Women's Equality Amendment

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martha said:
I doubt it. Form other posts in FYM and other parts of Interference, I know that FG has some serious trouble with women. From what I can tell, he truly does believe we are out to get him.

I think you should focus on the debate, rather than engage in amateurish attempts at psychoanalysis.
 
Just curious, who got custody of the kids prior to the extremist feminist intervention?
 
financeguy said:


I think it is helpful, when one criticizes one poster's contribution for a perceived lack of evidential back-up, that one actually provides some evidence for one's point of view oneself, wouldn't you?

This is rich coming from you :lol:


financeguy said:

Discrimination against fathers by the family law courts is very well attested to, very well researched by objective observers and has been shown in numerous studies.

There are numerous examples of studies which show this on the internet and in the publishing media, I am surprised you are not aware of this.

My own personal view is that this discrimination is due to infiltration by extremist feminism of the family law court structure and of the profession of social work. That is just a personal opinion, mind - but it is pretty unarguable, frankly, that such discrimination takes place.
This doesn't even make sense, how would extreme feminism be a cause of this, if anything it would have the opposite effect.

Vincent said it best, yes there are many fathers who find it difficult, but it has absolutely nothing to do with your reasons.

financeguy said:

I attach a link to just one website which deals with the issue - there are hundreds of others.

http://www.coeffic.demon.co.uk/

Are you serious? That webstite is a joke.

It's as paranoid, and sloppy with their conclusions as your posts. The suicide rate is higher in men, so it must be discrimination? WTF?
 
It was kind of an interesting website...I was expecting something more ....um....objective. It kind of undermines the credibility of a serious discussion. I'm assuming you're taking this issue too seriously to be engaging in satire.
 
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http://www.coeffic.demon.co.uk/

I hope that is meant to be funny. Women have been treated like crap until recently and continue to be abused all over the world yet after a couple of decades of supposed favoritism, it's time for men to revolt. Gimme a break!!

I think men should be glad women outlive us. Who else is gonna wipe the dribble from our face and change our diapers when we are 80?
 
BonosSaint said:
Just curious, who got custody of the kids prior to the extremist feminist intervention?
Women, in every Western legal system I'm at all familiar with--and assuming whatever exactly 'extremist feminism' refers to doesn't predate the 1970s. In British law, for example, the decline of the previous practice of automatically granting fathers custody of their 'property' (i.e., children) following a divorce can be traced to the so-called 'tender years doctrine' underlying the Custody Of Infants Act (1873)--though technically this only guaranteed divorced mothers 'access' since, like children, women were legally defined as chattel rather than persons at the time. The Married Women's Property Act (1884) and Guardianship of Infants Act (1886) established that women were legally separate persons and as such, qualified to be awarded sole guardianship of children--which they tended to be from there on out, provided they had access to adequate financial resources (which of course most women didn't). Later reforms in the Progressive Era laid the foundations for the modern child welfare system by developing the concept of the 'worthy mother,' i.e., the woman who lacked such resources following a divorce but was deserving of legal and social assistance to enable her to keep her children. US family law followed a similar trajectory, though generally lagging behind the UK by a decade or so. Mid-to-late twentieth century feminists actually on the whole rejected special preferences for women in divorce and custody, though their focus was on rights for women in the labor market, not the family. It was during that period that 'the best interests of the child' (as opposed to automatic preference for the mother) began to emerge as the standard for awarding custody, though the tendency to favor mothers persisted--more on less on the sometimes unwarranted assumption that the mother had performed the largest share of caretaker duties up until that point, therefore it would cause the least disruption to the child to remain with her. On the other hand, based on 1990s *US* data at least (the 'Massachusetts Study'), when divorced fathers do actively seek custody they get sole custody about 30% of the time, and joint custody about 45% of the time--though it should be noted that this study didn't address sociocultural and legal factors which might discourage men from seeking custody in the first place (and most don't; overall, the number of men who got either sole or joint custody amounted to less then 8%), nor did it address the results for unwed fathers (whom the scantier available data indicates fare considerably worse in the courts). At any rate, while this and other studies certainly suggest some persisting bias in favor of mothers in custody law, it makes little sense historically to attribute this to 'extremist feminism.'
 
BonoVoxSupastar said:
Are you serious? That webstite is a joke.

It's as paranoid, and sloppy with their conclusions as your posts. The suicide rate is higher in men, so it must be discrimination? WTF?


When the evidence doesn't fit their view of the world, I guess the default position of 'progressives' is to dismiss uncomfortable facts as 'a joke'.
 
Sometimes the source is just crap.

Yolland gave great evidence, your conclusion that women do have an "advantage" in the custody question is right, the reasons are hilarious.
 
martha said:


What about when the evidence doesn't fit paranoid conspiracy theorists' views? What about yolland's uncomfortable facts?

