Click to read Part One: The Family Plot: The Past

 

Often we identify the introduction of No-Fault Divorce laws in the 1970’s as the beginning of the divorce epidemic. As I pointed out in The Suffragettes versus The Patriarchy, this is not entirely accurate. The divorce craze actually began back in the 1860’s and 1870’s when the Suffragettes undermined father-custody with the Tender Year’s Doctrine and mother-custody became the norm. This voided one of the core tenets of marriage in the first place – which was bringing men into the reproduction process in a meaningful way so that their higher provisioning abilities could be utilized for the greater good of both families and society.

 

It’s not like No-Fault Divorce had no impact on divorce rates – it certainly did! But it more or less streamlined a process that had been well under way for over a century.

Contrary to popular belief, obtaining a divorce before the 1970’s was not that difficult. Marilyn Monroe divorced three times between 1942 and 1961 while Elizabeth Taylor had four divorces under her belt and was working on her fifth when No-Fault Divorce became law. Before No-Fault Divorce was introduced there were just a few more hoops to jump through, in an effort to “find fault.” Of course, with “fault” divorce, it extends that one must prove that an actual “fault” had occurred. There were many things which constituted “fault,” including adultery, alcoholism, insanity, abandonment, and a host of others. But the most pernicious to the institution was the fault called “cruelty.”

The word cruelty was an undefined term that much resembles the word “abuse” today because almost anything could be construed as cruelty. An argument that made her cry could be deemed cruel. Not paying enough attention to her could be deemed cruel. Well, you get the idea. Just look at how many things today are classified as “abuse” which really wouldn’t be claimed as abuse anywhere else in society except in male-female relationships. Take that meaning of abuse and simply replace it with the word “cruelty” and you’ve pretty much got the spirit behind the system. Over years of having a relationship with someone else, it is pretty easy to find something that can be considered abuse or cruelty in one way or another.

 

So, what happened before No-Fault Divorce was that a trial occurred to prove the husband was “cruel,” and therefore a divorce ought to be granted. This caused the dragging out of people’s dirty laundry and was pretty much just a show trial. Belfort Bax referred to the “cruelty” argument as a sham over a century ago already, indicating it was all about taking normal human interactions and having a lawyer twist things around to portray the husband as some heinous monster when the reality was far from it. No-Fault Divorce was really more about not making the courts look like hypocrites for orchestrating such a charade. They finally said, “Give her the damn divorce already and let’s just get it over with.” Women have always gotten what they wanted from the courts when her adversary was a man. 

“Prior to 1970, the law usually justified its wrecking of families on the grounds either of adultery or of “extreme cruelty.” The sexual revolution has now made adultery a right for women (“a woman’s sacred right to control her own body”); extreme cruelty was usually understood to be a legal fiction meaning no more than that one of the spouses, usually the wife, wanted out. The pretense that the husband was an extremely cruel man was in most cases sufficiently absurd that it embarrassed even judges and lawyers and it was felt necessary to “reform” divorce by perpetuating the same destruction of families under a new terminology. This is called No Fault divorce. There were label switchings. Divorce was renamed Dissolution of Marriage. The Plaintiff was renamed the Petitioner. The Defendant was renamed the Respondent. Alimony was renamed Spousal Support (the ex-wife was no longer a spouse, but calling her one “justifies” taking the man’s money). The real core of the change is that it was no longer necessary to “prove” extreme cruelty to inflict upon the husband a more severe penalty than is imposed on most low-income black male felons.” – Daniel Amneus, The Case for Father Custody, p.215

 

As you can see, while the introduction of No-Fault Divorce certainly helped to fuel the divorce craze by streamlining the process, it was definitely not the sole cause of the break-down of the family… so, what other factors were involved?

One of those answers can be found in the present day, as our great altruistic feminist sisters attempt to “help” the women of the third world. The feminist organization CARE puts out the following claim:

 “When a girl in the developing world receives seven years of education, she marries four years later and has 2.2 fewer children.”

In other words, they are messing with hypergamy and they know it affects marriage and birthrates.

 

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t particularly have a problem with girls receiving an education, but what I am pointing out is that feminists know they are altering the conditions of the nuclear family by pushing women into the workforce – where they will be directly competing with men.

 

Of course, the same website claims that women put 90% of their income back into their families but makes no mention of the percentage of income the men put back into their families (Do the men spend 50% of their income at the local tavern and the other 50% wagering on cock-fighting in the alleyway?) Nor does it indicate what kind of families they are talking about. Do they mean husband-wife & children families, or are they discussing female & children families?

You only have to look at our recent economic crisis of 2008/09 to see what feminists consider “family.” While men lost their jobs in significantly larger numbers than women, when job recovery began to occur, feminists started complaining that men were getting re-hired in larger numbers than women. (Kinda makes sense, eh? If three times as many men lost jobs as women, a similar ratio of men ought to be re-hired during a recovery – except in femi-supremacist 50/50 land). Then, feminists tried to claim that men were receiving hiring preference because they had families to care for and complained because women too had families they were providing for!

Yes indeed, but the difference is what kind of families we are talking about. A man providing for his family generally means that the man, his wife, and their children all get food put on the table whereas for the most part, when a woman provides for her family, they mean there is food on the table for the single/divorced mom and her children. There is no man being provided for in this equation.

Women don’t care for men the way men care for women – they care for themselves and their children. A single mom “family” leaves the male out of the equation, where he starves on the street corner alone – it certainly does not lead to general economic improvement if the male gender is left to suffer in poverty separately from families. In the traditional nuclear family, men, women and children receive the benefits of the man’s labour but in the new single-mother “family,” only women and children receive benefits. The men just magically vanish to… who knows where?

