Dear the Men’s Rights Movement,
I think there’s one issue you and I need to sort out before I go back to my general policy of pretending you don’t exist and/or sporfling when you call me a female supremacist.
Being cheated on and raising your wife’s boyfriend’s kid is not the male equivalent of rape.
Not getting child custody is not the male equivalent of rape.
A woman wearing a short skirt is not the male equivalent of rape.
Having to pay child support is not the male equivalent of rape.
Paying for dinner and not getting sex afterward is not the male equivalent of rape.
A woman saying “no” when she means “yes” is not the male equivalent of rape.
A man getting fired from his job is not the male equivalent of rape.
A false accusation of rape is not the male equivalent of rape.
A woman saying she’s on birth control and then getting pregnant is not the male equivalent of rape.
Getting divorced is not the male equivalent of rape.
The male equivalent of rape IS RAPE.
And every time you say it isn’t you put the lie to the idea that you care about men’s rights at all.
Sincerely,
Ozy
Thing of Things 
I think some people would define lying about birth control and having sex as rape, provided the birth control was a precondition to the sex.
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Some people might. Rape via false pretenses was a bit in vogue for feminism back in about 2004. It never gained much traction though and the law certainly doesn’t agree.
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It may not have gained much legal traction due to being impossible to implement, but rape via fraud seems like a perfectly legitimate concept to refer to in conversation. It’s definitely “bad consent”, especially as rape via fraud can become fraud via rape via fraud.
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…it isn’t anymore? Huh.
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Sniffnoy- it went out of fashion when non feminists pointed out that it implies a moral/legal obligation for trans people to disclose trans status before engaging in sexual contact that might not force that disclosure.
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It’s the basis of the rape charges against Julian Assange. I’d say that’s some pretty good traction.
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@Ginkgo: That statement is factually incorrect. The basis of the rape charge against Assange is an allegation that he engaged in sexual intercourse with one of the complainants while she was asleep. That she had made it a prerequisite (when she was still awake) of sexual intercourse that he should use a condom, and that he did not use a condom while raping her while she was asleep is stated to be an aggravating circumstance.
There is another charge laid against him, in connection with another incident, of “sexual molestation” (some sources say “sexual assault”; there seems to be some uncertainty as to the best English translation of the relevant Swedish legal term), on the basis that he had sexual intercourse without using a condom with another woman who had made condom use a prerequisite for sexual intercourse, and who was not aware that he was not, in fact, using a condom.
There are three points to highlight here:
1. The most serious charge, of rape, has nothing to do with false pretenses.
2. Even the charge that does superficially appear to have to do with false pretenses doesn’t really: The central issue is that the woman consented to a different physical act than the one that he performed.
3. Assange’s willfully inaccurate public statements about the substance of the charges against him really doesn’t support the idea that he’s innocent.
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Osberend- thanks for the backup. I was pretty sure that wasn’t the case, but I’m on mobile so it’s not easy for me to check.
Additionally- Assanges case is overseas, and is just about the least representative context I could imagine.
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Wait, I’m confused. Not that I’m in favor of classifying it as rape anyways (I’m not), but isn’t a trans person having sex without disclosure only rape according to that rule if not being trans was an explicit precondition to the sex?
Otherwise, you could say literally anything you didn’t know about a person makes them a rapist.
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@Iluminati Initiate
I’m sensing a parallel to Scott’s comment about SJWs trying to establish that bad things only matter if they constitute “oppression.” This whole line of discourse is predicated on a bizarre conclusion that things are either rape or they are okay. We should stop focusing so much on whether things are rape and focus on whether they are harmful.
In answer to your question, though, a lot of legal questions depend on a “reasonable person” standard, and while LGBT activists might wish it were otherwise, not wanting to have sex with trans people is something most of contemporary society would still consider the default position.
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Illuminati- In most contexts, I do not support the idea of rape via false pretenses. So this response is a clarification, not a defense.
Explicit preconditions aren’t relevant. In real life, they rarely exist at all. The issue is whether the victim would not have consented had they known the truth, and if the accused knew, or should have known, that this was a reasonable likelihood.
The fact that this leaves open the possibility of prosecuting all kinds of people on flimsy grounds is why the idea is dis favored.
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If it actually went out of fashion because people noticed that taking the idea seriously led to unintended bad consequences, then I’m kind of impressed! 😛
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Of course the male “equivalent” of rape is rape. Which happens to a very large number of men.
However I think I understand some of where the MRM is coming from. The MRM feels that society treats rape of women as a “special kind of evil.” And so they feel society is willing to sacrifice too much of the rights of individual men in the effort of stopping rapes against women. One could say they think society consider “stopping rape of women” a sacred value relative to many important men’s concerns. By saying “X is the male equivalent of rape” they try to put men’s concerns on the same level as “stopping rape of women.”
I am not saying the MRM is right about this. Though TV tropes does have a page for “rape is a special kind of evil.” And I am aware the standard feminist viewpoint “we live in a rape culture” leads one to conclude MRAs are just insane (and vice versa). This post should not be taken as an endorsement of the MRM. I am just trying to explain how I think a percentage of the MRM feels.
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I would certainly agree with the idea of rape as a special kind of evil being messed up on many levels. It doesn’t really have any positive outcomes since it leads to rape victims being dismissed as insufficiently traumatised and witch hunts at the same time.
It’s a real shame that feminists and MRAs can’t work together on the few legitimate grievances the MRM has, especially those where there is a degree of straightforward equivalency, e.g. reproductive rights and gender performance.
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MRAs and feminists are both helping to dismantle gender roles for men. Even if they are not working closely together (And would both would deny the other side is helping). Though I am not sure the MRM is helping remove gender roles for women, though the movement seems open to female leadership (Though some of this is an explicit strategy, the MRM feels it needs female leaders to be taken seriously).
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Quote: “Being cheated on and raising your wife’s boyfriend’s kid is not the male equivalent of rape.”
I think it kind of is – in the sense that a) it’s a usurpation of reproductive autonomy and b) is devastatingly emotionally destructive.
No, it’s not a perfect mapping, but how many surface features do you need in common for a metaphor to be reasonable?
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I think that (a) is sort of at the heart of this debate: Is rape most centrally a violation of reproductive autonomy or bodily autonomy?
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I would argue that both have been violated.
By being made legally responsible for someone else’s offspring, said male is now going to be paying for the next 18 years. The male has effectively been told that their reproductive choices do not matter, and that their bodily autonomy and future prosperity are subject to the restraints of providing for a continual reminder that their choices, in fact, never mattered.
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Surely it’s the latter.
A rapist who takes precautions to ensure he doesn’t impregnate his partner is not a rapist.
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@kalvarnsen:
a) Someone who is raped is a victim, not a partner, and
b) Pretty sure from context that you either meant “is still” or “isn’t not”
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How do you separate reproduction from the body?
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When events that are relevant to X’s reproduction occur outside X’s body.
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Neither. I would have guessed the key factor was “emotional autonomy”, to continue the pattern. Violation of bodily autonomy can’t be the only factor: we call that “battery”, and even though simple battery can often entail as much bodily harm as rape, only the most life-threatening cases feel like they’re as serious a crime. Violations of reproductive autonomy can’t be a critical factor: how ludicrous would it be to tell an infertile victim that they weren’t *really* raped?
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“When events that are relevant to X’s reproduction occur outside X’s body.”
