THE BLOGGER Dennis Mangan joins the ranks of small-minded men’s rights ideologues attempting to burn me at the stake. Mangan writes about my comment that men have nothing to fear in marriage other than the loss of their honor. He comes to the conclusion that conservative women cannot possibly empathize with the plight of men.

Mr. Mangan conveniently ignores the fact that this particular statement by me occurred in the context of a discussion about comments at another website from men who said no women can be trusted and that “99 percent” of women are nothing more than materialistic whores when it comes to marriage.

In addition to failing to mention that participants in the particular discussion in question called women many nasty, unprintable names and celebrated soulless sexual conquest, Mr. Mangan also forgets to take note of the many, many things I have written against female-initiated divorce. If I am not mistaken, I have written more prolifically on the subject than Mr. Mangan. His omission of this small detail suggests some deeper motivation for wishing to excommunicate me from the ranks of anti-feminists. Could it have anything to do with my being a woman? Could it have anything to do with my frequent writings on the devastating loss of the male provider or my refusal to say that the divorce rate justifies anti-marriage campaigns by men or obliviousness and indifference to the soaring rate of illegitimacy?

The lists of my posts on the scourge of unilateral divorce by women is very long. Some (not all) can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Men’s rights ideologues like Mr. Mangan gleefully search for heretics and smack their lips when they think they have discovered that a conservative woman who denounces women for divorce and yet who also points to the responsibilities of men in marriage and society is really an impostor and secretly out to subjugate men. Why do men’s rights advocates so fervently wish to prove that no woman can be trusted? Why must they burn me on their pile of pathetic rhetorical twigs? So they can bask in their One True Faith and not contemplate the complexities. So they can indulge a sense of victimization and self-love.

I repeat. I have written about female-initiated divorce at least as forcefully as Mr. Mangan has. Not only have I written about it, but I have gone so far as to call for a return to presumptive paternal custody. I agree with Whiskey, the blogger quoted by Mr. Mangan, that women must criticize other women for damaging the lives of decent men. I have made this point many times. For all I know, Mr. Whiskey got this point from me. No one has more adamantly insisted on it than I have. Oh! But all that was just an act. I am really a feminist in disguise! Burn me at the stake! I don’t deserve to speak and stand up for marriage! You’re good to go, men.

Arguing with a men’s rights fanatic is like being interrogated by the KGB. The very hairs on your head may be used as evidence against you. At any moment you might be proven an imperialist dog. Even if you have lived the life of hard-working peasant, you can still be an enemy of the people.

                                                — Comments —

Youngfogey writes:

Take heart! These attacks on you will pass. Perhaps some understanding will even be gained.

As I have followed the argument what is clear to me is that in the few sentences of yours Mangan quotes you are speaking from a Christian perspective. I read your words as having behind them a sentiment similar to that behind the question “what does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul?”

I interpreted your words to mean that men, if they share our Christian assumptions, have nothing ULTIMATELY to lose from marriage except their honor or their inclination to choose the good. Perhaps, you mean that through returning evil with evil a man risks ULTIMATELY losing his soul.

Clearly, this comment has been read by others in a more worldly way. I do not think you mean that a man cannot lose money, children etc. through divorce. However, this seems to be they way many have read your statements.

Maybe some of this confusion could be cleared up be trying to clarify the difference between the temporary worldly losses men suffer everyday and the ultimate loss of his soul that comes about, in part, from choosing to engage evil on its level rather than choosing to overcome it with good.

Laura writes:

Yes, I meant men have nothing ultimately to lose. I went on to clarify this point by quoting Plato, who would have entirely agreed. Also, if one accepts this point, that virtue is the highest possession, this statement is in essence the deepest possible condemnation of those who betray their marital vows. Do you follow me?

I believe my statement has been deliberately taken out of context and jumped upon in order to dismiss my other points.

