned -- though it created the "new" woman -- and points to the irony that the more and better a father provides for, pampers, spoils, or "loves" a daughter (by working overtime to give her things), to that extent he makes it that much more difficult for men later in her life to successfully please her. After all, we all know that a lot of women are virtually insatiable when it comes to material things.

It was an acknowledgement of this that had previously been at the core of a daughter's suitor having to first get the father's permission to marry her. It was called "asking for her hand in marriage", and seems quite quaint by today's standards. But having thrown this veto power by the father over a marriage out, in favor of the woman making her own choice, the residual expectations by the woman still remained. So now women are responsible for their choice, but not really, because the husband's role is still to "make her happy", and he's seen to be at fault and the ultimate seat of responsibility if she makes, as very commonly happens, a bad choice. Sounds like a double standard to me, and a no-win bind for men -- and society in general when she falls back on any of the many taxpayer supported welfare programs, making herself, as Amneus puts it, financially independent by becoming dependent on the government (us) or the ex-husband. Even if money is not at issue, the women still has an out on the issue of personal "fulfillment", which is entirely subjective.

The other part of Whitehead's book I found interesting was her description of the "love family" which frequently results after a divorce. This is a "family" in which men are permitted as visitors at the whim of the woman. It's tempting to think of this as a new familial form, but as many scholars have pointed out it's a devolution to a pre-civilized structure, the old matriarchy. An online description and account -- Ok, a diatribe -- can be found in Amneus's book Garbage Generation. The chapter "Our Paychecks Ourselves" is also worth reading with regard to the financial matters affecting men in divorce.
Canadian feminist (the good kind) Wendy Dennis has written a review of Whitehead's book, with more emphasis than I've given on where kids fit into all this.

Maggie Gallagher's book The Abolition of Marriage also has quite a lot on the topic of divorce, again almost entirely from a woman's perspective. (Does anyone know of a good book written from a masculist perspective?) I've written up some comments.

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A Local Case Study In Double Standards, Female Dominance, Etc.
"The most scathing vilification of immoral women does not come from men. The feminine establishment which sees its techniques of sexual bargaining jeopardized by the disregard of women who make themselves cheap is more vociferous in its condemnation."
- Germaine Greer

According to feminist theory, some huge wave of peace, love, harmony, and understanding was supposed to wash over the country as soon as we started electing women to public office, because of woman's superior level of compassion, etc. This theory was disproven recently, as a recent local brouhaha shows.

Basically, at a hearing on child support enforcement, an already notorious female county commissioner inadvertently used the "s" word (slut) while trying to explain why some men resented or refused sending their ex's a check each month. It seems some guys don't want to support their kids' mom's partying habits, or her being a bad example by sleeping around. The commissioner maybe thought the guys had a point which should at least be considered. I mean, the nerve of someone representing men in an area belonging to women...

Call men predators or deadbeat-dads or scumbags, and nothing happens. Suggest that some women are sluts, and it's like someone kicked over the ant hill...

Well, I used to have links to all the relevant articles from the local paper, including letters to the editor. Unfortunately these links all expire after 90 days for some reason. We also have an independent weekly here (Colorado Springs), with a decidedly anti-conservative leaning. Unfortunately they're not online, so you can't read their article by a generic femsymp staffer, accompanied by an open letter from the head of the local N.O.W. chapter. Great stuff. Usually they're very anti-PC, but in this case they bust a butt backing up the status quo. Nothing they had to say explains how depriving a man of both his kids and his paycheck is either equal or fair, and why it shouldn't be surprising that men are resisting being railroaded by the matriarchy and its thugs. Actually, men are barely mentioned in either piece. (The title of the piece was "Beedy's `slut' comment ignores single-mother reality".) Instead, since only what the moms say matters from the feminacrentic perspective, the main argument in the article and letter hinged on the poverty of single mothers and their kids -- Amneus's "Mutilated Beggars" gambit. Just like the Victorian feminists of the nineteenth century, who protested in the streets with placards saying "Sir Pity Us". You've come a long way, baby. Indeed. That and a lot of moral indignation, which, as Bertrand Russell tells us, is a form of cruelty.

