JULIAN writes:

I have been catching up on your site and just came across your marvelous short piece of Oct. 22, 2009: “The Unfaithful Wife.” It is the best essay I have seen on the the divorce epidemic. I’m a veteran of a stupid, destructive and monstrously wasteful divorce war, dragged through the courts for three years by a wife of 25 years for no reason other than her simply having become bored with being married. (Ok, being married to me.) That and a very rough menopause, but let’s not go there. 

I emerged from the divorce court sewerpipe relatively unscathed, notwithstanding that the other side used every single dirty trick in the divorce-lawyer playbook. But I’m a big boy and was able to look after myself better than most. I have no complaints for myself because after the initial shock I was not surprised. It’s a mean world. But I was shocked and horrified at what my ex-wife then did to my daughter who was ten years old at the start of it all. I am now a witness to my daughter doing something similarly destructive and cruel, with the active collusion and encouragement of her mother, who still lives alone after 20 years (and one proposal of remarriage, which she made to me, and which I respectfully declined; but that’s another story). 

My daughter was 28, with a beautiful little home and garden, married for seven years to a kind and handsome young man who loved her dearly. In exchange for his devotion she betrayed him and abandoned him for a recent immigrant who divorced (at least) three wives, did not raise (at least) two children, and who is (at least) 55 years old. She lives with this elderly Casanova in a rathole welfare neighbourhood. She has no more flower garden. 

For ten years, I made a huge effort to raise her properly in the face of constant undermining. I (mistakenly) agreed to joint custody and (stupidly) encouraged her to maintain a good relationship with her mother, who then poisoned her. I sent the child to the best schools, where she did well. I always enjoyed her company; we skied together; sailed with her and her friends; she speaks French and reads Jane Austen, Dickens and Joyce for pleasure. I taught her to ski, how to handle a big sailboat, to ride a motorcycle, to shoot a semiautomatic handgun and to listen to opera (the soprano arias anyway). She studied history, philosophy & English lit, played sports, is an expert skier, has a Master’s degree and a good job at a major university. A nice kid, a smart kid and an extremely good looking girl. 

And yet the mother seemed to have finally succeeded in ruining her. 

You’ve heard all this before; everybody has, and I have not even mentioned the undermining of the child during her teenage years, but you can well imagine. Rhetorical question: how could a mother do such a thing to her only child? Of course: hatred for the husband leading her to try to ruin what he loves best in the world. But still, after all these years, the sheer perversity of it all is incomprehensible to me.

You asked about the reaction of my daughter’s husband. It was typical of him; I had lunch with him to let him know we still cared about him and he was calm, visibly saddened and was obviously ready to take her back. He did not complain. He did not say one word against her even though she had abused him, betrayed him and abandoned him, leaving him alone in their lovely little home and now untended gardens. Thank God, they had no children. There are three homes in my area where something similar has happened recently and the gardens bear witness to the families’ disasters. 

My former son-in-law later met with my wife while walking their dog alone and he spoke openly with her for an hour. He told her that he always believed that my daughter was his best friend, which was the saddest thing I ever heard. It brings tears to my eyes just to think about it again. One can analyse it to death but genetics might perhaps play a part: three out of the last four generations on the mother’s side of the family did the same thing and destroyed their own families in horrible ways. 

I repeat, this is not a whine or a complaint for myself; I have a beautiful wife whom I will love till the end of my days, I retired at 59 and we spend our time sailing the boat, riding the bike, reading our books, going to Europe and digging the garden. Things are good. The only thing that bothers me in this world is what is happening to my poor child.

No, in reply to your question, I don’t think her husband should have acted differently; I asked her what the problem was at the time she was leaving him and she said that he had done nothing wrong. She was leaving because she simply found someone more interesting. Her husband did nothing to drive her away. 

Here’s something else you way find amusing. My elderly mother was married for over fifty years until my father’s death. It was an imperfect marriage. She is a good woman who ran a good home but she was from the wrong side of the tracks and was intellectually limited. My father was extremely intelligent, highly successful with a somewhat difficult personality who appreciated her beauty and womanly qualities and gave her an upper middle class life. They each did their duty, worked at it, honoured their promises and looked after each other and the children, but it wasn’t easy. 

