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I’ll raise the issue of paternity testing as potential culture war fuel.
As far as I know, the law in US federal states and Western European countries is usually that a husband may not have a paternity test done on the child or children unless the wife agrees to it in writing and the family court permits it (in case of a divorce). I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know the specifics. But anyway, the practical reality is that a husband having such a test done on the kids without consulting anyone else is illegal. Basically there is never any permission given to do such tests.
On one of the now-defunct Manosphere sites, namely Dalrock’s blog, a regular commenter who went under the online name Novaseeker made a prediction about 10 or more years ago: not only will there not be any new legislation making paternity tests easier, as usually demanded online by angry men’s rights activists, but the opposite will happen. Namely: a growing number of men, usually in case of facing an initiated divorce, will start tinkering with these laws, covertly getting paternity tests done, basically on the black market, and this in turn will result on corresponding legislation becoming even more punitive and restrictive. There’ll be heavy fines, maybe even prison sentences etc.
Again, this was written more than 10 years ago. I wonder if anything of this has materialized or not.
This has always been morally insane.
I can't think of any other areas where society and law has some justification along the lines of "well it wasn't you, but someone needs to pay for it, and you are the easiest to catch."
Imagine this justification used for crimes:
[state]: pay the fine for running a red light
[person]: but i didnt run a red light
[state]: Well someone ran that red light, and we can't let it be known that running red lights will go unpunished. You were nearby and I've already captured you, it would be too much work to go get the real culprit if it turns out it wasn't you.
That is a light crime and it already feels heinous. More serious crimes with more serious punishments feels even more heinous. Imagine the above but for a crime that carries a lifetime prison sentence.
Just reversing the gender roles shows how insane this can be. A husband and wife. The husband wants kids, the wife does not. The husband manages to somehow adopt a kid without the wife's knowledge or consent (or he even forges her signature and commits some level of fraud in getting her assigned as the adoptive mother). Or the husband gets a surrogate to carry his baby, then he and the surrogate lie at the hospital about the mother's identity and he brings home a kid that isn't the wife's.
The wife then files for divorce because the husband clearly betrayed her trust. The wife then must pay child support to the husband for the raising of the adopted kid.
One of those scenarios might be the only way such insane parenting laws get reversed. Or they will just carve out an exception and send the man to jail without the slightest hitch in their step at the dissonance of their actions.
Its also a weird take on the responsibility level of the women involved. A women can't be expected to know for certain who the father is, but can be expected to raise a child? Like what?! Raising a child is way harder than knowing who the father is. In most cases not knowing who the father is would also be a demonstration of incompetence. If you claim to care about the welfare of the child, maybe having them raised by a woman that can't keep track of her sexual partners is not a great idea. Even if they aren't keeping constant track, once they know the due date of the baby they should be able to narrow down the conception to a 1-2 week time frame.
In a sane world we would be using this as an example of why Utilitarians shouldn't be in charge of writing laws.
Scenario: A person roles into the hospital with a gunshot wound to the [organ that can be lived without]. The shooter has the same blood type as the victim.
Question: Is it ok to take the organ from the shooter to replace the organ of the wounded person?
Utilitarian: You can take the organ from the healthy person in the waiting room, they are easier to find and might have been the shooter anyways.
I don't think the red light comparison quite works, or at least it exaggerates the injustice in a way that is not conducive to a fair discussion of the subject (effective as it may be as polemic). From what I understand, the situations where the man is on the hook are those where he was married to the woman who had the child, and the justification is essentially that integrity of the nuclear family, or at least material safety for the child, is valued higher than justice for the man. (Contrary to many arguments, a ban on unilateral paternity testing even in alimony/child support proceedings protects intact families too, because not having it would incentivise doubting men to divorce so they could get the test.) They are not arresting a completely random guy just because he was easy to catch, and there is a good being defended (the family that is involving him, his wife and the disputed child) that is much more specific to him than the "recompense for red light violation" good that could really be fulfilled by just about anyone.
It's hard to build a plausible analogy with cars, but perhaps we could imagine a hypothetical society that takes valuing privacy of private residences to an absurd extreme. In such a society, if someone was murdered on private property, by similar logic the property owner could always be on the hook, unless everyone who entered the property consented to an investigation: someone has to be punished for the murder, the registered property owner is easiest to catch, as the owner he is felt to carry some measure of default responsibility for what happens in it anyway, and the alternative would be a sudden unexpected violation of privacy of everyone who went into the house which is roundly agreed to be a greater evil than the possibility of sending the owner (who anyhow would look a bit lame for not being on top of what's going on in his home) to jail innocent.
