So this is an … interesting reaction to that Buzzfeed piece about Paul Elam. And by “interesting” I mean “WTF?”
Over on The Spearhead — remember The Spearhead, home to some of the crankiest misogynists on the Internet? — our old friend WF Price offers a rather unique analysis of Elam’s life story.
Price admits right off the bat that Elam is indeed as much of an “asshole” as the Buzzfeed article makes him out to be, snarkily commenting that this fact “isn’t exactly news to anyone who has dealt with him personally, or read his articles.” And then he goes on to blame Elam’s assholery on feminism.
Wat.
Well, as Price sees it, Elam hasn’t exactly suffered for being an asshole. The fact that he basically got away with abandoning his daughter proves
that telling your wife and kids to screw off when your marriage goes bad is a better strategy if you’re concerned about yourself than trying to be a niceguy. What could be a more damning indictment of feminism than that?
Um, do you really want an answer to that?
Meanwhile, Price argues, the fact that Elam has had three failed marriages shows that ladies just love assholes. No, really. According to Price, Elam’s life story
proves that being an asshole doesn’t torpedo one’s prospects with women. Quite the opposite, in fact: Paul’s many walks down the aisle are testament to the fact that there’s something about the guy that contemporary women find appealing. Elam’s a major hit with women to this day.
Checkmate, feminism!
Price then works me into the equation, for some reason.
And I don’t write this out of envy; on the contrary, I think his popularity with women has probably been his biggest problem in life (Futrelle wouldn’t understand).
Price concludes with this, er, zinger:
So if feminists were to say to me that Paul Elam proves that MRAs are terrible people, I’d respond by saying “he’s the product of your philosophy, not mine.”
It will take someone more versed in formal logic to explain exactly what logical fallacies Price is committing here, or if he’s somehow come up with a new logical fallacy all his own.
Wow, this is fascinating. So basically, Price has become a feminist, but he doesn’t want to call himself that because feminists are man-eating monster women. So he’s trying to reclassify all the feminist ideas he supports as not really feminist for some reason, and all the kind, sensible, non-man-eating feminists he knows as not really feminists. And this has landed him on a feminist website, trying to tell all the feminists there that we secretly hate it when men change diapers.
What an odd conversation this has turned out to be.
Oh, I know that. (My sister was two weeks late delivering herself, and was very very glad to have that over with.)
The thing is, you can start pregnancy leave up to 17 weeks prior to the official due date, so that your leave would normally end right after the due date. If the baby is late at that point, then you get the automatic extension.
The normal expectation in that case is that pregnancy leave will automatically end on the actual date of live birth, and the mother will then normally start parental leave. (Which still lasts for 35 weeks even if the pregnancy leave lasted longer than 17 weeks.)
The link I pointed out above has some bureaucratese to it, but it has covered most of the likely corner cases I can think of. (I will admit to having not thought about it too hard, as I have no plans on having children.)
Shaenan I think you just summed up the entire conversation, no need to read through his long teal deers. Everything he wrote was the epitome of mansplaining feminism to feminists.
@Bill:
I hope I don’t offend you or anyone here by saying this, but if things went down how you say then you’re something of a feminist – you should reevaluate your view of what feminism is. As others have said, you keep pointing at ‘evil’ women and saying they’re feminists because they did something bad. But they aren’t examples of feminism.
What you say you did, that’s more like feminism – it sounds like you’ve just got your labels mixed up and you’re not listening when people tell you it’s not feminism.
What you say your ex did, that’s the same kind of behaviour I don’t like in MRAs, it might be empowerment but it ain’t feminism, it’s just bad behaviour.
@ Bill Price
“I’m talking about making a request for a visitation schedule. Any man who is not a serious danger to his kids will get one.”
Doesn’t this blow a frequently recited MRA myth out of the water? The one about mothers “stealing” children from caring, loving fathers who never see them again?
That’s another good point.
When I was working (full time while taking part time classes) with two kids, it almost felt like there were months where I was at home more than at work – and I had to be the one to do it because my husband had a travel-intensive job.
