Check out this unbelievable article from the UK Spectator that ECM sent me. It’s written by a feminist. She is complaining about paternity tests. She thinks that women should be able to sleep with a lot of men and then arbitrarily name the richest one as the father to get the highest child support payments, and no fancy DNA test should be able to contradict her. Oh, and it goes without saying that women should not be punished for committing paternity fraud. That would be mean.
Excerpt:
The subject has resurfaced lately, courtesy of a story in the Daily Mail, about a married television presenter who for years had been paying for the support of a child conceived, as he thought, as a result of his relationship with a writer. It seems that after meeting the child for the first time, he asked for a DNA test; it duly turned out that he was not, after all, the father. Poor child.
[…]Now I can see that some men might rather welcome an end to the old-fashioned scenario whereby they find themselves held to account for the paternity of children born to girls with whom they just happen to have had sex. The actor Jude Law recently found himself in just this position, and unhesitatingly and ungallantly demanded a DNA test.
By contrast, the old situation, in which women presented men with a child, and the man either did the decent thing and offered support, or made a run for it, allowed women a certain leeway. The courtesan in Balzac who, on becoming pregnant, unhesitatingly sought, and got, maintenance from two of her men friends, can’t have been the only one. Uncertainty allows mothers to select for their children the father who would be best for them.
The point is that paternity was ambiguous and it was effectively up to the mother to name her child’s father, or not. (That eminently sensible Jewish custom, whereby Jewishness is passed through the mother, was based on the fact that we only really knew who our mothers are.) Many men have, of course, ended up raising children who were not genetically their own, but really, does it matter?
Hmmmn. I wonder how anyone could even prove that the woman actually slept with her victim? Maybe a woman can just pick out a man arbitrarily on the street, based on his nice suit or fancy car, and name him as the (involuntary) sperm-donor. He wouldn’t have any parental rights or authority, you understand.
Anyway, this shouldn’t affect me. I’m chaste. But maybe I could still be forced to pay single mothers that I haven’t even slept with just because I can afford to? Oh wait – that already happens. It’s called progressive taxation. Oh well. It’s not like I needed the money I earn for my own future wife and children…
Save us, Barbara Kay!
Here’s another article about child support from Barbara Kay about the child support bureaucracy in Ontario, Canada.
Excerpt:
Ontario’s Family Responsibility Office, which is responsible for ensuring that custodial parents don’t get stiffed for child support payments by the non-custodial parent, has a lot of power.
Starting Dec. 1, someone (read “father”) in arrears on their support payments can have their car impounded. That’s about the stupidest punishment for non-payment one can imagine, since most people need their cars in order to work.
[…]If you’re going for irrational responses to non-payment, why not just throw the guy in jail –– but oh wait, they already do that. They throw guys in jail for non-support all the time, and when they do, the guys serve the whole 30, 60 or 90-day sentence (the term keeps lengthening), even though cocaine dealers routinely get out of jail after serving half their time.
[…]Let’s look at the bigger picture, though. What is the guy paying child support for? Yeah yeah, to support his children. But that means they are, you know, sort of hischildren, right? Not necessarily. The custodial parent, almost always the ex-wife, although supposed to grant agreed-upon access rights to the children’s father, can arbitrarily decide she doesn’t want to allow access, and for any old reason — oh sorry, little Jimmy has a play date, oh sorry little Emma has too much homework, oh sorry, I just don’t want to — can deny the father access. And does she pay for that? No. Oh, she might get a scolding from the judge, but there is no downside for her. No custodial mom has ever spent a night in jail or had her licence suspended for refusing her children’s father legal access to them.
There’s more in the article. Sigh. At least Barbara Kay likes men enough to speak out to defend us. Sometimes I think that women who care that men are treated fairly are the only ones who should be able to get married. If only men weren’t so stupid that they judge women solely based on appearance. I guess we’ll have to learn the hard way!
WINTERY KNIGHT 
I agree that women can abuse the sorts of systems described here.
I think it’s ridiculous to deny the man a paternity test. The only possible rationale is fraud. So the writer’s argument is lousy.
