IBB linked to an interesting article by Megan McArdle on Bloomberg View: How Hollywood Can Save Our Families. McArdle points out the enormous disadvantage broken homes create for children and our society. She proposes having Hollywood use its moral force to sell two parent families:
I’m not talking about sticking a few propaganda story lines into Very Special Episodes of some sitcom, which wouldn’t do a darn thing. Rather, I’m saying that if Hollywood actually believed that married two-parent families were overwhelmingly optimal, that would naturally shape what they wrote, in a way that would in turn probably shape what Americans believe, and do.
However, she notes that this would require liberal Hollywood to sell a socially conservative message:
But this is an inherently socially conservative message, and Hollywood is about the furthest thing you can name from socially conservative — our entertainment industry tends to send socially conservative messages only accidentally, as it did with “16 and Pregnant.”
This is true, but the problem is much bigger than even McArdle identifies. Even “social conservatives” aren’t truly comfortable with the message she would ask Hollywood to sell. When it comes to portraying husbands and fathers as fools and villains, even Spielberg can’t hold a candle to the movies modern Christians make. It isn’t just the left we would have to convince to value fathers and honor intact families. First we must convince the right to do so.
There is after all another way we could send a message to our entire culture that broken families are a bad thing; we could stop offering a cash reward for each broken family in the form of child support, or we could at least reduce the attractiveness of child support by greatly limiting it. If you want to understand how difficult selling intact families will be to social conservatives, try raising the idea of eliminating or greatly reducing child support to them. Child support is our modern alternative family structure, the structure we designed to replace marriage. Despite only existing for a few decades in its current form, child support has been profoundly successful in displacing marriage. Prior to child support single mothers and divorce were all but unheard of. Now both are extremely common and out of wedlock births continue to rapidly increase*.
Nearly all conservatives are very much in favor of intact families in theory, but when it comes to subsidizing the destruction of families conservatives are all but unmovable. The reason for this is conservatives are just as invested in divorce and single motherhood as empowerment for women as feminists are. As an astute commenter on a related post at Ricochet titled What Do the Ten Most Dangerous Cities in America Have in Common? noted:
On a side note, this post catalogs the effects of marriage; but not just any kind of marriage. It documents the need for the kind of marriage where parents, especially men, exert a substantial moral influence, and doing so in neighborhoods which maintain that moral influence. It’s not only that we have parents, but that those parents have a job to do, and society depends on them doing it effectively.
Child support, far more than no fault divorce, abortion, and contraception, is the legal force which underpins modern feminism. Child support is the solution to shotgun weddings, unhappy marriages, and strong husbands & fathers. No fault divorce is designed not just to destroy families, but to weaken husbands in all marriages. However child support is the economic arm which makes divorce an attractive option for wives, and therefore makes divorce a credible threat when there are children involved. Child support is also the incentive which makes it more attractive for single mothers to remain single than to marry the father.
In short, long before we convince Hollywood that marriage is sacred and fathers matter, we will have to convince conservatives and then moderates that this is true. By the time we get around to selling liberals on the importance of marriage and fathers we won’t need Hollywood’s help anyway. In theory it should be easiest to convince Christian conservatives that marriage is sacred, but realistically it will probably be secular conservatives who come around on this first. Merely being vocally ambivalent on the role of husbands and fathers is now at the extreme right of modern Christian culture. While convincing anyone, even conservatives, that marriage and fathers matter may seem impossible now, this will become easier as the full cost of the broken homes underwriting feminist “empowerment” becomes harder and harder to ignore. Eventually when the costs get high enough the unthinkable has a way of suddenly seeming obvious. The only question is how much pain we are collectively willing to endure before this happens.
*Correction: Out of wedlocks have remained flat since 2009.
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Pigs will fly before child support is repudiated. Way too much money in the trough. MGTOW is the response to all of this. Young guys are watching. They know when their dad is being hosed. I wonder how many have sworn to themselves that they’re not a chump.
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I was really getting into it over there with Iowaduck. Iowaduck’s basic premise is that marriage 1.0 subjugates women which is why Iowaduck like the unilateral divorce and child support model, even it means forever and ever, no more marriage. There is a greater good accomplished by destroying that which iowaduck believes is wrong and evil. Basically Dalrock, it doesn’t matter that God wants you to have headship, you should be ashamed of yourself for even believing in it (and so should God.)
Until these people stop voting, Western Civilization is done for….
Marcus, Shoot, I always thought I was supposed to have sex with the wife WHILE she did the laundry!
Damn!
This is what I said to Megan McArdle.
———————-
The problems are feminism. The cardinal virtue to the second wave of feminism is unilateral divorce law. This is used as a “threat point” to keep husbands in line, to give their wives marital “headship” in their marriage. Basically, he must do whatever she says OR ELSE she divoces him and takes half. The “state” besows upon the wife cash and prizes (the house, alimony, child support) at any moment she wishes to divorce her husband. This gives her the power. So now, an entire generation and half of young men who raised under “threat point” have learned NOT to marry. So, marriage simply doesn’t exist in significant portions of our working cl@ss. With only sticks in which to whack him and no carrots to entice him, there simply is no reason for men to marry.
Easy to explain. In 1930, feminism was a woman’s right to vote, not her right to unilaterally divorce her husband for no reason. Wives may have been miserably married but no judge would grant a divorce based on her misery. That was unlawful. Not one state in the United States had unilateral divorce laws in 1930. Today, all 50 do. So, judges are forced (by state law) to grant them.
So? Live a life of celibacy. Tough noogies if you’ll never in your life be able to support a child and family, I guess you’ll have to die a virgin. Ugly, short, stupid, uneducated men (who can not find stable work or a stable romantic relationship), have nothing financial or physical to offer a wife and (as a result) often live lonely, miserable lives of celibacy. I believe that ugly uneducated fat women do that as well. Perhaps (in our entirely hypergamous society that worships nonsense like 50 SoG) more people who can not support children, need to live celibate lives?
Its not about “norms.” Its about unilateral divorce law. Its about “threat point”, nothing else. That didn’t exist back in the day. It does today. Lo and behold, men aren’t marrying so you’ll have Elizabeth Bruenig write the cr@p she wrote ignoring the problem.
