Friday, July 27, 2012

The Marxist Dialectic of The Family: Part II - Marriage 1.5 versus The Second Wave

Part I
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Often we identify the introduction of No-Fault Divorce laws in the 1970’s as the beginning of the divorce epidemic. As I pointed out in Part I of this series, this is not entirely accurate. The divorce craze actually began back in the 1860’s and 1870’s when the Suffragettes undermined father-custody with the Tender Year’s Doctrine and mother-custody became the norm, thus voiding one of the core tenets of marriage in the first place - which was bringing men into the reproduction process in a meaningful way so that their higher provisioning abilities could be utilized for the greater good of both families and society.

It’s not like No-Fault Divorce had no impact on divorce rates – it certainly did! But it more or less streamlined a process that had been well under way for over a century. Contrary to popular belief, obtaining a divorce before the 1970’s was not that difficult. Marilyn Monroe divorced three times between 1942 and 1961 while Elizabeth Taylor had four divorces under her belt and was working on her fifth when No-Fault Divorce became law. Before No-Fault Divorce was enacted there were just a few more hoops to jump through, in an effort to “find fault.” But let’s make no mistake, if a woman wanted a divorce she could get one. Of course, with “fault” divorce, it extends that one must prove that an actual “fault” had occurred. There were many things which constituted “fault,” including adultery, alcoholism, insanity, abandonment, and a host of others. But the most pernicious to the institution was the fault called “cruelty.”

The word cruelty was an undefined term that much resembles the word “abuse” today because almost anything could be construed as cruelty. An argument that made her cry could be deemed cruel. Not paying enough attention to her could be deemed cruel. Well, you get the idea. Just look at how many things today are classified as “abuse” which really wouldn’t be claimed as abuse anywhere else in society except in male-female relationships. Take that meaning of abuse and simply replace it with the word “cruelty” and you’ve pretty much got the spirit behind the system. Over years of having a relationship with someone else, it is pretty easy to find something that can be considered abuse or cruelty in one way or another. So, what happened in divorce cases before No-Fault Divorce was that a trial occurred to prove the husband was “cruel” and therefore, a divorce ought to be granted. This caused much dragging out of people’s dirty laundry and it was pretty much a joke. Belfort Bax referred to the “cruelty” argument for divorce as a complete sham over a century ago already, indicating that it was all about taking normal human interactions and having a lawyer twist things around to portray the husband as some heinous monster when the reality was far from it. No-Fault Divorce was really more about not making lawyers and judges into hypocrites for orchestrating such a charade and simply saying, “Give her the damn divorce already and let’s just get it over with.” Women have always gotten what they wanted from the courts when her adversary was a man. Dropping the need to prove “cruelty” simply streamlined the process and stopped making the courts look like such hypocrites.  

“Prior to 1970, the law usually justified its wrecking of families on the grounds either of adultery or of “extreme cruelty.” The sexual revolution has now made adultery a right for women (“a woman’s sacred right to control her own body”); extreme cruelty was usually understood to be a legal fiction meaning no more than that one of the spouses, usually the wife, wanted out. The pretense that the husband was an extremely cruel man was in most cases sufficiently absurd that it embarrassed even judges and lawyers and it was felt necessary to “reform” divorce by perpetuating the same destruction of families under a new terminology. This is called No Fault divorce. There were label switchings. Divorce was renamed Dissolution of Marriage. The Plaintiff was renamed the Petitioner. The Defendant was renamed the Respondent. Alimony was renamed Spousal Support (the ex-wife was no longer a spouse, but calling her one “justifies” taking the man’s money). The real core of the change is that it was no longer necessary to “prove” extreme cruelty to inflict upon the husband a more severe penalty than is imposed on most low-income black male felons.” – Daniel Amneus, The Case for Father Custody, p.215

As you can see, while the introduction of No-Fault Divorce certainly helped to fuel the divorce craze by streamlining the process, it was definitely not the sole cause of the break-down of the family... so, what other factors were involved?
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One of those answers can be found in the present day, as our great altruistic feminist sisters attempt to "help" the women of the third world. There is a feminist propaganda advertisement that appears here in Canada on a regular basis which particularly irks me because of its blatant lying right off the bat. The feminist organization CARE put on the ad which starts off by saying something along the lines of "No-one can understand a woman's life in the third world better than another woman anywhere in the world." It's such an obvious slap in the face to not only men in general, but also to bloody common-sense. They mean to tell us that a woman working at her NGO job and living in a high-rise condo in downtown Vancouver has a better ability to understand the life of an impoverished woman in the third world collecting and burning camel-dung over an open fire in her mud-hut better than her husband, sons and fellow countrymen do? It's just bloody absurd on the face of it, so I once perused their site and here is what I found: "When a girl in the developing world receives seven years of education, she marries four years later and has 2.2 fewer children." Now, don't get me wrong. I don't particularly have a problem with girls receiving an education, but what I am pointing out is that feminists know that what they are doing is altering the conditions of the nuclear family by pushing women into the workforce where they will be directly competing with men. Of course, the same website claims that women put 90% of their income back into their families but makes no mention of the percentage of income the men put back into their families (Do the men spend 50% of their income at the local tavern and the other 50% wagering on cock-fighting in the alleyway?) Nor does it indicate what kind of families they are talking about. Do they mean husband-wife & children families, or are they discussing female & children families?

