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.
blockquote monster got me again — I guess typing on an ipad isn’t my forte
Oh Billy boy,
You’re still assuming that if you don’t like someone (advocates in this case) that they must be feminists. You also still haven’t provided a shred of evidence that any problems with the court system are due to feminism. Most of them seem like plain old bureaucratic issues to me.
Then why do MRAs not get serious about fully sharing parenting BEFORE a breakup? Like… from Day One? The ones I’ve talked to seem to consider childcare a woman’s business, and not even that hard, meaning of course the mom gets totally dumped on for years, sometimes ’til she’s finally had enough and wants out. Big shocker, right?
at THAT point, the MRA crowd starts making noise about wanting equal parenting time and no child support obligations.
I think the whole thing is a cynical ploy to opt out of the hard parts of parenting, both when the kids are labor intensive and relatively cheap, and again when it’s relatively less labor-intensive and more expensive. By the time the kids are school-aged or teens, the “default parent’s” career has often taken a major nosedive, but these guys are like, “tough shit, not a dime, bitch!”
I am not shocked that family courts often don’t view this kind of transparent ploy kindly. My parents’ divorce played out a lot like that. I wasn’t then, and am not now, all that sympathetic to my old man on that front.
Well, fully sharing is not optimal at day one, for obvious reasons (nursing). But it gets closer to that pretty soon, I’d say when kids are weaned and cruising (actually that’s when childcare is hardest, because they never stay in one place).
Most families need to be flexible and cooperative, and most are. Being a single parent is brutal. I just did it for a few days while my wife was out of state, and I was pretty drained by the end of it, not in the least because the baby is used to breastfeeding and I can’t do that for him, which prompted a lot of crying.
In being flexible I mean that people need to play more than one role, sometimes when they’re not the best at the job. Often, “being there” is what counts. I think most people recognize this (especially younger families), and try to work things out.
But I don’t think many divorces happen because of this issue (as you suggest many occur well after the difficult infancy/toddler stage). In about half of divorces, the motive is romantic, i.e. one partner meets someone else, and in the remainder it’s a mixed bag. Childcare becomes more of an issue after the divorce, because cooperation is terminated.
This is why making it an issue of contention is not helpful. As I’ve matured, I’ve come to realize that endless choices and possibilities are not always a good thing (look what it’s done to our tax code, for example). It would be better if parents had a clear idea of how things will be in the event of a separation. Also better for children, because family conflict is not good for kids.
If courts said “you get this week, you get that one,” it would be a lot easier than fighting over the details and who pays whom. Unless one parent has a serious behavioral problem (I mean clinical, not alleged), that should be that. If one parent doesn’t want to take care of the kids, then he or she pays support to the other one. That’s exactly how it is in Scandinavia, and it works fine.
Of course, this would put a lot of lawyers out of work, but we already have way too many lawyers out there, and that’s a social problem in its own right.
Bill, these guys are not “flexible,” except when it suits them. Surely you know this.
Look, I’m intimately familiar with childcare: I’ve stayed home for a decade, raising the four kids we had in six years. There were times, especially when I had four under six, that I fantasized about hitting the highway and never look back: childcare is fucking hard… (and seemingly never-ending when it’s 4pm, everyone’s melting down, and you’ve still got 4 hours to go til bedtime, whereupon you can count on waking up every two hours to nurse the baby anyway.)
Those were the days, man.
Meantime, my husband was free to take almost any hours for work, travel for work, socialize/network with colleagues, and take whatever jobs he thought were best with no concern about who was going to wrangle the young’uns or whether he was late for daycare pick-up. That’s… a pretty nice benefit, no?
(In fact, today he has the family vehicle and I have no idea when he’ll turn back up for the evening, as he may or may not go to the gym today with is former boss: totally up in the air! And that is really fine with me. Flexibility! It’s amazing!)
However, if we split next week and he were your average MRA, he’d go balls to the wall on the equal custody/fathers rights kool-aid, and inform me and probably the judge that “Oh, hell no, she gets nothing. FULL EQUALITY!”
Never mind I’d be starting completely over again career-wise, with a huge gaping hole in my resume. Never mind that supposedly our previous arrangement had been “what’s best for the kids: stability!”
Never mind that supposedly during the duration of the marriage, my lack of income and his lack of hands-on parenting time were not meant to say anything damning about either of us.
