Saturday, December 09, 2006

Italian father "attempts televised self-immolation" in protest

Watch the video here.  Italian father Nicola De Martino is reported to have tried to set fire to himself on Italian TV in protest at the poor state of fathers' rights in Europe.  The BBC says he had no history of mental illness with obvious implication that he was mentally ill to try the stunt.  On the other hand, watch the video.  He moves slowly, and gives the studio staff plenty of time to react and restrain him.  He had no intention of setting light to himself, but he sure as hell made a point.

De Martino's son, Luca, was taken from him 13 years ago when his mother moved to Australia.  The two were only reunited when Luca turned 18 and traveled to Italy to find his father.  The Italian site AGI posts a message curiously subtitled "on behalf of the Italian Prime Minister's office" which says:
I believe Nicola did more in ten minutes than we did in ten years. Nicola is not crazy, he is moderate and certainly somebody who suffered a lot, very much. But who wouldn't suffer if they would take away your child for 13 years?
And:
"In Italy in the past ten years 100 fathers committed suicide, in Europe two thousand in the past year. Our country has strict laws on the sufferance of animals but forgets about some human beings. It is time to change things and the gesture of Nicola must be interpreted in this sense".

Did De Martino do the right thing?  Had he actually set light to himself, I would have to say "no".  But he didn't, and raised the profile of a desperate and widely ignored cause.


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Friday, December 08, 2006

The rewards of resentment

The image “http://media.knuttz.net/funny/061205/knuttz_ueba_25.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Just in case the hotlink for the above image doesn't work, it's here. Apparently an actual memorial, it reads:

To our mother

Mona Herold Vanni

October 14, 1912 to April 11, 1996

You spent your life expressing animosity for nearly every person you encountered. Including your children. Within hours of his death, you even managed to declare your husband of fifty-seven years unsuited to being either a spouse or a father. Hopefully, you are now insulated from all the dissatisfaction you found in human relationships.

Buddy, Jackie and Mike.

Although apparently not an actual case of parental alienation, it says something for those too prepared to bad-mouth others, does it not?

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Cathy Young Reasons with us.

Cathy Young headlines in the print edition of Reason magazine with a very balanced column on parental alienation. It's rare that I can find nothing much to argue with in a piece on this topic, but I can only quibble with Cathy to the extent that I think she underestimates the partisan motivations of almost all of parental alienation syndrome's critics. Very few of them seem to be capable to recognizing that children can be and are alienated from perfectly good parents by manipulative and unscrupulous others.

We know it exists, so why do so many insist that it doesn't? Because they have a vested interest in having us believe a lie, much as do alienating parents.

What Cathy does very well is show how many emotive and superficially obvious cases are actually much more complicated and difficult than usually meets the public eye. Indeed, there are alienating parents and false accusers out there who will spend large chunks of their lives working on peddling their stories even while the children grow up and try to tell a deaf world what really happened, often not to be heard as the media and politics combine to ignore them.


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Sunday, December 03, 2006

The future President of France?

Britain is all-of-a-bother over the Misbah Rana abduction return order -- for once, I like the Times' point of view put forward by Gillian Bowditch - the case is messy, but the father unilaterally took the child away from her mother without bothering the courts. It should play out in Scotland, not Pakistan.

But Canada is a-buzz over two more kids returned from an international abduction to the rather less controversial France. Indeed, the mother, Nathalie Gettliffe, future President of France, may be about to go to jail for taking her two children now 11 and 12 to France five years ago.

Once in France, Nathalie went public, accusing the father of being an abusive brute who belonged to a religious cult and that she would abduct her children again if they were returned. Now Scott Grant is indeed an evangelical Christian and some might prefer to think of that as a cult, but it's not exactly the Moonies nor the Krishnas, is it? There's also no evidence of anything but a close and loving relationship with the children before abduction.

Nevertheless, as the French courts side with Grant, Gettliffe gets meaner. Grant, apparently, is "mean and dangerous", he's a "despot", and he makes "unreasonable sexual demands". Oooooh. Everyone run and hide.

But this isn't enough, she accumulates 3,000 signatures on a petition, doubtless from people with immense and intimate personal knowledge of the case and all its ins and outs, all of whom think she shouldn't be forced to return the kids.

Grant saw his kids four times in 5 years, the last one in the face of threats of a lynching.

How was this resolved? I bet you can't guess. Gettliffe returned to Canada to defend an academic thesis and got nabbed at the airport. There, did you see that coming? I know, I know, what was she thinking? Who knows...?

But there's more.

The kids are still in France, so Grant has to go look for them, again. Now Gettliffe's mother, in her turn, like daughter, like mother, abducted the kids. This time, at least they're still in France, and they're found, but not before Gramma-abductor has accused him of drinking, getting stoned and trying to sleep with his own daughter.

Fortunately, the credibility of these accusations is believed to be a tad suspect and Grant gets to take the kids home. But he's got a lot of work to do as they're thoroughly alienated from him, believing rather too much of their mother's claims in their impressionable years. (But then again, as so many are so bent on demanding, parental alienation is junk science and they couldn't possibly be telling anything but the truth, so who knows what the future holds.)

Indeed, what does it hold? Two years in clink for Gettliffe and 3 probation is what the crown is asking for. (Maybe she should get life, geddit? Gettliffe, get life? Oh never mind.)

Gettliffe herself thinks she should become president of France. Wait. Er. What? No. You're not serious.

Oh yes I am. Really, I kid you not.

So, we have a bona fide nutcase mother, who abducts children internationally, goes rabid in public and spews vitriol all over her ex husband and poisons the kids against him, while developing plans to become president of France and it takes 5 years and CA$500,000 to sort it all out. But, yay, the system works, eventually, sooner or later, if you can afford it, if you can keep at it, and if mom's nutty enough.

Update: she got 16 months, which comes to 6 to go with time served, which actually seems quite reasonable to me.


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Friday, December 01, 2006

Just the facts ma'am: men are smarter than women. O RLY? RLY.

The Independent (UK) gives us a few interesting factiods:
  • on average, men are 5 IQ points smarter than women.
  • There are twice as many men than women with IQs of 120 or more.
  • there are 30 times as many men than women with IQs of 170 or more.
This is from 22 surveys sampling 20,000 university students. Hard to argue with that.

I do not simply gloat, the article fails to mention that there are more men than women on the low ends of the IQ spectrum as well. What does this mean? Well, for starters, it must mean that there are more women than men of average intelligence, although the difference need only be quite small to compensate by the small fraction of the population found in the wings of the distributions. I'd be curious to see the numbers.

But most interestingly, it means that diversity in intelligence is greater in men than in women. Anyone with half a clue about evolution knows that diversity is the key. Without it, evolution stalls and the creature dies when its environment changes. 'Strikes me that this is reason to value the male of the species, not just for his smarts, but for his promise for the future. Of course, you could always resent them for it.

Inevitably, the Independent has to have the usual ass-covering: "The results of both studies were a shock to me. I find prejudice abhorrent." To me, that's a non-sequiteur. Good science is not prejudiced. He goes on: "There has to be some female compensating factor" because the facts don't match his prejudices. What? Yes, he has prejudices, but can't see them. His prejudice is that men and women are equal in all things, and now he finds they aren't. He argues women have better communication skills, which may be, they are known to talk more, but then he says "women work harder than men and are more conscientious so they do things technically correctly. Men are often quite original but deficient in what is technically demanded." When it comes to keeping the house clean, it's possible he has a point, but, for example in the machine shop, where precision and skill are paramount, men hold the ground. Surely there's a reason for that.

At least he finishes with a note of reason:
"People should have equal opportunities but if you want a society where everyone feels satisfied you're not going to find men and women doing the same things in the same proportions. It would help if we recognised that."
Wow. Men and women are different. Who'd've thunk it?



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Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Is his behavior understandable?

