Maybe Makow’s wife found happiness in a traditional marriage, but let’s also acknowledge that many other women haven’t. I personally don’t want a traditional wife–I want someone who feels equal to me and feels like she can challenge my opinion. What modern brain science shows is that women think in a wide variety of ways. Some are very analytical and right brain oriented. Others are more left-brain oriented. Curiously, men tend to be less diverse and are more likely to think in one way. The point is that what worked for Makow’s wife, won’t necessarily work for every woman. A feminist would tell you that feminism is about giving women a sence of self-worth, self-empowerment, and the freedom to make choices. Feminism according to most feminists should not be about forcing women to grasp for power as Makow characterizes it.

Dr. Henry Makow, author of savethemales.ca, is Jewish.

It is not my role to defend Makow, yet I recall reading articles written that honor God and are pro-family.

Though his conspiracy theories are puzzling, he is right on, for me, when he writes about the strength of the bible’s wisdom versus failure of feminism, among other things.

Maybe allow others to read his articles to develop their own opinions. Thanks for sharing yours.

After Feminism Stole my Identity
http://www.savethemales.ca/080801.html

Reclaiming Male power in the Viagra Age
http://www.savethemales.ca/251001.html

Some things you state concern me, for they represent the kind of partial analysis that passes so easily in todays left style excuse for debate.

You say:

1.Still, a child needs at least one parent to care for it full-time under the age of three

Assuming thats true, you leave it hanging as if you’ve addressed the full 18 years. At least go on and either say therefore one should keep that full-time arrangement, or it be changed to equal time after the age of three. It seems you suggest the former, which is one of the many traps equal parenting falls into in debate. It is fallacious if not extrapolated.

2Also, no fault divorce leaves a woman with children..not as rich as you might suppose.

If a woman files no-fault divorce, unilaterally tearing apart a family, devastating man and child, I really couldn’t care less if she ends up “not as rich”. Making sure a woman ends up nat as rich if she files no fault would slow the rate of female filings dramatically, and thats the goal. To much credibility is afforded the “my man was just a jerk” crowd. If she wants the divorce, and if he is SOOOOOO much a jerk, it should be well worth it to suffer economically. Then I’m convinced, maybe he was a jerk. Otherwise, he was likely just not “behaving” according to her model.

3.You’d be surprised…for every man that is being taken to the cleaners, there is a woman who cannot even find the ex husband…

Good, except for the kids part. It is horrible that these children have no father, and inexcusable, but to bemoan that women cannot find the man to milk him illicits zero sympathy from me. It is about the kids, not the moron who decided she didn’t feel loved, etc. etc.

After high school and college, it takes most men and women 15-20 years to realize the old traditional ways are best. Of course, a horrible divorce can educated a man much earlier.

And hence they have low divorce rates, and presumably their children aren’t torn apart by parental fighting.

This is awful, and can’t be allowed to become the norm in America. The next thing you know homosexuality would be considered “less than ideal” and the dems would never win office again.

Given that 50% of marriages end in divorce, there is a critical need for Americans to start reevaluating our conception of marriage. Clearly such a high divorce rate harms children and fatherhood.

Traditionally marriage was not conceived of as being an arrangement based upon love. Today, however, we have huge expectations about what a marriage should be. We have this ridiculous ideal that you should always be in love with whoever you marry, although everyone knows that couples don’t always feel romantic love. We expect our wives to be our best friends and we expect couples to do everything socially together. This was not the case traditionally. It was expected that people went outside of the marriage for recreation and friendship in traditional marriage, but that is considered less acceptable today. I have spent a lot of time in Latin America where they have low divorce rates. One thing that I have noticed is that Latin Americans take a much more pragmatic view of marriage. I’m not sure if I want to advocate the Latin American conception of marriage, since it is often very sexist and patriarchal, but I do think they have a more realistic expectations about what to expect from marriage. They don’t have the attitude that if a marriage isn’t fun or always fulfilling, you should automatically leave it. They expect couples to have bad times and they accept that the husband and wife don’t always act loving in public. Yes, they think love is the ideal, but they also accept that men may sneak off and have sex outside of marriage occassionally. I don’t want to defend this practice, but it is a practical reality that it happens. In America we assume that marital infidelity is automatic grounds for divorce, but I’m not sure that this is the best for children and fatherhood.

In short, I think we need to have a more pragmatic and realistic conception of marriage, and stop expecting people to fullfill all their needs and desires within marriage. In many other societies, there are greater social occasions outside of marriage. Also I think that our society places too much burden on the individual nuclear family, which places huge stresses on a husband and wife and easily leads to divorce if they can’t fullfill all those ideals. America has this conception that only the mother and father are responsible for the kid, but we also think that somehow the mother and father are somehow deficient if they can’t live up that. For instance, what happened to black marriages in the inner city, when most of the industrial jobs packed up and went abroad. When the black male was unemployed and no longer able to provide for his family, a lot of black marriages broke up because the black male wasn’t living up to the ideal of a good provider for the family. Increasingly, the black woman saw more demand for the service jobs which she was better at than the black male. So the woman was able to earn more than the male, because his jobs had largely dissappeared. Should this lead to divorce? No, but our unrealistic conception of marriage says that it should.