That’s an arbitrary standard. Reproduction is reproduction and it can only occur when some of an organism’s body detaches form the parent body. Both the ovum and the sperm do this.
The confusion comes because of what happens afterwards in placentals – internal gestation. And that poses a problem only under an invented set of circumstances, in this case the Western conception of individuality and personhood. That’s a cultural construct and it should overrule basic human rights.
That western conception counts the fetus as part of the woman’s body even though it is genetically -distinct – the biological metric for individuality.
I agree with this conception generally, but I acknowledge it imposes problems in some instances
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Yes, I meant “still”. Whoops.
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Do half the men it happens to end up with PTSD?
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Could someone explain the aspects of (b) that are specific to raising an unrelated child (as opposed to be being betrayed by your partner)? For instance, is paternity fraud more emotionally destructive than cheating+stealing (say, spending money from a joint bank account on gifts for secret lovers)?
From my point of view, while being conned into adoption is, of course, bad, at least you get a kid who’s socially yours — they love you, look up to you, absorb your memes, perhaps help you out when you’re old and weak.
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I suspect that women and men are incapable of fully understanding each other’s emotional framework when it comes to rape and cuckoldry. The only thing more devastating to my manhood than being tricked into raising another man’s child would be castration. I’m reminded of the old, appalling suggestion to “lie back and enjoy it”.
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@ stillnotking
Eh, I wouldn’t say that about rape. But let’s talk about “cuckoldry”. Judging by your emphatic statement, your intuitions are perfect for exploring this issue. (Of course, everyone else’s opinions are welcome as well.)
1. Is the “other man” an important factor? Suppose that your wife turned out to be a bio-transhumanist who secretly used a set of synthesized genes instead of your genes. Is this less bad? What if she didn’t use her own genes either?
2. Are resources an important factor? Suppose that your wife earned enough money to support herself, you and two children, one of whom turned out to be unrelated to you. Is this less bad?
3. Are reproductive opportunities an important factor? Suppose that you were hoping to have five kids at most, but managed to successfully raise six with your wife’s help. Later, it turns out that one of them has a different biological father. Is this less bad?
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Nita, how would you react to a man trying to exploring the boundaries of what you consider rape. Does it matter if the guy uses a condom? What if he does it while you’re asleep so you don’t feel anything? etc.
If those questions make you angry, then that might give you some idea of exactly how you’re coming across right now.
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@ Alex Godofsky
With interest?
Yes. Rape with condom is less bad, although it’s still rape. Similarly, rape without physical injury is less bad, although it’s still rape. Another way to conceptualize it is like this:
“rape without a condom = rape + extra STD endangerment + extra pregnancy endangerment”,
“violent rape = rape + violence”.
Uh, I usually wake up in such circumstances. But even if I didn’t, using my body and exposing me to health risks without my consent is still wrong.
Funnily enough, in the creepiness thread Sniffnoy just explained to me how he’s frustrated by some feminists’ unwillingness to fully explore and clarify the issues and solutions they bring up.
I didn’t mean to trigger any negative emotions, or to sneak offensive ideas into my questions. Apparently, I failed? Sorry.
But I’m honestly trying to understand, and also open to suggestions of better (either more effective or less upsetting) methods.
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@Nita:
1. Yes, the “other man” is important. It would be painful to find out that my partner didn’t consider me a worthy father for her children, but at least I wouldn’t feel like a mere stand-in for someone whom she did.
2. Doubtful. It would be a small mercy if I didn’t have to pay child support for a kid who wasn’t mine (talk about twisting the knife), but the revelation would be just as horrific.
3. Yes, that would be less bad than an only child. I suppose I’d be more inclined to see it as a lapse in judgment, rather than as strong evidence that my partner never really loved or respected me.
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@Alex: The most unpleasant things to think about are often the most worthwhile. Besides, how can we ever understand each other without talking about it?
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@ stillnotking
Thank you.
Hmm, your explanations remind me of the cute phrase, “I want to have your babies” — meaning “what you just did is awesome”, “I admire you” or “you’re the best”.
The reverse message, “I want to have not-your babies” -> “you’re not good enough” had never really occurred to me, so thanks again. My intuitions about this issue have been amended.
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Personally, if I kept on presenting as male, I would have no problem actually *raising* a child that was “supposed” to be mine, but I would insist that my wife leave me, formally or not. Nothing’s wrong with the child, but everything would be wrong with my partner; I’d never be able to trust her again.
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(If we both agreed beforehand that it’s okay for her to have a child by a different partner, I’d have no problem with that either – as long as I did not feel coerced or coaxed into allowing it, and as long as I’d have some rights to the child. Sex and reproduction do not really matter to me emotionally, but trust and attention do.)
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Speaking as an adopted child, I really *do not get* this.
Which, I understand the violation of trust. The woman lied about something important. So yeah. But do the genes matter *that much*? Doesn’t that kinda imply that my family was less valid?
That would be pretty fucked up.
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@veronica d
Genes matter that much to some people. They obviously did not matter to the particular people composing your family.
The fact that genes matter to some people doesn’t make your family less valid; that would be like saying that the fact that I despise mint implies that the mint that other people are eating is less tasty.
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I wish to note my strong support for this sort of deep exploration of moral intuitions. Also, @stillnotking:
I suspect that women and men are incapable of fully understanding each other’s emotional framework when it comes to rape and cuckoldry.
Careful with that gender essentialism there.
I’m a cis[1] man, and my intuitions are probably closer to Nita’s here than they are to yours. In theory, I suppose that one could say that I’m male but have a “female” emotional framework or set of moral intuitions, but one would have to find a way to reconcile that with my very “male” stances on creepiness, drunk sex, honor, and a variety of other issues.
[1] Probably by-default.
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@veronica d: Adoption is completely different. I know I could love a child I adopted, as I’m sure your father loved you.
I’d like to think I could love a child who was a living reminder of the most fundamental betrayal I can imagine, whose existence made me an object of contempt and ridicule from most men who knew the truth, who had revealed me to be a chump and my happy monogamous relationship with a woman I loved to be a fraud. It would be wrong and petty to take any of that anguish out on the kid. But I can’t honestly say with certainty that I wouldn’t.
I have immense respect for those men who can.
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I’m a cis man, and this sounds bizarre to me – I know that there are people who feel this way, but I have no idea what it feels like from the inside. It’s understandable and justified to feel betrayed if your partner cheats on you, but beyond that, if you manage to reconcile and reestablish trust, who cares whose biological child it is? They’re your child in all the ways that matter – you take care of them, teach them, etc.
What if you had genetic defects that would be bad for your child to have? Would you be okay with your wife using a sperm donation from someone with better genes?
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“Could someone explain the aspects of (b) that are specific to raising an unrelated child (as opposed to be being betrayed by your partner)? For instance, is paternity fraud more emotionally destructive than cheating+stealing (say, spending money from a joint bank account on gifts for secret lovers)?”
It’s one of the deepest betrayals there is. It’s betrayal on the deepest biological level. It is enslavement.
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“Speaking as an adopted child, I really *do not get* this.”
Good point.
Think of it this way – did your parents both decide to adopt you? Were they both aware that this was an adoption and not their own biological reproduction?
It comes down to consent to what is a huge life investment. That investment is not only raising someone else’s child but often involves not having your own instead.
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To be clear, I don’t object to exploring edges. What I do object to are the use of scare quotes (“cuckoldry”) and the implications that someone is wrong to be bothered by this because “who cares whose biological child it is?”