A beautiful and terrible article in the Telegraph (UK. Update: vast amounts of supportive feedback here):
"I see my daughter regularly, but unofficially. I would stand outside the nursery school playground. Gradually, after many appearances, we made eye contact. After two years of this we would wave to each other. I do the same at her new primary school. Am I right to do this? I am aware of the risks and penalties, but I intend no harm and if I saw fright I would desist. My daughter has absolutely no idea who I am, just a silly man."

A silly man? An obsessed man? A desperate man? Part of me is horrified by the risk this man takes and by the confusion he could be creating in his daughter. Another part of me sees this reckless behaviour through the severe eyes of judge, school and mother.

And another part of me finds this picture unbearably sad: the longing, silent father on one side of the fence, the innocent, fatherless child on the other. Is he wrong? Probably. Is his behaviour understandable? According to the letters I get, yes.

"A silly man?" Silly? To love one's child and want to be part of her life is "silly"?

"An obsessed man?" Would we use the word obsessed to describe a mother in that position?

Creating confusion in his daughter? It is not him that is doing that, it is the mother, the judge, the school, by barring his access, by showing the child that her father is redundant, a problem, an embarrassment. It is the system that is confused, and passing that confusion on to the child. Do not condemn the father for trying to love his child, condemn the system for allowing it.

"Is he wrong?" Absolutely and unequivocally no! What he is doing may be illegal, but we are in a sorry state if we take legality as the moral standard.

"Is his behaviour understandable?" Try it. Try having your children extracted from your life by an uncaring system, by a vicious, vindictive ex spouse, then ask that question.




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Thursday, November 23, 2006

Killer fathers, again.

Two more major British newspapers report on the horrors of fathers killing their own children. It's obviously a fashionable topic. The Independent gives us "What makes a father kill his children?" and the Guardian "Fathers who kill their children". Both articles mention Angela Schumann in passing, the mother who tried to kill herself and her two year old child by jumping off a bridge (it wasn't just an attention-getter either, that bridge is a notorious spot for successful suicide), but otherwise discuss only fathers who kill, and usually kill themselves too.

Fortunately, neither paper makes the dishonest claim that parents who kill are nearly all fathers as did India Knight the other day in the Times and Olga Craig in the Telegraph, but there is a common thread that mothers who kill are depressed and ill, the poor dears, and the nearly equal number of fathers who kill are out for revenge and just bad, the murdering bastards.

Both articles cite the Heatley case, now a dozen years old, in which the surviving mother describes her control-freak husband and how the court system failed her and her children by granting him unsupervised visitation against her wishes, with tragic consequences. It is a common thread in much of the discussion that the murdering fathers are control freaks - walking cauldrons of "rage, jealousy, revenge and hatred. 'They are people who lack strategies for giving vent to that turmoil in the way that many women can,' says Dr Black - cutting the sleeves from their unfaithful husband's suits, destroying his favourite CDs, giving away his fine wine - 'attacking whatever he values'" (The Independent).

Question: how would we view a man who took out his revenge by cutting up his wife's dresses, giving away her jewelry, pouring her perfume down the toilet?

This may be true, for those rare, highly unrepresentative cases, such as the Heatley case, where the mother is said to have "found the courage to leave her husband and did not want him to have unsupervised contact with their children. However, the family courts, who believe contact with both parents is always in the best interests of the child, granted it. It was on their first unsupervised weekend with their father that [he] strangled them." (The Guardian).

Undoubtedly, "the system" failed in this case. Something went badly and forever wrong.

More than one of these articles frowns on the sense of ownership of their children that these murdering fathers are said to have, which is interesting given that no-one questions a mother's sense of ownership of those same children and her right to take them with her when she leaves.

These control-freak fathers are said put a great deal of store in their families, that the loss of that family is devastating to them, that they often appear normal until the moment when it is all too late. Heatley himself was a well-respected doctor, which too easily becomes a perverse point against him. Thus we pathologize normalcy.

These articles never seem to report on the vastly greater number of men who also set great store by their families, to whom the loss of that family is likewise devastating and who face a world in which 40% of them will lose contact with their children within two years, but still do not go over the edge and kill. There is no interest in the double standard that a wife has the courage to leave, but a deserting husband is philandering scum or, worse, the deserted husband is there to be enslaved financially and left for dead emotionally.

There seems to be no concern that the custodial parent can wield absolute power over the non-custodial parent's relationship with the children (let's be fair, custodial fathers are just as capable of malicious behavior as custodial mothers), that all they have to do is complain that they're afraid of what the other may do (look at the Heatley case!) and the doors can be made to slam shut.

It's a positive feedback thing, folks - the bleaker the outlook for the throw-away parent, the more likely the tragic over-reaction. The more tragedy, the stronger the malicious custodial parent's argument for the exclusion. We should never even begin to condone this tragedy, but we should also take great care to avoid cultivating it.

Four major national newspapers hold forth on murdering fathers within one month, and none discuss the greater context of the ongoing destruction of fatherhood. Could it have been that some of the perpetrators are driven over the edge by their wives' insistent claims that they were dangerous? That sufficient maltreatment brutalized them, made them want to deserve it? That living in the looking-glass world of a family court, their own world views are turned inside out?

Would some of these hellish murders not have happened if the fathers had felt sure they would not have lost their children, if their environments had been more protective of their roles? That they do actually have some right to control over their own lives and influence in their children's? Could it have something to do with the criminalization to which innocent fathers are so easily subjected?

Could some of these rare and highly unrepresentative murders actually be caused by spotlighting them and extending the suspicion to all separated fathers, locking them into a vicious circle by which the harder they fight to stay fathers, the more suspect they are?

We'll never know, because these are questions we never see asked.

-------

Update:

Having written the above, I discovered a much more sensible article on the phenomenon of "family annihilators" by Zoe Williams in the Guardian, in which they are identified as horrific, but very, very unusual and a number of excellent points are made. Aside from repeating the erroneous 20:1 ratio of killer fathers to mothers, which is corrected in the on-line version, Ms. Williams says:

"Studies aren't undertaken to establish how men respond to the stimulus of jealousy, or what the specific factors might be that add up to the overweening emotional breakdown necessary to kill a child. But the argument that filicide could stem simply from jealousy has no currency among the police officers investigating these cases. They say, quite fairly, time and again: 'Well, married people have affairs all the time.' Husbands do it, wives do it, nobody likes it, and yet very few people take this as a reason to kill their children. It simply will not stand up as a motivation, when this response is so aberrant. Yet newspapers will report the alleged sexual behaviour of the mother as if it were of the utmost relevance."
....

"The second misconception is that the paternal instinct isn't as strong as the maternal one, that the urge to protect is not as great."
....

"Fathers are not afforded the same lenience [as mothers]; they are not assumed to be insane. Although there are, of course, murderous fathers of whom it may be said he was very "mild", " wouldn't hurt a fly", of whom no one had the slightest inkling of any psychological or emotional problem, these are actually the minority. In fact, fathers who kill their children often have a history of mental illness. ... Surely the fact of their having carried out such a crime and attempting suicide proves their instability?"

She ends with:

"The truth is that people go mad. The aggressively mad, more likely to be men, may kill others. The unaggressively mad, more likely to be women, may kill themselves or perhaps not kill at all. Infidelity doesn't create madness any more than money problems do, it is just that none of it helps. And the more facile the explanation of why a parent has killed their child, the less likely it is to bring comfort to the people who most need it."

At least someone around here seems to have some sense, although I wish she'd identified the family court stressor along with jealousy and finance.



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Sunday, November 19, 2006

More on murderous mothers and fathers.

