Fatherhood, Society

LEADING WOMEN FOR SHARED PARENTING

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A growing number of children are being raised without the benefit of meaningful engagement with both parents. As contemporary research conclusively demonstrates, a child who effectively loses one of his or her parents through a custody decision, usually the father, is a child at risk for a number of negative personal and social outcomes.

Research also proves that, although children want a relationship with both their parents regardless of marital status, healthy bonding with a non-residential parent is impossible without a substantial amount of time spent in that parent’s physical presence.

Consequently, LW4SP is sending our elected representatives, the judiciary and policy-makers the clear message that substantive changes in family law must be implemented: changes that will ensure children the opportunity to remain fully engaged with both their parents into adulthood.

The women endorsing this statement know that not all children can have full access to both parents, and we know that not all parents are fit to raise their children. But we also know that far too many good, willing and fit parents are pushed to the margins of their children’s lives by unfriendly family courts, government policies and laws that undermine family integrity and autonomy.

It should be alarming to women everywhere to know, as they look at their son’s, there is a significant likelihood our government will turn him into a visitor to his children in the event he no longer resides with his kids’ mother.

Parental separation should not spell the end of a relationship between a child and one of its parents.

Forced separation from one’s own flesh and blood in the absence of abuse is morally wrong and socially irresponsible. That is why LW4SP supports equally shared parenting as the default arrangement for separating parents of minor children.

 

Read all about them HERE

Society

The thoughtless slave

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I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man

Frederick Douglass

THINK!!! It ain’t illegal yet…

Fatherhood

Working women must stop blaming men for their troubles

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The fact that some men have done terrible things in the past, it’s ridiculous to blame all men for those acts.  It is a mass injustice to society to brand all men abusers, or any other negative trait women may have experienced with men.  It seems that when men today stand up against such extremist views, those same extremists tend to cry ‘sexism’ and the brand ‘misogynist’ is soon to follow.  This kills any intelligent conversation on the issue.  Therefore, when society goes too far in branding all men as abusers, or the enemy, the only people that can counter that debate, is WOMEN.

Australian journalist Natalie Barr exposes the “us” against “them” mentality of modern gender relations and explains that men aren’t to blame for women’s workplace struggles.

AM I the only woman who’s not angry at men? I’m a woman and I have never felt discriminated against. There. I’ve said it.

I’m not angry at men. I can’t remember being passed over for a promotion because of a man and I have never felt undervalued ­because I’m a woman.

I went to a co-ed country Catholic school and the boys were my mates. Just like the girls. Maybe that’s where it started — my view that I was just as good as the opposite sex.

No one ever told me I wasn’t. And they still haven’t.

That doesn’t mean by any stretch that I’ve been positive and confident and happy every day of my life. It just means I don’t blame men for my troubles.

When I was 20 I missed out on a cadetship at the ABC, but I didn’t for a second think it was because I was a girl. I just had no bloody idea what I was doing; and they could tell.

Through the end of high school and university, I volunteered to work for free at the local TV station in Bunbury during my holidays. I couldn’t have known less about TV news or being a journalist.

Every day I was there taught me something new, gave me a little bit more confidence in myself and made me realise that I had to take a leap and start applying to every news organisation in Western Australia for a job. Work experience shaped my future and I still believe it’s one of the most productive things a kid can do.

As a result of one of those letters, a very nice person, who just happened to be a man, finally gave me a ­cadetship with a local Perth newspaper. The pay was $142 a week. That was for a D-grade cadet, man or woman.

I loved it, worked my way up to senior reporter (in charge of a man) and then headed to Kalgoorlie for my first TV job. I worked overseas for a few years and, of this ­December, I’ll have been at Channel Seven for 20 years.

For nearly half that time I was a reporter for the 6pm news. I started off doing very low profile stories, because I was a pretty inexperienced journalist.

I don’t remember the other junior male reporters being given better stories than me.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Politics, Society

Rape Culture Myth

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Barbara Kay knocks it out the park in this piece ‘Rape culture’ fanatics don’t know what a culture is’. Here is an excerpt:

Indeed, the more closely one follows the increasingly hysterical volleys of rhetorical fire back and forth on this issue, the more apparent it becomes that those who speak of a rape culture don’t understand what the word “culture” actually means. To result in a “culture,” a phenomenon must be widely accepted as the norm. It is culturally normal in some countries for women to be virtual chattels, governed by patriarchal standards of honour; to be married against their will; to meet blame from their kinsmen and indifference or even hostility at law enforcement and court levels when reporting sexual assault; to be shunned as unmarriageable — or worse — for the “shame” of having been raped, and so forth. There we can legitimately speak of a “rape culture.”

Here, where women are socially and legally equal to men, official sympathy for rape victims at every institutional level has created a climate so overwhelmingly sympathetic to female victims of sexual abuse that the emerging cultural danger is injustice to falsely alleged perpetrators. We are gripped by a baseless, but pandemic, moral panic in which significant collateral damage is beginning to pile up.