Mari writes:

I especially wanted to comment on the recent attacks you have gotten from the men’s blog, The Spearhead. I think first of all that it is despicable of them. Men are supposed to be protectors of women and yet the men’s movement has degenerated into a whiner’s club. Some of us have tried to explain what a traditional wife and mother is to these men but they are not interested. They apparently would rather have bitterness. It is extremely painful to know that such men exist and encourage other men to malign traditional wives and mothers whose only crime seems to be to have happy marriages and raise well-adjusted children.

If their lives were destroyed by divorce because of unfaithful wives, they in turn seek to destroy others’ lives through making sure as much as possible ( by their vitriolic attacks against traditional women) that happy marriages never come to be in society. When they do so, they are no better than the women who hurt them and abused them.

May God help us all.

Jesse Powell writes:

In the history of your website many battles and public confrontations needed to be waged in order to drive out the men’s rights influence and make your website friendly to those of a pro-family persuasion. Other anti-feminist sites have been completely taken over by the men’s rights crowd. Every single politically oriented anti-feminist website that I have ever seen has comments posted by men’s rights supporters or has some history of confrontation with the men’s rights crowd. Every single anti-feminist blogger must either fight against or submit to the men’s rights influence. This is simply a fact of the current political environment.

Laura writes:

There is an important difference between the men’s rights ideology and traditionalist advocacy of the authority and rights of men.

Brad writes:

These fellows – Mangan and his ilk – don’t really merit a response. I well understand parts of their argument, as I know you do, and I even like to read them occasionally, but they inevitably step off of the reservation and fly into an irrational hissy fit that I just can’t quite follow. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been happily married for over 26 years. Does that make me a beta? I bet Mangan and Roissy wouldn’t think so if they met me and the Scots-Irish side of me (admittedly at bit irrational itself at times) commenced to kick their [posteriors]. A moving target, I suppose they are.

Chris writes:

First, thank you for your blog which I greatly enjoy reading.

Your argument with Dennis Mangan (whose blog I also read and enjoy) complements your earlier discussions on the possibility of an atheistic conservatism.  As an atheist and a conservative, I find the increasing distance and mutual incomprehension between the atheist right and the traditionalist (Christian) right to be unfortunate — but maybe inevitable in practice.

I’m of two minds here.

I understand and appreciate Mangan’s (utilitarian) disinclination to advise for marriage as it is statistically likely to cause men pain as things stand today.

I also understand that a sick society in which marriage declines will only become sicker.

So this points to yet another division on the right: despair versus hope.  It is easy (and rational) to counsel despair, that worse is better, if you are certain that we’ve passed a point of no return and
that the only way to improvement is to first pass through a period of tribulation.  The atheist (radical, alternative) right is increasingly (in my observation) disinclined to believe in the possibility of
reform without a collapse.

So if you are on the right and have no hope for society short of a collapse and rebirth, then Mangan’s argument will likely resonate with you.

Mangan’s friend Bruce Charlton (bgc) takes your side (the hopeful side):

“Laura Wood is talking about what is best for the long-term interests of society, and is putting forward a coherent argument on that basis. Hostile commenters here are apparently asking for something which will improve their own personal situation, regardless of social consequences, at minimal cost or effort from themselves, over the next few days or weeks.”

Laura writes:

Thank you for writing.

First of all, let’s get some facts straight. You say marriage is “statistically likely to cause men pain.” This is not true. Marriage is statistically likely to cause men overall satisfaction even though it causes a very significant minority of men who are divorced involuntarily (as well as the smaller number of women who are divorced involuntarily) serious pain and the loss of stability, income and full-time custody of their children. The situation of this minority is not to be dismissed. It is dire. 

However, let us not exaggerate how big this minority is. Mangan appears to address a fairly educated audience. According to the National Marriage Project,  about 11 percent of those who are highly educated divorce in the first ten years of marriage, when divorce rates are at their highest, and about 37 percent of those who are “moderately educated” do. If I am not wrong, the National Marriage Project does not look, at least not in its latest report, at the rate of divorce initiated by women. This rate is generally placed at between 60 and 70 percent. It is safe to say that some of these women who initiate divorce do so because of infidelity or abandonment or abuse. I am not going to pursue that point because it’s hard to pin down and, besides, I believe separation, not divorce, is the only honorable solution to marital difficulties. Let’s say every last one of these women divorces a saint. Still, the number of men who are not divorced by their wives significantly exceeds those who are. 

