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.
@Bill
Ah I see. Sorry for the misunderstanding. And I admit I did read “isn’t” as “is”. (It’s the early hours in my timezone and I’m still wide awake :/ )
The role of divorce court is to oversee the division of resources as appropriate for the details of the marriage, and settle issues like custody. Why in the world do you think they would be in a position to, let alone be inclined to, provide incentives to get the father to contribute more to child-rearing? If there is no divorce, the divorce court is not involved. If there is, and there are custody issues, their purpose is to reach a fair and responsible arrangement, not to try to goad one side or the other into taking a certain role.
“Natural difficulties:” If you’re referring to the basics of child-rearing, mothers face them to. Usually mothers face them more often even in marriage, though thankfully that’s starting to turn around.
“Artificial difficulties:” Like what, exactly? Did you know that courts tend to award custody to the primary care-giver if custody is contested? I believe the split between sole custody to the father or to the mother is relatively even (in contested cases), but the most common result is joint custody.
But let’s ignore joint custody; if a father is more involved in the care of his children, that’s a stronger case before the court to grant him custody. Historically custody has favored the mother because the mother was, or was assumed to be, the most involved parent. How is that a difficulty that discourages fathers to be fathers? If anything, it’s an incentive (if you’re planning on divorcing and asking for sole custody, anyway).
Serious question time. How do you actually think divorce court works? No platitudes, no talking points, just step-by-step how the courts act to discourage men from being involved with their children?
O/T, but I have a new movie to watch:
http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/02/second-wave-feminists-documentary-shes-beautiful-when-shes-angry
I saw some news broadcasts from the sixties, a bunch of men talking about Helen Gurley Brown and the women’s movement… It was incredibly surreal. They were fascinated by the fact that Brown used a telephone. For work.
There were six college-age women and a fifty, sixty-something female professor, and we all turned to her and asked if they were joking. Because they had to be joking. Nobody could be that… obtuse and dismissive.
She assured us that no, it was real.
So as much as it feels like we aren’t making progress, I guess that little moment of culture shock showed us what we have to be thankful for.
“He’s humble when it serves his interests”
That’s not how humility works.
I saw that documentary’s campaign on Kickstarter! Also this, but I don’t know when this is coming out:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/889543128/equal-means-equal
@suffrajitsu Lol! Oh Gamergate, what are you like.
The Telegraph dude completely missed what objectification actually is by trying to use Magic Mike and 50 Shades as examples. They hardly count when the characters of Magic Mike are actually fleshed out as people and not just as strippers. Likewise, in 50 Shades Grey is fleshed out AND himself a manipulative controller who reduces Ana to a sex object – even though the characters in the book are mind-numbingly awful and two dimensional, how the hell can you reference one main character who objectifies the other main character as the one being objectified?
Gamergate’s an easy target, but in all seriousness, one of the early MRA talking points (Warren Farrell, I believe) was that men were objectified just as much as women, but as “success objects”. There’s a lot to critique in how our culture values material success, but 1) that’s not objectification, and 2) even if it were, it’s way preferable to being a “sex object”.
Sexualization =/= objectification. Women tend to be both sexualized and objectified but something can be sexualized without being objectified. But even if you were arguing men were sexualized as much as women that’d still be bunk. Studies have shown that 30% of female characters in movies are sexualized or dressed in sexy clothing–that’s nearly 1/3. I’m very, very certain that 30% of all male characters in film are not sexualized.
You aren’t taking “externalities” into account. Family courts will follow the letter of the law when it comes to visitation. The father, whether or not he’s blown off the kids in the past, has a right to some minimum visitation unless he’s been adjudicated dangerous to the kids. And this minimum visitation is pretty close to what most guys who fight like hell for their kids will get — on the order of 25-35%.
So if you just said “screw it” and took five years off when the kids were small and difficult, you can go back to court at a later date and get pretty much the same as you would have if you’d been taking care of them the entire time. And add to that the fact that a lot of mothers, especially if they are still single, would actually like the time off (who could blame them?).
So no, relinquishing your responsibilities for some time makes no real difference in the eyes of the law. As it stands now, I can simply tell my ex two days beforehand that I don’t have time and skip a weekend with the kids, and that’s my “right.” I’ve only done that twice in seven years, and one of those times was the weekend my father died and I had to take care of that, but if I’d done it dozens of times I’d still have every right to see my kids at my convenience.
The family court allows men an enormous amount of latitude as far as neglect is concerned, but not where cash money comes into play, and that’s exactly how feminists wanted it all along.
So if you tell your ex “screw you — you deal with the kids now and I’ll do no more than the minimum,” she’ll often make concessions later to get some help in raising the kids. It DOES pay to be an asshole. Of course, it hurts the kids, but hey, we adults have the right to “self-actualize” and all that.