Yolland's 'uncomfortable facts' actually very much back up and substantiate the point I was making about fathers not being favoured by the family law courts.

That was my central point, before some of you decided to get side-tracked and focus on trivialities, for reasons best known to yourselves.
 
I suspect those reasons may have something to do with the manner in which you joined the thread in the first place:
financeguy said:
Feminism is essentially built on a tissue of lies.

In Western societies, from health care to jobs to education to paternal rights , it is men that are discriminated against, not women.

However, I wouldn't expect the self-regarding navel-gazing 'liberal' coterie on here to realise that.
And you weren't speaking of "fathers not being favoured by the family law courts" (a point which no one disagreed with you on)--rather you spoke of "nothing short of an active, prolonged and vindictive assault on fathers' rights" which you speculated was "due to infiltration by extremist feminism of the family law court structure and of the profession of social work", in an echo of the sentiments of your initial post.

I don't like it when people take cheap shots at me or ridicule my claims without building a logical case for their criticisms either, but then I don't generally hand people that kind of ammo to assume my approach is intellectually suspect to begin with. Facts are important, but so is how you present them and what that signals about your attitude towards the discussion. It's nothing personal, and if this topic hits close to home to you for some reason that's none of my business and no skin off my nose, but realistically, it'd be easier to be sympathetic to your frustrations if you hadn't charged into it with the same kind of overblown rhetoric you're griping about people tossing at you.
 
Thank you for the information, Yolland. I didn't think anything in anything I remembered reading indicated that mother didn't usually get custody in both US and UK in the twentieth century. I couldn't imagine that modern day feminism had effected that change.
 
To be fair, unlike the history of women's legal status, that isn't the sort of topic anyone in here is likely to have studied in college or read much about in the papers, unless perhaps for personal reasons they've been seeking out information on it for a while. And I'm sure, considering even just the few custody stats I quoted, that if I looked long enough I could find something (though probably not from the NYT Magazine) analogous to the Belkin article INDY quoted, suggesting that all the mothers-to-fathers ratio in custody awards "really" shows is that most men don't care that much about involvement in their childrens' lives, and are happy to leave the heavy-duty interpersonal relations and 'busy work' aspects of parenting to the ladies, themselves being 'naturally' better suited for the hard-driving competition and status-oriented world of the workplace (and besides, what kind of selfish guy would put his own parental ambitions ahead of his children's need for a mother's love)? Which, hopefully, is readily recognizable as just as unwarranted a set of assumptions as Belkin's.

This is, I think, related to the shortcomings of law as a social leveller often cited with racial issues. Again, I don't see it as a satisfactory answer to "Why not an ERA?", but gender socialization and therefore sex discrimination encompass a lot more than what affirmative action quotas and the like can realistically address on their own. Different learned social interaction and 'networking' styles, different received expectations about parenthood as an identity, alienation and resignation to something less than desired after repeated embittering encounters with people on The Other Side who don't appear to recognize these things even exist--those consequences (and various others) do add up, and they can adversely affect men as well as women, but it can be extremely difficult to legislate against them or quantify them enough to win a discrimination suit. Attitudes and expectations may change once the most obvious barriers come down, socialization differences may become less pronounced, but it's a slow and gradual process and often too easy to deem completed to any 'reasonable' person's satisfaction, especially if you're not in the historically most adversely affected group. Of course it also happens that people will manipulate a protected status and try to use it as a battering ram; but whether that's happening is often a highly subjective call, and that's where what the stats say can be helpful as a reality check, and a starting point for collectively analyzing why the initially expected outcome didn't occur--and reconfirming the desirability that it should.
 
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financeguy said:



When the evidence doesn't fit their view of the world, I guess the default position of 'progressives' is to dismiss uncomfortable facts as 'a joke'.

Now you are just being ignorant. I gave you a specific piece of the website, and how the logic fails. Why can't you address that?

There were no uncomfortable facts. There were pieces of information that were spinned into sloppy and sexist conclusions.

The website looked like it was written by uneducated sexually frustrated adolecents that are pissed off that their women aren't in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant.:|
 
It seems possible that one possible reason that women more often get custody then men is because of the traditional belief that kids are "better off" with their mother, as she is the one "primarily responsible" for childrearing. It's more likely the traditonalist viewpoint rather than the feminist viewpoint that is responsible for the more women gaining custody than men.

So, I'd suggest the people that SHARE Fianance Guy's views about feminism are the responsible for the difficulty fathers may face in the family courts.
 
trevster2k said:
it's time for men to revolt. Gimme a break!!

Many of the men I know already are revolting. :D


Hey, someone had to say it. :wink:
 
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