Young men do not want to marry and put a woman in state-sanctioned-authority over his earning power for the rest of his life. That is unilateral divorce law. It offers nothing to the man. Low and behold McMegan, our marriage rate is dropping like a rock and some women (even the most educated) don’t marry until they are in the late 30s or even early 40s (if at all.) This is not a coincidence. Why is this so hard for 320,000,000 Americans to understand? Hollywood can’t save marriage, Hollywood wanted to destroy it. They have succeeded by claiming this feminist driven “threat point” is a moral good. Hollywood is “doubling down” on its support of “threat point” with the recent ads on tv talking about domestic violence and anyone who argues against it.. well, that is the war on women. See how this goes?
We have “threat point.” As a result, a significant percentage of our country wll never marry. And that percentage ever growns. The only question we need to ask ourselves is if we really like what we have done in giving in to the feminist imperative and destroying marriage? I’ll tell you one thing, Christian men hate it.
———————–
She never responded. But her post was a d-mn near perfect reason why the world works better, red pill. I’ll get her….. I will.
And when I get her to leave the dark side of the force and to join us in civilization, she will have an impact on her readers greater than my comments.
Male birth control pill and home-ec for boys (redpill class MGTOW 101) With in a couple of years problem is solved. Women vote the west is doomed to civil war. the most likely solution.
Hollywood is only “liberal” when it comes to America.
When it comes to Hollywood’s favorite country, they are quite old-fashioned, quite patriotic, and quite nationalist.
One standard for me, another standard for thee.
I still remember how Dan Quayle was mocked for making an issue out of Hollywood promoting a single mother on TV. Now look at us.
I suspect that part of the challenge in getting people to consider eliminating the current version of child support is a tragedy of the commons issue. It’s easy to portray child support as being “in the best interest of the children” in any individual divorce case. After all, in such cases the divorce of these particular parents is (in a no-fault divorce world) a foregone conclusion. And the material benefit of child support for these particular children is acute, while the incentive it creates for others to divorce is diffuse. It’s easy for a person to envision a situation where he would accept that divorce (even if just legal divorce without remarriage) is inevitable. From there it’s easy to say that “in that particular scenario, child support would be critical, so we shouldn’t rule it out altogether.” And once you start evaluating child support on a case-by-case basis, it starts to look reasonable in each individual case.
And all of that is just for the people who are willing to consider the idea that “divorce is bad,” and “child support can incentivize divorce” in the first place.
There may be tactics to mitigate this, but it’s always a balancing act between making things more palatable while not giving up the moral high ground.
Defeating Hollywood is quite easy actually, but first, a little historical perspective:
Beginning in the 1920s, the outcry against Hollywood’s subversion of morals was so great that various forms of legislation — federal, state and local — were proposed as an antidote.
As a way of heading off this legislation, Hollywood’s Jews in 1934 entered into a voluntary agreement with the Legion of Decency, a Catholic operation. That agreement was known as the Production Code. The Catholics forced the issue by organizing boycotts at a time when the film industry was reeling from the effects of the stock market crash and their heavy indebtedness to the nation’s banks.
The most memorable and most effective boycott was organized by Cardinal Dougherty of Philadelphia, who forbade that city’s Catholics from watching movies in the city’s movie houses, which at the time were largely owned by Warner Brothers. His efforts created a situation in which Warner Brothers was losing $175,000 a week at the height of the depression.
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2013/01/the-sexual-subversion-of-america-part-1-of-2/
So there you have it guys, the solution to your problems: Starve the beast.
Hollywood actually wants families to be dysfunctional, Dalrock. Portraying intact families is the absolute LAST thing they want. Why? Apart from intact families being secure and therefore “boring”, Hollywood is run by a bunch of satanic scumbags.
They also know that they can sell their product – divorce fantasy – to women, who will eagerly snap it up. Demonising husbands and fathers is okay because Christian men won’t fight back. When Muslim men get attacked for any reason, they show up in front of some office, frothing at the mouth, demanding either change or blood vengeance.
While I don’t endorse the behaviour of Muslim men – they can’t discuss the remotest bit of their religion without death threats, they have a point. We give Hollywood too easy a ride.
I never thought about child support being the prop that most easily aids no-fault divorce. I doubt that it can change for the better until all of Western society collapses, but I fancy that a right-minded conservative might be able to start tinkering around the edges by tightening the conditions under which it is granted in the name of ‘welfare reform’.
It’s posts like this which bring me to repost this (which is similar to I have posted as a comment in similar posts).
Eighteen years, eighteen years
She got one of yo kids got you for 18 years
I know somebody paying child support for one of his kids
His baby momma’s car and crib is bigger than his
You will see him on TV Any Given Sunday
Win the Superbowl and drive off in a Hyundai
She was spose to buy ya shorty TYCO with ya money
She went to the doctor got lypo with ya money
She walking around looking like Micheal with ya money
Should of got that insured got GEICO for ya money
If you ain’t no punk holla We Want Prenup
We want prenup!, yeah
It’s something that you need to have
‘Cause when she leave yo ass she gone leave with half
Eighteen years, eighteen years
And on her eighteenth birthday he found out it wasn’t his
–Kanye West, “Gold Digger”
the best way to sell less child support is to encourage shared parenting. The best part is that their is no trickery involved. The importance of fathers in the lives of kids is real and documented. The message just has to be spread using the same “best interest of the child” context. Its already started. I know in Florida, that the non-custodial pays less child support the more time they spend with kids.
I’ve seen a couple small Hollywood studios try to make pro-morality movies & entertainment here In Cali. The sticking point is the same as all Christian fiction, an unwillingness to deviate far from Biblical narratives.
If these small studios would lay off the overt moralizing and show by-the-numbers action flicks, with no stronger messages than damsels in distress being rescued by hunky men, then they’d get a lot of good morality displayed while simultaneously banking lots of cash. It’s a good, proven formula and Hollywood is even neglecting it in their zeal for the feminist narrative. Huge blind spot! By contrast, Christophanies are NOT the way to do Christian fiction.That’s a BAD, proven formula.
