I recently had a discussion with someone female about the fact that divorce laws have been, for at least the past fifty years, very unfair to men. Those laws have allowed and encouraged women to use their sexuality and the institution of marriage with avarice. In our present lunatic culture, unscrupulous women routinely bait men with sentimental appeal and sexual allure. Once a woman has a man "caught" (obligated by his agreement) she breaks the contract herself, blames him for the breach, and then she and her lawyers use the law to strip him of his property.
Both wives and brothels have their enforcers, but the wives are finding it easier to renege on their bargains, and easier to avoid the stigma that reneging ought to bring them: it's merely a matter of selecting any of several socially acceptable pretexts.
My debate opponent made an argument in defense of this legalized deceit, a sour blend of caveat emptor with Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake." If men didn't approve of the conditions of marriage, as they presently are, then let them never marry. She seemed to be ruling the notion of changing the terms of marriage out of bounds.
She was implicitly saying (for example) that, no, child custody should not be changed so that the custodial parent was whichever parent was most able to provide, since it would deprive the man-trap of much of its force.
My opponent also suggested that alimony payments—not coincidentally nearly always paid by a man to a woman—were "fair," which manifestly they are not. Alimony is a means by which one party to a contract (marriage) divests herself of the obligations pertaining thereto, while simultaneously holding the other party (her husband) bound to fulfill his own. That isn't honor; it's madness. Or, more exactly, it's an illicit separation of power from accountability that creates blatant inducements for the moral corruption of married women.
The debate got me thinking about the ways in which people justify an established system of rules, seemingly without regard to the foulness of those rules. One sort of justification crops up frequently. It goes like this: "Yeah, well there's always somebody who will complain that he's been cheated, no matter what the rules are." But that's a facile explanation. It implies that you must be supremely impartial to notice the gravest injustice, which isn't true.
Another remark that I hear a lot is this one: "Well, how would you write the rules?" The idea being, of course, that if you can't describe the perfect system of laws on the spot, then you're not qualified to say that there's something wrong with the system we have. That argument is, if anything, even more facile than the preceding one. Why?
Let's say you're in your house on a Saturday afternoon, playing cards with your buddies. A softball batted from the yard across the street thumps into your front door. The next thing you know, the back wall of your house falls flat to the ground, the roof starts to slide that way, then the other three walls go, and the only thing that saved you and your buddies from being crushed is a quick ducking under your sturdy dining room table.
Are you now empowered to say that your house wasn't built as well as it should have been built? Yes.
Does the ability to make that judgment convey the expertise necessary to building a good, solid house? No.
The same is true for the laws.
I'll summarize the two important ideas that I've learned.
1. Self-interest casts no moral shadow.
A person stung by injustice in any matter is not disqualified from noticing a flaw in the system that gave occasion to it.
A man whose house fell apart because a softball struck his front door has a selfish interest in finding fault with the carpentry—but his basic conclusions in the matter are correct.
A man stung by the injustices in divorce and child custody may rightly notice those injustices, even if his personal misfortune is what had first called his attention to them.
Although it is certainly possible that a selfish act is also an immoral act, the immorality cannot be deduced from the selfishness.
Although it is certainly possible that a selfish opinion is also an erroneous opinion, the error cannot be deduced from the selfishness.
2. The ability to notice a flaw does not convey the knowledge needed to repair it.
An inability to say how something broken might be fixed doesn't mean you can't tell that it's broken.
When your house fell apart at a mild disturbance, you knew that your house was improperly or inadequately made. You didn't need expertise in carpentry to make this judgment.
When your life falls apart because of legal corruption in divorce or child custody matters, you don't need to be an expert at making laws to see that the existing laws are improper or inadequate.
However, whereas selfishness doesn't imply corruption, it doesn't preclude corruption, either. The two can go together quite smoothly. Take a poll of women on the matters of divorce or child custody, and you'll quickly see what I mean.
More (Deserved) Anti-Feminist Takedown
Have you ever watched women trying to act like men? They're absolutely vile. They talk too loudly. They curse too much. They criticize pettily. They spit everywhere, with no attempt to be discreet about it. They confront each other over trifles. They roughhouse more frequently than men do, and in ways that men don't ordinarily do. They have no conception of the mitigating manly graces, of manly dignified restraint. And they always choose the lowest, most apelike sort of male to imitate. Is this how their daddies behaved?
If you, a real man, meet one of these masculinized female clowns, it's quite likely that she, the imitation, will challenge you, the real deal, to display as much "macho" as she does. I mean, here's this creature whom you don't want to hurt because of what she is—a potential mother to your children—taking shameless advantage of your reluctance to give her some bruises. You know that most of the time you could teach her who was really the larger, more powerful animal, despite her fantasies to the contrary. But you don't want to do it, and she knows it, and, knowing it, she behaves with the same shameless lack of grace that you would expect from a spoiled kid whose indulgent dad is bigger than you are.
She, indeed, might not see things this way—perhaps she's seen too many judo moves on TV. Her delusions can be dispelled only by giving her the treatment that her manners merit. But if you're like most men, you won't do that, simply because, if your natural reluctance to harm a woman doesn't stop you, then your reluctance to outrage your fellow men certainly will.
You know that you'd be held to account for violence against her that she might easily be excused for directing at you. She can slap you; you can't slap her, or, if you do, you could be in jail the next day. In fact, if she slaps you, you might be in jail the next day because of the story she tells the sheriff about why she slapped you. Unfortunately, the story does not have to be true. When feminists speak of "equal rights" for both sexes, they're either being brazenly dishonest or else flagrantly ignorant.
This feminist social environment, which de-womanizes Woman and unmans Man is a serious problem that the customary attitude—a smirking "I'm above it all" attitude—allowed to exist.