Feminism, it seems, is at the nadir of its disrepute. Almost everyone, from the far right to the far left, seems to have a complaint against the feminists, most of them justified. And yet at the same time, feminism seems to be unstoppable in its influence. Few criticize it in general terms, let alone that the entire experiment was a mistake. Indeed, one place feminism seems the most solidly entrenched is among the “neoconservative” operatives of the establishment Right.
And so feminism marches on, apparently impervious and oblivious to the opprobrium in which it is held by millions.
Only a few eloquent souls, like academic Janice Fiamengo, are willing to confront feminism head-on and criticize it in depth for its “hatred of men, social dysfunction, and victimhood ideology.”
Yet when asked in a recent interview if she had a “magic wand” solution to reverse the destruction, Fiamengo seemed to share the general assumption that such a thing is not possible.
But I believe it is, and what is more it is feasible. We can continue trying to cut off the multiple hydra heads of the feminist monster or disentangling the various threads of the Gordian Knot. (Perhaps a more modern analogy is playing Whack-a-Mole.) Or we can cut it with one fell swoop.
We can break the back of feminism and bring the malcontented ladies under control once-and-for-all. I did not think this up by myself. It was first proposed by Professor Daniel Amneus, the greatest scholar ever to confront feminism and the catastrophe of fatherless children.¹ It was also suggested by the late Phyllis Schlafly, who made a career of combatting feminism (starting with her single-handed defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s) — and a name for herself as one of the most influential political figures of the 20th century — when even most men were faint of heart. She must surely be considered one of the most effective political operators of all time and one of the few who combined political skill with ethical integrity.
According to Amneus, feminism’s central impulse is the demand for unlimited sexual freedom and female-dominated reproduction, surpassing in importance all else on its agenda and to which all else is ancillary. “A woman’s right to have a baby without having the father around is what feminism is all about.”
This is what gives feminism all its leverage over men, over society, over all of us. “The linchpin in the feminist program is mother custody following divorce,” Amneus insists. “Pull that pin…and the feminist structure collapses.” More than anything, this is what undermines masculinity and patriarchy and turns the most stout-hearted men into frightened, cowering sissies – at the same time that it turns their children into aggressive nihilists, rebelling against their impotent fathers and everything else. “Until then, men must remain afraid of women, of marriage, of feminism.”
And it does not stop there. Men today increasingly fear not only “the divorce court judges”, as Amneus said, but all government officials, who learned from the matriarchy how to create and enforce the other bureaucratic tyrannies of the “Deep State” and who understand that ordinary men heading families pose the principal impediment to their power.
The feminists’ first substantive achievement, after obtaining the vote, was the welfare state, and their next major accomplishment was no-fault divorce. Both of these governmental innovations furthered their professed goal of decimating the American family by transferring sovereign authority over children from married fathers to single mothers — first in low-income communities, and then among everyone else. Beneath the political radar screen, the subtext enabling both developments was court decisions that gradually weakened married fathers and shifted power to divorcing mothers. This shift was codified in the no-fault divorce laws, which were the proud achievement of the feminist bar associations. The National Association of Women Lawyers describes no-fault divorce as “the greatest project NAWL has ever undertaken.” Within very few years, “no-fault divorce became the guiding principle for reform of divorce laws in the majority of states.”
As long as women can divorce at whim, take along the children and everything else, and consign men to state-enforced servitude, men must fear them. Nothing cows men and extracts concessions with remotely the same effectiveness. As the poet said, “The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.”
This is why repealing no-fault divorce and making the marriage contract legally binding — with a presumption of father custody — will break the back of not only the divorce/custody machinery but the entire feminist movement. In fact, a legally enforceable marriage contract will carry an effective presumption of father custody: Women may file 70%-80% of divorces, but mothers – who are confident of getting custody of the children – file close to 100%, almost always without any legal fault grounds.²
Other Injustices?
All the other injustices men suffer — all of which are less important anyway and leave them open to the accusation of “whining” — can be rectified more easily once this is addressed and implemented. Here is why:
Women’s two major weapons and source of leverage over men are sex and children. If they control these, they control men. Nothing does more to weaken the patriarchy, not even abortion, because if women can claim monopoly control of the children there is no extortion they cannot commit and no price they cannot demand from men – both fathers and politicians. Fear of this is what emasculates all men and makes all women despise men generally. Only women who despise men demand “equality”. Women who respect men understand – as they have understood for millennia – that male strength benefits women as well, and a woman gets the full benefit by marrying a strong man.
