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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   29830 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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The presumption in Western courts has long been shared custody. I think MRAs have always had some reasonable points on this issue, especially with courts willing to believe mothers over fathers on some questions. But in general, many complaints about ‘divorce rape’ happen when the father understands that he can’t reasonable split weekday custody with the mother (almost always because he works full-time) and so voluntarily relinquishes this possibility, and then resents the fact that his ex-wife or baby momma is the homemaker (part or full time) on his dime.

Also, while payments are often a substantial part of a poorer man’s income, the only times they’re “ridiculously” high (often an MRA complaint on this issue) is in a handful of cases a year where super rich people get divorced, which is very far away from most divorces, concentrated as they always are among people who are poorer and have fewer resources.

In general, men ‘benefit’ more from divorce than women because a single dad’s romantic market value is much higher than a single mom’s. Single mothers almost always have to ‘date down’, often much older men who are divorced with kids of their own. Single dads - provided they’re young-ish and otherwise somewhat attractive - can often find a childless woman a second time.

Divorce sob stories are mostly just people whining because they fail to realize a fundamental and obvious truth. Divorce sucks because it is negative sum. At the end of a divorce, neither party can afford the lifestyle they could afford together.

Marriage, or household consolidation more broadly if we want to bring in things like multi-generational households or communes or whatever, are ceteris paribus positive sum for the participants. The difficulty of chores doesn't scale on a linear basis, doing better than twice as much laundry for my wife and I takes me 15-25% longer than it takes to do my laundry when I lived alone. Cooking a bigger plank of salmon or pan of chicken breast adds negligible time to my cooking prep. Before you even get into any complementarity, living together is good.

Now you take that and smash it, and suddenly both parties are worse off.

There is obviously the risk of that kind of scenario, but I don’t think it considers (as @100ProofTollBooth says) the fact that divorce is pretty much never in a woman’s interest unless (a) her husband is untenably abusive such that being much poorer is worth escaping his grasp, (b) the couple is extraordinarily rich to the point that a settlement will allow her both ‘freedom’ and wealth or (c) the woman in question is still young enough, pretty enough and childless enough to roll the dice again and find a better partner.

A woman over 30, certainly over 35 with kids is pretty much never getting a ‘good deal’ in a divorce unless she married very, very well the first time. I don’t know why this isn’t repeated more in these discussions, men will gladly discuss how they would never date a single mother and how women lose value as their looks fade but then claim some 37 year old woman divorcing her average husband is some great financial coup on behalf of the wife.

In “real life”, she’s likely to either remain single for a long time or remarry to a man far below (in that he’s older, uglier, poorer etc) what she could have got had she remained single the whole time (even at 37). Meanwhile, her 37 year old ex-husband, provided he’s OK looking and gainfully employed, can likely find a 30-34 year old probably-childless woman to start a second family with, or decide not to have more kids and date most of the same kind of people he’d have if he’d never married.

You are correct that divorce is almost never in a woman's best interests. That doesn't mean it is in the man's, either. Women suffer romantically (because a single mother in her 30s will never be able to get as good of a husband as a childless woman in her 20s, if she can get another husband at all) while men suffer materially (because, as the primary bread winner, he is the one that gets hit with the alimony, child support, etc.). It's mutually assured destruction.

That doesn't change the fact that women are responsible for the vast majority of divorces, either initiating them outright or making their husband's life hell until he files for one. It is just evidence that women cannot be trusted to make their own sexual choices. Which is precisely why they were not allowed to until the sexual revolution.

From "The False Life Plan" by the Dreaded Jim:

Consider the reality show star Kate Gosselin, woman has eight children by a decent, reasonably attractive husband, who loves her and loves his children. Acts like a complete shrew towards the only man who will ever love her and her children. Ditches him. Is shocked to discover that no other male wants a woman past her prime and encumbered with eight children.

Kate Gosselin was videotaped continually treating her husband like dirt, as the man she reluctantly settled for seeing as all her preferred choices would not return her phone calls.

She then divorced him, depriving him of his much loved children, depriving her eight children of a much needed father, and herself of a much needed and entirely irreplaceable husband.

And I have seen a similar dynamic in every divorce that I have observed, though of course with considerably fewer children. In every divorce that I have observed the wife was utterly and spectacularly out of contact with marriage market realities. The result of the divorce is that the man, who very much did not want the divorce, was much better off, free of a hateful and unfaithful shrew, and the wife was very much worse off. As the wife goggles fell from his eyes, he usually found a considerably younger replacement.