Today, in the Sunday Telegraph we read:
"Crime statistics show that in the decade from 1992 to 2002, an average of 78 children under 16 were murdered each year in England and Wales. In roughly 70 per cent of cases, the killing was carried out by a parent, almost always the father."
And last weekend, there was a letter to the Sunday Times:
"We rely on Home Office figures for the number of homicides of children aged under 16 recorded by the police in England and Wales. These show that killings of children by a natural parent are committed in almost equal proportions by mothers (47%) and fathers (53%)"
How are we to reconcile the two? They're pretty clearly contradictory. The latter was written by Diana Sutton, the NSPCC Head of Policy and Public Affairs in London, the former by Olga Craig, Journalist. Somebody's telling porkie-workies, aren't they? (Translation: porkie-workies = pork pies = lies). It doesn't seem likely it would be Diana Sutton, a big-wig in the NSPCC, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, but Craig seems to have done at least some legwork (but does not cite her source).

Curiously, Craig also writes: "Psychologists agree that the majority of women who kill their children are seriously mentally ill, but fathers who do so rarely are." Why is it that so many absurd claims are begun with the claim "Psychologists agree..."? Absurd? Well, I would have thought that murdering your own children, whether you were the mother or the father, more or less by definition means that the murderer is mentally ill. How does the Telegraph justify the distinction? The mothers do it because they're ill, we don't need to know any more.

But, we hear, the fathers do it out of some need to revenge themselves on the mother. There's plenty of discussion about "troubled childhoods", "histories of violent and abusive behaviour", all the usual things to tell us that these murdering fathers are very screwed up, as if we didn't know that already. However "almost all are the sort of men who place enormous value on their role, or perceived role, within a family" which is a bit of a Catch 22 given that the responsible father used to be a good thing. Of course, too much of anything good can become something bad, even pathological, which is a word often used to describe mental illness, and is presumably the relevant case here. If that is the writer's point, then they should say as much, but they don't and another brick gets added to the wall against which we shoot fathers.

The imminent or ongoing failure of a marriage is cited as a primary trigger, but there is no analysis as to why it should have such radically different consequences between the genders. There is no discussion of the very different worlds that men and women face when their marriages fail. That mothers can find exceptional support in all walks of life from the courtroom to the garden fence and no-one will even think to take their children away from them. But fathers? 40% of them will lose all contact with their children within a couple of years, sooner, much sooner, if the mother gets uppity, and no-one will care, no-one will come to their aid. Indeed, they will be expected to "man-up", "take it on the chin", or just roll over and let it happen. Is it any wonder that once in a while a father is driven off the rails?

On the other hand, what if the NSPCC are to be believed and there really is not much difference in the numbers of murdering mothers versus fathers, then I can't exactly have my cake and eat it, can I? I'd have to admit that society's bias is not a relevant factor and these people are just crazy or evil regardless of their gender. And Craig and her interviewees would also have to retract that comment about the murdering fathers as over-valuing their roles, would they not? Or at least extend the observation to the murderous mothers. (Although I think I could still give them a run for their money over society's undervaluing of fatherhood and overvaluing of motherhood - because that's the question, really, whether society is to have the last word in the value of one parent or the other, or the parents themselves.)

If, instead of giving the patriphobes more excuses to kick a normal man out of his kids' lives and pathologize his attempts to fight back, we took an intelligent approach to the whole problem, we'd probably find that these incidents are so rare that general conclusions are just about impossible anyway, or at least we'd be careful to make that point. By the Telegraph's numbers, in the UK, there is roughly one murder of a child by a parent per year per million population and, in the USA, one "annihilated family" per year per 2.5 million. It seems unlikely that the people concerned make a representative sample of the population at large. That while the murdering father might have strongly valued in his role as a father as do, one hopes, the great majority of the rest of the country's fathers, it is not a relevant point in these sad, tragic, fortunately very rare and highly unrepresentative cases.

Before I sign off, a final note about the UK national newspapers' inability to get the story straight. The letter from the NSPCC was an attempt to set the record straight with another journalist who had published a piece about murderous fathers the week before. Both the Sunday Telegraph and the Sunday Times published misleading pieces on killer fathers just two weeks apart. Do we smell a rat?

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Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Replies to India Knight, patriphobe.

There were three letters in the last Sunday Times (UK) responding to India Knight's patriphobic column of the previous week, and which I complained about here. All three come out in defense of fathers - one from a father forced to give up on the courts and join Fathers 4 Justice, another from a friend of a father driven to kill himself and the third from Diana Sutton, NSPCC Head of Policy and Public Affairs, who says "killings of children by a natural parent are committed in almost equal proportions by mothers (47%) and fathers (53%)".

Time for a retraction, Ms. Knight?

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Tuesday, November 14, 2006

A parental alienation surivior speaks.

The text below was submitted anonymously as a comment to my last post. I put it here as an object lesson (my emphases):

I faced [parental alienation] too. My mother tried to convince me I was molested in order to take my dad to court. I almost bought into it because I was very young and believed my mother, but I never had any memory of anything happening so in the end I could not go through with it. Still it took years to repair the damage between my father and I.

She also referred to him as Hitler and literally danced a jig years later when we heard he had a heart attack, while I was on the floor sobbing. She did and said many other horrible things over the years; this is just the tip of the iceberg.

I took care of her when she was dieing from cancer, and did a damned good job, but after she passed I suddenly felt nothing but searing hatred for her. I refused to get her body from the morgue and was ready to see her put in potters field. Her family took care of it eventually.

I've struggled with the hatred and it's ruined my life. I haven't had a relationship with a woman in years and don't plan on it. I'll probably die alone with no offspring and that's probably for the best, considering I could never trust a woman.

Mothers who do this do not care AT ALL about the wellbeing of their children, whatever justifications they make, and should be prosecuted as child abusers.


Thank you for trusting us with your story, sir. I wish you everything great in life that might possibly compensate you for what you have gone through. There are women out there who can be trusted and know how to behave honorably. Do not let the past sins of others cost you what happiness you might stumble across one day.

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Thursday, November 09, 2006

Patriphobes and misandrists everywhere

Sorry, I've been quiet for a while.

The truth is that at times I just get tired. I get tired of how difficult it is to get people's attention, to knock them out of their complacency and realize that there is criminal injustice of an unfathomable degree right in front of their noses. Most of all, I get tired of the patriphobes who get so much air time and publicity for their misandrist howlings. Like bullies in the playground, they're dominant and obnoxious and you just want to get away from them.

For example, the National Organization for Women has come out against Parental Alienation Syndrome with a resolution which reads like they're the final authority.

"WHEREAS", they write, with all the trappings of an authoritarian patriarchy they claim to despise, "the term Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) was created by the psychiatrist, Richard Gardner." OK, so far, so true, but "created"? "Coined" would be better, created implies he made it up, but that's what they want you to think...

"It is used as a tactic in courts by litigating attorneys as a defense strategy for batterers and sexual predators that purports to explain a child's estrangement from one parent, or explains away allegations against the estranged parent of abuse/sex abuse of child, by blaming the protective parent;"

Yes? Then prove it. I mean it. I've been in this game a couple of years now and don't know of a single bona fide case where an abuser has gotten custody on this basis, but I have encountered many where the abuser uses their custody to turn the kids against the other parent.

"WHEREAS, there are no data to support PAS" If you don't look for it, you won't find it. It's there, girls, just spend some time in a family courtroom.

"WHEREAS, mothers are primarily pathologized and blamed for interfering with their children's attachment to their fathers" Note the full-on sexism. Note the over-generalization. Note that failure to acknowledge that this can and does happen.

"WHEREAS, abuse is continued via the court system thru [sic] a series of ruthless assaults from all angles strategically planned over time by an abuser, his criminal-divorce-personal injury attorneys and PAS therapists to fully discredit, blame and control a protective parent with the sole purpose of hiding abuse, infidelity, finances and to "win" possession of the child(ren), while proponents of PAS profit" Note the full-on sexism. Note the assumption of guilt. Note the failure to acknowledge the very real power of the "protective" parent to use the courts to control the other parent.

"WHEREAS, as documented in the PBS film, Breaking The Silence, The Children's Stories there are epidemic levels of abuse and dysfunction in our courts system where espoused judges repeat Richard Gardner's unsubstantiated doctrine and make binding recommendations in conjunction with PAS therapists and PAS attorneys;" Note the failure to acknowledge PBS's documented misreporting and considerable bias on this program, explicitly pointed out by their own ombudsman and forcing them to make a more balanced program to compensate.

