Since the first annual international conference on men’s issues has convened in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, maybe now is a good time to try to imagine what a legitimate men’s issues group would or should do. I am fortunate enough to have never had to work my way through divorce or family court, and my experience in joining a family was to come in on the mother’s side. I don’t have any first-hand or even second-hand experience with how men are treated under the law in disputes with women. I won’t presume that the law is perfectly fair and equitable, but I also won’t presume that men are systematically getting a raw deal. My sense is that there are a lot more men than women skipping out on their families and not providing child support. There are more men than women committing domestic abuse on their spouses and children. Perhaps these facts make it falsely appear that men are treated unfairly. But, perhaps, these truths create biases that disadvantage men in our court system. It could be that, all other things being equal, men do poorly in court compared to what equity would predict.
Just as a father deserves a right to an attorney in any family dispute, men in general deserve advocates in the legal system. This is true even if the current law is basically correct and fair. So, I can imagine a men’s rights group that focused on assuring fairness that would be perfectly legitimate. Perhaps, like any advocacy organization, it would occasionally make unbalanced attacks and maximalist demands, but it wouldn’t be based in any antagonism for women or feminism or liberalism. By it’s nature, it would include a lot of deadbeat dads who were less interested in actual fairness than in lessening the burden of parental responsibility, but it wouldn’t have to be defined by bitter people who resent having to support their children.
Groups that are privileged can be obnoxious when they band together to claim victim status, but it’s always legitimate to fight against any kind of systemic bias. There can be remedial factors that cause that bias, as in the case of preferential admissions and hiring for minorities and women, but if there were actual judicial bias, I think that opposition would be justifiable. Unfortunately, the men’s movement doesn’t look anything like this. It’s much more about sour grapes and hostility to women than it is about addressing real discrimination against men.
Yeah, what you said at the end is especially poignant. Men’s rights groups never talk about, you know, “men’s rights” (whatever the hell those are). It’s always about how feminism is ruining everything. And sure enough, right there in the link, they’re doing it again. MRA’s aren’t about men’s rights; they’re just misogynists.
See also PZ Myers about how mass media and video games in many ways dehumanize men, yet what do the MRA’s do?
Always about them damn bitches. Always.
Ten years ago when more than a million Americans marched in Washington to express their support for women’s equality, many men wore T-shirts that said “This is what a feminist looks like.”
We already know what a men’s movement looks like.
If only they could learn to fake sincerity they’d have it made.
I’m a divorce attorney with 18 years experience. My particular interest is what’s called collaborative divorce, where both sides legally bind themselves to keep the case out of court, and we bring in mental health professionals. Then, as a team, we work to contain emotions (such as fear, anger, sadness) while taking apart the old family and rebuilding it into two separate but connected families. In this process, much healing can take place. The goal is to divorce with empathy, with civility, with dignity, even with love.
I’m also a divorce mediator and, there, the goals are very much the same. The container is just smaller, comprised (typically) of the mediator alone (in my cases, me). For some couples, that’s adequate. A few can even do it entirely by themselves, just sitting down together and listening with open hearts and open minds until they reach consensus. Those couples are, however, a minority. Most need some degree of containment.
In all my years of practice, I’ve never met a men’s rights attorney whom I respected. Typically, it’s a marketing ploy designed to give them an area of expertise without really having to know anything about anything and it’s a way of targeting one’s services to those with money. I have a great deal more respect for victim’s rights advocates, who in fact need to have real knowledge of a real subset of law and who target their services to those least able to pay.
When I litigate, the cases I take are typically in defense of those coming out of abusive marriages. This is because, if someone meets and consults with me, and we connect, even if I’m not the best attorney for the case, I cannot in good conscience turn away a person who sees me as her only hope. So I sign on for the good fight and keep my litigation skills honed while doing so.
There is zero systematic bias against men in the legal system. I say this as a twice divorced father of two (with a third on the way). I raised the first two on my own, during law school and beyond. One is now a successful young attorney and the other a striving computer engineer. My third wife and I now have a child on the way. At age 51, I’ve seen marriage and divorce from many angles. I’ve seen relationships from many angles. I’ve developed a great deal of knowledge about conflict and the dynamics that lead in that direction (as well as those that lead back toward harmony).
If an individual man tells me he was a victim of the litigation system, I can say with complete sincerity, “Tell me more” because many people are victims of a system not designed to deal with divorce and that gets used in ways that are incredibly destructive. This systems needs to change. It is essentially violent, well suited perhaps to disputes between those in arms length transactions such as businesses (who will sue each other, then settle, then sign new contracts as though the entire conflict was nothing). But this litigation system might as well have been designed to bring out the worst and most self destructive impulses in the divorce context, for which it was most clearly not designed. Divorce (on a grand scale) is a very new phenomenon.
Sure, men are sometimes victims of that system. So are women. Most of all, children are its victims. And society as a whole. That’s why I derive satisfaction from helping to bring about a complete revolution in the culture of divorce, which is a part of a larger revolution in the culture of communication. In many societies (including ours), communication itself can be inherently violent in ways that few understand or see. This violence underlies most of the physical violence in the world (including war). This phenomenon is explained well by Arun Gandhi (Mahatma’s grandson) in the forward to the book “Non-Violent Communication: A Language of Life” by Marshall Rosenberg. Rosenberg himself is a genius and one of the gurus of the emerging science of relationship dynamics.
