Father Gregory Boyle, former director of Dolores Mission in the Los Angeles barrio, laments that “The week before Christmas, I had to bury the 40th young person killed by what is still a plague in my Eastside community. I’ve grown weary of saying that gangbanging is the urban poor’s version of teen-age suicide….Poor, unemployed youth are hard-pressed to conjure up images of themselves as productive and purposeful adults sometime in their future.”1
Father Boyle also describes the girls’ problem—which is not gangbanging but sexual promiscuity:
The 15-year-old girl, bounding ecstatically into my office with the news of her pregnancy, explains, “I just want to have a kid before I die.” She says this not because she’s been diagnosed as having a terminal illness, but because she lives in my community—a place of early death and where the young lack the imagination to see something better.
Father Boyle is a little lacking in imagination himself, for he supposes that the familiar litany about poverty, racism and discrimination points to the real problem. He fails to see the causal connection between the boy who gets himself killed and the girl who pretends to be “ecstatic” over becoming pregnant “before I die.” The behavior of each is routine in a matriarchy where neither males nor females can hope for stable families—because females insist on controlling their own sexuality rather than sharing it with husbands, and because the resulting male amotivation makes males poor marriage material. The community he describes is one where social arrangements do not chain women so that men can depend on having families with them. The girl supposes that turning to sexual promiscuity is an affirmation of life, in contrast to the boys’ choice of death. But her words “before I die” show that her ecstasy is a pretense and that her offspring will recycle the same matriarchal pattern of female promiscuity resulting in male violence. Without stable families there is reduced hope for both boys and girls. The girl brings a fatherless child into the world because she inhabits a matriarchy where females control their own sexuality and can deny males families. “One does not move freely and joyously ahead,” says Ms. Friedan, “if one is always torn by conflicts and guilts, nor if one feels like a freak in a man’s world, if one is always walking a tightrope between being a good wife and mother and fulfilling one’s commitment to society….”2 Fact is, society’s primary demand of women is that they accept the responsibility of being good wives and mothers, that they perform their maternal functions—the most important functions of society—with competence. Ms. Friedan wants to minimize the importance of these functions while maximizing the far less important goal of becoming an elitist career woman, which she supposes means “fulfilling one’s commitment to society”—and in probable consequence becoming a poorer wife and mother, certainly more divorce-prone.
“Men,” says Dr. Popenoe, “need cultural pressure to stay engaged with their children, and that cultural pressure has long been called marriage….Currently marriage is an institution that is quietly fading away….[A] man’s chances of staying with the mother are considerably lower when he is not formally married. We should increase social, cultural, and economic supports to help couples stay married.”3 He should have added “legal support.” A man’s assurance that he will have custody of his children will make the mother’s chances of staying with the father higher—and will make his chances of staying with the mother higher, for he will not wish to place himself in the situation of today’s single mothers.
“I would warn you,” says Ms. Friedan,
that those societies where women are most removed from the full action of the mainstream are those where sex is considered dirty and where violence breeds.
By “women” Ms. Friedan means middle-class, educated white women, by “full action of the mainstream” she means elitist careers where women are economically independent and, not incidentally, free to follow a liberated matriarchal lifestyle and engage in adulterous adventures—to “do bad and feel good.” For lower-class inner city black women who are two generations in advance of their white sisters down the slippery slope into matriarchy, this lifestyle has developed into a virtually complete rejection of the patriarchal family, to an illegitimacy rate verging towards 80 percent and a male demoralization and amotivation which traps one-third of young black males in the criminal justice system. It does not serve the purposes of Ms. Friedan’s propaganda to say what she knows as well as the rest of us, that it is here in the matriarchy that real violence breeds. “Where stable family life has been the norm for men and boys,” says David Courtwright, “violence and disorder have diminished. That was one important reason why, during the mid-twentieth century marriage boom [=the era of the feminine mystique, when women were “most removed from the full action of the mainstream”], violent death rates showed a sustained decline.”4
Ms. Friedan continues:
If we confront the real conditions that oppress men now as well as women and translate our rage into action, then and only then will sex really be liberated to be an active joy and a receiving joy for women and for men, when we are both really free to be all we can be.5
Everyone who reads the newspapers knows that the high crime areas are those where females are sexually de-regulated, “liberated,” “unchained,” and where men are denied a family role. “The rage women have so long taken out on themselves, on their own bodies, and covertly on their husbands and children, is exploding now,” says Ms. Friedan.6 Men prefer this rage to be bottled up rather than “exploding now.” Automatic mother custody provides a major motive for the explosions of divorce and adultery, by which feminists de-regulate themselves. The “rage” they affect to justify this de-regulation is mostly spurious—which is why, as I explain on page 215 “extreme cruelty” (the legal fiction which embarrassed even judges and lawyers) had to be replaced by No Fault. Nothing would do more to prevent the explosion than automatic father custody. Nothing would do more to make divorce court judges behave themselves than letting them know they are not paid salaries to facilitate the explosion of women’s rage in divorce actions which displace fathers.
Women, like men, must accept regulation if children are to have fathers and grow up in two-parent homes. Father custody is the most humane way of imposing this regulation, far more humane than gynaecia, harems, chadors, clitoridectomies, foot-binding, suttee. Father custody would make wives see the benefits they receive, those required by Briffault’s Law—a family, children, a home, the father’s paycheck, the higher status conferred by patriarchy. Mother custody with equal division of the property—the “assets of the marriage after there is no marriage”—is the big temptation which the legal system dangles before the wife—since “children belong with their mother.” It is this sanctity of motherhood which transforms “marriage in contemplation of divorce” into solid cash.
The real sanctity of motherhood, and of wifehood, and of family, was understood by Queen Victoria’s prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli:
“The nation is represented by a family, the royal family; and if that family is educated with a sense of responsibility and a sense of public duty, it is difficult to exaggerate the salutary effect they may exercise over the nation.”
The feminist revolution emphasizes two things: (1) male reproductive marginality; (2) women’s reluctance to de-marginalize the male by allowing him to share in reproduction. It fails to emphasize the need for the legal system to enforce the marriage contract.