"WHEREAS, the newly revised, 2006 edition of "Navigating Custody and Visitation Evaluations in Cases with Domestic Violence: A Judge's Guide," published by The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, includes a strong statement condemning the use of PAS which it calls a "discredited" syndrome that favors child abusers in custody determinations" Now this is a good one. That guide is distinctly schizophrenic on the issue. It does say that PAS is "discredited", but it bases that statement on the APA's line that there is as yet insufficient formal scientific study to permit acceptance of the issue. This is not the same as saying it does not exist, nor that it is discredited.

Also, a little investigation will show that the Judge's guide is most likely strongly influenced by a recent paper of appallingly bad scholarship which sets out to undermine PAS mostly through personal attacks on Gardner as opposed to a direct investigation of the phenomenon itself. It was written by someone who is a strong proponent of the much more controversial recovered memory syndrome. (This author won a case against her own father, putting him in jail for molesting her, the evidence being her own recovered memories. As such, if the recovered memories were in fact bogus, and we can never know for sure, they would make this author a prime candidate for the most extreme form of PAS there is. Objective? You decide.)

Finally, it is interesting that the Judge's guide, while it does indeed claim PAS is discredited, also explicitly acknowledges that vengeful parents can and do turn their own children against the other in order to gain an advantage in court. 'Seems they want their cake and to eat it.

"THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the National Organization for Women (NOW) denounces Parental Alienation Syndrome and recommends that any professional whose mission involves the protection of the rights of women and children denounce its use as unethical, unconstitutional, and dangerous."

So there you have it, the NOW dictates divorce-court professional ethics. Aren't they sweet?



Another sweetie, recently, is India Knight who, just as British Airways thinks that all men a pedophiles, thinks that all separated fathers are murderer-suicides and if they're not, then they haven't any balls. Her entire article is a transparent case of blaming the victim. I wonder how she'd feel if she were raped and we all claimed she was asking for it.

Why don't these women see how they put men in inescapable positions and then condemn them for whatever they do to try and escape?

Actually, I think they do see it, I think they get their giggles out of tormenting men like this. It gives them some pathetic sense of power, just like the bullies in the schoolyard.

Well, Ms. Bully & cronies, you may have some crude power, for now, but I know that I and my fellow disenfranchised fathers (here's another) are better than you and no matter how much it angers you nor how much you wear us down, we will always know that.




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Friday, October 20, 2006

I remember when lines like these used to be funny...

"Ah, yes, divorce, from the Latin word meaning to rip out a man's genitals through his wallet."
--Robin Williams

"Instead of getting married again, I'm going to find a woman I don't like and just give her a house."
--Rod Stewart

"Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist."
--Matt Barry

"I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy."
--Tom Clancy

"There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL."
--Lynn Lavner

"My girlfriend always laughs during sex---no matter what she's reading."
--Steve Jobs (Founder, Apple Computers)

"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch."
--Jack Nicholson

"Women complain about premenstrual syndrome, but I think of it as the only time of the month that I can be myself."
--Roseanne

"According to a new survey, women say they feel more comfortable undressing in front of men than they do undressing in front of other women. They say that women are too judgmental, where, of course, men are just grateful."
--Robert De Niro

"There's very little advice in men's magazines, because men think, I know what I'm doing. Just show me somebody naked."
--Jerry Seinfeld

"See, the problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time."
--Robin Williams

Sunday, October 01, 2006

An unusual custody argument...

A man and his wife were getting a divorce at a local court.

But the custody of their children posed a problem.

The mother jumped to her feet and protested to the judge that since she had brought the children into this world, she should retain custody of them.

The man also wanted custody of his children.

The judge asked for his side of the story too. After a long moment of silence, the man rose from the chair and replied:

"Judge, when I put a dollar into a vending machine, and a Pepsi comes out, does the Pepsi belong to me or to the machine?"

Credit: MoronLand


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Saturday, September 09, 2006

Two new disenfranchised fathers

Two new blogs from disenfranchised fathers, both victims of ex wives who manipulated the system to criminalize them and separate them from their children. Read them and learn what can be done in the name of the "best interest of the children".

Will Hayes at Dad's Story and JQ75 at Domestic Relations Disaster.

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Sex doesn't sell, male cooperation causes wars and men are smarter than women anyway, so nyah!

It's no surprise to anyone that magazines for men tend to be full of photos of scantily clad women, which, of course are well known as nothing but an annoying distraction from the articles for which we buy the magazines, but it's always been a source of quiet amusement that so too are the magazines for women full of such photos, in amongst the articles about the neurosis-du-jour. Failing access to dad's Playboy collection, many a spotty young man has fallen back on perusing the knickers and well-filled bras in mom's comics laid out so conveniently on the coffee table. I confess I've often wondered why (not the spotty young man's interest! the presence of the salacious pics in the first place), but always ended up shrugging my shoulders and assuming it had something to do with the same sort logic that drove women to read about their neuroses all the time. (*)

Of course, some dastardly man's gotta be at the bottom of this, hasn't he?

At least, that's what MSNBC says, reporting (female reporter) on a study (female lead author) which investigated the reactions of 100 college-aged women to female models finding that "the more seductive the model, the more it left the women bored and uninterested". Uh oh, something's not right. In which case, why are women's magazines full of pictures of models? One of the authors of the study (male, this time) said "that the results also illuminate a gap between the male executives who are marketing the magazines and the consumers". You see? I told you it was our fault.

In which case, I still have to ask why magazines that are so proud to market themselves as produced by women for women are still full of pictures of naked and near-naked women and still manage to be successful?

Another study cited in the same article seems to show that women can only distinguish two types of beauty: "wholesome" and "sexy-sensual" despite a sample selected from a range declared to be of 6 distinct types. That sounds like a sort of color-blindness. I confess I don't really know what to make of it. Any ideas anyone?

(*) Could it be that women are as confused about their identity as we
are? (Come on folks, there's got to be at least one comment in that
line or do I have to go all out balls-to-the-wall misogynistic to get
some action around here?)


    --------

Also, MSNBC report that "men bond together and cooperate well in the face of adversity to protect their interests more than women".  Now, before you get a nice warm feeling about a positive aspect of being a man, this is of course interpreted to "explain why war is almost exclusively a male business" and "makes them particularly able to engage in wars".  Sigh.  This is deduced from experiments with students involving money in which the men were found to be more likely to invest in group ventures when told they're in competition with other, unnamed groups, whereas women acted no more cooperatively when they knew they were in competition as a group than when they did not.  In other words, when the group is under threat, the men do more to protect the group than do the women, but to distract us from an example of male inter-cooperation, we're told how aggressive we are and more likely to try to beat the crap out of eachother.

But we can finish on a small male victory in the war between the sexes in which we all know that women are completely unwilling participates and at an innate and unfair disadvantage because they're all so peace-loving and cooperative and want us all, men and women, just to get on with each other.  It turns out that teenage boys are smarter than their female contemporaries.  Really, no kidding, paper available on-line


(Oh, and to prove my male blood-lust, I've been waging war over the pros and cons of gun-ownership at Dr. Helen's.  Am I a sucker for punishment, or what?)



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Wednesday, September 06, 2006

20/20 cruises the titty bars

It used to be that stripping and prostitution were considered pretty much at the same level of society, i.e. just a step above bag lady or drug addict. These days, it appears to be an appropriate, er, career choice for single mothers and "students". 20/20, for want of anything better to do, has been hanging around titty bars (quality establishments only, please) and is legitimizing this by describing the career pros and cons of taking your clothes off for a paying audience.