And that seems to be the way it breaks down for many couples, at least in the US. Unless you can swing a nanny or au pair, with young children – even school-age but not able to stay home by themselves young – it ends up being a better strategy (earnings-wise) for one spouse to go full bore and another to have a more flexible and/or low-key job. Someone’s got to handle the grunt work, and it makes sense not to ding the person with most earnings potential (because many professional environments take leave, even family leave, as a sign that you’re not really serious about the job) if you’re viewing it from a functional-unit rather than individual perspective.
Re: spousal support: I think it still as a place when one spouse has made substantial career sacrifices for the sake of the other or the family, at least as a temporary/phased thing.
I don’t have to tell you about the job market around military bases. A spouse who moves with their military member *is not* going to have the same earnings potential that theyay have had if they’d stayed put, and if a spouse follows their husband or wife to a country in which they can’t work (work visa, etc) that should be taken into account, too.
My friend’s ex followed her to India for most of a decade. He only did so much to raise the kids (a local Nanny and Housekeeper were well within their means), but couldn’t really work. He cheated on her and left, and even that douchenozzle merited (and received, btw) spousal support for a few years to find his professional feet.
Both alimony and child support should be – and seem to increasingly be – gender blind and circumstance contingent. That the circumstances “favor” generally favor women (with “favor” being in the loosest possible terms) is more of an issue of – wait for it – systemic patriarchy than anything else.
As Bill points out (!!!), it’s less of an issue in countries with generous family leave attitudes and policies, good public daycare/preschool, and a robust social safety net. As others have said, he’s talking like a raging feminist…except for all of the “damn raging feminists” stuff.
Clearly there is no reason that Bill’s ex would want him out of her life and another man in it other than wimminz slutty scheming biotruth.
He thinks that. That is a thing he thinks. I’m reading this asshole’s stupid, misogynist pontificating and it is blowing me away how up his own ass he is. I cannot imagine wasting my life with a shithead like that. He’s such an asshole that he has made up an entire fictional world where the world is against him and his marital and parenting problems aren’t his fault. He is consumed with self pity while he encourages fathers to do the “smart” thing and abandon their children.
…and he thinks women are the horrible ones.
NEWSFLASH: Being poor sucks. Capitalism isn’t fair. That’s not feminism’s fault and it does not only suck for men.
http://media.giphy.com/media/5bo8XMq0GROw0/giphy-facebook_s.jpg
I’ve been married and I’ve had young children. If your wife began planning to get financial security and leave you when her youngest child was 1 year old and the oldest two and a half your marriage must have been awful and she must have been desperate to get out. That’s the truth of it. The stay at home parent of such young children is too busy, otherwise, to scheme in this way. I’d also like to point out that you went from having a flexible full time job to taking what you represent as an enormous hit financially and in terms of job recognition in only six months. That seems odd.
@Lea Right, I don’t know Price’s ex– maybe she’s every bit the terrible conniving blackmailing backstabber he portrays her as– but every time he gets to yammering about feminism, I really kind of want to divorce him myself.
Yes, the military spouse thing is often shockingly bad for a person’s longterm employment prospects. There are a handful of careers a person can pursue while being the trailing spouse, like nursing… but there’s a reason a lot more milspouses are stay-at-homes than in the general population.
Plus, usually you are far from extended family so there’s no backstop of cheap/free Grandma-care to lean on, even in a pinch. Which, from casual observation, helps keep a lot of the dual-career couples afloat in my extended family.
I still think it’s funny he thinks real parenting and employment equality is “totalitarian” before divorce, but too many choices and consideration of individual circumstance is very bad afterward.
Yup, still smells like MRA bullshit to me!
@lea & ceebarks
Sorry to butt back in after saying I’d leave you alone, but the speculation about my ex’s personal character and reasons for wanting out of the marriage aren’t fair, and aren’t really relevant to the broader issue, because people have all sorts of reasons.
First, she is not a “terrible person” or backstabber by nature. She was a young mother who was frustrated for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that I was depressed and disillusioned with marriage myself. It was all fine when we were young and hot without a care in the world, but then all the sudden we had a lot more work and a lot less money, and we felt and looked like shit much of the time (parenthood can do that). It’s those kinds of situations that bring out the flaws in the relationship that were papered over by the benefits in the beginning.