I particularly object to these in a forum where the analogous speculations about various crimes against women would be… less well-received.
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Inclusive genetic fitness means that suddenly finding out that the entity that was supposed to be your genetic payload is, in fact, unrelated, makes monkey brains very, very upset. This is probably more common in male monkey brains due to the male sex facing an absurdly higher probability of this kind of problem than the female sex.
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@ Alex Godofsky
I put “cuckoldry” in quotes because I was borrowing stillnotking’s chosen term for paternity fraud. Since it can also mean adultery without offspring, I thought it was necessary to specify “the kind of cuckoldry stillnotking just mentioned”, rather than “cuckoldry in general”.
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I want to separate out the behavior of the woman from the value of the child. Which is to say, women who commit paternity fraud are (to my view) criminals. Which, I’m not sure if this is against the law, but it should be.
However, the claims from the MRA types on this issue seem morally repugnant to me. Let me introduce two scenarios.
Imagine I am *accidentally* raped. Let us imagine it is violent and traumatic.
Okay, so we can invent a scenario about how this could happen, perhaps in a BDSM context, where both I and the man are operating with good faith and with sensible safeguards, but still, something goes wrong and he “rapes” me. (For my purposes the specifics don’t matter. I don’t want to get lost in the weeds.)
Except probably this is not really “rape” as such, as there was no intention. In this scenario, I am specifically saying that I, once I know the details, do not believe the man is a criminal.
But still, I experienced the trauma, the terror, the sense of violation.
To me this makes psychological sense. I can understand how I or any person would feel terrified and violated and thus why *rape is deeply wrong*. It’s my body.
Say a man accidentally raised a child not his own. As with my not-really-rape scenario, there was no ill intent. Nor was their egregious incompetence. We can imagine a scenario where it falls under “shit happens.” (Like my rape scenario, I don’t want to get lost in the weeds regarding the specifics.)
If I understand the MRA position here, they claim that their horror over raising a kid not their own is similar to a person who has been raped.
Perhaps they indeed feel that way. Which, we need to respect people’s claims regarding their own thoughts and feelings. That said, fuck them. Goddamn heartless troglodytes. THE CHILD IS A HUMAN BEING AND THEY RAISED THE CHILD AND BONDED WITH THE CHILD AND OMG THEY ARE JUST GENES.
This issue does no credit to the MRAs.
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“they love you, look up to you, absord your memes”
Is an extremely cute phrase ❤ ❤ ❤ <3.
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I agree with you, Veronica.
On the one hand, that does seem to be an emotional reaction that some people have, and I could see being seriously upset just by being around a person who (innocently and unavoidably) reminds one of a personal violation.
On the other hand, I am pretty horrified when people take it out on the kid – e.g,, I’m not going to help you pay for college because I found out we’re not genetically related.
So it’s all kinds of messed up.
(On the orthagonal hand, I love adoption, and it’s a choice, which I hope can be even stronger than an accident of fate. When I adopted, the judge sat me and our daughter down and gave us a “you understand, this is for life” speech, and then we made that choice.)
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You cannot be conned into adoption. Making a decision to raise a child is different from your partner deciding that you’re not good enough for her – fit to bear her as an ass bears gold. Nobody wants to be the Lepidus of a relationship.
I have no strong feelings about my “genetic load” but paternity fraud repulses me in a way which other forms of adultery do not – a fling is just a fling. A potentially equivalent terror is the idea of a man having a secret second family or wife but I wouldn’t know.
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Right, and sex is just pleasurable friction and shooting mucus at each other so there’s not logical reason to treat rape as worse than assault.
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@veronica – While I, a cis male, don’t identify with the sense of horror expressed about cuckoldry, I think your comment really misses the mark.
If a women is raped and becomes pregnant and then decides to keep the child, it’s still perfectly OK for her to feel the rape was a horrible violation. Just because a child is conceived and born doesn’t somehow magically transform the rape into an OK thing.
In the case of paternity fraud, the “false” father did not even get to decide if they would become the parent of this child. I’m not saying this “makes it worse” or anything like that, but loving the child does not magically make the hurt if the betrayal any less.
In fact the analogous situation might be to find out that the child you thought was conceived via a sperm donation was actually the result of an in clinic rape by the fertility doctor, which is something that has actually occurred. Those women can love their children and be horrified and what happened all at the same time.
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veronica d: It is said: “The magic ingredient that turns something ugly into something beautiful is consent.”
But – I agree with your general sentiment. If it was me – my Best Self would not abandon my children. But it would take a lot of therapy and pretty serious redemption on my wife’s part to get to that place. Sorry, but the “just genes” argument doesn’t fly. I’m an adaptation executor.
Not to drive home the point, but: the term “paternal investment” is ill-chosen for a dry, economic tone that hides a great deal of emotional attachment and bonding, and the sacrificing of time and preferences (I’d rather sleep in but instead I’m going to get up and make pancakes because they’re aging fast and opportunities to eat pancakes on Sunday morning are slipping away), and all of that – *all of it* – can’t be based on a lie about who they are.
Not to mention the more pragmatic reasons of the truth of where their genes are from being important to their future in terms of heritable diseases &etc.
And here’s the important point, from an MRA perspective: the decision of how to respond to this injury belongs to *me*, not the state. If you think rape is a good reason to have an abortion (and I would agree that it’s up to the victim) then I don’t see how the moral calculus much different.
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“Right, and sex is just pleasurable friction and shooting mucus at each other so there’s not logical reason to treat rape as worse than assault.”
Is that seriousness or sarcasm? Because I actually pretty much agree with that statement interpreted literally*.
Reading the comments on this thread is really causing me to… not exactly “realize” because I already knew, I don’t know the right word or phrase… how strange my views on sex are, even somewhere like here. I see sex as not ethically qualitatively any different than playing a game together.
So: rape really is just a punch in the face, I have no desire to require “fidelity” in relationships (which means it is impossible to cheat on me), I see requirements for monogamy in others as just a little bit creepy* (though not inherently wrong), etc.
As for reproduction- I don’t want to have to take care of any children, but if I did their genetic relationship to me would be irrelevant. (If I did want children I would probably want to adopt anyways).
*Though I would say how bad an act of assault is depends mostly on how much it violates the victim’s preferences and the risk of suffering and death, not it’s placement in arbitrary categories.
**Imagine you play chess, and someone decides to play chess with you, and you get to know each other and eventually hang out together and occasionally play chess. Then they start getting upset whenever you play chess with another person, and demand you only ever play chess with them or they will stop being your friend and playing chess with you. That’s not an inherently wrong thing to desire, but it’s kind of “creepy”. This is kind of what relationships conditional on monogamy look like to me.
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@roe: and all of that – *all of it* – can’t be based on a lie about who they are.
But I think veronica’s point—and certainly mine—is that it’s not all based on a lie, or at least not exclusively on a lie.
Because by the time your (actually) biological kid is . . . let’s say five, to pick a perfectly arbitrary age, the proper answer to “Who is this child?” is not limited to “The product of my sperm’s fertilization of my wife’s egg,” although that’s certainly accurate enough (in the given scenario). It’s also “The kid who calls me dad, who I tuck in at night, whose preschool “art” I hung up on the fridge with a rather inordinate amount of pride, who I spent a sleepless night with at the emergency room when he got the flu two years ago, who is delighted on nights when mom is too busy to cook because it means we’re having pancakes for dinner because that’s all that I seem to be able to cook competently, et cetera ad infinitum.”
