| Men who choose poorly shouldn't complain so much about the consequences of their own choices
Suppose tomorrow it is decided that a divorcing woman may, as easily as she can now get a restraining order, have her husband shot. She goes down to the courthouse, fills out a little form, and they send a sheriff out to shoot the husband dead. I agree that today this seems preposterous, but maybe in ten years or so this will be seen as the next logical step. At that point, will you still be saying that, "Well, men have to live with the consequences. They have to be more careful about whom they marry." It just seems to me that at some point that whole line of argument becomes ridiculous. If we have young men avoiding marriage in droves, that is a signal that it is already ridiculous. I don't think this discussion is useful to the extent that we pretend that we're fixing anything by telling people that they need to make better decisions. We might save a few heartaches doing that, but we are not going to produce perfect people, and human beings are not going to stop making mistakes. The issue is more properly what system awaits those who make such mistakes, however many there are. Even if there were only one divorce per year in the United States, we would not want it to be administered by government in as unjust and capricious a fashion as is the norm today. |
Permit me a bit of reductio ad absurdum. For what you said to make sense, there has to be some reasonable association between the size of the mistake and the size of the penalty for making it. What this thread is about is that the penalty for making these sorts of mistakes has been increasing, to the point where they are now quite onerous and intolerable, but seemingly only for men (with some minuscule number of exceptions). My question is, at what point does it no longer make sense to pretend that men are not only responsible for making the mistake, but they are prohibited from complaining about the size of the penalty for making it, or about the fact that they are singled out by sex to pay the entire penalty for what was probably a two-person mistake?