The radical feminists of the Second Wave understood this as well:

Second Wave feminism made no bones about their goals to destroy marriage, believing that true equality for women could not be achieved in the nuclear family. They pushed women into the workforce en-masse because they knew doing so would undermine one of the major reasons women entered into the institution of marriage in the first place – access to the husband’s paycheck along with the higher standard of living he provided. This massive entry of women into the workforce where they began directly competing with men for their traditional roles likely had far more to do with undermining marriage than the introduction of No-Fault Divorce laws, which merely streamlined a trend that had been happening for a century already.

 

Also, the Second Wave did everything they could to destroy “the mating dance” between men and women. Men are the designated initiators in sexual relations. Women attract and men pursue. That’s just the way it is. However, just because men are the designated overt initiators does not mean that women are innocent little darlings, simply fending off multitudes of horny men at every corner. They are just as complicit in the mating dance as males.

“Women chat happily, send sexually explicit signals and encourage the man’s attention, even if they have absolutely no interest in him. This gives a woman time to assess a man, says [Karl Grammer of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Urban Ethology in Vienna, who studied 45 male-female pairs of strangers in their teens and early twenties]… Importantly, the women also seemed to control the encounter – what the women did had a direct effect on what the men did next. ‘You can predict male behaviour from female behaviour but not the other way around,’ says Grammer” – New Scientist Magazine (London), February 14, 2001

 

Cary (1976) discovered that the woman, through eye contact, controlled the course of interaction with a male stranger, both in the laboratory and in singles’ bars. Perper (1985) gave a detailed description of courtship, stressing an escalation-response process in which women play a key role in escalation or deescalation. The steps in this process are approach, turn, first touch, and steady development of body synchronization. (Note: This is similar to mating behaviour in other mammals, like rats).

Although these reports are clearly valuable, most researchers addressed courtship very generally, and some failed to recognize the importance of the female role in the courtship process .What was needed was a more complete ethogram of women’s nonverbal courtship signals. To compile such a catalog of flirting behavior exhibited by women involved in initial heterosexual interaction, more than 200 adults were observed (Moore, 1985) in field settings such as singles’ bars, restaurants, and parties.

Research has shown, therefore, that the cultural myth that the man is always the sexual aggressor, pressing himself on a reluctant woman, is incorrect. — Courtship Signaling and Adolescents: “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”? Monica M. Moore, Ph.D.Department of behavioral and Social Sciences, Webster University

 

Thus, the old saying, “He chases her until she catches him.” Kinda makes you wonder what the whole feminist campaign about “No Means No!” was about, doesn’t it? Some studies have indicated that in a typical male-female sexual encounter, the woman will give off up to 150 rejections – either verbally, physically,  or with eye gestures – until finally saying “yes” to sexually accepting the man as a mate.  In the average 7 to 8 hours it takes to get to the magical “third date,” that is one rejection every three to four minutes. Not only does no not mean no, the only way to get her to say yes is to get her to say no 150 times!

These types of campaigns were designed to drive the sexes apart by monkeying with the basics of the mating dance – which women insist on perpetuating, no matter how much men get criminalized for doing what she desires in the process.

A similar thing has happened in the workplace, where women once often found a husband. Today, after a plethora of sexual harassment laws being introduced, anyone in a position of power could get into no end of trouble for trying to woo a woman who is subordinate to him, even though women in the past often married their bosses. Remember, women are hypergamous and seek out men who are more powerful and wealthier than they are, thus, it is natural for a woman herself to be attracted to someone in a position of authority over her. Do you really think Monica Lewisnky wasn’t tickled pink to be the President’s cigar holder? But, since men are the designated initiators in the mating dance while women always hide behind plausible deniability, it is the male’s part of the dance that had to be outlawed in order to drive the sexes apart. When desiring women is outlawed, only outlaws will desire women.

The William Heatherington Spousal Rape Trial in the mid-1980’s was the final death-knell for any semblance of marriage resembling that which had existed for millenia before in our culture. Not only was this trial a complete mockery of justice but it undermined the very basis for marriage, which was a vehicle to contain human sexuality and channel it positively into something that benefited both families and society.

This was the end of expecting that sexual relations were to be a part of marriage. If your wife – your lifelong mate – is no more of your expected sexual partner than a strange woman you have just met at the pub whom you have to woo and game into having “intimate relations”… then what is the point of setting up a legal framework such as marriage to contain two people’s sexuality into the institution in the first place? Keep in mind as well, the sexual revolution had also made adultery a “right” for women (her sacred right to control her own body). If there is no expectation of either sex for the husband, nor the expectation for sexual fidelity in marriage… then… um… what is the point of marriage? It has been deconstructed into basically nothing at all.

 

The above points I have addressed in this post are but a brief synopsis of how feminism sought to undermine the institution of marriage and drive the sexes apart. There are, of course, dozens, if not hundreds of other examples that could be used. The points I am trying to get at here is that while No-Fault Divorce certainly had an effect on our cultural values towards marriage and family, it more or less simply streamlined a process that had been well underway for a century before.

 

The real insidious aspects of Second Wave Feminism were more about undermining the basics of male-female attraction. Many who are reading this are at least somewhat familiar with The Principles of Seduction. Once you understand “the mating dance” a little, you can see that what was going on was the criminalizing of men’s and women’s natural heterosexuality. It ultimately left us with a fraudulent contract that in no way resembles anything of marriage 1.0.