At the age of thirty eight, with eight children and a notorious shrew, Kate Gosselin’s chances of marrying even a homeless obese seventy year old alcoholic are about equal to her chances of being kidnapped by terrorists and becoming the wife of the sultan, but she specifically requires her new husband to be rich, six foot tall, physically fit, and childless. (Her previous husband was not rich, not six foot tall, and only ordinarily fit, which is presumably why she divorced him.)

Meanwhile her husband, Jon Gosselin, the father of her children, having lost the wife goggles, promptly got a hot twenty two year old girlfriend to replace his aging thirty eight year old wife, and if the girlfriend is lucky, might marry her. But then, having been burned once, maybe not.

The typical marriage is Kate Gosselin and Jon Gosselin: The wife has a hugely inflated idea of her marriage market value (based on her F-buddy market value when she was considerably younger) and this poisons the marriage.

Now theoretically, if a woman is chaste, men will only approach her that are appropriate to her marriage market value, and she will avoid getting an inflated perception of her value, but no man believes that a chaste women is likely to remain chaste, because, they are not likely to remain chaste. So a woman faces a storm of approaches that would never happen if the boys had to ask her dad before approaching her, and if her dad said yes, they would get not a date with the opportunity of physical contact, but merely the opportunity to court her for marriage. These approaches lead Kate Gosselin to believe that she is entitled to marry a six foot tall physically fit millionaire, and that life, her husband, and the male dominated society is being terribly unfair to her in not giving her what she is entitled to have.

or making their husband's life hell until he files for one.

I don't think this works as well as the women think it does; men have memes about this (ball and chain) that aren't meaningfully replicated across the gender boundary. Head-crushing (by men) and heel-striking (by women) behavior is the baseline for Biblical gender relations within the context of a marriage, after all.

Head-crushing (by men) and heel-striking (by women) behavior is the baseline for Biblical gender relations within the context of a marriage, after all.

Could you elaborate? I've never heard of "you shall crush his head, he shall strike your heel" claimed as having anything to do with gender relations, given that the trade is between man and serpent. Compare the curses directed at men and women respectively from the same passage: men will suffer toil, women will suffer pain in childbirth.

It’s catholic doctrine that part of the woman’s punishment is chaffing under the rule of her husband, but the woman/serpent thing has nothing to do with it.

Huh, must have conflated the two in memory. (It still seems to me to be the main failure mode of how both genders handle being nasty in relationships, though.)

Aww nuts. I thought I was about to discover a neat rabbit-hole of esoteric scriptural interpretation. Oh well...

Nah, the spiciest thing from me you're likely to get is the claim that 1 Corinthians 8 is... probably not only referring to idol food.

But that's slow-pitch as far as interpretations go, I'm pretty sure everyone already knows that anyway (even if only to abuse it because you want to completely disregard what the previous chapter says... and then create a bunch of fallout for being completely un-self-aware about what doing it does and/or creating a crisis of faith for yourself due to your inability to back up your actions), and it's... well, not unusual, but somewhat remarkable that it's a conclusion that falls out of the significantly more general "should social systems that are designed for the average person still let you flip the safety off, and if you do that, when should you do that, how should you talk/how public should you be about the choices you're making, and why?" discussions that are half of what anyone around here talks about these days anyway.

Maybe I'll have to come up with something more esoteric when I misremember something else about scripture and gender later; too bad that whenever I'm thinking about this it's not for very nice reasons.

You don't. It's relative and empirical. But it's known to happen.

Years ago, I remember coming across an article that I think was from CNN, or some liberal/progressive leaning outlet. It was about how domestic violence was on the rise across the country. My immediate instinct was to treat it with skepticism but give the benefit of the doubt at a first pass. Someone then decided to do some analysis on the article, and decided to tally up and count what they were classifying as 'domestic violence'. Loud arguments, boyfriend/husband storming out of the house, ignoring the ultimatums of their spouse; hilarious infractions that would've never dawned on anybody who was sane to think it should've been called "domestic violence."

Even in how relationships are measured, it's important to keep in mind that your data expands and contracts with the size of your definitions. And it's not always the case that you should be persuaded with the methodology or its findings.

The last time I got into a debate with this person was on reddit where he told me that being in a marriage where you are chattel to your husband was the same as having to get a job at Pizza Hut to make rent. I will read and critically judge any source I am given but I will say I have set my expectations at a certain level.

That is... uh, interesting, to say the least.

Why is the assumption that she would remarry? As I see it, the natural counterfactual is one in which both parties never married, and then the delta is that in the married-and-divorced world, there is a perpetual transfer of money from the man to the woman. This suggests that the compound action "marry arbitrarily, then divorce" is indeed in the woman's interest, unless you want to price in opportunity cost - which could then be read as the expected amount of resources that the woman would extract from men as a class, a reading which itself seems sufficient to drive resentment even before you introduce some mechanism (alimony) that serves to place a floor on how far the individual can fall below expectation.