Further reasons why child custody exceeds all other issues and injustices in importance and urgency:
Nothing is more important to men. Most would willingly endure any injustice and the most gruesome physical abuse (and many do) rather than lose their children.
Nothing is more cruel to children than their parents’ divorce and being torn from one of their parents.
Nothing is more devastating throughout society. Fatherless children are plausibly identified (even by tradcons and some liberals) as being the most destructive social problem of our time. Single mothers and fatherless children are tearing down our entire civilization.
Nothing does more to pervert government power and corrupt governmental ethics, to erode protections for citizens’ rights and civil liberties, and rationalize tyrannical measures. This starts with the judiciary but extends to the entire state machinery.
Another Wish List?
Moreover, this is eminently achievable. It will not be accomplished by the conventional political methods of organizing pressure groups, lobbying legislatures, litigating in courts, commandeering the media, protesting in the streets. No, men have little hope of achieving any of that, and there is no point in bothering with it until men first mobilize the leverage they already possess.
What is that levarage? Simple, the Marriage Strike: Men are already refusing to marry, date, reproduce, or even associate with women. This spontaneous, de facto boycott is sad and tragic for all — unless, unless it is mobilized as leverage to force changes in the custody laws. I have described the enormous potential of the Marriage Strike elsewhere. The point here is that the conventional political methods are not working for men, but they do not need to work. Men do not need to shout in the streets (let alone tear off their clothes), which is not masculine behavior anyway. Men can act more effectively from quiet strength. They have this unique source of leverage, which is already growing in strength day-by-day. They only have to harness it for the purpose.
1 Daniel Amneus, The Case for Father Custody (1999). I discuss his solution more extensively in my most recent book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” — and What to Do about It” (2024).
2 See my book, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (2007).
***
Father Custody Will Restore America
In fact, it is the only thing that will.
The responses to my previous post (above) were so positive and thoughtful that I decided to follow it up with some specifics.
Previously, I suggested that restoring marriage as a legally binding contract, with a presumption of father custody of children in case of divorce, will do more than anything else to break the back of feminist power. But it will do much more than even that.
It will do precisely what Donald Trump promised to do: restore American health and strength and “Make America Great Again”. Trump is flailing now, because he will not confront the ever-worsening family crisis and the federal government’s role in causing it, and the rest of us are not holding his feet to the fire.
It will require that we all summon the courage to face down the feminists on this one matter above all others, curtail the most repressive and abusive government machinery ever created in the United States, and confront forces that intimidate the most stout-hearted men like Trump (Musk, RFK, Jr, et al.), because that it precisely what they are intended to do: emasculate.
By the way, father custody has nothing to do with fathers being "presumed to be the superior parent," as one reader wrote. A father can manifestly be the worse parent, and the principle still holds (and in any case, no government official has any business deciding which parent is superior). It does not presume that "single fathers make better parents than single mothers" (though evidence suggests that they do).
The point of father custody is that it will keep families together and allow children to be raised in intact homes. Mother custody means discarding fathers and raising children as single mothers. Father custody does not mean discarding mothers; it means that the mothers who wish to leave cannot take the children with them. Families will remain intact, because fathers’ authority will remain intact.
Here are some specific benefits:
Family and Marriage:
It will restore the family and the marriage contract, by making it enforceable in law. It will provide the protections that both men and women lack in cohabitation. Spouses who violate or abrogate the contract will be held liable for the consequences to the other spouse and children.
It will eliminate most divorces and broken families, especially with children. With fault grounds, and if fathers are guaranteed custody of children, women will stop initiating close to 100% of divorces involving children.
Marriage will be respected and restored, because men will understand that their parental rights (and their property rights after childbearing) will depend on being married to the mother. They will therefore insist on marriage before having children. Women who balk will stigmatize themselves as unmarriageable. Both men and women will marry and reproduce with the assurance that their children and everything else cannot be taken arbitrarily (for “no fault”).
Young men will once again be motivated to improve themselves, study, work, serve in arms, invest earnings, marry and start families, rather than living lives of idleness, knowing they can have secure families to protect and provide for.