And all of that is itself a reason, arguably—I’d certainly argue it—a much stronger reason than mere biology, for continuing to regard this small human as your child, nurturing it, providing for it, etc. And all of that is still true if (to change the hypothetical a bit) it turns out that your wife cheated on you, and the kid is not, in fact, the product of your sperm’s activity, but of someone else’s.
Now I suppose you could argue that all of these things that actually happened, and all of these feelings that you actually had somehow “don’t count” because they were themselves based on lies, or based on other experiences that were based on lies, or based on other experiences that were based on other experience that were . . .
But that’s really weird, psychologically. To take a lower-stakes deception, and a lower-stakes bond:
Imagine you see a girl reading your favorite book. You get excited and strike up a conversation, and she, perceiving your attitude, claims to love it. One thing leads to another, and after you’ve been dating for several months, she admits that she was reading the book for class, and honestly, she thinks it’s rather dull.
Would you regard your relationship up to that point as meaningless, since it was initially founded on a lie? Or would you recognize that the vast majority of what has brought you two to where you are now, although a causal product of that initial dishonesty, actually has nothing to do with it in any meaningful sense?
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It’s serious, but didn’t need to be taken as such to make the point I wanted. Which is that humans have extreme, visceral, irrational, emotional responses to sexual things and that those emotional responses are justification for special treatment (i.e. how we approach rape) if and only if those emotional responses are justification for special treatment (i.e. how we approach false paternity).
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osberend – The problem is, you’re asking me to not be sad because my grandmother died – I mean, she lived for 90 years, which is more then most people get, and lived an awesome life, which not everybody gets to, and and and….
Well, you’re not asking that, exactly, what you’re trying to do is reason me out of having the feelings that I do. And that’s just not how it works.
I say again: Adaptation executor.
And I’ll add: sometimes, you just have to accept that people have different values. Fidelity is a value I highly prize (as does Mrs. roe) – just the way it is.
There’s a difference between rape and paternity fraud – one involves force, the other deceit. Both force and deceit are bad.
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I don’t fault men’s rights types for hating paternity fraud on account that the woman lied to them. Being lied to sucks. Dump the bitch.
But there seems to be more to it. The verbiage they use is always “raise another man”s child” —
There’s a subtext to this relating to models of manhood, domination, ownership, what it means to make your mark on the world.
It ain’t YOUR fucking kid. The child is a person who will grow and move beyond you. You’re spunk ain’t fucking magic and neither was that other guy’s.
In all this there is a sense of patriarchy, possessiveness, and *fear*.
And fuck that shit. The men’s rights movement is rotten to its core. Men like Paul Elam are fucking literally scum. Like, I would take a thousand Shanley Kane’s for one Paul Elam.
This says nothing good about Shanley Kane.
Such men are frightened, petty little monsters who hurt all they touch. They let their daughters get raped and do nothing.
Which seems to actually be true:
Oh. My. Fucking. God.
How I wish that poor girl’s mother had found a different man to raise her child, a man of decency and goodness, an admirable man.
#####
I make no claims to speak on behalf of men. But still, I can say this: men deserve better than the MRAs.
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I agree, but this is uncharitable – “your” doesn’t necessarily imply ownership. For example, someone can say “my parents” without meaning that they own their parents, “my route to work” without meaning that they own the sidewalks and highways of their daily commute, etc.
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Or, you know, evolution programmed their brains to react angrily to situations that harm their inclusive genetic fitness. But no, it can’t be a natural response to the evolutionary constraints of the ancestral environment, it has to be an insidious cultural phenomenon which can only be solved be men stoically enduring their pain with grace because it’s only genes. And expressing that pain makes them “heartless troglodytes”.
There’s a reason the MRM has a disproportionate number of misogynist assholes in it. It’s because misogynist assholes are disproportionately likely to take male suffering seriously rather than dismiss it out of hand. You might want to reexamine your contributions to that situation.
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@blacktrance — You’re right (of course) on the formal semantics. However, I think I am right about the actual meaning-system of the MRAs.
Of course, in *my* meaning system, “MRA” means “someone in the orbit of Paul Elam and those like him.” It does not mean “someone who cares about the particular problems faced by men in our culture.”
Which is maybe crappy for anyone who uses the label “MRA” but who has nothing to do with people like Elam. We’ll see how all of *that* plays out over time.
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Or anyone who gets labelled as an MRA for the crime of caring about the particular problems faced by men in our culture. [sarcasm]Thanks, tumblr![/sarcasm]
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veronica d – I admit: that looks bad. But…
Can you name a civil rights movement in history that the establishment and press didn’t hate in it’s beginning stages?
Can you name a civil rights movement that wasn’t somewhat driven by it’s extremists in the beginning?
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@roe — I dunno. I mean, I think I get your point. At one point the broad society thought the rioters at Stonewall were creepy faggot monsters. Now we admire them.
So you think someday we’ll feel that way about Elam?
I mean, maybe. But maybe not. Just cuz he calls his work “civil rights” does not make it so. Just adopting the language of social justice does not make a movement socially just.
Myself, I can imagine someone in fifty years writing “The History of the Gender Shifts” about the feminism, queer rights, gender politics, and so on. What will they say about Farrell, about Elam, about AVFM?
That’s their story to tell, based on their agendas. I suspect this: the current MRAs will be seen as an absolute disaster. Whatever improvements may come to pass, it will be *despite* the actions of such rotten men.
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I like how this discussion has gone. Just some general points.
I and the other guys here who have spoken up against this have no problem answering specific questions and clarifying anything you may want to do. But only if the motivation is “okay, if so many men feel so strongly about this, I will defer to them on this; but if you expect me to shift my views on something I wouldn’t otherwise morally condemn so strongly, I’d at least like to fully know why”. Not, “how do we sooolve the fact that so many men feel this way?” The latter will get immediately hostile reactions, as they almost did in this thread before the intentions of the questioners became clearer.
A lot of men feel very strongly and negatively about this. And it’s hardly taking anything away from you to accommodate it, to acknowledge and validate their feelings, so the decent thing to do would be do that, no? I can think of a handful of reasons why some people would want to effectively defend paternity fraud, even if they would never commit it themselves, and all of them are pretty morally condemning of the person in question.
@Nita,
Could someone explain the aspects of (b) that are specific to raising an unrelated child (as opposed to be being betrayed by your partner)? For instance, is paternity fraud more emotionally destructive than cheating+stealing (say, spending money from a joint bank account on gifts for secret lovers)?
Yes, very much so. It’s a matter of bodily, reproductive violation, and of altering the courses of entire people’s lives. It can’t be compared to money. And while I understand you are only asking because you are genuinely seeking to listen to answers in a good faith manner, this manner of breaking it down into components of lesser violations (cheating + stealing money) can get potentially offensive, and I must echo Alex Godofsky’s point that this approach could easily be applied to sexual violations of the type that women tend to complain about more. I suspect it would not be well received in the vast majority of places and by the vast majority of women, Nita aside.
1. Is the “other man” an important factor? Suppose that your wife turned out to be a bio-transhumanist who secretly used a set of synthesized genes instead of your genes. Is this less bad? What if she didn’t use her own genes either?
2. Are resources an important factor? Suppose that your wife earned enough money to support herself, you and two children, one of whom turned out to be unrelated to you. Is this less bad?