This betrayal of marriage and the family by the legal system is what has permitted the feminist revolution and the consequences noted on pages 12ff.
The solution is obvious: father custody. “It is [Princess Diana’s] greatest concern,” wrote her biographer Andrew Morton, “that her children will be taken away from her.7 If Diana had really known this would happen all would have been well. She would have known that it was Charles who gave her children, her royal status, her wealth, her admired situation in British society as one of the most glamorous women in the world. He did not make her “irrational, unreasonable and hysterical…her behavior …endangering the future of her marriage, the country and the monarchy itself.”8
With automatic mother custody, the “enormous potential, and natural, counterforce” against regulation came into play. Chaucer’s Wyf of Bath told us that what women want most is mastery over their husbands. Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs tell us “The clitorally aware woman is sexually voracious to the point of being a threat to the social order.”9 This is partly because much of [her] private dissatisfaction centered on marital sex, which fell short of being a glowing payoff for a life of submersion in domestic detail. At the same time, new opportunities were opening up for women. As jobs for women proliferated, young single women crowded into the major cities, and began to enlarge the gap between girlhood and marriage, filling it with careers, romances, and—what was distinctly new—casual sexual adventures.
Female promiscuity before marriage, female adultery within marriage10 and the appalling divorce rate, mostly female initiated, all work to destroy families and undermine men’s desire for them and for legitimate children. The “distinctly new…casual sexual adventures” made possible by female economic emancipation are what make father custody especially needed today. The only means of restoring what marriage has to offer males is for society to guarantee men custody of their children regardless of female sexual irresponsibility. “The more decisively sex can be uncoupled from reproduction, through abortion and contraception,” say Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs, “the more chance women have to approach it lightly and as equal claimants of pleasure….[S]ex has been overly burdened with oppressive ‘meanings,’ and especially for women.”11
Uncoupling sex from reproduction is an aim incompatible with civilized society, which must make reproduction its most serious business, and must support the two-parent family by supporting the father’s role. Women who wish to uncouple sex from reproduction—to be promiscuous—must be prevented from claiming custody of children procreated within marriage.
A woman’s claimed right to control her own sexuality has two corollaries: the man’s right to control his own paycheck and his obligation not to let it be used for alimony and child support payments to subsidize the placing of his children in the female kinship system. The primary purpose of marriage and of patriarchal society is to allow children to have fathers. They can have mothers—and the mess described on pages 12ff.–without patriarchy. The primary purpose of the feminist revolution is to deprive children of fathers (though not of their paychecks), thus releasing women from sexual regulation.
The main means for bringing about this result, simplicity itself, is indicated by Ms. Heyn. “The original immutable marriage contract,” she says, “a commitment to permanence, has shifted to a commitment to the quality of the relationship—a mutable phenomenon if there ever was one—so if one partner or other decides the quality has diminished sufficiently, all the court has to do is simply agree and the marriage is over.”12 And Mom walks away with the kids. So the marriage contract is no contract at all.
A University of Chicago study concludes that “marriage in the U.S. is a “weakened and declining institution” because “women are getting less and less out of it.”13 The opposite is true of divorce, because women are getting more and more out of it—or expecting to, an expectation encouraged by judges and politicians (“We will find you. We will make you pay.”) The way to make marriage deliver more is to have divorce deliver less.
Feminist Marilyn French repeats the feminist party line when she says “[W]omen choosing to raise their children alone is not a social problem unless it is accompanied by severe poverty,”14 but the facts disprove her. Divorce and single motherhood are unhealthful for children. “Marriage,” says Nicholas Eberstadt of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, “is a far more powerful predictor of infant mortality than money: If the mother is unmarried, the risk of death to her infant more than doubled….Despite the well-established link between education and infant health, a baby born to a college educated unwed mother is far more likely to die than a baby born to married high school dropouts.15 Similarly with the other problems mentioned on pages 12ff.
Lesbian feminist Laura Benkov says of her fellow lesbian feminist Adrienne Rich that she “saw the institution of motherhood as inextricably bound to the institution of heterosexuality and the oppression of women”:
She pointedly questioned the nature of motherhood in our society. What ideas about mothering do women bring to the experience of raising children? How do these ideas affect family relationships? Where do these ideas come from? And most important of all, What other possible ways of constructing motherhood are available? Describing time spent alone with her three young sons, she wrote:
[W]e fell into what I felt to be a delicious and sinful rhythm. It was a spell of unusually hot, clear weather, and we ate nearly all our meals outdoors, hand to mouth; we lived half naked, stayed up to watch bats and stars and fireflies, read and told stories, slept late. I watched their slender, little-boys’ bodies grow brown, we washed in water warm from the garden hose lying in the sun, we lived like castaways on some island of mothers and children. At night they fell asleep without a murmur and I stayed up reading and writing as when a student, till the early morning hours. I remember thinking: This is what living with children could be—without school hours, fixed routines, naps, the conflict of being both mother and wife with no room for being simply myself….We were conspirators, outlaws from the institution of motherhood; I felt enormously in charge of my life.16
The passage shows how many women feel about the patriarchal system. She got rid of her husband; she has economic independence; she is de-regulated. And she likes it that way. So do many women. Feminist Kate Chopin describes the sadness and exhilaration of a woman who hears that her husband has died in a railroad wreck: “She will miss him, but loves her freedom more.”17 This is the matriarchal pattern, that of Ms. Boulding’s Indian squaw, that of the ghetto matriarch. Ms. Rich had divorced her husband, deprived him of his children and the poor man, driven to despair, killed himself. She was liberated; he was dead, a small price, we are to suppose, for Ms. Rich’s freedom to be “enormously in charge of my life” and having custody of her three sons, who, however, will not wish to live the kind of life their father led, as Marcia Clark’s sons and tens of millions of other sons living in female headed households will not wish to live the kid of life their fathers led—just as Ms. Coontz’s and Ms. Breines’s and Ms. Debold’s and Ms. Wilson’s and Ms. Malave’s girls did not wish to lead the kind of life their mothers led. Females, clearly, are chafed by patriarchal marriage; males have hitherto had to depend on it if they want to have families, but they are coming to realize, as Adrienne Rich’s husband and Marcia Clark’s husband came to realize, that they can no longer depend on it:
if their wives choose to drag them into the divorce court the judge will deprive them of their children and the role on which they hoped to build their lives.