(Yes, the framing of extracting resources from men completely neglects every way in which men benefit from women in partnerships in turn, but those benefits do not come with an alimony-like floor. A society which opts for fairly applying this idea of capping the loss of trad-model marriage benefits by not only compelling divorced men to pay alimony in resources but also compelling divorced women to pay alimony in household chores would be, uh, interesting.)

Divorce is generally a bad deal(and men usually don’t come out ahead either), yes, but it happens with alarming frequency because people don’t know that.

Perhaps going back to a culture of shaming divorce would be a good thing.

In my culture we see divorce in the same way that I see limb amputations. There are times where it is absloutely necessary, but you should do everything humanely possible to avoid it unless there are no other options left. Westerners see divorce as like leaving a job, much less serious. Raising the costs of a divorce (e.g. through shaming) is probably a good thing.

Except the divorce rate is going down consistently. The main reason there was such a high level of divorce in the 70's and 80's is a lot of bad marriages finally had valve releases, and a lot of people headed for the exists. Now, you can think that was a bad decision or whatever, but I doubt even many conservative-leaning people are going to be OK with, "let's go back to 1955 norms about marriage."

Westerners see divorce as like leaving a job, much less serious.

I would be careful not to generalize Westerners in this case. There are plenty of groups (in the US at least) where divorce is viewed much more like your limb amputation analogy. For example, I grew up in small town conservative Christian culture, and there it's considered pretty awful to have a divorce. Not necessarily shameful (because sometimes it really is the only option left), but definitely it's viewed as a bad thing which should be avoided if possible.

You hit it on the head when you said "a single dad's romantic market value is much higher than a single mom's." The only place where this isn't necessarily the case (although, mostly still is) is in the PMC, wherein divorces are so common, along with professional single women running the household, that single motherhood is seen as no-big-deal to almost-a-badge-of-honor.

Very different situation for a working-class woman with children trying to date/re-marry.

This is another reason in favor of the theory that many products of the sexual revolution (no-fault divorce, abundant and common contraception) disproportionately benefited an upper-class that we now call the PMC, while disproportionately penalizing the working-class. You have a whole group of highly educated 1960s women who've tricked themselves into thinking they're oppressed, aided and abetted by the sexually and ethically incontinent Don Draper types. The latter now has no conflict of responsibilities in sleeping around, because the baby no longer has a say. The former can pursue endless responsibility-free self expression and simply jump in and out marriages when the flavor's gone.

All this happening just when the poor (of any color) were able to develop more solid family structures and starting to enjoy the benefits of escaping an agrarian hand-to-mouth existence. Emphasis, there, on family instead of individual.

Within a decade, it all get's ruined for them. Then, by the 1980s, those just above them (the mythical steel / auto factory workers and longshoremen types of the Rust Belt and industrial Northeast) become tragic characters in Bruce Springsteen songs because it turns out they weren't that far ahead. 2023: "Rich Men North of Richmond"

PMC people don't divorce much. You are right that single motherhood isn't seen as bad in the PMC but if we go by a comment above this may well be because two parent households are still the norm in the PMC, so the protective societal effect that single mother's children get from being surrounded by intact families lessens the negative impact of it on them.

Of course the PMC people then take this observation about how single motherhood is not so bad for them and those they know of and apply it to the whole of society, large portions of which don't have the protective societal effect, thereby promoting single motherhood elsehwere in regions less suited to handle it, leading to a twofold hit to the other sections of society, firstly to women directly who are now single mothers and wouldn't have been in the counterfactual, and then again by degrading the environment of these women so the single motherhood hurts them even more now.

is in the PMC, wherein divorces are so common, along with professional single women running the household, that single motherhood is seen as no-big-deal to almost-a-badge-of-honor.

Interesting, I'd expect the opposite: more divorces in the lower classes and more tolerance of single motherhood too.

The latter especially, since lower class people may be less likely to get married.

I'd say the difference is in perception and, unfortunately, what's termed "mood affiliation." Excuse the squishyness of my reply:

Lower class single motherhood is, now, seen as an inevitable reality and par for the course for a huge amount of young women. I wouldn't say it is "approved" of, but, accepted the same way physical injury on the job is assumed / accepted for working class men (every construction worker / roofer / tradesman who's been working longer than 10 years has a dozen scars from accidents, probably a bad knee or shoulder, and maybe some eye damage). Divorce perception is very similar; "Y'all tried, sometimes it doesn't work out. Gotta keep movin on."

