The wrecking of the patriarchal system

The Humphrey Principle 

  After a half dozen years of futile war in Vietnam, with nothing to show for our expenditure of lives, money, prestige and good will, with the entire world wondering whether America had gone mad, the question was put to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Why not just acknowledge that we made a mistake--that we should just put our soldiers on board ships and bring them home and forget the stupid war? The Vice President's reply represents the same political wisdom which prevents the solution of the problem of the Garbage Generation:
We must not look for easy solutions.   -- Hubert H. Humphrey 

The application to the problem addressed in the present book is this: If mother-headed homes generate most of our crime, delinquency, illegitimacy, educational failure, drug addiction, infantilism, gang violence, sexual confusion and demoralization--as they demonstrably do--why should not our society adopt policies which make fathers heads of families?
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Our Paychecks, Our Selves: Why Fathers Must Demand Custody  

Short of total annihilation, there can be no more fundamental change in a society than the one taking place in ours, a change which has no name and whose nature is unrecognized because its separate facets--crime, delinquency, drugs, sexual anarchy, educational underachievement, family breakdown, feminism--are perceived as separate problems, or as not problems at all, but progress. The essence of the change is the abandonment of the system of social organization based on male kinship and the reversion to the older system of social organization based on female kinship. The statistics which measure this change inch upward only one or two percentage points a year, but viewed historically it is happening with electrifying speed.

What makes it possible is the sexual de-regulation of women, with (in the words of feminist Helen Colton) "no man, be it husband or physician, telling [a woman] what she may or may not do with her own body." The idea strikes at the basis of the patriarchal system, which requires that males shall share equally in reproductive responsibility. Patriarchy achieves this sharing by imposing the system of agnation, kinship through males, in place of kinship through females such as is found in the ghettos, the islands of the Caribbean and surviving Stone Age societies.

What men must do to salvage the male kinship system is to safeguard the male paycheck--to prevent anyone, ex-wife, house-male judge or house-male lawmaker, from telling him what he may or may not do with that paycheck, and that if he enters into a contract of marriage to share that paycheck with a wife in exchange for her sharing of her reproductive life with him, this contract shall not be abrogated for the purpose of depriving him of his children and his paycheck. Early Roman society was divided into the plebeians, meaning "the people" (the base of the word survives in plebiscite, a vote of the people), and the patricians, the "father-people" (from patri, father), a term which can have come into existence only in a society where mother-kinship was normative and the idea of kinship based on fatherhood was an innovation. The success of the innovation made Roman government, law and civilization possible. The patricians were wealthier, more stable; and in time the plebeians saw the advantages of father-kinship, which became the norm for all of Roman society. Learning how to govern their families on patriarchal principles made the Romans capable of governing the world. The social structure based on mother-kinship is found in relatively pure form in Haiti--the most impoverished, most squalid, most matriarchal nation in the Western Hemisphere.

Haitian women enjoy the sexual liberation Ms. Colton covets for American women: the typical Haitian woman has children by three different fathers, none of whom, needless to say, has a family in any meaningful sense of the word, none of whom, needless to say, can be motivated to work very hard. Poverty is the hallmark of societies (or areas within societies) based on female kinship. When the complaint is made that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, what is meant is that patriarchal families get richer and female-headed families get poorer. Feminist agitprop calls this "the feminization of poverty" and tries to combat it with the Mutilated Beggar argument, or with affirmative action and comparable worth programs and quotas favoring women.

As indicated in Chapter I, the wrecking of the patriarchal system is obscured by two facts: the generation-long time-lag between cause and effect and the sex-switch between generations. Let's illustrate. In 1980 crime increased by a startling 17 percent. Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates was flabbergasted; nothing in the economy, he said, could explain it. What did explain it was the huge increase in divorce and illegitimacy in the mid-1960s. Back then nobody paid much attention. The children from the newly created female-headed families didn't walk out of the divorce courtroom and start committing crimes. But by the early 1980s the fatherless kids were entering the crime-prone years, 14-24, and the skies were darkening with clouds of chickens coming home to roost.