Ms. Benkov’s comment on Rich’s thinking is this:
As an “outlaw from the institution of motherhood,” Rich discovered the pleasure of being in charge of her own life and the joy of being able to be herself along with her children, who also were able to be themselves. Noting these feelings as extraordinary, she thought about how her usual experience of mothering made her feel less in control of her life. She recognized that this loss of control was not a necessary corollary of motherhood but rather a direct consequence of particular societal expectations of mothers—expectations quintessentially linked to women’s oppression…. When a mother extricates herself from the experience of oppression and begins to value her capacity to act from a strong sense of herself, both she and her children can thrive.18
This is code language for getting rid of the father and returning to the female kinship system, where Mom runs things and Dad is a boyfriend or an exile—or in this case a cadaver. Ms. Rich extricates herself from “the experience of oppression” and “both she and her children can thrive.” Much of the thriving of the single mother is done in the “feminization of poverty”19 and “her children” are eight times more likely to become delinquents. The one-third of fatherless ghetto males who do their thriving in prison, jail, on probation or parole are being joined by increasing numbers of fatherless whites, “the growing white underclass.”
How the fatherless male children of the matriarchal ghettos will thrive when they grow up is indicated by the following from the Los Angeles Times for 5 October, 1995:
Nearly one in three African American men in their 20s is in jail, prison, on probation or parole—a sharp increase over the approximately 25% of five years ago, a study concluded Wednesday….African American women in their 20s showed the greatest jump of all demographic groups under criminal justice supervision—up 78% from 1989 to 1994….What has changed in recent years is the age composition of those males engaged in violent crime, particularly with a substantial and disturbing increase in the murder rate of young black men since the mid-1980s.
This is the way things drift when Mom is “enormously in charge of her life” and “extricated from oppression,” sexually de-regulated, or “unchained.” The crucial lack is male motivation. Formerly this motivation was created by women’s acceptance of sexual law-and-order— including the “feminine mystique,” the most important feature of the feminine mystique being the female chastity which made families possible. Women’s rejection of sexual regulation is destroying it. Women’s former acceptance of patriarchy gave men a role, gave them families, and society thrived. Ms. Benkov would like us to suppose that women and children thrive in the female kinship system, but the ghettos, the areas of feminized poverty, are the least thriving parts of society.
It was the great discovery of Ms. Friedan that women hated this thriving patriarchal society. Also girls, as signified by Ms. Breines’s title, Young, White and Miserable, where young females talk like this:
[I]t was clear to me…I did not want my life to be anything like my mother’s life!…None of us wanted to do any of the things our mothers did—nor anything the way they did it—during the postwar years.20
They didn’t want to live as their mothers did during the era of the Feminine Mystique. They wanted to live like the black girls whose lifestyle elicits the admiration of Debold, Wilson and Malave:
[W]ithin segments of the African-American community, mothers are granted respect and authority that, by and large, non-African-American mothers are not.21
This confuses authority and power . A wife may have unlimited power over her husband and be able to get him to do anything she wishes, yet have no authority—and if she tries to exercise authority she loses her power. Black men are denied authority in order that black women may be promiscuous. This is why the ghettos are “hostile and dangerous”—the danger coming from other blacks. Debold, Wilson and Malave would like to reduce white society to the same matriarchal pattern so that white women can enjoy the same liberation as these admired black women. This is the “revolution” of their title.
White mothers have the power to spend three-quarters of their husbands’ paychecks, in part because they acknowledge male authority. The black mothers have both authority and power—but they spend a smaller paycheck. The white mothers give up authority to gain power and they spend three-quarters of a larger paycheck.
To say that “women compete against each other” is to say men have bargaining power, something to offer women, this being their income and status, things which lift a society out of matriarchy and civilize it. Such men are worth competing for, just as attractive and chaste women are worth competing for. When such men and women find each other they create stable families and well-behaved, high-achieving children. It ought to be the object of social policy to get such people together to create such children. Debold, Wilson and Malave don’t want women to compete with each other, but a society in which women think men aren’t worth competing for would be a society in which men are low achievers or anti-social, like many men in the ghettos, whose women Debold, Wilson and Malave wish white girls to imitate. It would be a society in which most women would be worth competing for only on the shallowest basis, for their desirability as partners in short-term, unmeaningful relationships.
The patriarchal culture they wish to undermine is condemned as “sexist.” It is sex-centered in the sense that it puts sex to work for the most worthwhile and long-term goals, those related to the family, the future and the overall good of society. Also the past, for in such societies ancestors are revered. Where there is no such regard for the past there will be little regard for the future or concern for those united by family ties.
Feminist sociologist Stephanie Coontz was quoted on page 172 as complaining that the double standard increases the number of prostitutes. The double standard is part of the patriarchal idea, a means of motivating males to support families, of elevating the status of chaste women deemed to be suitable wives, and lowering the status of unchaste women, those for whom Ms. Coontz is concerned. Feminists would like to obliterate the distinction between good and bad women. Women who have premarital sex have an eighty percent higher divorce rate. Formerly they would have been condemned as bad women and unsuitable marriage material. Now the feminist revolution considers such condemnation to be “sexist.” Thus a correspondent to Ann Landers:
DEAR ANN: I read those 12 guidelines to help sons choose a mate, and I think some of them are clearly sexist. No. 3, for example, says to leave her alone if “she has sex with you on the first date.” Well, if she had sex, so did he.