To their astonishment, they have discovered that "their stories were echoed not just by other dancers, but by women throughout the work force." Uh-uh, I'm sure it's just exactly the same as waitressing, or working as a bank teller, or doctor in a hospital. They do manage to make it sound like any other career, sort of. The girls whine about lack of mentoring, they have to buy their own health insurance and pensions, they complain about overheads. They have to talk to the customers and persuade them to purchase the wares. And they are "customers" and "clients" not actual men as if to recognize that your talking about sexually motivated interaction between MEN and the WOMEN that they're paying to undress and writhe for them is slightly icky, getting too close to honest recognition of the mutual exploitation that is going on.

"Butterfly" said "I had to make money, good money fast" in the wake of her divorce (I guess he was already broke or something and real work beneath her), and "spends all day with her children, then leaves them with a baby sitter when she heads to work at night." "Nicole" is a real feminist dream, she used to be a marine, then became a Penthouse model and got into stripping that way - started out competing with men, ended up exploiting and and being exploited by them. She's pleased that she goes to work after she's tucked her son into bed and gets home in time to feed him breakfast. I wonder what he tells his friends when they ask him what his mom does for a living. "Rachel", "Dawn" and "Stephanie" all told 20/20 they're students. I wonder if their classmates come in for a beer and a chat over lecture notes once in a while.

20/20 themselves come across as terminally naive. "After watching dancers give lap dances it's easy to guess what the customer is thinking about." Uh, no kidding, why do you think he's there in the first place? I think they've bought into the fantasy the clubs are peddling - that the beautiful women are really just these terrific girls, home-town honeys who are working for an honest living or to put themselves through college and need their "customers" to give them just enough money to support their families or pay the college fees. In fact, the whole thing is a pretty good commercial for these clubs and a lead-in for the girls to convince the "clientele" of their pure, virginal motivations.

Who are the best marks? "Jennifer" looks for the "vulerable ones" - "You want to look at the guy who probably doesn't get that much love or affection or whatever. And then you try to fulfill that need, you know? You try to make them feel better about themselves — smarter, stronger, whatever." Aw, isn't that sweet? Of course, the girls "are compensated for that." Yes, well, the lonely ones would be the ones most likely to cough up for a little company, but that's always been true in any walk of life. But is there any context in which it is permissible for a man to size up a woman for her vulerability with an intent to take money from her? I am intrigued by the euphemism "compensated" as opposed to "paid".

20/20 wants us to go away remembering that these poor creatures "work in a world full of scorn and moral condemnation" but "have each made a choice about what is best for themselves and their families" and "They show up each night because it's their job." Wow, but how the world has changed.

Overall, 20/20 appear to have done an excellent job of sanitizing the whole affair, gently bringing into your living room just enough of the dark side of life to titilate you but not so much as to give you any discomfort. There are no seedy dives any more with raddled drug-addicts trying desperately to squeeze a few bucks out of the groping drunk in the corner, only beautiful moms and students with Penthouse spreads on their resumes and vulnerable, lonely clients who follow all the rules. Puh-lease.

Who knows, maybe drug-pushing and pimping for single dads will be next on 20/20's career specials.



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Tuesday, September 05, 2006

DV on Men, tasteless feminists, why there's less sexual harrassment and Punch is a puppet, for goodness sakes!

MediaRADAR is serializing the chapter on domestic violence from Warren Farrel's book "Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say". In this chapter, he writes "When he fails to leave, it is not called 'Battered Man Syndrome'; it is called comedy". To me, this is the crux of it, we think that a woman beating a man is funny - kick him in the balls, knock him flat with a frying pan, or, more likely in today's Hollywood, go for an all-out frontal karate attack with spinning kicks and punches, and this is supposed to amuse us. Good God, it actually does amuse us if movie theatre audiences are anything to go by. We haven't grown out of the Skimmington, we've extended and refined it.

The reality is that the physical damage is usually something less significant than the humiliation. And the humiliation isn't even public. To the man sitting at work the morning after, nursing one bruise or another, it isn't the pain that hurts most, it's the memory of the attack. The confusion. The lack of a framework in which to identify a solution. It isn't even that he couldn't fight back, it is the knowledge that it didn't even occur to him. It wasn't cowardice, he doesn't think, it was the knowledge that he had to put up with it, let it play out, and lick his wounds later. It's the guilt, formless and sourceless, because he doesn't know if he did something to deserve it. Probably, he thinks he did, perhaps he thinks the punishment was excessive, but who is he to argue (that'll just make it worse)? Besides, everywhere he looks, it's men that get punished, not women, it's men that are the acceptable targets of casual violence, day in day out, all over the place.

Probably, he knows there isn't a solution, he just has to endure it. Leave? And what about the kids? He's already been told she'll make sure he never sees them again if he doesn't get his act together, whatever that was supposed to mean, and he knows enough of what goes on in family courts to know she'd probably be allowed to do that. Not to mention the financial cleaning out. Best just to let it slide, endure it, cluck over her poor bruised fist she complained about this morning and not say anything about the knuckle-shaped welts on his ribs. Most people he knew, if they knew what was going through his head, would just think he was whining anyway. He got himself into this mess, he's got to be a man and if not control it then survive it.

It isn't the fucking embarrassment, that can usually be avoided, it's the presumption of guilt and lack of any options.

----

To change the direction a little, but still to remain on the topic of attitudes towards men suffering injury and, in this case, death - I see that the Guardian (UK) is fully participating in the game of alienating the Australian public from their stuck up British cousins by nailing one of their most famous sons the day after he's killed. Yes, who else but Germaine Greer would show sufficient lack of taste to not only speak extensively ill of the dead Steve Irwin, but also demonstrate once again that the British care more for animals than people. Only an idiot would be unable to see the inevitable irony that Irwin would sooner or later suffer something unpleasant if not tragic in the course of his undoubtedly risky adventures, but that didn't stop us watching and enjoying his shows even if we did cluck over the foolishness of it all. But to have the appalling bad taste to crow over the man's death could only come from a whinging pom feminist(*). Doubtless she thinks this is just more of her own proud notoriety. Someone please show her the door. (Actually, come to think of it, let her keep it up, dig that hole Ger!)

(*) Yes, I know she's an Aussie, but her tripe was published in a British rag and she lives in the UK now and I wouldn't blame Australia for disowning her and revoking her passport.

And to another perhaps comparitively trivial item, in California, one Wendy Bliss thinks that the decrease in sexual harrassment claims between 1997 and 2005 is a result of the increase in sexual harrassment training. Of course, the same item reports that average damages awards have risen from US$141,000 in 1994 to US$1 million now, so I can think of at least two more factors to account for the decline in the number of claims - 1) companies are now terrified and much more likely to fire the man, who can't fight back, at the slightest hint of an accusation (or even just voicing politically incorrect thought) and 2) lawyers will prefer the clear cut cases that a jury is likely to award the bigger chunk of cash.

Finally, today's entry in the silly science stakes comes from the ever reliable BBC who want us to believe that Mr Punch of Punch & Judy fame is always in a bad mood and beating people up because he has a medical condition called acromegaly. Would someone please tell Auntie Beeb that Punch is a goddamned puppet?




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MediaRADAR is serializing the chapter on domestic violence from Warren Farrel's book "Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say". In this chapter, he writes "When he fails to leave, it is not called 'Battered Man Syndrome'; it is called comedy". To me, this is the crux of it, we think that a woman beating a man is funny - kick him in the balls, knock him flat with a frying pan, or, more likely in today's Hollywood, go for an all-out frontal karate attack with spinning kicks and punches, and this is supposed to amuse us. Good God, it actually does amuse us if movie theatre audiences are anything to go by. We haven't grown out of the Skimmington, we've extended and refined it.

