An enduring double standard

Our Declaration of Independence says we’re endowed by our Creator with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The identity of our nation is colored (bad pun, sorry) by this ideal of “unalienable” human rights.

Regardless of what color your skin or whether you’re rich or poor, your rights are protected in the United States of America, thanks in part to words penned into our Declaration of Independence by former slave-owner Thomas Jefferson. As the owner of over 600 slaves during the course of his lifetime, our Tom is only a “former” slaveowner now because he’s dead.

Founding Father

This distinguished founding father of our country stood a strapping 6’2” tall, which was “a good bit over six inches taller than the average male” of his time, which is a shame. Basketball wasn’t invented until 65 years after Jefferson died, but without question, our redheaded 3^rd President would have had a physical advantage on the basketball court, even over our current President Barack Obama, who only stands 6’1”.

Still, it makes you wonder whether Jefferson, a Virginia planter who lived ostentatiously, would have been a player or a trader. More to the point, if alive today, would Thomas Jefferson own a team in the NBA? What qualifications would his players have to meet to be on his team?

After recent remarks by Donald Sterling, regarded almost unanimously as racist, one player, J.J. Redick cited the example of “white center Chris Kaman, who [was] traded to the New Orleans Hornets in 2011” to reveal why he felt discriminated against because he was white.

Employees or Property?

When Sterling’s girlfriend reminded him during a taped phone call that every player on his team was black, Donald Sterling said the following:

I support (black players) and give them food, and clothes, and cars, and houses. Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them? … Who makes the game? Do I make the game, or do they make the game? Is there 30 owners, that created the league?

Donald Sterling looks at himself as a “benefactor of actual players” rather than their employer. In other words, he “gives” the members of his team money and expensive gifts, rather than seeing their salaries as something they earn. If it doesn’t point directly to slave owners, then it does to the peon camps where “freed” slaves were often recaptured and forced to purchase their own food and clothing from their bosses at an inflated price, keeping them indebted to the company.

This attitude may seem shocking, but it is not in the least unprecedented. Thomas Jefferson himself was once quoted as having said:

Brought from their infancy without necessity for thought or forecast, [blacks] are by their habits rendered as incapable as children of taking care of themselves, and are extinguished promptly wherever industry is necessary for raising young. In the mean time they are pests in society by their idleness, and the depredations to which this leads them.

Thomas Jefferson believed that freed slaves should be returned to Africa and not permitted to intermarry with whites. Citing “the real distinctions which nature has made” Jefferson believed that Blacks and whites would eventually try to exterminate each other. He believed, among other things, that “Blacks lacked basic human emotion” and that “Blacks’ ability to reason was much inferior to that of whites’.”

Though he was three times her age, Thomas Jefferson, the man who openly expressed his belief that blacks and whites should not intermarry, reportedly fathered six children with Sally Hemings, his slave-mistress, who remained his companion until his death nearly 40 years later. To further complicate matters, Sally and Martha, Jefferson’s first wife, were half-sisters, their father being John Wayles, a white attorney. Sally’s mother, a slave concubine, became Jefferson’s property when his father-in-law passed away, nine years prior to the death of his first wife, Martha. The children Jefferson conceived with Sally were three-quarters white and were freed after Jefferson’s death.

In her online article Sally Hemings from the Perspective of Women’s History: Paternity and Patriarchal Power, Jone Johnson Lewis writes:

A ‘women’s history’ perspective on Sally Hemings’ relationship to Thomas Jefferson would have us look at questions relating to the different roles men and women were expected to occupy. In this particular situation, where Sally Hemings was a slave of mixed racial heritage, a more complete picture of the ‘truth’ of the situation also requires looking at the ways in which race and slavery were part of the context of their relationship.

Wife and Family as Property

Yet another similarity exists in the wealthy white male selecting a mixed-race female for companionship. It wasn’t so long ago that a white woman was considered the property of her husband once married, as were their children; an interracial companionship today serves to reinforce a gender hierarchy of simpler times, when it was socially acceptable for a man to beat his wife as though she were a slave.