Nothing has been done to lessen crime since then because nothing has been done to prevent the family breakdown and illegitimacy which underlie it: men are excluded from responsible participation in reproduction more effectively than ever. The number of incarcerated prisoners is today almost double what it was in 1980. The prisoners are nearly all male, a fact dwelt upon lingeringly in feminist literature, which likes to contrast the dangerous violence of the male with the harmless gentleness of the female. Feminist literature passes silently over the fact that three-quarters of the male prisoners are the products of female- headed households.

The necessity of regulating female sexuality in order to create the stable families which ensure male participation in reproduction was the discovery made by our wise ancestors who created the patriarchal system several thousand years ago-- following the million year prehistorical coma of the Stone Age, during which society was matrilineal--built on female kinship (and female promiscuity), the arrangement to which we are now reverting. Dr. Gerda Lerner has been quoted in Chapter III, describing the means employed to impose the patriarchal system in the times of Hammurabi (18th century B.C.). Under Hammurabi's law code, "the wife enjoyed considerable and specified rights in marriage" but was sexually her husband's "property." She was sexually regulated by the Babylonian state, which understood, as our society does not, the necessity for such regulation.

Hammurabi's legislation benefited women. The woman's willingness--or in the absence of her willingness, her obligation-- to submit to sexual regulation gave her the bargaining power to claim the "considerable and specified rights in marriage" Dr. Lerner alludes to. It enabled her to offer a man something he very much wanted--a stable family and legitimate children--something he could not obtain from a sexually unregulated female.

Betty Friedan's 1963 book The Feminine Mystique told American housewives that the "considerable rights" they obtained through marriage were an overpayment for the trifling services they performed: "Society asks so little of women....It was not that too much was asked of them but too little." Ms. Friedan had no understanding of the pivotal fact that the "little" asked of women was primarily not housework but acceptance of sexual regulation. 

The male's reproductive marginality forced him to offer the female the extremely one-sided bargain upon which Ms. Friedan poured her scorn. The benefits of this bargain are being lost to men because women will not keep the marriage contract and the courts will not enforce it. They are being largely lost to women by their insistence on sexual autonomy and their consequent withdrawal of sexual loyalty from the nuclear family, which then ceases to provide what Ms. Friedan deemed a free ride for women. With that withdrawal women can no longer offer men what men must have if they are to participate responsibly in reproduction.

From the feminists' point of view subsidization by an ex- husband is as good as subsidization by a husband; but from the man's point of view the difference is total. The husband who works to support his family works to secure his own role and to stabilize the civilization made possible by patriarchy. When he works to subsidize his ex-wife he is undermining the institution of the family and the patriarchy of which his ex-family was once a part-- working (under compulsion of the legal system) to wreck civilized society rather than stabilize it. He is an unwitting and unwilling (but helpless) recruit in the warfare of the ages that between matriliny and patriliny, pressed into service to fight for the enemy, matriliny. Betty Friedan has suggested that the feminist movement is a new biological breakthrough, "the next step in human evolution":

Lately, I've been thinking that the ultimate implications of the women's movement are more profound than we dare realize. I think [the family] is just evolving to new forms. Otherwise, like the dinosaur, it would become extinct. ...these phenomena of changing sex roles of both men and women are a massive, evolutionary development.... Evolution itself...seems to be moving in what might be called a "feminine" direction.

The feminist/sexual revolution is not a breakthrough but a throwback. The breakthrough was the creation of patriarchy a few thousand years ago, since when the primary business of society has been to maintain patriarchy by stabilizing the male role within the family, a role now being undermined by the enforced subsidization of ex-wives by ex-husbands--the enforced subsidizing of matriliny with money formerly (and properly) used to support patriarchy. Feminists protest against the double standard required by the regulation of female sexuality. The double standard is an essential part of the patriarchal system. Male sexuality requires less regulation because it is less important. Male unchastity sets a bad example and demoralizes wives who find out about it, but otherwise damages society little. Female unchastity destroys the marriage contract, the family, the legitimacy of children, their patriarchal socialization, the security of property and the motivation of work--destroys civilized society.

(Men accept a double work standard, requiring them to be more dependable, more committed to their jobs, willing to accept more arduous and dangerous labor and to exercise more self-discipline-- the things which account for their earning more than women in the job market.)

