Among those who celebrate Christmas, the holiday is often (for better or worse) a time to celebrate family, and to bring usually distant family members together – parents and their adult children, grandparents and their grandchildren, and so on.
A proposal from the guy behind the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog would mean a bit of a change in this tradition: it would eliminate grandchildren from the equation utterly. Not just by excluding them from the holiday celebrations, but by eliminating them altogether – at least until his demands are met.
Upset that paternal grandmothers aren’t rising up en masse and joining the father’s rights movement to support their sons in custody disputes, Mr. PMAFT has proposed a Grandchildren Strike.
Here’s part of his stirring manifesto:
It’s one thing to not realize that divorce means that you can’t see your grandchildren before a divorce happens. It’s another to be fine with it afterwards as paternal grandmothers appear to be. This is an example of team woman in action. It’s a particularly extreme example in that grandmothers are willing to never see their grandchildren again just to support daughters in law they will no longer have a connection with.
The only way to deal with this is a true grandchildren strike, denying grandchildren from potential grandmothers. A grandchildren strike should not be necessary, but as we can see, paternal grandmothers don’t care when they can no longer see their grandchildren. The only way to deal with this is to not have children in the first place.
In your face, hypothetical future grandmothers!
Usually, I advocate surrogate mothers in India for men who really want children in the current feminist climate, but doing so protects our mothers from the consequences of their actions. That is unconscionable so perhaps we should all be on a grandchildren strike.
A brilliant plan, clearly. This “strike” is designed in such a way that it will have zero effect on the women Mr. PMAFT is angry with – paternal grandmothers. Instead, it’s aimed at mothers who aren’t grandmothers, whom I guess Mr. PMAFT assumes will sign up with the father’s rights movement en masse in order to support their sons in hypothetical custody battles over grandchildren that don’t exist.
It’s as if workers angry at their boss were to go on strike not against the company at which they work, but against a rival company on the grounds that some day they might conceivably work there.
Meanwhile, the plan neatly eliminates the problem at the root of Mr. PMAFT’s anger. Men can’t lose custody battles if they don’t have any children to have custody of in the first place.
Checkmate, feminists!
Shiraz, I just watched my first Aussie film in ages last night – Red Dog. Very funny but oh, lots of crying stuff too! Not least since Koko, who did most of the playing of Red Dog, passed away just a few days ago.
I couldn’t get over how Josh Lucas looks like a fairer-haired, slightly prettier Bruce Springsteen. Very nice looking fella.
Oh and since this is the live thread at the moment, I’mma reposting a video of Mads and Ball here. Naturally she didn’t make anything like the effort at Cuteness she would have if there hadn’t been a camera running.
http://youtu.be/8b0hiO1uXFs
Maddie is trying to be nonchalant, I see.
It’s 11:05 pm here. Nutmeg decided he was going to crawl in one of the gift bags and sleep there, so we gave the kitties their presents early. We didn’t get them anything this year, but my sister got them adorable mouse toys, which they’ve been trying to open all week. I got most of the cooking done I wanted to today with a tiny bit of energy to spare, so I can enjoy tomorrow. Now I’m just hanging out drinking a Tangueray and tonic and listening to Christmas Lounge on http://somafm.com/.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, everybody!
Merry Christmas everyone.
The neighbors brought me a present today and the muggers helped me open it so they could have their favorite thingummy. The box. They have been piled up in it all evening.
Merry Everything and Happy All Ways to Everyone!
Boxes are the best presents.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone who’s not yet had them! 🙂
Mr Kittehs’ and I did the present-wrapping thing over the other side a couple of nights back. We did a swap of cat toys with a cat-loving friend over there, so the toys they’re getting are pre-
chewedloved but they do have the all-important novelty value. Naturally the whole wrapping-paper-and-boxes thing was a feast for the kitties, or some of them. We’re probably wasting our time giving them stuff, we could just leave crumpled paper and boxes lying around.“The muggers” – LOL thebewilderness, never were cats more aptly described!
Merry Christmas from Motley!
By the way–The Tale of Genji is not boring.
Cuuuute! Katz, is Motley about to pounce on that train? And is zie what you called a torbie the other day? I really like that term, I haven’t seen tortie-tabby combined before. Both our girls are that combination (though my vet GF read me a lecture on how they’re not torties ‘cos they have white, they are calicos).
Yeah, torbie is the term I heard for cats that are a mix of red and brown tabby. Of course you are right, she also has white, which makes her more calico. I think “torbie with white” is the correct term, technically.
It’s interesting because I don’t think the term calico is used much here, if at all. To the best of my knowledge, tortiseshell, tortie, tortie-tabby include the tri-coloured cats as well as the red/black only ones. Of course properly, yeah, white isn’t part of tortiseshell, but they get lumped together. And what we call blue/cream torties seem to be called shaded torties in the US, IIRC.
Cats … always things to talk about regarding them, even when we’re not doing stuff for them!