Never mind that our initial agreement has largely been dictated by living in a country that thinks the full Scandinavian model– including long maternity/paternity leaves, subsidized childcare, universal healthcare, etc, is communism. Neh?
*sigh* Alright, I’m confused.
So the court system can favor “assholes,” by which Price means a father that only keeps up the minimum amount of visitation to avoid child support payments if that’s part of the agreement between the exes… And somehow this is an example of a secret feminism cabal whispering orders in the back room, stacking the court against fathers?
Wha?
What are you even arguing anymore, Price? It seems like you can’t even approach the topic of fathers getting screwed over with jumping all the way to platitude land.
In fact, right now we are actually working on making some changes: he’s always wanted to do the SAH thing and I’m ready to get back in the workforce. Which works out and is thus great.
OTOH, he’s not bullshitting me that he’s going to have anything resembling the same experience I did with doing the lion’s share of childcare…. because the youngest one will be five and in kindergarten all day. Everyone is toileting independently, capable of using big-kid words, and sleeping 10 hours straight every night. He really probably can do some quality meaningful or remunerative “side projects,” as I remember a certain angsty MRA telling me I needed to start doing, back when I had three under four. HA HA HA
Someone, pleeeeaaaase tell me how leaving infants with women for 10+ hours a day and then not giving them any meaningful credit for it, is equality. Or flexibility, ffs, really.
@ceebark
Your traditional marriage is in the minority these days. Most married women don’t have the luxury of staying at home for ten years because their husbands don’t make enough money. I didn’t make enough to support my first wife staying at home in the lifestyle she was accustomed to (i.e. middle class homeowner, two cars, dog, etc.). Not in Seattle, anyway. Same with my teacher parents. If my mom didn’t work we would have had pretty lean times growing up — it would have been stretching it to call us middle class. That’s my reality. That’s the reality of most Americans.
I wonder sometimes why feminists are so obsessed with this upper middle class version of the patriarch with stay-at-home-mom when most men don’t live this way, and certainly not most non-custodial fathers. In fact, you’re probably in the demographic least likely to separate, whereas most young men who live separately from their children’s mothers are lucky to even have a job these days.
This is why there’s a disconnect between feminists and MRAs and what’s going on with most new parents. You’re fighting over what was happening over a generation in the past. Today’s parents live in an entirely different reality, yet the courts are still stuck in the time when people thought The Handmaid’s Tale was a plausible future scenario.
Are you guys actually having fun with this clown? A dude imperiously telling us what we think only amuses me for the first couple of minutes.
I doubt anyone would consider us upper middle class. (I wish!) We’re a former enlisted military family, we live in the sticks, and divorce is hardly a rarity in those circles.
And yes, in many American households with small children, women do work. However, they’re still usually the ones who are expected to take the “flexible” job: the one who begs off work when there is a sick kid, the one who finds a side job wherever her husband’s “real” jobs sends them, the one who does the doctor and dental appointments, the one who scales back to part-time when things get too complicated at home, etc.
When people are married, that’s all considered fair and “flexible.” You’re being a team player and a decent mother, etc.
But that system still doesn’t encourage full equality before a divorce or a breakup, and it strikes me as super disingenuous to invoke “equality” when you’re facing a split from someone who legitimately took a series of big, possibly unrecoverable hits for the sake of the family in the early stages. People are telling you that family courts look at that stuff and think it matters for the welfare of the kids. I think it also matters for the sake of fairness to the parents who are in the trenches with the longterm caregiving.
Seems to me that MRAs are bad about blindly enjoying the benefits of the “traditional” system when it’s working, and then crying foul about the consequences whenever the wind changes.
I mean, it would be like me expecting to start making the same kind of money and demanding the same kind of respect, as if I hadn’t disappeared from the workforce for the better part of ten years. Everyone would think that was totally absurd, and even kind of offensive.
There’s something wrong with bothering to argue with Bill Price because he simply isn’t talking about the real world. In the real world alimony has mostly ended–there is nothing but child support. And child support is assessed on the non custodial parent and is paid to the custodial parent. That is absolutely gender neutral and both women and men can end up paying child support for their children. In addition for families at the lower end of the SES scale (at least in MA) there is an absolutely set value to child support–only families where there are lots of assets and money at issue go to court at all. Men can and do ask for full custody, and where they don’t shared custody is the norm. In addition younger/poorer families don’t get married at all these days and so divorce is not even an issue–child support is the issue when the relationship breaks down.
