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/r/deadbedrooms would like a word. It's interesting you brought up closing on a home, and said marriage makes it so that neither party can get what they want without coughing up what they were offering it. It just doesn't hold up under scrutiny though. Virtually the only way to make the arrangement fair like you claim it is would be, is to make it so that you can have as much sex with your wife as you want, consent be damned, legally. But I doubt anyone has the heart to go through with that. So you are left with one side that can defect at will, and the other losing most of their assets and income.
That was part of the religious rules, yes. Before the modern concept of martial "rape", a man was entitled to take his marital rights from his wife. Consent didn't enter into it; she gave consent when she agreed to marry him, and such was irrevocable.
This is an absolutely essential part of the marriage bargain. Sex is the payment that a man receives for supporting and protecting his wife. Saying that a wife has the right to, at any time, stop providing that payment because she does not feel like it, is ridiculous. Doubly so because the typical man disgusts the typical woman, which means any society where the majority of men get married is a society where the wives are laying back and thinking of England, and will stop performing this unpleasant chore at the first opportunity.
To help conceptualize the absurdity, imagine a pro-worker's rights party in government passing a law that an employee is at any time entitled to stop doing useful tasks for a company, but that the company is legally obligated to continue paying that employee his full salary. Oh, and at any time the employee can decide to quit and receive half of the company's assets. What happens to the employment market in such an scenario? Solve for the equilibrium.
Societies which abide by the zeroth commandment cannot survive. Either we get our heads out of our asses about this, or, more likely, we get replaced by a culture that still understands how marriage works, like Muslims (or, more likely still, AI makes all of this irrelevant, but I have never liked "run for the singularity" as an exit strategy).
Every time you DreadJimmers bring this up, I wonder what your model of a marital relationship is like. It's obviously not one where you and your wife actually love one another. So if your wife is not in the mood, or she's injured or sick, or you've just had a raging fight, or you're drunk and stinking and gross her out, you believe in the Good Old Days she'd just have to spread 'em anyway, no recourse, and if she resists, you could beat her until she stops resisting, and that is the past you want to return to?
It does seem to me like there is a whole lot of room between "not when she is injured, or right after a fight, or when you need a bath" and /r/deadbeadrooms. Your examples all seem to assume a pretty high, or at least medium, baseline of sex and then declare that there should be a non-zero number of limits on when a man can assume his marital rights, but what is being discussed is a level which is low to non-existent so your comment seems non-responsive tbh. Real "all debates are bravery debates" energy IMO, where you are saying there must be SOME limits on how often the husband can expect a yes and erwgv3g34 saying there must be SOME limits on how often she can refuse.
There may be room between those positions but there's no stable position between them. The center cannot hold, and has not, and we have reached the stable equilibrium of "she may withhold sex for any reason at any time and his only permissible recourse is a divorce in which he loses most of his assets and future income".
Do you actually know anything about the circumstances under which a man can "lose most of his assets and future income" in a divorce? It is not common. In fact alimony is pretty rare nowadays (and almost never close to "most" of his assets and future income), child support is to support the children, and the number of men paying "unreasonable" child support (however you define that) is exceeded by the number of men not actually paying their child support. The worse case scenario you will usually see is an equal distribution state where a spouse can claim 50% of marital assets, even those he or she didn't bring into the marriage. (This can and sometimes is the man who benefits, though usually it's the woman.) And not all states do a 50/50 split like that.
You guys seriously need to update your notions of how divorce works from the 1960s, or the 19th century.
I've had this argument about a hundred times, so I'm going to experiment with a new track:
What about "child support", as currently practiced in the liberal west and particularly the United States, evidences that it is about supporting children—without referencing its name in any way, shape, or form? If I gave you a sheet describing the terms, functions, and conditions of C.S. with the name at the top blacked out, what elements would lead you to suspect ah ha, the primary function of this policy is to support children! What elements would you point to in order to refute the competing hypothesis that the primary function of the policy is actually mother support?
This is an open challenge. Anyone reading should feel free to answer.
A child support order is going to say, throughout, "for the support of the child" and among other things will typically specify that support will end when the child turns 18, etc. If we have to black out every mention of "child" then I suppose it might be hard to figure out what the purpose of the order is.
The fact that the support ends when the child reaches age of majority, and that the calculation of support is based on the child's needs, not the mother's. ("Mother support" is called alimony, and as I mentioned already, it's awarded rarely nowadays, usually only in a marriage of long standing where one spouse has substantially depended on the other and has no ready means of earning income once separated.)
I am guessing your grievance is that the mother (or, more rarely, father) is given $X per month in child support and nothing really prevents her or him from spending it on heroin or lotto tickets. True except inasmuch as failure to care for the child would be subject to court oversight and in extreme cases loss of custody, but if Mom puts all the child support in the same pot of money as her other sources of income (let's assume she has a job, which most often she does) - how would you prefer to make sure she does not personally benefit from the child support? Suppose you think she's spending too much money on clothes for herself. But she can always say "The child support money is what paid for the food Child ate and the Child's clothes, I bought my clothes with the other money." You could argue that without the child support she wouldn't have been able to afford to buy clothes for herself. While true, the point of child support is that children add expenses. If she weren't taking care of the child she could afford to buy clothes for herself.
I have also had this argument about a hundred times. It always boils down to a desire to be punitive and/or bail on financial obligations, almost always rooted in a sense of bitterness and injustice, not actual concern for the welfare of any children in question.
I said that referring to it by name is against the rules.
I didn't say that, I just said you can't say "the purpose of the law is support the child because the law says so, it's in the name, stupid". You do this multiple times so I'm only addressing it once.
This is also compatible with the mother support theory.
Do the needs of children scale with the father's income? They eat more food? Wear more clothes?
I'm less concerned about this part than other elements, but to the extent that it matters, it is a solved problem. You make it an EBT card with similar controls. Courts can pull the records on a moment's notice. There's way less deniability because the funds aren't co-mingled. This isn't rocket science. Wouldn't be surprised if some places already do this.
If this were the modal impact of the policy, that would be a great point in favor of calling it mother support.
I will cop to feeling that there's a great amount of injustice across nearly all policy that touches men and women as such, and that I harbor a considerable measure of bitterness about it. No point in denying it. I guess that means my beliefs about the world are wrong because they come from a bad place, huh. Where do your beliefs about child support come from? Only love and honey, I'll bet. That means they're better than mine.
How do we know that child support policy as it exists today isn't "punitive"? Sounds like a motivation that could be attached to the fact it scales with income.
I have financial obligations to women all across the country and their children. No bailing on that one, unfortunately. I'd probably feel less bad about child support if it meant I never had to pay strange woman to raise another man's kid. Hell, raise it 10x if that's what it takes. Throw men who can't pay into lithium mines.
Who cares? Nobody has any concern for the welfare of children when it collides with the needs/wants/whims of women. If a woman's right to drink smoke and snort as much as she wants while pregnant is inviolable, I don't see how a man's right to stay home and play video games shouldn't also be etched in sapphire. There's a thousand different policies we could pursue that would have manifest benefits to children to the inconvenience of women, and we implement exactly zero of them.
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