A man who wants a woman to marry him would get nowhere by telling her, "If you will marry me, I will guarantee that you will be the mother of your children." He is offering her nothing, since it is impossible that she should not be the mother of her own children.

A woman who wants a man to marry her would be talking sense if she said to him, "If you will marry me, I will guarantee that you will be the father of my children"--talking sense, though her personal guarantee is insufficient, because women notoriously change their minds, because the Promiscuity Principle claims for women the right to renege on their promise of sexual loyalty, and because the legal system supports this right. In the words of Mary Ann Glendon, the duty of an exiled ex-husband "to provide for the needs of [his] minor children [in Mom's custody]...is so important that it cannot be excluded by contract." In other words, the woman's promise is worthless and the law will grant the man no rights under the contract of marriage. A century ago John Stuart Mill wrote "They are by law his children." Today they are by law hers and the man can do nothing about it--and nothing to protect the paycheck which he earns and she claims by a biological right which "cannot be excluded by contract." If men consent to this spoliation, the patriarchal system is doomed. The only salvation is to get the legal system to understand that it must support the man's right to have a family and deny the woman's right to wreck it at her pleasure. In other words, it must regulate female sexuality--or rather allow the father to regulate it by allowing him control over his own paycheck, a control not subject to revocation by a divorce court.

This hated double standard places a burden on women but rewards them lavishly for accepting it. It gives them the bargaining power which makes men willing to raise their standard of living by an estimated 73 percent. Female sexual autonomy forfeits this bargaining power; legal regulation of women (enforced by a guarantee of father-custody in divorce) maintains it. Feminist books are written about the unwillingness of men to "make a commitment" to support women and about the unmarriageability of educated and economically independent women, those with the highest divorce rate. These women would be beneficiaries of sexual regulation, which would make them non-threatening to men and therefore marriageable. Their superior education and talents-- often combined with superior personal attractiveness--would become assets to themselves, to their families and to society if there existed an assurance that these assets did not act, as they now commonly do, as incentives to divorce. Would it not be fairer to regulate both male and female sexuality with equal strictness? No; male sexuality isn't important enough.

If ninety percent of male sexuality were regulated the unregulated ten percent would create as much sexual confusion and illegitimacy as the ninety percent--if females were unregulated. The regulation of ninety percent of female sexuality would, on the contrary, prevent ninety percent of sexual confusion and illegitimacy, and that is why society must insist on the double standard, which both stabilizes society and gives women greater bargaining power because it makes them more valuable to their families and to society. The woman's chastity gives the man assurance of a family; the man's motivation, created by his assurance of a secure role within this family, gives the woman a higher standard of living. This is the complementariness which makes patriarchal civilization possible.

The arrangement is now being destroyed by the removal of the man's assurance of a secure role within his family. The feminist/sexual revolution and the betrayal of the family by the legal system are the two chief causes of this destruction and (a generation later) of the skyrocketing of crime, second- generation illegitimacy and other social pathology. Other causes are the social acceptance of non-family groupings as "families"; the abandonment of the idea of marriage as a legal contract; the abolishing of the distinction between "good" and "bad" women; the consequent abolishing of the distinction between responsible and recreational sex; the acceptance of Screwtape's view that marriage is less important than a storm of emotion called "being in love" ; the creation of reverse-rites-of-passage to prevent the transition to adulthood (e.g., trial marriage, Esalen-type group therapy in which participants break down and have a happy cry when they learn that self-discipline is not required of them); the alliance of sexual anarchists in academe and the media with feminists and other anti-patriarchal, anti-social groups; the sentimental chivalry of lawmakers; the feminist-legal attempt to make divorce into a viable alternative to marriage (for women); improved computerized techniques for extorting child support money from ex-husbands, techniques which make divorce attractive to women and marriage unattractive to men; the lowered status given to maternal functions and the higher status given to career-elitism for women; the increasing education (albeit diluted education) of women; their growing economic independence; the growth of the Backup System (welfare, day care programs, etc.); sex mis-education of children, including pre-adolescent children, who are robbed of their latency stage and pressured into premature preoccupation with sexuality; the censorship of facts and ideas unpalatable to feminists--and the placing of feminists in positions in bureaucracies and the media where they can exercise this censorship; the qualitative erosion of education since the 1960s, including the creation of Mickey Mouse programs such as Women's Studies; the abolition of shame, guilt and field direction (doing what everyone else does) as social controls (illustrated, e.g., by actresses flaunting their illegitimate children as status symbols); the inversion of "cultural flow" (in dress, hair style, music, ideas, language), formerly from the higher ranks of society to the lower, now from the lower to the higher....And so forth. Small wonder feminists and sexual anarchists celebrate the demise of the family and the restoration of matriliny and promiscuity.