You only have to look at our recent economic crisis of 2008/09 to see what feminists consider "family." While men lost their jobs in significantly larger numbers than women, when job recovery began to occur, feminists started complaining that men were getting re-hired in larger numbers than women. (Kinda makes sense, eh? If three times as many men lost jobs as women, a similar ratio of men ought to be re-hired during a recovery - except in femi-supremacist 50/50 land). Then, feminists tried to claim that men were receiving hiring preference because they had families to care for and complained because women had families they were providing for too! Yes indeed, but the difference is what kind of families we are talking about. A man providing for his family generally means that the man, his wife, and their children all get food put on the table whereas for the most part, when a woman provides for her family, they mean there is food on the table for the single/divorced mom and her children. There is no man being provided for in this equation. Women don't care for men - they care for themselves and their children. A single mom "family" leaves the male out of the equation, where he starves on the street corner alone - it certainly does not lead to general economic improvement if the male gender is left to suffer in poverty separately from families. In the traditional nuclear family, men, women and children receive the benefits of the man's labour but in the new single-mother "family," only women and children receive benefits. The men just magically vanish to... who knows where?

The radical feminists of the Second Wave understood this as well:

"How will the family unit be destroyed? ... the demand alone will throw the whole ideology of the family into question, so that women can begin establishing a community of work with each other and we can fight collectively. Women will feel freer to leave their husbands and become economically independent, either through a job or welfare." -- From Female Liberation by Roxanne Dunbar
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A significant factor in our culture which led to the destruction of the family was women entering the workforce en-masse in the 1970's and 1980's. Whereas Briffault's Law was undermined by the Suffragettes transferring presumed Father-Custody into Mother-Custody with the Tender Years Doctrine in the 19th Century, Second Wave feminists undermined hypergamy by encouraging women to abandon their traditional roles and compete directly with men in the workplace. Previously, a woman's standard of living significantly improved upon marriage as men were socially conditioned to work like mules to provide for their families. After the second wave arrived, women were encouraged to "have it all" and be both high-earning career chicks and brave single-mother-victims at the same time. Of course, there is nothing wrong with women aspiring to do something more than live up to traditional sex-roles, but overall in our culture, women have merely cooked the Golden Goose by insisting on pursuing their dreams and aspirations. Yes, they want a high-flying career so they have money, but they also want their work to be socially beneficial (who doesn't?) and they also want their careers to be flexible enough to allow them plenty of time to spend with their families - not necessarily hers and her husband's family. They had all of that in spades before Second Wave feminism appeared on the scene, but were convinced by feminists that it wasn't good enough for them. Like greedy children, they had to have it all! 

"No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one." -- Simone de Beauvoir, "Sex, Society, and the Female Dilemma" Saturday Review, June 14, 1975, p.18

"If even 10 percent of American women remain full-time homemakers, this will reinforce traditional views of what women ought to do and encourage other women to become full-time homemakers at least while their children are young... This means that no matter how any individual feminist might feel about childcare and housework, the movement as a whole [has] reasons to discourage full-time homemaking." -- Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA, p.100
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Second Wave feminism made no bones about their goals to destroy marriage, believing that true equality for women could not be achieved in the nuclear family. They pushed women into the workforce en-masse because they knew doing so would undermine one of the major reasons women entered into the institution of marriage in the first place - access to the husband's paycheck along with the higher standard of living he provided. This massive entry of women into the workforce where they began directly competing with men for their traditional roles likely had far more to do with undermining marriage than the introduction of No-Fault Divorce laws, which merely streamlined a trend that had been happening for a century already.
      
Also, the Second Wave did everything they could to destroy "the mating dance" between men and women. Men are the designated initiators in sexual relations. Women attract and men pursue. That's just the way it is. However, just because men are the designated overt initiators does not mean that women are innocent little darlings, simply fending off multitudes of horny men at every corner. They are just as complicit in the mating dance as males.