See above. If you drive a hard bargain on other forms of assistance women will bend on the CS front.
Yeah, I agree. Decent people find relationships with their kids fulfilling and purposeful. People who reject that are assholes. But who’s the bigger asshole: the guy who rejects it because he’s a selfish prick or the attorney or feminist who taxes people for being decent human beings? In my mind, the latter is the asshole to beat all assholes. Gloria Allred is the queen of assholes, and beats Paul Elam hands down.
You mean like how feminists do every single time?
Actually, I don’t want to antagonize people here at this point, but rather invite them to look at the bigger picture. I have a little baby right now (well, actually, he’s kind of a hefty one), and it’s pretty clear that my life isn’t just about “me.” But that applies even to the childless to some extent. Seeing sex in terms of “my team” can be extremely counterproductive when applied to intimate and fragile communities such as the family, and yet we don’t even take this into consideration, and thereby end up trampling the weak and helpless to whom this is entirely irrelevant. In aggregate, we’d be better off without this sexual jockeying for power, although I understand that some professional political actors and lawyers might take a hit (for some reason that doesn’t bother me too much).
RE: Christian Grey: I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey but main characters are awkward examples of objectification. The only examples I can think of are something like Lolita, who was intentionally written as someone objectified/dehumanized by an unreliable narrator.
And doesn’t Christian Grey have a fully fleshed out tragic backstory, replete with Freudian excuses explaining his behavior? Cuz that’s literally the opposite of objectifying someone.
He didn’t commit a logical fallacy, he committed a logical phallusy.
A logical fal…fal…falsity.
Again with the “Social Justice Words are magic spells” crap.
Objectification is literally treating a person like they are on object, like they have no internal subjectivity and are easily replaced by any other object. That is… not how male characters are usually presented in fiction.
Hell, even in advertising, they don’t objectify sexy men the way they objectify sexy women. Think of Old Spice Guy–he is one actor, with a character, who happens to be seriously hot. How many of the sexy women in advertisements can claim that?
Citation needed.
(Emphasis mine) Citation needed.
(Emphasis mine) Citation needed.
Citation needed.
All this “I’m perfectly willing to screw up my bond with my children in order not to pay a single cent more than absolutely necessary” is not really selling you as a good father.
The thing that drives me crazy with MRA notions of “family” and “equality” is that they’re either unbelievably two-faced or stupid. They don’t think there needs to be any consideration of childcare on a systemic level in this country: childcare is a private family matter and if it so happens that young couples can’t afford daycare and one parent stays home or cuts back work for a period of time (gee, how is that one parent so often the mother?) then that’s great. Childcare, after all, is a woman’s issue and thus trivial.
(Meanwhile, that freeloading bitch should be super grateful he’s providing for her and kiss his ass all the time, because, really, she’s basically useless deadweight.)
OTOH, when they get divorced, it’s super, SUPER unfair when courts look at the overall family situation and go, “hm, well, if it ain’t that broke, don’t fix it” and leave the kids with the parents who’s mostly been looking after them all along, and expect the parent who’s mostly been paying the bills to keep it up.
You’d think the MRA boys would have sorta put two and two together ’til now and started talking about being really, truly 50/50 on the childcare and work for both parents so that for the marriages that do “fall apart” without clear fault, the courts can go, “Well, it’s not that broke, so let’s not fix it” and make things completely 50/50 like the MRA boys claim to want (when divorced, anyway. I see no evidence they give two shits about equality when they have a serv– I mean wife, to dump on.)
Truly 50/50 coparenting arrangements would involve change on a societal level: workplaces would need to be more flexible, governments will probably need to subsidize daycare, etc. But it would be great in terms of equality. Really feminist.
Most women who drop out of the workforce to SAH aren’t doing it because it’s their dream to stay home with kids for years on end while careers dry up and (some) husbands learn to take them quite for granted.
That reminds me, it’s my turn to draft the daily feminist tax on decent people bill. I’d better hop to it or the CIA won’t give me my paycheck. Being a feminist is hard. I don’t think I’ll even have time to spermjack tonight.
The thing that annoys me most about misogynists in general is that you cannot pin them down about how they view the role of women in their ideal society. They can’t even coherently state the role they think women *should* have in a way that is reasonably achievable. Sorry, that’s sort of random, but it does drive me fucking crazy.
It’s perhaps worth noting that the relevant family laws are of course entirely gender neutral; they apply equally to men and women. Now of course MRA types will say that, notwithstanding that, they get a worse deal under the law because of its applicability in the real world.
