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Where are the Conservative Critiques of Family Court?
Conservatives, especially religious conservatives go on and on about the collapse of the family, declining sexual morality, and the increasing millennial failure to form families or have kids...
And yet I cannot think of a single major right wing thinker who's talked about one of the top 3 things causing all of this and which, unlike the pill, is a pure matter of public policy and government officials preying on the populace: Family court.
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Just as abortion was sacralized in post-60s as fundamental inalienable right, that women should not be forced to carry to term or have a child and deal with the financial and social burden it represented... and just as religious conservatives the country over started begging and pleading with women to not abort, but instead to have the child, and then give it up for adoption, that "obviously" they should not be burdened personally and financially with raising a child for 18 years over 1 night's sexual concourse... just please don't kill.
A new set of institutions were put in place to recreate every social, financial, personal, and hypothetical legal burden that even the most fever dreamed feminist never imagined a patriarchy might impose over one night's coupling. But for men.
Just as it became sacrosanct that every woman should be able to have sex and escape any possible financial or personal burden, even if she doesn't use protection, nor takes the morning after pill, nor avails her self of first trimester abortion, nor second, nor third, nor gives it up for adoption in the first, second, third or forth year, but in the fifth year, or even the fifthteenth! surrender the child to the state or for adoption with no ongoing legal, social, or financial penalty...
It became equally understood that the very second of coitus (or even without it if the sperm is stollen). That absolutely an child conceived will result in the man's complete legal and financial ruin. That the legal system gains full power over every asset, skill, or income source, he has ever or might ever have, and that if he tries to evade legal """Responsibility""" (as if this something that would ever consider being applied to a citizen of one of the other 82 genders) his wages will be garnished, his assets forcibly confiscated, he may be imprisoned, and in many jurisdictions his passport might even be confiscated.
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And yet Conservatives who claim to be critics of the state and claim to be critics of state intervention in family life... seemingly have nothing to say about marriage and the family being converted from an inviolable religious and moral compact, to a state contract whereby the entire thing can be disolved, and indeed is financially incentivized to be dissolved... except for the part where every asset and dime you might ever make is now at the sole discretion of the state for how it would like to redirect them.
They have nothing to say about a religious partnership essential being converted into a slavery contract. Nor that instead of doing the reasonable "Egalitarian" thing like setting a standard child support amount that all non-custody parents should be expected to pay as a universal obligation (all children being equal) family court judges are instead allowed incredible discretion to assign amounts based on the income or percieved competence of the non-custody spouse... because obviously bieng productive is the worst possible crime in our society.
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This is the great trend of conservative criticism. Point at the decay, (failing families, schools, communities, ethics) but cower from even raising the possibility that the laws and policies which caused the decay might be reversed.
Every conservative laments the decline of the family... none will suggest ending no-fault divorce or reversing the presumption of custody, such that a parent who cannot afford to raise a child on their own is presumed to be the parent less qualified to receive custody, thus removing the incentive for an unproductive deadbeat wife to divorce as a means to take her husband's assets.
Every conservative laments that social institutions used to work better, and that social values are decaying... none will broach returning to the policies and matterial realities that produced those quality institutions.
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Edit/ Addendum: (realized I didn't include this las night)
My solution is the same one that has worked throughout all of history in every institution that's been functional:
The person with the power is the person with the responsibility.
If women are to be empowered to abort whenever they like, surrender to adoption or the state whenever they like, and generally have full control... THEN THEY SOULD BARE FULL, TOTAL, AND FINAL FINANCIAL RESPONCIBILITY.
Family court should not exist.
The names on the bank accounts keep the accounts. Same with the houses and assets. And any joint assets accounts are divided in even... you don't even need a court all these things would happen naturally and the banks, etc. would oversee the pre-arranged division.
80% of divorces are started by women... this would end that very quickly and defacto limit divorce once again to real documentable instances of abuse. Since there would no longer be a financial incentive.
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Out of wedlock births should never result in a court case unless there is a criminal charge of sexual assault.
It should simply be the woman's full and final responsibility.
These are the conditions that produced the sexual norms conservatives were so fond of In the 19th century and before, if a man got a woman pregnant out of wedlock, that was a her problem. Full stop.
Even if a community thought they could try to force the responsibility on him, he could just disappear a few towns over.
This is what created the intense emphasis on chastity, and the sense of ruin that accompanied fallen women.
