A startling new development on the frontiers of anti-male oppression. According to the loquacious lady MRA known as girlwriteswhat on Reddit, men are being oppressed by evil feminist dudes cruelly clamping down on their right to bitch about ladies in the bathroom. In a recent comment she writes:
No space is allowed to be male-only, or male-viewpoint-only, but women insist on female-only or female-viewpoint-only spaces all the time.
The only male safe space left on the planet is the men’s bathroom, ffs. And even then, there will be feminist-leaning men policing what is said. It’s very frustrating.
As a dude feminist who is a regular user of men’s restrooms, I should note that dudes do not actually talk in restrooms.
Happily, this does not prevent me, as a dude feminist, from policing the non-existent speech of other dudes in said restrooms.
Here is the complete transcript of a restroom discussion I recently policed:
Dude One: [silently urinates]
Dude Two: [silently urinates]
Dude Three: [silently poops]
Me: Goddessdamnit, keep it down with all your lady-bashing! Men are bad!
Always glad to help.
HT to Shit Reddit Says, which has just ended its month-long moratorium on r/mensrights posts, for pointing me to girlwriteswhat’s observation.
Even on a board that has multiple marxists on it, you will need to do better than “Politicians thought there was a problem”.
This is from two seperate, unrelated idiots who assume there’s bias because fathers don’t have custody of the kids very often, ignoring little facts like oh, I don’t know, the part where mothers do the majority of parental care and are far more often than not the primary caretaker *BEFORE* the divorce. I mean, I want this problem solved too, but you’re not even beginning to look at anything but a symptom.
I’ve said it before, and I’ve said it again; father’s rights jackasses ultimately want nothing more or less than the right to fob the kids off on mom whenever, while married, then still have us take claims of equal engagement and caring when the divorce comes.
Well I gotta go to uni but I up my efforts to learn more about custody when I return. Thanks for the debate Rutee and others, adios.
Again, in societies where mothers do the majority of the child care and child raising, I consider an even split of custody *reason to suspect the father is getting a bias in their direction*. Almost every western society I know of is oriented this way.
But you aren’t buying it. Ho hum.
Nope. You have to do more than vaguely gesture in the direction of stats like “40% of women admit to interfering with visitation to get back at their ex-spouses” as if the implications of such stats were self-evident. Without context, however, your figures mean nothing. Were these women acting in contravention of a court order, and, if so, were the fathers able to get adequate redress through the courts? If so, that’s not a problem of bias in the court system, but rather a problem of ex-spouses behaving badly; while regrettable, neither gender has a monopoly on that sort of behavior. Do these figures hold true for all divorced families, or only those with court-ordered visitation (which, at the risk of repeating myself, is only a tiny minority of divorce cases)? In 80% of divorces, by your own figures, custody is resolved without third party involvement, through agreement between spouses. Are 40% of these women then reneging on their agreements to spite their ex-spouses, with whom they were previously able to agree on custody? It seems unlikely. Are they doing this once, in a fit of pique, or are they denying visitation for an extended period of time? Your statistic doesn’t tell us, even though such information would be rather significant in determining whether denial of visitation is widespread and systematic. So, no, not very convincing.
I’d plumb further, but it’s way past my bed time. Cheers.
Again, in societies where mothers do the majority of the child care and child raising, I consider an even split of custody *reason to suspect the father is getting a bias in their direction*. Almost every western society I know of is oriented this way.
I think the question of whether fathers or mothers are getting bias in their direction is beside the point. Custody shouldn’t be an issue of fairness to either parent, but rather a question of what is in the best interests of the child. The answer is so unique and idiosyncratic to each family that using statistics to make a claim of bias is meaningless. Some bias in either direction is not necessarily relevant to the child’s best interests. For example, sometimes it makes sense to award physical custody to one parent even when both parents are equally competent and involved, in order to minimize the disruption that comes with constantly moving back and forth between houses. It may be unfair to one parent, but it’s arguably in the best interests of the child.
Which is what I think really fries the MRAs–it’s not really all about them.
@ Ullere
MRAs trot out these stats about children growing up without seeing their father. F4J leader Matt O’Connor went as far as blaming the English riots on the family courts. A truly absurd claim but, as an MRA, he can’t help himself. But their argument is idiotic. They are “fighting” against something that doesn’t exist, in keeping with the MO of all MRAs.
They cannot give the statistic that would matter; how many fathers who don’t present a threat to the child’s wellbeing are being denied access to their child because of the mother’s insistance.
They won’t get drawn on this, basically because the number, whilst individually tragic, is so tiny as to be statistically insignificant.