Its true that younger families, because of declining earning power, are often not in a position to have one member stay home and do full time childcare but that has pretty much nothing to do with anything at this point because men still leave their families with young children if they want. You don’t have to have been the only person doing the childcare in order to get stuck with full custody of an infant if your husband abandons the family.
Family court is complicated and tragic but just sitting there and watching, which is what Bill Price claims is his form of research, is really not meaningful. You are only seeing a portion of cases, and only those where communication has broken down irretrievably.
I think its important to note that at the heart of BP’s “argument” such as it is is simply this notion that all modern women are feminists and therefore anything that he has ever seen a woman do is a kind of feminist act, for which feminism is responsible. That’s absurd. Feminism is a political philosophy and sometimes an activist stance to which some women and men subscribe. But not everything that any woman ever does is the result of this philosophy or is some kind of super sekrit plan for feminist world domination. Certainly not everythign that happens in family court.
Nah, I am tired of him, katz.
I am pretty sure I remember this guy lecturing me circa 2009 about how I needed to stop perpetrating the fraud that taking care of infants was even challenging enough to be worth discussing, lol Like, I don’t know, I got the impression he thought then that it was like having a cat, or something.
So hey, we’re up to understanding obvious things at this point!
Who knows, in another six years he may have worked his way up to basic decency.
Don’t laugh!
I must admit that I was completely boggled when I realized how… lousy parental leave support is for most of the U.S.
Here in Ontario… pregnancy leave is up to 17 weeks, assuming that the woman has been employed for at least 13 weeks prior to the expected due date of the baby. If the baby is born early, the expected due date is still used even if the actual date of birth is before that 13 week period expires. If the baby is born late and the 17 weeks has expired while the woman is still pregnant, pregnancy leave is extended.
Parental leave is up to 37 weeks, and is applicable to any new parent, applying to mothers, fathers, adoptive parents, and even technically applies to people ‘in a relationship of some permanence with a parent of the child and who plans on treating the child as his or her own’. This also explicitly includes same-sex couples. Parental leave is reduced to 35 weeks if the person in question is ALSO taking pregnancy leave.
So the birth mother of the baby can take a full year off work, while any other parent can take eight and a half months. And the employer is required to not punish the employee as a result. (Of course, we know how employers can work around that if they really want to, but there have been enough employment lawsuits that any company trying that had better have a well-documented other reason.)
http://www.labour.gov.on.ca/english/es/pubs/guide/pregnancy.php
Some of the stories I’ve heard from the U.S. are pretty horrific on this aspect of employment law. (Well, on a lot of aspects of employment law, really.)
Jenora, I’m in Ontario as well. I know couples who both took parental leave, and it was a huge help for them. Sorry it isn’t that way in the U.S. – it seems like the logical approach (except for the whole ‘zomg soshulizm’ thing that so many on the right seem to be obsessed with)
I am no longer following what you’re arguing here, Bill, and you haven’t made clear how feminism is the cause of bad family court stuff. I mean, I know women who’ve been screwed over in family court – is that also the fault of feminism? Or could there possible be other factors at play?
A system that tries to encourage “full equality” is going to be totalitarian, and it will fail in every goal but one: power over others. I seriously fear people who talk about “full equality,” because who knows how and where they’ll start cutting people to equal size and shape.
That said, I do support fairness. It isn’t fair that some women do the heavy lifting for the kids and then get kicked to the curb. I’ve heard those stories, and even met a few of those women, and it’s really pretty f*cked up. But I don’t think it’s any more common for a man to screw over his wife like that than for a woman to do so to her husband.
I could go over what went down in my divorce in detail, but I’ve already written about the worst of it (which was pretty bad — I was accused of felonies over and over again until I signed off on the final parenting plan, at which point the accusations magically stopped). Instead of rehashing the entire thing, let me just say that in the final six months of my marriage childcare became an issue, as did our suddenly poorer one-income reality. Because my then wife was very frustrated, I offered a solution: I’ll help with the kids while you ease into a job again. At this point my daughter was about one and my son two and a half. I happened to have a full-time job at the time, but I could do a lot of the work from home or on off hours if needed. So I helped out, and inch by inch I became the primary caregiver, eventually having to take a leave of absence while my ex was in the final stages of getting her permanent position. I wasn’t happy about it, but I figured things would stabilize when she got the job locked down (it took about four months of being “on call” before she became a permanent employee). I became the “flexible” parent.