The same goes for the one that says to leave her alone if “she can get her pantyhose off in less than five seconds. It means she has had lots of practice.” If the man has had enough experience to set a time limit, he, too, has had “too much experience.”…
I have no beef with the man’s warning signals, but why didn’t you point out that some of these red flags also reflected poorly on men? It is considered perfectly OK for men to have one-night stands, get drunk and want sex on the first date, but women who do this are called tramps. It’s time men were held to the same standard.
Ann Landers’ reply is naive—“Thanks for nailing those male chauvinist attitudes.” The man’s primary contribution to marriage is his paycheck, the woman’s is her sexual loyalty.
If what she offers is accompanied by the threat of an eighty percent greater divorce rate, and if the legal system automatically gives her custody of his children he is a ruddy fool not to consider the woman poor marriage material. And telling women their unchastity makes them no less attractive as potential wives is no favor to women (or men). The good new life as seen by Ann Landers is that previously described by Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs, where young single women crowd into the cities in search of sexual adventures.
FATHERS AND BOYFRIENDS
Patriarchy separates the “good” women, who delay sex, from the bad ones, the madonnas from the whores, the women who are willing to give men families from the women who are willing to give them one-night stands. Men and women who think that our divorce rate and illegitimacy rate are unconscionably high ought to see that these rates are the result of the sexual revolution which tries to obliterate the distinction between good and bad women, between legitimate and illegitimate children, between fathers and boyfriends—and the result of the legal system’s perverse promotion of the female kinship system, of which bad women are the principal “beneficiaries.”
Ms. Friedan speaks of women’s “inalienable” right to control their own bodies—regardless of a marriage contract. The meaningfulness and enforceability of that contract are essential to the patriarchal system and since the law has now come around to the feminist view and refuses to enforce it, fathers must remove discretion from the legal system and take custody of their own children. The legal system will not support the family and accordingly it is necessary to remove all discretion from it and make father custody automatic and mandatory. The present situation is too threatening to men—and children and good women. Men once trusted women’s commitment to the contract and the legal system’s commitment to enforce it. Neither commitment is now taken seriously. Ms. Friedan speaks for millions of women when she says woman’s right to disregard it is “inalienable.” Judge Noland speaks for most judges when he says human reproduction ought to be modeled on that of cattle. It is no wonder so many men are afraid of marriage, afraid of judges willing to do the bidding of disloyal wives—judges whose weakness encourages wives to be disloyal.”
The maintenance of the distinction between good and bad women (and men) is essential to the patriarchal system, to maintaining family stability and the procreation of legitimate children. The breakdown of this distinction is essential to the feminist program. Feminists wish to trivialize this breakdown. Ms. Coontz says: “Much of the modern sexual revolution consists merely of a decline in the double standard, with girls adopting sexual behaviors that were pioneered much earlier by boys.”22 “Pioneered” suggests progress—that the girls are catching up to a good thing already enjoyed by the boys. Ms. Coontz, however, realizes the magnitude of the sexual revolution:
Much of the new family topography is permanent. It is the result of a major realignment of subterranean forces, much like plate tectonics and continental drift. Women will never again spend the bulk of their lives at home. Sex and reproduction are no longer part of the same land mass, and no amount of pushing and shoving can force them into a single continent again.23 Sex and reproduction are no longer part of the same land mass for liberated women, for squaws on Indian reservations, for ghetto matriarchs like Rosa Lee, for women who don’t need men—for women living in the female kinship system. But suppose men woke up to the realization that for them, since they need the male kinship system which exploits male aggression and creates male motivation—for them sex and reproduction must be part of the same land mass because sex and reproduction and work and creativity and responsibility and family life are all interconnected and the loss of their children is the loss of everything. Men must, if they are not to lose everything, be assured of the custody of their children and must refuse to share their paychecks with women who discard the double standard which enables men to participate as equals in reproduction.
“New family patterns,” says Ms. Coontz, “are the result of pluralism, increased tolerance, and the growth of informed choice.”24 These bad things are thus explained by Ann Landers: “Many more women are in the workplace. They have more visibility, more mobility, more temptations and greater economic independence….Is the trend toward infidelity going to change? I don’t see how. Cheating on spouses is now an equal-opportunity sport.”25
Equal opportunity but unequal damage, since the woman’s sexual loyalty to the man is of greater importance to him than is his sexual loyalty to her. Her sexual loyalty is her primary contribution to marriage, comparable only to her husband’s economic loyalty. This breaking down of patriarchy seems natural to women because it is natural, because patriarchy itself is artificial, dependent on the stability of fatherhood. Men and children must have the patriarchal family—and men must not be jollied into subsidizing its deadly enemy, the female-headed matriline, with AFDC and child support money.
“Black girls,” says feminist Marie Richmond-Abbott,
who are less eager to marry, show higher self-esteem, more independence, and much less fear of success than do white girls….The woman may be reluctant to be tied to a man she feels is not worth the restrictions. He may be reluctant to take on the role of provider, particularly if he feels that he will not be able to fulfill it well. 26
They have high unemployment because they lack the motivation provided by families. The “strong family connections” of black girls described by Debold, Wilson and Malave are not family ties at all, but matriarchal ties. Few of these girls have fathers. The “fewer resources” and the loss of “economic security” are the price they pay for living in the matriarchy and being able to avoid collision with “the wall” of patriarchy—being able to escape patriarchal socialization.
Debold, Wilson and Malave quote Beverly Jean Smith, an African-American educator: “When I read the psychological research about mother-daughter relationships, mostly what strikes me is daughters’ pain, anger, hate, rejection, fear and struggle to find self….This way of speaking about the mother-daughter relationship runs counter to my experience.”
In fact, Smith tells us, what research there is suggests stronger connections between African-American mothers and daughters: “A decisive 94.5 percent expressed respect for their mothers in terms of strength, honesty, ability to overcome difficulties and ability to survive.”27
This female solidarity explains why so many of them live in ghettos:
At the edge of adolescence every girl collides with the wall of the culture. But this wall is not simply made of the power relations between women and men. There are other bricks in the wall: racism, classism, homophobia, and bias against persons with disabilities.