In the person of James Callender, our new nation had its own Andrew Breitbart. Callender, who had ended the political careers of both John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, blackmailed Jefferson and eventually publicized the scandal of his mixed-race progeny, in much the same way Donald Sterling’s relationship with V Stiviano caused an outcry when he recently complained that she was associating with Black people and his remarks were recorded and revealed to the American public.

These attitudes toward Blacks and mixed-race individuals are shocking, but ingrained in an older generation “marinated in racism,” as Oprah Winfrey recently remarked in an interview.

If Donald Sterling is found unworthy to own a basketball team, then Thomas Jefferson certainly could not be President in today’s America. Others will argue that “we the people of the United States” were not ready for the Black President we elected in 2008. But, over and over, we are forced to realize there is no such thing as “a nation ready for social change.”

My Name is V

My name is V.

As I put on my lipstick, I think about how I can make my lips look bigger or smaller and how men love that flash of color. I got my big lips from my dad. They don’t really match my face, but that’s OK. I can make it work.

I got accused of being illegal a lot growing up because my mom is Mexican. I guess it didn’t help that she got arrested for stealing baby formula. Maybe she wasn’t the best mom, but I love her. She’s the only parent I had, and at least she stuck around. V stands for Victory. I am victorious because I survived my childhood.

There is this exotic pop musician named Prince who is mixed, like me, but he identifies black and Italian. If you’re Mexican, you’re just trash, but if you’re Italian, people make movies about you, like The Godfather. Even if you’re a bad guy, you have power. You have a family that loves you. Prince changed his name a couple times and it gave him mystery. Some Sicilians have dark skin and kinky hair, like mine. Now I have an Italian-sounding name, Stiviano. V stands for Validated.

If I’m a good student, I will go far. Everyone says that. I will move far away from San Antonio and never look back. I will make a lot of money someday. The Voyager is an all-American, expensive NASA space station just a little older than me. Every spacecraft winds up far, far away from where it started. V stands for Voyager.

As I dab foundation on my broad face, I remember my wide nose which I had fixed, and how flat my cheeks used to be. My dad didn’t love my mom. He didn’t even stay with her one night. V stands for those naughty girl parts men can’t stop thinking about, ha ha! Maybe I’m a bad girl, but I can keep a man seeing me for weeks or even months.

Are women really supposed to dress trashy and hang out like this on the front of a taxi late at night? Like this? I can make it look fun and natural. See?

No one can be all bad. Sometimes I wonder if my dad was a good guy those times in his life when he wasn’t a rapist. Did he ever have children? Did he love the ones he knew about? It feels good to talk to black men. I like it when they smile at me and tell me I got swag. I like to snuggle. I’m a cuddle toy, too, not just a bad girl.

V also stands for Virginal, which is a must if you want a white Daddy to love you. You have to act pure as the driven snow, but just a little bit naughty, but confused about it. Whether you’re bad or whether you’re good, it’s always a game. It doesn’t matter how you really feel. What matters is, whether Daddy is happy.

He makes me happy when he smiles, and calls me his Silly Rabbit.

If my Mom had known how to make my Dad happy, maybe he would have stayed for more than just one night. But none of that matters now.

Mom, I was blessed to learn all those things you never could. V is for Victory. If you get really good at pretending, you can get rich men to pretend with you. Then you’ll never need money.

There’s a movie out called V for Vendetta. The hero wears a mask. I feel like I’m wearing a mask when I smile, but it’s really my face. I have a really cool way to hide when I want to, though. People joke about it, but then they copy me because my visor is swag. I am a trend-setter. Others are starting to wear visors just like mine to keep paparazzi away! I have good ideas, and I can be scary. V is for Darth Vader, which is what I look like in a visor!

