Yes, I know very well NOW Michigan is not all feminists, yes I know as many feminists support equal parenting as oppose it – although not as strongly as they might if they really cared about it – but as long as NOW calls itself feminist, it is feminist and its members are feminists. That’s what you get for “feminism is not a monolith.”
And this business of opposing equal parenting, and of casting fathers’ claims to equality as somehow detrimental to children is deeply sexist, bigoted and dishonest.
So NOW Michigan has come out in opposition to a bill that would allow fathers to make paternity claims whether or not the mother identifies them as the father – in other words, to establish their parental rights in law as independent of the mother’s whim.
“The putative father’s rights bills (HB 4067, SB 256, SB 557, 558, 559, 560) have passed the Senate and House Judiciary Committee. We testified against the bills as they take away a protective mother’s rights. The bills are supported by the Family Law Section of the State Bar, the DHS Office of Child Support, the probate judges, and of course the father’s rights groups. Now that there is DNA testing, biological fathers can be identified should they wish to come forward and make a claim. The logic of allowing putative fathers to gain access to and some control over their progeny seems to hit sympathetic chords with legislators in the silence of the affected women and children.”
The silence of the affected children? And who decides that this is silence and what these children would say if they could? The very mothers interfering with the childhood and their access to their fathers, and the advocates of these mothers? And fathers coming forward and atemting to assert “some control over their progeny”, some degree of the control that mothers demand and are guaranteed under Michigan – “Oh the misogyny! Fetch the smelling salts! Equality? Oppressive!!”
This opposition to equal parenting is not confined to Michigan; on the national level NOW has form on opposing equal parenting. This is part of NOW’s wider anti-child and anti-father agenda – they have a pattern of outright distortions and lies about Parental Alienation Syndrome that tries to erase an especially destructive form of child abuse in the service of a very short-sighted, and actually anti-woman, women’s advocacy.
Has it never occurred to these organizations how misogynist this works to be, along with the misandry this entails? The legal regime as it currently stands leads to a social expectation on women that they get custody of children in a divorce unless they are so egregiously unfit that the court in desperation gives custody to the father. Are they unaware how oppressive and restrictive this is to women? But maybe that’s the plan, to have yet another issue to advocate about.
- The Woman Card - May 2, 2016
- Frat boy bachelorettes and the invasion of gay bars - April 15, 2016
- “Not my kid….” - February 22, 2016
by 
thanks for writing this….
it’s ironic how *they* claim we are terrible men who shouldn’t raise children and also get an unfair advantage as earning a buck for their 77 cents but *they* still want to regulate us with things like the nice guy ™ and other memes trying to keep men trapped in old gender roles then punishing us for living up to them….
there’s no winning is there?
maybe MGTOW is the best survival strategy….
Ginkgo: The two-step is very simple, breath-taking in its logic.
1. Complain that women are burdened with the responsibility of child-care, so men need to step-up and do more of it.
When mummy wants help changing poopy diapers so she can go-out and become a go-getting career woman, she should get the help from the man in her life. Despite not needing no man to do things for her.
2. Complain that masculinity is primarily about violence and men can’t be trusted around delicate little children.
So when mummy doesn’t want that man in her life anymore (perhaps because he’s an unappealing wimp who does– eeeyew– girly stuff like changing poopy diapers) she can have him kicked-out of the house on a whim but still have access to all of that yummy money of his. Which she needs, despite being a go-getter career woman who don’t need no man.
Win-win! And internally-coherent, too!
Aych you are 100% correct.
Over on the MensRights reddit there’s this thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/w9zna/dr_oz_does_not_recommend_male_babysitters_in_his/
About a passage in a book by Dr. Oz where he basically says “don’t trust boys to babysit your kids, because they might sexually molest them.”
I’m so sick of this.
Paul: Remember Satanic Ritual abuse back in the 80s? McMartin preschool? That ridiculous moral panic?
Well, a big part of the feminist movement was front-and-center in pushing the notion. Kee MacFarlane, the case worker who started-off the McMartin hoax, was a self-identified feminist and former lobbyist for NOW. Ms. Magazine devoted a whole special issue to hyping these non-existent torture-basements in the early 90s. This was a witch-hunt in the most literal possible sense.