“Earning all the stuff” enables men to have families. Girls don’t need to earn all the stuff, as boys must if they are to find wives. It is earned, not a gift. Patriarchy, let it be said again, is the system which creates a civilized male role, enabling males to claim their status in families by their achievement. Hence Arthur’s Education Fund, which enables Arthur to support a wife and children. This is why men earn more than women: they must and they know it. They know that ghettos result from men’s not earning more than women—and women not needing men.28 Briffault’s Law. Women earning as much as men would wreck the patriarchal system by making males superfluous and roleless.
According to William Murchison, Between 1983 and 1993 births to unwed mothers soared by more than 70%. This means that 6.3 million children under 18 lived last year with a never-married parent. The truly astounding thing, perhaps, is to look back three decades to 1960. How many children lived that year with a never-married parent? Just 243,000. Since that time, we have undergone social revolution.29
According to the Los Angeles Times, “Nearly 500,000 teen-agers have babies annually—the highest adolescent birthrate in the developed world.” About 90 percent of the federal welfare payouts go to fatherless families ”most often started with unwed teenage childbearing.”30
Many will turn to drugs to forget their problems. According to the Times, “African Americans and Latinos were found to constitute nearly 90% of offenders sentenced to state prison for drug possession.”
Children have to put up with father-deprivation in order that their Moms may be free to “thrive.” Boys must accept matriarchy and a high probability of rolelessness. Girls may like their freedom from sexual regulation but they too are trapped in the role of impoverished single motherhood, where they wonder where the men are.
Judith Wallerstein’s study has been cited, showing that only half of the male students she followed completed college, and that forty percent of the young men were drifting—on a downward educational course, out of school, unemployed. When so many of them have seen their fathers expelled from the homes they bought for their families, when they themselves face a sixty percent chance of divorce and the loss of their children and their role, they wonder why they should work as hard as their fathers and grandfathers did in the years after the war. Feminists now say “the ultra-domesticity of the 1950s was a historical aberration,”31 ultra-domesticity meaning that women accepted sexual regulation and the housewife role. It was the judge’s conviction that she (and not her husband) was fitted by nature for this role which gave her custody of the children. But many women—those for whom Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique—knew this domesticity to be an assigned role, unnatural, a “mask,” and hated it.
Of course feminists were right that the domesticity of the fifties was artificial. They have proved this by proving what is natural—the matriarchal lifestyle of the ghettos, the barrios, the Indian reservations, the Stone Age, the barnyard, the rain forest. This matriarchy is the natural pattern of human—and all animal—society when there are no artificial props for patriarchy. Automatic mother custody has enabled women to destroy the prosperity of millions of males by destroying the motivation which produced it. This motivation can be restored by automatic father custody and this motivation will restore the economy of which William Baumol said in those better days, “In our economy, by and large, the future can be left to take care of itself.”32
If you ask a man why he works at his job, he will bring out his wallet and show you pictures of his family. Males have lost confidence that a society with a sixty percent divorce rate wants them to be heads of families rather than providers for ex-families. This is what they hear when President Clinton tells ex-husbands “We will find you. We will make you pay.” It is what men hear when California ex-Governor Wilson says, “If you abandon your responsibility to your child…you forfeit the freedoms and opportunities that come with being a responsible citizen….We cannot and will not tolerate parents who walk away from their children.”33 He means men who have been deprived of their children. This is like stabbing a man in the back and accusing him of carrying a concealed weapon.
The troubles of fatherless boys have led to government programs to provide them with role models or mentors to replace their missing fathers. Governor Wilson dedicated $15 million for this purpose and hoped to expand the number of mentors from 70,000 to at least a million.
“Mentoring programs,” says the Los Angeles Times,
are based on the premise that many youth turn to the camaraderie of gangs or to destructive peers because they lack a role model to inspire their confidence and encourage responsible behavior….The biggest problem facing mentoring programs is finding adults willing to volunteer their time.34
There are millions of fathers willing to volunteer their time—which is why they got married. The Governor himself undertook to mentor a fatherless Sacramento boy “for at least an hour a week.” “I am convinced,” he says, “that unless a whole lot of us step forward…a lot of very decent kids are going to wind up making very tragic mistakes that hurt themselves and the people who love them and hurt society in a variety of ways. I think that an awful lot of kids are hungry for the kind of affection and the kind of attention that they don’t get and frequently can’t get.”
They find it difficult to get it from fathers thrown out of their homes. Governor Wilson imagined that an hour of his mentoring time once a week could replace a real father in a boy’s life. Why not instead guarantee the father’s role within the family by an assurance that if he undertakes to be a provider for his family he cannot be expelled from it?
Once again: men can end this foolishness by raising their consciousness. If men realized that they were primarily responsible to be fathers to their children, not sugar daddies to Mom, not willing handmaidens and servitors to the stupid judges who are wrecking over half of society’s families. The judges assume that fathers will accept the injustice they are handed more readily than mothers would, which is why they give mothers custody and victimize the fathers. (I’m repeating, but this needs repeating.) Suppose the fathers saw through this fakery and didn’t feel themselves obligated to “go ahead and pay anyway— they’re my kids and I love them.” Frederic Hayward has the right slant on this:
[It] sounds like a kidnapper’s demand: “I want money. It’s not ransom, because I don’t intend to return your child. But still, I’m running low on cash, so start sending me one-third of every pay check from now on.” My hunch is that most parents would reply: “You have some nerve asking me to subsidize your torture of me. If you can’t afford my child, return it.” A father who refuses this extortion, however, is just another Deadbeat Dad….
Imagine your child is kidnapped and you receive a ransom demand. You call the police, but they put you in jail for failing to pay the ransom. Their only concern, they tell you, is that the kidnapper not go on welfare. And insisting that what the child needs most from you is not your love, attention or a relationship but simply money, they cynically tell you that they’re looking out for your child’s “best interests.” How do you feel?35
Blaming the victim. There is virtual unanimity of support for the folly of wrecking families by expelling fathers and then holding them responsible for their own victimization.