Grant_us_eyes brought up the case in another comment where a 16 year old female babysitter had sex and was impregnated by the 12 year old boy she was watching. The boy was ordered to pay child support. link
Yes the justification was the well-being of the child. I have no idea how a judge said that with a straight face as he ordered a child to pay child support. And to specifically pay it to a mother that is a convicted pedophile rapist of a child that was under her care. I hope the newly born child in this situation was a girl, otherwise he will probably be having a sibling/child in another 13 years, and then he will have to get a job at 14 to pay child support to his mother. Insanity.
What about the incentives created by forcing doubting fathers to raise kids that aren't theirs or pay their wages to a woman who tricked them? If there are multiple kids in a family and just one is in doubt then guess who that father likes the least? I'm sure that kid is not having a pleasant time even if the parents stay together.
If you were married to a woman that cheated on you and then had to pay money to that woman and that child? I cannot imagine how infuriated I would be. I'd probably be willing to destroy my own life to spite them. Live poor for 18 years, leave the country to get out of payments, etc etc. I'm also not a violent person, but its not hard to imagine what choices a violent man might make in that situation.
Maybe it works because the type of man that can be actually cucked heavily overlaps with the type of man that can be cucked by the justice system.
I'll admit the traffic light example is a little polemic, but I don't think it takes very much wrangling to become more accurate.
Imagine a business is being stolen from by one employee. The theft is large enough that the business will go bankrupt unless the money is returned, which is bad for all of the employees, the owner, and their customers. We would not think it is ok to just confiscate the savings of one of the employees to pay for the theft.
Is a business just not that sympathetic? I can make it more sympathetic. Its not a business its a non-profit. They make pacemakers for people that can't afford them especially children. If the non-profit goes under people will die, children will die. Can we take money from a random employee? What if its not random, can we pick the ugliest man with the biggest bank account and no family? At what point in this hypothetical does it become ok? For me the answer is never. (which is the same answer I have to Robert Nozick's The Tale of a Slave)
Unfortunately, under the old ideal of the family (the mother runs the house, the father slaves away at a day job and maybe is home on the weekends every now and then to give some words of stern admonition to the kids), the incentives there don't matter so much. The father's role is to provide resources, and exist as an abstract sort of role model and stabilising force.
I don't have access to stats, but I would assume that out of all the "cucked" men in the world (who are stuck with a less than certainly affair-produced child in a marriage), a bigger fraction continues more or less playing out the above role than actually resorts to violence or spiteful self-sabotage. To begin with, I would think that the woman actually having an affair when the couple is trying to conceive correlates pretty well with such a family model, because otherwise the woman simply would not have enough opportunity to cultivate one. If my partner managed to get an affair baby, my first reaction would be "when the f did she manage to sneak that in"; outside of work we are basically together all the time and we are pretty well-aware of each other's social calendars too.
I think this once again misses the circumstance that the cucked husband is not some random bloke grabbed off the street. You seem to want to pick a random employee, or the ugliest one, or whatever, but why are you so resistent to picking the most obvious default-responsible one, which is the CEO? If you made the example say that some employee embezzled money from an LLC, but the state refused to investigate and just put the CEO on the hook for it, we would be getting closer to the marriage situation.
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I get that this is rhetorical, but here's the actual answer:
He ordered a man to pay child support.
A man is not a child, and being male takes precedence; furthermore, men can't be raped (their age of consent is 0- no Woman would ever actively want to fuck a man so this doesn't create any downstream problems, especially the most objectively attractive kind of Woman, that being a 16 year old one). The male gender role is to do the fucking, so this was Consensual, thus forcing him to take Responsibility makes trivial sense.
The only reason we pretend men can be raped is just basic gender equality, but that's just a fig leaf: they get the title but none of the protections that being a victim of the same grants Women. If we could get away with it, we would set the age of consent for Women to be infinite, even within the confines of a marriage (because otherwise, a Woman couldn't have Her husband thrown in jail if he displeased Her by retroactively revoking consent -> claiming marital rape, as all sex with Women is illegal).
TL;DR It was base human instinct.
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