THESE ARE OUR TRADITIONAL SEXUAL VALUES AND INSTITUTIONS.
And not a single conservative will just full mouthed endorse a return to how things worked in 1890, instead they gesture at some version of a welfare state that never existed and lament sexual morality is collapsing whilst they use the violence of the state to prop up that immorality
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If the founding father's had been threatened with a coterie of lawyers threatening to drive a wedge between them and their wives, then claiming for themselves the power to divvy up every child, animal and asset whilst claiming for themselves a share (often the lion's share)... The founding father's would have slaughtered them to the last.
This is the part that leaves me flabbergasted. I've seen close friends have their lives left in utter shambles after being cheated on and left by a wife who decided that he was nothing more than a piggybank. Men who were allowed only a pittance of time with their children, despite having no criminal record/history of abuse/etc. That the modern, overpowered family court allows women to destroy the lives of decent men for absolutely no reason is a stain on our society, and will undoubtedly have more severe ramifications as future generations grow up saying "yeah there's no way I'm risking my life by getting married and ending up in a financial/emotional/spiritual dumpster like my dad".
It makes me physically angry sometimes that so much societal and conversational capital is spent on the most trivial "microaggressions" that supposedly-marginalized communities experience, yet massive legal aggressions with the demonstrated effect of driving men to suicide are only spoken of in hushed tones in the dark recesses of the internet.
You ready to roll back the whole sexual revolution, or just the parts that hit your identity group?
I agree that the way the family courts treat men is pitch-black evil. The way a lot of men treat women is likewise pitch-black evil. We had a better system, but Horny Liberalism burned it to the ground in the name of sexual liberation. Well, you asked for it, here it is. There is no risk-free way to allow other people access to your brain, dick, heart and bank account, but allowing that access is a choice you make. Those who make poor choices have to pay for them, one way or another.
I've been seeing this rhetoric from certain factions of the right recently, but now I suppose it's being espoused by someone whose attention may be accessible to me—so maybe you can help me out understanding this one.
Who, pray tell, is the audience for this statement? Cads who are looking to get married and start a family? Married men who are looking to fuck around?
What is the thesis of this rant? "Sorry fellas, as long as there are promiscuous men out there, your married ass can't expect fair treatment from family courts."
I am deeply confused.
The intended audience is anyone dissatisfied with our current norms surrounding sexuality. The thesis is that sexuality is not a series of simple knobs that can be individually fine-tuned to achieve a desired outcome, but is rather a deeply interconnected, highly complex, and highly consequential social system that we cannot reliably conform to our whims.
The sexual revolution's thesis was that crusty old religious fuddy-duddies and repressed bigots had packed our sexual norms full of pointless, killjoy rules based on their own superstitions and hangups, and that once these were removed everyone could just do what felt good and be happy all the time. So they removed all the rules, a whole lot of people got badly hurt, and now they've had to reimpose new, worse rules and people are still pretty unhappy with the results. The claim here is that there are simple, obvious changes that will fix the problems and then everything will be fine. I don't think that was true before, and I don't think it's true here either. Risky sex is always going to be risky sex, no matter how we shuffle the risk around, and the inescapable fact is that all sex involves a significant degree of risk. There are solid strategies capable of seriously mitigating the problems people are pointing to here, but they involve living a Trad life that avoids divorce entirely, not attempting to "fix" divorce so it doesn't fuck people up, something I'm pretty sure it isn't possible to do.
That doesn't mean that none of the examples provided are probative; some of them display some degree of bias, and some are just straight-up badly decided. But I'm fairly confident that these specific issues of female rapists getting child support from male victims are very much edge cases, and while I entirely endorse fixing them, doing so isn't going to do a thing to help the much larger class of despairing men referenced in the comment I was replying to. The fact is that divorce is actually pretty awful, no matter how we try to shuffle its components.
If enough people recognize the failures of the current system, maybe we can as a society try for something better. In the meantime, people are better off accepting that the problem they're pointing to simply isn't going to get fixed, and start looking for workarounds.
But only one part of the argument is about how to "fix divorce". I agree it will never be a pleasant affair.
The other half is "Divorce policies are currently set up to be maximally awful for men and maximally beneficial for women. This is unfair." Your comment does not address this at all. That we may never find a risk distribution that will leave everyone happy is not a good reason to adopt a massively unfair one.