Moral panic fuelled by ideology and righteous indignation quickly corrodes the critical faculties and blinds even otherwise intelligent people to objective facts. The numbers on campus rape don’t even come close to the famous “one in four” [women on campus are victims of rape or attempted rape], even taking into consideration unreported rates (i.e. multiplying reported rapes by 10, or even 100).

Where did that figure come from anyway? From bowdlerized research.

It began in1982, when Mary Koss, then a professor of psychology at Kent State University in Ohio, published an article on rape in which she expressed the orthodox — and remarkably misandric – feminist theory that “rape represents an extreme behavior but one that is on a continuum with normal male behavior within the culture.”

Koss undertook a survey whereby she arrived at the one-in-four figure. To get there, Koss mischaracterized responses. For example, 73% of those she characterized as rape victims said they had not been raped. And 43% of the alleged victims said they had continued to date their alleged rapists. Nevertheless, the one-in-four meme took hold. The survey was published in Ms Magazine in 1987 and “took the universities by storm,” producing what can rightly be termed a rape-culture industry: expensive, over-staffed rape-crisis centres, hotlines, rallies, conferences, sexual-assault procedures consultancies and inter-collegiate sexual-assault networks.

You can produce any culture you like if you dumb deviancy down. If you change “against her will” to “without her consent,” as we have, that is a huge paradigm shift from what we used to think of as rape: i.e. forced sex. And if a drunk woman can’t give her consent, another moved goalpost, she is ipso facto raped.

Last word to brilliant feminist (the kind I like) Camille Paglia: “The feminist obsession with rape as a symbol of male-female relations is irrational and delusional. From the perspective of the future, this period in America will look like a reign of mass psychosis, like that of the Salem witch trials … The fantastic fetishism of rape by mainstream … feminists has in the end trivialized rape, impugned women’s credibility, and reduced the sympathy we should feel for legitimate victims of violent sexual assault.”

Amen to that, sister.

Read the entire piece HERE

Relationships, Society

The Good Men Project Has Been Completed

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I used to actually read the Good Men Project…until it got taken over by good women. No thanks, but I’m longer interested.

MEN…We like to do man things. We like to talk man talk. We like to bond with other men. I’m specifically talking heterosexual men in this post by the way. I have NO idea what others do.

I am really starting to see a shift in the public discourse – at least I hope I am. I know I am starting to see more men actually grow a pair (as some like to say) and get some testicular fortitude to stand up to the nonsense that permeates much of our culture.

I am proud the be a man. I am not afraid to stand up and call out bullshit when I see it. There are a lot of double standards and I feel it is time to tell it like it is.

Tom Matlack, the founder of the Goon Men Project has since left the blog. I’m glad he did. The current blog is filled with female writers writing pieces about things women would like to read. It also seems to be filled with commentary that you might find in female centered publications. Before Tom decided to leave, he wrote a piece called Being a Dude is a Good Thing. I applaud him for writing it and standing up to those who have a problem with masculinity.  

Tom said:

Why can’t women accept men for who they really are? Is a good man more like a woman or more truly masculine?

Here perhaps we have to go back to the macro picture for some explanations. God knows men have done some really bad shit. And god knows as guys we can, at times, live up to the stereotype of knuckle-draggers looking to eat, fuck, drink, and sleep. In that order. We’ve been slow to reveal our inner thoughts and feeling. But again my pet theory is that this comes back to vocabulary. Emotional language has been so dominated by women that to talk about feelings is, at some level, to become female rather than macho.

Sweeping generalizations about individual relationships are pretty useless. How a guy who teaches Gender Studies relates to his spouse is probably pretty different than how some Navy SEAL does. And I am sure there are plenty of heterosexual relationships where the gender roles are reversed before even getting in gay marriages.

But my basic point is that many men, I think, feel blamed for being simply men. That their most basic instincts are twisted around to torture rather than celebrate who they are.

One of the most interesting things about the Good Men Project is the readiness of women to talk about men. They are more than welcome here, but I still wonder why? Why such a passionate outcry by women about men?

I’ve probably done over a hundred talks by now about manhood. For the first couple years I would always say that my best audiences were women, boys (who are dying to know about manhood), and prisons (because the guys can’t leave).

But that has been changing recently. I spoke at the Boston Book Fair a few weeks back to a room of nearly a thousand. And for the first time I noticed more men than women.

It seems that the blame game in the mainstream, whether through the minimization of male life in pop culture or on television or through the continued obsession with men behaving badly, has finally struck a chord with the average guy. We are no longer willing to be blamed for being men. We are no longer willing to avert our gazes and stay silent about our feelings. We are raising our voices and telling our stories in our own male vocabulary.

To women, I assume the response is, “well, it’s about time.” But just remember when we talk it’s not going to sound like a women in a man’s body. It’s gonna be all dude. And you are just going to have to deal with that.

I totally agree! He is totally on point.

There are plenty of other outlets for men to express themselves. I have an outlet here on my blog to express my thoughts and feeling about current events and things that pertain to men and fathers. I also find lots of interesting tidbits of information on A Voice for Men, Men’s Activism as well as The Spearhead.

Once I saw the infiltration of more female voices to GMP, I became less and less interested in what they had to say.

Good luck to Good Men Project! I think the project has been completed.