Yes, what she did was really aggressive and not nice, but she had reason to be angry with me. Sure, I looked after the kids so she could work, but I was pretty resentful about having to take on that role and deal with her frustration, so I let her know that by being distant and gloomy for months (it didn’t help that our parents on both sides, and my boss, all shit on me for doing the childcare, and used it as an excuse to offer no help). Add an extremely painful health condition that emerged right in the middle of it and I must have been a pretty unpleasant person to live with. I don’t blame her for wanting out. I wanted the hell out of the situation too. She was just the one with the guts to do something about it.
I’m not bitter about her leaving. On the contrary — I understand. I’m just really not happy about how it went down. Out of all the ways people could end relationships, the way it’s done in the US is among the worst. And I think that’s because men and women treat it as a war with each other in politics, philosophy and the courts.
I’m not the God-damned “patriarchy” for heaven’s sake. I’m just one guy out of millions, so why the heavy artillery?
BTW, my ex and I get along fine now, because it’s just about the kids, and she’s a good, loving mom, which I appreciate most of all. When it’s just between me and her, and you remove the lawyers, courts, in-laws and all other partisan factors, somehow we can work things out.
In fact, the only professional who ever helped at all was an expensive private mediator who worked with both of us in a professional, time-efficient manner. He was worth every penny, because he totally shut down the “personal” issues and focused only on the practical matters of working out a residential schedule that we could both live with. I wish to God we’d had that at the beginning.
Bill, my thing with you is that I don’t think you really understand that part of the reason for this kind of drama is that the US has such poor support for families in general. You want the benefits of a Nordic-type system post-breakup, but not the taxes or obligations or conformity of it beforehand, when things are going relatively well.
In the US, childcare is so much based on … private handshake agreements behind closed doors, often without any real contingency planning or compensation or clear boundaries involved. (Personally, I think it’s a miracle that kind of thing doesn’t actually blow up more often than it does.)
But then when it does go kablooey, you seem to want a very one-size-fits-all approach, with no respect for any prior arrangements or constraints. And to some extent, this already happens. I think it is reasonable to say that a lot of divorcing couples have some pretty major deficits that they clearly can’t resolve on their own, so of course the state tends to get involved to define some responsibilities, within the limits of what already exists. The alternative is, I guess, let the kids starve on the streets, in the worst case scenarios. So the state steps in when people can’t or won’t do it themselves.
Not a big surprise that people don’t always like the outcome of that!
It’s like… you think divorce should be as easy and clean as possible (which, you know, I agree with; no one in possession of their faculties is excited about the prospect of having a massive court battle, probably not even lawyers.)
But none of this goes down in a vacuum, either. You seem to understand that your own career sacrifices had a big meaningful impact on your job prospects (even though they lasted like, what, six months? Granted, in the middle of a recession in, as I recall, an industry that has struggled for a long time even in better times!)
But you do not seem to grok that this disproportionately impacts women, because they disproportionately continue to be the ones to do the unpaid grunt work of raising children in our society.
Yes, even in 2015.
Yes, even (especially?) unmarried low-income women.
I’m like, how the heck is this feminism’s fault? Anytime I bring up how broken the childcare system is, how much American workers need better wages, tenable work/family policies, etc, I inevitably get back a giant shouty dude-chorus of “NOT MY PROBLEM!”
Well, ok– but that collective choice has some consequences!
Wut
[again, sorry if I’m bothering those who don’t want me here, so go ahead and skip this please if it pisses you off]
Actually, it was closer to two years. I started taking care of the kids in August ’07, and finally got a permanent parenting plan in April ’09. The temporary parenting plan insanely held me to taking care of the kids during the day while mom and grandma worked, and on top of that demanded I pay child support, because she and her mom had them sleep at their place — only overnights count for total days. It was really brutal, but I followed it because I wanted to have that time with the kids, and I knew it would matter in the long run because I remember how grateful I am to this day to my paternal grandfather for taking care of me in similar circumstances.