3. Are reproductive opportunities an important factor? Suppose that you were hoping to have five kids at most, but managed to successfully raise six with your wife’s help. Later, it turns out that one of them has a different biological father. Is this less bad?
1. Yes, the other man would be an important factor. And yes, whether she used her own genes in your hypothetical would matter. Secretly using a bio-synthesized baby without telling me while leading me to believe otherwise is still a gross violation that I may consider worthy of ending our relationship over, but it would be a minor yet significant mitigation if she didn’t choose to use her genetic material as well.
2. Yes, resources are an important factor. The more the man had to toil under the pretense of a lie, the worse it is.
3. Yes, reproductive opportunities are important. Lying about an only child would be worse than lying about one of several children, though the latter is still terrible.
Genetic legacy is important to a lot of people – most people, among those who choose to have children, I’d gather. Even those for whom it’s not important, however, the violation is almost the same. The problem is that you’re taking away someone else’s ability to make that choice, perhaps for the rest of their lives. Having a child changes your life in ways that few other things in life do.
Some people do not ever want to have children precisely because of these changes. When you have a child, one life ends and another begins. The same probably applies for having a second child. (From what I hear, it’s quite possible to still live like a young urbanite, if that’s what you want, while a parent of one child if you structure your life properly. Two, forget it.) This can be a beautiful thing – if it’s freely chosen. Much like sex. But you’re taking away someone’s life, essentially, if you’re making someone make this choice without all material information, i.e. without their consent.
This is probably why I’d consider paternity fraud when there are already two or three genetically related children to be less severe, though it’s still terrible. And why I’d also consider it less severe if it’s done to an absentee father. For the purpose of this argument, assume that he had a perfectly ethically valid reason for doing so and didn’t just run out on his kid. Even so, it’s less of a violation for the above reasons, because he wasn’t robbed of a life that he would have otherwise have chosen.
Hopefully, these thought exercises all help you better understand most men’s perspectives on this.
@veronica,
Speaking as an adopted child, I really *do not get* this.
Which, I understand the violation of trust. The woman lied about something important. So yeah. But do the genes matter *that much*? Doesn’t that kinda imply that my family was less valid?
That would be pretty fucked up.
Besides the fact that adoption and paternity fraud have as much in common as sex and rape…
I’ve heard SJW-inclined people who happen to be adopted make similar claims. Now, you’ve made your moral condemnation of paternity fraud both clear and believable, so I’m not including you among them, but the things you say are quite similar to the things commonly said by others who do deserve to be met with hostility.
Genetic relatedness matters a lot to people. Most prospective parents who are infertile often go through a lot of expensive options to make sure that their child is genetically related to them, from artificial implantation to using a known surrogate to hiring and paying a stranger to bear their child for them. Some don’t even consider adoption. My impression is that most do, but only as a last resort.
If the honor of adopted children were what was really at stake, this should all bother such people immensely. The former, while they may not make up the majority, still exists, and even the latter is implicitly valuing adopted children at the bottom of totem pole. (Supposedly, that is; I don’t actually buy this argument.) But as far as I can tell, this isn’t even on the moral radar of such people. And that’s obviously because the moral worth of adopted children is not anywhere close to their driving motivation; pushing one side of sexual politics/relationship football is.
It goes far beyond a violation of trust. That’s like saying stabbing someone with a knife is a violation of personal space. Everyone gets to make their choice of whether to have a family, and if they do, if and how much they’d prioritize genetic legacy. (Even those for whom it initially did not matter. Not giving someone $1000 – something we “do” to most people every second of every day – is not morally equivalent to helping someone earn that money and then later on stealing $1000 from them. To pick a lesser example.)
Which is to say, women who commit paternity fraud are (to my view) criminals. Which, I’m not sure if this is against the law, but it should be.
I appreciate the thought, but I suspect such a law would be impossible to prosecute due to the “proving mens rea” factor, without severely trampling on defendants’ rights. I think we’d be better off without such a law. I’d settle for simply not making it illegal for a father to test his children’s parentage without the mother’s consent, which it is in some places like France, I believe.
But there seems to be more to it. The verbiage they use is always “raise another man”s child” —
There’s a subtext to this relating to models of manhood, domination, ownership, what it means to make your mark on the world.
I strongly suspect that to the extent that such men use “possessive” language when talking about their children, it’s no more so than most typical parents everywhere do.
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I cannot imagine outlawing paternity tests. Even if the man decides to keep the child, it seems important to know exactly what extent they will inherit his family’s history of illness.
It is one thing for my mom to say, “Veronica is my daughter.” It is quite a different thing for a man to look at the girl he raised, say at age thirteen, and say, “You’re not really my kid.” Yes, those both use the same grammatical form. However, as I said to @blacktrance, I think the MRA version comes from a very broken meaning system.
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veronica d – I’ll put it this way: we now admire an arsonist (Pankhurst), an arsonist/bomber who headed a militant organization that killled civilians while he was leader (Mandela), a weirdo pervy near-pedo ex-racist (Ghandi), &etc. All Elam’s done is write some controversial stuff on the internet. AVFM, it should be noted, is strictly non-violent in their approach. I think our view of historical civil-rights suffers from “far-mode” biases and are much messier while they’re happening.
Not that I can make a prediction – depends on if the MRM catches on or fizzles completely.
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This post stinks to high heaven of someone looking for a reason, finding a stupid comment somewhere and using it as a meme to dismiss an entire movement.
Aside from that, the MRM is active in trying to correct the general dismissal of male rape as one of its basic principles.
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> The male equivalent of rape IS RAPE.
Not according to the media, the court system, college campuses, Hollywood movies and daytime TV, politicians, charities and the feminist movement.
All of these groups treat the rape of boys and men as LESS of an issue (or even less of a crime) than the rape of women and girls.
Female rapists often get away with a slap on the wrist, and when a feminist professor recently made excuses for female staff who were raping underage boys at a detention facility she did not lose her job, there were no protests or media outrage….. instead fellow feminists rallied around her and made thinly veiled threats against the few men’s rights advocates/ anti feminists who bothered to call her out for being a rape apologist.
Male rape victims get little to no media coverage, support, sympathy, legal backing etc. Our society just doesn’t want to know about the suffering of males. It simply does not serve women’s interests to acknowledge the potential for men/ boys to BE victims, and that is why patriarchal society has always insisted men and boys deal with their suffering on their own…. and feminism, as the modern continuance of patriarchy, carries on this gynocentric tradition. “Women and children first” has morphed into “He for She” (note the dropping of concern for children). And just as before men are expected to protect and serve women, and then go off and deal with their own suffering and trauma on their own…. or just repress it and become emotionally callous and detached.
One only has to look at all the feminist campaigns being launched each week to see that feminists view bossy woman being called ‘bossy’, or men not crushing their own balls on public transport, or other ‘micro aggressions’ as more important ‘issues’ than men and boys being raped, or assaulted in the streets, or abused by their wives.
Feminists have continued to promote the old patriarchal definition of the word ‘rape’ to mean the rape of females exclusively. There is ‘rape’ (the rape of females) and then there is ‘male rape’ (the rape of males). This is like defining ‘crime’ to mean crimes committed by blacks, and then adding the sub category ‘white crime’ to mean crimes committed by whites. Doing this means talking about ‘crime’ automatically implies black crime, unless otherwise specified. Would this be acceptable? I don’t think so! Yet that is how ‘rape’ is commonly used in society today.