A better idea would be if males and females lived on separate planets with sexbots and used reproductive technology via artificial wombs, in-vitro fertilization, gene-splcing, and cloning to reproduce. All “War-of-the-sexes” problems solved!
Merry Christmas to you guys.
And I really don’t see the point… I mean, the only case I know where a grandmother isn’t allowed to see her grandchildren is an unfortunate collision of the grandparents having been… less than nice people for decades and the son having married a woman who’s in some sort of sect.
My entire traditional Japanese literature class would beg to differ. (Or wait, are you my teacher?) Genji was the longest thing we read, so it was kind of like prolonged torture, and our discussion groups were mostly us agreeing how much we hated the story. Maybe it’s different (as it tends to be) if you’re reading it for fun.
Although if I had to choose between that or reading haiku forever, I would probably opt for Genji.
I used to think that it was just a matter of the translation or something. My first two literature classes were all in English and I couldn’t stand every single thing we read. Some was “better” than others, but “better” was a very relative term. And then I had to take a class where we read stories in the original Japanese … and everything still sucked. And that was just “modern” lit. God help me if/when I take classical lit (written in classical Japanese, so I’d have to take classical Japanese first, and by then my eyeballs may have fallen out of my skull with bits of my brain attached, so I might not take classical lit at all on account of no eyes/bits of brain).
Oh, and as luck would have it I “have” to take another lit course (in English again) because it was the only class available that would have me graduate on time. FML.
Then again, I’m one of those folks who generally hates any kind of “literature” class. So I’m not literature-racist or anything (if that can be a thing). I’m just … picky. Really, really picky.
/j-lit talk
Do M-I-Ls tend to side with the D-I-L in custody cases? The only ones I’ve known have backed their sons all the way. Because that’s what you do for your kids. If your mom is siding with your ex over you, you might want to double-check and see if you aren’t a horrible person. That is seriously the only way I can imagine a mom risking the chance of never seeing her grandkids again.
Also, I wholeheartedly agree that MRAs should not be breeding and fully support their desire to not make babies. *stamp of approval* No kid deserves to be brought up in that kind of household.
So, Abnoy, how do you explain that most men and women get on – even allowing for the rampant sexism of much of the world, which is NOT weighted against men – pretty damn well? How do you account for the fact that billions of people meet, fall in love, get together or not, break up or not, without turning into miserable, bitter, and frankly delusional idiots such as the MRM and MGTOW? Who, I might add, are an absolutely miniscule bunch, just a pack of whining, self-centred faux-adults on the internet, shocked that women have their own lives, and that their existence doesn’t revolve around pandering to stupid men’s wishes and demands. I say “stupid” advisedly, because the level of stupidity in the MRM/MGTOW is astonishing – and not representative of the majority of men in any way. Your fantasies of separate worlds and sex-bots and so on say nothing at all about the state of the world, only about you. The fact that you’re trotting out this nonsense on a board where many of the regulars are in happy, long-term relationships (whatever the genders of those involved) and those who aren’t are also happy people, shows you’re not good at observation on any level.
Go have a happy Christmas if you’re capable of it, and maybe look at all those couples walking around SMILING and HOLDING HANDS and LAUGHING TOGETHER while you’re at it.
Wow, I need more caffeine and Christmas cookies – I read ” we were going to go out to meet friends for drinks” with ” we were going to go out to meet ferrets for drinks”. And then I started thinking about how one would have drinks with ferrets. Would it be like “most ferrets like beer”? Or something way more individualistic, like Sally the ferret loves gin and tonic but her friend George likes cognac? And now I’m picturing ferrets in evening gowns and tuxes and top hats…
Oh, and a monocle. MUST HAVE the monocle.
I don’t know the opinions of ferrets, but humans seem to like this one…
http://www.hall-woodhouse.co.uk/beers/badgerales/furstyferret.asp
Why does this idiot presume that grandmothers are siding with their daughters IN LAW as opposed to their daughters by blood or adoption?
My first guess would be “because that’s what his own mother did, although I can’t imagine why,” but it looks like maybe that’s someone else’s problem, and he’s just linking to/agreeing with it? So my second guess is that’s what happens when you start with your conclusion and can’t get the facts to fit into the argument without a liberal application of conspiracy glue.
I also have only rarely seen women side with the DIL in the divorce, and it was universally true in those cases that (a) the guy involved was a massive asshole and (b) the MIL/DIL had a reasonable enough relationship that the MIL didn’t lose all access to the grandchildren.
Woa, I would totally love to drink with ferrets! I am so addicted to the internet, my family is being festive around me and here I am posting here. They think you’re all very witty, btw!
>By the way–The Tale of Genji is not boring.
Well the translations are. The two or three famous scenes are pretty good, yeah, but the rest of it was one huge drag.
Just popping in to tell you all my brother bought me a SCENTED FUCKING CANDLE for Christmas. I was heartily amused, although no one in my family could figure out why.
It’s eucalyptus scented, so naturally, I’m afraid I’ll wake up to a drop bear in my bedroom. (I’m not sure if that’s how drop bears work, but since when does my brain make sense of things???)