So my ex gets her permanent position thanks to my willingness to pick up the slack for a few months, and the very next day she bails on me, leaving me marginally employed and fighting for custody (she took the kids to her mom, who went to war against me immediately). I did my best to fight for what I thought was fair, and I lost, because the courts assume that a man who isn’t the primary earner and paying all the bills – no matter what the reason – must be a loser and doesn’t deserve the kids anyway — you should have seen how contemptuously I was treated by court-appointed mediator and certifiable bigot Barry Rose. Or else they don’t care either way because it’s King County, and female empowerment is a socially progressive goal.
So I took my hits and then some more to remain close to the kids. It sucked, and in my frustration I started The Spearhead. It was therapeutic for a while. But now I realize that it isn’t a gender thing, but rather a systemic problem, and both “teams” are responsible for this. Their demands of “equality” are just a way to gain an advantage in this very counterproductive fight. Better to take the wind out of their sails. Remove the incentives to fight. People who married each other should never see the result of their separation and divorce as a victory or defeat. This is a profoundly cruel and sick way to arrange families.
Now, I want to stop that.
It seriously freaking sucks. If you say it sucks and could be made to suck less, people will say it’s a pie in the sky women’s issue and radical crazy feminists need to stop picking men’s pockets and re-engineering society to suit their whims. You breed ’em, you… deal with ’em. I guess. (otoh… damned women are too selfish to have kids anymore and are ruining society)
You really can’t please these people. lol
Price is too boring for me at this point. To have a serious discussion there needs to be some sort of common ground or common understanding. Right now it’s like talking to a martian who likes to offer big generalities on how earthlings behave, as if they didn’t realize there were earthlings in the room telling them how earthlings behave.
The funny thing is that a lot of middle class white people who used to be in a financial position to marry, buy a house and have kids all while maintaining a decent standard of life can no longer do that until thirties. It’s bbecause of Reaganomics. It’s because wages haven’t grown, Healthcare and housing cost more and there’s still no paid maternity leave. The demographic that would normally vote republican is not able to reproduce at a rate that will match the new citizens who are frequently not white that the Republicans have so much contempt for. Their demographic extinction is something they crafted themselves.
Righties are never self aware or able to evaluate cause and effect though. They’ll still blame sluts for not having lots and lots of babies.
Yeah, until Billy boy starts offering evidence for any of his claims, there’s no point in talking to him.
Price is so bloody boring I’ve literally fallen asleep twice so far while trying to work my way through his wall-shits. When was the last time we had a troll that was actually amusing, not just annoying and/or a guaranteed cure for insomnia?
Jenora — as a really late baby (like, over two weeks late), back in the 80s, I gotta say that there is no way a pregnancy can run 17 weeks past the due date. My mother was induced because I was running out of fluid around me, and that stuff is IMPORTANT. Anything much past two weeks late was cause for alarm thirty years ago, now it’s probably like, ultrasound daily or some shit. So yeah, the law is awesome, but that hypothetical is impossible.
WWTH — “they still blame white sluts for not having lots and lots of babies” = FTFY
Cuz everybody not white is having way too many and welfare moms and the republicans are just screwing themselves over on the racism front too.
M. — Pell, every time he shows up.
Bill really does have a terrible case of “if I say so, it must be true!”
Hey, how about paid parental leave?
But really, the above is a big part of the problem I was referring to. It isn’t just Reaganomics and republicans — it was Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and then I’m afraid next will be more of the same. This gender war thing is stuck back in the 80s, I swear.
I’ll bow out here since a number of commenters would prefer I do so. And anyway, I think I made my point, and I hope some people consider it.
Finally, as a closing statement I’d like to say sorry for being nasty to Dave, who, although I don’t think he always gets things right, seems like a pretty decent guy. He doesn’t deserve to be trashed.
But in all fairness he did piss me off a bunch of times, and I was easy to provoke at that point.
Take it easy, folks. I’ll be out there working on something else in the next go-round.
You’re years late to the party on that one, Bill. Remember that whole “gender roles” thing you scoffed at feminists for attacking? Paternity leave, and parental leave in general, is a natural extension from that, and feminists already support it.