But they don’t accept this argument when it applies to women generally. Then it’s all: “Women have the same rights as men”.
@isidore13,
Yeah, the MRAs are particularly bad at that. At least the traditionalists have a plan for women–granted, one where women give up most of their rights in exchange for benefits that they may not even receive and a heaping helping of second-tier status. But you know, it is something to do.
MRAs… they don’t even offer the fake give and take traditionalists do. It is all women give, men take.
“Pretty sure “Sexual identity politics” pertains to LGBT+ rights, not feminism.”
Those words you are using, you know what they mean 🙂
“And doesn’t Christian Grey have a fully fleshed out tragic backstory, replete with Freudian excuses explaining his behavior? Cuz that’s literally the opposite of objectifying someone.”
Well, I only survived one chapter, and read same snarking of the first ten or so, but yeah, that there be true.
@WWTH
You really should be getting some rest prior to your interview, so for tonight I’ll cover for you and oppress myself.
If you need me I’ll be hiding in the corner in case feminists throw rocks at me. I know how you like to incite each other to do that.
QFT
Once you’ve added in the prime objective of most jurisdictions dealing with custody, domicile, child support matters — that they consider first and foremost, primarily if not entirely, the welfare of the child — it will follow that a couple who’ve allocated to the mother the majority of caring and organising tasks for child(ren) during their lives before separation will find the courts generally in favour of continuing that arrangement. Courts know that separation of parents disrupts children’s lives so they try to “rescue” as much stability and continuity as possible for the future.
Fathers (and quite a few mothers) who’ve delegated/ ignored or neglected/ rejected the down and dirty tasks of child raising can be at a disadvantage in these proceedings. But that disadvantage is (usually) largely of their own making.
blockquote>
You aren’t taking “externalities” into account.
— snip —
And add to that the fact that a lot of mothers, especially if they are still single, would actually like the time off (who could blame them?).
Are you talking about just straight-up disappearing one day, then being hauled back to court 5 years later and asking for visitation rights? I was talking about a guy’s behavior during divorce proceedings when there is a custody battle, so already you’ve jumped to something different.
If I’m right about what you’re talking about, though, apparently courts can limit visitation if the non-custodial parent has been absent for a long period of time or otherwise failed to form a relationship with the child/ren. So if you just said “screw it” and popped off for 5 years, that’d be an excellent reason to not grant visitation.
It all depends on the circumstance though. Perhaps if you came back sorry you left, and wanted to do the work to form a relationship, both the court and your spouse might be more ammenable to joint custody/visitation. If you are an asshole, that could only serve to turn the court against you.
If you do this often enough, and your ex wants to address it in court, your truency could be fodder for reducing your visitation rights. It doesn’t exactly show that you are doing what you can for the child’s welfare, which is the most important thing in custody disputes.
What? And no.
“Feminist who taxes people for being decent human beings” means absolutely nothing to me. There’s a reason I asked you to avoid platitudes. What “tax?” What do you mean by “being decent human beings?” So far you’ve been arguing that being an asshole was the best way to avoid responsibilities while still retaining access to your abandoned kids. So far you’ve pretty much ignored how the law actually works.
As for feminists fixating soley on money and time, the hell? The only feminists that I’ve heard fixating on child support and the like is the straw feminists that MRAs concoct. Actual feminists (well, actual women) express frustration at the guys who vanish, avoid due child support that would help enormously in providing care for their children, then come back years later feeling entitled to the children they abandoned.
I would think that women with child custody would want, in rough order of desirability:
1. A father that stays around and helps raise the kids, like a normal couple.
2. A father that stays involved with the kids through the divorce, and is generally helpful.
3. A father that at least follows the court orders (which may or may not include child support payments) and at least avoids being an extra burden on top of single parenthood.
4. A father that stays gone and lets her raise the children in peace.
But that’s just for the particular case of mothers with custody. Feminists want what’s best for the children in any situation, which may mean the father gets custody (and wouldn’t get it if the court continues to be sexist in automatically granting the mother custody).
No no, the people who fixate on money and time costs at the expense of all else is the MRAs, the ones who are afraid of sperm-jacking and being roped into child support payments for ever and ever amen hail satan. Also, you, when you argue that being an asshole is best because you get visitation without needing to spend money or time raising the kids.
Blockquote Mammoth, why!?!?
What’s that? Sometimes being a total asshole is easier than being a halfway decent human being? In that case, I guess I renounce feminism forever.
I guess it’s technically true. If you just abandon your kids after the divorce, you don’t have to work out custody arrangements. If you burn down your house, that’s the last time you’ll have to mow your lawn. And one way to deal with the hassle of sending Mother’s Day cards is to kill your parents.