Ultimately, I think it was the right choice despite it essentially ruining my social life and career, because giving your kids your time when they need it most can set the tone for life. My dad totally dropped the ball in this way, and while I don’t hold it against him because he had some pretty serious problems, it was hard on me as a kid and the effects lasted well into my youth and linger to this day.
And I don’t buy the idea that lawyers don’t want this kind of thing. They do. It’s how they jack up the bills. They are not innocent in this mess.
As for the taxes and all that, I don’t have a problem with Nordic style socialism so long as it’s feasible. What ruins it in the US is identity politics. Every group is fighting for a bigger slice of the pie, and can’t see the big picture. Could you seriously tell me that every interest group will set aside its own special issues for the greater good? It just isn’t going to happen.
I understand that women have a gripe about doing the unpaid work of childcare. In Seattle, daycare costs, last I checked, some $1,200 a month per kid. More for infants. And this in an industry that pays barely above minimum wage. Family work isn’t sufficently valued, and that’s a systemic problem. But assigning monetary value to it doesn’t seem to be helping. Both Seattle and San Francisco are notoriously childless, despite a much stronger push for gender equality in both places and a very powerful feminist establishment. And yet both California and Washington have normal fertility outside these cities. Clearly, political feminism, which is as powerful in these two cities as anywhere, hasn’t done much to help.
So why not try my prescription, which is to give men an incentive to care for the kids. If the father doesn’t want to take care of them, he pays. If he’s willing to share the burden, he doesn’t. Most noncustodial fathers these days are not middle-aged assholes with kickass jobs who are screwing the secretary. They’re young men without much money who could actually help the kids’ mothers by shouldering some of the burden of childcare. But instead our system treats them as though they are callous jerks who have dragooned women into giving up their aspirations to “stand by my man.” The picture you get from feminists is totally dissonant with reality, and asshole baby boomer MRAs aren’t doing a damn thing to help solve this problem. Like I said, they’ve been rewarded for being jerks, and as far as I can tell feminists are perfectly happy to perpetuate this screwed up system. Maybe it validates their complaints. Maybe they have some skin in the game as lawyers and social workers. Whatever the reason, they’re half of the problem.
Jenora — oooh, I misunderstood, my mistake! Blame your southern neighbor’s utter lack of parental leave! You might have more snow than us, but everything else makes up for that 🙂
(And we’ve got a few feet too many here anyways, I’d take Toronto over this!)
Proxieme — yeah, I’m starting to actually feel bad for Bill, like yeah, shit here sucks, and he seems to want to do rights by his kid(s), but is barking up the wrong tree. As far as school age kids but not old enough to stay home alone — we had a neighbor who ran daycare and took my brother paid and me as a 10~ year old volunteer helper. I wasn’t old enough to handle an emergency, but I could handle fetching stuff and cleaning sticky hands. Being able to get your kid watched for free cuz they help out is probably a rarity though (and I’m lucky, the other time I did that was mostly silly office stuff and feeding horses, even got to ride one since I was a nice little passenger to ease the new momma horse back into riding!)
Bill —
“In fact, the only professional who ever helped at all was an expensive private mediator who worked with both of us in a professional, time-efficient manner. He was worth every penny, because he totally shut down the “personal” issues and focused only on the practical matters of working out a residential schedule that we could both live with. I wish to God we’d had that at the beginning.”
Is pushing for that sort of things, an helping people find mediators gonna be on the to do list for the new blog? Cuz that sounds like a way you could actually help people!
Ceebarks — having worked for a civil law lawyer, no, they don’t like big cases. Actually, this is on topic! He wouldn’t do divorce cases because everybody’s wrong and everybody’s right — in divorce neither party is 100% perfect, nor 100% terrible. It’s not a matter of, say, whose client should’ve dealt with some blueprint thing, or whether the changes were on the final blueprints, or whether the shopping center or store is responsible for the sidewalks.
Laywers usually get paid hourly, of course they’d rather get ten hours from ten simple things rather than ten complex hours of the same thing.
You know, and the other random thing I was thinking about WRT the “nordic model” is that, as I understand it, most Scandinavian countries tax husbands and wives individually, instead of allowing them to file jointly like we do here. That also seems to have an effect on how people organize their lives, long, long before a separation looms… more along individual lines, basically.