However, I also have difficulty feeling sorry for a man who sleeps with women he is not married to. If men do that, they must realize that they run the risk of getting the woman pregnant and they must be prepared to face the consequences. May this, unfair as it is, act as a deterrant to men sleeping with women whose children they do not wish to support. Just as women should bear a certain amount of responsibility for choosing to get entangled with immoral men (something you argue for a lot, Wintery), so too men should bear a certain amount of responsibility for choosing to get entangled with immoral women (something which the you don’t argue for, but should).
On the issue of child support, I think that a reasonable approach should be used. So, if there is a valid reason why the man does not provide child support (such as losing his job, or being *genuinely* unable to get one), then he should not be punished. But men with the means should support their kids. I think the principle of fairness should come into play. So the woman, if she has custody, should be required to provide the father with access to the children. If she does not, then the law should hold her accountable too. Both parents have parental rights and parental responsibilities.
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Things like the above actually deter men from getting married…ever: if women are this inherently dishonest (and many, many of them are, with the full force of the state behind them) what is the incentive to get married?
You’d have to be a masochist that enjoys the prospect of being saddled with a child not your own as well as the possibility of being locked up for the ‘privilege’. And, yeah, maybe men shouldn’t sleep around but, then, maybe women shouldn’t either? And if she’s the one that’s going to end up pregnant then, on balance, who’s got the bigger problem*?
*Right, men do: see above and it’s f…ing ridiculous.
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ECM:
I am not advocating what such women do. I’m just echoing Wintery’s claim that women who get involved with bad men are at least partly to blame and saying that the corollary is that men who get involved with such women are at least partly to blame too.
I agree entirely that neither men nor women should sleep around.
My main point is that if men want to avoid being taken for a ride by bad women, then their primary strategy should be to avoid premarital sex in the first place.
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We all agree on your point, Mary.
ECM said: “And, yeah, maybe men shouldn’t sleep around but, then, maybe women shouldn’t either? “.
I think what he is saying is this:
1) at least some women are voluntarily sleeping with men before they are married
2) both the man and the woman are equally guilty of doing something dangerous
3) when a pregnancy results, the system is set up to punish men and reward women
4) this reflects an situation that is unfair to men but actually REWARDS women
5) women don’t seem to be very aware of this unfairness
6) women don’t seem to be real concerned about fixing the situation so it’s fair
I think that our concern as men is that we don’t think that women care about men very much. Someone, we have gotten to the point where everything we do is wrong, everything we want is stupid, our only lot in life is to slave away for 65 years paying for social programs for all women and being taken for granted at home. Sure, there are women like Dr. Laura and Dr. Morse and Barbara Kay and Carrie Lukas and men find them very comforting. I think men can put up with a lot of unfairness and injustice from taxes, laws, no-fault divorces, jail, false accusations, discrimination, anti-male schools, and so on. But what we can’t put up with is when all of this happens and yet women have no sympathy or understanding.
If women want men to marry, maybe a little more work needs to be done to understand men and to think about what men feel and what men need and what motivates men to take on the awesome responsibility of marriage and parenting in a world that doesn’t like them very much. The number one reason why I am currently pre-disposed against marriage is because I don’t feel taht women caare very much about these concerns.
I was having a conversation recently with a Christian woman and trying to explain the sexual needs of men and she was explaining why she had no obligation to care much about men’s needs if she didn’t feel like it, (because whatever happened to her in life had to make her feel good, otherwise she didn’t feel that she should be obligated to do it). I raised the point about how men have to get up and go to work whether they feel like it or not. Men have to deal with her family whether he feels like it or not. Men have to be dragged off to shopping or artsy stuff whether he feels like it or not. Her response was to say “that’s different”. I think men are horrified at the way that women treat us as objects. And don’t mean just as sperm-donors and wallters (for paying taxes for universal health care, IVF and contraceptives), I mean by being incapable of understanding what men want – what incentives they respond to and what a woman has to do to get them to engage and take on tasks.
It’s like women want the freedom to sleep with bad men, and yet be supported by the good men through taxpayer dollars without having to care about the needs of those good men. Sort of turning good men into ATMs and bad men into sperm donors – all with the goal of squeezing life dry by using people and trying to do as little as possible for anyone else. I think that’s what abortion and divorce are – a resenting of RELATIONSHIPS. A rejection of the idea that a woman should have any duties or obligations to anyone else at all.
