I’ve quoted from the Duluth Model document Countering Confusion about the Duluth Model in several posts, and the more I look at it the more astounded I am as to just how open the Duluth Model organization is regarding their philosophy and their goals. This is a document intended to refute criticisms against the model, and is published on the organization’s official website (theduluthmodel.org). The document opens with (all emphasis below are mine):
Recently, the “Duluth Model” of working with men who batter has received serious criticism, despite being the pre-eminent model internationally. Much of the criticism is based on flawed research that is contradicted by other better-designed, more comprehensive studies. Here the authors respond directly to misinformation generated by 1) a 2003 study from the National Institute of Justice of the U.S. Department of Justice; 2) an analysis of batterer treatment models by Babcock, Green, and Robie (2002); and 3) unsubstantiated criticism of the philosophy underlying the Duluth Model by Dutton and Corvo (2006). The authors, both of whom have worked with the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in Duluth, Minnesota, rebut inaccurate assumptions and myths about what the model is and how it works and challenge the ethics, as well as the efficacy, of avoiding criminal justice sanctions and relying solely on resource-intensive mental health treatments for batterers. Changing historically entrenched battering behavior is difficult, the authors explain, but the Duluth Model prioritizes victim safety and autonomy.
For the purpose of this post, I’ll focus on their response to Dutton and Corvo, which begins on page four with an outline of the first set of charges the Duluth Model organization wants to set the record straight on:
Critical Review of Dutton and Corvo
In their 2006 article, “Transforming a Flawed Policy : A Call to Revive Psychology and Science in Domestic Violence Research and Practice,” Donald Dutton and Kenneth Corvo grossly misrepresent the Duluth curriculum when they write “according to the Duluth Model, all [men] must be treated as patriarchal terrorists regardless of differences in how the violence developed.” They further state that “essentially, the Duluth Model views every man convicted as equivalent to the worst man convicted without gradations or nuance,” and “the primary goal of this model is to get male clients to acknowledge ‘male privilege ’ and how they have used ‘power and control’ to dominate their wives.”
Astoundingly, what follows is not even an attempt to refute the bolded portions above, but instead:
- Confirmation that the philosophy and mechanics of the model are as Dutton and Corvo have accused.
- An explanation of why this is a good thing.
The following is the unedited response* in the paper to the claims I quoted above. Search carefully for any refutation of what Dutton and Corvo assert:
Interestingly, Dutton and Corvo place quotation marks around power and control and male privilege as if they don’t exist, but that is for a later discussion.
The underpinnings of the Duluth curriculum do come from a historical analysis. When Europeans came to this continent, they brought religion, laws, and economic systems that institutionalized the status of women as the property of men through marriage. From the church to the state, there was not only acceptance of male supremacy, but also an expectation that husbands would maintain the family order by controlling their wives. Various indiscretions committed by wives were offenses to be punished by husbands. This system of male dominance (like any social structure where one group oppresses another) was perpetuated by: a) a belief in the primacy of men over women; b) institutional rules requiring the submission of women to men; c) the objectification of women which made violence acceptable; and d) the right of men to use violence to punish with impunity (Dobash and Dobash 1983).
The status quo of male domination remained fully intact until the early twentieth century when state legislatures began to make wife beating unlawful. However, the practice of men using violence to control women didn’t diminish. In the late 1960s,the Women’s Movement began challenging the state to intervene in domestic violence cases and women and some men began to confront the concept of male supremacy in the home. In the 1970s, the Battered Women’s Movement emerged as the voice of victims and advocates to challenge psychological theories about the causes of violence and explanations of why victims often stayed in abusive relationships.
Do all men who batter want to dominate women? This is a complicated question. Clearly, many men who batter believe that women should be submissive to men and there are others who share a variation of these sexist beliefs—“The man is the head of the household” or “You can’t have two captains of one ship.” However, there are other men who batter that don’t believe that their wives or girlfriends should be subservient because of their gender, but they still batter. These men use violence to control their partners because they can and violence works. Violence ends arguments. Violence is punishment—it sends a powerful message of disapproval.
The final bolded part above is the most comical, as it explains that even when men don’t use violence as a tool of the patriarchy, they are still using violence as a tool of the patriarchy! This is merely restating (with approval) the accusation they ostensibly set out to refute:
Donald Dutton and Kenneth Corvo grossly misrepresent the Duluth curriculum when they write “according to the Duluth Model, all [men] must be treated as patriarchal terrorists regardless of differences in how the violence developed.”
The defense continues:
Some mental health practitioners are now repackaging old psychological theories in opposition to analyses that indicate that culture and socialization shape the way men who batter think and act in intimate relationships. Although there is much of value in mental health theories that can assist the healing of victims and perpetrators alike, we do not see men’s violence against women as stemming from individual pathology, but rather from a socially reinforced sense of entitlement. We believe that the beliefs and attitudes possessed by men who batter can be changed through an educational process.
Try to find a contradiction between this defense of the model, and the claim by Dutton and Corvo repeated below. This is a defense of why it is good that the goal of the model is as Dutton and Corvo describe, not a refutation of the description of the goal itself:
the primary goal of this model is to get male clients to acknowledge ‘male privilege ’ and how they have used ‘power and control’ to dominate their wives.
Next they raise a new set of accusations by Dutton and Corvo that they want to set the record straight on:
Dutton and Corvo claim“the Duluth Model maintains an ineffective system where resources are diverted from other potential program responses, e.g., joint treatment of violence and chemical dependency or mutuality of partner violence.” They go on to state “mandatory arrest policies are a product of the ideologically driven view that since domestic violence is always strategic, always intentional, always unidirectional, and always with the objective of female domination by men, that it must be contravened by the power of the state. Once one removes this ideological presumption, the rationale for mandatory arrest disappears.”
And again, instead of refuting the bolded claim above, the Duluth Model organization confirms the claim and justifies the model:
They cite research on mandatory arrest policies in Milwaukee and other cities that apparently fails to demonstrate that mandatory arrest reduces recidivism(Shepard 1992). What they don’t tell us is that the cities chosen for this research had very poor prosecution rates and lacked a tight coordinated community response, which is the cornerstone of the Duluth Model. It is axiomatic that arrest without prosecution, meaningful sentencing, jail, the threat of jail and counseling will usually be less effective in reducing violence because offenders will get the message that the criminal justice system and society as a whole don’t take domestic violence seriously. And, although arrests alone may not reduce recidivism to the level we would hope for, critics of pro-arrest policies would never argue that we should stop arresting rapists or thieves who assault their victims if arrests don’t measurably reduce recidivism for those violent offenders.
From a public policy perspective, not arresting batterers essentially decriminalizes domestic violence and condemns a victim to either live with the violence or (as in the “bad old days”) be forced to press charges against an abusive spouse. Doing away with pro-arrest policies targeting the predominant aggressor (a core component of the Duluth Model) reduces the total number of arrests but increases the proportion of dual arrests. Dual arrests have proven ineffective in stopping violence, and they also have the unfortunate consequence of making victims more reluctant to call the police when further acts of violence occur.
Again, they are in agreement with Dutton and Corvo; they explain that if it police were permitted to respond to each domestic violence incident based on the facts (instead of Duluth’s ideologically driven model identifying the man as an abuser), the police would:
- Arrest fewer men.
- Arrest more women!
This brings us to the next point by Dutton and Corvo that Duluth wants to set the record straight on:
Dutton and Corvo also contend that the “best designed studies” (Ehrensaft, Moffitt, and Caspi 2004; Moffit et al. 2001) indicate that intimate partner violence is committed by both genders with equal consequences. They point to these studies to buttress their argument that marriage counseling is an appropriate treatment to end domestic violence.
In this case they do at least make an effort to refute the quoted claims. But this is a disagreement on data and interpreting studies. In the process of making their argument they further reinforce Dutton and Corvo’s claims about the ideological nature of the Duluth model:
We respond that, even if surveys comparing rates of perpetration by gender are accurate, proponents of the argument that women are as violent as men fail to account for the impact of the violence (Langhinrichsen-Rohling et al. 1995; Cascardi and Vivian 1995), the severity of the violence (Hamberger and Guse 2002), the level of fear experienced by the person being assaulted (Barnett and Thelen 1995; Hamberger and Guse 2002), or motivation for the violence.
In an emergency room study, gender differences among a cohort of injured patients found that men initiated violence in far greater numbers than women (Phelan et al. 2005). One hundred percent of female respondents versus 39 percent of the male respondents reported being injured in a domestic violence incident. Thirty-six percent of women reported being intimidated by their partner’s size while none of the men reported being intimidated by their partner’s size. Seventy percent of women reported that they were very strongly afraid duringpartner-initiated violence while only one man reported experiencing this degree of fear. The majority of men (85 percent) reported not being afraid at all when their female partners initiate violence. From experience, police officers and domestic violence advocates have long understood the contextual differences between the violence of men and women, yet proponents of the “women are as violent as men” agenda downplay the significance of gender differences in the ways that men and women use violence (Dutton and Corvo 2006; Mills 2003).
Opponents of a feminist analysis of domestic violence continue to argue their theory that women are as violent as men and that the level of mutual violence calls out for changing arrest and prosecution policies as well as advocating for marriage counseling to stop the violence. This may be an attractive theory to some in the mental health field and “men’s rights” activists. The problem is that practitioners who endorse couples’ counseling while one person is still intimidating or using violence against another ignore the very real risk of violent assaults following counseling sessions. Most psychologists and therapists who have knowledge of domestic violence dynamics would concede that marriage counseling is ineffective if one party is a batterer and has power over the other. How can a victim be honest about what is happening in the relationship or talk about the violence when she fears physical retribution?
Dutton and Corvo’s notion that women are as violent as men or that most domestic violence cases are mutual assaults simply distorts the reality that any law enforcement officer, emergency room nurse or doctor, or domestic violence advocate can validate from their experiences with victims. In 1998, national statistics showed that women were the victims in nearly three out of four of the 1,830 murders attributable to intimate partners in the United States (Rennison and Wechans 2000). That year, women experienced about 900,000 violent offenses by an intimate partner, and men, 160,000. Even if there is some underreporting by men, the claim that men and women commit assaults in equal numbers and with equal severity defies common sense. It is simply untrue. We acknowledge that women use aggression and violence in intimate relationships and not always in self-defense. But we also contend that relying on family conflict studies that utilize the Conflict Tactics Study (CTS)—which simply counts acts of violence without accounting for the circumstances under which these acts occur and the size and strength of the people involved—is deceptive (Kimmel 2002). In a conflict study, a push in response to a beating would be scored as one conflict tactic for each party.
While there are women who kill their male partners for reasons other than self-defense, the numbers pale in comparison to men who kill their female partners when the female partner is trying to end an abusive relationship. In 2006, the U.S. Department of Justice reported that the number of men murdered by an intimate since 1976 had dropped by 70 percent. One third of female murder victims were killed by an intimate, while only three percent of male murder victims were killed by an intimate.
Stating that domestic violence is gender neutral is not only disingenuous, but also has serious public policy implications. How often do you read about a woman killing her husband and the couple’s children because the man is trying to leave the relationship? How many men are raped by an abusive woman as an act designed to punish or retaliate? Yet in city after city, male batterers stalk and murder their partners. Men and women use violence in very different ways, and therefore our response must be different.
*I’ve included much longer quotes than normal in this post because quoting the full response is the only way to show that they never do get around to refuting the claims Dutton and Corvo make about the nature of the model itself.
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Damning stuff.
It’s genius how they twist male headship, male authority in the home to “male supremacy in the home.” Absolute diabolical genius!
“The status quo of male domination remained fully intact until the early twentieth century when state legislatures began to make wife beating unlawful.”
They equate patriarchy (male domination) with wife beating. It doesn’t get more misandric than that. As if wife beating has always been legal everywhere in the world until first-wave American feminism. That’s like saying the world lived in poverty until Das Kapital was published.
Their malice disturbs me much less than so many leaders’ eagerness to buy into it.
All of this helps contextualize and explain the deep ambivalence I had working as a DV group counselor in graduate school.
I said the things I was supposed to say to the men. I showed the videos. I wrote the reports to the probation officers.
But I always sensed something wasn’t right.