They inform us that the word "family" refers to many different groupings, of which the nuclear, patriarchal family is merely one, not the best. Mary Jo Bane writes what is intended to be a reassuring book arguing that "American families are here to stay....Americans seem deeply committed to the notion that families are the best places to raise children." But her reassurance is based on the fact that "the proportion of children living with at least one parent" has not declined. Ms. Bane has no comprehension of what is taking place: it is the one-parent (read: female-headed) family that is destroying the real family and reinstating matriliny.

The Hirschensohn case illustrates the manner in which the patriarchal system is being undermined. Michael Hirschensohn, a Santa Monica businessman committed adultery with one Carole D., wife of (though separated from) Gerald D., their adultery resulting in the birth of a girl named Victoria born in May, 1981. The paternity of Hirschensohn is established by blood tests said to be 98 percent reliable. Sometime after the birth of Victoria, Carole D. and Gerald D. reconciled and moved from California to New York. Hirschensohn, upset over losing contact with Victoria, filed a lawsuit, which eventually reached the Supreme Court, demanding the right, which he says has been unfairly denied him, to prove his paternity in court, asserting "I think I'm entitled to see my daughter....I'm not asking to be treated other than like a divorced father."

The existing law states that the woman's husband must be presumed to be the child's father, a legal rule-of-thumb intended to strengthen families and avoid custody battles. Hirschensohn's lawyer, Joel Aaronson, says the legal rule is old fashioned and outdated and fails to take into account recent changes in the American family.

What Hirschensohn is demanding is the right to proclaim his daughter a bastard, the right to confuse her concerning her social and family identity, the right to advertise to Gerald D.'s relatives and neighbors and the public that Gerald D. is a cuckold and his wife an adulteress, the right, based upon his status as an adulterer, to perpetually intrude himself into Gerald D.'s household for purposes of visitation, to embarrass and humiliate and weaken the family bonds between Gerald D. and his wife and daughter, the right to deny to Gerald D. his right, which would be unquestioned with respect to non-adulterers, of protecting his home and family from the intrusion of people he doesn't want to associate with.

Hirschensohn says he is only asking to be treated like a divorced father, which is to say he is only asking the courts to declare that marriage confers no rights on husbands. He says that the current law, holding Victoria to be legitimate, fails to take into account "recent changes in the American family." The recent changes referred to are those which replace the Legitimacy Principle by the Promiscuity Principle, and its corollary, the denial to men of any right to procreate and possess legitimate children under the contract of marriage.

That the Supreme Court would even consent to hear such a claim is a dereliction on the part of the profession whose responsibility ought to be the safeguarding of the family but which has instead become the principal agent of the family's destruction.

According to Michael L. Oddenino of the National Council for Children's Rights, Inc., who supports Hirschensohn, "modern society has essentially redefined our notion of the family unit." Indeed it has, and that is why we have a Garbage Generation.

Hirschensohn and Carole D. are offenders against sexual law-and-order who have brought suffering to Gerald D. and Victoria (and, of course themselves) and have worked to undermine the institution of marriage and the stability of society. But the worst villains are the practitioners of the legal system and the propagandists of the feminist/sexual revolution and its Promiscuity Principle. The Promiscuity Principle assured Carole D. that she alone was entitled to make decisions concerning her reproductive activity; and her believing this, combined with the Supreme Court's willingness to consider the claimed right of an adulterer to perpetually intrude himself into the privacy of another man's family, have already worked to weaken Victoria's perception of her social and familial identity--her legitimacy. The patriarchal system and the Legitimacy Principle would have given the girl reassurance concerning these things by maintaining the fatherhood of the man whom she called father, who functioned as her father, who was the husband of her mother and who provided for the family of which Victoria was a member--Gerald D.