Sigh, I should be an easy guy for Hollywood to please. Swordfights, gunfights, good guys win, bad guys bleed, hold the preaching, here’s ten bucks. These days, however, Vin Diesel’s Riddick is the most I can hope for.
If you Christian Hollywood types are reading this and want inspiration, I got one word: Westerns!
the best way to sell less child support is to encourage shared parenting. The best part is that their is no trickery involved. The importance of fathers in the lives of kids is real and documented. The message just has to be spread using the same “best interest of the child” context. Its already started. I know in Florida, that the non-custodial pays less child support the more time they spend with kids.
Sure, but feminists are against that. There are several states where the local NOW chapters have campaigned against legislative changes that would create a presumption of shared custody. Their “reasons” generally are (1) it would keep abusive men in close proximity to their victims (which, of course all of the legislation provided would be exceptions to the presumption anyway) and (2) it would act to make divorced women poorer than they are now.
The second reason is where the action is. They’re right, of course. It would work that way. But the point of the custody award is supposed to be the best interests of the child, and in no way is that served by seeing one parent not very much and being effectively raised by the other parent. The interest that serves is that of the custodial parent — almost always the mother. Organized feminism knows this and is prepared to fight. It will be difficult, therefore, even to make progress on something as sensible as shared parenting, with the well-funded, well-connected and very aggressive feminist political organizations being consistently against it.
@Novaseeker
Difficult, but not impossible. We have cold hard facts on our side and the entire black community as a glaring example. As the aliment of the black community start showing up in white communities, governments will have to act. Feminism be damn. We just have to keep beating the drum. Nothing happens overnight.
I tried to do a little drum beating myself. In response tho Sandberg creating the ad with nba stars to #leanintogether, I created #leaninNowtogetherParents and tweeted it to all those who appeared in the ad. Included in the tweet was a link to the avfm story about how NOW opposed shared parenting. I was hoping one of the players would retweet, but i didn’t happen. I also tweeted it to Elam, Now and Sandberg. It didn’t work this time, but I will try again whenever there is another opportunity.
We have to keep trying.
You know the conservatives are getting desperate if they are calling on Hollywood to save the day. Hollywood has already shown you the future. Its name is “Big Love” . Women don’t need men as Providers and they would rather share a high value man than compromise. So this is the obvious solution; especially with high amounts of unmarried women over 40.
For the younger men, expect more gotcha type laws where if you live with a woman for a some period of time you are considered married.
Of course neither provides boys with caring male role models. But society does not care about boys any more than it cares about men.
So I got the impetus to do some more tweeting. I you guys want to help, and Darlock doesn’t mind me posting this here, Tweet this to whomever you can:
Someone tell NOW to start helpin divorced dads to #LeanInTogether instead of http://www.avoiceformen.com/mens-rights/opposing-shared-parenting-the-feminist-track-record/ #LeanInNOWtogetherParents
Iron Man will never fly to save the thousands of fetuses aborted every day.
Superman is not brave enough to stop a women from killing her own children.
Spiderman will never swoop down on a web to keep a woman from stealing the home and pension.
Batman will never be seen riding his batmobile on his way to shutting down an abortion clinic to save hundreds of children.
Thor will never be seen preventing the state from blowing up a family.
Why is this?
Also, why do they all wear their underwear on the outside?
lzozoozozoz
The odd thing about child support is that a mother can effectively cohabit with another man while the original father continues to pay support.
It’s also interesting that cohabitation (particularly in Commonwealth countries) can be used to impute common law marriage at a woman’s behest but can’t be used by a child support paying father to prove that his ex wife is effectively in a common law marriage for the cessation of payments.
Simple application of the law in jurisdictions with common law marriage would go a long way to make branch swinging unattractive for a lot of people.
Megan is naïve and transposes cause and effect. Hollywood is not going to reverse course and save the day . Hollywood is driving the ship. Hollywood IS the culture. Hollywood has half the population thinking that gays are 25% of the population and that the Defense of Marriage Act was just like the attack dogs at Selma.
What did you guys think all those “Women’s Studies” departments are all about? They are all engaged in the business of hard core, Marxist inspired, radical, feminist Utopia, egalitarian style social change. They make sure that movies showing happy two parent families are poorly rated and criticized.
At the same time they make sure that almost all movies show families breaking up and this is NORMAL and good. That single moms frivorcing and trading up is normal and expected. That having babies for the first time at age 44 is normal and common. That fathers are a joke. They are not necessary. The in-charge mother working 100 hours a week and raising a family while the stupid, or drunk, or at least DEADBEAT ex-husband interferes with her joy. We know that because it is in in every single movie.
Hollywood created this caricature which drove the culture in this direction and it is not reversing course. Thus, Enjoy the Decline.
TLDR: Hollywood is controlled by the Feminist Departments and their well funded allies who make sure movies primarily show abusive fathers. Drunk fathers. Absent fathers. Kidults. Jokes. Hilarious morons. Incompetent losers. Dangerous criminals. Sexual predators. Child abusers. Rapists.
Great point in the last paragraph about who it is we need to target with this pro-family message. Why blame liberals for not being conservative? We should instead blame nominal conservatives for being de facto liberals. This touches on something that has bothered me for a long time about many of the “conservatives” I know, especially those who are Baby Boomers. I think people make a mistake when they see the divide between social conservatives and liberals as a religious/secular divide because it is actually a rebellious/compliance divide. It seems their views are not motivated as much by values and convictions as much as compliance. Liberals are rebellious at heart and are all about demolishing norms, convention, and authority. Social conservatives are, in my opinion, really reverent and unquestioning when it comes to norms, convention, and authority. In 2015, when the ultimate authority is the individual, norms are all according to secular values, and the rules state that above all else, you do not judge anyone according to any standards, the compliant are all too happy to goose-step to that. Even if they are the types of people who go to church, say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays,” and vote Republican.
More than one can imagine. The key words here are “we” and “collectively”.