It reminds me of atheism, where people reject God because they just can’t be bothered with the demands of a relationship but instead reduce Christianity to being happy and being forgiven what whatever selfish things they do. I think that’s what’s behind the drive to turn Christianity into “having happy feelings”. It plays very well with women, but men are suspicious of it, because they sympathize with God and they wonder – what about God’s needs? what about God’s feelings? who is thinking about his interests in this relationship? Christianity is about serving God, not keeping score to make sure that he gives you more than you give him. Sometimes I think that all of this opposition to evidence of God’s existence and character is really just a way of keping him cloudy, indistinct and at a distance. We do this so that we can use him to “forgive” us and to feel significance and love, but only when we feel like it. We avoid the evidence so that it is not really clear what our obligations are. Christians seem to be making God out in their image, and substituting their goals for his goals, without really caring what he thinks about it. And I think I see something similar happening between women and men. No one understands us, and they don’t want to, so long as they get what they want from us.
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Well, I agree with you.
I’m just more concerned for the good men than the bad ones. So I’m more concerned about the divorce issue than the issue of the guy who sleeps around. I want to see good men rewarded – men who have worked hard, and stayed chaste before marriage, and treated women with respect. Those men earn my sympathy. The ones who sow their wild oats don’t.
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“3) when a pregnancy results, the system is set up to punish men and reward women
4) this reflects an situation that is unfair to men but actually REWARDS women”
Perhaps the solution is to make laws that, when a man fathers an out of wedlock baby, he could ask for custody or visitation rights? And in the case where 50-50 shared custody is deemed to be the solution, neither parent have to pay the other anything? In the case of 75-25 custody, the dad has to pay half as much(75 minus 25 is 50) as a parent who never see his kid? And if the woman is deemed to be a lesser caregiver than the man, he can get the kid and she has to pay custody?
It has the advantage, for the dad, of being more able to choose to take real responsibility for his kid, rather than just money.
For the child, there is a bigger chance of knowing both parents. And a greater chance to end up, if there are even-handed people reviewing who is the best parent, with the better parent. (And a lesser chance of being out of wedlock in the first place, as his/ her mummy had less to gain from sleeping around.)
For the woman, it has probably only one advantage: A lesser insentive to spoil her character and values with illicit sex.
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You see, now that’s what I like to hear. Policy ideas from women to solve the problem. You should be president. I’d vote for you.
We definitely want to discourage people from bad behavior.
You know that shared parenting (joint custody) discourages women from divorcing, right? That’s the kind of law we should pass to encourage people to marry wisely and well. Covenant marriage laws (with tax breaks for doing that) would also be good.
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I knew about shared custody laws. Laws here in SA have recently been changed in that direction.
What is covenant marriage laws?
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Covenany marriage is a special kind of marriage that you can only get out of for traditional reasons like adultery, abuse, abandonment, etc. It does NOT allow no fault divorce, which is really UNILATERAL divorce. In no-fault, there are financial incentives to file for a divorce. The person who files first usually gets the advantage.
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The law is often not a logically coherent thing.
1. Having a child is a woman’s choice but fathers are required to pay child support to support a choice that is entirely the woman’s.
2. A man has a duty to pay child support but not a right to see his child.
I would love to have laws that affirm the value of motherhood and fatherhood and treat children as autonomous creatures and not tools of the mother. In order to do that we need to support biological fathers’ right to visitation, force child support on deadbeats, outlaw abortion and foster a culture that condones only monogamy with premarital chastity for both sexes.
I was glad to see that the comments on the first article you linked to thoroughly rebuked the author. I particularly liked the one by Dream Puppy: “You are pushing men towards the already increasingly popular “never marry” route, leaving millions of women who like me, actually WANT a loving committed marriage SOL.”
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Yeah, the main point to draw from this is that if third-wave feminists are making the laws, men will be less inclined to marry. I have no problem with equity feminists, but third-wave feminists are anti-male. Men need approval and affirmation to want to take on marriage.
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Well said, Matt.
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It’s only a sleeping-around woman (several shorter words exist for them, but most are frowned upon in polite conversation) who could reason like the disgusting article above.
Except that she advocates lying and fraud, she is also wrong about what a world without paternity tests will bring: Not women taking money from whoever they will, but men getting away without paying child support, and women who gets nothing.
