Posted on 04/17/2002 1:58:35 PM PDT by M 91 u2 K
Men of today's older generation grew up in the chivalric miasma of their time, which held that women were morally superior to men, and that civilized men protected women against any available vicissitude. A corollary was that women needed protecting. So common has this understanding been throughout history that one may suspect it of being based in ancient instinct: In a less hospitable world, if men didn't protect women, something disagreeable would eat them, and then there would be no more people. So men did. And do.
Instincts have consequences, particularly when the circumstances requiring them cease to exist.
Because women were until recently subordinate, and in large part played the role of gentility assigned to them, men didn't recognize that they could be dangerous, selfish, or sometimes outright vipers. They were no worse than men, but neither were they better. Men believed, as did women, that women were tender creatures, caring, kind, and suited to be mothers. Males deferred to women in many things, which didn't matter because the things women wanted were not important.
When women came into a degree of power, it turned out that they were as immoral, or amoral, as men, probably more self-centered, and out for what they could get. Not all were, of course, as neither were all men, but suddenly this became the central current. This too followed lines of instinctual plausibility: Women took care of children and themselves, and men took care of women. It made sense that they should be self-centered.
These newly empowered women knew, as women have always known, how to wield charm, and they quickly learned to enjoy power. The men of the old school didn't notice in time. They deferred, and they were blind-sided. They gave gentlemanly agreement to one-sided laws hostile to men.
Political deference became a pattern. It remains a pattern. It probably springs in part from the male's instinctive recognition that, by giving women what they want, he gets laid. Between individuals this worked tolerably well, but less so when applied to abstract groups.
When women said they wanted protection against dead-beat dads, the old school fell for it. They were attuned to saving maidens and the sheltering from life's storms of white Christian motherhood. "Dead-beat dads" was of course that sure-fire political winner -- an alliterative slogan of few words that embodied a conclusion but no analysis. So sure were men that women were the kinder gentler sex that they never bothered to look at the statistics on abuse of children, or the track records of the sexes in raising children.
The romantic elderly male believed -- believes -- that women were the natural proprietors of the young. This led to laws virtually denying a divorced father's interest in his children, though not the requirement that he pay for their upkeep. The pattern holds today. Male judges in family law defer to women, almost any women no matter how unfit, and female judges side with their own. The demonstrable fact that women can and do abuse and neglect children, that a female executive clawing her way up the hierarchy may have the maternal instincts of a rattlesnake, that children need their fathers -- all of this has been forgotten.
The reflexive deference continued. Feminists wanted congress to pass a vast program of funding for every left-wing cause that incited enthusiasm in the sterile nests of NOW. They called it the Violence Against Women Act, and men deferentially gave it to them. Of course to vote against it, no matter what it actually said -- and almost no one knew -- would have been to seem to favor violence against women. A law to exterminate orphans, if called the Domestic Violence Prevention Act, would pass without demur.
There followed yet more male deference to female desires. When women wanted to go into the military to have babies, or a Soldier Experience, men couldn't bring themselves to say no.
When the women couldn't perform as soldiers, men graciously lowered standards so they could appear to. It was the equivalent of helping a woman over a log in the park, the legal and institutional parallel of murmuring, "Don't worry your pretty little head about a thing."
On and on it went. The aggregate effect has been that women have gained real power, while (or by) managing in large part to continue to exact deference and, crucially, to avoid the accountability that should come with power. A minor example is women who want the preferential treatment that women now enjoy, and yet expect men to pay for their dates. In today's circumstances, this is simple parasitism.
Today men are accountable for their behavior. Women are not. The lack of accountability, seldom clearly recognized, is the bedrock of much of today's feminist misbehavior, influence, and politics. Its pervasiveness is worth pondering.
A man who sires children and leaves is called a dead-beat dad, and persecuted. A woman who has seven children out of wedlock and no capacity to raise them is not a criminal, but a victim. He is accountable for his misbehavior, but she is not for hers. It is often thus.
Consider the female Army officer who complained that morning runs were demeaning to women. A man who thus sniveled would be disciplined, ridiculed, and perhaps thumped. Yet the Army fell over itself to apologize and investigate. Again, men are held accountable for their indiscipline, but women are not. Men expect to adapt themselves to the Army, but women expect the Army to adapt to them. And it does. The male instinct is to keep women happy.
Note that a woman who brings charges of sexual harassment against a man suffers no, or minor, consequences if the charges are found to be unfounded -- i.e., made up. A man who lied about a woman's misbehavior would be sacked. He is accountable. She isn't.
Yes, large numbers of women are responsible, competent, and agreeable. Few engage in the worst abuses, as for example the fabrication of sexual harassment. Yet they can do these things. A man cannot throw a fit and get his way. A woman can. Only a few need misbehave to poison the air and set society on edge. And the many profit by the misbehavior of the few.
People will do what they can get away with. Men assuredly will, and so are restrained by law. Women are not. Here is the root of much evil, for society, children, men and, yes, women.