The ironic thing is that both Betty Beedy and her antagonists are actually on the same side here, trying in different ways to do what women have always done, namely increase the already exorbitant value of the female body. The former by emphasizing the supply side (women w/kids kept out of "the market" by not being allowed to date, with reprimands for those who date but don't hold out for enough); the latter arguing from the standpoint of reputed intrinsic value (maternal entitlement/neediness). These have, for about as long as anyone can say, been the two basic female strategies. Either way, she wins, and the guy still pays. Ms. Beedy's method just takes a little more time to work its way through the market.

The Dept of Social Services' Lloyd Malone says, "We try not to categorize people, because it's not helpful in dealing with their problems...". You've got to wonder where he was on the undoubtably many occasions when the categorical term "deadbeat dad" was used, and when they were implementing harsh measures to hunt him down and make him work and pay, like a proper man/slave should be made to do -- even if he never formally agreed to work for her by marrying her. In other words, you don't have to get married to suffer the costs. I also liked David Bern's remark about putting the needs of the children first. Sounds like an argument for father custody to me, which would allow mom to do as she pleases without being a possible bad example to her children, especially her all-important female children. If he's got the dough, isn't that where the kids should go? Why should he be forced to make time payments on kids he doesn't own?

The real downer in this whole thing is that an initial opportunity to hear men's concerns devolved into an argument almost entirely among women about how many men a woman has to sleep with (and over what time interval) in order to be considered promiscuous. (I haven't yet mentioned that this episode has been all over our TV and radio, too.) The matriarchy once again co-opted the "debate", which one gathers is something like what goes on among gossipy girls in the hall of the average high school -- "Yes she is". "No she isn't". "She did too". "I'm sure - not!". The female equivalent of hazing... This ensured that men would be confined to the margins of the conversation and to less than their traditional role in the actual world.

I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry, if only because Ms. Beedy sounds like she's at least willing to listen to what men have to say, and maybe even be an advocate for positive change. Instead, she ended up allowing others to portray her as a kook who at best can't keep from shooting herself in the foot, though this may be less her fault than a measure of what men are up against. It takes a great deal of courage to speak out on behalf of men, so Ms. Beedy appears to be the radical in this drama. She certainly has shaken things up like a radical. Perhaps there's some sign here that the right wing view on things, namely that "men are the problem", is undergoing a change and broadening.

Impossible not to miss also how clear the traditional view is: they're her kids when it comes to custody, but his kids when the bills need to be paid. She has rights, while he has only responsibilities. A divorce means she doesn't have to have sex with him anymore, but he still has to keep giving her money. Who'd ever be dumb enough to commit to that double standard?

An update: The above was written near the end of 6/98. It's now some 10 weeks later. Ms. Beedy's local notoriety got her on a national TV talk show (the kind no guy watches), where she made yet another gaff. One of her constituents has initiated a recall process. What's ironic is that the woman doing this is neither single nor black nor gay. But she's convinced it's only a matter of time before her group (Hispanics) comes under attack. Here's a brief news editorial from a Denver paper to give you an idea of what the mainstream supposedly thinks.

Needless to say, Ms. Beedy has continued to be a regular feature of the local news. Like most areas, I'd imagine, we have virtually no investigative reporting around here. Consequently, the coverage has been very unsubstantive at best since there really hasn't been much news, though it's been fun watching people come out the woodwork in support of sluts. There's been one interview on the topic in a local free monthly paper mostly dedicated to lite news, ads for boutiques, and ideas for things to do in town when you've got time and money to kill. After reading it, it strikes me that we've still yet to hear much from the invisible men at the heart of the story.

Anyway, the recall petition drive came up short about 20% on the number of signatures needed, though Ms. Rodriguez blamed it more on their inexperience and difficulty getting organized than on a lack of negative sentiment for the county commissioner.

Now, can we get back to the debate about fathers and kids?

[MYSONSDAD]

"Children learn what they live"