Sometimes it feels like other people always want me to play a game, and no one loves me for who I really am. I try not to think about that, but sometimes it gets to me. I’m sorry to use a swear word, but you wouldn’t believe some of the things this sick old fuck wants me to do.

I’m not silly and I’m not a rabbit, but I can never tell him how I really feel because he wouldn’t understand. He wants me not to be Black and he wants me not to be Mexican. He uses his money to make all the things he doesn’t like to look at go away. He’s only different from the other guys I’ve known because he has more money.

I’m sure no one would believe the things he says to me, so I’m going to tape record them. How can anyone think making someone play games of pretend constantly can be healthy for them? Being in this relationship is like being in jail.

My white daddy doesn’t love me anymore. He’s blaming me for everything. His friends hate me, too, and they wish I would get hit by a car. It wasn’t my fault he says such awful things. Maybe he can change.

The worst part is, no matter what I do, I can’t change the fact that my real dad still doesn’t love me. He doesn’t even know me, and he never will.

I’m not a mean person and I never wanted to hurt anyone. Some famous guy once wrote: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” I don’t know what that means, but maybe it’s true. V is for vengeance.

How To Propose To A Woman

My daughter and I play MovieStarPlanet, a game of pretend that has turned out to be a learning experience for us both. Think of all the grown who dress up as Santa Claus at Christmas time to trick children.

Cultural fibs are forgivable. I remember all the grown-ups who promised me I could be anything I wanted. The fib proved true, more due to technology than to women’s rights. Thirty five years later, I am finding that in a virtual world, I CAN be anything I want, as long as it’s role-play. On MovieStarPlanet, I get things as a boy player that I don’t as a girl. Gifts. Credibility. I am a validated person in ways I’m not in real life. I get respect. From whom? Girl players.

My daughter, who got me started playing this game, sees the effectual way I move in the virtual world. The other day, I taught my daughter how to propose to a woman. That sounds like a funny thing for a mother to teach her daughter. We’re both heterosexual. But as a male player in my virtual world, of course I’m going to have a GF (girlfriend).

As we imitate the rituals of real life on MovieStarPlanet, there is a social transference. My daughter liked the films my male character made better than the films my female character made. Soon, she had a male character, too. Then, my character got engaged.

“How did you propose to your MSP girlfriend?” my daughter asked. I explained that, as a young man in the game, I told my GF that I had never learned to cook, so I boiled and ate macaroni and cheese from a box, knowing all along that food is better when you cook it and eat it with that Special Someone. I then told her: Not all good things come from a box, but here is something for You; please be my Special Someone, whereupon my male player got down on one knee and opened the box with the huge diamond ring I got from the in-game animation. She said Yes, and we were engaged. A few days later, my daughter wanted me to witness her proposal to her online GF. Her macaroni box proposal was a little different: She told her online GF, “I want someone to share my macaroni with, no matter the pot, no matter the pan, no matter the utensils….” It was precious.

The lesson of the marriage proposal reaches beyond the cultural myth and the social clichė. Role-playing a successful man, I found myself wondering why women are so interested in men, why they want to dress as brides and put on makeup, and what is the big deal about this male-female relationship, aside from that all-their-friends-are-doing-it?

The value of a mother teaching her daughter how to propose is in de-mystifying the male-female relationship. The magic of being a Disney princess goes away when you look at it all from backstage. Maybe that’s a good thing.

😉

 

 

Masculinsanity: Fathers of the Human Race

Next time you find yourself standing around a socialite party or political fundraiser with your friends, balancing the martini glass daintily on three fingertips, slyly winking as you tongue the pimento out of the olive suggestively, discussing how everyone knows marriage is the true solution to income inequality and laughing at the very idea that foreign heads-of-state might respect “Grandma-in-Chief” Hillary Clinton, here is a delightfully outrageous conversation starter posed as a math problem:

The magic number is fifty-five thousand dollars. This is the average cost of annual tuition to an ivy league school. First, multiply that by four, the estimated time it takes to complete a degree, and you get $220,000, which approaches what it costs to raise that child for 18 years ($241,080). We don’t know if the kid needed braces or not, so for shits and giggles, round up to $250,000.