I’d also like to say that America has really unrealistic ideas of what is acceptable family behavior. For instance, in America, it isn’t considered acceptable for the family to be sitting at an bar with the parents drinking, while the kids run around underfoot. Let’s face it, it is very difficult to socialize in America as a family, so people think that you have to stay at home. If there are tensions between the husband and wife, then there are fewer ways to relieve that tension, because Americans don’t socialize much outside of their homes. I was shocked to see men drinking in Latin America in front of their kids in the park, but I ultimately realized that they had a much healthier conception of marriage and family than we do. We have this rigid idea that if the marriage doesn’t fit the ideal, then the marriage must be bad and it should end. Lots of men get hurt in this process because they loose contact with their kids.

I’m not sure how we change marriage so it is more accomodating to reality, but I do think we need to ask what are some of real stresses which make it difficult to for couples to stay together.
We never talk about how to provide for the rising costs of housing, health care, education and transportation, Americans are statistically working longer hours. This places huge stresses on marriages, which causes many to end in divorce. How many marriages break up because of arguments over money? In other societies, there is universal health care, higher education is free or highly subsidized, and public transportation lowers the cost of transportation, so there are fewer stresses on a financially strapped marriage. In many European societies, husbands and wives work shorter hours so it is easier to have a viable marriage and to raise kids. The Japanese men work longer hours than we do, but they hardly ever see their kids and the women are expected to stay home and take care of the kids. We clearly aren’t going back to that model, so we have to find another route. We also need to start asking what society can do to support kids, rather than throwing all the responsibility on the individual parents.

That’s an idealistic vision, however the problem remains that what goes on in the Family/Divorce Courts and DV Industry and Child Support Racket is largely unreported and flies under the radar.

The Family Courts in particular are a kind of Star Chamber unencumbered by the reporting and documenting requirements of the criminal justice system.

You can’t even get the actual data of how cases are being decided because there are no records.

Family Court judges are terrified of feminist reprisals should they “go easy” on fathers or even attempt objectivity in their decisions.

Orders of Protection are routinely granted with no proof of cause, and all a woman filing for divorce needs to do to secure full child custody is to make a false allegation of domestic or sexual abuse.

VAWA is like a guillotine poised to descend on every man’s neck should he ever assert himself in a disagreement with a woman.

Feminism has nearly achieved its primary goal of destroying heterosexual unions and nuclear families, because today no thinking man would be so foolish as to marry.

It will be largely up to ordinary non-feminist women, who enjoy the power the sisterhood has bequeathed, to decide if they want to continue their predatory strategies, or whether they want to champion a massive legal reform to deconstruct feminist lethality against men.

The recent reauthorization of VAWA provides little cause for optimism.

Still, a child needs at least one parent to care for it full-time under the age of three. Not all woman or men have parents who are willing to raise their children while they work. And day care centers are certainly not the answer.

Also, no fault divorce leaves a woman with children..not as rich as you might suppose.

You’d be surprised…for every man that is being taken to the cleaners, there is a woman who cannot even find the x husband…

But the family unit is being politically attacked from the left, who want the family to give up to the state. It has been a long fight for them, but we see the damage…everywhere.

The real problem is a civil rights issue, in which millions of certainly innocent children and their almost certainly innocent fathers are deprived of their right to the unimpaired relationships of an intact family.

At the moment it probably sounds ridiculous to say that fathers are denied their civil rights systematically and in great numbers. It also sounds ridiculous to say that children are damaged by fatherlessness as badly as they would be by motherlessness.

Unfortunately, these things sound ridiculous to most people because they simply haven’t thought about them, and because of a force that stills thought: the aura of depravity. I’ve written about this elsewhere, and the idea is simply that men are dangerous physical, sexual, and power abusers. Society needs a wide variety of protections against men, because they are all on a continuum of abuse, with every man on a hair trigger, ready to turn into a monster in an instant. Men are like pitbulls — no sensible person would allow them in the same house with children.

Actually, men are more like black men. We say the same things about men in general today that some deplorable people used to say about black men in the Jim Crow era. That was clearly a civil rights issue (still is), but people didn’t see it that way until black people managed to educate them.

Fatherlessness is the most pervasive cause of psychological and social problems in youth, and these last for the young as they mature. We are throwing out the father with the bathwater, and it hurts the baby badly.

Before we can have a civil rights movement, the victims have to be aware of what’s eating them, and we don’t have that yet. Despite the fact that all of the suffering comes out of a pattern that has been with us for decades, men don’t see themselves as a disadvantaged class. While they don’t see the situation clearly, men and those who love them can’t do their duty to fix it.

So, what we need is an equality movement. Parental equality and respect for the family, for all of its forgotten benefits to children. This is bigger than VAWA. Social programs and the courts and the lawmakers need reeducation to the necessity of parental equality. My hope is that people will wake up to the truth about what they are seeing every day, and I remain hopeful.

-Eric

After a few years of marriage, my wife divorced me. Publicly, she says I am abusive. Privately, she says that I did not make her happy.

After the experience of divorce court, while sharing the situation with friends and family, I learned quickly that the complaint department is closed to men.

Instead, the message I receive loud and clear is pay up and shut up.

Thanks feminists. Thanks for altering Father’s Day and to the feeling of another Visitor’s Day.

Our country cares more about pets and whales than for the men who help design, build, and maintain our cities, homes and workplaces.