The “we” who are providing the resources are different from the “we” who are receiving the resources, so as long as the receiving “we” continues to receive enough to offset the social ills (in their minds), then the collective “we” are screwed.
The only solution is to stop providing resources.
Starve the beast, let the system collapse on itself.
This is an excellent post. As one who has experienced the miseries of marriage and divorce, I’ve come to believe that marriage is already dead– we’re just beginning the autopsy. Too many conventions and too much decency have been lost. This half-hearted appeal to Hollywood executives therefore seems an odd way of reviving the corpse. Combat dating, spinsters, and MGTOW are the norm. Take note, beta lurkers.
question about marriage and dating
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=951413
—
http://voxday.blogspot.ca/2015/03/expect-more-of-this.html
A wise man once said:
Washington is like Hollywood for ugly people, and Hollywood is politics for idiots.
While I agree that it’s easier to convince secular conservatives concerning fathers than christians, I doubt we will see any political change for the better. Political change always seems for the worse. They have an agenda that doesn’t include God, cursed is the man that leans on the arm of flesh.
You would think common sense would prevail but the forces at work will only trade in real power, and my guess is we will only see an exchange for the betterment of fathers at the expense of Christianity. I hope I’m wrong about this.
Hollywood will never promote intact, two-parent families as superior, because that would be “judging” single mother families as inferior.
Perhaps some here remember the “Murphy Brown” hysteria of some 25 years ago? Dan Quayle had said that two-parent families were better, and TV’s “Murphy Brown” (a sitcom character) read a speech as part of the show, lecturing to Dan Quayle, stating that “families come in all shapes, sizes, and colors.”
Then there’s the issue of what is a two-parent family? Are not same-sex couples as good as heterosexual couples? Are not co-habitating couples (mom and her boyfriend) as good as married couples? Hollywood would say yes.
Hipster Racist: “Hollywood is only ‘liberal’ when it comes to America. When it comes to Hollywood’s favorite country, they are quite old-fashioned, quite patriotic, and quite nationalist.”
You mean Israel? You’re right about that. I remember a “West Wing” episode, written by Aaron Sorkin. The president (played by Martin Sheen?) suggested that Israel abide by the same nuclear disarmament standard that it insisted apply to Iran and Iraq. So a character on the show lectured to Sheen about why Israel is morally justified in having nukes while its opponents do not.
Yes, the liberals of Hollywood are all for “no nukes” for the West — Israel excepted.
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In the end, that which cannot be sustained will stop. The USA is bankrupt — an imperial system can either have the dole for plebians or a decent army, but not both without borrowing, and you cannot borrow for that long. (I live in NZ: we have the dole but not the army as we have a 1200 mile moat).
The divorce industry cannot imprison all the men. And when enough men are out of work (which is happening in this depression) then jailing and depriving people of their licences to work… stops working too.
What Megan is seeing is that the rich continue to do well and raise their kids in a fairly functional way (ignoring the trainwrecks on reality TV) while the poor move into greater dysfunction. When the socail welfare system you have — which is not that generous compared with Australasia and the EU — breaks (and it will) then the functional will protect their children while the dysfunctional will try to take everyone down.
This will destroy the apostate churches that have aligned themselves with the current worship of the progressive ideology (and it’s high priestesses of the church of feminism). But the true church will remain.
And us? It is not time to align with Hollywood, but to treat it as akin to Babylon, and flee.
I long ago observed that Americans tended to treat the latest movies as having moral authority, as if the latest Eddie Murphy flick carried the same sort of moral imperative as Milton, Shakespeare or The Bible. This struck me as very strange for I don’t think anyone ever thought Pinewood (Boreham Wood or Elstree) was looked to for moral guidance, but then you do not allow an establishment of religion (and your President is not God’s representative on earth).
Wait. What are you suggesting as the alternative to child support, no money at all or forcing men to marry through legal force? One hurts the child, and the other sounds like fascism.
In the past I’m guessing men chose to marry voluntarily after getting a girl pregnant due to social pressure and the fear of “God”. (I don’t imagine a father would literally commit murder with a shotgun if the boy didn’t marry his daughter.)
But our society is so selfish and wild now that there is little shame left to motivate people. Now it’s cool to have a “baby mama” (a term that interestingly originated in black inner-city culture) or to make jokes like, “I have no children … that I know of.”
There are several alternatives to child support. The first would be to scrap no-fault divorce entirely. That way child support would work as originally designed, and apply only in cases of abuse, abandonment, or adultery, because those would be the only cases where divorce would be possible.
Alternately, ability to financially support the child could be taken into consideration when awarding physical custody. If you want the children to come with you, you must demonstrate your ability to provide for them.
Those are just a couple possibilities. There are more.
A guy whom I have known for decades has just had his wife announce that they are going to get divorced. He is an extremely decent and honorable guy, but hopelessly naive about the ways of women. He graduated in STEM from a top-10 university, and he has a good well-paying career. He is also a very loving and supportive father.
I do not know her well. The impression I got was that she never loved him. Previously, she would do almost anything that he asked, but she did not seem to do those things will love in her heart. It seemed a little odd to me.
The two of them got married when they were in their mid-30s, which was about 9 years ago. They have two children; one just turned 4, and the other is 7.
Several months ago, he inherited some money. The amount was not huge, but perhaps enough to largely pay off their mortgage.
What I suspect happened is the following. She wanted to have children, and her clock was ticking loudly. She latched on to him as a good reliable provider. She then did everything to get married and to have children shortly thereafter. Now that the children are old enough, and she can rely on substantial payments for alimony and child support, she divorces him. Simply put, I suspect that the marriage was a set up: she was using him, and from the beginning, she expected to leave him.
She is wrecking his life. She is seriously harming her own children. Yet she seemingly cares only about herself. And she will be payed for doing all that—via alimony and child support.