I hardly consider labeling her a "whiner" as intellectual criticism. Offering solutions is not an absolute requirement of an academic thesis - sometimes pointing out the problem is the beginning of a solution. Further, you overgeneralize in your comments regarding her work to the point that any rebuttal becomes meaningless. This is exactly the kind of thing for which you've so freely criticized others throughout this thread. Such tactics wouldn't win anybody any friends on either side of the fence, so I wouldn't brag too much about it.
There is no such implication. I merely stated what happened. I advocated no prior restraint on lobbyists of any sort.
On the other hand, I do not believe we are required to roll over and play dead every time our political opponents win one on Capitol Hill. Hell, that happens every day. The set of ideological Marxists is much larger than the set of feminist ideological Marxists. We have environmentalist Marxists who ultimately want to take us back to collective agriculture powered by the Sun; globalist Marxists who want us to pay taxes to the UN so they can do to developing countries what Marxists have already done to Russia and Eastern Europe; we have almost every kind except economic Marxists. We used to have those, too, but then the Marxist economies imploded, putting lie to the idea that Marxism has any value as an economic theory. But that doesn't stop people from advocating it as an ideal. As Gorbachev said, "Communism is a beautiful-sounding idea. But it does not work."
So anyway, what we have in this case is a bunch of academic Marxists who managed to lobby their way into having a gigantic bureaucracy with lots of federal money and authority over the education system. They now use this to implement their vision of a utopian gynocratic socialism in which men are basically uneducated worker bees who are kept off in the corner somewhere so that the lesbians running this effort could actually get to be in charge.
I think parents of sons need to have their antennas out for this phenomenon, and if it's happening in their school, they need to get their sons out of there. The people running that show do not have their sons' education as a goal. Their real agenda is more at emotionally and intellectually crippling him so that he can't compete. That's not really anything a sane person would want for their child.
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This is meaningless drivil. I want to know the specific condition of the marriage, the reason for it, and the reason for the divorce.
No you don't. Saying you do is just meaningless drivel. According to the census bureau, there are roughly 20 million each, men and women, who have been divorced. Let's be kind and assume the average divorce decree runs to 25 pages. Let's even give you a break and assume that you can divine the gist of it from just 2 pages. That right there is 40 million pages you are going to have to read to get what you are asking for. Assuming that you can read legalese at something like 20 seconds per page, and spend 8 hours each day doing this until you are done, it will take you 76 years to complete this task, and that's if there are no more divorces between now and 76 years from now.
Clearly, you have either not thought this through, or you are just throwing up chaff that is supposed to sound reasonable, but which on examination turns out to be an impossible -- in fact preposterous -- task.
There seems to be no Constitutional obstacle to taking children from fit and economically capable fathers over their vehement objections, in order to place them in the care and protection of unfit mother economic cripples, where they are seventy-three times more likely to be abused or murdered.
Somehow, I think the Constitution will allow children to be cared for by the parent who is capable of doing so, rather than the one who is not.
Especially since mother custody is an innovation of the past eighty years.
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OH, YES I DO.
What I'm saying is there are a significant number of men who are intolerable and have already deserted their wives and children even though they hang around the house. When the woman breaks down and divorces them she is accused of breaking up the family. I notice several men on this forum who nobody of any intelligence or human sensitivity could remain married to and retain any sense of dignity or mental health.
1) There are men who no healthy woman of quality could survive in a marriage.
2) There are women who no healthy man could survive in a marriage.
3) There are on occasion two of the above married to each other.
4) Those in all categories have the habit of pointing their fingers at each other as the primary problem in the marriage. Right now I am friends with and monitor an 87 year old woman who is as sharp as a tack. Her husband was a boozer, partier, womanizer, and good time charlie until the sonofabitch died at the age of 41 and left her with five kids to raise. There are many like him, and many like Bill Clinton. Many women seek divorce for damed good reason.
DAILY EXPRESS Feminine Mistake by Michelle Cottle
Only at TNR Online Post date: 04.24.02
Want to see a woman go berserk? Try tossing out these tidbits at the next office happy hour: Female fertility begins to decline at age 27. The process accelerates dramatically in a woman's late thirties, and by age 42, her odds of having a baby (using her own egg) have dropped to under 10 percent--regardless of how many visits she makes to the fertility clinic.
http://www.thenewrepublic.com/doc.mhtml?i=express&s=cottle042402
So, the freaks try to act like men, while breaking the bones of their feminine lovers. What freaks of nature!
There we agree. I'm always so surprised on the occasion that I see an ad that portrays fathers well----as something other than a peripheral goof----that I go buy the product just as a cosmic karma thank-you.
I would add to your statement that never should obligations be discussed without an equally-weighted discussion of rights.
Yeah, we had already established that your job in life is to protect womankind from the men of the world. You're the White Knight, come to save the Lady from the monsters. All men but you are wife-beating drunkards that women should stay away from.
C'mon, that is such a cheap trick. And to be still using it at your age... it's embarrassing to watch.
I agree with all of that...but it's worth noting that the maternal preference in custody cases was first instituted in law in 1839; over the following 80 years it became progressively more widespread. Then, of course, the liberalized divorce laws and welfare state instituted in the 60s/70s gave would-be single-moms the other half: the financial entitlement they needed to raise the kids without their father. And of course, with that maternal economic-custody entitlement package complete, the country promptly went to hell.
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