Same-sex marriage will become irrelevant and with it the rest of the radical sexual political agenda: feminist, homosexualist, transgenderist — all of it.
Children will be raised to respect parents and (unified) parental authority, other traditional authorities, marriage, traditional moral values, legal and other obligations, and men.
Adolescent rebellion against parents and society will be diffused, thereby starving political radicalism of new recruits.
It will discourage abortion and undermine campaigns to liberalize it by discrediting the notion of sex-for-pleasure, except among a few unmarriageable women.
The war between men and women will be pacified.
Welfare and its Ills:
The bloated welfare machinery will become largely unnecessary, because little incentive or justification will exist for women to go on welfare.
The worst effects of the welfare system will be eliminated, especially the destruction of families, which will mostly remain intact.
Chronic, long-term poverty will be alleviated, because in the West it is produced almost entirely by welfare and broken homes.
Violent crime will be all-but-eliminated, especially that committed by fatherless youth. Other forms of criminality and self-destructiveness, such as substance abuse and truancy, will also be brought under control.
Government intrusion into citizens’ private lives by social workers and other functionaries will have no justification.
It will eliminate ghettos, revive inner cities as prosperous and safe neighborhoods, and restore urban life as the center of civilization.
It will elevate African-American communities, still enslaved to welfare and incarceration. Other impoverished communities and minorities, such as native American reservations, will be similarly resuscitated.
Child abuse will be all-but-eliminated, virtually 100% of which takes place in the homes of single mothers or in foster care. This will further undermine the police powers of social workers and other functionaries.
Welfare will no longer serve as the magnet for illegal immigration.
The corrupt and mischievous child-support system will be rendered superfluous.
Constitutional and Judicial Integrity:
Judicial integrity will be restored by eliminating the oxymoron of “no-fault” justice. Dispensing real justice will once again be the only legitimate business of courts.
The integrity of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights will be restored, almost every article of which is now openly violated by the family law judiciary that is supposed to be its guardian: the Contract Clause, Habeas Corpus, the Searches and Seizures Clause, Due Process Clauses, and the entire Bill of Rights will be restored to full operation.
Family and household privacy will be restored by prohibiting lawyers, judges, psychotherapists, and other forensic officials from interferng in the private lives of legally innocent citizens.
Ethically, it will separate the sheep from the goats. Legal practitioners and others who protect and defend fraudulent marriage contracts, based on “no-fault” terms, will expose themselves as unethical and unscrupulous, and they will lose business.
The integrity and effectiveness of the police and penal system will be restored by redirecting them toward real crimes rather than gender crimes such as vague forms of domestic “abuse” and other manufactured criminality: thought crimes, speech crimes, political crimes, etc.
The integrity of criminal justice will be strengthened by removing the subterfuge that courts are overwhelmed by criminals whom they must presume to be guilty and from whom they may extort pleas and confessions of guilt.
It will cut off the supply of rogue prosecutors, who learn their trade in divorce courts and child-support prosecutions.
It will relieve prison overcrowding, which is caused entirely by welfare and fatherless homes.
It will alleviate homelessness, which consists overwhelmingly of men who have been plundered, incarcerated, and rendered unemployable by family courts.
State and Economy:
The family will again become a productive economic unit, contributing to the economic prosperity of the United States and any western or other countries that follow the US, as they have already followed it into sexual chaos.
Property rights will again be secure, because they will no longer be abrogable whenever an emotionally unstable person “falls out of love,” yearns for sexual freedom, or takes children as hostages for emotional and financial blackmail.
Taxes can be reduced by eliminating most of the domestic budget devoted to welfare, law enforcement, incarceration, health, and education — ills caused by fatherless homes.
State government operations will be brought under control by ending their elicit, back-door funding using child-support money.
Educational integrity and achievement will be restored, because intact parents can better control truancy and monitor their children’s education.
Immigration law will no longer be manipulable and evadable by fraudulent “marriages” of convenience.
Military Strength:
The citizen-in-arms will again become the norm, removing military authority from desk-bound functionaries and lawyers and returning it to active male soldiers.
Military strength will be reinvigorated by dismantling the military’s welfare operations, removing single mothers from its payroll, ending its role in social engineering, eliminating sex scandals, reducing the number of clerks and lawyers, and making it again the foremost bastion of masculinity.