@ S.Chan —
I think very few women are so mercenary as to deliberately marry someone they are already planning to divorce. Some undoubtedly do — there still are gold digger types, of course. But more commonly a woman thinks she can make it work even though she isn’t very sexually attracted to the guy, and then finds that once the kids come along, she wants out because what was really drawing her to the guy to begin with — steady support for having kids — has now been obtained and the remainder can be obtained via the courts, and she is even less sexually attracted to him and frustrated about that than when she first married him. The effect is stronger in the “alpha widow” type who marries because she realizes she can’t get one of her AFs to marry her, but I think it happens in a lot of other women as well — they can’t get arousal and comfort from the same man, choose comfort for purposes of having kids, and then ditch when the discomfort of not being aroused at all becomes too much to bear. And the state happily subsidizes all of this, of course — why wouldn’t it? It prevents the state from paying for the kids, after all, and keeps the kids (and future tax payers) being born. Win win for the state.
I think guys like your friend are unfortunate in that they got married when all of this stuff was less out in the open and less clear. Information wasn’t as available. So they kind of got stuck at a bad time — when open hypergamy was just coming into full bloom, but the manosphere didn’t properly exist yet and information was not really available. I still have some sympathy for such guys, if they didn’t act more stupidly than average. It was hard to act RP when the RP wasn’t a concept yet. But for guys now, much less sympathy, because the info is out there now. Guys are now more or less deliberately hiding their heads in the sand when there is a lot of contra messaging, even now spilling over into the mainstream media — that makes me have less sympathy for guys who are now making the decision your friend did a decade ago.
‘I still remember how Dan Quayle was mocked for making an issue out of Hollywood promoting a single mother on TV. Now look at us.’
Same here. That was Murphy Brown.
‘The two of them got married when they were in their mid-30s, which was about 9 years ago. They have two children; one just turned 4, and the other is 7.’
I imagine that’s the guy she settled for because of her biological clock and not so much that she loved him. Women in the early-mid 30s are trying to get that second part of life after they are done with the school, career, party life. That’s the sad part…when women are doing all these things only for themselves (having sex with men they’ll never marry, divorcing the guys they marry who have money). They don’t care what they do to their children.
Opus, “I don’t think anyone ever thought Pinewood (Boreham Wood or Elstree) was looked to for moral guidance”. Perhaps not. Too expensive and intermittent.
Brits take their precepts from the relentless, tightly-scripted and policed drivel of “Coronation Street” and “East Enders”, both of which are stunningly inaccurate portrayals of the alleged “commooonities” they claim to represent.
I can’t decide if it’s deliberate pleb-baiting fun, or just posh art-school production wombles being completely unable to grasp the mindset and indeed the physical and environmental conditions of us morlocks.
Even the Bible says that you can’t game a contentious woman into submission:
A constant dripping on a day of steady rain
And a contentious woman are alike;
He who would restrain her restrains the wind, And grasps oil with his right hand.
Proverbs 27:15-16
There are two main categories of child support with radically different implications:
1. support paid for by frivorced provider men
2. support paid for by never-married alpha studz
We WANT alpha studz to keep paying their share. The temptation in society is huge to let them off the hook, re-enter the dating pool masquerading as baggage-free non-parents and transfer the costs to provider-beta taxpayers.
For case (2) anyway, I don’t see this as being a feminist issue. They would just as soon the money come from your taxes as Mr. Studmuffin’s wage garnishments. Pre-welfare state, men could get thrown in jail for failing to support their children – because they were making them a public charge! See here:
http://www.childsupportanalysis.co.uk/information_and_explanation/world/history_usa.htm
I disagree with Fiddlesticks. Ban all formal child support and you will see a big drop in ‘alpha studz’ spawn.
I also don’t believe that many men will stand by and see their children starve to death. They will step in and contribute, but they will want something in return. They will insist they can see their children. They may even live with the mother. Who knows? Perhaps they will even get married.
Prior to the post-war implementation of Beveridge and all that, the unmarried girl’s family often passed off the baby as a late “oopsie!” of her mother’s. And kept a closer eye on her amounting pretty much to house-arrest, until they could retread her hymen and pass her off on some mug, which was do-able due to there being almost nowhere else for her to go apart from the workhouse or reform school, Magdalene laundries and the like. No stamp, no dole. End of.
It was also not unremarkable for a ruined “good girl” to find herself alone and teetering on the parapet over t’canal, to be found at daylight, face down in the filthy water. A very traditional way out for “fallen women”, as they obviously didn’t have their own secluded oven to stick their heads in, like housewives.
It was a rough old world, probably inconceivable to the ultra-privileged promulgators of Nth-wave feminist pish, except as myths and legends to further the Cause.
“Even the Bible says that you can’t game a contentious woman into submission:
A constant dripping on a day of steady rain
And a contentious woman are alike;
He who would restrain her restrains the wind, And grasps oil with his right hand.
Proverbs 27:15-16”
..which is a direct refutation of the “win them over without a word” heresy from Caleb.
@xtc
I also don’t believe that many men will stand by and see their children starve to death
That’s not what how it would go down in 21st Century America.
Some feminists, for obvious reasons, are already chattering about how UNFAIR it is for vibrant young single men to be burdened with this. They want to rescue these sweet, soft-spoken misunderstood rebels from this horrible coercion! (Ah, but they are still very much in favor of frivorced salarymen being required to pay, pay, pay.) They are driving the bus, and would simply replace wage garnishments with Uncle Sugar should they get their way. See this feminist’s essay for an example of this line of thinking:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/is-forced-fatherhood-fair/?_r=1
That’s the sad part…when women are doing all these things only for themselves (having sex with men they’ll never marry, divorcing the guys they marry who have money). They don’t care what they do to their children.
It’s incentives, really. Women are in the catbird’s seat at the moment — full access to their sexual strategy in a way their sex has never, ever had before (wasn’t the technology/economy to facilitate this kind of independence ever before), so they are gorging themselves at the trough. That’s just human frailty. It’s sinful, of course, but humans tend to behave precisely as badly as they are able to, and that’s what we see here. If men had the same thing available to us, many men would be behaving the same way (and the men who *do* have it available to them under this system — the alphas and so on — generally *do* behave the same way). Humans are naturally greedy and don’t do what’s right naturally.
“Hollywood will never promote intact, two-parent families as superior, because that would be ‘judging’ single mother families as inferior.”
That’s the subtext of Boyhood.
