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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25628 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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OP claimed

only 10% of divorces actually result in any actual alimony paid.

Is this wrong?

I didn't read the study, but I can assume it's true, and it changes nothing. As pointed out in another comment:

When the Manosphere discussed the phenomenon of ‘divorce rape’, they didn’t just mean the issue of alimony payments, they also meant the ways child support payments are calculated, the way those are enforced, and the way child visitation rights are decided.

This is just the tip of the divorce-industrial complex iceberg.

  • The allocation of assets like houses, in which even if both parties contributed evenly to, is held hostage during divorce negotiations, or provided entirely to the female
  • The responsibility to maintain or pay taxes for those assets, which is assigned entirely to the male
  • The division of retirement accounts, including individually named ones when both parties are high-earning white collar professionals but one person didn't contribute
  • The delaying of remarriage (despite long-term cohabitation) to extend alimony payments when they're applied
  • The delaying of high school graduation to extend child support payments
  • The total disregard of value provided from one spouse to another prior to the divorce when determining alimony (my favorite anecdote - a friend paid for 4 years of his wife's post-grad degree as a full-time student to the tune of $150,000. She sucked her professor's dick at her graduation party, then ground out the extraction of his credit card points before the end of the divorce! Also received massive alimony payments since she delayed actually starting a job with her nice degree)

@Unsaying mentioned:

Then again, I'd expect high-earning men to also have good legal teams and/or hidden assets, so, who can say, really?

I can tell you firsthand that when shopping around for someone to help with a basic, equitable prenup: Family lawyers generally have some combination of either A: Genuine misandry or B: No desire to advocate for a client who's already predisposed to lose.

Sure you can bill the same amount as when you're representing women, but it's a near certainty you'll be left with an unhappy customer. Why bother?

my favorite anecdote - a friend paid for 4 years of his wife's post-grad degree as a full-time student to the tune of $150,000. She sucked her professor's dick at her graduation party, then ground out the extraction of his credit card points before the end of the divorce! Also received massive alimony payments since she delayed actually starting a job with her nice degree

I've worked enough in divorce law to say straightforwardly: this is retarded. The fact that your friend couldn't argue his way out of a wet paper bag is not an indictment of the adversarial legal system. Literally every aspect of that should have gone differently, and routinely does.

The majority of stories like this are the result of one party or another failing completely to argue their case, or walking into court totally unprepared to argue, or blowing off the court and being subject to a default judgment. These things just don't happen if you don't fuck up somewhere.

I've literally heard the same beer-rants of guys who claimed they'd been divorce raped in cases I knew intimately enough to know what he was leaving out.

For reference, here is a common trick where men who "got fucked in the divorce" fumbled the ball.

Wife's Attorney: You have three children, correct?

Husband: Yes.

WA: What are their names?

H: Kaylee, Kayleigh, and KaeLieh

WA: What are their ages?

H: Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

I'm serious. This happens all the time.

I am sure there's more to the story and/or my buddy kept walking into proverbial rakes.

To circle back to my original point, he's now on a great upward trajectory 4 years later. Alimony timed out after something like 2 years?

The most baffling part of all of it is that they had no kids. I couldn't see the justification for any of it.

Another victim made the "mistake" of moving out after his wife cheated on him, so she got the house by default.

I'd still maintain that I don't understand how a court can arrive at these judgements, not matter how braindead a man's lawyer is.

Basically you're facing impenetrable just-worlding with a touch of refuge in audacity. There's no way it can be that bad therefore it must not be and the people who got screwed must have brought it on themselves.

I think you could look at the existence (or absence) of lobbying groups arguing for either side.

If women were being screwed over by divorce courts, we would expect feminist groups to campaign for their reform, whereas as far as I can tell, most feminist lobbying is to stop reform of the divorce courts. Men's groups campaign for the right to see their children, women's groups campaign against laws that would allow them to do this. Divorced men campaign against permanent alimony, divorced women campaign to keep it.

The very fact that the miniscule and powerless men's rights movement focuses mostly on unfair divorce laws suggests that perhaps they might have some legitimate complaints. After all, even if the law is written in a gender neutral manner doesn't mean it needs to be applied evenly. Hell, two-thirds of divorcing women acknowledge that men are treated unfairly when it comes to child custody. I struggle to think of any woman who is known for losing out from an unfair divorce ruling, and yet multiple men come to mind immediately.

Focusing on stranger violence by men is misleading. When it comes to domestic violence, child abuse and infanticide, there is a much greater balance. Depending on the figures you look at, it is easy to find studies showing that women commit the majority of domestic violence (both reciprocal and non-reciprocal), the majority of child abuse and the majority of infanticide. In addition, lesbian relationships are the most abusive and relationships between gay men are the least abusive, which suggests that men being more violent in general than women is not that relevant when specifically looking at violence within households.

And let's be frank, women's groups oppose men having custody of children because they are reflexively pro-woman. Talking about domestic violence is the best soldier-argument they have, but that doesn't mean it's the most honest. Courts never award custody to known abusers, but that isn't what feminists campaign against. They campaign against laws that allow ordinary, non-abusive men the right to see their children for any meaningful amount of time. These kind of laws exist in countries like France and the Netherlands, and their introduction did not increase family violence. If feminists campaigning against presumption of shared custody laws were really interested in equality or child welfare, they would know this. But as Bryan Caplan points out, their guiding belief is not that men and women should be treated equally by the law (most people believe that), rather, it is the belief that society generally treats men better than women. If men and women are two opposing teams in zero-sum conflict, then any concession to team man is a loss to team woman. Hence, legislation which involves treating men and women equally before the law, which encourages children to have stronger relationships with their fathers and which helps both men and women to not be bound by their gender roles is opposes by activists who supposedly support all these things.

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