The reality is that the physical damage is usually something less significant than the humiliation. And the humiliation isn't even public. To the man sitting at work the morning after, nursing one bruise or another, it isn't the pain that hurts most, it's the memory of the attack. The confusion. The lack of a framework in which to identify a solution. It isn't even that he couldn't fight back, it is the knowledge that it didn't even occur to him. It wasn't cowardice, he doesn't think, it was the knowledge that he had to put up with it, let it play out, and lick his wounds later. It's the guilt, formless and sourceless, because he doesn't know if he did something to deserve it. Probably, he thinks he did, perhaps he thinks the punishment was excessive, but who is he to argue (that'll just make it worse)? Besides, everywhere he looks, it's men that get punished, not women, it's men that are the acceptable targets of casual violence, day in day out, all over the place.

Probably, he knows there isn't a solution, he just has to endure it. Leave? And what about the kids? He's already been told she'll make sure he never sees them again if he doesn't get his act together, whatever that was supposed to mean, and he knows enough of what goes on in family courts to know she'd probably be allowed to do that. Not to mention the financial cleaning out. Best just to let it slide, endure it, cluck over her poor bruised fist she complained about this morning and not say anything about the knuckle-shaped welts on his ribs. Most people he knew, if they knew what was going through his head, would just think he was whining anyway. He got himself into this mess, he's got to be a man and if not control it then survive it.

It isn't the fucking embarrassment, that can usually be avoided, it's the presumption of guilt and lack of any options.

----

To change the direction a little, but still to remain on the topic of attitudes towards men suffering injury and, in this case, death - I see that the Guardian (UK) is fully participating in the game of alienating the Australian public from their stuck up British cousins by nailing one of their most famous sons the day after he's killed. Yes, who else but Germaine Greer would show sufficient lack of taste to not only speak extensively ill of the dead Steve Irwin, but also demonstrate once again that the British care more for animals than people. Only an idiot would be unable to see the inevitable irony that Irwin would sooner or later suffer something unpleasant if not tragic in the course of his undoubtedly risky adventures, but that didn't stop us watching and enjoying his shows even if we did cluck over the foolishness of it all. But to have the appalling bad taste to crow over the man's death could only come from a whinging pom feminist(*). Doubtless she thinks this is just more of her own proud notoriety. Someone please show her the door. (Actually, come to think of it, let her keep it up, dig that hole Ger!)

(*) Yes, I know she's an Aussie, but her tripe was published in a British rag and she lives in the UK now and I wouldn't blame Australia for disowning her and revoking her passport.

And to another perhaps comparitively trivial item, in California, one Wendy Bliss thinks that the decrease in sexual harrassment claims between 1997 and 2005 is a result of the increase in sexual harrassment training. Of course, the same item reports that average damages awards have risen from US$141,000 in 1994 to US$1 million now, so I can think of at least two more factors to account for the decline in the number of claims - 1) companies are now terrified and much more likely to fire the man, who can't fight back, at the slightest hint of an accusation (or even just voicing politically incorrect thought) and 2) lawyers will prefer the clear cut cases that a jury is likely to award the bigger chunk of cash.

Finally, today's entry in the silly science stakes comes from the ever reliable BBC who want us to believe that Mr Punch of Punch & Judy fame is always in a bad mood and beating people up because he has a medical condition called acromegaly. Would someone please tell Auntie Beeb that Punch is a goddamned puppet?




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Monday, September 04, 2006

Feminists faking orgasms, a catfight, not shaving, and rock music for brains

The news out of Britain today is just terrific. In the Observer, get this, we have a feminist arguing for women to be nice to men. Good lord. Whatever next? But really, Fay Weldon offers the following advice to women not getting off from getting laid: "If you are happy and generous-minded, you will fake it and then leap out of bed and pour him champagne, telling him, 'You are so clever' or however you express enthusiasm". Personally, behavior like that from a bed partner would make me deeply suspicious. "Clever"? I have been declared at least reasonably capable in bed (really, at least once!), but "clever"? As for the leaping out of bed, she oughtn't be capable of "leaping" anywhere at that point if anything has been done at least reasonably right, don't you think? Besides, the champagne ought to be in easy reach without any kind of leaping, oughtn't it?

But then there's the question of faking it. Ms. Weldon goes on: "Faking is kind to male partners ... Otherwise they too may become anxious and so less able to perform. Do yourself and him a favour, sister: fake it." Ah, so it comes down to the fragile male ego from which so many women are so convinced we all suffer intolerably. Of
course, every woman I ever met has had a universally and infinitely durable ego and no performance anxiety of any sort in any realm.

Now, I don't know if I've ever observed a fake orgasm, although I've had my suspicions (and I know of at least one woman who would happily and for the simple fun of it, claim that she faked every single one just to try and puncture my oh-so-fragile ego, but I know better, hehe), but either way, I don't much like it. It's just dishonest. One learns from one's mistakes. If one thing doesn't work, try another. We're too tired now? Well, there's always tomorrow. But why fake it. Who needs that?

Of course, if the choice is between faking it and making a scene because you didn't get off, I'd rather you weren't in my bed in the first place.

These issues aside, Ms. Weldon's advice gets the predictable short shrift from the more common variety of feminist. Apparently, she's an old fart whose ideas are not relevent to the modenr woman. Hmmm. Bitchy.

Of course, if we want more bitchiness, we can check out Hastings where a lesbian teacher is accused of fondling the daughter of a woman who she says was her ex-lover. Someone's lying, and whoever it is, the claws are well and truly out. Cat fight, anyone?

Next, on the male side of the street, we've got the BBC's usual pathetic idea of science reporting encapsulated in an item trumpetting a link between shaving less and having strokes. Huh? Yes, that's right, if you shave less than once a day, the BBC thinks you're more likely to have a stroke. I expect that this is some feminized twit's idea of "News for Men"(TM). Before reading on down the article I tried my best to imagine how dragging, or rather not dragging a blade across my face could possibly influence the integrity of the blood vessels inside my skull.

Momentarily distracted by the thought that not shaving tends to be better for the blood vessels on the outside of my head, I ask myself: when do I not shave? When I can't be bothered, but wouldn't that make me more relaxed and therefore less likely to pop a vein at the general antagonism of the world? Then we read that men who need to shave less have less testosterone, although any possible suggestion of cause, effect and intervening mechanism is left to our imaginations as we further learn that men who shave less frequently are more likely to smoke. Yes, well, that's bleeding obvious isn't it? As is the tendency to have angina and do manual work and be less likely to be married and more likely to have a heart attack and contract lung cancer. All this for not shaving.

But the extra chance at lung cancer & heart attack is actually caused by the smoking. Duh. Even so, not shaving still means that you're 30% more likely to die from any cause. This, of course, is a distinctly odd thing to say because everyone that I know, shaver or not, is 100% more likely to die from something sooner or later.

As ever "follow the money" is a good way to figure out what's really going on, and the lead, er, researcher says he still doesn't know why the correlation, but he hopes to carry our further research. I.e., he wants more funds. I wonder if he's angling for a grant from Bic.

Finally The Times tells us that rock music is good for our brains. My immediate mental vision was a slightly eye-watering mix of leather jackets, long hair, IQ tests and slurred "yeah, well, iss obvious innit". But no, apparently, for a sum total of sixteen Scottish "volunteers", listening to classical music or rock allows for better performance in memory tests than does listening to static noise or silence. Again, following the money, The Times points out that "The Mozart Effect" has "spawned a multi-million-pound industry in classical music CDs designed to boost children’s intelligence." Perhaps we'll see the Red Hot Chili Peppers' next album with a sticker propounding its intellectual merits alongside the parental advisory.

And this is just Monday...


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Friday, September 01, 2006

What could possibly go wrong?

The lunatics have taken over the asylum and you couldn't make this up. If you thought false allegations were already a serious epidemic, you ain't seen nuthin' yet. To everyone living in Ohio: run, don't walk, run for the border...

"An Ohio legislative panel yesterday rubber-stamped an unprecedented process that would allow sex offenders to be publicly identified and tracked even if they've never been charged with a crime."

"Rubber stamped" brings to mind bureaucrats doing things they're not really thinking about, just as long as the piece of paper went through the right process. They also missed out the word "alleged" in front of "sex offenders", but if a sex offender hasn't been charged with a crime, is she or he still a sex offender?

