Transcript of "Men not marrying? How deep does "the problem" go?"

Okay, so an online friend of mine was spitting mad after reading this recent effort on the part of I can only assume to be a traditionalist woman, in trying to figure out what the heck is wrong with men these days. As so many traditionalists and feminists before her, she missed the mark by a freaking mile, even though she did dance dangerously close (within 100 miles or so) of a few of the core issues that currently discourage men from being good little married drones like they're supposed to be, dammit.

Despite being critical of feminist attitudes that she rightly sees as anti-male, the article was absurdly gynocentric. It was very much about what women want, and there was a lot of expectation that men *should* do what women want when they want it--that is, get married and have babies on HER schedule as decided by her. One has to wonder if she even bothered to ask any actual unmarried males WHY they are refusing or not bothering to "man up" before writing her article.

But as I said, it did at least poke at the surface of the festering boil that is the systemic nature of "the problem", even if it didn't give it the lancing it truly deserved. Her conclusion was "why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? And why get a good job when women are so independent they can just give the milk away for nothing?" Both are backhanded criticisms of women's behavior (yay, for someone brave enough to blame women for their own troubles), but they fall far short of any sort of true examination of the issues.

So I'm going to give it the old college try, and give a bit of an overview of what I believe has become a multifaceted problem.

A recent examination from Heartiste said a very great deal, and with some serious literary flair (pearls of wisdom from that pit of social nihilism that is the pick-up artist community). I'm just going to quote some of the relevant bits and leave a link to the article below:

If you want to know why men are running away from marriage, children and beta provisioning, one major reason is that the women available to these working class men are flat out disgusting. Take a look for yourself. What man of normal mental health and active libido wants to romantically woo and date, let alone marry, a beastly, waddling tatted mountain of pustulence with the issue of three other men barking and nipping at her cankles?

And let’s not forget that economically empowered and government-assisted women, slaves to their hypergamous impulse for higher status mates than themselves, can’t help but winnow the pool of men deemed acceptable marriage material. When women say “there are no good men left”, what the astute observer hears is “there are no good men left thanks to a combination of my increased expectations and decreased attractiveness.”

He goes on to say: 

to the factory-farmed ivory tower sociologists studying marriage trends and turning out paper after paper of half-assed hogwash: there’s a whole other world out there. It’s the world of men, and in that world, men’s desires matter. You should think about incorporating that ugly reality into your theories.

Hey, Heartiste--why don't you tell us how you really feel. As blistering as that little snippet was, it raises some very important points, I think the most important of which is that MEN'S DESIRES MATTER. When men cannot find women THEY desire who are willing to partner with them, why would they partner?

And I think it's important to note that the reality of divorce and family law in our culture plays a HUGE part in men's growing contempt for marriage as an institution. It's not that men are commitment-phobes. It's that women seem increasingly commitment-incompatible. The word "commitment" has in fact, in female parlance, come to mean, "up until the moment I'm no longer 100% satisfied with the person I married". And that attitude is only going to lead to more and more divorces as more and more successful women effectively set their sights higher than they reasonably should while their youth and attractiveness wanes, leading to a growing number of them feeling like they settled even if they didn't--even if they scored someone 2 points above them on the overall attractiveness scale.

And oddly enough, no one, least of all women, seem to really give a shit what MEN desire in a partner. Why can't men just be happy with what's available? Well, let's look at what's available to the *average* man in his 30s: a 35 year old woman who hollers yes over the jangling of her biological clock while unable to keep the grimace from her face because he's a bigger loser than the 5 guys she dumped in her 20s and now she has to settle, a divorcee who's already financially annihilated and emotionally crippled at least one man, and a single mother who's collecting reams of child support from one poor schmuck while her other baby daddy manages to duck his obligations because he's a drug dealer and his income's off the books.

And yes, I'm exaggerating, but you see my point.

And no, not all women are like that. But frankly, the consensus among today's women seems to be that this state of affairs is the new normal, and even responsible women will often frame such destructive choices on the part of other women as somehow valid and defensible. The sentiment in the mainstream is that men should just man up and go along with Pairing Up 2.0: Who Cares What Men Want?, that essentially, a given woman's behavior and life choices should have no effect on whether she is able to attract a good, reliable man...this does not speak well of the principles of even those women who are more well-situated. In fact, I think it's safe to say that the fewer female voices of reason there are out there the more men are likely to wash their hands of the entire idea of partnering.

But I honestly think it goes deeper than even the baggage the average unattached woman now carries, or the danger of ending up an emotionally and financially devastated statistic with "generous" every-other-weekend access to one's children that is keeping men from "manning up".

I've been thinking of the White Feather Girls. For those who don't know, it was a group of young women in the UK during WWI who bestowed a white feather of cowardice on any man they saw in civilian clothes, to shame them into enlisting.

And when I consider how vulnerable so many men were to those kinds of shaming tactics, vulnerable enough to enlist in a war that killed 10 million to preserve their manhood in the eyes of women they'd never met, I simply can't believe that it's only the risks of marriage, as onerous as they are, that have rendered men impervious to the kinds of shaming tactics employed by traditionalists and feminists who seem increasingly desperate to strong-arm men into their old roles.

I think at the very core of it, it's about a positive male identity. Male identity almost always revolves around doing, rather than being. Most of that doing has always revolved around being of use in a uniquely male context. Most of men's usefulness through history has derived from learning "male" skills and performing them well, embodying a male role in the service of women or society. In the more turbulent past, those roles needed to perform a valuable service to women or the community that women could not--or should not be expected to--perform for themselves.

This is the most common path to a positive male identity BECAUSE MEN LACK A MECHANISM FOR AUTOMATIC OWN-GROUP PREFERENCE. Simply put, they do not relate to other men automatically, just because they're men.

Women have this bias, which provides them a natural ability to form cooperatives, relate to other women, and seek consensus though their strong mechanism for own-group preference based on gender alone. Given their gender roles through most of human history, this mechanism makes sense. Their individual value as, to put it bluntly, breeders, meant that in a survivalist environment, you didn't throw a woman on the trash pile without a pressing reason. Adjustments were made when possible to keep as many women as you could within the sisterhood. This is where you find a ton of attention in female spaces given to things like "tone" and "being nice" and "getting along" even when there are disagreements. It's all about comfort level and feelings of acceptance.