So many things to say about this post. I’ll start by noting that common sense dictates that when men have legal ownership of their wives they have de facto power and control, so violence is inherently unnecessary. Ironically, movements to remove men’s legal authority make it more likely they will try to maintain that authority by other means. In other words, if you want men to stop trying to maintain authority using force, then give them their legal authority back.
This is part of the reason why domestic violence is far more likely to be perpetrated by unmarried men against their live-in partners. These men have the least authority of all.
I’ll also note that common sense dictates that people are much less likely to misuse something that belongs to them, as compared to something they rented or stole.
So, the solution, like so many of the solutions to social problems, is to do the exact opposite of what the SJWS prescribe.
They might say, “Why do men need authority at all? Why can’t husbands and wives be equals?” The answer obviously is that men and women are not inherently equal, and someone needs to have ultimate authority. That’s why, what they are really advocating, but will never admit, is matriarchy.
RPC says: February 6, 2017 at 9:23 pm
This is part of the reason why domestic violence is far more likely to be perpetrated by unmarried men against their live-in partners. These men have the least authority of all.
hanh? that assertion makes no sense.
as an unmarried couple,
IF she’s living with you and she makes you unhappy
THEN you boot her ass to the curb.
and there are no consequences.
boyfriends have FAR more power than husbands.
@bob
You missed my point. Married people have more legal power over each other than unmarried people. While you’re correct it’s easier for an unmarried man to kick his partner, the same principle works in reverse. If you understanding male/female sexual behavior differences it will make sense to you why it is a far bigger threat, and much more common, for the woman to ditch the man. While it’s true that women have very few barriers to this in marriage, it’s just common sense that it’s even EASIER for women to do this in non-marriage relationships.
The broader point I’m trying to illustrate is the inherent contradictions in Duluth ideology. They bemoan the fact that men had legal power over the wives in the past, and then get all up and arms when after that legal power is stripped that men try to maintain their power by other means. The truth is that the more disenfranchised a man is in the relationship, the more likely he is to resort to violence to maintain his God-given authority.
If Duluth truly cared about violence they would be trying to find ways to give men power via more socially acceptable avenues, e.g. through making wives property, like in the past. Instead, their prescriptions exacerbate the problem they purport to fix — like all liberal “public policy,” it’s iatrogenic.
The fact is they don’t actually care about violence. They care about tearing down traditional models of authority and transferring power to women. I don’t have statistics, but I would wager that domestic violence has gone WAY UP since the attack on patriarchy went into full force. That alone should be evidence that violence is not their primary concern.
@GunnerQ “Their malice disturbs me much less than so many leaders’ eagerness to buy into it…”
The early feminists “suffragettes” were violent. The “wife beating” accusation is jus a red herring to mislead us. It’s along the lines of when our older sister was punching us she would scream out “mommy, mommy, he is hitting me!”
Fern Riddell investigates the campaign of terror orchestrated by the Edwardian suffragette movement before the First World War and asks why it has been neglected by historians.
http://www.historytoday.com/fern-riddell/weaker-sex-violence-and-suffragette-movement
Dalrock, what were you expecting from aging, 2nd stage feminists? Not logic or science, were you?
Back in the previous century I audited a class on Women’s History. Some of the materials assigned were a lot like the text quoted. Self-referential and even circular argumentation was pretty common, along the lines of the Duluth creators citing themselves in justification for more of the same.
In my opinion, a lot of feminist writing boils down to “Because we say so!”, like some helicopter-mommy.
This stuff would be amusing, if it weren’t embedded into the law so deeply. The Duluth model really is a lot like giving loaded submachineguns to little children; someone is going to get hurt, badly, and nobody is going to admit anything.
I do hope all the long time readers who have never posted before, along with the very concerned churchgoing women who just want to make one single, solitary point about wife beating – I hope those people read this OP very, very carefully. You readers may only have daughters, but you might have a son someday, or you might have a brother. This dreck is the law, the not to be ever debated administrative law.
This stuff has got to stop. Getting the word out and educating others on what is going on is necessary, sure, but we need those with their hands on the levers of power working to change the laws. And that may mean running for office ourselves or working for those who do to help make the necessary changes.
“Men and women use violence in very different ways, and therefore our response must be different.”
That is the last sentence in the quoted material.
Are you arguing that that sentence is not correct?
If the quoted sentence is correct (and it is), how would you deal with that reality if your job was to maintain the peace of whatever area you were assigned to? No matter what you do, you are going to make mistakes (that’s the nature of being human). If you are like most folks, you are going to err on the side of caution. You can’t be perfect, so it makes sense to consider whose violence creates the biggest problem and then guard against that.
The problem of interpersonal strife between partners, whether in marriage or business or whatever, is not ever going away. And there are no perfect solutions for how to manage that strife. Those solutions are going to become even more imperfect the further away from Biblical morality they get.
“[W]e have no government armed with power capable of contending
with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. . . . Our constitution
was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the
government of any other.” John Adams, second President of the United States
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Lol, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The risk that men take when getting married, the responsibility men take on, dictates that they have absolute authority in marriage. Responsiblity = authority, without that component, it’s a flawed system giving authority to those that have no responsibility.
A man has no legal power over his wife. A boyfriend has all the power he needs. Domestic violence has its definition changed time to time to reflect the need to increase perpetrators, much like rape. If compared to actual physical cases, the numbers of both have dropped substantially. Most men simply are not capable of that sort of direct violence against their loved ones, not now and not then. The Duluth excuses are myths made into law.
You are calling this simply an imperfect solution? WTF! There has always been a solution to these problems and it doesn’t entail putting the innocent in jail because they happen to be male. That’s a shit excuse. Separation of both parties with community involvement and rehabilitation for the guilty party.
Your ‘solution’ places a cork in a powder keg. You allow no release valve. You’ve ensured the violence will only get worse here on out as more innocent people are turned into criminals. Women have always been the most protected and provided for in a marriage. Children are also the safest in such a marriage. Yet somehow that’s turned into an evil. That is directly what the Duluth model does. Take the safest institution human families have, destroy it; and place the victims in a far more precarious than before.
Well done!
It isn’t correct. They are arguing that women rarely use violence as a means to abuse but only as a means to defend themselves against an abusive man. They are absolving women of their crimes by putting men under the bus.
This is the belief system they hold to. Men are evil and to blame for everything, even abuse against them. Women are angels and only ever use violence as a means to defend themselves.
They even absolve women who provoke others into violence, but men who do the same are emotional abusers and deserve 14 years of prison. You see, men guilty, women innocent. Always.
Starve the system. Starve the beast, women can go pound sand. I walk past them without a care in the world. They’ve earned it.
A man defending himself is see as furthering his abuse. To deny he abused, is to proclaim he is an abuser. It’s absurd, men are assumed guilty and can never be innocent. That is the nature of this game and it’s not worth playing.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/11244275/New-domestic-violence-law-will-outlaw-coercive-control.html
Just in case someone thinks I’m talking shit about 14 years in prison for ’emotional abuse’.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/11244275/New-domestic-violence-law-will-outlaw-coercive-control.html
You better damn well shut your mouth and not back chat your wife, she’ll send you to prison for 14 years because you dared to disagree. She can hit you, bad mouth you, turn you into a cuck and there is nothing you can do about it. But muh Patriarchy! Sure, cupcake..
The safest place for a man is by himself, no marriage, no women.
@feministHater
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11251254/When-does-an-argument-between-lovers-become-domestic-abuse.html
Here they detail out the criteria (non legal)……….note that even when it’s not about physical (which is the underpinning of why Duluth is needed. Males are bigger so can do more damage), Eve when it is not physical, makes are still targeted.
“Neate tells me one example where a man told his partner that she had to wrap the cheese in a particular way before putting it in the fridge. If she did it wrong, he would scream and shout at her.”
Do you know how many times I’ve been yelled at for folding towels wrong, or made to feel incompetent for not doing something right? How do they justify this being male centric??
I see that marriage counseling is advised AGAINST by Duluth. Because nothing lessens violence like someone being told they are bad and wrong, then giving them no opportunity to talk it through until (he) fixes (himself). Extreme sarcasm here.
I’ve been here. It is incredibly frustrating. It’s the coercion I was accused of being blatantly used on me. It increased the aggressive feelings inside me as the frustration ran its course.
And I went to this guy specifically because we couldn’t have a conversation without arguing.
@Hose_B
They are against any strategy that isn’t solely focused on arresting men and making them learn to check their male privilege. This is something they reiterate multiple times in the document.
They note that men are almost never physically intimidated by women, but that many women are physically intimidated by men. Nice sleight-of-hand there. Direct physical intimidation is only part of it: ask how many men and women are intimidated by the police and you’ll get two very different answers. Armed thugs with legal immunity will arrive at the scene, and no matter who called or who started it or who got injured, they will aggress against the man, thanks to the Duluth Model. But while the Duluth defenders decry the disparity of physical force in the man’s favor that results from him (usually) being stronger… they don’t even mention the overwhelming disparity of force in the woman’s favor that she has at her fingertips in the form of armed agents of the state trained to treat the man as the perpetrator and the woman as the victim no matter what the facts are in any individual case.
If the problem they’re trying to fix is that one party possessing overwhelming and unaccountable force results in abuse, then they haven’t done anything to address the issue… all they’ve done is magnify that advantage by 100-fold and transferred it from men to women. They don’t even acknowledge what they’ve done, but if they did they would defend it, since it’s based on the false belief that men gleefully use power to exercise control, while women only use it reluctantly in defense against brutish men… therefore putting overwhelming force at the disposal of women to be used against men at will must be a good thing.
It’s bad enough when feminists demand the rights of men and the responsibilities of children, but this takes it a step beyond: they want to be protected like children while possessing a power men never had: the right to have the state commit violence on their behalf at the drop of a hat with no questions asked.
As for the disparity in deaths due to partner violence, once again the Duluth defenders miss what’s right in front of their faces whenever it benefits women. When a woman calls the cops and they kill the man, that should go into the “death by woman” category every bit as readily as every dead woman goes into the “death by man” category. If a dead wife is a “victim” no matter what (since they believe that self-defense by men cannot be justified), then it’s only right that a woman getting a hit man to off her husband (even if that hit man has a badge) falls into the same category. Plus, as others have noted, the Duluth model that treats men as aggressors and women as victims offers ways for women to get away short of murder, such as restraining orders and shelters. Men do not have those options available to them… in fact, if they try to avail themselves of them they will be treated as perpetrators themselves. As a result, in the gravest extreme the only apparent way for a man to protect himself and his children from state-sponsored domestic terrorism may be to kill the perpetrator (at which point she’s automatically declared the victim and he’s just another (bad) man who killed his (good) wife).
The only way for their rationalizations to makes sense is to adopt the premise that men are inherently bad and woman are inherently good, or at least that only men can be be bad people. That’s the only way to justify stripping men of all authority and giving that (and much, much more) to women.
Experience is not kind to the belief that women never misbehave when they have the power to do so. And as Lord Acton famously noted, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The Duluth model gives de facto absolute power to women. Far from feeling the wrath of the state when they aggress, it is the state that gives them the power and does the wet-work on their behalf. (And then they wonder “Where Have All the Good Men Gone?”)
They are against any strategy that isn’t solely focused on arresting men and making them learn to check their male privilege. This is something they reiterate multiple times in the document.
Yes the model requires it and the state has codified it in the mandated psychoeducational groups.
Confront! Confront! Confront! With the explicit threat that the probation officer will be informed of your non compliance should you defend yourself.
“Domestic abuse is so serious a crime that even innocence is no defense.”
Caveats:
A) Anything a man does may be classified as abusive.
B) Anything a man fails to do may be classified as abusive.
C) If A and B conflict, the woman may decide which one is abusive, or she may pick both.
D) Behavior that would be classified as abusive if done by a man is not abusive if done by a woman.
E) Behavior that would be classified as abusive if done by a man is not abusive if done to a man.
F) Only men abuse power, so it is important that they have none.
G) Women do not abuse power, so it is desirable for them to be able to exercise it with impunity.
H) An accused man is a guilty man, and any attempt to present evidence of his innocence is further proof of his guilt.
and yet somehow…
I) Men have a huge amount of institutional privilege.
I thought of a few more:
J) If the official rate of DV rises, it has nothing to do with expanding the definition, and the statistics are valid (because the government is trustworthy).
