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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Helen Smith
As the book Legalizing Misandry points out: . . . fatherhood can be a nightmare—legal, financial, and emotional—due to the laws governing divorce, custody, and access. These laws are not going to prevent all men from investing in family life, certainly not those who consider marriage a religious covenant, but they have already made many other men think twice before becoming involved in what could easily become a no-win situation. Why invest so heavily in family life after all, if your children can be taken away from you or even turned against you so easily?
I once wrote an article asking if a man could be raped by a woman, and the answers I received were shocking, to say the least. Many of the commenters felt that men were asking for it, should keep their legs crossed, or should have known better than to allow a woman to harm them.6 This sounds like what women used to be told about rape fifty or more years ago. Are men now being treated like the women of yesteryear?
“Fatherhood by Conscription: Nonconsensual Insemination and the Duty of Child Support.”7 In the article, Higdon describes three different cases of men who have been forced to be fathers against their will.
The commonality in these three cases was that a man or boy was forced into fatherhood against his will and was then forced by the court against his will to pay child support.
Can you imagine the uproar if a fifteen-year-old girl had sex with a thirty-four-year-old man and she was obligated in any way to him by the courts? Or if a woman passed out at a party and a man had sex with her and she was then forced to have the baby?
As Warren Farrell says about reproductive rights for men: He realizes that when a woman and he have created a pregnancy, the issue is not the rights of the female vs. the fetus, but the rights of the female, the fetus, and the father. He realizes that a woman who says “It’s my body, it’s my business,” and then chooses to have a child that she makes him pay for; forces him to take a job he might like less just because it pays more; forces him to stress himself out and die early—forces him to use his body for eighteen years. If it’s his body being used f...
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However, every time the question arises of whether a male victim of statutory rape should be made liable for child support, “every single court has answered it in the affirmative—holding that yes, the minor father is liable.
Now the boy has been victimized twice: once by the woman who abused him, and again by the courts for the next eighteen years while he engages in involuntary servitude to pay for a child that the law claimed he was not even able to consent to at the time. Does anyone care about the psychological abuse they heap on a kid like this? Of course not; he’s male and probably deserves it. After all, he asked for it, just like the girl who was asking to be raped by wearing a short skirt. Again, I ask, is it still 1950 and are boys the new girls?
As the saying goes, “women have rights; men have responsibilities.” Not only are men responsible for kids whom they didn’t consent to fathering, but they are also responsible for kids whom are not even theirs genetically.
For men, there are no reproductive benefits to marriage anymore. —Blogger Mike T., reflecting on state-sanctioned paternity fraud
If the genes don’t fit . . . you must acquit. —Signature line of Carnell Smith, advocate for men accused of paternity fraud
Sadly, paternity fraud is so rampant that it is hard to get an exact count of how many men are either acting as fathers to kids they think are their own or being forced to pay child support after having been wrongly told that they are the fathers to children that are not theirs.
tens of thousands of men have been wrongly assigned paternity and are compelled by law to pay years of child support for children whom DNA tests have shown are not theirs.
That means over a million guys out there are taking care of some other man’s kid.
But given the nondisclosure policy of most genetic counselors these days, it might as well be 1970 again—except that now, with women dominating 92 percent of the field, paternalism seems to have been replaced by maternalism.
Many of these female genetic counselors are concerned with how the mother would feel if her husband found out the truth, not the poor duped dad, of course.
In many cases of married men, men who found out they were not the father of a child were devastated and never really got over the shock. Many had trouble with depression, but, for most men, the feeling is anger, which is often said to be depression turned outward. This anger is a common feeling for many men, as you will see from some of my informal research.
So the most common responses to paternity fraud from the polltakers was anger at the mother who put the man in this position and anger at the state that forces him to pay for a child that is not his. These are good and appropriate responses because they are the fuel that will cause men to act on their own behalf to change the laws.
Farrell says two ingredients are necessary for a major movement: emotional rejection and economic hurt. Paternity fraud has these two ingredients written all over it.
The State Supreme court has just ruled unanimously a person mislead into believing they are the father of a child may sue the mother for back payments made if it is later found they are not the biological father of that child.
Georgia passed a paternity fraud bill that gives men the right to terminate child support if they file a paternity test showing zero percent chance that they are the father, and if they also meet other conditions.
Across the U.S. on an average day, roughly 50,000 persons are in jail or in prison for sex-payment debt. —Douglas Galbi
While jailing non-paying parents—the vast majority of them men—does lead to payment in many cases, critics say that it unfairly penalizes poor and unemployed parents who have no ability to pay, even though federal law stipulates that they must have “willfully” violated a court order before being incarcerated. They compare the plight of such parents to the poor people consigned to infamous “debtors’ prisons” before such institutions were outlawed in the early 1800s.
Some estimates find that up to 52 percent of men will be arrested at some point in their lives, and that a man is about four times as likely as a woman to be arrested.
Add to jail time the fact that in many states there are other penalties for not paying child support, such as losing driving privileges, professional licenses and passport privileges.