What nobody ever pointed-out during this phony hooplah is that male child-care staff, despite being a tiny percentage of such workers, were way over half of the people being thrown in jail about it. So the next time you hear some feminist piously go-off on how, oh yes, men are perfectly capable of being nurturing and taking care of children so they should do half of the child-care? Well, you should ask them why so many feminists back in the 80s and early 90s were so very eager to believe– and push– the idea that male child-care workers were secretly running satanic rituals in torture basements. They really WILL believe the absolute worst things about men, no matter how ludicrous the charges are.
And this utterly boggles my mind. They are completely ready to buy into the idea that male day-care workers are closet satanists and child-torturers while they simultaneously demand that men do more child-care. Well, jeez, why should Satanist child-killers be looking-after the children? I simply can\’t get-past how completely bonkers it is.
Now me? I believe that a lot of men are capable of caring for children. But the fact of the matter is, the only reason feminists would agree with that statement is because they want to accuse men of being lazy bastards for failing to do 50% of it. When men actually, sincerely, want to do things with children? Feminists don\’t encourage him, they find him creepy and, in fact, WILL believe an accusation that he\’s worshiping the devil. But when it comes to women who actually abuse their children? Well, ho ho, that does not raise the same level of ire at all, does it?
You guys are on it – it’s all about constructing a lose-lose matrix to keep men in our place. It is not just pathology parading as ideology for these feminists, it is also feminist collaboration with traditonalist patiarchal social structures. We are always heraing that feminism is not a monoloith and how feminists contend with each other – this is one are where it is true. There are a lot of feminists who despise this stuff. Typically they are the ones who become MRAs because they have sons, but see no reason why that conflicts with their feminism.
I’m not sure if this is the right place for what I’m about to say, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently and it’s about something mentioned in the OP.
The thing about “feminism is not a monolith” is that it’s not just a statement, an excuse or an explanation: it’s a vocabulary. It’s a vocabulary that very few feminists think to employ. That doesn’t make them all hypocrites and it doesn’t make the statement untrue, but it can show them to be entirely unaware of or unconcerned about their presentation (a surprising number of neurotypicals have this problem; they never had to really study how their presentation is perceived because they good just coast by on the privilege of a society which rewards their perceptions and behaviors as the standard). Every time someone says “the fundamental principles of feminism are…” or “feminism is really about…” or “as a feminist…” or “it’s (not) feminism that causes…” they are using monolithic language (to say nothing of all the people who praise feminism as a single entity).
Using non-monolithic language starts with a focus on the personal and concrete over the abstract: “I believe…”, “I think we should focus on…”, etc. In the case of feminism, it also means being as specific as possible in one’s attributions. Ideally, they would be referring to specific individuals and their ideas rather than making sweeping, movement wide statements and never saying “feminism” without at least one qualifier before it if they can help it. If they weren’t too busy shouting about how they should never have to modify their presentation for anyone and that being put off or offended by their rhetoric is solely the fault of the person having that reaction to practice things like this, they would be able to slough off most of their social baggage practically overnight.
This isn’t a problem limited to feminism (I use no qualifiers because it is can not be meaningfully linked to any specific branch) so much as an extension of widespread problems in the social justice community (which I have remarked on several times in the past). Personally, I find that this sort of behavior causes me to be disinclined to offer my ear, my trust, or my support to those groups. This is, after all, the same social justice community that produces frequent speeches defending their habit of screaming at and insulting people who come to them with questions by demonstrating their inability to even conceive the idea of automating simple, repetitive tasks.
Well, surely no children would actually want contact with their fathers! We can trust mothers to speak for their kids on this matter… why would they lie?
[…] ¿Alguna vez se les ha ocurrido a estas organizaciones que tan Misoginista resulta esto a la vez de ser misandrista? El régimen legal que actualmente lleva a la expectativa social de que las mujeres deberían obtener la custodia de niños en un divorcio a menos que estén tan exageradamente incapacitadas que la corte en desesperación le da custodia al padre. ¿Se dan cuenta que tan opresiva y restrictiva es esto para las mujeres? Pero tal vez ese sea el plan, para tener otro problema para hacer activismo. http://www.genderratic.com/p/1631/it%E2%80%99s-shit-like-this-feminists%E2%80%A6-feminist-opposition… […]