K) If the official rate of DV falls, it is proof that the patriarchy is ignoring it, which is proof that’s it’s actually rising, and the statistics are not valid (because the government is not trustworthy).
L) If the official DV statistics are mixed, so that the rate is falling for one thing and rising for another, only the statistic that indicates a rise is valid… unless it seems to benefit men, in which case only the statistic that indicates a diminution is valid.
M) Statistics that show the situation improving for women are lies of the patriarchy.
N) Cherry-picking half-truths from the 1600’s is not only useful for formulating policy today, but is the only valid source of information for understanding the underlying issues.
Maybe this was touched upon somewhere, but when I read about the Duluth Model, it just said to me, this is another money making gig for counselors/therapists that wouldn’t have work otherwise. These diversionary counseling sessions are paid for by government money in some form or another. They do the same in divorce proceedings where I practice. Court appointed counselors make a nice living off of government contract around here. I laugh when when these people purport to be small businesses . . . they are just an extension of government which in reality makes the government employment numbers even larger when you consider all of the “private” businesses like these that rely largely if not solely on government contracts for income.
Remember what I raised in the last thread about how the Duluth Model fails when applied to the same-sex relationship situation? This is no thread jack: it’s pertinent to this discussion.
Our host, in reply, cited to another resource to which the Duluth people say they defer, a clearinghouse for activists and counselors who specialize in same-sex d.v. issues. There’s a PDF on that website if you hunt for it.
Won’t paste it here but for same sex relationships there is a revised version of the Duluth power wheel, with a couple of changes. The “uses male privilege” slice is gone – duh. But at the top, instead of blasting “PATRIARCHY”, the wheel banner states “HETEROSEXISM”.*
Otherwise the guidance provided by the revised wheel is far fuzzier. They refer to open-ended accounts by counselors and former victims trying to navigate who is the abuser and who is the abused, without success, because it is impossible to just Blame The Man, since the Man may also be a victim too. One account posed a case where both partners came to the same shelter to complain about the other’s abuse and the shelter flailed around trying to do right by both without giving a purported abuser a legal leg up.
Meaning: the Duluth wheel don’t and won’t work if it is truly put to the test in this new paradigm. And they know it. They have no good answer for it. So the Duluth people say, okay we’re about the patriarchy here, go talk to the same-sex counselors, but they don’t know quite what to do either. You can’t “Arrest the obvious abuser” if it’s not obvious at all because there’s no unimpeachable “tell” like one of the parties sporting a baby’s arm holding an apple while the other isn’t.
And that’s all I’m pointing out with this sidebar; I know this is not the place to work that side of the street. Just pointing out a societal issue where this construct will have to break down. No wonder the Duluth people are so defensive about the fundamental assumptions which are touted as canonical just because they are repeated over and over.
*Yes that is a charged word but there is an interesting claim that explains the citation: in at least 3 states, d.v. rules do NOT apply to same-sex d.v. cases because the laws, as written, strictly follow the Duluth model and only apply to man-on-woman abuse accusations.
Hose_B
Do you know how many times I’ve been yelled at for folding towels wrong
If the answer is “more than once”, then I would say you have been yelled at too many times.
Scott
Confront! Confront! Confront! With the explicit threat that the probation officer will be informed of your non compliance should you defend yourself.
This won’t be news to Scott, but this is very similar to the way “self criticism sessions” were done in Mao’s China, especially during the Cultural Revolution. As I’ve mentioned before, a friend of mine wound up in one of these 52 week re-education sessions. A few years later his wife frivorced him anyway.
There are some additional issues involved in the whole “women are scared of big scary men but men aren’t scared of women” idea as well.
I’d be interested in stats about how frequently women use the children as hostages vs. men who do so. Presumably men can use direct threats of violence, so wouldn’t have much reason to threaten the kids (or threaten to steal the kids or what have you). On the other hand, the biggest, strongest, toughest man still has to go to work sometime, and he can’t stop the wife from doing things to his kids or making off with them.
Another issue is self-harm. I would imagine that a) men rarely threaten to hurt themselves to buy compliance from their wives, and b) it wouldn’t work if they did. But a wife holding herself hostage definitely happens, using the husband’s love for her as leverage to get what she wants.
So while a man may not be at all fearful that his wife could really hurt him physically if she wanted to (though it seems like these wackos are using male bravery and female fearfulness as some sort of weapon against men here, implying but not demonstrating that their emotional states can be directly compared and that they are providing objective information) he may well be very fearful of things she might do such as hurt his children, take his children, or hurt/kill herself.
Notice the striking parallels between Duluth and another progressive cult: racial justice.
Two main similarities I notice. First, the tendency to double-down when prior efforts fail. In the case of racial justice, the initial theory was that race disparities could be eradicated via legal changes. Hence, desegregation, civil rights, affirmative action, etc. However, a funny thing happened: racial disparities worsened, black families disintegrated, and black culture went in the gutter. With these outcomes the logical move would be to admit error and reverse course. However, progressives doubled-down, asserting that the real problem is unconscious racism, and if only THAT could be eradicated, we’d have a racial utopia. Instead, more animosity, more conflict, more black entitlement and misbehavior.
With Duluth, we see the same process in action. First, they attempt to eradicate sex discrepancies via legal changes (no fault divorce, child support, etc.). But, another funny thing happened: women became more miserable, domestic violence increased, and families disintegrated. Instead of reversing course, again, MORE DOUBLING DOWN. Now, the problem is unconscious sexism in the form of internalized ideas of “power and control.” More Utopian bullshit, more chaos.
Unsurprisingly, cottage industries have sprung up around both of these movements to take full financial advantage of the lie.
The second similarity I notice is that both are quasi-religious movements. Any time a public policy moves from modifying behavior into the realm of modifying thoughts and beliefs, it has essentially become a church. Both Duluth and the “white privilege” movements have articles of faith, including perverse doctrines of original sin and redemption through correct belief. They both have intellectuals who operate as priests and priestesses, dispensing the one truth to naive souls, and evangelizing to as many of the “fallen” as possible.
Both movements are false religions straight from the pit of hell.
It’s also important to note that both the racism clergy and sexism clergy have full and unanimous support from the educational system, starting with the universities, out to all levels of education and the media. I wonder what sort of veiled force could coordinate such a synchronized campaign of propaganda? Particularly one whose goal is to disrupt and destroy traditional structures of power and authority, and enshrine certain groups of people as superior and untouchable? Hmmm.
In fact, thinking about the man I knew who got re-educated then a few years later frivorced, the Duluth protocol is all but certain to make a man less attractive to his wife than he already is, by breaking him further to her whims. I started to write “to her will” but that’s really not what is going on.
The circular “because we say so” contentiousness that Dalrock has uncovered is rather classic 2nd stage feminism. First, men and women are exactly the same in nature, so any power difference must be due to systematic patriarchal oppression. Then later, women cannot be arrested no matter what they do because women commit violence for different reasons than men do – men and women are different. Of course there is also a large game of “motte and bailey” going on in this self-referential, self-contradictory defense of the undefensible.
Someone up the thread claimed that governments use Duluth because they have no alternative. This is true, and it is no accident. The 2nd wave feminists who embedded Duluth into law, and then crammed it further into law with VAWA in 1994, are not about to accept anything else. They have what they consider to be a timeless truth and they will not ever give it up – can’t be reasoned out of it because they didn’t reason themselves into it. Can’t be guilted emotionally argued out of it either, because they have too much groupthink going on.
I don’t see this going away anytime, either, because enforcement will always be selective, so most men just won’t see this happening around them. Anonymous Age 7* used to comment on the old Spearhead when he was Anon Age 64 that his support group for divorced / divorcing men almost always had some traditional conservative, more-manly-than-you (AMOG) in it who had been totally blindsided by events. Many of these men had been staunch White Knights of the “lock those wife beaters up and throw the key away” until they were hit with their own utterly false charge of DV as part of the opening round of the divorce. Then, way too late, they came to understand.
Please note: Anon was writing about his experience back in the 1980’s, fully 30 years ago it was already standard in some urban areas for attornies to file false DV charges as part of demanding a Temporary Restraining Order to ensure that the man was not ever going home again.
The Duluth Wheel was concocted by a coven of feminists in 1979 or 1980. It is older than most of the people who enforce it! It is also beyond question, now, thanks to a veritible army of White Knighting traditional conservatives, moderates and liberals all of whom just obeyed Feminism unthinkingly.
People sometimes ask me why I despise feminists so much. There are many reasons; the suicides of too many men for a start. But the utter rejection of even basic human decency is one major factor; “heads I win, tales you lose, you can’t quit the game” sort of thing. Feminism is like handing over part of society to the Mean Girls from mid school, only with real punishments.
Someone up the thread claimed that governments use Duluth because they have no alternative.
Governments use Duluth because government bureaucracies are overwhelmingly staffed with progressives who want to destroy traditional structures of authority and take it for themselves. These bureaucrats are the same ones that determine what research gets funded and hence what propaganda programs are broadcast to the public via education and media.
To the extent that progressives have a firm grip on government power, it’s true there is no alternative. However, there are alternatives in the larger sense. It starts with completely severing the government from the educational system.
@Lyn87 great comments, and adding on to what @Eidolon brings up, that women threaten men with things other than physical harm, how many women kill their husbands by using another man? Have an affair, and then get the two of them to fight. It’s easy to feed a line of abuse from your husband and convince your white knight to murder him. None of that is included in their model.
@Morgan
It’s the same thing as saying that women have no power in government because most of the people running the country are male. As though the fact that all those men have mothers, most have wives, and many have daughters is irrelevant, and women would never have power by proxy.
If this sort of thing were true then, to take one example, there would have been practically no market for female convenience items in the 50’s, since men earned the vast majority of the money. If women don’t directly earn the money then they don’t control it because patriarchy, right? Oh yeah, women spend the vast majority of money whether they make their own money or not.
Since the feminist thing is envy of the trappings of male power, they covet the overt indicators such as size, strength, and ability to inspire fear. All the while using their more subtle, second-hand, under-the-radar techniques to acquire power while still trying to seize the overt power as well, and whining because they don’t have all of it yet.
Of course when you have a historical woman who’s the power behind the throne, they love that and never fail to point it out and crow about it. Just like the Duluth people above, it’s always “this never happens, but if it did happen then it would actually be a good thing.”
@GunnerQ has a great point that I have seen in my own personal life. Women believe that spousal abuse was endemic (all men did it) in the past (pre-suffrage). I have said right back that I completely disclaim that idea.
Is there evidence one way or another? Many of my female acquaintances believe that female submission will always and has always resulted in wife beating and sexual abuse. Where did this idea originate, and what’s the best refutation? Rhetorical or Historical argument, rather than Rational, is preferred, because women.
The Duluth model is a “morality play” of the Fall of Heaven. The devil makes a false accusation against God, his servants are shocked… shocked, I say!… and somberly consider the charge, concluding that God has indeed done wrong and must now give up His Throne to the accuser. The ‘jury’ decides this for themselves because they cannot appeal to a higher authority than God.
Duluth plays out this Show-Trial. Bored wifey makes the false accusation. God-hating authorities pretend to be horrified as they are “reluctantly forced” to unseat the husband from his God-given place of authority. “For the children,” they hiss, because “For justice” would bring up questions of innocence and guilt.
I don’t have all the details right yet but I’m close. Why did the Communists ever bother with those show trials? They never convinced anybody of anything. Just mutter “Uncle Joe says hi” and cap the poor sod, right? The purpose was devil worship. Put the innocent man on trial, convict him of a known-to-be-false accusation and tear him down as “the people” demand.
By such symbols do the gods make war. God made patriarchy to glorify Christ; the devil made Duluth to steal that glory.
GunnerQ
Why did the Communists ever bother with those show trials? They never convinced anybody of anything.
Because the man on trial was always connected to other men in stronger positions who couldn’t be taken down directly. To pick one example, Karl Radek’s show trial and “testimony” provided tools for Stalin to eventually go after Red Army officers all the way up to Marshal Tukashevsky. The show trial was always part of a larger play.
The modern SJW’s use a similar playbook but fortunately only try to get people fired from their jobs and possibly jailed, or maybe SWATted. At least that’s all they do so far.
Just mutter “Uncle Joe says hi” and cap the poor sod, right?