Men, however, lack the hardwiring to form a preference for maleness based merely on maleness. And that only makes sense when you think about men's roles for the last couple million years or so--roles that involved things like beating the guys down the valley to a pulp when they threatened his women and children, and competing against other males within his community for a shot at the mating game. Given those roles, automatically siding with one's own gender over the other is...well, it just doesn't work.

And it's not that men cannot manifest a form of own-group preference, it's just that when own-group preference manifests in males, it can't be based on maleness alone. There must be a common purpose, a common set of ideals, a common duty or cause, a common doing or a common position in the status hierarchy.

Men can indeed identify with each other and be team players among other men--you see it in churches, military units, fraternities, sports teams and even sports fans, political parties, movements, project teams. While they will often form hierarchies within those contexts, those realms can be sources of a sense of loyalty and brotherhood among men.

The myth among feminists that men will insult each other for displaying feminine traits because they see women as inferior is just that--a myth. Men do this because women have a trump card that bestows intrinsic value on them--their uteruses--and they retain that value even when they gender-bend a little. A woman who acts like a woman is not seen as inferior. A man who acts like a woman has always been seen not as a woman, but as a "woman without a womb". He has no female value, and he has no male value. Therefore, he has NO value at all. And unlike women, men who were not "useful" did--and still do--get thrown on the trash heap of society.

In the currency of reproduction, an ovum goes for a thousand bucks, a uterus is worth a cool mill, and an ejaculation about 10 cents. To be acceptable mating material, and worth keeping around, a man had to do more than generate sperm. And when the only thing keeping you from becoming completely disposable as an individual lies in differentiating yourself from the feminine, well, guys gonna enforce that shit.

This is why men have always tended to define themselves by their roles. Father, husband, working man, soldier, career man, family man, middle class man, politician, activist, etc...in other words, roles to exist in which allow them to relate to other men who also occupy those roles, and to derive a positive and meaningful identity from performing their masculinity through those roles.

And I think this may be why suicide rates for men skyrocket after divorce--you have not just taken away his kids, his wife, his assets and a chunk of his income. You've effectively stripped him of a huge part of the male identity he's built around himself.

So I'm thinking that for most men, forming a positive male identity in relation to other males requires a couple of things--a male role that is differentiated from the female one (or at the very least, a male-oriented environment) and, well, positivity.

Men used to be able to derive a positive male identity from marriage. That is, through the respected and uniquely male role of husband and father. When that identity is increasingly characterized by society as superfluous, obsolete, or in the words of Harriet Harman, unnecessary to social cohesion, it is no longer a way for a man to defer his disposability, is it? Moreover, when that identity can be unilaterally stripped from him on the whim of the increasingly fickle and hard to please female even when he does everything right, marriage ceases to be a positive way for men to define themselves as men. It becomes a way for men to define themselves as chumps and idiots, and who wants to define themselves that way? Moreover, from sitcoms to romcoms to TV commercials, to billboard ads, the role of husband/father is increasingly one of playing the incompetent buffoon to sassy, smart, together wife or even child. In the mass media there is nothing noble or respectable about husbandhood or fatherhood anymore. Further, when the roles within marriage become virtually indistinguishable and interchangeable, a man's role becomes less and less...well, uniquely male. It's just a role. It can be a path to meaning and fulfilment (if he's lucky), and it may be something he desires to do and become, but it's not necessarily a path to defining himself AS A MAN.

So we can scratch that one off the list--even for men who've been living under a rock when it comes to divorce law. Marriage and children no longer offer a reliable path to a positive male identity. It is no longer positive, nor is it significantly differentiated from the feminine.

The workplace is yet another milieu that has largely lost its maleness. And that's not to say that women ruined everything. It is not so much the presence of women but rather the alterations in environment and interaction many women demand when they want to engage the world through the paid workforce. A male space that leads to a positive male identity need not be free of women, but it still needs to be male--men need an environment that suits their psychology, not one in which they must be metaphorically castrated in order to steer clear of trouble with HR. And I'm not even talking about vulgarity or expressions of sexuality, but aggression, ambition, ribbing, competition, passion, authority, and plain speech--all of these are often discouraged when women are present, in order to spare feelings and prevent discomfort. Outspokenness is replaced with drawing room rules of discourse and ingenuity with protocol, all of which render a feminized workplace, though tolerable to men, no longer a path to a positive MALE identity.

Because it is no longer a male space, and no longer appeals to the psychology of men, the workplace has become a ladder fewer men feel driven to climb in order to construct their identities. Combine this with the fact that we handicap men through quotas and affirmative action for women, well... a large number of men are not only becoming disenchanted with the expectation to perform in an environment that does not feed their natures and has set them up to fail--in the absence of those uniquely male-centered psychological rewards and motivators, a growing number are finally opening their eyes and waking up to the negative aspects of wage-slavery. And that is a pill that, once taken, cannot be unswallowed.

In every space males congregate where women have elbowed their way in and demanded changes, you seem to find large numbers of men giving ground and eventually losing their drive to perform there. And again, I don't think it's the presence of women that does this--it's the enforced necessity to change one's behavior in order to maintain a proper decorum around them, and the changes in how those places function that women often demand. It's the expectation that the environment and the men in it adjust to suit women's needs, rather than expecting women to adjust themselves to the environment.

A few bastions of maleness remain, places where women are often welcome right up until they begin to demand the environment change to suit them, at which point the male protests begin. Hell, you can even see this tolerance on the part of men when women sneak into the men's room when the line-up is too long for the women's bathroom. It's all good unless she takes offence at men behaving the way men do in a restroom by farting and pissing in her presence.

So where are men retreating to? The internet, and the few men's spaces that have not tailored their rules of conduct to suit women's easily offended natures and need for comfort. The MRM, where a common set of ideals and values bonds the community and allows them to define their maleness irrespective of society's or women's approval. A place where words and ideas are more important than the tone or the smiles that may or may not lie behind them.

The hierarchy and uniquely male objectives of the pick-up artist community, where competition and scorekeeping are indeed still allowed, where there are men for others to admire or to mentor, and where they thumb their noses at what women say they want. Society wasn't working for them, so they invented their own society and they're running with by their own rules.

Video games and related forums. Online venues where refusals to police speech are deemed misogyny and the men there don't give much of a fuck.

Men going their own way, who've taken a stand based on a realistic assessment of what's in it for them, and maintain their self-respect not by complying with society's expectations but by disregarding them.