I remember my dad objecting to my mom’s occasional part-time cleaning jobs partly because it put them into a higher tax bracket (which today, seems to me like a pretty stupid objection to extra income, but whatever. Maybe things were different in 1995.)
But if they’d been taxed separately, it wouldn’t have seemed so much like it was “extra” income, you know?
— Wikipedia entry on income splitting
Well, see, there’s something readily actionable right there. I always thought it was strange that the one-income (or income-and-a-half, or income-and-a-quarter) model would continue to prevail so much here in the US…
oh, look, more!
Maybe it’s just the G&T talking, but this is all pretty interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_splitting
@Bill:
You keep saying feminists and feminism are doing these bad things but they aren’t things feminists want (at least the ones I know of) and they aren’t what feminism is about.
Seriously, have you seen views like that somewhere on this blog being expressed by someone who identifies as feminist (as opposed to the trolls)? Because I haven’t.
But you can always do home-based sales!
It’s great!
You can guilt your friends into buying whatever you’re selling by reminding them that you bought the stuff that they’re selling!
*breaks into “Circle of Life”*
Bill – I actually don’t think that you sound like a bad person, just myopic on some things.
re: never married parents not paying support when genuinely sharing custody: That’s…how I’ve seen it play out, at least in the past decade-decade and a half ????
But I’ll admit that I’ve also seen things start out that way and then be revised (in court) when one parent or the other consistently flakes out.
re: your situation: Not to pry, but out of curiousity (1) how long ago did your divorce happen and (2) where do you live (region’s fine)?
Because I absolutely think that your childcare/work history should have been taken into account; and, honestly, I have seen them be in anagolous situations (at least in the mid-Atlantic with lower/middle income dual earners).
re: court vs mediation: I would absolutely urge anyone in the Us who’s getting a divorce to first try mediation. It keeps things at least marginally cooperative rather than defaulting to adversarial.
But re: the adversarial nature of US splits: I honestly don’t think that you can tie that to feminism (or any other -ism), really. It’s a more integral part of our culture, exacerbated (I think) by our increasingly insular ideological stances and media sources (“If we disagree, you’re not only wrong – YOU’RE EVIL!”).
It’s large part of the reason I refuse to watch TV news.
re: income and childcare: ACTUALLY, I’ve also seen many low-income mothers staying at home because they just can’t afford what they seem to be adequate childcare, with any employment being…let’s call it “casual” (under the table), inconsistent, and contingent upon when friends and family can watch the children.
In my state all divorced parents get shared custody unless there is a problem or one or both of the parents want a different custody agreement. Child support goes directly to the state and is then paid to the parent receiving child support. That does not mean people don’t get screwed.
Still, 75% of fathers who sue for custody get it.
A friend of mine’s sister lost custody of her daughter after the statute of limitations has run out on the statutory rape that got her pregnant because for the first time in his life, the father wanted to spend time with his daughter. She had been 14 when she got pregnant. He had been her older brother’s best friend and 18. The absent father used her relying on her family too much to help her raise her daughter when she was a teen and his better financial position to take the 8 yr old to another state permanently. The judge said the mom had had a fair chance and now it was the fathers turn.
The judge was a woman who it is said is bias toward women by singles dads in town.
Can you imagine the uproar if she was even fair to women?
I’m a SAHM. I have been for years. My husband is a nurturing dad, but I’m more likely to get custody than him because I am and have been the main caregiver at great sacrifice to my earning potential and aid to his. I stayed home while he finished school and worked on his career. He has had years of networking, work experience etc. Why should he befit from my free labor for years and then be able to split with the kids with zero financial obligation to me?
right, but what coastal city isn’t pretty low-fertility? People seem to gravitate to big cities to establish careers and have fun in their 20s/early 30s, and then decamp for the ‘burbs if and when they have kids, ’cause the rent is too damned high.