That’s what was done to the ordinary enemies of the state for years. Search on “Holodomor” for one example. In special cases, more horrible methods of execution were used.
I’ve discussed this before, and I do not mind doing it over again. I should save a word file and re-post it in these threads when they come up. Here is how it works, in practice:
Jim has an argument with his wife that the neighbors hear. It is over something mundane. It is standard “husband and wife stuff.” He thinks nothing of it, and goes outside to tinker in his garage and cool down. He drinks a couple of beers.
The police show up. No one knows who called. One of them approaches him, the other goes into the house. Jim is confused about why they are there, and cooperates, because he didn’t do anything wrong.
The police are drenched in Duluth informed DV incident response training, and are cognitively biased to believe that Jim is lying, and his wife is protecting him. They see the beer bottles. It is a “must arrest” state, so Jim goes to jail, his children crying in the driveway.
At his hearing, he is released by a judge, and the lawyers tell him he should sign up for state-mandated domestic violence intervention groups, in good faith. Jim doesn’t understand this, because he has not been found guilty of a crime. But he trusts that the system is fair, and this big misunderstanding will work out. A no-contact order is placed on him, to protect his wife from him. This is automatic.
He starts attending the groups where his facilitator, Scott tells him that he must attend for 52 weeks, and that he has to pay out of pocket. The clinic is a private practice that specializes in delivering this state regulated service. If Jim misses a session, he must make up the session and pay for both the missed one and the make up one. If he misses more than three, it is an automatic violation of his probation. If Jim reveals that he has violated the no-contact order–also a probation infraction.
Week after week Scott tells him he must be accountable for what he “did” or else his weekly reports will reflect a lack of progress toward meaningful change. This is a totally subjective assessment by the white knight, Scott who is a graduate student learning all about male privilege.
Eventually Jim is convicted of “terroristic threats” and the neighbor who called, a divorcee has been feeding her crap about how she has been “abused” all this time. Jims wife divorces him and wins custody of their kids. A new boyfriend moves in to take Jims place.
In the mean time, Jim is struggling to make it to the meetings and pay for them, and child support. His life is ruined while he sleeps on his friends couch. Jim misses a 4th session, and Scott violates him back to jail.
Jim has lost his children, his wife and his property, all for having a loud argument with his wife.
Having no hope that his family that he worked so hard to create will ever be whole again, he kills himself.
All the players in this scenario are incentivized to keep this racket going–the police who cannot help but rescue a damsel in distress, the company Scott works for, Jims wife, etc. There is no one looking out for Jim.
There is an alternate ending to Scott’s tale:
OT: Brad Wilcox is at it again: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/02/07/better-sex-better-health-more-money-what-men-really-get-out-marriage.html
Scott,
And Jim’s death will certainly not be added to the list of men killed because of domestic violence, even though he’s every bit as dead a hypothetical woman bludgeoned to death by her ex-con boyfriend for snorting all his coke. Nope… a dead man don’t count unless his wife kills him, and even then he only counts a little because he probably had it coming. [Note] Let’ face it, if ex-wives killed themselves even 10% often as ex-husbands do after one-sided court rulings, there would be a Presidential task force looking into it, and the “epidemic” would be the lead story for every Fake News outlet from CNN to Rolling Stone to the New York Times, and the subject of every talk show that airs between noon and four P.M..
His despair-induced suicide will, however, be used by the hoplophobe lobby as another “death-by-gunfire” to justify more gun control.
[Note: I’m not sure of the proper Duluthian ratio… maybe a dead man counts as 3/5 of a dead woman? That ratio sounds familiar for some reason.]
They’re demonstrating the total lack of intellectual justification for the state invading families and usurping the power of a husband and father. Their whole response is answering the questions they *wish* they were asked, not the ones they were actually supposed to answer. It’s funny that they used scholarly, thorough, proofread format to make it obvious they put zero effort into ignoring the critique.
Brad Dildo can go pound his own arse. The statistics lie. Single men include divorced men in their scenarios, greatly reduced the quality of life of a man. Include divorced men with married men, you know, those men who took the plunge and single men, who didn’t marry, come off smelly like roses.
There are lies, damned lies and statistics. Brad Dilcocks is a lying fraud piece of arse shit hanging on by an arsehair.
@King Alfred
That’s a good one. The comments belie the article.
This thread is an amazing education. I’ve already started asking around a bit. Though every man lives under this hair-trigger weapon, almost no one has heard of the Duluth Model (I first learned of it from Dalrock), let alone have an appreciation for its full effects.
Dear Feminist Hater, King Alfred, etc.:
I don’t think Wilcox is completely off base. Bear in mind that a full half of American women do not divorce their husbands. This is amazing to me, given the state of our society, with its constant enticements.
The problem (which he never addresses, naturally) is finding a way to discern between the subset of women who will someday divorce you, and those who will not. It’s a huge gamble, and all the advice from game gurus and other so-called experts (marry a virgin, etc.) is not convincing to me.
Note that in the above example, we can readily find stories of virgin brides who, ten years down the line, suddenly woke up one day and decided to cash out. Some of their victims have appeared in this very comment section, over the years.
Nothing is certain, and there is no protection in the law, so sitting it out is the best bet for me, and many like me. Wilcox can marry the women that we use and cut loose, if he wants to. We’ll send him new brides who are “more worthy” as they say – lol.
Boxer
FH,
I noticed that, too. These stats almost always put divorced men in the same category as men who have never married, which ignores the fact that all divorced men took the advice and got married, but most of them were divorced against their will for frivolous reasons. I suspect that those guys drag the “single’s happiness” numbers down, whereas they should be dragging the “married’s happiness” numbers down, since they did, in fact, get married.
It’s all a myth, anyway. Psychology Today published this article about the subject, which focused on a meta analysis of 18 large surveys. After all the tech-talk, there were major two take-aways:
1) “After 18 Failures to Show that Getting Married Increases Happiness, They Are Still Insisting that It Does”
2) To the extent that anyone looked at the numbers after separating out the divorcees: “On a 1 to 4 scale, with 4 indicated the greatest happiness: 3.3, currently married; 3.2, always-single; 2.9, divorced; 2.9, widowed.” Of course those numbers include women, who tend to report less happiness when married (at least while they’re young enough to branch-swing) and who also “win” at divorce, which props up the “happy divorcee” number. Once those factors are accounted for, the average man who marries is going to be less happy than his never-married peers, although the differences between the sub-groups will be stark, with married men being the happiest, followed closely by single men, probably followed distantly by widowers, and even more distantly by men whose wives divorced them. In other words, for a man, getting married today means you’ll probably either win small or lose big, and you have little control over which of those two paths you end up on, since “Princess” is in the driver’s seat.
A true measure for our purposes would require looking at 1) men who have been married for, say, at least twenty-five years (old enough to have raised kids and sent one or more through college), 2) men who were married fathers whose wives divorced them for trivial reasons, 3) childless husbands whose wives divorced them for trivial reasons, 4) men who divorced their wives for good cause, 5) men who never married at all, and 6) widowers.
(We can ignore men who divorced their wives for trivial reasons because such men are as rare as hen’s teeth. Given what happens to men who bail out of marriages even for good reasons, no man in his right mind would initiate divorce unless his situation was truly intolerable.)
Boxer is right that men aren’t really told what they can do to minimize the risks of divorce and how to find a wife who will actually not divroce you.
The entire sum and substance of Wilcox’ advice to men on the risk of divorce (after acknowledging 42% of first marriages end in divorce, mostly at the wife’s insistence) is a statement that research shows that men can reduce the risks of divorce if they get a job and stay in it, don’t cheat, don’t abuse drugs or alcohol, go to church with their wives, and be “emotionally engaged” with their wives.
Yeah. Bullshit.
I am one of the most highly educated people in the populace. I hold two degrees, one from a top 25 university. I have been continuously employed for 24 years in my field. I earn a healthy six figure salary, on which I support 3 other people, all by myself. I am in the top 20% of wage earners in the United States. I haven’t used any illegal drugs in more than 30 years. I don’t abuse alcohol. I went to church regularly with my wife and kids.
And I was the most “emotionally engaged” man you ever wanted to see. I was attentive and caring with my wife. I paid close attention to her, and catered to her every emotional need. I told her all my feelings. I wore my heart on my sleeve. I showed her everything.
And you know what? I spent the first 15 years of my marriage begging for sexual table scraps. I My wife was at my throat and yelling at me all the time. She treated me like absolute utter shit and walked all over me like I was nothing to her. I had a terrible, horrendous marriage. We were at the brink of divorce 6 years ago.
AND I DID, AND WAS, AND AM, EVERYTHING BRAD WILCOX SAYS I SHOULD BE.
I followed all the rules. I did everything everyone told me to do. I did all the things young men in the late 80s and early 90s were trained and told to do, to have a successful marriage and family. I did everything my pastors and parents and teachers and everyone else told me I should do, and became what they said I should be.
And my marriage almost failed because of it. I almost lost my house, my kids, and a shit ton of money. Because of people like Brad Wilcox.
Don’t be like me. Don’t listen to people like Wilcox. Don’t listen to your pastors or teachers. Don’t listen to your parents. Read here. Listen to men who have been through it. Read. Learn. Apply.
Continuing:
You men want successful marriages and relationships with women? Read here at Dalrocks. Lift weights, lose weight, maximize your physical appearance. Make money. Do interesting things you want to do. And if and when you do marry, use Dalrock’s vetting suggestions. And do not show her any negative emotions. When you feel fear, anger, depression, despair, don’t tell her about them. Handle them yourself. Stay in touch with your male friends because you’ll need them.
And care less, much less, about her emotional state. Don’t concern yourself with whether she’s happy, sad, mad, frustrated, etc. Do fun things with her. Make it fun. Do not tell her about your emotions. Just don’t.
And I’ve never cheated on my wife. I have not had sex with any other woman since I started dating my wife 23 years ago.
So yeah. I was everything Brad Wilcox said I should be. I did everything Wilcox said I should do. And I still almost failed.
Men have more authority outside of marriage.
It’s Godly for the husband to have authority over his wife.
Secular marriage gives wives authority over husbands.
The logical conclusion is that Legal marriage is unjust and cohabitation is a more moral reflection of sacramental marriage. Rather than trying to change marriage laws men should be trying to protect their rights via cohibation and not allowing administration law to impose obligations where none exist.
hahaha wow can’t even. not including divorced men with married man in a study trying to convince people to marry is like only including lottery winners in a study convincing people to play the lottery.
OT: has anybody any experience with authenticmanhood.com or the “33 Series” they put out? More blue pill pedestalization or actually useful.
Thanks in advance.
OT:
According to her twitter feed, Jenny Erikson is pregnant. She has an estimated delivery date of April 2017. No reference to a dad. References to “Dating” in spring and summer 2016. No photos of a man in her Instagram account.
I’ll leave it to you all to assess THAT.
And no references to remarriage.
Interesting.
Boxer,
I don’t think Wilcox is completely off base. Bear in mind that a full half of American women do not divorce their husbands. This is amazing to me, given the state of our society, with its constant enticements.
Remember to look beyond the binary outcome.
Since there are continuous media commands and enticements to divorce, even the intact marriages see an erosion of happiness in many cases. A ‘happy’ marriage that is a 7/10 in happiness would have been a 9/10 in another era. 7 may be good, but they still lost something of immense value. Like a very wealthy person going down to upper-middle-class.
Hence, assume that almost all marriages are 2 points lower than they could be. Some had too little buffer and led to divorce. The ones with an immense buffer still had to lose a lot of it. It is unfortunate to go from what could have been a 9, down to a 7 in happiness, even in the stable marriages.
Those who would have been a 6, but went down to a 4, are the divorce stats, but that does not mean the pernicious effect has solely befallen them…
deti,
So yeah. I was everything Brad Wilcox said I should be. I did everything Wilcox said I should do. And I still almost failed.
You wrested success from the jaws of defeat IN SPITE of doing what Brad Wilcucks tells men to do.
What is interesting to me is how heavily these cuckservatives are doubling down. There is a new embarrassment from them almost every other week. They are obviously seeing something that makes them more worried than they were not long ago..
RE Jenny Erikson: “I don’t know, it just happened!”
Actually, she probably did it just so she could write about it.