The rape of females by males is universally condemned in society as one of the worst crimes there is…… yet the rape of males by males or females barely registers as an issue at all. And many people still believe men cannot even BE raped. If there is a ‘rape culture’ then it only applies to the rape of boys and men, and to female rapists.
If you truly believe the male rape = female rape then do you support raising more awareness of male rape in society, and a balancing of the law/ support services/ media coverage etc so that men and women are treated more equally? And have you actually DONE anything to promote such gender equality?
The Truth ABout Rape Culture
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Yes.
Not much. Any suggestions?
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“Not much. Any suggestions?”
I second this question. Agitation and advocacy is about all I can suggest, and what would that look like? Penalizing or dismissing or disciplining prosecutors who have a pattern of bias in who they charge with child rape and who they don’t?
I remember when the Mary K. Letourneau case broke. I was teaching in Tacoma, the same general region. I remember the caustic impotent rage of the female teachers at her crime, a breach of a trust they held sacred. They wanted blood. They would have burned her if they had gootne ahold of her.
This is not a woman problem, this is a man problem. The Women Are Wonderful effect is mostly a male prejudice.
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> Any suggestions?
Yes. Mostly the arduous (and thankless) task of challenging/ debating so called ‘rape culture’ (TM) in everyday exchanges at work, on the web etc. So when people say 1 in 4 women will be raped (or some such nonsense) call them out on it. Links like the one in my previous comment have some eye opening (and IMHO fascinating) stats.
I’m weary of falling to the whole ‘victim olympics’ debating (ie “Women have it worst” …”No men have it worst!”) and I think it’s often hard to challenge feminism’s ‘rape culture’ narrative without ending up mirroring their over simplified and polarised world view (only with the genders switched). That’s why I think a mood of deep fascination is the most healthy approach …..why, why WHY is society like this or that? IMHO this is more healthy than basing an argument or discussion on emotion or ‘righteousness’.
I think like most issues to do with men and women it’s a case of chipping away at the coal face of prejudice, ignorance and confusion with a spatula. Same as it always was throughout history.
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>Any suggestions
Discharge your responsibility to be a Good Person by giving 10% of your income to charity and don’t worry about fixing rape. Paying attention to rape when Against Malaria Foundation has a funding gap is a gross misallocation of resources.
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I don’t think that it’s just the disregard for men’s rights that leads people to dismiss the rape of men.
I think there is also a perception that the rape of men by women causes less psychological suffering for the victim than the rape of women by men. This perception is probably not true. But if it was true, you could make a utilitarian argument that stopping the rape of women by men deserves higher priority than the rape of men by women, since it causes a higher level of suffering per rape.
What about the rape of men by men? It seems to me that most people understand on some level that heterosexual men suffer severe trauma from being raped by other men. But I’ve also heard jokes about gay men wanting to go to prison so they can be raped. So I think the perception people have is actually, “Men do not suffer the same type of trauma when they are raped by a person of the gender they are attracted to as women do.” Again, this perception is obviously wrong.
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“I don’t think that it’s just the disregard for men’s rights that leads people to dismiss the rape of men. ”
It’s a disregard for men’s humanity, just one more manifestation of male disposability.
Why you suppose those perceptions persist in the broader culture? Because people see no reason to examine and then discard them.
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@Ginkgo
My argument is that it isn’t just disregard for the humanity of men (where “disregard for humanity of men” is defined as “believing that the desires and feelings of men are less important than the desires and feelings of women”). My argument is that there is a (false) belief that the rape of men by women (and the rape of gay men by men) causes men to suffer less than the rape of women by men.
Even if you had full regard for men’s humanity, and considered the suffering of men and women to be equally important; holding this belief would still lead you to take male rape less seriously, because you would believe that men do not suffer as much when they are raped. You would take rape of women more seriously because you would believe (wrongly) that it causes more suffering.
Obviously sexism and kyriarchy are what cause this belief to be commonly held. But the fact that so many people justify their disregard of male rape with such a belief is somewhat encouraging. It indicates that they know on some level that it is wrong to cause men to suffer, so they entertain a belief that men aren’t really suffering that much.
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Unpopular opinion puffin- a lot of male rape victims of female rape really DON’T suffer as much as we piously pretend.
Even more unpopular opinion puffin- the same is true of a lot of female rape victims.
I think all of the above applies fairly broadly, but is particularly acute for statutory rape. I knew someone once who I reasonably suspect engaged in some inappropriate behavior with a same sex adult. Not sex, but… Behavior. He was 16 at the time. You know what? Dude was elated. Probably learned a lot about himself. Could easily have been an extremely positive experience.
I feel like I should be able to believe that there should be a firewall between adult and teen sexuality without having to pretend that this guy was horribly despoiled and somehow lacked the capacity to tell. I was the same age- I understood how much agency a 16 year old has. Plenty enough for the circumstances.
Not to mention, kinda hard to square believing this guy was a victim with all the other 16 year olds I knew engaging in far more hardcore sexual activity with each other than anything this guy probably got up to.
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Statutory rape is a bullshit concept anyway, though, so it doesn’t make much sense to cite it in the context of the idea that rape victims suffer less than the cultural narrative has it – which may or may not be true. The mention of statutory rape is likely to drown that interesting question.
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I focused on it because it was discussed above by some of the same people as this comment thread branch.
I don’t think it’s a bullshit concept, by the way. I think it’s quite valuable. I just don’t think that this requires me to pretend that people are suffering when they plainly are engaged in consensual behavior (or else it wouldn’t just be statutory rape, that’s kinda the definition).
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> I think there is also a perception that the rape of men by women causes less psychological suffering for the victim than the rape of women by men.
I understand where you are coming from and think there is an element of truth, or at least logic, to this attitude. BUT having said that, we have to examine WHY this might be the case, or appear to be the case. Or why we FEEL that it makes sense that it should be the case.
And the reason is (as others have pointed out) that males are treated as more disposable than females, and this is drummed into them from childhood. Males are taught (mostly subconsciously) that their feelings simply don’t matter as much as the feelings of their female peers. And conversely females are taught their their feelings are super duper important and to always EXPRESS those feelings so that others around them can come to their aid.
I would agree that many experiences which might qualify ‘on paper’ as sexual assault or rape do not actually (need to) cause the victim any profound psychological harm…. at least no more so than some other misadventure like going getting drunk, falling over and smashing a tooth or breaking an ankle.
We all put ourselves into stupid situations, especially as teenagers, and if we get drunk and have what I would call ‘train wreck sex’ with some equally drunk (or perhaps not) guy or gal who saw an opportunity to take advantage of us then we could claim ‘rape’ …. or we could look in the mirror and say to ourselves “What an idiot I was….. and now I have learned my lesson!”
Males will have been conditioned to have this approach, and there is I think something to be said for it (depending on the context and the severity of the incident OBVIOUSLY). Whereas females will have been conditioned to automatically play the victim role and express all of those regrets NOT to a mirror (to herself) but to offload them onto everyone around her and have them deal with her regrets for her, by going after the other party.
In some circumstances I believe the ‘male way’ is actually more constructive, and the experience can be a real life-lesson learned…. but in other circumstances the poor guy is just going to end up repressing a bunch of trauma, becoming isolated and suffering as a result. And conversely the ‘female way’ can be more constructive in some circumstances, but can also potentially lead to the girl never addressing her own stupidity and irresponsibility, and basically never becoming a mature grown up responsible adult. This means she will likely repeat her mistakes and suffer all over again, and it potentially puts her – and every man she socialises with – in danger (and perhaps them even more than her).