No more. "Modern society has essentially redefined out notion of the family unit"; "A woman has a sacred right to control her own sexuality"; and "There is no such thing as an illegitimate child." If Victoria spends her life thinking otherwise, thinking that there are illegitimate children and that she is one of them, she can thank the unchastity of her mother, the chutzpah of Hirschensohn and the weakness and lack of cognitive skill of the justices of the Supreme Court in making it a matter of controversy whether the rights conferred upon Gerald D. by marriage and the Legitimacy Principle are as meaningful and socially desirable as the rights conferred upon Carole D. by the Promiscuity Principle and the rights conferred upon Hirschensohn by adultery.

"Divorce," says Bishop John Spong, "has become part of the cost that society must pay for the emancipation of women." The cost would be too high even if the emancipation were a desideratum.

It is the responsibility of society not to emancipate women but to regulate them (and men too, of course) in order that reproduction may take place within families, in order that children may be legitimate and may be socialized according to patriarchal principles, in order than men may be motivated to work and create the wealth and social stability which make civilization possible, in order that property may be secure and may be securely transmitted to the following generation.

"In non-industrial societies," says the homosexual agitator Arthur Evans, 

prostitutes are often treated with great religious respect, and their activities are considered as religious activities....[T]he ritual worship of sex and nature was once the case throughout the world, and still is in the societies that industrialized academics call "primitive."

That's why the societies are "primitive" and "non-industrial"; sex for these people is recreational and nothing else; they haven't figured out how to regulate it and put it to work.

"In the ancient Middle East," says Evans,

the land of Canaan, later invaded by the Israelites, was originally peopled by a society where Gay male prostitution was very prominent. These prostitutes were located in the temples. As with medieval witches, men and women who impersonated sexual deities were literally thought to become them, and having sex with these people was viewed as the highest and most tangible form of religious communion with the deity.

So they thought. That is why the Bible denounced Canaanite worship as "whoring after strange gods" and W. Robertson Smith described it as "horrible orgies of unrestrained sensuality, of which we no longer dare to speak in unveiled words."

"In these societies," says Evans,

as in the case of the witches, women and Gay men generally enjoyed a high status, Gay people of both sexes were looked upon with religious awe, and sexual acts of every possible kind were associated with the most holy forms of religious expression.

Admittedly, there were also great diversities and variations in the beliefs and practices of these societies, but there was one great common feature that set them off in sharp distinction to the Christian/industrial tradition: their love of sexuality.

Meaning their love of horrible orgies of unrestrained sensuality of which we no longer dare to speak in unveiled words. Evans contrasts this sexual chaos with the patriarchal system. In patriarchy, he says,

Sex itself is locked up in secrecy, privacy, darkness, embarrassment, and guilt. That's how the industrial system manages to keep it under control. Among nature peoples, as we have seen, sex is part of the public religion and education of the tribes. It becomes a collective celebration of the powers that hold the universe together. Its purpose is its own pleasure. Any group of people with such practices and values can never be dominated by industrial institutions.

Right. They cannot be integrated into civilized society because they will not accept sexual law-and-order. Anyone who attends a rock concert or reads the classified ads in a homosexual publication must be confronted by the thought that our society is becoming just such a "nature people" as Evans describes, partly because it has stopped using "embarrassment and guilt" to regulate sexuality, mostly because the legal system, created to maintain and stabilize families, is now busily working to destroy them and (mindlessly, to be sure) to restore matriliny.

It is judges who create most female-headed households, the breeding places of the next generation's crime, illegitimacy, demoralization, and poverty. They deprive households of their male breadwinners and then expect these displaced breadwinners to make compensation for the damage they have inflicted.

"The property which every man has in his own labor," says Adam Smith,

as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper without injury to his neighbor, is a plain violation of this most sacred property.

