People make mistakes. Men learn from them and move on. No individual man controls police or courts’ attitudes toward domestic violence. No individual man controls what happens in divorce courts. All they can do is see things for what they are, and make the best choices they can.
Personally, I think putting his daughters first is admirable.
And I can’t help but note that what you’re doing here is victim-blaming. If it was a woman who posted this, your attitude would be EXACTLY the opposite of what you just posted.
Let me ask you something: do you think women who stay in abusive relationships should be shamed? Is the fact they stay in those relationships all about their “weak natures?”
Actually, I have a lifetime of experience with feminism.
If I were to go through and pick out all of the examples of man-bashing, in this thread alone it’d take an hour.
I realize not all feminist are the same. But I have no way of taking a poll to find out which feminists really hate men. I only know from what they say. And the more I talk to, and listen to, feminists, the uglier, nastier, and meaner feminism becomes.
Finally - and I say this knowing it will not make a difference - MGTOW is not an MRA, and I’m not “sifting” anything. Your preconceptions are wrong.
My daughters are 13 and 9 and I have them every weekend, additional days or weeks when my ex travels and I travel with them several weeks sprinkled throughout the year every year. I can’t claim that I got screwed on the custody arrangement even though it started out that way in the original divorce agreement because I have to work most of the rest of the time and my ex would love for me to have them much more any time that becomes possible. She frequently tells me some version of ‘Just take them please!’. I don’t want to badmouth my ex as bad as I think our marriage was. I still get invited to all of her family events including Christmas and her family is still awesome to me. She was probably about as bad a wife as I was a husband but she makes a very good ex-wife.
What I meant when I said I don’t have much to offer the women that I have gone out with isn’t about general attraction or finances. I have never had a problem getting really good dates and some of them wanted to keep it going but I realized it might be best just to end things early because I wasn’t being fair by not showing all my cards. The problem is that I like women in their early 30’s with little baggage and they almost universally already have kids or are starting to get desperate to find someone to have them with. I have an admittedly strong bias against step-children (just me for me personally) because divorce is the major product my family produces and I had so many step-whatevers come in as ‘fully accepted family members’ only to disappear suddenly a few years later when the next divorce came that it turned me off the whole concept. I am also committed to having only my existing two children of my own so it isn’t fair to start a real relationship with someone who expects something else.
I love women and actually enjoy going on most dates. I did it recreationaly for a while just to see who I could convince to do something really cool with me - a lot as it turns out but it is like catch and release fishing and becomes unsatisfying after a while. I will do it again when I feel like it but it isn’t something that I actively look for now. I just let them come to me on dating sites or at work and pick the relatively few unusually good ones to do something good with.
Maybe someday, an infertile, blue-eyed brunette that is really smart but doesn’t ask too many questions, isn’t afraid to kill spiders and has a pathological aversion to nagging will come stumbling into my life but, if that doesn’t happen, the freedom and peace of being single is more than enough reward on its own.
LinusK is not the pope of MGTOW. He’s just a guy slugging it out in this thread.
And there’s about as much in common between the Pick Up Artist wing of the men’s movement and MGTOW as there is between “all sex is rape” and “do me” feminism.
LinusK said he was quoting from an MGTOW FAQ, not expressing his personal opinion or quoting a Pick-Up Artist site. According to his quote, MGTOW want everyone to know that they’re humping and dumping women all the time.
I’d actually be happy to believe that LinusK was unwittingly quoting from some sort of parody site and that MGTOW really are just a bunch of decent guys who’ve accepted voluntary celibacy for the time being, but you haven’t given me any reason why I should accept your description of the group instead of his. I presume that you’re not the Pope of MGTOW either.
jsgodessOpting out. I’ve read MGTOW blogs that expanded beyond “why should I get married” to “why should I spend $K’s on college” and “why should I get killed in the military?” It’s about running an audit over the entire bill of goods that men have been sold, for which society pats them on the head and says “you are a man” while giggling “you are a chump!”
You guys here are, baring a few who just post in to compliment themselves on their snarking skills, a genuine and fair-minded bunch. So it’s worth it to explain the principles. But part of the “going ones own way” is not to get dragged into pointless arguments with people who are not going to give any reasonable concessions.
Analogous a feminist who does social work. She sees a woman prostituting herself for drugs. The feminist focuses on the woman, telling her “you don’t have to do this.” She doesn’t waste her time on the drug dealer pimp. He’s doing just fine, why should he listen? But the message is for the person who benefits from it.
Eta: Lamia, if I wanted to play “so why should I listen to you?” bullshit lawyer games, I’d go waste my time in the pit baiting Bricker.
It doesn’t sound so bad. I have a 6 year old, whom I love more than anything in the world. If I got divorced (and not saying I’m going to) I can’t imagine getting married again, or being a step-parent. Still, I find myself lusting after some of the new condo units, that are going up all over town. Oh, to have a place of my own.
I think it’s more like three static targets; what the manifesto says, what the forums say, and what people want to believe about them so they can comfortably dismiss them.
Actually, if you are asking for a cite in good faith, here: a voice for men. You’ll probably find some things there you disagree with; so do I at times. We’d each find things at Jezebel to disagree with as well. But at a voice for men they mod heavily to remove “they should be barefoot and pregnant/Kinder, Küche, Kirche/slap my bitch up” hate speech.
That’s because many people have a vested interest in portraying it for something it’s not.
Having said that, if you pick through the threads, I’m sure you can find people saying all kinds of contradictory things.
MGTOW itself seems to have made a deliberate decision not set out a list of principles. A charitable explanation would be that they see it as an evolving philosophy, and they want the actual members to be in charge of figuring it out for themselves. A less charitable explanation is they’re either too lazy, or are afraid of causing too much dissention.
That has been experience too. My test for popularity is whether you see it discussed in relatively diverse fora (like the SDMB) or in opinion pieces in the pop press. I never see regular, everyday men talking about how patriarchy and sterotypical masculinity limits them.
When sexism comes up, usually it is in the context of how it affects women or how “reverse sexism” hurts men. Laments about how the educational system is designed to fail male children is an example how the latter often presents. And my problem with this lament is that it rests upon stereotypes that fit an argument rather conveniently. I thought girls were social animals that just loved to talk, sing, twirl about like dancers, and express themselves with giggles and shrieks. But suddenly, to account for why they do better in school,we have to believe they are naturally quiet and calm creatures? Why? Why not consider the ways that boys are raised relative to girls and see whether that has something to do it?
I was asking for a cite in good faith. As I said, I would be happy to believe that LinusK is mistaken about what MGTOW is really all about. However, I’m not seeing that the Voice for Men site claims any affiliation with MGTOW and their “About” page acknowledges that “AVfM does not speak for the entirety of the men’s movement”.
I do not doubt that there are plenty of men’s sites out there that aren’t making ridiculous boasts about how their members have humped and dumped all 10 million single mothers in the US, but the material LinusK posted explicitly claimed to be speaking for MGTOW. Maybe they’re actually from a parody site or some weird fringe site denounced by most MGTOW, but if you want me to believe that something purporting to be the MGTOW FAQ doesn’t represent typical MGTOW then I don’t see how an apparently unrelated website is evidence of that.
Dude really, it’s not a cult with ironclad strictures.
As much as I have issues with feminism (mainly that it gets to be whatever any opportunist feminist says it is but it’s always above criticism by outsiders), I’m not in with the guys who blame feminism. I tend to agree with Susan Faludi in Stiffed: yes, guys have been screwed, and the people who screwed them would just love it if feminism were made the scapegoat.