"
A recently enacted law allows county prosecutors, the state attorney general, or, as a last resort, alleged victims to ask judges to civilly declare someone to be a sex offender even when there has been no criminal verdict or successful lawsuit."

"T
he person's name, address, and photograph would be placed on a new Internet database and the person would be subjected to the same registration and community notification requirements and restrictions on where he could live."

Note the deft insertion of a gender-specific pronoun.

"A civilly declared offender, however, could petition the court to have the person's name removed from the new list after six years"

I am reminded of the book Wild Swans describing what it was like to live through China's Cultural Revolution where denunciation was a national sport and lives destroyed at the word of a neighbor with an axe to grind.



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Thursday, August 31, 2006

Nothing to do with fathers' rights

Over at Gonzo's bar and grill, I found that The Gonzman is all worked up about some woman. Intrigued, I went and looked. Hmmm. Here we have a woman who thinks she's a catch. Well, good for her. Her criteria are that (she says) she's slim, attractive, young, intelligent, educated, solvent, horny and likes things that men like. Really, that's what she says. Hmmm. She preceded this list with an acknowledgement that what she says sounds arrogant and continues her post with a lot of things that are arrogant with, for example, the suggestion that any men pursuing her that she considers out of her league should go and find a fat single mother to date, or even a woman from a third world country. Charming.

Hmmm. Charming. Now there's an interesting word. There's nothing charming about her post, and yet I would have considered that fairly high on the list of characteristics for someone that I wanted to spend time with, that they could be charming. Indeed, personality is generally fairly important to consider when selecting company, I guess we're supposed to figure that she's absolutely loaded with personality from the general content of her post. Well, I guess, then, that I should be more specific about what I mean about desirable personality.

The real reason for her post, however, is not anything to do with dating tips as it pretends to be, but is to be found here. That is, it is cheap sensationalism. She reminds me of that slinky blond loonie-right-winger who thinks Intelligent Design is an intelligent option. She doesn't really have much to say. Indeed, she doesn't really believe what she says, but she wants as many people as possible to read it. And here I am linking to it. Sigh.

Sometimes, I get depressed at my relatively low traffic count (but I'm actually not doing all that badly compared with Ms Mackie, Paisley, Passey, whatever, before this stunt). Maybe I have to write something irritating and superficial to get the hits up. Er, er, er, damn, I can't think of anything. Too interesting and profound for my own good, I guess...

Monday, August 28, 2006

So you don't like my art, eh?

OK guys, if you see a photograph of a small, naked child in obvious distress, how does it make you feel? If it upsets you, and if you complain, Jill Greenberg thinks it means you're projecting your own desires into the image and you sublimate this obviously unacceptable reaction into anger at the photographer.

Read that again and think about what it implies.

Jill Greenberg is this photographer who undresses small children, makes them cry, then photographs them and applies a little photoshop. She thinks it's art. Moreover, she thinks it's art of a political bent because she interprets the children's distress in terms of her own distress at George W. Bush (who was it that was doing the projecting?) She's horrified that some people don't like this. I won't link to any examples from here, you can find them yourselves, they make me at best unhappy. But The Sunday Times (London) saw fit to put them on the front cover of its magazine and report:

Greenberg is appalled that some people even saw a sexual context to the pictures. “It didn’t even occur to me that people might think that. A lot of the people who’ve been upset are men. I don’t know if it’s because they project their own desires on these images and they don’t know what to do with them and blame me.”

I mean, wow. Some people should be banned from practising armchair psychology in public, especially "artists". The Times goes on:

So what’s next? Photographs of bears, she says. “I think bears can represent all the anger and scariness out there”.

Oh boy, so what are we going to get? Yogi Bear with an uzi? Winnie the Pooh raping piglet?



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Sunday, August 27, 2006

How to destroy a man.

In today's Observer (Manchester Guardian's Sunday edition), coverage of "the only family court in Britain dealing exclusively with children and their families". It's not all bad news and worth a read, but of course the usual claim of no bias against fathers followed by woe-is-me hand-wringing over those mothers who "are frequently guilty of implacable and unscrupulous hostility towards former partners."

But this case particularly struck me:

The case involved a mother who abandoned her husband and two young boys. The father gave up his career to care for his sons only for her to reappear two years later and demand custody. Reluctantly the father agreed, only for her to stop all contact between him and the children a few months later. 'The arguments between them in court raged for days when, suddenly, the mother looked straight at her former partner and told him the youngest boy wasn't his,' says Crichton. DNA tests proved this was correct. Back in court, however, the father insisted that he still loved the younger boy and wanted contact with him.

'Then the mother leaned forward a second time and revealed that the oldest son wasn't his either. I had never seen a man collapse from the inside-out before, but that's what happened: it was like he had been hollowed out. He was a husk of the man he had been just seconds before.'


I can't think of a word to describe the mother that I'd feel happy repeating in good company.



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Saturday, August 19, 2006

Suicide is painless (but what about breast augmentation?)

CNN appear to be fascinated by the news that breast implants correlate with suicidal tendencies. 

Pop quiz:

Do you think that, despite not being in any way deformed, having a need to modify your physical appearance via a painful and risky surgical procedure in order to make yourself more attractive to the opposite sex would also mean that:
a) you might be less inclined to have such a poor self image that you are an increased suicide risk?
b) this need and one's psychological state are not relevant to one another?
c) you would indeed be more likely to have such a poor self image that you are an increased suicide risk?

Personally, I don't think it takes a rocket scientist nor a "large Canadian survey" to realize what the correct answer might be and I wonder that this actually makes news, never mind the headline.  That said, on reading the article, I'm mildly surprised that the increased suicide risk is quite low, body modification fans being only 73% more likely to top themselves than their more personally comfortable neighbors.

On the other hand one wonders what CNN would make of a much more common life experience than breast augmentation which actually tripled the risk of suicide.  One wonders what they would make of it if the risk for men was not affected at all by the same experience.  This is exactly what happens in the aftermath of divorce, only it's men's suicide risk which increases, not women's. That's one every 35 minutes in the USA, only slightly longer than your typical sitcom.


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Monday, August 14, 2006

Children of Sperm Donors Want to Know More.

In the UK, project Donorlink is uniting the children of sperm donors with their fathers, insofar as that is possible. I cite this here not for any personal problem that I have with sperm donorship, but for the insight that it gives into the needs of the children so produced and for the sense of responsibility of one donor father. The article provides no words from any mother.

Will Calder, is a donor father who "had witnessed the pain of infertility experienced by some family friends." doesn't want to actually meet any of his children "because his partner has reservations - but he wants to help any young people who need information about their biological father." He says: "This is not about what I want out of the game."

Louise Jameson is a child of a sperm donor now in her early 30s. When she found out: "All of a sudden who I thought I was, I wasn't. I cried a lot. It was just completely and utterly destabilising."

"I had a deep conviction that it was simply not right to create people, to hold information about the origins of those people and withhold that information from them. It was basically immoral,"

On acquiring a photograph of her now dead father: "I felt shame just come off me - and I never knew that I felt ashamed. It was literally like something physical leaving me. I just felt I was holding my head up higher."

Some of these women working their way through catalogs of donors might want to think about these sorts of consequences, especially if they plan on bringing up the child alone. In fact, anyone keeping their children in the dark about their father might want to think about it, assuming that their motivations aren't entirely selfish.


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Friday, August 11, 2006

DesertLight Journal loses the plot.

I'm disappointed with DesertLight Journal. Trudy Schuett makes some valid points about the probable futility of John Murtari's hunger strike over his combined disenfranchisement from his son, impoverishment and incarceration. Nevertheless, many will recognize his desperation and will realize that, for him personally, it may well be that there is no option. I don't buy the argument that a father who doesn't look after his own health as being "irresponsible". The system all too often reduces him to a financial, physical and emotional wreck already, fighting it at all leaves you open to that criticism. "You're going to lose anyway, why fight it." Sheesh. And who is to tell any parent how to be responsible when it comes to defending their own child? Leave it out Trudy, it's not like you're ever going to suffer anything similar after all, at least respect the man for fighting the fight as he sees fit instead of rolling over and donning the yoke as so many men do.