The extortion of child support money from ex-husbands constitutes "a plain violation of this most sacred property" and men ought to resist it. As indicated at the end of Chapter VI, many wives couldn't afford to throw their breadwinners out if the displaced breadwinners didn't pay them to do so. A father who sends his ex- wife child support money is subsidizing the destruction of his own family, perpetuating the system of child-support-extortion which has wrecked tens of millions of other men's families, and paying to have his children placed in a female-headed household where they are several times more likely to be impoverished and delinquent and demoralized and neurotic and underachieving and sickly and sexually confused and drug-addicted.

The father's paycheck is the stabilizer of marriage. Wives, as pointed out in Chapter VIII, overwhelmingly consider a husband's primary function to be that of breadwinner. The legal system has adopted the feminist view that an ex-husband should perform the same breadwinning functions, a notion which is placing the two- parent family and the entire patriarchal system at risk. Dr. Lenore Weitzman thinks the divorce court should try "to maintain the standard of living that prevailed during the marriage and, insofar as practicable, to place the parties in the financial position in which they would have been had their marriage not broken down." In other words, she thinks the purpose of the twin institution of marriage-cum-divorce is to take everything from the man and give everything to the woman--to strap the man into a milking-machine forever.

This forced labor for the benefit of another person--which differs in no essential and no particular from slavery --is illegal but judges impose it anyway because they figure the American male is so docile he will submit, and because it is what he has always done in the past and what all other judges do--like mindless caterpillars following one another around the rim of a saucer, each supposing he is doing the right thing because he is doing what the others do, what he has always done in the past. They cannot see that the rise in the divorce rate from a few thousand in the mid-19th century to a mind-numbing fifty percent today has altered the nature of divorce from a tragedy affecting isolated members of society to a program for abolishing patriarchy and returning to matriliny. They cannot see that the main reason for this rise in the divorce rate is the certainty of wives that the anti-male bias of the divorce court is absolutely dependable.

The present divorce debacle is created by combining the Sanctity-of-Motherhood principle with the Mutilated Beggar principle. In the typical case Mom divorces Dad knowing that the court will assign custody on the Sanctity-of-Motherhood principle, allowing her to drag the kids into risk of poverty and delinquency and exploit their predicament to extort money from Dad. "It is already established," writes Mary Ann Glendon,

that there is a legal duty to provide for the needs of one's minor children, that this duty must be shared fairly between both parents, and that the duty is so important that it cannot be excluded by contract. What has to be made more specific and forceful is that in divorces of couples with minor children, this duty must be given the foremost consideration.

In other words, the marriage contract confers no rights on fathers, only obligations. Mom plays the Motherhood Card and the legal system straightway becomes her willing handmaiden, transferring her children from the patriarchal system to the matriarchal system where their increased chances of poverty and delinquency make them better Mutilated Beggars.

Dr. Glendon intends that, even without the Mutilated Beggars, Mom should be rewarded by Dad "to compensate, so far as possible, for the disparity which the disruption of the marriage creates in the conditions of their respective lives." The compensation, says Dr. Glendon, depends on the establishment of the fact of a disparity between the situations of the ex-spouses, and its aim is to enable both of them to live under approximately equivalent material conditions. 

Why should they live under approximately equivalent material conditions? Why should there not be a disparity in their material conditions if the man earns his standard of living and if the woman does not earn hers and if she withdraws the reciprocal services which during marriage justified her sharing his? Why should she be compensated for what she does not earn? The feminist movement began by Ms. Friedan heaping scorn on the parasitic wives who performed only minimal services in exchange for a virtually free ride. Why should a parasitic ex-wife receive a wholly free ride for performing no services at all? What happened to Ms. Friedan's rhetoric about women needing to gain self-respect by standing on their own feet and facing life's challenges "without sexual favor or excuse"?

The "disparity" between the man's and the woman's earnings is the principal reason most woman marry their husbands in the first place. Dr. Glendon would make it an inducement for women to divorce them. She would make the male earnings which were once (and properly) a means of strengthening marriage into a means of weakening and destroying it. If the woman can simply take the man's money, the man cannot offer it to her, since it is already hers--he has lost his bargaining power, and with it his motivation to earn the income she covets. The patriarchal system is based on putting sex and the family (not sex-deprivation and the ex-family) to work as motivators of male achievement. Dr. Glendon's "compensatory payment" for divorce wrecks the system.

from the book The Garbage Generation (Daniel Amneus)