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Very much not a fan of the dude but relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/592/
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The audience is dissatisfied young men. Maybe incels, maybe RETVRNers: what matters is openness to women-as-outgroup. The goal is rallying a bloc via distrust for that outgroup. You’re seeing this in right-wing spaces because more liberal ones have very strong antibodies against the general sentiment, for better or worse.
Your interpretation of the thesis is almost correct, but you skipped the premise of societal decay. It’s often paired with claims that females—not women—are the real hypergamists. Thus it becomes “sorry fellas, so long as society is willing to tolerate women acting like whores, your married/responsible/trad ass can’t expect fair treatment.”
There’s a lot to unpack about an almost Marxist version of this argument that’s popular on the far right. But I don’t think you have to bite that bullet to express dissatisfaction with the state of affairs.
Dissatisfied young women, too. The current situation makes us all wretched.
...What?
None of this is accurate. Your married/responsible/trad ass can absolutely expect fair treatment, provided you find a woman willing to treat you fairly, which absolutely can be done. I have in fact done it, and it is delightful. What you can't expect is fair treatment from a system that is, in general, breaking down. There is no way under current conditions for our system to adequately police sexual ethics for men OR women, because we broke too many of the necessary tools, and most of us value personal gratification over workable general rules. It was stupid to imagine that emotionally and sexually intimate relationships can be regulated the way one does parking violations, but here we are.
The problem with relationships is not "Females". The problem is that relationships are necessarily fraught, and we as a society removed most of the safety mechanisms. One can (and should, in my view) find pockets that voluntarily maintain those safety mechanisms. Otherwise, one should understand that there's a lot of risk lying around for everybody that the prevailing narratives resolutely paper over.
Unfortunately, a lot of people making these complaints are the same people helping to generate the risk. You aren't stuck in traffic, you are traffic, as the saying goes. Men and women both embrace Horny Liberalism, and then when the long-term effects manifest, imagine that they can patch the downsides without having to compromise their own desires. Foolishness, but humans were ever thus.
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Maybe we should look up a word before we write an analysis. Your search bar is right there. Type hypergamy into it.
I looked it up, and it seems to fit. Relevant quotes from the first few links:
boring Wikipedia
...a May 2020 YouTube live stream titled Men Should Pay for Everything, Women Should be Hypergamous...
Hypergamy: When a woman always looks for a better partner based on opportunity even at the cost of hurting a relationship, morality, and other side-effects.
What point were you trying to make?
You are describing a fairly anodyne observation, that women are more social status conscious and care more about that in their partners, and using Urban Dictionary's almost unrecognizable definition and describing them as whores, which conflates hypergamy with being sexually loose for money.
I don't think many of the people you are describing would primarily think of women as whores. They would describe them as gold diggers. Or maybe they would describe them as whores. But not because of hypergamy. They are very distinct traits, even if they are both leveraging sex appeal for personal benefit.
“Gold diggers” would probably have been a better term, yeah. I somehow overlooked it, though I considered “mercenary...”
But I’ll stand by the appropriateness of “whores.” @FCfromSSC wasn’t just describing hypergamy, he was observing entrenched Horny Liberalism. Dismantling social institutions is absolutely associated with prostitution and vice in general.
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I think you're refusing to recognize term (meme) creep here. The Wikipedia definition of hypergamy may be "an anodyne observation that women are more social status conscious and care more about that in their partners," but I never see anyone refer to women and hypergamy where it isn't shorthand for "status-seeking whores."
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(FYI, I'm not @netstack)
Urban Dictionary is a perfectly fine source here, because it reflects the same attitudes and biases as the group we're talking about: they conflate hypergamy with being sexually loose for money because "dissatisfied young men. Maybe incels, maybe RETVRNers" conflate hypergamy with being sexually loose for money.
See The Red Pill Community Forum|What is hypergamy? How to Benefit from Hypergamy & Everything You Need to Know About Hypergamy. for a second example.
If you think their claims are incorrect or confused, then go ahead and argue that. They are making the claims, though.
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Do you find the "female", even if paired with "male" and not "man", offensive?
Women value potential for financial prospects more than men. See this study, page 7 of the PDF. In every of the 37 global cultures included in the study, human females valued "good financial prospects" more than human males did.
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to imply that your claim was incorrect. True statements are valid rallying flags.
I think your usage is appropriate.
There is a stronger form of the hypergamy claim where it represents a class interest, a cause rather than an effect. When “female” is used in that context, it is an attempt to sneak onto clinical high ground. I understand that’s not what you were doing.
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