Beer and buddies, hook-up culture, and part time jobs men tolerate but don't care about.

Gynocentrism--the manginas and white knights who supplicate and pander to the feminine even when it's ugly or amoral, differentiating themselves from the feminine through their blind worship of it.

And why? Because all of the "approved" paths to a positive male identity, the paths society both endorses and depends on, are gone. And even when men don't consciously realize this, they know it somewhere in the backs of their brains. Men have always worked and sacrificed and sweated and bled if they were rewarded with a means through which to see themselves as worthy of respect. But when every role society wants to cram you into is no longer a way to respect yourself, then it's time to throw those roles away.

And one thing the apexuals at the top, like Bill Bennett and Obama, feminists like Kaye Hymowitz and Katie Roiphe, and traditionalists like Suzanne Venker, will never realize is that using shame to try to coerce men to do what is expected of them isn't going to work this time, because while it's possible to shame a man into giving his life for his country if there's a promise of respect in it, it's impossible to shame someone into working his ass off and risking his future just for the joy of looking in the mirror and seeing Homer Simpson or Ray Barone looking back at him.

When the cost of society's approval is the self-respect you derive from a positive identity, it ceases to be worth it to a lot of men.

Transcript of "Fempocalypse!!!"

Okay, someone commenting on my last video scoffed at my assertion that unless our attitudes change, society will, sooner or later, reach a...well, let's call it a "fempocalypse". That is, that feminism will eventually help bring about an economic and social collapse.

Many people are simply unable to wrap their heads around that idea, because we've all been told, ad nauseum, that feminism is a cause of prosperity, when in reality, it is largely--perhaps entirely--a consequence of it.

I mean, let's consider patriarchy, or to put it another way, the social contract of marriage and fatherhood. This system benefitted all parties in a world of largely manual labor (much of it, since the agricultural age, beyond the physical capabilities of women). Remember that we are also a species whose offspring have one of the longest periods of complete helplessness and immobility of any on earth, and whose maternal parent lactates to provide nourishment to offspring for up to four years.

Because men were not burdened with the gestation, lactation and care of children, as individuals they could subsist and survive while expending only a small percentage of their capacity to perform work. When male animals of any kind don't need to do more than survive, there's often a great deal of lying around going on--and this isn't necessarily laziness, but efficiency. Expending more energy on work than you need to, especially when that "work" is physically demanding, negatively impactful on your health, and dangerous, is just foolish.

Because women were burdened with the gestation, lactation and care of children, because those children have a prolonged period of helplessness, and because women had no real control over their fertility until just a few decades ago, women were unable to work at their full capacity for a large portion of their lives, and I would suggest that during the periods of extreme vulnerability shortly before and after birth, unable to reliably and consistently perform the necessary labor to even keep themselves alive, let alone their very helpless offspring. 

The mutual dilemma was that those individual men who only had to expend a small amount of energy to subsist probably wanted to pass on their genes as much as anyone else did. And those individual women needed help and support in order to successfully raise their children in a world with no daycare, social safety net, maternity leave, baby formula or safe, easy jobs offering flex time and health benefits.

A man could not have children without the cooperation of a woman, and a woman could not raise her children effectively and safely without the cooperation of...well, someone.

And I'm going to borrow a bit from another blogger, Rob of the blog No Ma'am, and read a portion of his description of patriarchy and lifelong monogamous marriage, because he explained it EXTREMELY effectively.

When one stands back and observes the whole lot, we see that both males and females have a surplus and a shortage: 

Males have a surplus of labour but a shortage of reproductive ability. 

Females have a surplus of reproductive ability but a shortage of labour. 

Now, perhaps, you can see why marriage is an economic contract.

The male “sells” his surplus labour to the female in exchange for her reproductive ability. 

The female “sells” her reproductive ability to the male in exchange for his surplus labour. 

In order to “sell” something, you first must “own it” yourself, and upon “selling it,” you are agreeing to transfer ownership of it to the buyer. This is the basis of economics, and as you can see, it is based on property rights. 

In the economic contract of marriage, the female agrees to transfer the ownership of her sexual reproductive ability to the male, and she takes ownership of his surplus labour as payment for it. 

So, yes, while the feminists harp on and on that women were once “owned” as chattel, there is truth to this because in a very real sense, a woman’s sexuality became the property of the husband. He very much was considered to “own” her sexuality and the products of her sexuality (children). The children of a marriage became his property, because he paid for them. 

(Note that while the children of a marriage are supposed to belong to the husband, children born out of wedlock are the property of the woman. A woman who is not married owns her own sexuality and the products/children of that sexuality are also her property). 

This is also why, in the past, women were so much more harshly condemned for adultery than men. The wife's sexuality was no longer hers to give away. 

This is why, in the past, when a woman was raped it was considered an act of theft against the husband. Someone “stole” the sexuality which was his property. 

This is why, in the past, it was considered impossible for a husband to be found guilty of spousal rape. How can you possibly steal your own property? 

So, feminists are somewhat truthful when they claim that women were “owned” as chattel. A wife’s sexuality (NOT her person), was very much “owned” by her husband and it was in fact used as a means of production: The production of the husband’s own children. 

But, as always, feminists are only capable of speaking in half-truths. The part of the “women were owned as chattel” song leaves out the second verse, which is “and men were owned as beasts of burden.” 

Now as an aside, one thing I find very interesting is that a recent experiment with capuchin monkeys found that once you taught them the concept of "money"--chips that fit in machines that dispense food and treats--it wasn't long before the male monkeys were trading their chips for sexual favors, and the female ones happily obliging them and spending away on things like grapes and jello. And at its most basic, money is representative of labor. So the idea that a woman's reproductive capacity is a valuable commodity men are willing to pay for (whether through marriage or prostitution) is not a purely human social construct designed by men to oppress and exploit women. If it is exploitation, both sides are culpable. I mean, sheesh, considering how quickly those monkeys took to prostitution, is it any wonder it's considered the world's oldest profession? 

It also bears mentioning that an expectation of chastity in women was socially enforced under patriarchy largely in the service of women's interests and wellbeing--that is, a woman who had no husband to assist her in raising a child was bringing that child into the world at an extreme disadvantage, and putting herself at a disadvantage as well. 

And it ALSO bears mentioning that, because of the gendered roles of patriarchy, men were penalized with a great deal of social censure for not living up to THEIR part of the marriage bargain--that is, just about the only thing that could earn a person as much scorn as being a slutty woman was being a deadbeat, shiftless, layabout husband/father.

