The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Proving @RationalMale Right Again

Posted on | October 16, 2019 | 1 Comment

In Australia, there has been an uproar since Pauline Hanson of the right-populist One Nation party asserted that false accusations of domestic abuse are a problem in child-custody cases. This is relevant to proposals to reform Australia’s family court system, and Hanson’s remarks have prompted outrage from feminists and the Left generally, where the Women Never Lie Myth is sacrosanct. This mirrors the Left’s position on “rape culture,” where mere accusation is considered tantamount to proof.

The dispute over Australia’s family court system highlights something Rollo Tomassi (@RationalMale on Twitter) has noted: “Child support is the defining feature of our modern family model, since it is the replacement for marriage whether or not a wedding has occurred.”

Because of the desanctification of marriage in our secular, sexualized, feminist-dominated culture, wedding vows now come with asterisks next to them, pointing to footnotes that in essence declare, “We don’t actually mean all this stuff about ‘death do us part’ and so forth.”

Every couple now goes to the wedding altar under the threatening shadow of potential divorce, and it is generally acknowledged that divorce is a punitive procedure by which aggrieved women are authorized to obtain a sadistic revenge against their ex-husbands. Because accusations of abuse give women greater leverage in divorce proceedings, we should not be surprised that (a) such accusations are often exaggerated or even sometimes fabricated from whole cloth, and (b) anyone who expresses skepticism toward these accusations will be accused of being anti-woman, an enabler of male violence against women.

Rollo’s comment about the Child Support Model of family structure, where it is more or less assumed on the wedding day that the couple will eventually divorce, highlights how radically our society’s basic institutions have been altered. Between the startling rise in illegitimate births and the frequency of divorce, a majority of children in most Western countries will not be raised in a traditional family. This in turn has produced what Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, in her book The Divorce Culture, has called the “Love Family” ideology, a mentality in which the loyalties once demanded by permanent ties of blood or marriage are replaced by an imagined system of kinship based on mere sentiment.

The problem with the celebration of “love” as a basis for social organization is that human emotions can be ephemeral, and that “love” can be so easily exploited by selfish and dishonest people. For years, I have disavowed any accusation that I am a “men’s rights activist” (MRA) because, in the first place, I reject the identity-politics formula of group “rights.” Secondly, however, I recognize that most MRAs bring a particular axe to grind against women. Many MRAs — if not a majority, certainly an influential plurality — are men who have gone through the ordeal of divorce and custody disputes which are no part of my direct experience and, I pray to God, never will be. Yet while I am not an MRA, this doesn’t mean that they have not made important points about male-female relationships, especially in regard to how divorce has become a state-sponsored instrument to punish and humiliate men. And this is such a fundamental and relatively sudden shift in our culture that most older people (I’m 60 now, and certainly qualify as such) have no idea what absolute hell many young men now face in their relationships. Statistics showing a decline in men’s willingness to commit to marriage, accompanied by a significant drop in birth rates, testify to how the institutions of marriage and fatherhood have been made into something like a medieval torture device to inflict punishment on men. No matter how much a woman may profess to “love” a man, he must take into consideration that if his relationship leads to marriage and fatherhood, he will be at risk of personal destruction if her “love” ever fades.

Quite often, it seems, women seeking divorce view child custody as a weapon to wield in an all-out war to destroy their ex-husbands. It is not enough, for such women, to be free to pursue their own lives; instead, they develop an appetite for revenge against the man they once vowed to love until “death do us part.” Those of us who have been fortunate enough to avoid such a hell-on-earth are generally horrified to watch our friends or relatives endure the ordeal of divorce. We don’t enjoy the pressure to choose sides in the kind of interminable warfare that goes on between divorcing couples, but our court system seems to enable (and indeed, to encourage) the scorched-earth tactics so commonly employed in these disputes. Pauline Hanson has provoked controversy in Australia by saying aloud what everybody actually knows, i.e., that some women will invent or exaggerate incidents of abuse in order to “win” court proceedings against their ex-husbands. This threat hovers like a shadow in every divorce involving children: If her ex tries to dispute custody, or if he doesn’t make child-support payments in a timely manner, he may find himself facing accusations of abuse, and such accusations generally amount to a “he-said/she-said” conflict, where the real matter at issue is the credibility of the accuser. Feminists tend to deny that women ever make false accusations, or else contend that false accusations are so rare that we can disregard the possibility that a woman might be lying, and therefore feminists must destroy Pauline Hanson.

It doesn’t have to be like this. There is no objective reason why men and women should view each other as eternal enemies, but unless and until we are willing to take a hard look at how public policy now offers incentives for male-female conflict — especially including divorce — we are doomed to endure the continuing destruction of our society.


 

Category: Marriage, Sex Trouble

Comments

One Response to “Proving @RationalMale Right Again”

  1. Friday hawt chicks & links – The muh white privilege edition. – Adam Piggott
    October 18th, 2019 @ 12:12 am

    […] turns out that false accusations of domestic abuse in child custody cases are a problem. My God, is it true? Do women lie? […]