T is for This requires comment...

One thing that is true about humans is that they do something, and then make up the reasons for it later.

In this case we have what I am sure is a lovely woman (Hannah Seligson), explaining why she isn't getting married.

Apparently there are 'un-travelled continents and four more career paths to explore'.

And there are. Career paths and continents, which can't be explored if:

1) no one has a very high-paying career to pay for them, and
2) no one has been roped into a divorce settlement to pay for them.

Now I do think Hannah is probably a decent partner, as she tracks her purchases with an eye to dividing it up based on who paid for what, and tries to avoid the messy divorces of the previous generation, but I wonder...

I wonder if she really would, after a 12-year non-married relationship, walk away with just the things she personally bought - or if she would walk across the street to the lawyers office, and discover that palimony is just as good as marriage, and take her ex 'partner' for everything she could get. I can hear her muttering about how 'that bastard took the best years of my life', and feeling all justified as she turns him into a slave for the rest of his.

Unfair? Unrealistic? Not if you look at the statistics. No, unfortunately, financially enslaving your ex is big business, and if Hannah resists the temptation, she is the exception, not the rule.

The delay in marriage might have something to do with unexplored contients and careers, but it is, in my opinion, mostly about men avoiding slavery.

Why did this particular essay tweak me enough to post? Because it reeked so strongly of sour grapes. Rare is the man who doesn't want to find a good woman, and raise children with her. Even more rare is the PERSON (no sexism in this post) who can resist enslaving their ex and ensuring their future casual explorations of careers an continents when the state hands it to them on a silver platter, courtesy of the partner whom they now dislike.

-And the tightness of the marriage market is all about this. With a judiciary/legal system that thinks that men were built to support women, no matter WHAT they do (no fault, remember?) marriage is going to become more and more rare.

It's not about 'adulthood', or the length of 'careers' - marriages and kids were more common when we were mostly working on farms and in sweatshops, and when 'success' was something that never happened. And it isn't about exploration, although the exploration is in there, but mostly by the women, and at the man's expense.

My Best To You In Your Struggles

-M

H is for Hmmmm

The story of Jaycee Lee Dugard has drawn a lot of interest lately, but for me, it draws interest for slightly different reasons. There are questions that I'd like to know the answers to, questions that probably won't be answered.

I mean, we all read the Big Media Story, like the MSN one linked above, right? 11-year-old girl is abducted, kept as sex slave by sex offender Phillip Garrido, who had two daughters by her. But other parts of the story just didn't seem to be being brought out. One minor thing - I'd like to learn more about Nancy Garrido, Phillip's wife, who assisted in the kidnapping and then the 18 years of imprisonment. Was Phillip more evil that Nancy? Probably. Probably a lot. But I'd hate for the woman who helped every step of the way to get off scot-free because she cuts a deal.

But even more than Nancy, I wondered about Jaycee's fathers. Her step-father, who tried to run down Phillip and Nancy (the abductors) on a bicycle as they zoomed away with Jaycee in her car, and I also wonder about her biological father. Very few words wasted at MSN on the man who was raising Jaycee, or the man who fathered Jaycee.

The Sacramento Bee provides a bit more robust information, letting us know that the step-father Carl Probyn is 'separated' from Jaycee's mom. Elsewhere we read that they have been separated for 10 years. However MSN indicates that they are divorced:

"Probyn has been in constant contact with Dugard's mother, his ex-wife Terry Probyn, since she found out her daughter was alive on Wednesday. "

The money quote comes from AP, found here in the LI press:

“It broke my marriage up. I’ve gone through hell, I mean I’m a suspect up until yesterday,” he told The Associated Press at his home in Orange, Calif. “I’m the last person to see her.”

"I'm a suspect up to yesterday." Add it to how the cops and probation stumbled over every opportunity to catch the real abductor, and I think we can wonder if it isn't true that the cops had their suspect - the step-father, and looked no further, torturing this man and his wife until their relationship was destroyed.

And what about the biological father? Help Find The Missing tells us "Dugard's biological father was quickly ruled out as a suspect; at the time of her abduction, he did not even know where she was living."

One wonders how it is possible that a father doesn't know where his 11-year-old daughter is living. Mostly, one would. And I'm starting to think uncharitable thoughts about Terry Probyn. Living in the real world, I see too many men cut out of their children's lives, and wonder if in fact Jaycee wasn't abducted twice. Once from her biological father, and once from her biological mother and step-father.

I wonder what Jaycee's biological dad's name is? Was he paying child support? What about Carl? Alimony? Support? This is, after all, California.

The real story - the big story - is the rescue of Jaycee and her daughters, and the stupidity of the police - and that stupidity does seem to have part of its origins in misandry - the misandrous focus on the step-father to the exclusion of others, and the failure to do the right kind of investigations and do the right kind of monitoring with respect to Phillip and Nancy Garrido - Phillip, who as I read it, should never have been let out of prison.

But one wonders about Terry, and Jaycee's biological dad, and why it was and is so easy to ignore him, perhaps cut him off from contact with his daughter, and why it was also so easy, and perhaps financially attractive, to toss Carl aside too. Inquiring minds want to know.

My Best To You In Your Struggles.

-M

Another look at this story - Stockholm Syndrome/PAS

UPDATES:

One poster asked why we care -thought that this was all sick - and I think that deserved an answer, and one that should appear in the post:

I care because my default opinion that men are good, and that Jaycee's biological father was a decent man who was cut out of his child's life. I don't assume he was bad, or that he abandoned her, and I think perhaps his story needs to be told - but it isn't.

I alsso care because I see that the stepfather clearly spent years and years as a suspect, and whose marriage was destroyed as a result.

It is too easy to suspect fathers, and too easy to discard fathers.

That's why I care.

Update on Jaycee's biological dad from the comments:

The Daily Mail says: "Jaycee's natural father, Kenneth Slayton, split up with her mother before she was born and has never seen his daughter. He is said to live in the Los Angeles area but was not available for comment last night."

Again, we have a third name. Seems that Jaycee's mom likely named someone named Dugard as the dad.

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My Best To You In Your Struggles

-M