@thedeti Thank you for the testimonial and the advice. The most frustrating thing about the manosphere sites as a whole is that they do an excellent job of liberating Neo from the Matrix, but almost nothing to prepare him to go back in. And despite the reality of the unholy terror of modern marriage, society needs kids to survive, and kids need parents. God save us from a world full of bastards.
So if a woman accuses her husband or boyfriend of abuse the police must arrest her? And I think that an arrest for domestic abuse, even if utterly baseless, carries various penalties. Do employers ask if you have even be arrested for these sorts of crimes? Would government welfare agencies hold it against you? I’m pretty sure if you have been arrested for domestic abuse you can’t own a firearm.
Its clear whoever made these policies believe that almost all women will not abuse these laws with false accusation. That women are inherently good and rational and just better than men.
I meant arrest *him* of course.
Pinging all trolls! Pinging all trolls!
https://mobile.twitter.com/NA70162/status/829141178574655488
You are all cordially invited to twitter, to celebrate the birth of yet another pseudocelebrity bastard, shat out by a skank ho single mom. Anon, you are specifically invited. Thanks to Deti for slogging through the slags feed to give us all this pertinent update.
@Johnycomelately
>The logical conclusion is that Legal marriage is unjust and cohabitation is a more moral reflection of sacramental marriage.
After some recent, brief research into Canadian law, I started to suspect the same thing. If your statement has become true, this would be ironic: (Some) Religious people used to look down on others who had “common law” marriages/relationships, even where those couples stayed together until separated by death. If the non-legal form of marriage is now closer to Biblical marriage, it would be an unfortunate reversal. Perhaps it would also be a damning statement against the effectiveness of our churches.
Does anyone know of a church or ministry group that actively agitates for changes to the laws, to permit a Biblical marriage or to prevent either divorce or child-abduction for profit? There are some states that allow covenant marriages, so perhaps. The only sites I found when I searched were sites describing the political limits on legally registered charities.
I’ve seen it said many times before in the manosphere, including on this thread, but it bears repeating, often:
Women: All the authority, with no responsibility.
Men: All the responsibility, with no authority.
All I can do is pray for the faith of Christ in me to believe Romans 8:28:
“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”
My experience is as follows:
1. When a woman complains about violence from a man, 80% of the time she is also guilty as well. Hey people choose those people to hang around with who are most like them and this applies especially when they get married. The violence may or may not be physical depending on the size/strength differential and how intimidated she may be but the violence is there alright. It my be done in a passive-aggressive way. Examples of this are: obvious flirtations done to provoke, mocking, put downs, emotional infidelity, etc. Nicole Simpson was a good example. One was going to end up killing the other. Nicole would send OJ pics of her naked with two guys right after having sex. Given enough time OJ would’ve been killed, died of heart failure or committed suicide.
2. When a woman says that her ex cheated on her, once again 80% of the time she is somewhat guilty of that. See 1 above. She may not have cheated herself but did everything she could to drive him to it. She would openly flirt, have emotional infidelity, or in some cases even did cheat. One can tell that this is the case when the woman would say that her husband was pretty open and not as discreet about this. It implies that he wanted her find out and there was a reason for it. I am not advocating this but many times this is the way a man can reclaim a lost sense of manhood that she has taken away from him.
3. Women that go to women’s shelters are themselves violent and a danger to the other women and children in that institution. Violence, drugs, even rapes occur in those centers. I have known of women who seduced 12-14 year old boys in such centers.
4. Many women who have gone to women’s shelters have been indoctrinated about their complete innocence in all matters of domestic violence. They know all the rules and can bring a perfectly innocent man down. If a woman ever says that she has gone to such a center, avoid her like the plague.
for a man, getting married today means you’ll probably either win small or lose big,
One Liners collection. Why is there always dark humor in the best one liners? Maybe it’s just me.
Disillusioned says, “If a woman ever says that she has gone to such a center, avoid her like the plague.”
Agreed. I’m no longer in the game, but knowing what I know now, my recommendation to any guy looking to get serious with a woman would include advising him to ask her these two questions: 1) Has anyone you know ever called the cops on you? and 2) Have you ever called the cops on anyone you know?
Except under the most bizarre circumstances, an answer of “Yes” to either question would be a strong indication to get away from her as quickly as possible.
@ Lyn87 says:
February 7, 2017 at 3:24 pm
“And Jim’s death will certainly not be added to the list of men killed because of domestic violence, even though he’s every bit as dead a hypothetical woman bludgeoned to death by her ex-con boyfriend for snorting all his coke.”
We’ve mentioned this here before, but I think it bears repeating. Domestic violence is exceptionally rare among heterosexual (I can’t believe I have to specify that) married couples.
Most domestic violence cases involve all permutations of unmarried “intimate partners”, from one night stands to shack-ups. But the domestic violence statistics aren’t broken down that way*. Still, feminists (of both sexes) use DV statistics to bludgeon married, Christian fathers – the people least likely to commit DV – while encouraging women to engage in every conceivable “intimate partner” permutation other than marriage. Those permutations include lesbian relationships, which are the MOST likely to involve DV.
That means that feminists (of both sexes) actually ENCOURAGE women to engage in behavior that is more likely than heterosexual marriage to result in DV. Which means that feminists (of both sexes) don’t give a damn about women getting their asses kicked. It may even mean that feminists (of both sexes) WANT women to get their asses kicked so they can blame it on married, Christian fathers.
*I mentioned above that DV statistics aren’t broken down in such a way that they distinguish between different kinds of heterosexual “intimate partner” relationships, which means that one night stands get lumped in with marriages. If this is so, then on what evidence do I base my assertion that DV among heterosexuals mostly involves unmarried “intimate partners”? I base it on what my police officer friends have told me about the cases they see.
Hose_B:
“Do you know how many times I’ve been yelled at for folding towels wrong, or made to feel incompetent for not doing something right?”
Sigh.
I bring out the trash. I wash our bathrooms and washrooms. I mop the house. I kill the lizards (she’s petrified of them). I destroy ant trails. I (sometimes) do the laundry. I cook our breakfasts on weekends (she rarely cooks). I clean the kitchen. I clean our windows. I do minor repair works in our house. I am the IT person. I am the go-to person for any IT stuff at my in-law’s. And still, I am deemed not loving enough and we do not enough spend quality time together.
(To be fair, she does the ironing, sweeping of the floor and laundry (sometimes).)
And then when I ask her questions clarifying what she just shared (e.g., she would briefly talk about her work schedule (she’s a teacher) for the week and I would ask her if she’d be having a long day, on say, this Wednesday). She would say that I am like one of her students who does not listen (“Didn’t I just say that?”) or that I fail at listening comprehension. But I nary say a word when she forgets stuff (and she has claimed on a few occasions that she can be forgetful). Just do it for her, out of love.
Or that she makes a joke out of it when I made a wrong turn somewhere while driving.
And she tells me that she’s kind to the extent that if someone gets her order wrong (e.g., beef burger instead of fish burger), she would quietly accept it so that it would not make the server look bad.
We had our fair share of fights but she hasn’t really yelled at me. But passive-aggressive behaviour, emotional manipulation and disrespect can really, really hurt.
thedeti:
“You men want successful marriages and relationships with women? Read here at Dalrocks. Lift weights, lose weight, maximize your physical appearance. Make money. Do interesting things you want to do. And if and when you do marry, use Dalrock’s vetting suggestions. And do not show her any negative emotions. When you feel fear, anger, depression, despair, don’t tell her about them. Handle them yourself. Stay in touch with your male friends because you’ll need them.
And care less, much less, about her emotional state. Don’t concern yourself with whether she’s happy, sad, mad, frustrated, etc. Do fun things with her. Make it fun. Do not tell her about your emotions. Just don’t.”
Thanks for sharing this (and your story). It’s advice that’s gold (but I have never, ever, heard anywhere). Pre-marital counselling and discussions in our small groups give different advice, putting all that hard work on resolving a wife’s emotions (and emotional issues) on husbands.
@Boxer: I echo Anon’s comment from 5:48 pm. I know Wilcox is not completely off base. The problem with Wilcox and many others lies more in what is ignored than in what is said. The sources of unnecessary drag a man is subjected to on the path to marriage and those that continue into marriage are generally ignored or acknowledged very selectively, but their cumulative impact is devastating.
OT
http://fightthenewdrug.org/sex-before-kissing-15-year-old-girls-dealing-with-boys/
India tried it’s own version of Duluth some years ago. The point was to curb dowry related violence by arresting anyone was was accused by wives. It was a disaster. Wives began to immediately misuse their new found power to harass their in-laws and use this legislature as a threat-point.
Long story short, Indian judges intervened by Expressing concern over the misuse of the law, the judges ordered the police “not to automatically arrest” an accused, but to go through a “nine-point checklist” to “satisfy themselves about the necessity for arrest”.
And if the police make an arrest, a magistrate must approve further detention of the accused, the court ruled.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-28140205
These ghar ki lakshmis (noble goddesses of fortune) that everyone is supposed to sympathize with turned out to be just as malicious and opportunistic as the men that they seek protection from. No good ever comes from pedestrianizing women. They are just not worthy.
Off Topic
Society is creating a new crop of alpha women who are unable to love
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/02/08/society-is-creating-new-crop-alpha-women-who-are-unable-to-love.html
“To put it another way: a wife is in charge of the puppet strings. If she pulls on the wrong one, she gets a negative response. If she pulls on the right one, she gets a positive response.”
“Another way to think about the male-female dance is to consider the game of chess. In chess, the king is the most important piece but also one of the weakest. He can only move one square in any direction—up, down, to the sides, and diagonally. The queen, however, is the most powerful piece. She can move in any one direction—forward, backward, sideways, or diagonally. And how she moves affects how he moves.”
thedeti, can you contact me offline, I’m am struggling right now with my churchian wife, need some outside perspective that’s not churchian based (been unplugging for the last year). email: thewhiteguy-at-usa.com
chokingonredpills,
I read the article, and it’s not all that off-topic, after all. Just like the Duluth Model, it blames the problems between males and females on “patriarchy” and, of course, the men and boys themselves for “imposing” it on pure-as-the-driven-snow females who, after all, just crave the respect they so clearly deserve. The only difference between that article and what the Duluth defenders write is that one blames hyper-sexuality on patriarchy and the other blames hyper-violence on patriarchy, with significant bleed-over in both directions.
In both cases the basic premise is wrong, because women are no less fallen than men are. And if the majority of girls did not enjoy the ego boost inherent in being sex objects, the practices of the boys would end overnight. But when they deny the fact that women hold most of the cards in the sexual arena (because that denial is inseparable from the lies of feminist patriarchy theory), all bad outcomes must be caused by men and boys.
Do the girls like to be treated that way? They say they don’t, but their actions dictate otherwise. That’s true of both the Duluth model when it comes to violence and the article’s focus on porn. I’m certainly not going to suggest that either violence or porn is good, but if women and girls stopped spreading their legs for guys who rough them up and treat them like crap (in or out of bed), there would be a lot fewer guys who did those things. In other words, when women open their thighs for violent and/or sexually-demanding men, they forfeit the right to complain about the personal and societal consequences of preferring those guys over the “icky” quiet guys they avoid like the plague until they reach Rollo’s Epiphany Phase. The consequence of living in a society that places no restrictions on female sexuality is that within a generation or two, men will exhibit the behaviors that women want when their true desires are unrestrained. As it turns out, polite society is appalled at the men such a society creates, at which point it becomes necessary to blame-and-constrain them, because blaming-and-constraining unrestricted female sexuality (the underlying cause) is “sexist.” It also forces women to look into the mirror, and what they see terrifies them: they want to think of themselves as respectable “good girls” overflowing with innate virtue, but if the men in a society behave like Johnny Rotten, it’s a sure-fire indication that the women behave like Nancy Spungen, with tragic consequences for all.
The article, like the Duluth model, searches for solutions in the wrong places, and for the same reason: they’re both looking at the symptom rather than the cause. the Duluthians and the anti-porn crusaders both blame men and patriarchy, and seek to change men’s behavior by teaching them to behave differently, but neither group even thinks to ask, “What are we teaching to girls and women? Males wouldn’t treat females this way if it didn’t work, so what does that say about them?” The simple fact is that they’re not teaching girls and women anything, because to tell girls and women that they should reign themselves in is part of the eeeeeevil patriarchy. Holding females accountable for the consequences of exercising their sexual power is simply beyond the pale for them. This is all of a piece with the “Prager U” stuff we were all talking about recently: men must be gentlemen (like Ward Cleaver), but under no circumstances may anyone even suggest that women should be ladies (like June Cleaver).