What you have is a group of embittered divorcees who hate their wives more than they love their children.
Matt O’Connor himself was, by his own admission, a suicidal alcoholic at the time of his divorce. Unstable by any stretch of the imagination. His former wife was concerned about his children’s welfare and sought to prevent him having access. Once he sorted himself out and was able to function as a parent, there was no question of him being prevented having access.
Interestingly, O’Connor is something of a serial campaigner. Or, to be less kind, he has a business to promote and a childish need for media attention. The poor stooges he gets to embark on the sad little stunts they engage in don’t get the limelight, only fines and public humiliation.
Hats off to O’Connor, though, at least he actually got off his seat and did something. One suspects if Paul Elam had a fraction of the support and flair O’Connor has the Sink Misandry fiasco wouldn’t have degenerated into such a source of amusement for all those that oppose his brand of fringe lunatic “politics”.
Ullere, you’re a young guy, presumably, have a look at the type of people who support MRAs and then ask yourself if you want to be like them.
Moeicus:
““When have mothers had to face systematic and virtually automatic loss of their children? In what society, in what time?”
Several stories have come out recently about how Cathloic hospitals have been involved in removing tens of thousands of children from their mothers at birth in countries such as Ireland, Australia, etc.. The mothers were usually single and were told that their children had died. Meanwhile the children were sent off goodness knows where. I can’t find an article to link to right now, but the answer to Antsy’s question is “the twentieth fucking century.””
We had the Magdelene laundries here until the 1970’s. None of the women who bore children while working in them knew what happened to their children and that seems to have been considered part of their punishment for having had sex out of wedlock.
Then there were the children who were sent to Australia after the war because the government had 1. A white Australia policy and b. They believed that if they didn’t populate the country hordes of Asians would sweep down and invade. Some of those children were taken from orphanages, some were simply picked up while playing in the street, some were “war babies”, and many had families who had no idea what had happened to them. Many were horribly mistreated, sexually, emotionally and physically abused and used as slave labour. It’s an appalling story. The Government made a public apology recently and I think some kind of token compensation was paid.
Noone’s situation is identical, but there can be similarities, which do get represented by statistics, ideally. Because there are variations, unless the studies are very specific or more holistic, data gets skewed in all kinds of marginalizing ways.
I hate that.
In my situation, I read the statistics, see how they reflect my reality, lay them against the stories told by sites/news/other people, and then try to see what picture they are painting. Standing up close to it and only staring at my dot of paint is pretty pointless and doesn’t teach me anything new.
Standing and staring at some other random singular dot and pretending nothing else is around it is, well, choosing to be ignorant. It’s also arrogant to pretend I can understand another dot, since I didn’t paint it or pick the color. You can’t get the picture that way.
(see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism)
Every time I read a “study” linked by one of the MRA gang, I get a bad case of You’re-Doing-It-Wrong! More to the point, shut it, Antz and Co. Learn to research. If you want to have a public opinion and discuss it in a public forum, make sure YOU have researched it, kept it current, and have done the work yourself. That’s what “informed” means.
CB, there is a reason I mentioned women being primary caretakers and doing the majority of childcare work (as a group) prior to the divorce. That’s why I’m mentioning bias at all. Quite frankly, I would be happy if women were not the default parent of society, but making that decision for women collectively after the divorce is not the time to do it; s’ a little late, for a number of reasons. If you’ll look at DSC’s statistics, you’ll see that even when it is blazingly, obviously against the child’s best interest (Perhaps even especially in that case), juries believe dads over moms and award custody in ways that hurt kids.
Let’s break down just this sentence, “just over half the time you can still see you kids! thats faring well?”
If that were the case, then no, but not for the reason you imply. That implies that in all grants of sole-custody, the non-custodial parent has no access to the children. That would mean mothers, in just under half the cases “still can’t see [their] kids.”
Which isn’t the way it works (I’ve been a kid in three divorces, the first, my mother left, and as a result I didn’t see my father for about 15 years.
The second my mother and my step-father did the divorce themselves and he got weekends: his girlfriends had to accept that we might be there. a couple of years later we moved into an adjacent house and saw him whenever we felt like it; had keys to his house and everything).
The third, was less pretty. But I was old enough that seeing that stepfather was up to me, so no, he had no legal custody, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t see me.
Live without their fathers is not the same as never see them.
The amount of conflation you perform is amazing… did you have to take a class?
Okay, that’s really sad when fathers that are honestly devoted and want to be in their kids lives. Same for moms who don’t have access.