Contrast with PMC divorce mood affiliation. It's usually a long, drawn out process (partially because there's more money involved and, therefore, more incentive to use the legal system to divide the pie) full of emotionalized soul searching ("how could it come to this?", "we were so in love"), followed by some semi-established period of Second Singledom (divorced dudes dating bimbo-ish ladies 20 years their junior, divorced women getting "glow ups" and having trysts with "interesting" men of almost any age. High likelihood of European or California temporary relocation), maybe followed by a second marriage (or just long term dating partner) that's really more about mutual companionship than family.

Throughout all of this, however, is the conception than the divorce wasn't a failure or an unfortunate reality of the times, but that it was simply a "stop along the way" to your truer, better, more You-er self. Going back to the idea of scars, how many pop songs and instagram poetry posts essentially say "our physical or emotional scars are what makes us beautiful!" Contrast this to the welder who can plainly state, "No, I really do wish that falling I-beam hadn't smashed off my two little toes. It hurt a lot, I couldn't work for some time, and I still don't quite walk right" or the Appalachian single mother, "It is fucking hard to feed and raise my kids without a man in the house. I do not have the time to "get an education" to try to increase my wage. My eldest keeps getting arrested but, because he's a 17 year old boy, there is no way I can physically intimidate or control him. Very few men will consider dating me because they do not want to help raise a family that isn't theirs - and I wouldn't want to do that in their position either."

Dealing with suffering and failure is part of any life. When it's your own damn fault, you ought to use it as a learning experience and an impetus to better choices and behavior. Other times, it is utterly random or, worse, cosmically unfair. That's when you exercise some sort of value/faith/anti-fragile/discipline system and decide whether or not (or how much) to descend into cynicism or existentialism or just undirected anger and frustration. Nobody's perfect or even very good at this, you just do as good as you can.

Far, far worse than any of those choices, however, is turning personal failure or even random chaotic unfairness into purely joyful and self-reverential deterministic positive affirmation. It's an insane (literally, not correctly functioning cognitive system) level of delusion that can only lead to repeated poor decision making and/or distorted risk appreciation, to say nothing of the personality and character defects it will likely nurture.

Before anyone jumps in with "but a conservative Christian world view doesn't prevent this." Yes! I agree. One of the things I detest the most about pop-culture mainline American Protestants are copes around hardship that are the same "purely joyful and self-reverential deterministic positive affirmation."[^1] You just lost your job and can't pay your bills, "The Lord is just testing me. But I know it's all part of the plan!" Maybe think why you lost the job? Were you bad at it and failing to perform? (Your fault). Has the economy taken a downturn and it wasn't your fault? That's cosmically unfair. What steps did you take to manage such a risk? Or, more forward looking, do you have a concrete plan to regain employment?

[^1]: Intra post self-quote. I am so.fucking.cool.

The presumption in Western courts has long been shared custody.

The practice has been that child support will be enforced by any means necessary, but father's visitation rights will not be enforced at all.

I mean, even if this is true, the main reason isn't some evil feminists being in charge, it's that it's far easier to garnish a person's wages than to pay enough people to make sure all visitation rights are followed to the letter. You could put this message board in charge of America, and guess what, you'd still see this.

No, they don't stop with garnishing wages. They suspend professional licenses and drivers licenses for unpaid child support. They put "deadbeat dads" in jail, in one of the few remaining uses of debtor's prison in the US. For women who don't co-operate with visitation the system gives a Gallic shrug and admonishes the fathers that they still have to pay child support or else.

I’ve heard of quite a few cases where mothers have been charged with kidnap for denying visitation or moving to eg. another state or country to be away from their kids’ dad.

On some level it’s a underclass problem, too. I assume your sympathy for single mothers who don’t get child support from their exes because they’re in jail/unemployed/etc is limited too, so why wouldn’t it be for those men who married women so ratchet/psychotic/etc that they illegally deny their exes visitation?

I’ve heard of quite a few cases where mothers have been charged with kidnap for denying visitation or moving to eg. another state or country to be away from their kids’ dad.

There was a famous case some decades ago where a woman moved the kid out of the country and was held in contempt, and they changed the law to get her released... without, of course, getting her to comply.

I can be sympathetic for single mothers who don't get child support from their exes because they're in jail/unemployed/etc, but you still can't get blood from a stone.

so why wouldn’t it be for those men who married women so ratchet/psychotic/etc that they illegally deny their exes visitation

Because I refuse to accept that women don't have agency, and shouldn't be held responsible for their exercise of it. If they really are so psychotic that they can be effectively said not to have agency, they sure as hell shouldn't have custody.

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