And it ALSO ALSO bears mentioning that the *lifelong* component of the  marriage contract arguably protected and benefitted women living under difficult socioeconomic conditions MUCH more than it benefitted men. Men's value in the "economic contract of marriage" was likely to increase over time as he accumulated job experience, savings and property, while a woman's value (her reproductive capacity) peaks very early, and disappears long before she'll die of old age. Lifelong marriage protected women from husbands who might abandon them when their fertility (and all her options) were gone in favor of someone younger--from a man essentially using up the best, most valuable years of her life, and then trading her in for a newer model. In a sense, he owed her "pension benefits" long after her primary contribution to the economic contract was gone.

A few other details:

Men who are married and have children--especially if they have a sense of ownership, in the philosophical if not property-rights sense, of their children--are more motivated to labor at full capacity. Historically, within marriage, when a child is born, a man will often scale up his participation in paid work. And it's been shown that divorced men who have no access to their children are the most likely to default on child support, while as access and involvement increases, so does the likelihood of him paying that child support in full.

Women are also, for the most part, consciously or unconsciously hypergamous. Even women who would never dream of uttering the words "I want to marry for money," usually have standards of success before they will consider a man a long term prospect. The standard, even now, is usually "as successful as, or more successful than, I am", and from many of the articles I've read from even feminists, disillusioned and still single in their late thirties, the idea of "settling" for most women often has as much to do with income/career potential as personality, sense of humor, or how often a guy is willing to do the dishes.

So let's look at why this social construct of lifelong monogamous marriage (with all its attendant shunning of fallen women, enforcing of gender roles and placing authority over children in the hands of husbands and fathers) has always been considered so important to society.

Well, in order for society to function, you need two things: Strong backs (literally or figuratively) to perform the necessary labor to keep everything going--to build the roads and plough the fields and slaughter the cows and haul the bricks--and people whose job it is to replace the strong backs as the old ones wear out. 

Men are very good at being the strong backs that were much more necessary in the past than they are today, and women are...well, good or bad at hauling bricks, they're the only ones capable of generating more strong backs to replace the old ones. It was very much in society's interest to keep women at that work, because without modern medicine and other such luxuries, infant mortality rates and lower life expectancies required more babies born in order to keep things chugging along. And I think it's important to note that the VAST majority of both men and women through history had zero access to educations that might help them perform work that didn't require lifting, lugging and frequently...well, dying.

Patriarchy worked very well for society overall, because it provided women with the surplus labor they required in order to raise their children in the best possible circumstances AT NO COST to anyone but husbands and fathers. And men's ownership of their children motivated the vast majority of men to do more than just subsist--to essentially labor at more than minimum capacity. That meant that a lot of work got done, and the economic surplus men generated was handed directly to the women who needed it. Of course this arrangement benefitted some women more than others (the ones who married rich), and some men more than others (the ones whose wives didn't turn out to be barren), and could easily benefit one party in a particular marriage more than the other. But for the most part, in its function as the smallest building block of society, it worked like whoa and like damn. 

In fact, it's been suggested by anthropologists that the Neanderthalers died out because they employed an egalitarian division of labor in a world that did not lend itself to maintaining and growing populations through equal distribution of labor and equal distribution of risk to life and limb, and once the hapless neanderthalers met up with modern humans, who had a more gendered division of labor based on prioritizing women's safety, it was all over for them.

And this is generally what has happened to all societies based on arrangements other than patriarchy--the few matriarchies that existed through history tended to be small, poor, and disappear the moment they came into contact with patriarchal ones.

Now I've heard some people posit that there's no reason to believe a matriarchal society can't be just as successful as a patriarchal one, now that the world, technology and the nature of work has changed. 

I think there is plenty of evidence already to the contrary. 

For instance, the UK has essentially become a partial matriarchy wrt the base unit of society. Neither children, nor women's sexuality, is owned by men--on the contrary, even children born into marriages are essentially more the "property" of the mother. In addition, single motherhood is a growing norm over there, with about half of all babies born to unmarried women, and at least 20% of children currently living in single mother households.

However, even now that we have safe, easy indoor jobs that pay decently, women still seem to require the surplus labor that used to be provided by husbands and fathers--in the form of maternity benefits if nothing else. They get that surplus labor now from the state. Men contribute a disproportionate amount of tax revenue to government coffers, and women pull a disproportionate share of the benefits. Women also get that surplus labor in the form of forcible extractions  through alimony and child support from divorced fathers, or from single men who often did not consent to become fathers.

The UK government has also been rather...blase about the idea of fathers having access to their children, and as I mentioned above, when fathers do not have access to their children they are generally less productive and pay less child support. Fathers who never wanted children are pretty much in the same boat as those who are banished from the lives of children they did want--especially since they are penalized for their productivity. The more they earn, the more is taken in child support. So not only are they not motivated to be more productive through a sense of ownership of their children, THEY ARE INCENTIVIZED TO BE EVEN LESS PRODUCTIVE than they might have been, because any surplus they generate will be seized anyway.

And because this surplus of labor is not willingly handed directly from men to women--that is, because it has to be extracted in one way or another from men--that means a growing bureaucratic machine taking it from men and handing it to women, eating a share of it as it performs this service. 

I keep hearing the term "nanny state" used by political pundits, but really, in effect, we have a "daddy state". Men pay into the system in taxes and direct payments, and women withdraw from it in the form of alimony, child support, tax benefits, subsidized health care, day care and housing, government sponsored after school programs, income top-ups, welfare and food stamps. Not every woman with children is a drain on the system, but women as a group very much are. Not every man pays more into the system than he takes out, but men as a group very much do. This is why the system works...for now.

But let's look at some of the other costs of single motherhood--especially when fathers are completely absent--through the statistical disadvantages to their children These children face a 2 to 10 times greater risk of:

• substance abuse
• truancy
• health problems
• being abused
• behavioral problems and personality disorders
• criminal behavior
• gang activity
• suicide and running away
• dropping out at all levels of education
• incarceration as youths and adults
• sexually transmitted diseases
• having children outside of relationships
• becoming teenage parents

So we basically have a lot of direct and indirect costs attributable to the breakdown of marriage as the base unit of society, all of which will increase as those last two pesky items--single and teen parenthood--beget more and more single mothers generationally. 