“Reno Stepping Up Pursuit of Child-Support Delinquents,” says a Los Angeles Times headline:
Even her severest critics agree on this: More than any other U.S. attorney general in history, Janet Reno has gone to bat for children.36
Ms. Reno’s program for helping children is more mindlessness— making it easier to deprive them of fathers, making divorce more attractive to mothers, making marriage less attractive to men, encouraging judges to continue discriminating against males as they have been doing for over a century:
Under a recent Reno directive, the Justice Department is stepping up the pursuit and punishment of deadbeat parents who fail to make court-ordered child-support payments after moving across state lines. The move is intended to put sharp teeth into a 1992 law that made the practice a federal crime for the first time.
Prior to the Civil War this was known as a Fugitive Slave Law, punishing slaves who tried to escape from their obligation to perform forced labor for the benefit of another person. Ms. Reno’s attempt to enforce slavery is thought to be justified by the following untruth, previously noted:
Reno, the first woman to serve as attorney general, hopes the accelerated enforcement will have a genuine impact on a national problem of staggering proportions. More than half of all court-ordered child support currently goes unpaid, and the accumulated IOUs total an estimated $34 billion.
Susan Faludi complains that ex-husbands are so selfish they don’t even want to support their ex-wives. Her argument is the same as Reno’s:
The real source of divorced women’s woes can be found not in the fine print of divorce legislation but in the behavior of ex-husbands and judges. Between 1978 and 1985, the average amount of child support that divorced men paid fell nearly 25 percent. Divorced men are more likely to meet their car payments than their child support obligations—even though, for two-thirds of them, the amount owed their children is less than their auto loan bill.
As of 1985, only half of the 8.8 million single mothers who were supposed to be receiving child support payments from their ex-husbands actually received any money at all, and only half of that half were actually getting the full amount. In 1988, the federal Officer of Child Support Enforcement was collecting only $5 billion of the $25 billion a year fathers owed in child support.37
Ms. Faludi’s figures are faked, but apart from the fakery why should an ex-husband pay anything to an ex-wife? What services does she perform for him that entitle her to share his income? The support money he is alleged to owe her serves the bad purpose of financing the destruction of his family.
Donna Shalala makes her contribution to the promotion of matriarchy by doubling Ms. Faludi’s spurious figure of $25 billion to $50 billion, ten times the true amount. (Lying is OK for a good cause.) According to Stuart Miller, cited on page 150 above, senior legislative analyst for the American Fathers Coalition in Washington, “there was about 10.9 billion in court-ordered child support owed by all Americans, and of that, a little more than $6 billion was paid. That leaves $4.9 billion in unpaid child support for 1992—far short of the $50 billion Ms. Shalala hopes to raise.”38 A better estimate is that half of court-ordered child support is paid in full and another quarter is paid in part. The wildly different estimates are significant; they show how muddled the existing system is, how little anybody knows about what’s going on or how little concern there is for the truth, how much concern for saying whatever will promote the feminist program.
Suppose President Clinton could make good on his threat to Deadbeat Dads: “We will find you. We will make you pay.” Can it be doubted that child support awards would skyrocket, that divorce would become yet more attractive to women, marriage yet less attractive to men? “Divorce almost always guarantees a woman severe financial hardship,” says the National NOW Times of Feb/Mar 1989. It is well that it does; it would be better if it guaranteed more hardship. To say that divorce hurts women is to say that marriage benefits women. It is the purpose of marriage to benefit women (and children). Hence the folly of the present system of virtually automatic mother custody and the need for replacing it with automatic father custody. The feminist/political “solution” to the poverty of single mothers is to still further penalize fathers for having undertaken the responsibilities of marriage—more discrimination against men, not only because the ex-wives want the money but also because most of them are resentful of their continued dependence, and their resentment makes many of them vindictively rejoice at the law’s punishment of their ex-husbands.
Irv Garfinkel, author of Assuring Child Support, and Sara McLanahan and President Clinton and virtually every judge are assisting this erosion of marriage. It is astonishing that the manifest connection between matriarchy, family destruction and violence is invisible to these people. The same obtuseness is shown in the following from Garfinkel and McLanahan’s book:
Stronger child support enforcement for cases involving out-of-wedlock births is likely to eventually result, in our view, in a decrease in such births by the following reasoning. Increasing the probability that men will have to contribute to the support of children they father out of wedlock will increase their incentives to father fewer children.39
Increasing the probability that men will have to contribute to the support of children they father out of wedlock will increase mothers’ incentives to bear more children out of wedlock and to make the children they do have fatherless, since many mothers hate patriarchy and many want “the right to have children without having a man around,” since, as Betty Friedan says, “our so-called sexual liberation isn’t real and isn’t possible as long as…women are still trapped in mutual torments and rage by their obsolete sex roles,”40 and since, as feminist Barbara Seaman says, they believe “the sexual morality of an individual is and should be a private matter, for it has no bearing on the general welfare if she conducts herself responsibly.”41 “If there is going to be a breakthrough in human sexuality,” says Ms. Seaman–
and I think such a breakthrough might be in the wind—it is going to be because women will start taking charge of their own sex lives. It is going to occur because women will stop believing that sex is for men and that men (their fathers, their doctors, their lovers and husbands, their popes and kings and scientists) should call the shots.42
It is going to occur because women will stop believing that sex is for men and children—and believing that children need fathers. It is going to occur if men are foolish enough to suppose that if they stop calling the shots women will continue to submit to sexual law-and-order and allow men to have families and children to have fathers. It is going to occur because men imagine they ought to continue subsidizing the destruction of their families. Patriarchy, fatherhood and the stabilizing of the two-parent family are only possible when men do call the shots.
“There are women you screw and women you marry.” A promiscuous woman places herself in the former category and for doing this Garfinkel and McLanahan propose to reward her with support money. Even on the absurd assumption that they could frighten 90 percent of males into being chaste, the remaining 10 percent would sire as many bastards as the 90 percent, if women are unchaste. The obvious, tried and successful way for making men sexually responsible is by allowing them to be heads of families.