Edit: I meant Sid Vicious, not Johnny Rotten.
Dear Anon:
You make good points, and I don’t disagree with the substance of them.
You’re a Trotskyist. (Not really joking — he advocates what he calls a permanent revolution, like you.) This isn’t a bad thing, but I think it loses sight of our successes, despite the current system’s shortcomings. If we’re gonna have a revolution, we should be heartened by the fact that most women (a slim majority, but still) are not skank-ho sluts. Most women somehow manage to resist the degenerate message and remain faithful (at least figuratively) to their vows through their lifetimes. Most women never run their good husbands through the divorce courts, despite all the incentives they’re bribed with.
This is what leads me to constantly remind folks that feminism is not winning. It only wears the clothes of victory. In reality, it’s collapsing of its own internal contradictions. I’d argue that it has only held on this long because one of its only strongholds is its propaganda/pr machinery.
Incidentally, nothing irks radfems like reminding them of this basic fact: Most women are happiest in patriarchy, and if they haven’t abandoned their marriages now, they never will. Try it out. It’s hilarious to watch them melt down.
Society isn’t perfect. It won’t be perfect in a healthy patriarchal system. Perfection is an ideal we should strive for, but in the interim, we gotta keep our spirits up and count our successes as well as our losses.
Boxer
Boxer,
Most women somehow manage to resist the degenerate message and remain faithful (at least figuratively) to their vows through their lifetimes.
We don’t know what is under the surface unless we had some way to quantify the frequency/intensity of threatpoint, headship being disregarded, henpecking, etc.
I mean, this blog has shown that even Churchgoers with their mere 38% divorce rates are subject to extreme misandry/woman worship, and many of those marriages, while legally intact, are still torture for the man. Hence, to overrate the value of the >50% legally intact marriages becomes analogous to assuming that Republicans are strongly against ‘feminism’..
I maintain that the number of marriages that are truly solid (where the man is not endlessly berated, threatpointed, or otherwise tortured) is 30%. Some of this 30% include men who have very low expectations/standards to begin with. Most of the 30% could have been even happier in a different society/era (the 9 out of 10 outcome, rather than the 7 out of 10 outcome).
// Off-topic, quoting from wikipedia entry of Johnny Rotten (John Lydon):
“Lydon broadcast a short pod on Current TV in which he critiqued the Doors’ keyboardist Ray Manzarek’s previously broadcast pod. Manzarek’s advice to young people had been to “f*ck your brains out.” He emphasised this especially for 25-year-old women, saying that “it won’t last.” Lydon had several choice words for Manzarek and told young people that the best thing they could do was get an education because knowledge is free.”
Dear Anon:
Again, can’t really argue with your analysis, just about interpretations on the fringes. I think your assumption of .3 is probably conservative, if anything. We should still celebrate the overall failures of the feminists.
On another note, take a look at this fine specimen, who divorced her husband because he joined #TrumpTrain. Physiognomy is real, folks!
http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/r-couple-calls-it-quits-over-trump-wounds-still-raw-after-bitter-us-election-2017-2-1001728363
Can you imagine how hubby feels? He has finally been set free of looking at that thing.
Best,
Boxer
One thing to throw into the whole mess is how easy it is for a woman to mark herself up to facilitate her claims of DV. Imagine the tizzy of white-knight cops if the woman actually troubles herself enough to scratch up her own arms or even tap her cheekbone or forehead with a small hammer until it welted up. Those self-marking moves aren’t even very painful at all. If she really wanted to head butt the kitchen counter or smash her cheekbone, then the results could be shocking. A drunk or high wife/gf who was really looking for trouble could really mangle herself up good. Amanda Heard’s smattering of small marks around her eye are exactly what I’m talking about. It was very dubious and looked like a series of low pain, concentrated taps. It is very easy to leave marks or bruises on yourself and a marked up woman is stronger than actual filmed evidence. Guys get hauled in for nothing anyway, imagine the sanctimonious gasps of white knights and feminists at a scraped arm.
Boxer,
Since ~52% of marriages are intact, and we know about the vast incidents of threatpoint, henpecking, removal of male headship, and obesity that happen within legally intact marriages, I put a number of 30 out of that 52 as being ‘satisfactory or better’. Many would say that I am being generous.
But I don’t think it can be higher than that, because that would refute many of the themes exposed on this blog (threatpoint, female headship, etc.)..
On the topic of husbands being set free from horrid wives, that could be why we see so few complaints by men about losing everything in divorce – they wanted out so badly that the seemingly high cost was not a problem for them.
……Which in turn supports the point that many intact marriages are miserable for the man. 30 of the 52% of legally intact marriages are satisfactory for the man, in my estimation..
In other words, here is the breakdown of married men..
10-15% of men very happy with their marriage
30% receive satisfactory or greater happiness (above group included here)
52% of marriages are legally intact (above group included here).
Note that some divorced men are very happy too : maybe they had no kids and didn’t have to pay anything. Maybe their marriage was so bad that they wanted out at any cost…
But I don’t think the consensus here would be different than the percentages I listed above for ‘very happy’ and ‘satisfactory or better’..
@Boxer,
“Most women somehow manage to resist the degenerate message and remain faithful (at least figuratively) to their vows through their lifetimes. Most women never run their good husbands through the divorce courts, despite all the incentives they’re bribed with.”
I just can’t even remotely agree with that. Divorce rates are very tricky to pin down. A lot of time you’ll hear “less people are getting divorced” but it’s only because less people are getting married. Also, all the marriages from last Sunday are immediately chalked up to the ‘successful’ side. Check on them in two years. So it’s a rolling stat, if you will. All new marriages keep the ‘successful’ side pumped up. If you really want to know the divorce rate from marriages in 2016, you have to wait until 2086. I’ve read that the ‘real’ divorce rate is between 70-80% which matches my set of, say, 20 closest friends and family about perfectly. There are still marriages from the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s that are propping up the success rates as well. We all know how different those generations are. The likelihood of divorce for a couple married in 2016 is very likely between 70 and 80 percent, possibly as high as 85%. BlackDragonBlog has some very good essays about this.
Dear Fellas:
Again, no disagreement. I just want to point out that lack of context can lead to a more dismal outlook on the situation.
We were designed (by evolution or God, whatever might tweak your fancy) to pair-bond and live in (mostly) monogamous units for life. (look up de Waal and Gavrilets work for more on this).
Human beings are born without the ability to evade predators for over a year of their lives. This necessitates a father and ideally an extended family to ensure survival to adulthood. The tendency toward monogamy may be a genetic holdover from prehistory, but it still exists — hence the subsequent “happiness” that is the result of the modern marriage.
If you’re going to go there, then you have to also acknowledge the plethora of women who have been divorced 4-10 times. These people inflate the stats at the other end.
https://psychcentral.com/lib/the-myth-of-the-high-rate-of-divorce/
Best,
Boxer
Dear Anon, et. al.:
This is a (fairly) accessible read for novices (like me).
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/38/15167.full.pdf
We are built for marriage and monogamy. Some of us might not choose it, but it’s hard to deny that it is our default setting, as a species.
Boxer
Why would people who divorce more than once somehow not count, or at least skew the numbers inaccurately in the divorce rate issue? A divorce is a divorce. You’re trying to bring some judgment of the individual players into it. I don’t see why only ‘one marriage’ players are the ones who should be monitored.
IRT your article; You can tell from that guy’s first paragraph where his heart lies on the issue. I disagree with a lot but especially this one:
“Thus, we reach an even more dramatic conclusion: That for college educated women who marry after the age of 25 and have established an independent source of income, the divorce rate is only 20 percent!”
Such a dubious statement, imo. And why the exclamation point?
Oh well, we both have our sources. I’ll just leave off with the idea that it is a very hard stat to pin down.
Dear Melmoth:
It’s difficult to analyze this stuff — which is one of the reasons I like this blog. I was never much good at statistics. (I had to take some to get a math degree once, and those are the lowest scores on my transcript).
Anyway, if you want a better (a/k/a more primary) source then this might be more appropriate.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divorce-patterns-by-gender-race-and-educational-attainment.htm
Best,
Boxer
Well that adds good information. My two immediate quibbles are that it only goes up to age 46 and more significantly is this one;
Say a woman marries at age 25, divorces and remarries a few years ago. If you’re tallying it, that second marriage will negate the divorce, even if she’s only been married 6 months.
I don’t think clearly on stats either. But what about this analogy;
Say you’re dumping marbles into a bin and there is a 80% chance they crack eventually; sometimes right away, sometimes later. Yet you are always dumping new, uncracked marbles into an ever larger bin. Your tally of uncracked marbles would always be higher, and hide the fact that there is a 80% chance of cracking because you’re always counting the new batch being dumped in constantly. So anytime you stop to take your tally, it would look more like 50% cracked (due to all the new ones), even though the reality is that 80% crack given time. You have to stop dumping new ones in and just wait for them to do what they will before you can really know the true percentage. So I’d like to know what percentage of marriages in 1970 made it all the way through. Actually, that wouldn’t satisfy me because that crew is from a different culture.
Of marriages in 2016, I think about 70-80% will end in divorce before the year 2100
Boxer,
Dear Fellas:
10-15% of men very happy with their marriage
30% receive satisfactory or greater happiness (above group included here)
52% of marriages are legally intact (above group included here).
Again, no disagreement. I just want to point out that lack of context can lead to a more dismal outlook on the situation.
But that *is* dismal. Particularly when just about every man entering marriage thinks he will be in the outcome attained by just 15% or at least just 30%.
That legally intact marriages are often (or even usually) rife with threatpoint, henpecking, headship inversion (which should be called ‘buttship’ from now on), and obesity is itself a devastatingly bad deterioration of even ‘intact’ marriages.
Remember, UMC women don’t get divorced as much; this instead manifests as threatpoint and henpecking.
Here’s the issue: None of us are going to make a dent in the amount of young men who are going to choose to get married. The MGTOW movement promised big things, and failed. It will continue to be a failure, because inborn human nature drives most people to a large extent, and inborn human nature dictates to young men that they should find a bangable wife, lock her down and get on with being an adult.
So what do we do, faced with this incontrovertible fact? I think we should support these men, give them worthwhile tips to improve their shot at not having a dismal marriage, and help that large minority who do find themselves in the divorce courts to survive it.
We don’t accomplish anything by indulging in woe-is-me rhetoric, or trying to convince young men not to marry (that just alienates us from them). We accomplish most when we work with human nature, not against it, while working hard to subvert the social and political structure that encourages marital failure.
BTW: lolled hard at “buttship” — gonna use it.
Boxer
On Boxer’s point, we really should always ask ourselves why the results aren’t worse than they are given the astounding incentives. The media cheerleads divorce and contempt for husbands, and stands by eager to toss the husband out of the home (and, if she wishes in jail) and shower the (now ex) wife with cash and prizes. Recognizing that there are forces working in favor of in tact families doesn’t mean we are denying how profoundly dysfunctional our system is.
@Boxer
Ha! My wife shared this same story with me earlier, so I googled it and found another article from the Telegraph, which added/corrected two details that are telling from a red pill perspective. First, he didn’t vote for Trump. He announced that he was considering it, and after she pressured him he caved and wrote in another candidate. Worse than voting for Trump had to be caving in to her ball busting. But even funnier, is the fact that she isn’t divorcing him, only separating. Clearly in her gut she understands their respective fortunes in the dating/remarriage market given their age:
Boxer,
I’m not sure. Dalrock has documented how an erosion of the ‘marriage signal’ has greatly reduced the extent to which young men prepare for marriage. This preparation was the foundation of civilization, and female suffrage led to a state that has decided to plunder this resource like there is no tomorrow. Hence, it took a while, but now many young men are just not preparing for marriage anymore. This is why cuckservatives like the Prager U gaggle are getting so desperate. The golden goose is near death..