But wait, there's more!

When a man defaults on child support, we incarcerate him, to the tune of about $60,000 per year. This not only directly costs us, but we've also removed his earning and taxpaying capacity while he's incarcerated and further, have handicapped his ability to return to a productive role once he's released with a criminal record. We are essentially paying for him to become less productive and more of a burden. It's lose-lose!

Consider, also, that when a family breaks up, you suddenly need two households and almost twice the money to support the same number of people--all of that money flows upward toward corporate coffers, rather than staying in people's savings accounts and helping them build futures. And since women control 80% of consumer spending in the west, the more money you put in women's sole control, the more of it gets spent on consumer goods and bonuses for CEOs.

And the really awesome thing is it all looks great on paper, because a divorce actually boosts the GDP--anything that causes money to change hands boosts the GDP. To the bean counters, the harmful, rotten beans are just as good as the nutritious, fresh ones. A multi-vehicle collision that kills several people may actually up the GDP more overall (through money shifting to and from insurance companies, doctors, nurses and other medical staff, funeral homes, EMTs, tow trucks drivers, accident investigators, law suits, prosecutions, etc) than if it hadn't happened and those people had lived to a ripe old age. So a divorce might boost the gross domestic product, even though there is little that's productive about it--even though it actually increases poverty. It's the lawyers and their yacht salesmen who are getting rich, as well as corporations, mortgage brokers,  bureaucracies, credit card companies, and banks, not families.

Once a family breaks up, then both parents usually need to work at full capacity to provide a quality of life for all of them that will still be less comfortable than it would be were they still together. And the really awesome thing is, the more people you have who MUST work at paid endeavors at full capacity, the more competition there will be for existing jobs, and the more power corporations have to negotiate compensation downward. It hardly seems surprising to me that between the flood of bored housewives glutting the workforce after the advent of the pill, and the rise in divorce and single parenthood, wages have failed to keep up with inflation. 

At the same time, our demand for the things corporations produce--jobs and merchandise--only ballooned as the nuclear family disintegrated and all those single-dwelling families turned into multiple-dwelling families with twice the consumption rate. The more family is eroded, the more us plebes need both jobs and goods, and the more power those corporations have to up the cost of living through inflating prices (and executive salaries), while lowering wages at the same time.

Again--lose lose.

And as all this is going on, the machine required to extract men's obligations from them, to provide their surplus labor to women and their children, gets bigger and fatter and less efficient and more hungry, and the gap between the super-rich and the rest of us gets wider and wider as we find ourselves having to work harder to provide a decent quality of life to our children.

But wait, there's still more!

Remember all those kids from all those single mother homes? You know, the ones who face all those increased risks of a host of social maladies that will lead them to become burdens on, rather than productive members of, society?

Well, here's how that goes. 20% of men under 25 in the UK are considered essentially unemployable. The London riots were blamed on fatherlessness. And that much is true--the false part is in blaming fatherlessness on fathers rather than on a system where fathers are considered superfluous to their children's lives, other than as ATMs, and encourages women to force fatherhood on unwilling men by not holding those women fully accountable for their unilateral reproductive decisions. This system has had the effect of discouraging the development of long term partnerships by skewing the power balance fully in favor of women the moment things get bumpy, while skewing the accountability balance even more toward men than it was during patriarchy.

Various feminist organizations have been fighting tooth and nail against a presumption of shared custody or equal access after divorce since it was first proposed, and they throw around super-scary (and super-flawed, super-one-sided) domestic violence stats to do it. The moment you mention an idea like legal paternal surrender--which would, essentially, shift full ownership of (and full responsibility for) single women's sexuality onto those women--feminists almost uniformly take up the cry, "What about the children??" 

Feminism scrapped tooth and nail to make no-fault divorce a reality--not to make divorce as available to women as it was to men, but to make a unilateral divorce without wrongdoing by either party a legal reality. And lo and behold, now we have 70% of all divorces initiated by women, and the leading cause given is "dissatisfaction." Not abuse. Not adultery. Not even irreconcilable differences. Just, "I'm not 100% content." And then they claim that men denied custody or access to their children is "sexism against women," and alimony is "benevolent sexism" though it's "sometimes necessary", and therefore "too soon to do away with it."

Feminists fought and still fight for women's reproductive freedom, but they don't seem to worry too much about the lack of responsibility demonstrated by women's growing penchant for getting pregnant and having children out of wedlock at rates of up to 60%, at a time when they have almost total control over their fertility. And despite women having 100% power of decision over reproduction (no matter what the man does or doesn't do), very few feminists believe those women should be held 100% financially responsible for those decisions. Not only should abortions be free, but child support automatic. Despite having no say in any of these decisions, men are still held partly responsible, and we ALL are as well, through the increased social spending required to make all reproductive choices on the part of women as burden-free as possible. 

Reproduction may be women's burden, but it's their power as well, and feminism seems happy to not only indulge any irresponsible exercising of that power, but has suggested and implemented measures designed to ensure every decision a woman might make wrt her reproductive capacity, whether wise or foolish, comes with as little cost to the woman making it as possible.

And let's look at some other feminist initiatives. The pendulum in both basic and post-secondary education was already swinging in women's favor in the 80s, yet during the 80s and 90s feminists insisted on measures like gender quotas, affirmative action and women-only funding, as well as changes in primary school teaching (such as the whole language method) that raised outcomes for girls relative to boys (insanely, the whole language method has been shown to handicap both boys and girls compared to oldschool phonics--it just handicaps boys MORE). The swinging pendulum was thereby given a firm and expensive push in the direction it was already going, and we're seeing the results now.

Men are now the minority of high school graduates, and the majority of drop-outs at all levels. They are the minority of university students. There are more women than men alive today with high school diplomas and bachelor's degrees. Women under 30 in US cities now earn an average of 8% more than their male peers. 

And while quotas, incentives, gender specific funding and scholarships and similar measures should no longer be required to assist a demographic that is already dominating at all levels of education (other than stem fields) and already out-earns their male peers, no feminist organizations seem to think it's time to do away with them, or to introduce gender specific measures to assist men. We have prioritized women's opportunities for career success, at the expense of the success of men, and at great cost to all of us in all the spending it requires.