She was rather mean to him when he became weak and unwell, getting petty revenge for old slights. She was not smart enough to realize he might die while she was busy getting even, now that she had the upper hand.She was deeply shocked when he died unexpectedly and immediately regretted her unkindness to him. It was pathetic to see her begin to appreciate him again after he was gone. (In sheer perversity this recalls my ex-wife’s suggestion that I marry her again, 10 years after she dragged me through a nasty divorce war, which I “won”.)

But somehow my mother must have dreamed of “escape” and now supports my daughter in having thrown away her handsome, interesting, devoted husband, for an opportunist scavenger from the far side of the world who is 25 years older than her, with multiple ex-wives, ex-children and a litany of excuses and reasons. 

You got that? Her own mother actively colluded in the disaster and now her grandmother retroactively encourages her. These women have 80 years of marriage between them and they seem to think the terrible destruction my daughter caused was somehow a romantic thing. In the mother’s case it echoes what she did herself after 25+ years of marriage; the grandmother seems to now think it’s what she would like to have done during her 50 plus years of marriage. Both the mother and grandmother remained alone after the end of their marriages and will do so for the rest of their lives.

Laura writes:

This is a sad story and of course it is very familiar, both the abandonment of decent husbands and the collusion of generations to absolve women of cruelty.      

There are two important things to note about this collusion. First, in the case of both your ex-wife and your mother, it is safe to assume that they refused to confront their own wrongdoings and in order to validate these acts of cruelty they encouraged your daughter. It was absolutely necessary to encourage your daughter. This allowed them to further evade responsibility and continue to live lies. Only repentance could have prevented this.

Second, feminist ideology is obviously a factor. When women presume, either consciously or unconsciously, the moral inferiority of men, it affects their actions. Your daughter had a brilliant education but she was taught that women are morally superior to men. She had to have been taught this because it is in the air we breathe and only in a home that explictly rejects this notion could she have learned otherwise. Surely she loves her father and in some ways loved her former husband, but she was probably so soaked in the idea that women are entitled to even the score against men that she could not really feel for your distresss or his.

It’s interesting to note that both your wife and daughter were intent on fulfilling their romantic dreams, out of some inner vacuity and spiritual infirmity, to the point of being willing to suffer heavy financial losses. Your daughter’s ex-husband will likely go on to find a better woman. Your daughter has many years of unhappiness ahead, especially if she never confronts what she has done. How terribly painful this must be for you.

John P. writes: 

I read Julian’s story with interest and dismay but what really caught my eye was his assertion that trouble had been brewing with his family’s women for three generations. This jibes with my personal experience and raises some questions that might be of general interest. We tend to think that the destructive effects of feminism which we see all around us emerged after the sixties or maybe in the post-war generation but in fact trouble had been brewing for some time previously. 

My own mother lived, by all external indicators, a highly traditional life – certainly by modern standards. She was a tireless homemaker, wife and mother, married to one man her whole life and only intermittently employed outside the home. Yet, upon closer examination, she was also an extraordinarily willful woman who never displayed much affection or respect for her husband and always held her opinions, which were often groundless and irrational, with absolute, adamant certainty. No force on earth, no amount of evidence could sway her no matter how wrong-headed her view. She never recognised any constraints on her thoughts or actions whether traditional or rational. She simply IS going to take action on her impressions, come hell or high water, even if those actions had repeatedly proven ineffective or counterproductive. 

She had neither the education nor intellectual curiosity to take on feminist theory as we see it today but she was clearly a proto-feminist. Her mother was a similarly willful person. 

It pains me to have to speak of my mother this way, honour thy father and thy mother and so on, but the fact is something has been cooking with women for quite a long time. Modern feminism is simply the apotheosis of a shift that began in the late nineteenth Century. She was raised in what would be by our standards a very strict religious household but was in fact a very Gnostic form of Christianity. This illustrates the necessity of engaging in a thorough-going critique of Christianity as it has been taught and a return to first principles.