I’d be happy to write about this at length if anyone has an interest. But the bottom line, with regard to this discussion, is that pretty much everything I’ve seen in the domain of “men’s advocacy” is just another front in an essentially violent war of words and ideas, an attempt to manipulate rather than to cast light on a real problem: the enormous need for reform of our litigation system in the context of family disputes.
I’d like to see a men’s rights movement formed around the goal of protecting men from abuses by other men, particularly when one is perceived to not fit into their expected gender roles. I don’t mean sexual identity, but just failing to conform to any number of expectations of “masculine” behavior. Women can be a big part of enforcing those expectations, too, and they can be cruel in playing their part, but at least they’re rarely dangerous in a physical sense.
That’s one of those caveats to “male privilege” that doesn’t get much discussion: privilege tends to accrue only to certain types of men.
We are going through a period of major acting out of misogyny and an attempt to reassert traditional male-dominant values through propaganda, legal maneuvering, and courts.
I have gone through a messy divorce in the courts and even a SC court in the 1970s was pretty fair even though I did not get custody. It did get settled with time.
We have friends in which a high-ranking professor has tried to wrangle out of a negotiated separation with his first wife while now in a separation litigation with his third.
Most men are not jerks and deadbeats but there are a sufficient number of them in the world to constitute a newly loud movement.
To understand what a real men’s advocacy group would look like would mean having absorbed the observations of a very good female author. Susan Faludi in Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man outlines the societal promises that US culture made to men after World War II, how that culture then systematically made them unachieveable, how women responded, and the various men’s movements that had appeared before the publication of the book that had in fact avoided the real issues and wound up being movements to force women to change. It is striking in its clarity.
Also in the stew is the emergence of the upper-class assertion of the right to rape with impunity as long as one keeps up appearances. There is a huge Twitter flame war that involves debate over this notion.
And there is also in the stew use of accusations of rape as means of social humiliation or control.
There is the discussion of the failure of the military and police departments to take seriously reports by women of rape, which plays out in men’s defense of these institutions by invalidating that women were actually raped. You have seen this in GOP political campaigns–to their loss.
Finally, there is the continued government control over women’s bodies represented by the instrusive abortion laws and tolerance of intimidation at abortion clinics, failure to see the murder of doctors who perform abortions or the bombing of abortion clinics as organized terrorism, and the increasing scope of the attacks on women’s clinics in general.
The reason this has spawned this movement now IMO is that guys who could reasonably afford child support payments prior to 2008, have been so savaged by the economy that they can no longer afford them nor do they have the opportunity of starting new lives with slim prospects. The legal and law enforcement consequences mean more legal fees, trips to jail for non-support, and so on. It is the failure of economic policy that is a major driver of resentment.
Being nearsighted and focusing on family law alone misses the issue.
A real men’s advocacy group would be advocating for more time for men to engage in care for their families. A real men’s advocacy group would be insisting that boys understand that the “boys will be boys” general excuse for everything no longer exists; that responsibility is an essential value. A real men’s advocacy group would liberate boys and men from the idea that they have to prove their manhood through firing someone or killing someone. It would see the cult of toughness as a false god that has been destructive in its effects.
Well said. A real men’s advocacy group would indeed advocate for men having more time to engage with their families. There are challenges to being human. It’s not easy to be a man. Not easy to be a woman. God knows it’s not easy to be a kid.
As a man, I can relate to being measured against artificial expectations in a way that can only lead to failure. I can relate to being seen, in a thousand ways, as a doufus for not meeting those expectations. On the cusp of the birth of my son, I remember back to the births of my first two children and how I felt completely out of place in the delivery room. I knew nothing about delivering a baby. When I tried to comfort my wife, everything I said and did was wrong. I felt in a way like I belonged out in the waiting room and I figured that maybe my dad’s generation had gotten it right. Looking back, though, it was just the strains of the relationship playing out through the birth and the paternalistic nature of our medical institutions that don’t have much humanity to offer.
This time around, my wife and I are talking through some of the stresses in our relationship because I don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past. I hope to be able to really help her go through the delivery. And in case I can’t we’ve hired a doula so she’ll have anther woman there, someone who knows how to guide her through the process and who speaks and intuits in the ways that many women communicate with one another.
As one who studies communication, I see a huge advantage that same-sex couples have. They don’t have to communicate across the gender divide. With guys I can say things in very straight forward ways. We all get the communication. No one takes anything in ways unintended. Female communication is far more complex and nuanced, and totally above my pay grade. But I understand enough of it that when I’m mediating or involved in a collaborative divorce case, I can pull what they’re saying inferentially out by asking questions. This helps open things up because most men, like me, don’t get the subtleties and inferences.
Without reflection, when guys talk to guys they talk to a common shared stereotype that they work hard not to shatter. Step out of that stereotype on some issue and the conversation gets awkward.
Likewise with the ladies, I guess, but I’ll let them speak for themselves.