Now let's look at how that plays out in the real world, by examining the very cut and dried profession of medicine. Spots in medical school are limited, because the cost of training doctors is so onerous that tuition doesn't even begin to cover it. Money is given directly from government (and private donors) to medical schools to cover those "invisible" costs. So let's put a dollar value on the cost to all of us to train a doctor--let's say it's a half million dollars. 

Now let's look at the return on investment between male and female doctors. A male doctor will almost always end up working 44 hours per week or more for about 35 years. During that time, he'll pay flipping great wodges of income tax, and provide 44 hours or more per week of necessary service to communities. He is also more likely than a female doctor to work unpleasant but essential shifts--such as overnighters in the OR. If he has children, in all likelihood, he will work more, not less. And with his ginormous income, he generates spending power that pays off in sales taxes, fuel taxes, property taxes, value added taxes and all that jazz. 

A female doctor usually has her first child within ten years of earning her MD. At this point, she'll take as much as a year off, and collect maternity benefits. When she returns to work, she will likely work 35 hours/week or less. If she has another child, she'll take another year off, perhaps more. And may opt to work even fewer hours if and when she returns. She may drop out of the workforce entirely at some point before official retirement age. A large minority of professional women have decreased to part time, or ceased altogether, their participation in their careers within ten years of getting their credentials. On average, male doctors work more hours per year and per lifetime than female ones. 

And when a huge percentage of your doctors are women, suddenly you find yourself waiting 3 weeks just to see your GP.

On average, we get a LOT more out of a male doctor in actual...you know, doctoring, than we do out of a female one, for our half a million dollar investment. And because that female doctor took one of a finite number of spots, well...we really are talking zero sum game--another qualified candidate was bumped so she could be trained. 

And that's not to say that motherhood is not important, or that she is not being productive. Just that she has not exploited her expensive training to its full economic potential, and she's given us a smaller ROI.

And while there are plenty of men out there who get university degrees we all help pay for and then do nothing with them, men are, over their lifetimes, more likely to pay that money back to us, and then some, simply because over lifetimes, men still earn more than women, pay more taxes, and take less out of the system. 

By prioritizing women in education at all levels, we have handicapped men's ability to be as productive as the system needs them to be to maintain itself. By encouraging single motherhood and allowing women to banish fathers from their children's lives, we're creating half a generation of boys who risk becoming unemployable and expensive burdens on the system as adults, and half a generation of girls who are more likely to perpetuate and exacerbate the problem by becoming single mothers themselves. 

By turning marriage into a risk for men that a compulsive gambler wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole if he had two brain cells to rub together, we've motivated men to be less productive than they otherwise would or could be. And by inserting a ravenous middle-man into the contract between men and women for men's surplus labor, we've only managed to increase the size of government, its mountains of expensive red tape, and the deficits it routinely operates on. 

The weaker fatherhood becomes as a concept, the weaker society becomes. Demoralized men in Japan have started a trend called "grass-eating", where 60% of men under 30 have no interest in marriage, children or getting a job that more than pays the bills. Japanese economists are freaking out over it, because women and children still need men's labor no matter how it changes hands, and Japan's economic dominance was built on the productivity that surplus labor generated.

So, to summarize:

Now that the transfer of surplus labor from men to women must go through a middle-man, who takes a slice of that pie only to get fatter and hungrier, you actually need more and more productivity on the ground to both provide for women and children, and feed the beast of government. In western countries, that beast has grown to 100x the size it was before women's suffrage, and has begun pulling out the visa card willy nilly--pledging the labor of our children to foreign governments to finance the largesse of today.

But what have we done? We've removed all the motivation men have to be economic generators by removing all the benefit to them of marriage and children, so more and more are refusing to do the 50 hour a week thing and are opting for part time jobs, beer and x-box instead. Others are simply so damaged and handicapped by the system we've created that they are incapable of being productive at all. So we actually have LESS productivity on the ground. And those children we're relying on to get us out of hock when foreign governments start calling in the debts, are only going to become less able to save our asses with every generation of them raised in single mother households.

Men paying a greater share of the taxes is what's been funding all of this. But because of our decision to prioritize women's educations over men's, this generation of men are now more likely to drop out at all levels of education, less likely to attend post-secondary, and already earn 8% less than women do under 30. We are actually handicapping the earning power of the people who fund the system women need, and prioritizing training and education for the people who are least likely to exploit it to its full economic potential. We are allowing women to banish fathers from their children's lives at no cost to themselves--in fact, the rewards to women for doing so are myriad and tangible--when we KNOW this disadvantages children and generates current and future costs to society. And we are disincentivizing men's productivity by offering them no realistic opportunity for children that are actually theirs, or marriages that will last longer than a few years, after which all benefit to them is gone, while all the costs and obligations remain.

And while economists in Japan are freaking out over Japanese men going their own way, men don't actually have to consciously go their own way to bring about a fempocalypse. They don't need to start rioting all over the place like in London, or begin waking up en masse to the fact that the "male privilege" they supposedly enjoy amounts to "shut up and get to the back of the line" the way it did at the Occupy protests. All that needs to happen is for us to keep right on giving women everything they want and keep right on marginalizing men, and eventually there won't be enough surplus productivity on the ground to hold up the increasingly bloated system women require, and it will fall. 

And no, not all of this is the fault of feminism. There are a lot of other factors paying into this fool's gamble. But feminism seems to be the one of the loudest lobbies out there demanding entitlements and freedoms that cost us all a crap-ton, and will only keep on costing, rather than paying off in return. 

okay, getting my shit together...

I promised to post text versions of my videos here ages ago, and I'm just getting around to it now. I'm going to start with the most recent and work my way backwards, just to make things extra difficult for all of you.

So here goes:

The invisible man riding the donkey backwards

Okay, someone sent me a link to an article in The Atlantic, called "What's Wrong with the Violence Against Women Act". Now I suppose I could pick apart the article, confirm many of its points, and examine what it leaves out of its analysis, but I didn't get further than the sub-heading, which reads as follows:

"A bill that was designed to rectify gender discrimination tips the balance too far, putting accused men at an unfair disadvantage."

There is so much wrong with that sentence, I don't even know where to start. Oh wait, actually I do.

The bill was never designed to rectify gender discrimination. It was designed to increase the gender discrimination that already existed. Believing that there was gender discrimination AGAINST women in domestic violence law and in society's attitude toward it, is to essentially rewrite women's history, and to utterly ignore men's.