My point is not that men do not face serious risk in marriage. They do. No fault-divorce is much more unjust to men than women and the turning over of marriage to the state at a time when the state perceives no interest in keeping marriages together and actually profits from divorce is immoral and a great injustice to boht men and women.

However, it is factually incorrect and misleading to say that men are more likely to experience overall pain than satisfaction in marriage. The sort of men who read Dennis Mangan’s blog, whom I would have placed in the “highly educated” category (at least before reading Mr. Mangan’s latest piece)  have a statistically smaller chance of being divorced by their wives involuntarily if they marry than they do of staying married.

Fear, worry and anger at the culture of divorce are justified. No society can flourish with marriage as it exists in our world today. Our divorce laws are a form of state-imposed slavery.

Bruce says I am talking about what is best for society. Marriage is the most important safeguard of freedom, civility, culture, democracy and the rights of children. However, this reality is not the main reason behind my conviction that an anti-marriage stance is evil and wrong.

Only men who are temperamentally unsuited to marriage (and choose celibacy instead) or, who have decided to devote themselves to a spiritual or intellectual vocation, should forgo the joys, satisfactions and hardships of fatherhood and the self-transcendence of marital love. My real concern is the individual. Walk through any nursing home and ask the fathers in their beds whether they regretted their children, and you will find the answer as to why the anti-marriage campaign is evil. To become a father is to participate in creation. To move through time with a spouse over many years, “oar-to-oar” and “wing-to-wing,” as Robert Frost said, is a worthy objective even at great personal cost.

I know men who have been involuntarily divorced and yet they have no regrets about fatherhood. To have become fathers outside marriage would have been an injustice to their children. They know that. They have remained close to their children through the travesty and humiliation of unchosen divorce. They are loved by their children.

Whenever I hear a man advocating that other men not get married, as opposed to advocating for change in divorce laws or advocating that the men and women who unilaterally divorce be ostracized and shunned, I have a visceral reaction. I think of my husband, of course, who loves his sons more than life itself and I think of my father, who cries when he speaks of his seven children. The tears fall down his cheeks. Yes, my father was lucky in his wife. Yes, we wore him down. But even if my mother had not been the good woman she is, he would have had us. We would love him no matter what.

It’s that love of my father that makes me say, “No!”

Y. writes:

Concerning man haters and woman haters and their joint hatred of marriage, I came across this today, from the National Association of Marriage Enhancement: 

“All over the world marriage is under attack. No country, no people group, no community is immune to the attacks on marriage.

“Yet most people view the attacks so personally because marriage is so personal. In the spiritual sense, however, every marriage is under attack because it is so foundational – marriage is the first institution that God created.

“And the enemy would like to hurt God, fully knowing that one of the ways to get to a father is to get to his children. Since marriage is the first institution, and it is the picture of Christ and His bride, the church, it ought to be a foregone conclusion that the enemy of God’s will for your life wants you to be embittered toward marriage anyway.

“And if marriage is the laboratory of agreement, and agreement is the place of power, then it also makes sense to think that division leaks power.”  

Here is encouragement for a couple to fight that loss of power, power that can come from two being united in prayer (Matthew 18:20), and to help avoid the destruction of marriage: A Gallup Poll during 1989-1990 called “Love and Marriage,” commissioned by the National Association of Marriage Enhancement, found that the divorce rate among couples who pray together was 1 out of 1,152. That is less than 0.0009 percent. The results were published in Faithful Attraction by Andrew Greeley.

Laura writes:

Marriage is the first institution God created and remains the first institution of society. It is hated because it is so powerful. The person who leaves a marriage is the loser.

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