Quite right, he’s satan’s representative.
‘I still remember how Dan Quayle was mocked for making an issue out of Hollywood promoting a single mother on TV. Now look at us.’
Dan Quayle was mocked because he was a pussy-whipped dipshit.
@Fiddlesticks
That article is basically about legal parental surrender,
which is mra. It is not Christian, but in the age of abortion,
It is very much fair and equal.
In a previous post from several days ago, someone mentioned Lewis Termin’s longitudinal study from the mid 20th Century. The commenter mentioned one of the conclusions of that study was a 5 year shorter life expectancy for children from single mother families. I previously read about Lewis Termin and his long term study concerning children with genious level IQs. However, I could not find anything online concerning the conclusion of a shorter life expecancy, which actually didn’t surprise me. I suspect the conclusion is accurate because I know children raised by single mothers tend to have lower educational levels. And I know that lower education correlates to lower life expectancy. If this isn’t a reason not to obtain a frivilous divorce, I don’t know what is.
Hollywood will never promote anything but itself. It’s basically the world’s ad agency — and that’s all it ever will be. Anyone who thinks it can propagandize good values is deluded at best.
Decency is the result of strong families. There exist strong families in the world, but most families are not strong families without community involvement and legal support. This is why Dalrock’s article is so prescient and important: it names the actual culprit (the child support and alimony agencies in all western governments) and describes, succinctly, the ideological flaws in the state which are used to destroy families rather than build them up.
The best first step toward sanity would simply be a repeal of the VAWA laws, and to deny child support to anyone (regardless of sex) who left the family unit voluntarily. Divorce with child support could remain in effect for a parent who saw his or her spouse convicted of a serious crime, or for a parent who saw his or her spouse abandon the home (the kids stay with the home in every case). That wouldn’t solve the problem, of course, but it would probably cut many of the worst rent-seeking wimminz off at the knees.
Modern divorce, with child support and alimony, is as different from Biblical divorce as modern marriage is as removed from Biblical marriage. What Christ was discussing about divorce back then, such as tossing a wife and mother of your children out on the street for no good reason, is not like what we have today.
Still, the admonition against any divorce make a heck of a lot of sense if you have children. A couple with children should stay together as long as they can.
@jg
That article is basically about legal parental surrender, which is mra.
Actually, the mra position would be that divorced husbands should have this right as well. In contrast, the feminist viewpoint espoused in the New York Times link is very clear: the current system should NOT let up an inch on divorced/frivorced husbands. Single men are the ones she believes to be rightfully entitled to a break. (She specifically cites male immigrant students as a sympathetic example.)
Boxer @ 9:34 am:
“Anyone who thinks [Hollywood] can propagandize good values is deluded at best.”
It could happen, partly because it did for a time and partly because there’s money to be made. Also, it needs to be cleaned up or shut down anyway because society can’t tolerate such a fifth column.
GBFM @March 16, 2015 at 10:00 pm –
Why is this?
Also, why do they all wear their underwear on the outside?
Because they only fight evil as defined by the new morality which is outlined by political correctness which came about by giving direct political power to women which is a direct result of feminism which was motivated by the feminine imperative and driven by a bernankified oligarchy. That’s my answer to both questions (lzozlzloz).
Why is this?
It is easier to confront non-evil, non threatening windmills than it is to confront real evil.
And since it is the nature of man to give himself meaning through struggle, made up BS “struggles” are better than boredom.
earl says:
March 17, 2015 at 7:43 am
Even the Bible says that you can’t game a contentious woman into submission:
A constant dripping on a day of steady rain
And a contentious woman are alike;
He who would restrain her restrains the wind, And grasps oil with his right hand.
Proverbs 27:15-16
Needs repeating. If you are thinking of getting married, make her good and mad before you tie the knot. Usually for western girls all you’ll have to do is disagree with her. Then observe how she treats you. Does she respect you? Does she apologize? Try to remember, has she ever apologized for anything? Has she ever admitted that she was wrong? Observe how she treats her father. Would you want to be treated that way by your wife?
Yep, you should thoroughly test any women before investing in her. Push a few buttons, get her hot under the collar on political topics. Make sure to retest her regularly and see if she is consistent in her use of judgment. If she throws a fit, you’re best rid of her now.
And the father thing is incredibly important. Make note of how her mother treats her father as well.
The evil that we confront on a daily basis is banal. Abortions go on everyday. We have no way of stopping it. Feminist rebellion has to reap it’s own wicked harvest, I reckon. If you are a student of the Bible, then you know that when the wicked rule, righteous men are hunted down and killed. Don’t kid yourselves……everything we say here is recorded. We will have to pay for our speech. I’m personally okay with that. I want my name written among those who mourned the slaughter of the innocent. As has been pointed out before, anyone who accepts the idea that abortion is a right will end up paying for that before God. If you want to get an idea of just how bad it’s going to get, read the Bible. As for dealing with a rebellious woman, divine wisdom says to consider your steps wisely. Don’t marry anyone with feminist leanings. That basically covers American women. Sure, some dont, but most do.
If you’re thinking of a young woman, remember, everything you see her do means something. Sad to say, most young women are feral. No true natural affection. Yeppers, they can give a good impression, but, as the scriptures say, her heart isn’t with you. Red pill is hard won knowledge that other men have suffered for. Do yourselves a favor, because she won’t.
‘ If you are thinking of getting married, make her good and mad before you tie the knot. Usually for western girls all you’ll have to do is disagree with her.’
It’s even simpler than that…be a man. The lionshare of western women hate men.
Plus the roundabout way GBFM has been trying to say around here…your ‘game’ isn’t going to make a rebellious woman submit. It doesn’t matter if you dominate her in the bedroom or do the chores for her to make her life easier or admit you are the stupid one when she makes the mistake. Women are making the choice to be rebellious of their own free wills. Submission isn’t a natural thing for anybody to do…and I’ve come to believe it takes God’s grace and the free will to accept it in order to submit.