Up until the early 1700s in the UK, there existed archaic laws regarding husband's discretion to physically chastise their wives. By this law, a husband was permitted to give his wife "mild correction", and I think it's important to note that this law existed because a husband was legally answerable for his wife's actions. If she committed a public crime or misdeed--stole from or assaulted someone, for instance, or even gambled away the family fortune--it was her husband who was held to account, legally, financially and socially. This law afforded him the power of correction "within reasonable bounds" and actually prohibited husbands from using violence.

A couple of things:

I'd guess that, considering the nature of the culture back then, how common corporal punishment was wrt children (not just by parents), convicted criminals, servants and apprentices, etc, the 1720s definition of "violence" is a probably a little different from our definition today, and the 1720s definition of it within the context of domestic violence--wherein current definitions include "not speaking to your wife" or "using logic"--will have been VERY different indeed.

Considering a husband was answerable for his wife's behavior in public and any wrongs or crimes she might commit against others, forbidding him ANY means of holding her accountable to HIM would have been an egregious imbalance of power within the institution of marriage. The law equally afforded men the right to correct the behavior of any individual for whom he was held legally answerable--children and apprentices, for instance.

And finally, before anyone pounces on the idea that men were answerable for their wive's behavior because men were in authority over their wives, and that this authority was a benefit given them by the system in order to oppress women, I'm going flip the sequence of that line of thought around.

Instead of "marriage is an institution to oppress women for men's benefit" therefore "husbands have authority over their wives" therefore "men are answerable for their wives since they could order those wives to do bad things", I'm going to posit a different sequence of logic based on a different primary assumption. "Marriage was an institution designed to serve children and protect women" therefore "women were entitled to the protection of their husbands" therefore "men must stand as a shield between their wives and the violence of the rest of the world, including that of the law" therefore "men must have authority over their wives." That is, if a man must be answerable for his wife in order to protect her from the consequences of even her own actions, then she should at the very least be answerable to HIM.

Why would I posit this sequence based on this different starting point? Because there were laws limiting what husbands were legally permitted to do to the women under their authority. Not just physically, but financially as well. Laws like [privy examination] also existed to protect women from financial abuse by their husbands. The law of [privy examination] required a woman who owned property and wanted to sell it--say, a house she had brought with her into a marriage--to be interviewed outside her husband's presence by a legal official to determine that she really did want to sell it, and that her husband was not forcing her to do so.

And I'd also posit this because lifelong marriage itself is a raw deal for men--a man's value in the sexual marketplace often increases with age, as he accumulates wealth and social status, while a woman's ALWAYS decreases and eventually fizzles to nothing long before she'll die of old age.

In a "male-dominated" society where marriage really WAS designed to oppress women for the benefit of men, it would have been legally easy, socially acceptable and even encouraged for a man to divorce his wife the moment her youth and beauty faded, if he could trade her in for someone better. Maybe a LOT better considering he'd have had a decade or two to acquire more wealth, and considering he owned his children, who could have contributed to that wealth in an age of child labor.

And frankly, the entire notion that marriage is the equivalent of female oppression and slavery is belied by the hand-wringing from pundits across the political spectrum clamoring that women want husbands and men aren't doing their duty and dragging themselves to the altar. If marriage is a form of slavery for WOMEN, why is it women who still desire marriage? And if it's an institution devised to benefit men, why is it MEN who are avoiding it like the plague?

So I think it's reasonable to assume that in the past, a man was expected to stand as a shield between his wife and the dangers of the world, even when those dangers were posed by the legal or criminal consequences of her own actions. Does ANYONE believe it would be remotely fair to hand a man the job of bodyguard and handler, to hold him accountable not only for the safety but the behavior of his charge, and then give him no means to enforce his judgment on that charge? To say to him, "If this person is harmed, you will be held accountable for it, and if they commit a crime, you will be punished for it, but oh, by the way, they don't have to do one damn thing you say"?

As early as 1768, when Lord Blackstone, gathered up all the assorted laws of England into one big compendium, it was made clear that physical violence and even physical restraint by husbands against wives was in violation of the law, though he noted it was common for such violations among the underclass to be swept under the judicial rug. Perhaps because female members of the underclass would be more likely to find themselves on the wrong side of the law, male members of the underclass spent more hours a day performing labor and therefore had less time to supervise the behavior of their wives, and all members were subject to hand-to-mouth living that meant jailing a battering husband would subject his wife to financial destitution?

Likewise, in the US, there have been laws against wife-battering since before the American Revolution, and by 1870 it was officially illegal in nearly every state. I have only heard of one gender neutral domestic violence law in this period--Massachusetts Bay Colony's law of 1655. Even prior to the drafting of these laws, wife-batterers could be and were, in fact, arrested and penalized for abusing their wives using the simple criminal charge of assault and battery. Punishments for wife-beating included 40 lashes at the public whipping post, fines ranging from $255 to $1000, and sentences of 1 to 5 years in prison.

Moreover, male family members, neighbors, and members of religious congregations were known to enact vigilante justice on wife-beaters--sometimes beating them, abducting and whipping them, or even running them out of town. Even in accounts I have read from feminist sources that include excerpts from women's diaries, there is often a male relative or family friend who steps in and removes the battered woman from her batterer's immediate presence, or even from his household, when serious abuse was witnessed.

And before anyone jumps in and claims that these protections and restrictions were based not on gender but on the power imbalance between those who had authority over others (husbands) and those who were under their power (wives), I'm going to call bullshit.

Because, we have a perfect example of a huge, socially and legally systemic ungendered power imbalance in history wherein women received protections that equally powerless and vulnerable men did not--slavery.

In France and Spain, in the early days of slavery, provisions in the slave code existed to protect pregnant and sick women from physical abuse. Other legal amendments prohibited sexual use or abuse of female slaves by slave owners--wrt both rape by owners and pimping.

In the 19th century, Britain introduced laws to limit the types of punishment allowed wrt slave women, forbidding punishing one in public, restricting the number of lashes she could receive, and prohibiting any physical punishment for pregnant slave women.

And though enforcement of these laws probably left a lot to be desired, no such protections existed for male slaves to be enforced or not.

Only 2/3 as many slave women were brought over to the European colonies as slave men, however, in many colonies females outnumbered males--because they lived longer. I wonder why?

Keep in mind, too, that even when I was a kid, children were still receiving corporal punishment in some schools--including caning. So attitudes toward physical punishment were VERY different from what they are today--yet wives and even female slaves had legal protections that prohibited those in authority over them from going too far, while men had no such protections.