Laura writes:

Feminism was well on its way during the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her famous feminist polemic, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, in 1792, and feminist teachings grew in popularity through the nineteenth century.

I think what confuses people is the retreat from egalitarianism in the fifties, after World War II, when there was a spike in the birth rate and traditional sex roles, as well as domesticity, seemed secure. This was a brief anomaly from the general progress of liberalism and it was undoubtedly caused by the affirmation of masculinity during the war. Women who were mothers in the fifties and sixties did not have sufficient conviction about their roles to defend these roles once feminism resurged with a vengeance in the sixties and seventies.

Your mother perhaps was formed by these conflicting trends. Outwardly, she was traditional, but inwardly feminist. She apparently believed that a feminine interpretation of the world was the highest truth. 

John E. writes:

Feminism was well on its way during the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century. 

I agree, but why should this be? The recent men’s rights movement appears to be almost purely a reaction to the feminist movement. Why shouldn’t a men’s rights movement appear in the time of the French Revolution? Why should a feminist movement have much deeper roots in history? Have women been historically dissastified much longer than men, who have generally been satisfied throughout history until recently?

Laura writes:

Excellent question. 

In the light of evolutionary psychology, feminism makes sense. It is natural for women to see powerful men more than they see  the average man. Men don’t seek to mate with powerful women (or at least in most societies, they have not), they want to mate with fertile and faithful women, so men naturally do not have this obsession with women who are powerful. 

Feminism does not prove that women have been more dissatisfied throughout history. The case can be reasonably made that the opposite is true, that men have suffered more, but since all of human life entails suffering, such attempts to measure each side are silly. It is natural for women to continually express what they want, to make demands, in order to ensure their security, which they cannot provide on their own, and this means the expression of dissatisfaction. Feminism is a perversion of this natural impulse.

Feminism fits in with the natural order, which is hierarchical, while the men’s movement does not and is a reflection of social decay in its latter stages. That is not to say that feminism is in any way good, only that it is comprehensible in light of egalitarianism’s objectives. The lower rebels against the higher and destroys its legitimacy and power in order for radical equality to be attained. In the same way, parental authority has been severely damaged and undermined. When I refer to men as “higher,” I mean that they are naturally meant to dominate and provide for the lower. They are both more powerful and more obligated.

John E. writes:

You wrote: 

The case can be reasonably made that the opposite is true, that men have suffered more, but since all of human life entails suffering, such attempts to measure each side are silly. 

Exactly, and I think this is the most exasperating aspect of the feminist narrative of history. This narrative, as you have pointed out previously, pits the average woman as Everywoman and a very powerful man as Everyman, and of course the woman always ends up oppressed in this story. If one doesn’t see the foundational fallacy here, the story is believable, and soon you have almost everyone asking the wrong questions, and of course proposing the wrong solutions.

Laura writes:

Think of all the conversations, all the textbooks, all the high school and college courses, all the marriages, all the divorces, driven by this single fallacy. It’s like a microscopic bacterium that brings down an entire city, an entire civilization even, with the plague.

Brendan writes:

It strikes me that the reason why the feminist narrative is about “powerful men” is sexuality-based. That is, women tend to notice and focus on what the most powerful men in society are doing, and as for the masses of “also ran” men, there really isn’t much attention — much of these men are invisible to many women, as many less attractive women are unfortunately relatively invisible to most men. I think that’s why the feminist narrative is so persuasive to women — it seems intuitive, because of course the only men that “matter” are the apex men. When this is pointed out, however, the most clever feminist response, of course, is this: aha! That’s why patriarchy (defined for that conversation as “the rule of powerful men”) is bad for men, too, see! And men buy into that, because of their own resentments against men who are higher on the totem pole than they are.

Feminism is quite clever, unfortunately. One of the reasons it’s been so successful is that, despite the fact that it is based on lies, it is very capable of being spun in a quite credible way to men and women alike by building upon the innate fascination with and/or bias against apex men by men and women alike.