Feral young women will not submit. They aren’t wired that way. And, make no mistake, they’ve been programmed to act this way. They are taught from infancy that men are animals. So, if that’s what they really believe, then you can see why they act the way that they do. Feminists lie. That’s what they do. You see, scripture points out that jealousy and envy are rottenness in the bone. I understand that to mean that once they get that way, there’s no changing. They’re permanently warped. Gentlemen, conceal yourselves from the coming storm!
I enjoy reading TFH. I really want to believe that he is right at 10.33pm but I don’t.
1. The state is not going to pay for children if there is a man who might. Certainly, in England, getting men to pay for a woman’s bastard goes back centuries without preventing G.B. from becoming top nation.
2. False Rape allegations (and the like) have always been brushed under the carpet.. There are more than enough men to go round – even something like the slaughter of WW1 was only a temporary glitch. There are simply too many White-Knights ready to step up to the plate
Both these evils long predate what passes for Democracy.
I am of the belief that there are a substantial number of liberals who would prioritize social spending for single mothers and children (in that order) above absolutely everything else. That includes our military, our borders, our infrastructure, our National debt, and a 99% “progressive” tax rate. We are dealing with faithless selfish people who literally do not have any boundaries other than what makes them feel good for the moment.
I believe that broken homes produce broken children NOT because of an absence of a father but because of too much of the mother. I think that boys from single mother houses are reacting to too much oestrogen in their environment. These boys see the true nature of women up close and all their bad behaviour is them reacting consciously or unconsciously against what Rollo Tomassi calls The Feminine Imperative.
@Opus
I have never been accused of “rape” and have absolutely *ZERO* expectations I ever will be.
The real struggle is obvious, but it is quite easier to blame young women (older women are a loss, write them off.)
You all know exactly what I’m saying, too.
Is GBFM right? Maybe – or maybe wrong. Maybe focus less on young, silly, immature girls, and instead focus on the quite cynical and quite knowing Hollywood producers that create this culture?
Or the pastor-whores-actors that want in on the action?
No, that would require a minimum of courage.
Let’s blame teenage girls for being horny and not particularly mature.
Caleb – and preachers like him – are raking in big bucks.
Which non-gamey Manly Christian Men are standing up to his tripe?
Nah – it’s so much easier to pick on young girls, isn’t it?
@Red Pill Latecomer
Oh, I don’t know. I’m not particularly saying anything about the state of Israel occupying Palestine, per se.
But isn’t it interesting that “Hollywood producers” make films like “The Tollbooth” – suggesting that Jewish women marry Jewish men, and protect their culture …
yet at the same time, these same Hollywood producers promote interracial, even homosexual “relationships” for the non-Jews?
Let’s face it – “Churchians” would rather pick on silly teenage girls than actually show an ounce of courage of real issues like this.
Scared? Admit it, cowards.
@TFH
Legitimacy is the problem. The old system came with a great deal of stigma and was designed to cover a bare minimum. It wasn’t designed to substitute for marriage or even the woman keeping good relationship with the father. Now not only is there no stigma for the unwed mother, but the only moral question when a child is born out of wedlock is will the father pay his child support. If he does, all is moral. In the movie Courageous when one of the men is found to have fathered a child out of wedlock, the solution was not for him to seek the woman out and marry her. The solution was to write a check, the first of many. Child support, along with romantic love, is our new view of sexual/family morality, and this is true for Christians and non Christians alike. No one cares about divorce or births out of wedlock. It wouldn’t be right to judge. But if the child support checks don’t flow as ordered, that is a moral outrage.
‘Maybe focus less on young, silly, immature girls, and instead focus on the quite cynical and quite knowing Hollywood producers that create this culture?
Or the pastor-whores-actors that want in on the action?’
Uh…have you not been around here? Fireproof? Mark Driscoll?
@earl
This is not a criticism of the host himself, but his commenters.
Pardon me – I find it outright hilarious we are talking about “Hollywood” yet no one is mentioning the obvious, er, “religious” aspect of “Hollywood.”
The manosphere – Christian or non – spends most of its time complaining that teenage girls are silly, horny, and don’t make particularly good decisions – as if we could expect otherwise, given “Hollywood.”
Let’s do a scientific survey – how many comments on this blog complain about “women” – vs. how many point to the actual creators of this culture – and the hired “Churchian” hands?
No, really – let’s count the words *in this thread alone*
‘Let’s do a scientific survey – how many comments on this blog complain about “women” – vs. how many point to the actual creators of this culture – and the hired “Churchian” hands?’
To me they all have the same root cause…rebellion. We have a culture that promotes and encourages rebellion. We have many Churchians promoting rebellion. So it’s no surprise that women listens to all that rebellion and then takes that advice or influence to their men.
@TFH
4) It is always a percentage of a man’s income, rather than any cap. A rich man cannot escape being ruined.
In Texas, there is a cap. Only the non-custodial parent’s first $7,500/month in net income is taken into account. However, this can get ratcheted upward if the child has been accustomed to a certain lifestyle. So once again never-married guys will have a better chance at keeping their payments reasonable than a well-intentioned family man who put the kids in private school.
http://www.leonardmrothfamilylaw.com/Family-Law/Child-Support.shtml
Lawyerly child support question: if a woman wants to get money from a “dead beat dad” (or just any dad) she has to get a court order from a judge, yes? So lets say a woman goes to a judge and tells the judge who the father is and who should be paying her. If the judge offers a ruling (without the father even being in the courtroom) and the ruling is for the man to pay her some sum of money each month, is the father entitled to force a paternity test to verify the child is his BEFORE he cuts a check? Second question, if the dad has been paying a check for (say) two years and they go on one of those daytime talk shows and he finds out then that he is NOT the father and the mother goes running off the stage in horror, can the man sue the mother for two years of child support checks that she cashed that he shouldn’t have sent her? I don’t know the laws on these thing (thank God) and I guess this could vary from state to state.
I am of the belief that there are a substantial number of liberals who would prioritize social spending for single mothers and children (in that order) above absolutely everything else.
Almost seconded. I would modify the above statement to the following: I believe there is an overwhelming number of female voters (left and right) and a substantial number of male voters (left and right) who will prioritize social spending for women.