I’m certainly not unsympathetic to your plight as outlined above. I’ll admit I’ve got some hard feelings ’cause the last time I tried conversing with you, you were kind of a dick to me for no reason and you made… just a ton of incorrect assumptions. But I get it, you were just mad. I was mad, too, ’cause six years ago was frankly not a great time in my own marriage. Small children will indeed amplify every flaw in a relationship.
My parents split in 2003, after my mom had spent 20+ years following my dad from military post to military post. I remember he didn’t like it whenever she’d find some part-time job, ’cause he didn’t like navigating around two work schedules, and he felt like the “extra” money she made mostly got swallowed up in more taxes. (How true this was, I can’t say.) Also, i think he really kind of liked being the only breadwinner because in a lot of ways, he who pays the piper calls the tune, and all.
Well, then he retired and the last kid flew the nest, and he took up with an online affair with someone 12 years younger. Suddenly he wanted Mom OUT, despite the fact that they’d bought their first house together just the year before. Instead of just saying, “hey, look, I’ve found someone else, I’ve been unhappy for a long time, let’s divvy things up and move on, blahblah” (which, yes, i’m sure she would have found devastating and which yes, the family would have judged him the worse for) he started a gaslighting campaign, wherein he’d make veiled death threats that were juuuuuust this side of deniable plausibility. “You know, if I were Scott Peterson and I lived here, I’d cut up the body and scatter the pieces in the bay. No one would ever catch ME!” Coupled with an uncharacteristically cold demeanor, Mom read the writing on the wall and fled to a women’s shelter with naught but the clothes on her back.
He, of course, claims to this day to be the innocent victim of abandonment by an irrational woman. What could he do? Poor him. So he did exactly what any grieving husband would do: moved his girlfriend in the following month and told the judge he didn’t owe my mom a thin dime because SHE abandoned HIM. Plus, he argued, his STBX was just mad that he had a new gf, and also, how was he supposed to support TWO women on one moderate income? Riddle me that, Judge Smarty Pants?!
The judge may have been a total hardcore ideological feminist because that argument did not actually go far. Mom was (finally) awarded half his pension, half the value of the retirement house they’d bought the year before, and five years’ spousal support. Dad was totally livid. If he were techier and more enterprising, he’d have started a mens-rights site.
Mom spent two years after separation living in her church’s basement trying to get back on her feet while their case went through the system. When she got a part-time job at Wal-Mart, she about cried for relief. (To this day, she will cut you with her eyes for talking smack about Wal-Mart in her presence. lol)
Dad would call me sometimes to gripe about how hard-done he’d been, how the system was working him over because courts always side with the woman. IT’S MYYY MONEEEY BITCH GET A JOB.
I’m like, nope, nope, nope, not listening to your bullshit. Oh, and before I forget, here’s some more nope.
In the end, she did get the pension payments, as that’s arranged through the fed. gov, but not most of the spousal support, which he terminated once she moved and he figured (correctly) that she wouldn’t go back just to take him to court. To this day, I’m sure he thinks the family is distant because he got divorced and she alienated the kids (as if she has those kinds of powers of psychological voodoo: she couldn’t even get us to brush our damned teeth half the time, and still can’t get any of us to go to church!)
omg, seriously, do not even get me started, lol Fucking Scentsy and Origami Owl and Mary Kay and Pampered Chef and Thirty-One and Lia Sophia and all the dodgy weightloss ones, too. argh
I extra-like when you get invited to what seems like an actual social gathering: “let’s all get together and work on some Christmas crafts!”
and it turns out that the main event is a pitch for rubber fucking stamps, or scented fucking candles.
WE’VE BEEN AMBUSHED! ABORT ABORT
I admit that I like Party Lites. I don’t need to buy anymore though. I have enough to last a while considering that I only burn scented fucking candles once in awhile.
@Argenti
I could have been clearer in my phrasing to start with.
And, actually, yeah, we have snow here, but Buffalo on the other side of the lake tends to get a whole lot more. Toronto gets this odd combination of lake effect and heat island effect that ends up redirecting a lot of the snow around it instead.
Then again, I grew up in Victoria, B.C., which doesn’t get much snow. A foot of snowfall at once was the worst storm in 80 years and shut down the city. Think Seattle weather patterns there.