Europeans will be compelled to devote adequate resources to their own defenses rather than sponging off Americans in order to enjoy their own welfare states.
Sexual liberation of foreign populations will no longer serve as an acceptable excuse for foreign-policy adventurism and military interventions.
Various government matriarchies — welfare/divorce/education/military/ national security — will be put out of business and boys will be emancipated to become men, because they will be raised, instructed, and commanded by their fathers and other men.
Churches and Religious Faith:
Churches will be revived as the first-line guarantors of the marriage contract, giving them a vested interest in its integrity and enforcement and restoring them to their traditional role of supporters of the family and watchdogs of the judiciary and of all government operations.
Parishioners will expect that violations of the marriage contract by church members will be addressed in the first instance — before initiating litigation — by the church that consecrated the marriage. This will re-create the incentive for people to join churches, marry under their authority, demand support and justice from clergy, and restore their traditional role of overseeing both family and civic life.
Parishioners will expect their churches to scrutinize any state intervention in families whose marriages they have consecrated. This includes demanding that churches and clergy have standing as legitimate parties to all government proceedings that adjudicate such marriages and demanding that justice be done to wronged parties.
Churches that fail in these responsibilities will be stigmatized as false churches and abandoned. True and false churches will be readily distinguishable. True churches that accept these responsibilities will see their pews refill.
Churches could even return to their traditional role of providing poor relief, supplanting welfare dependency and making poor relief again a temporary and exceptional provision by coupling it with enforcement of sexual morality.
Churches’ finances will benefit from tax reductions permitted by the elimination of welfare and reduction of accompanying ills, such as incarceration.
It will undermine the appeal of Islamism, Hindutva, and other forms of radical religion as alternatives to the weak and effeminate post-Christian West.
Men and Masculinity:
Demanding this change will in itself provide a single concrete rallying point and focused goal that will unite men, give them purpose, and motivate them to elevate themselves and one another as active, engaged citizens.
It will provide an alternative to and discourage extreme, destructive, or unsustainable male responses such as gangs, hyper-masculinity, sexual hedonism, homosexuality, marriage strikes, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), “incels”, or media “influencers” and gurus.
Male headship of families and from there of communities will be re-established. Exceptional women can still be leaders and advisors, but the norm for citizenship will be married male heads of families, owning property and serving in arms.
More:
Nitpickers and obfuscators will be silenced, because no valid arguments can exist in favor of a fraudulent contract. Once a debate is forced into the open, the goal can be accomplished in the process of dispatching the spurious arguments that will be attempted against it.
It will help reestablish principles of free and open debate, because this was the first such government oppression that was subject to full media and academic blackout.
One adverse side-effect must be expected: an increase in trumped-up accusations of domestic violence and other gender crimes. This is easily addressed however and must be confronted and restored in any case, because allowing knowingly false criminal accusations is obviously intolerable and indefensible in any judiciary of integrity or free society.
We know that it will do all this, because it is what built the western political and economic powerhouse nations of the nineteenth century. And it will cost nothing economically, because it requires only a single change in one obviously unjust and indefensible law.
What it will demand is precisely the focused male fortitude that the feminist matriarchy wants to neuter and has already neutered throughout the conservative political class. Summoning the courage to demand this will in itself restore men to their authority and benefit us all, including women who want strong men, safe homes, economic prosperity, less state interference, and happy, thriving children.
Other measures to rectify injustices against men can also be undertaken. But this must be the central, unifying objective, around which all else must be pursued: men applying their newfound resolve to restore their authority over their own children and then over society. Nothing else is remotely as important. Without this, we are just playing Whack-A-Mole.
Other measures that purport to reform divorce/custody law— waiting periods, compulsory counselling, mediation, joint custody — these are faux remedies and excuses for inaction, and they will only perpetuate the fraudulent contract of western marriage and the fraud of “no-fault” justice.
We must also discard the illusion that inaction is a viable option. The feminists and their allies are searching relentlessly for new methods and excuses to acquire the authority and assets and earnings of men and criminalize any who resist — even men who do not marry, cohabit, date, or have any personal association with women. Eventually, if men remain passive, they will find a way.
Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His books and recent articles are available at
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