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

E is for Effect, as in ‘Cause And’

Traditionally Men work longer hours than women, at hard dangerous jobs, with less leave, in order to:

* win improved lifestyle
* win improved choice in mates
* win ability to have offspring
* win improved outcomes for offspring
* win comfortable retirement
* win ability to leave legacy to offspring

But today’s misandrist legal/social systems take away:

* Lifestyle – if you even date a woman, she can claim you said you would support her, and she gets a significant portion of your income for an indefinite amount of time.
* Mates – lacking assets or disposable income post legal action, men have reduced choice in mates.
* Offspring – legal action awards children to ex-wives/partners leaving men without children, and as children are used as weapons against men, with reduced desire to have more children, not to mention with reduced financial resources to rear children. They simply cannot afford them.
* Offspring Positive Outcomes – It has been very well documented that children from broken families do less well, especially in homes lacking a father. Funds transferred to the woman via the legal system are often spent for her comfort, and not for the care of the children.
* Comfortable Retirement – Retirement assets are subject to marital division, and can also be raided to create the funds demanded for the woman by the legal system. And as the man’s income is likely severely impacted by divorce/palimony, it is much harder post-legal action, for him to save for retirement. He is lucky if he can just get by.
* Legacy – As the man’s assets are pillaged in divorce, along with his retirement savings, and his future income, it is very unlikely that he will be able to leave any sort of legacy to the children who likely have been forcibly separated from him.

So, the benefits of the male work ethic of the 19th and 20th century have been eroded so as to make them almost nonexistent, especially when you tack on a significant tax rate.

I think that the impacts of this are many-sided, and far reaching, including:

Male-Female Relations:

* As the man has become not just disposable, but a cash-cow to women, men will be less interested in relationships, and so women must try harder to lure men with increasingly sexualized behavior, dress and body modifications (such as breast enlargement).
* Some women will use money as an incentive to men to enter into relationships with them – advertising that they don’t need the man’s money and he can feel safe. And how to advertise? Expensive clothing and jewelry.
* Meanwhile as relationships with women are hazardous, men are more likely to engage in anonymous or pseudonymous one-night-stands or brief affairs, where women are brought, not home, but to a hotel.
* Women having become ‘the enemy’, men are much less likely to include women in their social groups or outings, instead seeking company that they can relax, and be safe and stress-free with.

All these reactions to the elevation of women above men in the legal system tend to increase the objectification of women, and increase division between the sexes. A women’s movement that started out claiming it wanted equality and moved to superiority is now driving men and women back into behaviors that they claimed to abhor.

Economic:

* Men are much, much less likely to seek high-power jobs, or take on ambitious projects, knowing that they can get trapped in a very high-stress job, with all the income going to an ex-spouse or partner.
* Men are more likely to leave for countries that will not enslave them. (And as we know, many do and have.)
* Men are more likely to opt-out of the above-ground economy, working under the table or for cash jobs that are hard to attach to.
* Men may begin hiding their friends, and their friend’s assets from abusive spouses and girlfriends, and from the police that are sent to enforce unfair judgments.
* Young men raised in households without fathers are even less likely to pick up a strong male work-ethic, and instead are likely to live on the margins of society.

The economic reactions to the elevation of women above men in the legal system injure our economy, with workers choosing underemployment, black-market employment, or leaving the country entirely to take their labor elsewhere.

Both of these sets of reactions seem potentially to be things that can feed back upon themselves, with women needing to become more and more ‘sexy’ to get noticed, and men who do work to their full advantage within the legal/economic system being disadvantaged, compared to those working on the black market, or scraping by 'on the dole' rather than having it all taken away anyway.

And is this a picture of our culture today? Increasing sexualization of women, with men becoming more and more shiftless, as the economics of marriage and even mid-term relationships make it impossible to hang onto your freedom, your income, and your assets? With highly motivated men living double lives - one life for the aquisition of money and power, and another life of anonymity, to protect what is gathered? Is this the country we want?

It certainly looks like where we may be going.

B is for Blackmail

I have repeatedly commented how divorce law amounts to blackmail, with a man's wellbeing, assets, freedom, ability to travel, and even children being held up to squeeze out money with the cheerful cooperation of the New Jersey court system.

Well at least the law -or lack of anything resembling real law- applies to all men, regardless of power, as Jon Corzine recently found out, being forced to knuckle under to divorce-court palimony of $ 6 Million to his girlfriend of 18-months;
Carla Katz. Poor Corzine ended up not only forking over for his golddigger, he also ended up paying for a trust to pay for Ms. Katz’s two children (12 and 15 years old) to attend college, and a 2005 Volvo sport utility vehicle that cost about $30,000. Oh, and he also bought Ms. Katz's half of her ex-husband's home for her for $470,000. (Apparently they discussed buying and rennovating the place together.) Oh, and she also gets a lump sum of cash to buy a $1.1 million condominium.

There certainly isn't a moral to this stlory, but if there was, it would be for every well-heeled man to leave New Jersey, and the USA, too.