Nor were they protected in ANY way from the violence of their wives. In fact, when a man was battered by his wife, the community held him answerable for THAT, too. In France, when neighbors discovered a man in their community was being dominated or beaten by his wife, he was paraded around town while seated backwards on a donkey holding its tail, while the crowd ridiculed him. In England, battered men were routinely strapped to carts and subjected to the derision and mockery of the community. Essentially punished for the abuse they suffered at the hands of their wives--abuse, I might add, that had no legally codified limits or restrictions in most jurisdictions.

And while many experts have attributed this treatment to a kind of blind adherence to the patriarchal norm of "husband as lord of his household", and systemic vilification and contempt for weak men that still goes on today, when you look a little deeper, it's not quite so simple.

Life was a lot harsher back then, and as I've said before, when life in a community is harsh, things like individual wellbeing, safety and fulfillment tend to take a back seat to more important things like social cohesion and collective survivalism.

Back then, when a woman married there was only one legal entity to which a she was fully answerable--her husband. A woman who beat her husband was seen as a HUGE threat to the stability of the community. Here was a woman capable of defying the socially enforced and legally endorsed norm of husbandly authority, a breaker of social and legal taboos. If such a woman--one already predisposed to ignore the rules of society--got up to malicious or harmful behavior outside the home, there was no way for the community to hold her personally accountable for her actions. That was her husband's job, and clearly he couldn't be trusted with it.

If she committed a crime, her husband might even be sent to prison for it, and if that happened, what little external constraint there'd been on her behavior--her husband's authority--would be out of the picture entirely. She would, in effect, be free to wreak havoc in the community, a socially irresponsible woman who is answerable to none.

Forcing a man to ride the donkey backwards served a couple of purposes within the community. For one, it put other men on notice, reminding them how important it was to social cohesion for them to exercise authority within their households and control misbehaving wives. Any man watching or participating in such a spectacle would be reminded just what things would be like for him if he failed the community in the same way this poor chump did. And secondly, it essentially stripped the battered man of respect and social status within the community, which was a consequence his wife--who shared in the respect and social status of her husband--could not avoid. She could not be punished directly for her behavior, but she could be punished through the public humiliation of her husband, and the decrease in her own social status that accompanied it. If the contempt of the community extended to such things as, for instance, job loss, she'd be forced to live with that consequence as well.

A few things have changed since those days, when it comes to battered husbands. The elaborate rituals of public ridicule are gone, but men are, by and large, still held accountable for the abuse they suffer, and women excused for their misbehavior within marriage. There exists little outreach or assistance for such men, because Patriarchy Theory and its twisting of reality fooled everyone into believing battered husbands could not possibly exist. Female batterers are still not held fully accountable for their behavior, nor does the community intervene the way it always has when men were horribly abused by their wives--we instead expect individual men to deal with the problem on their own.

Legislation and arrest policies are more biased than they ever were, but it's no longer because we see men as a shield between their wives and the violence of the rest of the world, even the violence of the law. It's because we've been fooled into believing that marriage was an institution designed to oppress rather than protect and support women. We've been tricked into believing marriage was always a raw deal for women and a great one for men, despite the fact that single motherhood--which is a struggle even now--would have been a one-way ticket to extreme poverty for 99% of women through history, and despite the fact that its lifelong component was designed to keep men from abandoning their wives after menopause, rather than the other way around.

We've been tricked into believing the job of a husband was to be a bully rather than a bodyguard, and that "male-dominated" societies are oppressive to women because hey, when men are in charge they will always act in ways that benefit men without ever considering the wellbeing of women. We've been fooled into thinking the extra rights and freedoms men had were cookies given to them "just because they were men" rather than because women were biologically vulnerable and dependent on men, and giving men those extra rights and freedoms enabled them to do the job society expected of them--to support and protect women.

We've been fooled into thinking the authority society gave husbands within marriage was a means to oppress women, rather than a necessary component of men's expectation to protect them, even from the consequences of their own actions. We've been tricked into believing the exception--the husband who used his authority to victimize and cruelly abuse his wife--was the rule.

We've been fooled into believing the battered husband is a time-honored and well-worn comic trope that makes appearances in Bugs Bunny cartoons on Sunday mornings, because it has always been RARE, rather than because it defies our internal gendered narrative of women as harmless and deserving of protection and our expectation on men to be strong and capable of taking care of and protecting themselves as well as others.

We've been bamboozled into believing that domestic violence against women was NEVER considered a crime until feminism arrived to enlighten us, and that it was ALWAYS socially acceptable, despite tons of historical evidence to the contrary. And the safer the world gets and the less directly dependent on individual men women become for their support and protection, the easier it is for us to believe that men are brutes and abusers by nature, and the easier it is for us to toss them in the trash when they're abused.

We don't even have to notice them anymore.

Because before the age of the pill, child support enforcement, subsidized daycare, safe streets, welfare benefits and safe, easy indoor jobs, the task of protecting and providing for women...well, that necessary task fell to individual men and it necessitated keeping those individual men around to do that job.

Whereas 200 years ago, the community could not afford to pretend a battered husband did not exist, well...we've come a long way, baby, and arrived at a point in our social evolution where society, rather than individual men, can do the job of supporting women and protecting them from harm, even when that harm arises from their own actions, and where battered men, instead of being subjected to ritualized humiliations, are essentially invisible to everyone, even when they're standing right in front of us, because we can afford not to care about them one way or the other.

By defying our gendered assumptions, battered men make us so uncomfortable we'll recast them as abusers themselves whenever we possibly can, and when we can't, we'd rather close our eyes and stick our fingers in our ears when they beg for help, than acknowledge their existence. And when even the people who are smart enough to realize that VAWA is the equivalent of gender apartheid are laboring under the misperception that historical laws and social attitudes about domestic violence discriminated against WOMEN, is it any wonder that it's so fucking easy for the rest of society to sweep all those male victims under the rug?

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/03/whats-wrong-with-the-viol...

http://www.canlaw.com/rights/thumbrul.htm

http://freedownload.is/doc/women-and-their-forgotten-role-in-slavery-nigel-sa...

http://www.fact.on.ca/Info/dom/george94.htm

http://www.fact.on.ca/Info/dom/lupri05.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverture

http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.ca/2011/10/societys-acceptance-of-domestic.html