Laura writes:

It strikes me that the reason why the feminist narrative is about “powerful men” is sexuality-based. That is, women tend to notice and focus on what the most powerful men in society are doing, and as for the masses of “also ran” men, there really isn’t much attention — much of these men are invisible to many women, as many less attractive women are unfortunately relatively invisible to most men.

Yes, that’s what I meant by an evolutionary psychology perspective, but I think there is more to it than that. This rebellion makes sense even when we take in to account that human beings have a higher, spiritual dimension.     

Do you think feminism is clever? It seems astoundingly stupid. It takes some kind of willful ignorance to deny the obvious.      

Brendan writes:

I think you are right in that the rebellion against hierarchy also reflects human spiritual history, and can be made sense of from that perspective.

In terms of feminism being clever, I think it would be hard to imagine a more effectively executed way to almost completely trash society, culture, marriage and so on than feminism. In that sense, it is indeed a cleverly designed thing. It is of course also false, but it takes cleverness to peddle such obvious falsehood as effectively as feminism has been. The feminists are clever, no doubt — probably as clever in technique as they are wrong in substance.

Laura writes:

I guess it’s both clever and stupid in the way the Marxist idea of equalizing wealth through State manipulation is clever and mind-blowingly stupid. 

Nathan writes:

I was reading this passage from E. Michael Jones’ Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control and thought it was pertinent to the discussion.

Jones is discussing the Marquis de Sade’s form of sexual liberation and its affect on the eventual French revolutionaries:

‘Sexual liberation becomes by its very nature a form of domination whereby the strong get to do what they want with the weak. Since strong is synonymous with male and weak with female in the Marquis de Sade’s anthropology, ‘liberation’ means the male domination of women. Sexual liberation, therefore, is always a form of control, according to which the idea of nature as rational purpose, implying good and evil as expressions of practical reason, is replaced by the idea of nature as brute force. This also means that any pancultural implementation of sexual liberation will call forth a feminist reaction, as women who are imbued with left-wing fantasies first succumb to unwitting domination and then react with inchoate rage when the outline of their bondage to ‘liberation’ begins to become clear to them.’ 

E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control (p. 26)

Reader N. writes:

“I guess it’s both clever and stupid in the way the Marxist idea of  equalizing wealth through State manipulation is clever and mind-blowingly stupid. “

This ties back to an earlier part of this thread, where the MRA/MRM was noted to be a reaction to Feminism, and the question was either asked or implied “Where was/is the equivalent of Feminism for men?”.

Thinking off the top of my head, Marxism creates a dichotomy within a nation, within the world of “minority of oppressors vs. majority of oppressed”. The cure for this is a dictatorship of the proletariat, led by a vanguard to ensure a glorious future of equality for all. (Years ago a soft Marxist professor admitted that Marxism can be argued to be a secular form of Christianity, with the state in God’s role. By the way.) Marxism is materialist and accepts the premise of Rousseau that humans are born in a state of good nature and corrupted by civilization, a neat inversion of the Christian concept of original sin. Therefore, any inequalitieswithin the world are not the result of natural differences, nor of sinful, imperfect humans but rather imperfections in society. Given enough centralized power, all  of those imperfections can be purged, leading to a perfect society inhabited by perfect humans.  Lenin famously said that one cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs; the eggs being, of course, class enemies of the state. So the theory of Marxism implies lifting all men up to the same level, but in practice it results in hammering down all but a few.

I oversimplify grossly, but as a student of history, that’s how I understand Marxism. Note that Rousseau’s conceit is also a basic premise of modern liberalism. I’m not going down that
rabbit trail today.

Looking at feminism, and I confess it’s been nigh on 30 years since I spent any amount of time reading the various Statements and Declarations from the 19th & 20th centuries, it seems that we can see a similar oppressor/oppressed mindset, along with a similar notion that any difference in the results of living must, must be caused by some societal defect that can only be corrected by state power.

Therefore I believe I can answer one question and ask another:

* Where was the equivalent of Feminism for men? It was and is Marxism. (How’s that worked out over the last 200 years, eh?)

* Is it possible that Feminism is merely a variation, a subcategory, of Marxism?

Laura writes:

It seems clear that Marxism gave further impetus to the major themes of feminism first articulated by Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792.

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