The test is good for chaste men, who cannot get cheated into paying for something not theirs. And for women who at least know who the father of the baby is, who can get him to take some responsibility. And for married men with doubts that their child may not be theirs. And married women whose husbands wrongly distrust them. (The overwhelming majority of inside-wedlock paternity tests come out that the husband is the father, and was wrong to distrust his wife.)
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I think the abortion culture plays into this issue as well. From what I read, the vast majority of abortions occur under pressure from the sperm donor of the baby or the woman’s family. In our culture I can understand why (from a worldly point of view that doesn’t value life, anyway).
If a woman gets an abortion, even if the man pays for it, that’s a few hundred dollars and he’s done. Statistics show that most relationships break up after an abortion occurs, and I think this is somewhat of a chicken-and-egg thing. They were already going to break up anyway, and the abortion severs the long-term ties of the relationship. Of course when the man wants an abortion to occur, the woman sees he never really loved her or wanted a family with her, he just wanted sex.
However, if the woman doesn’t get an abortion, then the man is stuck paying child support for 18 years and may or may not have a relationship with the child. Of course abortion is a better deal for a worldly man. Abortion is very damaging physically and emotionally to women, so it’s not a good deal for them, but of course the solution to that is to not have sex outside the context of a relationship where children are welcome, ideally marriage.
Personally, while I have zero sympathy for a man who has sex outside of marriage and is on the hook for 18 years, I also lack sympathy for women who become single mothers by having sex outside of marriage. Men have a lot to lose financially if they have to pay child support, but women have to deal with the consequences of pregnancy, childbirth/abortion/miscarriage, the day to day effort of raising a child, more easily catching STD’s because of how the biology works, etc. I plan to teach my daughter that any guy who would want to sleep with her outside of marriage does not love her and cares only about himself, and to run away! If I have a son I will teach him the same.
I really only have sympathy for the children in this case, but kids always suffer when their parents make poor choices. It sucks but it’s hard to avoid. And I think that if men can be forced to pay child support for an “unwanted” child, then women should also be forced to give birth rather than getting an abortion if the father wants to raise the baby. It’s only fair.
Why do women have all the power in this situation? They can choose to kill the baby even if the father wants the baby, but they can force the man to pay for 18 years even if he doesn’t want to be a father. That’s not fair. Perhaps if men weren’t on the hook for child support, women might be more careful about sleeping around. But then, often the children are the ones who suffer.
Of course the only solution for men is to keep their pants on until marriage, and to be careful in choosing a wife. There are risks in everything, but it’s possible to have a pretty good idea about someone if you keep your eyes open. I can say that after 5 years of marriage, there have been no real surprises about my husband, and we only knew each other a year and a half when we got married, and a large part of that was long distance. I just kept my eyes open and prayed about it.
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I am appalled that this “feminist” has the temerity to go all “conservative” and “traditional” in her claim that paternity is not something that should be proven. Aside from the fact that she would squall like a scalded cat if we were to enforce traditional norms on mothers in other ways – i.e. staying at home, not voting, not getting an education, and, best of all, giving the father the children, which is what traditionally happened – it’s just absurd. Applying traditional norms to a woman who sleeps with multiple men is like applying a study of Impressionism to dog poop.
Seriously, the “traditional” or “Jewish” thing to do is to stone the woman and give the baby to her survivors or to the man. If this “feminist” doesn’t like that, maybe she can enter the modern world and those cupcakes can submit their babies to a DNA test before getting child support.
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I put “feminist” in quotes, because it’s the most un-feminist, anti-woman theory out there. I firmly believe that women are deserving of the privileges of adulthood because they are capable of the responsibilities thereof, and the basis of this entire article is that women are incapable of responsibility (i.e. if they were responsible, they wouldn’t sleep with multiple men, try to raise a baby without a dad, nor object to doing what every other adult in the history of the world has to do: prove a claim in court with the best evidence available before getting relief from that court).
It’s anti-feminist in the extreme.
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All this guarantees is a tomorrow where no goodwill towards women will exist. Look around at how men are demonized, that is the fate of the worlds daughters and grand daughters of tommorow because of the hatred, deceit and cruelty sown by the women of today.
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