Now obviously I’m talking more about what you might call ‘dysfunctional sex’ rather than clear cut drag-you-by-the-hair-to-a-dark-ally-way-and-rape-you kind of rape. But that kind of stranger rape is pretty rare (at least outside of prison it is).
I’d say at the moment there is a distinct lack of balance in how men and women are taught to deal with these situations. I think men are pushed too far in the direction of repressing everything and pretending it wasn’t such a big deal… and women are being overly encouraged to define drunken sex which they weren’t entirely sure about at the time (not least because they were plastered out of their minds) as full blown rape, just because they happen to regret it the next day once they have sobered up.
Somewhere in the middle of those two extremes is a balanced attitude. Each sex could benefit from emulating the other sex to a degree, with men repressing less and speaking up more like women do….. and women taking more personal responsibility for their actions without always making a fuss, and learning from their own stupidity like men do.
I believe the combination of ‘sex positive/ girl power’ Beyonce style feminism (the night before) coupled with ‘victim/ damsel’ feminism (the morning after) actually leads young women into rapey situations that they otherwise would not have gotten themselves (and the men involved) into.
But, hey, more rapes and more dysfunctional sex and dysfunctional relationships is great news for feminism! Ka-ching!
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“Unpopular opinion puffin- a lot of male rape victims of female rape really DON’T suffer as much as we piously pretend.
Even more unpopular opinion puffin- the same is true of a lot of female rape victims. ”
True, but if you have a standard of equality that is “one law for all”, then individual instances can’t be the standard you rite the laws to.
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@Patrick
I think your concerns about statutory rape may be valid. I think I remember what it was like to be a teenager, and if my memories are accurate I was definitely mentally capable of giving good consent. When people go on about how teenagers can’t make these decisions I wonder if they remember being a teenager at all.
Incidentally, I always get upset about people who claim that one segment of “the Vagina Monologues” is horrible for portraying statutory rape, even though the narrator was clearly unharmed by the experience.
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females are taught their their feelings are super duper important and to always EXPRESS those feelings so that others around them can come to their aid
I don’t recall being taught that. When/where/how does this teaching happen?
OK, what about all the other kinds of rape? For instance, what about “yay, I’ve found a person who’s too drunk to stand up or talk, or fight me off”?
Sure, maybe getting very drunk is not a good idea (although teenagers may not know their limits yet). But doing something you’ll later regret while drunk is very different from having something done to you while you’re physically unable to resist.
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Oops. The first paragraph was also a quote from curiosetta’s comment.
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“Even if you had full regard for men’s humanity, and considered the suffering of men and women to be equally important; holding this belief would still lead you to take male rape less seriously,”
That’s theoretically possible but the attested pattern is that trivializing the suffering of a group is one of several tactics in dehumanizing that group. There’s just a long history of this kind of thing, whether it’s black people in the US or working class people in Britain.
Holding that belief would lead you to take male rape less seriously …yes, but taking male rape less seriously would also lead you t hold that belief, because it helps justify that belief. So there’s a question as to which comes first.
So which comes first? You have a culture based on male hyperagency – ascribing agency to male whether a specific male in a specific situation actually has agency., as when a female teacher raped six male students and then claimed she was the real victim:
http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2015/02/maplewood_teacher_accused_of_sexual_assault_is_vic.html
you have a culture where the Women Are Wonderful effect is very strong and incentivizes people to excuse or dismiss female misconduct.
Do you think any of this might motivate people to find some way to trivialize F>M rape?
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“Being cheated on and raising your wife’s boyfriend’s kid is not the male equivalent of rape.”
No. It’s enslavement. It is appropriating someone else’s labor to raise your young.
This is the connection – as Toy Solider argues so eloquently as a rape survivor, a survivor of repeated rapes over a period of years by the same rapist – rape is a very deep form of enslavement, of appropriating another person’s body to your wants.
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Would this mean that if the hospital accidentally switches bassinets and gives a couple the wrong baby that they have accidentally enslaved both parents? Or does enslavement require mens rea? I’m not trying to mock or reductio ad absurdum your position, I’m just genuinely curious as to what your position is on accidentally switching babies at birth? It isn’t unheard of for it to happen, so it is probably something that’s important to develop an opinion on.
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I’d say enslavement requires mens rea.
You could also split it into tricking people into work, and a more severe form where you force someone to continue working after they’ve decided they don’t want to.
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“I’m just genuinely curious as to what your position is on accidentally switching babies at birth?”
My position is that is a horribly sad accident that at most is a matter of negligence.
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Here’s the thing: hospitals spend lots of money on measures to ensure against babies getting switched. Many victims of paternity fraud are forced by the state to pay child support.
“Empathy gap”
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The “child support / paternity fraud” thing is an inevitable and unsolvable issue. You can push the line back and forth, but you can’t make the problem go away without some really dire consequences.
The problem is that you don’t want divorcing men to financially abandon children they’ve accepted for the past eight years or whatever over paternity issues they knew about but never acted on. But you also don’t want to pin paternity obligations on whatever poor sucker a woman names on a birth certificate.
So you come up with some procedural mechanism by which paternity can be disputed. But no matter what line you use, some people will miss it.
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Why not? If they have custody (joint or sole), they’ll be directly responsible for the welfare of the child. If they have no custody, why should they be responsible at all? Am I some insane monster for thinking authority and responsibility have to go together?
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Yeah, pretty much.
If two people commit to raise children together, that deal isn’t just between the two of them- its a bargain with intended third party beneficiaries- their children.
If they then break the deal, they have to either voluntarily (preferred) or through state imposed fiat (if necessary) come up with a way to ensure that the children come out of it as unharmed as possible. The biggest issues are who makes decisions, and where the money will come from. If they choose, or if that requires, sole custody and child support, they can deal with it. At that point the responsibility isn’t to the other spouse, it’s to the children.
If your idea of how the world should work is that someone should be able to divorce their spouse, decline custody, and walk away- having abandoned their children both emotionally and financially- then there’s little for us to discuss. You’re beneath my moral threshold.
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If the state is given ultimate authority to intercede on the child’s behalf, then the state is responsible for looking after the child when it exercises said power; attempting to displace the responsibility after the fact is unjust. At the least, if it is morally necessary that the parent who retains custody after intervention have financial support, then the support should come from the state. But I have misgivings in leaving a child in the care of an individual so financially insecure that they can’t afford the child on their own.
Attaching financial incentives to child custody is one of the most abhorrent things I can imagine. It creates a motive completely orthogonal to the welfare of the child, and is thus the cause of some rather perverse outcomes. Even having the state, rather than the former partner, provide this incentive is a problem. Direct assistance in raising the child (daycare, school meal programs, etc…) is probably a better solution in terms of ensuring the welfare of the child.
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Your position is ridiculous. It is the old “if the state can make me now my lawn they must own my yard” argument, except with stakes that make it a moral failing instead of whimsical curmudgeonry.
In fact, it’s worse than that. Your position is like noticing that “ultimate authority” (your probably incoherent concept, not mine) for resolving breach of contract disputes tests with a court- and then deciding that this means the state needs to satisfy all your breached contracts.
Custody and support arrangements are a simple application of the ethics of joint and several obligation. Both parties owe the child full care, and full financial support. They owe it because they explicitly, or implicitly, accepted that responsibility. In the course of a marriage, this is handled organically. If the parties reach agreement on custody, it is handled by consent. But if they can do neither, the responsibilities to care for and support the child will be apportions however seems most effective.
