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Oh for hell's sake. McKenzie Bezos helped Jeff when he was establishing Amazon and she was in the steady job earning the money while he chased his dream. Then the marriage ended because HE, not she, fell for the next door slapper* and blew up his marriage (apparently they are finally getting married because she just threw a huge hen party recently).
I think in that case she's entitled to every penny of the divorce settlement. I'm not familiar with Melinda Gates' case but again that seems to be Bill not being able to keep it in his pants. The men in these examples are the cheating liars, not the women. Pick a different scare story than "oh no, if you wreck your marriage to the woman who raised your kids and was there in the early years before you became rich and famous because you chased a blow-up Barbie doll, you might even have to pay a fair share of alimony! clearly women are all only gold diggers!".
*This is what she considered appropriate to wear to a presidential inauguration. But go ahead, tell me how poor Jeff was taken advantage of by his rapacious wife.
I don’t see why a woman should have any right to a man’s earnings after termination of the marriage. Being a good companion and a good parent is easy. Making money is hard. If one parent stayed at home while the other worked, if there’s a divorce, the idle parent should owe compensation for the time they twiddled their thumbs and watched teletubbies on the other’s dime: they’ve had their fun, it’s their turn to work now.
I smell a stuffy prudishness in your condemnation these men: are you familiar with the modern concept of no-fault divorce? No one gives a shit who fucked who, and even less how the paramour dressed.
In the case of McKenzie Bezos, she was functionally his business partner at the founding of Amazon and it simply hadn't been structured that way because they were married. This seems like a reasonable thing for the courts to decide in the event of divorce.
More to your point, being a good wife and mother is not, actually, easy. It isn't a super g-loaded task but housewives should be recognized for their valuable role and marital property in the event of a divorce seems fair. Neither Gates nor Bezos are poor after their divorces(which, again, were easily avoidable by those men).
She put a few stamps on early orders, that must entitle her to half the future earnings of the man who created and worked all his life as CEO of that company. I think not.
We live in a time where every wife feels like an “equal-value partner” in their husband’s business, and the laws we made agree with them. But they are not.
I understand it's always the man's fault and he always has to pay. If he cheats, well he got what he deserved. If she cheats, he failed to nurture a woman's love, he didn't treat her right, and you wouldn't want to slut shame a woman anyway, and besides, she 'contributed' to the marriage, so here's the bill again.
At every level of society, at every age, women get more than they put in. Starting at university, where they have been 56/44 for decades despite working far less, through marriage, divorce, and pensions, where they live longer after having contributed less. And the more we hand over to them, the more oppressed they feel.
It is not ‘always the man’s fault’ to believe that, in these two specific cases, it’s the fault of the man. Indeed, the rule of thumb most people would use to blame Jeff and Bill is that adultery is a major fault committed by the party who engages in it.
Life isn’t entirely fair, but ‘Jeff Bezos having to pay out to his early business partner because he couldn’t keep his pants on’ is not a great example. We live in a world where early google employees got it made even if they were cooks, ‘successful startups give huge payouts to early employees, even if they’re not worth it’ is just how our society works, and this is a delayed example because marriage necessarily changes property arrangements.
Your preferred religious morality rules are not applied fairly. Are you in a position to punish women financially for adultery like you think cheating men deserve? No. Because the system officially runs on very different principles (egalitarian & sexually permissive) that aren’t applied fairly either.
Partly because guys like you refuse to apply the same censure to women as you do to men, women get to pick which sort of marriage they’re in at any given time for maximal advantage.
Yes. Obviously it's much rarer because house husbands are still very uncommon, but tens of thousands of men receive alimony. A relatively small fraction of the total, but again that's because there is less reason to award alimony in the case a husband who continues to work throughout a marriage, especially when, as is true in most cases, they out-earn their wife.
You're a progressive, Harold. Why would you want to punish people for adultery?
I think alimony is a completely outdated concept. There is no reason to award it ever. The solution to the problem of the law encouraging women to mooch off men (and alimony is only a small part of that) is not to make it easier for men to mooch off women.
It's not about punishing people, it's about an implied obligation. If (for instance) a woman interrupts or gives up a career while married, whatever you think about who has is 'hardest', that is very obviously done on the understanding that this loss in current and future earnings is fine because the man will continue to earn. If he then pulls the rug out from under her because he's had a mid-life crisis and wants to run off with the secretary, he should have to make good his obligations. If you don't like those obligations, don't get married. If we could bring up the money for alimony from the ether, that would be great because I don't care about 'punishing' the adulterer, but obviously we can't.
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