Finally: the comparison with Irish protesters is simply insulting.




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Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Feminist-bashing, a rant

A nod to Pook's Mill who points us at Katherine Rake's article in The Manchester Guardian (UK) whose rallying cry to feminists is more of a tired rehash of the reasons why feminism is earning itself a bad rap.

People will stop "feminist-bashing" when feminism isn't deserving of a bashing. When it develops a sense of honesty and egalitarianism, when it stops portraying the few women who are victims as representative of all women, when it stops portraying the few men who are privileged as representative of all men. When it recognizes women's advantages over men and shows a willingness to redress those imbalances as well as those that do not work in women's favor. The "mythological figure of the dungaree-clad, scary, hairy and humourless feminist" will disappear when her obnoxious female-supremicist opinions are not held up as representative of what feminism wants. When it stops defining dissenting opinions as misogyny when from a man, and stupidity when from a woman.

Comparing modern feminism to the suffragettes of 100 years ago is disingenuous and disrespectful of the women who had something to fight for, but weren't intent on destruction in order to get it. I feel quite sure that many of the suffragettes would be embarrassed to be associated with modern feminism. Fighting to close the "pay gap" is all very well, but should one pay a person who is not committed to the long term development of a career in order to safeguard their future, their employer's future and the security of their family the same as one who is? It is right that "rape within marriage" should be illegal, but does that mean one should lift the safeguards that prevent false accusations or that one should consider all sex to be rape? No-one in this day and age thinks that feminism is about clothes and makeup, increasingly those of us out here in the real world think it is about oppressing us and forcing us, men and women, to be something that we aren't.

It is easy to say "violence against women is at crisis levels" and a little harder to quantify it with real data which compare men and women as equals, especially if one defines "crisis level" as any violence at all when it comes to women, and simultaneously blinds oneself to violence against men. If anything, "women's caring roles" are often over-valued. Oh, I don't mean, for example, in the hospitals among the nurses who, as far as I can see, get a lot more positive attention (if not pay) than the stereotyped arrogant male doctor who doesn't seem to care about his patients (which would make one wonder why he became a doctor in the first place, especially given the many years of hard work it took to do so). No, I mean in the court rooms where a mother's "caring role" is a trump card to any rights that the father might want to have when it comes to his own children, I mean in the schools where a man who wants to teach is an object of suspicion.

Picking and choosing and exaggerating the elements of life that they want is seen as the modus operandi of feminism, not its detractors. It is a direct result of there not being any one definition of feminism because this allows feminism's own predators to don the sheep's clothing of a "good cause" while undermining coherent discourse and the seeking of equality for all.

The question as to why "feminism [has] always provoked such hostility?" is trivially answered. It is a political movement. All political movements provoke hostility from their opponents, the more extreme the movement -- all sex is rape, "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" -- the greater the hostility. What's laughable is the rank hypocrisy of so many of feminism's stalwarts - the originator of "a woman needs a man..." is now married, "The Vagina Monologues" promotes statutory rape. Women get payoffs in the millions for the kinds of treatment, albeit inappropriate, that men have withstood for generations. And you wonder why the hostility?

Your agenda not only threatens some of the few men (and, indeed, women) who are in a position of power and therefore invokes their opposition (which is really why they have the power in the first place), but it also undermines the identities and value system of normal men and women who are by and large happy with their lot and just want to live their lives in peace. Are you suprised they get upset when you tell a peaceful man he's a violent brute and a good woman she's letting down the sisterhood because she wants a family? Believe it or not, few men and women see their relationships as a power play, and they wonder at a political movement which seeks to turn them into such "not only in the public sphere, but also, much more trickily, in the private sphere". It's much more tricky because they shouldn't be trying, politics has no place dictating how men and women live together.

Who gets the top jobs in business should be dictated by who is most capable, not what is found between their legs. Who cleans the toilet is no-one's business but who owns that toilet. The fat, lazy, alcoholic husband who lolls in front of the TV while the missus does the washing, laundry, meals and cleans the toilet, is fast becoming a feminist canard with little basis in reality. The feminist reality is that both husband and wife are too exhausted at the end of their respective working days to clean the toilet and they end up arguing about it. Either that, or he comes home after too many hours at the office and she's bored and frustrated and decides to take it out on him by harping on about the stupid toilet, his frustrations had better be left at work or he's asking for the label "abuser".

As to who feels safe (as opposed to who is actually safe) walking home at night, many men don't feel safe walking into their own homes. When do we ever hear feminist condemnation of that? Moreover, it's all too easy now for those men to be victimized by the system when she finally kicks him out and claims he kicked her. He quickly finds out that the "rules of the game" aren't simply changed - for her, there are no rules and for him, if he doesn't follow every rule to the letter he becomes "the deadbeat" and quickly learns that most of his rules are predicated on the idea that he's the bad guy already. If feminists were about "caring for family and others" then why are their's the loudest contrarian voices when it comes to redressing these imbalances? It's got nothing to do with allowing women to lead the same lives that men have for many years, if that were the case, feminism would be as worried about men's shorter life span as it is about its "pay gap". Who's really being "short changed" there?

"Rape conviction levels are at their lowest ever" invites discussion on two points: what if it were at its highest ever, would you be as outraged (of course you would), and: does anyone know if this is because the meaning of the word "rape" has been rendered so broad that many accusations of rape are not actually rapes at all, but second-thoughts and hurt feelings, or, worse, deliberate attempts to destroy a man? I don't know the answer to these questions, no-one really does and very few seem to be interested to find out. It is easier to howl in vengeful rage that convictions are at their lowest ever than study real reasons why.

Feminism will gain some credibility when it recognizes the responsibility for women making their own bad choices. Some women are truly victims (as are some men), but if they are grouped with others who are choosing plastic surgery over self-betterment, and making themselves as sexually alluring as possible while simultaneously protesting attention from men they themselves are not attracted to, then what credibility can they expect? One is not simultaneously a victim and empowered, and to claim empowerment through victimhood is surely the most pernicious form of self harm.

Yes, feminism could do with a "third wave", a recognition that too much of it has not been about equality and is now being misused to gain unfair advantage in too many arenas. A wave which does not patronizingly suggest that no-one is listening, that men across the board do not understand, that many women who don't support such feminism are not somehow ignorant of reality. If feminism has become an "f-word" it is through its own hyprocisy and frequent unfairness, not because some parts of it are honest and fair, it is because it uses the blunt instruments of stereotype, misdirection, propoganda, and moral intimidation to bludgeon good people into the party line. In short, in many ways, feminism has become its own worst enemy.

The "five key freedoms: power, rights, autonomy, respect and choice" are all gender neutral words. How often does a feminist argue from that position? It is more important that women be in charge, as politicians, as managers of Premiership football teams. This last is compared to a male nursery nurse as an issue of choice as opposed to blunt appropriate reality (how many Premiership footballers are women or ever will be?) and is a prime example of the kind of surreal argumentation we have learned to expect from feminism, that men and women are equal, but only in areas where women want it.

Feminism can no more deliver this world than capitalism can make everyone rich and still provide the poor to do the hard work, that socialism can make sure everyone is protected by the state and still provide the individual freedom to seek one's own potential, which are things that many ordinary, naive men and women want to see. Sure, go ahead, reclaim the "f-word", and do it by removing the reasons why "feminist-bashing" is so easy and so inevitable, not by trying to claim that feminism has been victimized unfairly and that's just not right with a trembling lower lip.



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Monday, August 07, 2006

John Murtari

John Murtari, a disenfranchised father undergoing a hunger strike, deserves all our suppport.

Here and here.





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