“Parents are obligated by law to support their children,” say Garfinkel and McLanahan:
When a parent lives with a child, this obligation is normally met through the course of everyday sharing. When a parent does not live with the child, the obligation is supposed to be discharged through child support— a transfer of income from the noncustodial to the custodial parent….Most noncustodial fathers do not pay even a reasonable amount of child support.43
With the exception of a minuscule number of token cases, where enforcement almost never enters the picture, “parents” is interpreted to exclude non-custodial mothers. No judge would dream of compelling an ex-wife to go to the home of an ex-husband who has won custody of her children and mop his floors and do his laundry. The ex-husband’s obligations to the ex-wife ought to be identical with the ex-wife’s obligations to the ex-husband, which are non-existent. They are identical to his obligations to Frederic Hayward’s kidnapper who steals his children and then hires a lawyer to drag him into court to collect support money on the ground that he is obligated to support them.
Feminist Sylvia Ann Hewlett makes the same mistake as Garfinkel and McLanahan:
By rewarding “good” behavior and penalizing “bad” behavior, our divorce laws send a clear signal to citizens about what kind of behavior is valued and what is not, as well as nudging people in the “right” direction by creating an appropriate set of carrots and sticks.
If a divorce court awards a significant amount of spousal and child support to a thirty-year-old homemaker with two preschool children, it is in effect rewarding the woman’s devotion to her children and giving her permission to continue to stay home with them. It is also reinforcing heavy ongoing responsibilities on the part of an ex-husband and creating a deterrent effect (severe financial burdens may cause other husbands to think twice before divorcing). But if a divorce court denies the housewife spousal support, awards minimal child support, and tells her she must get a job to support herself and her children, then the legal system is sending out a very different signal. It is opting for day care for the children of divorce and releasing the ex-husband from most of the responsibility for the continued support of his family, thus making divorce a less onerous alternative for many husbands and fathers.44
Talk about a double standard! Let’s put the shoe on the other foot. If a divorce court awards a significant amount of spousal support to Dad it is in effect rewarding the man’s devotion to his children and giving him permission to stay home with them and continue to earn the salary needed to support them and himself. It is also reinforcing heavy ongoing responsibilities on the part of an ex-wife and creating a deterrent effect (severe financial burdens may cause other wives to think twice before divorcing). But if a divorce court denies the father spousal support, awards minimal child support, and tells him he must get a job to support himself and his children, then the legal system is sending out a very different signal. It is opting for day care for the children of divorce and releasing the ex-wife from most of the responsibility for the continued support of her family, thus making divorce a less onerous alternative for many wives and mothers.
Ms. Hewlett affects not to know that most divorce actions are initiated by wives. If a divorce court awards a significant amount of spousal and child support to a homemaker it is rewarding the woman’s defection from her husband by giving her permission to continue to stay home with “her” children. Increasing the rewards of such women will result in more divorces. Husbands are already deterred from divorce— which is one reason why most divorces are initiated by wives.
Ms. Hewlett’s proposal will also deter—has already deterred—men from marriage. Recall Ms. Coontz: “At age 29 nearly 40 percent of American men have not yet settled into a stable long-term job.”45 The anti-male bias of the divorce court has frightened them away from marriage. Ms. Coontz has been cited on women’s proneness to divorce: “Women, despite initial pain and income loss, tend almost immediately to feel that they benefit from divorce.” Ms. Hewlett would increase this benefit, thus exacerbating the already high divorce rate, which will in turn exacerbate the sufferings of the children concerning whom she writes her book— whose subtitle is “The Cost of Neglecting Our Children.” Father custody will deter both wives and husbands from divorce.
The Janus survey found that “women were more likely than men to disapprove of the mother’s taking career time off for child care”:
They have heard tales of the reentry—poorer pay, lower ranked position, less or different responsibility, and less interesting work all await women who take a few years’ leave of absence to devote to raising their children.46
Ms. Hewlett’s proposals—and indeed the whole feminist program— de-motivate men from what society ought to induce them to do for their own sake, for the sake of women, children and society—becoming providers for families.
The male must be able to offer a woman a sufficient benefit to induce her to accept the sexual regulation required for family stability— he must “settle into a stable long-term job” and become a family provider. But he must also have society’s guarantee that when the woman does accept sexual regulation by entering a marriage contract the contract will be enforced. The legal system is not responsible to create motherhood; it is responsible to create fatherhood and to support it. The fathers’ rights movement must make judges and lawmakers understand this. Only in this way can the male’s non-biological contribution to marriage be made equivalent to the female’s biological contribution. Only thus can men have stable families. Only thus can marriage be made meaningful.
We have on page 24 quoted feminist Susan Faludi’s explanation of how the feminist program proposes to make marriage meaningless. She follows this with the Cosmopolitan quote we have had from Ehrenreich et al: “The woman we’re profiling is an extraordinarily sexually free human being” whose new bedroom expressiveness constitutes a “break with the old double standard.” Ms. Faludi cites Cosmo’s figure that they have a 41 percent adultery rate. There seems to be no comprehension of how this female sexual promiscuity, this rejection of the double standard, removes the husband’s economic responsibility to the wife and along with this the grounds for mother custody. This female withdrawal of sexual loyalty to husbands and to marriage positively requires a complementary male withdrawal of subsidization of these promiscuous women and a switch to father custody. Otherwise there will be matriarchy—since “an extraordinarily sexually free human being” can not have a stable family. Fathers should be grateful to Cosmopolitan, to Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs and to Ms. Faludi for throwing this ball into their hands. What need is there of further witnesses?
Let me repeat, for it is crucial: Married men bound by a marriage contract are not “at liberty to have sex on their own terms.” They pay for it. Women who suppose themselves at liberty to control their own bodies are entitled to no bargaining power at all, for they will use it, as Ms. Faludi acknowledges, to undermine patriarchy and restore matriarchy. “Women were at last at liberty,” Faludi says—oblivious to the distinction between good and bad women, women willing to give a man a family and women who marry in contemplation of divorce and continued subsidization by an ex-husband.