“Women chat happily, send sexually explicit signals and encourage the man’s attention, even if they have absolutely no interest in him. This gives a woman time to assess a man, says [Karl Grammer of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Urban Ethology in Vienna, who studied 45 male-female pairs of strangers in their teens and early twenties]… Importantly, the women also seemed to control the encounter – what the women did had a direct effect on what the men did next. ‘You can predict male behaviour from female behaviour but not the other way around,’ says Grammer”New Scientist Magazine (London), February 14, 2001

Cary (1976) discovered that the woman, through eye contact, controlled the course of interaction with a male stranger, both in the laboratory and in singles' bars. Perper (1985) gave a detailed description of courtship, stressing an escalation-response process in which women play a key role in escalation or deescalation. The steps in this process are approach, turn, first touch, and steady development of body synchronization. (Note: This is similar to mating behaviour in other mammals, like rats).

Although these reports are clearly valuable, most researchers addressed courtship very generally, and some failed to recognize the importance of the female role in the courtship process .What was needed was a more complete ethogram of women's nonverbal courtship signals. To compile such a catalog of flirting behavior exhibited by women involved in initial heterosexual interaction, more than 200 adults were observed (Moore, 1985) in field settings such as singles' bars, restaurants, and parties.

Research has shown, therefore, that the cultural myth that the man is always the sexual aggressor, pressing himself on a reluctant woman, is incorrect. -- Courtship Signaling and Adolescents: "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun"? Monica M. Moore, Ph.D.Department of behavioral and Social Sciences, Webster University
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Thus, the old saying, "He chases her until she catches him." Kinda makes you wonder what the whole feminist campaign about "No Means No!" was about in the 1990's, doesn't it? Some studies have indicated that in a typical male-female sexual encounter, the woman will give off up to 150 rejections, either verbally, physically, with eye gestures, and so on, until finally saying "yes" to sexually accepting the man as a mate. Quite obviously, "no" only means no when a man says it. These types of campaigns were designed to drive to the sexes apart by monkeying with the basics of the mating dance - which women insist on perpetuating, no matter how much men get criminalized for doing what she desires in the process.

A similar thing has happened in the workplace where women once often found a husband. Today, after a plethora of sexual harassment laws being introduced into the workplace, anyone in a position of power could get into no end of trouble for trying to woo a woman who is subordinate to him - yet, women in the past often married their bosses. Remember, women are hypergamous and seek out men who are more powerful and wealthier than they are, thus, it is natural for a woman herself to be attracted to someone in a position of authority over her. But, since men are the designated initiators in the mating dance while women always hide behind plausible deniability, it is the male's part of the dance that had to be outlawed in order to drive the sexes apart. When desiring women is outlawed, only outlaws will desire women.
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The William Heatherington Spousal Rape Trial in the mid-1980's was the final death-knell for any semblance of marriage resembling that which had existed for millenia before in our culture. Not only was this trial a complete mockery of justice but it undermined the very basis for marriage, which was a vehicle to contain human sexuality and channel it positively into something that benefited both families and society. This was the end of expecting that sexual relations were to be a part of marriage. If your wife - your lifelong mate - is no more of your expected sexual partner than a strange woman you have just met at the pub whom you have to woo and game into having "intimate relations"... then what is the point of setting up a legal framework such as marriage to contain two people's sexuality into the institution in the first place? Keep in mind as well, like Daniel Amneus pointed out in the quote at the beginning of this article, the sexual revolution had also made adultery a "right" for women (her sacred right to control her own body). If there is no expectation of either sex for the husband, nor the expectation for sexual fidelity in marriage... then... um... what is the point of a marriage? It has been deconstructed into basically nothing at all.

The above points I have addressed in this post are but a brief synopsis of how feminism sought to undermine the institution of marriage and drive the sexes apart. There are, of course, dozens, if not hundreds of other examples that could be used, but that would also make this piece into a full dissertation rather than an article for a blog post. The points I am trying to get at here is that while No-Fault Divorce certainly had an effect on our cultural values towards marriage and family, it more or less simply streamlined a process that had been well underway for a century before. The real insidious aspects of Second Wave Feminism were more about undermining the basics of male-female attraction. Many men who are reading this are at least somewhat familiar with the principles of game and as you can see, much of what was going on was the deliberate undermining of men's and women's natural hetero-sexuality, making it as difficult as possible for them to get together and form unions the way they had done for centuries already in our culture and it ultimately left us with what we today call Marriage 2.0, a fraudulent contract that in no way resembles anything of marriage 1.0. Basically men who get blindsided into signing on the marital dotted line are left as virtual slaves to their wives, unattractive in any way to their spouse's sexual desires, and without any benefit for themselves to look forward to but the peaceful slumber of death.     
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