“My body, my choice.” All I can do is shake my head and think “what hypocrites.” Women in the United States can decide whether to be a mother, can have a child and in some states give it up for adoption without even informing the father, and can use men for eighteen years—and sometimes more—to pay for their children. Men have no say in reproduction. Maybe now you understand why the “My body, my choice” bumper sticker has a hollow ring to it. With so many men in jail or suffering to pay child support, is it any reason that younger men are reluctant to get too involved with marriage and
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Since 1988, the number of females in postbaccalaureate programs have exceeded the number of males.
Between 1975 and 2006, the percentage of women with at least a college degree increased from 18.6 to 34.2 percent. Men barely budged: their numbers went from 26.8 percent to 27.9.”
Today the number of women is 58 percent and predictions are that women will reach 60 percent of the college grads in the near future.
Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent report by the American Council on Education.
Researchers there cite several reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in disproportionate numbers;
Why are men getting worse grades; why do they tend to drop out of school in disproportionate numbers?
Initially, feminism was presented as being about equal rights between the sexes. Now it is often about revenge and special privileges for women and girls.
According to Sommers, “gender experts at Harvard, Wellesley, and Tufts, and in the major women’s organizations, believe that boys and men in our society will remain sexist (and potentially dangerous) unless socialized away from conventional maleness. . . . The belief that boys are being wrongly ‘masculinized’ is inspiring a movement to ‘construct boyhood’ in ways that will render boys less competitive, more emotionally expressive, more nurturing—more, in short, like girls.”
Boys are less engaged in school, and less engagement means less success in the classroom; in fact, engagement with school is probably the single most important factor of academic success.
Why aren’t boys more engaged in school? According to Sommers, “schools today tend to be run by women for girls. Classrooms can be hostile environments for boys. They like action, competition and adventure stories. Those are not in favor. Games like tag and dodge-ball are out; tug of war has become tug of peace, and male heroes have been replaced by Girl Power.”
However, disinterest in school for boys can be a real problem. I found that even in my own studies of violent teens, boys’ and girls’ disengagement from school is a serious issue and resulted in more violence.
This analysis suggests that earnings have not stagnated but have declined sharply. The median wage of the American male has declined by almost $13,000 after accounting for inflation in the four decades since 1969. This is a reduction of 28 percent!
This stagnant or falling income for men is complex, but one reason for it is that fewer men have a college education. The Brookings Institution reports, “employment of men with only high school diplomas has fallen considerably—from a high of 97 percent in 1967 to just 76 percent today.”
Maybe it’s the schools and the culture that are the problem, not necessarily the men.
What explains this male flight? Let me speculate a bit and offer a reason that dare not speak its name in today’s PC climate: universities are increasingly becoming feminized and many men, to use the antidiscrimination vocabulary, loathe a hostile working environment. In a word, males increasingly feel emasculated in today’s universities. —Robert Weissberg, Professor of Political Science
Here is the problem in a nutshell. Because historically women have been the second sex, and did suffer discrimination, there is now an elaborate and powerful network of private and federal agencies that protect and promote women’s interests. Boys do not have a lobby to defend them. Worse, the women’s lobby (especially hard-line members like the American Association of University Women—AAUW) fights efforts to help boys. Women’s groups follow a double standard: When women lag behind men, that is an injustice that must be aggressively targeted. But when men are lagging behind women, that is a
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there is the infamous 2006 Duke University case, where three young men on the lacrosse team were falsely accused of rape by a stripper named Crystal Mangum, and again by the Duke professors and much of the community.
The new regulations should be seen for what they really are. They are not enlightened new procedures for protecting students from crime. They are a declaration of martial law against men, justified by an imaginary emergency, and a betrayal of the Title IX equity law.
Many of these regulations are said to be needed because rape is “increasing” at the nation’s colleges. However, much of this increase is the way that rape or sexual assaults are categorized.
What this all really boils down to, however, is control over men’s sexuality and freedom. The crackdown on fraternities, sports teams, and just everyday college guys by women’s groups and the government is a way to keep men on guard and worrying that they will be charged with rape or sexual assault. After all, these organizations don’t want men having too much fun, and if they do, they will get no due process and will be presumed guilty with little evidence. It’s also about revenge against men for discrimination against women in the past. And it’s okay with these groups even if innocent men
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A blogger who goes by the name Futurist said, “misandry (hatred of men) is the new Jim Crow.”
According to Kathleen Parker, author of Save the Males, “historians aren’t sure of the precise date, but sometime around 1970, everyone in the United States drank acid-laced Kool-Aid, tie-dyed their brains, and decided fathers were no longer necessary.”
However, the cost to society of portraying men in this manner is high. Because men are afraid to engage in many areas of public life and work, especially those that involve children, kids have fewer and fewer role models and can end up harmed or worse, dead. “A poll conducted by a NCH, a children’s charity, and volunteer group Chance UK, has identified what they believe is the reason so many charities are struggling to recruit men to work with children. Turns out, many men are afraid of being labeled as pedophiles.”
Two-year-old Abigail Rae died by drowning in a village pond in England. Her death stirred a debate because “the ongoing inquest revealed an explosive fact. A man passing by was afraid to guide the lost child to safety because he feared being labeled ‘a pervert.’ ”5 The man’s name was Clive Peachey,