But how come I don’t know anyone in that situation? By the statistics, surely I’d bump into one or two. I’m not saying they don’t exist, because, you know, I can imagine things outside my own experience.
What I have seen are several people who get pissy about wanting to be in total control of the situation/ex-spouse and the kids are waaaay down the list as far as priority. Instead of maximizing their relationship with the kids, everything else comes first, including ego, convenience, hobbies, etc.
I don’t see sadness from these guys posting about the atrocity. I see anger. And threats of violence. Again, with their feelings primary and the kids way down the list.
Seems like the same old thing about being in the movement for the chance to punish, versus actually helping make a change.
Pardon me if this has already been mentioned, but this same simpering, self hating “girlwriteswhat” character now has a post up at The (not so) Good Men project called “Patriarchy Shmatriarchy”
Yes, really.
Girlwriteswhat really is exceptionally stupid even for an MRA. In her case, the court attempted to give her full custody because the other parent was quite clearly demonstrating his unfitness as a parent. Custody is supposed to be in the best interests of the child – it’s not in the best interests of a child to send them to live part time with somebody who doesn’t bother to see them even when they live close by. That’s not gender bias, it’s the court recognising that she was the only responsible parent available.
One glaring issue with “fatherless home” studies is that they have no control group. Situations that lead to single parenting in high numbers (such as teen pregnancy or divorce) can result from issues that cloud the water considerably. “Fatherless home” whiners like to pretend that marriages that result in divorce are always as stable and always contain as favorable of situations in general as those that don’t, that things like abuse or drug addition during marriage could not result in those marriages ending in divorce more, that if a couple’s marriage ends it is a “failure” of the couple and not a “failure” of marriage as an institution to work in a variety of situations for a variety of people, etc. It does things like take the harm of a decade of watching verbal, physicaly, and emotional abuse against their mother, or against themselves, and blame it on the non-abusive mother who has gotten rid of the abuser. It does things like blame only the girls who raise babies alone when they accidentally become pregnant young if the biological father (who, stastically, is likely to be older than her by at least a few years) won’t play along. It blames women who work long hours because of lack of living wages and lack of full child support for not being able to spend more time with the children their ex isn’t spending any (or hardly any) time at all with and it blames them for the conditions of poverty that make life hard. Also, a lot of these studies conflate “unmarried” with “fatherless”, meaning that men who live with and raise their kids (sometimes even as primary caretakers) without being married to their spouses (a group of couples that most current US statistics put about as high in numbers as married parents) are considered to not be counted as being fathers to their children. These studies are total and utter fucking nonsense.
Live without their fathers is not the same as never see them.
The amount of conflation you perform is amazing… did you have to take a class?
Well, exactly. Even non-custodial fathers nearly always have visitation. You have to fuck up pretty badly, and willfully, to not be allowed even supervised visitation. I knew of a case where the father outright lied to the judge, in a really obvious and easily verifiable manner. Even then, the judge allowed the father to continue visitation–though he ordered the father to attend therapy and get a psychological evaluation if he wanted to continue seeing his kids. The father apparently refused to do either, and gave up seeing his kids out of spite. This is a guy who had a job and drove a nice car, so it’s likely that he could have come up with the money for those services if he could have gotten the fuck over himself.
Hey, schtick schticky schtickaroo what`s happening, buddy?
Inu beat you to it on another thread, timetravelling fool! 😀
I’m calling BS on your policing. There’s no way in hell to urinate silently. Thanks for your good work.
” ignoring little facts like oh, I don’t know, the part where mothers do the majority of parental care and are far more often than not the primary caretaker *BEFORE* the divorce”
Well, first, did you mean maternal care or paternal care?
I find it frustrating that this partly presupposes that women are better caretakers than men, which is a stereotype that feminism says its fighting against. You have also ignored why the fathers don’t have as much of a role in their children’s lives, and if your going to assume women are the ones staying at home giving all the care to the children then I’m going to assume that means the fathers are forced to spend all their time at work earning money to support their family. It doesn’t seem fair to me that (in the statistics cited by Ullere) men predominantly lose out in child custody simply because, according to your presumption, they don’t have the same opportunity to spend time with, bond with and give paternal care to their children.
The argument I’ve seen before against this is that it’s just backlash from the values of male patriarchy, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t sexism and against feminist’s goals.
Also, the White Australia thing where aboriginal children were stolen from their parents doesnt quite fit. Its children taken from one family and given to another family based on race. It seems out of place here. A better example of children being systemically removed from their mothers would be way back in spartan cultures, when boys were completely separated from their mothers at a young age due to Patriarchal and sexist values.