This removal of the marriage signal is the single biggest force that will make the costs of ‘feminism’ transfer back onto its proponents. MGTOW will always be a fringe movement, but men not preparing for marriage was happening even among men who never heard of MGTOW. No one overtly convinced them of it – they just responded to incentives, perhaps not even consciously..
Plus, we only care about men who are red pill or otherwise could be. Manginas and cuckservatives deserve nothing other than to see costs transferred to them.
Inversion of headship is perverse, hence calling it ‘Buttship’ henceforth is appropriate, and a way to win the language wars against proponents of Buttship.
I would credit some of the “lack of preparation” to Millennials, many are not as motivated as their predecessors and they face lots of obstacles in their way even if they are.
Though some, like one of my neighbors, is reasonably successful (an accountant with a decent firm), but who is still single for a variety of reasons. He is doing well for himself, but has not shared that gain with a family. He is likely ahead, though he also gets help from a married brother (and sister-in-law) who live in the same area at times.
melmoth,
Your marbles analogy doesn’t include the fact that many marbles are dumped back into the vault. They are not new by default and far more likely to break.
I did have someone assert to me recently that the divorce stats in the church were no longer worse than the world. Can anyone point to or deny that claim?
I am looking at doing some posts on who files for divorce, but I definitely don’t have the stats focus of Dalrock, nor the desire to really dig into that.
Anon,
I would also argue that the issue of plundering the foundations of civilization has been going on across the board for a while. We are eating what others prepared and most have no clue that the piper will need to be paid. Bumpy roads ahead I suspect, only partially smoothed by technological advances.
“We don’t accomplish anything by indulging in woe-is-me rhetoric, or trying to convince young men not to marry (that just alienates us from them).”
This is how Christians fight. We expose evil, warn the intended victims and complain very loudly about injustice. Actual victory comes from God whenever He wants it, not before or after.
Meanwhile, so long as my leaders are raping kids I’m not going to have kids. Not gonna end up like Lot with his 30% successful marriage. Somehow, this marks ME as a bad man, because soon my leaders will run out of kids.
“We accomplish most when we work with human nature, not against it,”
But unfettered human nature very obviously doesn’t want lifetime monogamy even though it’s in our best interest.
…
Dalrock @ 3:26 pm:
“On Boxer’s point, we really should always ask ourselves why the results aren’t worse than they are given the astounding incentives.”
The Pareto Principle alone suggests a natural 20% success rate. Not much difference between that and the figures getting bandied about.
What big things did MGTOW promise? What is the determination for ‘failure’ in this regard?
I don’t think you know what it means. Countless articles proving marriage is dead, a con and doesn’t have the best interests of the family in mind. MGTOW is simply about giving men information that can possibly save them from making the biggest mistake in their lives. It has no purpose beyond allowing men to find their own path in life.
It is you chaps who are against MGTOW that have either to pass or fail. Good luck, I don’t envy you one bit.
You’ve already lost. Marriage is not ‘innate human nature’ but banging hot chicks is. Marriage took eons to create into a viable institution that took the best of human nature and discarded the worst, it took strict discipline within society to make it work against the parts of human nature that would destroy it. That is what feminism has done, it has dismantled the strict adhesive parts that kept marriage a viable institution, we are now back to having true human nature as the all determining factor of male/female relations and marriage, real marriage, isn’t a feature.
This isn’t indulging in woe-is-me rhetoric. It’s putting a massive disclaimer in front of the ‘do you want to get married’ sign…
Why don’t you get married Boxer? Do it for the good of accomplishing social and political aims of reinforcing marriage.
Dalrock knows the answer to his own question. What is the reason that the results are not worse?
Cultural inertia, marriage is running off the years of success built up over two millennia of sacrifices made by our ancestors. Same reason that printing off trillions of dollars and hiking up the unfunded liabilities hasn’t gutted the American and World economies… yet. The wealth and good will that generations before us built up turned the West into the dominant force on the planet, most of that has been burned up, we’re now dealing with squabble over kitchen scraps.
It’s only a matter of time, but the tide is unrelenting.
Boxer,
I thought the marriage strike is at a noteworthy rate right now.
“We don’t accomplish anything by indulging in woe-is-me rhetoric”
That’s too binary, imo. A guy assessing his own incentives/disincentives can come to his conclusion and it’s not necessarily a ‘woe is me’ situation. It’s just a guy mapping out his own life. Much worse on the ‘woe is me’ scale is the bored-to-tears, likely overworked “Happy wife, happy life” pathologically self-deprecating guy who never had the nads to assess things on his own terms.
For me, marriage is legally untenable. Even if I still cried hard while watching Disney movies, and had superhuman oneitis capacities, it would still be legally untenable; VAWA, divorce court protocols, the very idea of imputed income (makes me sick) just make it legally impossible. That’s not even getting into the socio-emotional aspects. I actually never should get into the socio-emotional stuff because the disaster of the legal side makes any other consideration moot.
Also, Boxer, I’ve gone contrary to you a few times now but I like and respect your posts. It’s interesting to hammer through to an understanding of these issues.
Billy S,
So a cracked marble gets put back into the box again. Why wouldn’t it just add to the total of cracked marbes? Why should it be taken out or not counted? Divorce is divorce. The likelihood is the likelihood. I don’t understand why serial divorcers shouldn’t count.
Dalrock,
On Boxer’s point, we really should always ask ourselves why the results aren’t worse than they are given the astounding incentives.
I content that UMC women often replace divorce with henpecking, threatpoint, buttship, and effective imputation of income (i.e. the man age 55 is not allowed to work less, while the woman is pampered. The kids are gone, and the wife has to do nothing at all. The man’s earnings all go into useless consumption by the white elephant wife).
That masks a great deal of subtle torture and pernicious slow death within stats that indicate intact marriages.
That being said, UMC women who do divorce seem to fall for Nigerian romance scams to the tune of $200K+
My wife was apoplectic last week, watching Trump’s every attempt to fulfill his campaign promises meet with resistance / screeching from the left, the media, Hollywood, the pussy hat brigade, et. al. The final straw for her was Yates, and then Robart.
She finally just said words to the effect of “I wish he was a king – I don’t know how else he can get anything done in this climate of incessant challenges to his every decision.”
I turned to her at that point and said, “Welcome to the world that most husbands inhabit every single day. What do you propose a leader should do to guide and protect when the only power he is told he holds is the power to lovingly persuade, and the very place he goes for air cover – the church – shoots at him as well?”
Remember that a year or two ago, for the first time, there were more single adults in America than married ones. Married people are now abnormal.
http://thefederalist.com/2017/02/08/need-millennials-start-trying-sex/
Thanks for that link, Gurney Halleck. It illustrates several parts of the problem, starting with pedestalization of women by clergy…accidentally, to be sure.
Dear Fellas:
Dalrock sez:
Married men never seem to catch a break, I sweartagawd.
Then Feminist Hater sez:
Well, you can hunt up Crazy Rob Fedders’ blog. He claims (falsely, but still) to have been the founder of MGTOW, and he promises that it will lead to feminine women, masculine men, and conservative politics.
Utter failure on every count.
There are dozens of married men in this very comment section, in case you hadn’t noticed.
Then, in yet another article dedicated to Y’r Boy Boxer, Feminist Hater continues:
You are a man who has been completely feminized. Protip – You’re in the wrong place to be spouting the “men think only with their penii” nonsense. Go back to Jezebel or Feministing with the rest of the dullards who think that way.
I’d love to debate “true human nature” with someone who can make an intelligent argument. You, as we can all gather, don’t know anything about it.
I posted a study above. de Waal and Gavrilets make some compelling points, and their write-up is accessible enough that even I can understand it. With what do you disagree? Be specific.
You can personalize this if you want. I won’t get married because I know I wouldn’t make a good husband (I’ve become the male equivalent of a bar skank). Be that as it may, I don’t think this fact absolves me from trying, with whatever means I find expedient, to improve the world for other men and women, who have better odds.
You said yourself, above, that marriage was important for civilization. Whatever our differences, I doubt we disagree on rating civilization to be more pleasant than matriarchal anarchy. So, let’s get to work agitating for a society that is more conducive to marriage and family.
Best,
Boxer
Gurney, AR-
Sad link. “Feminine virtues” (like a quiet, gentle spirit) are assumed in the article to be innate and overlooked by evil men looking at porn all day.
That quiet, gentle spirit must be taught and cultivated, and it is not today.
Cart and horse stuff, really.
Dear Melmoth:
Those guys we sneer at are the men who built and continue to maintain our civilization. It’s true they’re unhappy.
http://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/FreudS-CIVILIZATION-AND-ITS-DISCONTENTS-text-final.pdf
But we shouldn’t sneer at them. Moreover, we don’t know that they’re all less happy than they would be if they adopted our lifestyles. Most people take pride in their families, and I think many of the people would be even more miserable if they didn’t have that outward sign of real-world accomplishment. What I’d like to see is a society that gets progressively more friendly and accessible to these men, rather than one that tries to convince them that being single is more fun.
I’m right there with you, man. But what’s the telos of our work? For me, it’s abolishing things like VAWA and family courts. It’s also, for me, not encouraging people to forego marriage — that just cedes ground to the feminists, most of whom are unhappy dykes, who would love to see more people, women and men, unhappy as they are.
Best,
Boxer
Scott
Sad link. “Feminine virtues” (like a quiet, gentle spirit) are assumed in the article to be innate and overlooked by evil men looking at porn all day.
That quiet, gentle spirit must be taught and cultivated, and it is not today.
Got it in one, and “quiet, gentle” is no doubt even more difficult to teach now because the entire society has bought into You Go Grrl. Notice that the writer at the link makes the usual churchman assumption that only young men are using porn, where ‘porn’ is defined solely in terms of video or other visuals. This is ignorant on two counts: First, women under 30 are a lot more prone to look at porn vids than women over 40, it is a cultural thing. Second, “romance novels” now are stuffed with explicit sex scenes. 50 Shades is still for sale in bookstores. The fact that women are more verbal than men and prefer their porn in text form rather than visual form doesn’t change anything – plenty of church ladies are reading porn in their spare time. If “exposed to porn” is a disqualfication for marriage, then probably 90% of women under 30 are so disqualfied.
tl;dr men are not women, women are not men. To put it in Bible terms, Adam’s sin and Eve’s sin are not necessarily the same sin.
Conservative feminists, like that Lutheran preacher, manage to assume the interchangeable nature of men and women when it comes to marriage and often when it comes to church leadership, but suddenly reverse into unique qualities of one sex when it’s time to cast blame for a social problem. It’s a longer winded version of “Men Bad Women Good”.
I would wager that the most blue pill, White Knighting church man around would protest this, but “watch what they do, not what they say” applies.
Putin just signed a good law about domestic violence that protects men.
Honestly, when I was single I’d have preferred to be in a relationship with a man who beat me than no one. A lot of women feel this way but won’t admit it. Also, indifference is the opposite of love. A lot of women feel loved by men when they are violent. It may not be healthy but it is true!
Boxer @ 10:07 am:
“Well, you can hunt up Crazy Rob Fedders’ blog. He claims (falsely, but still) to have been the founder of MGTOW”
Sheesh, you found a lying crank to speak for a decentralized movement?
” It’s also, for me, not encouraging people to forego marriage — that just cedes ground to the feminists,”
The feminists don’t want MGTOW. They want lots of marriage so they can suck men dry then destroy them in envious hatred. The last thing those slavers want is seeing men run for the hills. Why else do they keep shaming us?
Why is preventing men from being deceived and destroyed a bad thing? Why is breeding so important that men should be tricked into seppuku? These Churchians and feminists want us to have lots of kids then get out of their way so they can do to our kids what THEY want… do you want to shill for these monsters?
Melmoth,
My point was that the likelihood of getting a cracked marble was much higher if marbles kept getting thrown back in, something the original analogy didn’t note (claiming new marbles were always added). 2nd, 3rd, etc. marriages are much more likely to fail.
This doesn’t make things rosy, but it does require some different thought.
====
Whether the current state is normal is handled much better with a proper Christian worldview. It starts by noting how God made things originally.
Then look at the curse after sin entered the world.
You don’t need eons of evolution to explain our current situation. It is called letting sin rule. Our society has given license in the name of liberty. We have to adjust that to a point where sin is no longer the winning factor in most cases.