And there’s no room to complain, because no one is being asked to do more than they promised.
And your argument about attaching financial incentives to child custody is just bizarre. Kids cost money! Not sure how you’re planning to get out of that. Letting people duck child support by surrendering custody certainly won’t do it. That’s the opposite of solving that problem. And if your position is some kind of utopian rewrite of society to detach “caring for kids” from “paying for kids,” good luck, give us a call when you’ve made progress and we’ll talk.
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Concern for the child is presumably why most medical workers will not reveal paternity fraud when they become aware of it — usually not even if it’s relevant to informed consent for the father.
I can’t say they’re wrong, either. Not only is the child’s welfare at stake, but paternity fraud is one of the few offenses where the victim really is better off not knowing, at least not if he has emotionally bonded to the child.
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Sooner or later the child or the parent will be asked, “Do you have a family history of X?” Which, if the child is not genetically related to the father, it would help if everyone knows.
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Stillnotking- I always presumed it was from a desire to remain neutral and not become embroiled in personal matters. That can be awfully important for a hospital. It’s not the only goal or value, but it’s up there.
I do think it contributes to the problems I discussed in my initial entrance to this sub thread, though. There is no good means of investigating paternity suspicion without risking a lot more harm than many people might wish to accept. It creates a catch 22. One that I think may not be solvable.
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What are you views on adoption?
Are you denying that some unfit parents will seek child custody not out of concern for the child, but out of desire to obtain financial compensation which they will not use for the welfare of the child?
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1. Please explain the relevance of your question. Adoption is a broad subject and I do not intend to blather on about it until I address whatever you hope to discuss.
2. Not a relevant defense for the idea that parents should be allowed to voluntarily terminate their support obligations against the interests of their child. Parents who do what you describe exist and are a problem. Parents who do what you ADVOCATE are exactly the same kind of problem, except measurably worse. Someone sincerely worried about the former would not advocate the latter.
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1) As far as I can tell, adoption is the ability for parents to “voluntarily terminate their support obligations against the interests of their child”, and is generally accepted in society. Though your views may differ from society’s, so I was trying to avoid making assumptions about your position.
2) If allowing parents to voluntarily terminate their support obligations improves the welfare of the child on average, that’s a pretty strong case for allowing it, no? The government is more than capable of being a stand-in for financial support. Any parent heartless enough to abandon a child in such a manner isn’t going to do the child any good (the opposite really) by being coerced into maintaining custody on threat of financial sanctions. I don’t think punishing bad parents is more important than looking after the children. It’s possible that the financial sanctions do more good for the children than harm, but you haven’t demonstrated that convincingly (and that’s not the behavior they incentivize, so you have an uphill battle, as far as I can tell).
Furthermore, child custody is not awarded fairly in the current court system, so child support comes across more as extortion than noble child protection. The entire concept is a hold-over from the sexist era where women weren’t financially independent, and thus incapable of providing for children on their own. In the modern era, it feels like using children as emotional pawns in an attempt to defend a sexist institution.
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In what way is adoption against the interest of the child? It involves arranging, beforehand, for someone else to accept the support obligation.
You can do that in divorce, too.
Unfortunately, the magical governmental child support fairy the ethics of your point of view relies upon doesn’t exist, so you have to arrange for custody and/or support to vest in an actually existing person capable and willing to accept it- typically your spouse. If you can’t reach agreement, the government steps in and applies a formula. Is the formula ideal in a philosophical vacuum? Of course not. That’s why it’s a backstop behind the preferred option- a negotiated arrangement between two adults who are concerned with their child’s interests.
As for people being coerced into maintaining custody by threat of financial sanction- you’re drifting further and further from your original point, which was non custodial parents paying child support. And you’re using a “con-only” mode of analysis- yeah, if a man or woman accepts custody only because they know they’d get in trouble if they abandon their kid, that’s probably not a healthy parent/child relationship. What was the alternative again? Soviet style creches that don’t exist?
If you want to debate ethics in a fantasy universe, that can be a fun thing to do. Useful at times, even. But I’m not interested. The position you took earlier in this thread was that obligating child support in the absence of custody was wrongful- a position I presumed you meant to have actual, real world implications. I responded by detailing some of those real world implications, and how the moral values underlying child support stem from straight forward application of widely accepted moral principles. You’ve ignored this in favor of debating counter factual science fictional worlds, and I strongly suspect that it is a position you have retreated to because your original position, which mentioned no such thing, is indefensible. I’m out.
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Because children cost money.
Like the spouse who retains custody after divorce.
Government intervention could end with the child being put up for adoption. That uses existing infrastructure and is ethically acceptable, yes?
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This post seems like a studied effort to not notice that some people will use the phrase “is the equivalent of” to mean “is just as harmful as,” with some tinman examples thrown in to confuse the matter.
I think the cuckoldry argument is getting to much focus here, so I’m instead going to focus on the converse and assert that “not getting child custody” (in cases where the mother is going to move far away and you will actually lose access to your children) is, in fact, worse than rape.
Very curious to see if any of the commenters criticizing the cuckold-anger on “think of the children” grounds will have the chutzpah to turn around and argue that losing a child you very much cared about and were invested in raising isn’t extremely traumatic.
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“Paternity fraud” please – cuckolding is too loaded a term I think.
You bring up an important point – but my surface understanding of divorce law is that custodial parents have to petition the court for permission to move out-of-state (or province).
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In what sense is it too loaded? It’s an extremely negative term for an extremely unethical act (in civilised society). Could you be more specific about your objection?
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Sure – it’s linguistic origin is as a term of *mockery* and as an *insult*.
It’s currently associated with a fetish which is based in humiliation. (I find it very squicky as a fetish but I don’t object as long as consensual yada yada)
I prefer “fraud” because it’s linguistically accurate – it’s a lie. I don’t think it’s right to mock, insult, or humiliate victims of a lie.
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I think its pretty hard to rank tragedies. But “losing custody” is pretty horrific. Its seems comparable to man cases of rape. Especially if the relationship with the non-custodial parent is rocky (not exactly a rare case).
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I hesitate to leave this question here, on a post that is sure to draw some MRAs which seems to lead to a certain amount of dysfunctional conversation, but it seems very applicable to this post.
I think some of the feminist “catch phrases” around rape tend to lead to some of the conflation mentioned here, one of which is “rape is rape”. Now, I understand that phrase has a specific intended application, as a retort to those who might claim that, for example, date rape isn’t “real rape”.
But, the unintended side effect is to seem to be saying that their are no nuances, no gradations, no need to look at circumstances at all, every rape is just as bad as every other rape, therefore diddling someone who has drunker than you thought and was consenting and into it and has now fallen asleep … well, that’s rape, and rape is rape, so that should be a 20 year prison sentence.
Again, the important phrase in that paragraph is “seems to be saying”. I don’t think there are many, if any, feminists who are actually advocating that. But it does seem to be something of a motte and bailey type argument, where there can’t be any assessment of how bad some particular behavior is, you just have to combat all rape with maximal effort and then there is a retreat to the motte of “of course diddling someone at a party and stopping once you realize they passed out isn’t rape, it’s just sort of rapey.”
And then MRAs and others start making similarly grandiose counter-claims.
Not exactly sure how coherent this thought is, actually…
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