It is women’s loyalty to the male kinship system and to their families which entitles them to the benefits bestowed by patriarchy on good women. The female sexual disloyalty which Ms. Faludi celebrates is incomparably more threatening and damaging to civilized society than men’s philandering. It makes the man’s role in reproduction meaningless and reduces the woman’s role in reproduction to what it is in the ghetto. It forfeits the woman’s right to subsidization by the man not only following marriage but within marriage.
Ms. Weitzman has been quoted on page 26: “Our major form of wealth comes from investment in ourselves—our ‘human capital’—and in our careers. Despite the ideology of marriage as a partnership in which both partners share equally in the fruits of their joint enterprise, the reality of divorce is quite different. When it comes to dividing family assets, the courts often ignore the husband’s ‘career assets.’”47
Ms. Weitzman’s plea is that divorce should benefit the woman equally with marriage. For women this would be an incentive to divorce. The wife could reason, “I don’t need a husband since I can exchange him for an ex-husband who can be compelled to subsidize me since I have custody of his children.
My contribution of going through a marriage ceremony is equivalent to his contribution of getting an education and acquiring status in his field of work and raising my standard of living by 73 percent.” Ms. Weitzman is really pleading that the wife’s non-assets ought to be considered as assets, at least as long as she can cling to “her” children and make her demands in their name. The wife’s greatest asset is having a husband; Ms. Weitzman’s program for shafting ex-husbands by punitive divorce awards will deprive a very large number of women of husbands.
Ms. Weitzman wants us to suppose the ex-husband’s previous earning ability was made possible by his ex-wife’s previous services to him. But obviously the withdrawal of these services must cripple him, as the providing of them formerly benefited him—especially if their withdrawal is accompanied by the deprivation of his children, the chief “assets of the marriage” from his point of view. What she calls assets of the marriage are really assets of the husband, the chief inducement he had to offer his wife to marry him.
If the male has no Money Card to offer the female, or if the female doesn’t think his money is worth the trouble of her submitting to sexual regulation, the male can forget about having a family.
As pointed out on page 33 men have not yet woken up to what this means to them and to their children, a return to Stone Age arrangements, to the worship of the Goddess under whom, as in Crete, “the fearless and natural emphasis on sexual life that ran through all religious expression and was made obvious in the provocative dress of both sexes and their easy mingling.”48 Homosexual Arthur Evans, tells us (no doubt correctly, since the human Id is always the same, whether in the medieval witch cult or in the hypnocracies of remote antiquity), “The old religion, was polytheistic”:
Its most important deity was a goddess who was worshipped as the great mother. Its second major deity was the horned god, associated with animals and sexuality, including homosexuality. These and other deities were worshipped in the countryside at night with feasting, dancing, animal masquerades, transvestism, sex orgies, and the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Sexual acts were at the heart of the old religion, since theirs was a worldly religion of joy and celebration…. The material substructure of the old religion was a matriarchal social system that reached back to the stone age….In later European history, witchcraft retained this characteristic hostility to institutional authority.
Evans appropriately quotes Jeffrey Russell:
In the history of Christianity, witchcraft is an episode in the long struggle between authority and order on one side and prophecy and rebellion on the other.49
So is feminism, the revival (or continuation) of this rebellion against male authority. “The sexual autonomy of women in the religion of the Goddess,” says Merlin Stone,
posed a continual threat. It undermined the far-reaching goals of the men, perhaps led or influenced by Indo-European peoples, who viewed women as property and aimed at a society in which male kinship was the rule, as it had long been in the Indo-European nations. This in turn required that each woman be retained as the possession of one man, leaving no doubt as to the identity of the father of the children she might bear, especially of her sons. But male kinship lines remained impossible as long as women were allowed to function as sexually independent people, continuing to bear children whose paternity was not known or considered to be of any importance.50
This focuses on the essential difference between the two kinship systems. Patriarchy decrees that Women must not be permitted to function independently of men in reproduction.” Patriarchy requires that she must share reproduction with a man.
Is paternity of any importance? Not in the ghetto. Not among “primitives,” Evans’s “nature people,” for whom the purpose of sex is its own pleasure:
Among nature peoples…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.
Among nature peoples, sex is unregulated by marriage or by shame. In patriarchy, it is put to work:
Sexual relations [says Evans] have been reduced to productive relations. The basic unit of people-production is the monogamous heterosexual family. Sex itself is locked up in secrecy, privacy, darkness, embarrassment, and guilt. That’s how the industrial system manages to keep it under control.
It is left uncontrolled by “nature people”51 and “Any group of people with such practices and values can never be dominated by industrial institutions.” This is to say, among nature peoples sex is merely recreational, whereas among patriarchal peoples it is regulated. Among nature peoples marriage is virtually meaningless and sex is public; among patriarchal peoples marriage is a public ceremony and is stable, and sex is regulated and private.
That’s why the first thing industrial societies do on contact with “primitives” is make them feel guilty about sex and their bodies. The historical tools for doing this have been patriarchal religions…. The whole industrial system is like one great night of the living dead where the entire populace has been reduced emotionally to the level of zombies.52
Among the ancient Celts, says Evans, “nudity was never regarded as shameful since the nude body was respected as a source of religious power.”53
The clothed body is likewise a source of religious power; and the disciplined sexuality represented by clothing has greater power—deriving from the same “nature” as that represented by nudity and the sexual anarchy represented by nudity. Patriarchy is also “natural”—in a deeper, less obvious way, however, than matriarchy and sexual anarchy.
Daniel Amneus
From:
THE CASE FOR FATHER CUSTODY
This book deals with the problems of:
THE FEMALE KINSHIP SYSTEM OR MATRIARCHY OR THE CLASSIFICATORY SYSTEM OR MOTHER-RIGHT— —the system of female-headed “families” which has created ghettos and barrios by encouraging women to marry the state and breed fatherless children who are eight times more likely to become delinquent.