We will of course face sin until He returns and rules over the world (and for 1,000 years after that), but we can make a more stable livable situation if we push for the right core things.
What cannot continue won’t. MGTOW couldn’t continue any more than a fully homosexual society could. The next generation would never come and thus things would end. Going back to the same Scriptures shows that this will not happen, however much some want to just retreat off to themselves.
Warnings against the modern marriage system should be shouted from the housetops, but we also need to figure out ways to undermine and break the current flawed system so we can have a stable future for our posterity.
The United States would have been worse off if the Founding Fathers had taken a MGTOW approach. Others laid down their lives so modern MGTOWs can take their path. That is why it is a cop out, except for those who are specifically called to a life of singleness, such as the Apostle Paul.
@Gurney
The article is interesting about the millennial age cohort that is screen happy. But it swerves into the misconceptions that inform so much jacked up churchian teaching that relegates men to circular back rubs as rewards for good behavior while they yuk yuk yuk about if momma aint happy:
from the link: http://thefederalist.com/2017/02/08/need-millennials-start-trying-sex/
is half correct. Exactly half correct as shown in bold.
This is not an assertion that start to finish marriage is simply sex. This is an assertion that marriage , for men, is initiated FOR sex as the writer states. Sex is the primary motive. To suggest that that gets moved down the list as he sees her really.special.heart.and.stuff is that then she is attracted to his manly virtues like bravery, and the whole thing gets de-linked with sex, there is a reason why divorce in the church will not be mitigated. The efforts to mitigate it subscribe to what is implied in this whiny article.
@empathologism:
It’s always interesting when a writer nails the core topic then their need to fit within the culture makes them completely veer off course and collapse whatever point they’re trying to make.
LG
You’ve just explained a million blogs written by blue pill Christian men.
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And the more decent men encounter “the imperishable beauty of a quiet and gentle spirit,”
Not finding this around much, and I am actively looking for it (stumbled upon a handful but they were about 80 years old). Several young men are reporting the same. Since all the women innately have this, why is it so hard to spot? I suppose it could be read as only the “more decent men” encounter it. So it could be that I, and the men I’m talking with are not “decent”. This is possible.
Question for the decent men among Dalrock readers: Are you encountering women of a quiet and gentle spirit in any kind of numbers these days? Ha! Never mind.
GunnerQ to 8oxer
Sheesh, you found a lying crank to speak for a decentralized movement?
Nah, he’s got a big grudge against Rob Fedders dating back to Spearhead days, they had a big personal conflict in comments there. I remember scrolling right past both of them a lot, so frankly don’t know the details. Didn’t care then, care even less now. But 8oxer won’t let it go; Spearhead is mostly evaporated, Fedders seems to have gone dark, but from time to time kooky 8oxer has to bring up his twisted panties to people who have no interest.
When he gets off on one of his Rob rants, just scroll past, that’s my suggestion.
The feminists don’t want MGTOW. They want lots of marriage so they can suck men dry then destroy them in envious hatred
At the basic level, women want two things: sperm and resources. They want sperm the perceive to be of high quality to make babies with, and securable resources to raise babies with. That’s the basis of hypergamy, of the War Brides effect, of carousel riding and AF-BB. That’s the whole enchilada, everything else is on top of that. Even now when women are their own Betas, they still want those things at the hindbrain level.
So feminists are alarmed by real deal MGTOW. Not the whiners who screech at each other on YouTube over who is more pure in their MGTOW, but the quieter men who just go their own way and don’t care about feminist cant. Because the latter MGTOW tend to be competent men, and therefore attractive to some women, and so they can’t be allowed to get off the plantation.
@Lost Patrol
“Question for the decent men among Dalrock readers: Are you encountering women of a quiet and gentle spirit in any kind of numbers these days? ”
Yes, Hindu women. I work in IT. The Hindu men tell me differently, though.
I like this rewrite: “Yes, Hindu women. I work in it”
“I posted a study above. de Waal and Gavrilets make some compelling points, and their write-up is accessible enough that even I can understand it. With what do you disagree? Be specific.”
To be specific about all the things wrong with the study from de Waal and Gavrilets would take thousands of words and footnotes. I’ll write it on a different blog; it doesn’t belong here.
MGTOW didn’t promise great things. Rob Fedder may have promised great things, but MGTOW promised a very small, simple improvement. MGTOW promised men: Stop beating your heads against the impossible wall called marriage, and you will immediately improve your personal situation.
MGTOW was a symptom of a cultural turnaround. MGTOW was the cracking sound that overstretched responsibility made as it passed its Wile E. Coyote point.
2017 is a different world. The Clintons fear Pepe the frog and Trump just got an Attorney General.
Likewise dozens who’ve had the hearts ripped through their arses. You don’t care for that, though.
Some guy says something, therefore that must be the entirety of MGTOW beliefs and what they are all about. Yep, sure thing. Don’t know who Rob Fedders is, don’t care. I have begun to enjoy my life, a big part of that was MGTOW. Just the way it is.
Dalrock, please fix the blockquotes above, thank you.
Appreciate the context, AR.
GunnerQ:
This might be the old Fedders blog, or I might be totally confused. Either way it’s got a lot of links. Now, some of those are pure PUA, some are out of date, there may be some dead links.
Take the Bruce Lee approach: look at what is interesting, take what works for you, leave the rest; I’d concentrate on articles and forget any comment streams, because there’s been no activity since 2015. In fact, I think I’ll download some of those aticles & save various links locallly, because who knows?
http://no-maam.blogspot.com/
Dear gaikokumaniakku:
Fair enough. I’d be interested in your take on it. (Big fan of your blog, by the way.)
I’m aware that Fedders wasn’t actually the founder of it; but, he still has some nutcase disciples (see Anonymous Reader, right here) who want to politicize it, and these are the chuckleheaded buffoons (for better and for worse) who bother to define it to the broad masses.
The actual founders, and the well-grounded people who took it seriously, never bothered trying to make a brainless religious cult out of it. I’m sure they’re too busy riding motorcycles and having fun for any of that.
If you want to tell me that MGTOW isn’t a tiny fringe movement, then you’ve gotta explain the fact that few people are interested in it, while tens of millions of men are still ignoring the so-called ‘marriage strike’ and jumping into wedlock every year.
I have some hope in the integrity of the Trump administration, but I shall believe in great reforms when I see them. Politics ultimately begins at home (to quote Jack Donovan).
Best,
Boxer
Dear Feminist Hater:
Why, so people can see you get personal, rather than debate the real issues? Join the rest in the dunce’s corner. I can read it, as can anyone else, as is. As a rule, I don’t indulge in this sort of personal back-and-forth here. My time is valuable and this blog is too useful to muddy up.
I think you’re actually brighter than this (and brighter than some of these other people who are bent because I never respond to them – lol). If you want to argue, then come at me with a coherent argument, here or elsewhere. If you want to troll and make fun of me, then do it skillfully and make it funny. Anything less is a bore.
Regards,
Boxer
@Mandy, interesting comment !
Boxer. They can read for themselves. I would just like Dalrock to edit my comment since I cannot. It’s a fair request.
They can read my comments made to you, they were not personal. You then made a completely unrelated and unexpected personal attack on me and I responded. This isn’t personal for me, it seems to be very personal to you…
For the last few years I’ve been the most content, even excited at times, about my life than I have ever been. That is more than enough for me. You need to get over your issues about MGTOW. If it ain’t big, than you need not worry, if it is on the fringes as you say, you need not worry. Go expend your energy elsewhere.
blah, blah, blah… more obfuscation because you can’t really make an argument about de Waal/Gavrilets, above.
Pointing out that your goony religious cult hasn’t delivered on it’s promises (masculine men, feminine women and conservative politics, through the ‘marriage strike’ – fuck’n lol) isn’t a personal issue. It remains, however, pretty funny in context. Rest assured that I’ll keep chuckling at you and the rest of the true believers, whenever I find the time.
Regards,
Boxer
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Here’s a response to Wilcox’ most recent piece. It’s by Robert Franklin, a lawyer apparently, with the National Parents Organization:
https://nationalparentsorganization.org/recent-articles?id=23285
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BillyS said on Feb. 9 2017:
“Warnings against the modern marriage system should be shouted from the housetops, but we also need to figure out ways to undermine and break the current flawed system so we can have a stable future for our posterity.”
We know what that is. MGTOW and expatriation are not so much the solutions as the Toban Morrison path. That is, to get an egg donor and gestational surrogate, without a girlfriend, fiance, live-in, wife, anything. He will NEVER get his children (and current financial assets and future income) swiped from him by a faithless (e.g., typical) American woman. I applaud this choice, as the best one available for non-Amish American men, and wish I had done it. (I did do the egg donor/gestational surrogate route to get my two children, but made the mistake of thinking it would go better with a wife.)
Boxer says:
February 8, 2017 at 1:27 pm
“We are built for marriage and monogamy. Some of us might not choose it, but it’s hard to deny that it is our default setting, as a species.
Boxer”
Actually, that’s VERY easily refuted. Humans have only had monogamous civilization for not even 10,000 years, vs. our species having been around for 2- 5 million years. That’s less than a PERCENT of the time.
“Actually, that’s VERY easily refuted. Humans have only had monogamous civilization for not even 10,000 years, vs. our species having been around for 2- 5 million years. That’s less than a PERCENT of the time.”
That would be true if the evolution myth were true. Fortunately, there’s overwhelming evidence that it is not. In fact, if Darwin’ quaint musings were not taken as an article of faith among the “Cult of Scientism” (which is really just made up of naturalists pretending to a level of knowledge beyond the scope of their discipline), and someone posited it today with everything we now about genetics and paleontology… he would be laughed out of the room (and possibly institutionalized).
Maybe you could explain how it is that humanity survived, given the length of time infants take to become capable of running away from predators on their own, combined with our proclivity for sexual dimorphism… If we were hard-wired to be playas and cucks and feminists, it seems like we would all have been eaten by lions before our species got off the ground.
There are 3 general methods for mammalian reproduction and one example of what never to do given us by God. given biology, non mammalian species are irrelevant.
1- Most common is the harem. One or 2 genetically related males who gather a troop of females to defend and live off them. This leads to high male mortality with extreme violence between territorial males and relatively stable female bands. You can see this play out among some humans in some inner cities and Islam. High levels of male violence and mortality are required (being in jail reproductively is equal to death).
2- Alpha pairing, this does not exist naturally among humans as it is dependent on the pheromones of the alpha pair inhibiting the fertility of other troupe members, Perhaps western nations have implemented a form of this using birth control pills and it leads to insufficient reproduction. However, even birth control pills do not inhibit libido so this is not really applicable.
3- Monogamy, either life long or serial. This is almost the rarest form among mammals and the most stable, least violent and most conducive to child rearing of all.
Then there is the example of what never, ever to do: feminism. The hyena, where the female is bigger, and has male looking genitalia. This is the ONLY mammal where the young kill each other routinely, where the females very often die at childbirth due to giving birth through what is an very elongated clitoris. The hyena for a long time was thought to be a hermaphrodite because all hyena look like they have testicles and what looks like a penis. Please, google the family style and reproduction of the hyena and you will see feminism in all it’s depraved insanity. God has provided us a witness.
As horrible as Islam and the effective polygamous gang bang violence of the american inner city culture is, it is preferable to feminism.
Yet most pastors preach egalitarianism which is feminism light, and pretend the Bible does not mean what it clearly says.
Luke,
Full implementation of MGTOW would result in the end of human civilization, so it is not the solution.
I would also agree with what Lyn87 said. The Darwin myth has a huge number of flaws.
I instead look at how we were created in the beginning of Genesis. Add in the fall and sin’s influence and I see a very good explanation of what we have now, unfortunately.
Going forward is still going to be a mess and a painful process.
Much of this issue also depends on whether you think this life is it and what your view of the future of civilization is. If all we have and see is it, living only to maximize your benefits is almost certainly a good thing.
It is not a good thing if we have obligations and an existence past this life.
One does not have to be a Christian to observe that Darwin’s famous theory is short of the empirical evidence in badly needs if it is to be more than an intriguing hypothesis.
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Many of the claims also go against observable reality Opus. Not worth arguing here, but it isn’t just the lack of evidence, it is also the counter evidence that is denied or hand waved away.
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