From what I have seen men and women on both sides of the political spectrum are feminist and adhere to the Feminine Imperative. Money to enable the “independence” of women is a top priority, and money for children is almost always another way to get money for women.
If the judge offers a ruling (without the father even being in the courtroom) and the ruling is for the man to pay her some sum of money each month, is the father entitled to force a paternity test to verify the child is his BEFORE he cuts a check?
That depends on the state. Some states have tolling statutes that require a man to disclaim paternity within a certain number of days from the date he is placed on the birth cert. A woman has a hard time claiming CS from a man not on the birth cert, so the birth cert is key.
Second question, if the dad has been paying a check for (say) two years and they go on one of those daytime talk shows and he finds out then that he is NOT the father and the mother goes running off the stage in horror, can the man sue the mother for two years of child support checks that she cashed that he shouldn’t have sent her?
Varies by state, but in most places that would be “time barred” — in other words, the time period to disclaim paternity would have expired and he’s SOL. As far as the state is concerned, he’s the dad, whether bio or not (the laws are not based on bio paternity, per se, but the birth cert).
Agree with Earl upthread: In an LTR / marriage, Game enables a man to manage a woman, he cannot lead her until or unless she submits to follow him. In Bible terms, he can’t be the head of the family when she’s contending for that role, too. There’s only one steering wheel in the car, as well (note for slow readers, this last sentence is an analogy, there’s no need to brag on your infallible driving skills to the rest of us…).
Game enables management, not leadership or headship. But management beats the heck out of supplication, every single time, so for many men it’s a huge improvement.
@Anon Reader
I think there is something else in play, at least on the margins. For many wives the idea of following their husband is terrifying. If Game gives them a taste of following that is actually enjoyable it can help them start to rethink their attitudes. This is only on the margins though, and would be easy to overstate.
Nova,
Second question, if the dad has been paying a check for (say) two years and they go on one of those daytime talk shows and he finds out then that he is NOT the father and the mother goes running off the stage in horror, can the man sue the mother for two years of child support checks that she cashed that he shouldn’t have sent her?
Whoa. So he finds out he is NOT the dad, not only can he NOT get his money back (can’t get blood from a stone so to speak) but the court would still mandate that he continue paying child support money to her after it was proven chemically and scientifically that she cuckolded him?
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Great article!
@ Novaseeker, 6:58 am
Perhaps you are right that she did not plan to divorce in advance. I would greatly like to think that. Thank you for this; I feel much better with your alternative.
Even so, she is wrecking his life and seriously harming her own children—as well as breaking her marriage vows. And her doing all that is paid for via alimony and child support.
“Nah – it’s so much easier to pick on young girls, isn’t it?”
It’s not either/or.
My experience with the rising generation is that young girls (and boys, for that matter) respond well to competent leadership, and struggle without it. For various reasons, there is a vacuum of competent leadership from their elders that SJW types (and worse) have exploited, and continue to exploit.
‘For many wives the idea of following their husband is terrifying.’
Well for many women the idea of following a man is terrifying…and they are encouraged by the many things we’ve talked about NOT to do it. I give game the credit much I would give credit to a bandaid over a shotgun wound. The bigger issue is widespread rebellion in women encouraged by churchians and society.
Dalrock:
I think there is something else in play, at least on the margins. For many wives the idea of following their husband is terrifying. If Game gives them a taste of following that is actually enjoyable it can help them start to rethink their attitudes.
Interesting thought, and while not easily tested it has some validity. At the very least, if Gaming a wife tones down her rebellion to any degree it might create a little mental space for her to reconsider. If the issue is anger, maybe dial it back. If the issue is contempt, ditto.
The flip side might be true as well; a man who starts walking back from supplication by applying Game, however inconsistently and hesitantly, is also giving himself a taste of leadership, even if only by accident. At the very least he’s pushing back against his own mental “status quo”.
This is only on the margins though, and would be easy to overstate.
Hmm, yes, but I think it’s not unusual for change to start at the margins. Sometimes that’s where the stakes are lowest, or the leverage is highest, etc.
I hear you @Hipster Racist, But seriously, we need to do something about all these evil teenage girls and the “churchian” infiltration of Hollywood. Don’t you know Jesus called churchians the spawn of the devil? It says it right here in my New Twitterized Living translation.
There is another problem: there is such a huge, lucrative government bureaucracy built up around child support, that public sector unions would likely fight to stop any changes that would threaten that gravy train.
Wifey is leaving me for another man. When she told me this, she said that before we were married it was a choice between him and me and she chose me. All I knew about the guy at the time was that he had a long term girlfriend to whom he would not commit. His girlfriend left him shortly thereafter to have a family with another guy.
Now I would commit to her and give her kids, he wouldn’t, but he is more fun, more alpha, whatever. This information was available at the time. Premeditated? It walks and talks like a duck, all I’m saying.
If you read history, you’ll become much more jaded. If it looked like Hollywood was a force for moral good in the past, it is only because it was beneficial for it to play the part. Nothing has really changed in that regard. Hollywood is a mirror, held up to us, reflecting our own desublimated fantasies. We have to take some responsibility for the state of things.
You sound like Theodor Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School here. Their aesthetic critiques included a hatred of anything that was popular. I like some of Adorno’s work, but really, just because lots of people like something isn’t evidence that it’s bad or trashy.
I’d argue that there’s nothing really wrong with escapism, and providing escapist entertainment isn’t fifth columnist behavior (even a trashy Hollywood film is better for society than drugs and alcohol, for example).
“I’d argue that there’s nothing really wrong with escapism, and providing escapist entertainment isn’t fifth columnist behavior”
Agreed, but having seen Hollywood up close in Los Angeles I’m convinced the industry is completely infested with Communists. It’s a natural home for them because their agenda is advanced primarily through deceit and lies.
There will always be porn & fringe politics in film. I get that and know better than to reenact Prohibition. My comment about “cleaning up or shutting down” was more about charging the industry’s members with sodomy and sedition as needed than controlling what the industry produces. That’s rule of law, not Frankfurt School.
I see no difference between yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater and telling wives how awesome divorcing their husbands can be.