Tell the man standing next to you staring at your olives to count up all the times he’s ejaculated in his lifetime, beginning in adolescence. Each time he woke up with messy sheets counts as one ejaculation. So, if the guy next to you looks to be in his early 30’s, let’s say he’s gotten lucky in one form or another every day, excluding weekends and holidays for 260 days out of each year over the past 20 years, so the figure is 260 times 20, or 5,200.

Now, have him multiply that number by $250,000.

He still thinks you’re talking about sex. Keep playing with that pimento until he gives you the answer. It’s $1,300,000,000. Smile indulgently at him when he gets it right. Now tell him:

“Congratulations! You owe one billion, three hundred million dollars in child support.”

He’s going to turn red. Maybe even purple. Wow. He didn’t know sex could be that expensive.

Next, he’ll argue that he hasn’t actually had that many children. But if the two of you are attending a $2,500-a-plate cocktail party, or you happen to be standing near Mitt Romney after he’s just lost a $10,000-bet, your man friend may be willing to indulge your brazenness in an effort to measure up.

Tell him that all men clearly were not created equal in the wages department, but talking about the differences doesn’t help. He’s an educated man (let me guess, Harvard? Yale?) and he knows that for every scientist who believes in global warming (including Al Gore), there are twelve others happy to argue that climate change doesn’t exist because Jesus is coming back, releasing even more deadly carbon gases in a lovely ballroom just like the one you’re in right now with all your socialite acquaintances.

We need to line up all the men, make them hold hands and chip in until every man’s billion-three debt to society has been paid and all the orphaned children have been fed and clothed.

If your cocktail buddy really thinks about it, he’ll get down on his knees and kiss the ground in front of your feet that it takes you nine months to build a fetus. Already, your body was designed to save this guy money. Praise God! Next, if he personally knows the congressman standing a few feet away from you, he’ll suggest a vasectomy bill for adolescent boys. Vasectomy is a clean, safe, inexpensive and reversible technique that eliminates unwanted pregnancy before marriage and can thereby reduce the crime rate, preventing a great deal of human suffering.

As your cocktail buddy’s great new idea takes hold throughout the nation, family planning clinics will become temples. Mitt Romney himself may even put some spires with gilded statues of guys playing trumpets on them and start distributing framed images of them for immigrants to hang in their homes. Prophets and Popes will declare the earth subdued as God intended in the Bible, and we can begin caring for the people we have, placing higher esteem on generations to come.

It is said that “women hold up half the sky.” Dudes, we’ve been trying to hold this entire Creation together by ourselves for centuries. Now it’s your turn.

Affluenza and Child Support

Affluenza is a portmanteau word combining “affluence” and “influenza.” This word is presently defined as “the guilt or lack of motivation experienced by people who have made or inherited large amounts of money” according to Collins English Dictionary. Because the word affluenza is a neologism, it is a new word in the process of entering common use, which suggests its exact definition is still in a fluid changeable state.

A WORD WITH LEGAL INTERPRETATION

Recently, the word became associated with the Ethan Couch case. The young man’s lawyers, with the help of a psychologist, argued that the young man, who killed four people while driving drunk, couldn’t be expected to understand the consequences of his acts because his rich parents exposed him to a lifestyle which prevented him from developing empathy and responsibility toward other human beings.

The word affluenza has recently become associated with unjust or unreasonable lenience in a court of law toward the wealthy, either 1) because they have lots of money, or 2) because they have more money than the other party to the suit, meaning they can win the case through attrition. The word attrition literally means “[t]he war will usually be won by the side with greater such resources,” which turns the lawsuit into a contest.

Can the word affluenza be applied to a party’s failure to support his child? Do deadbeat dads have affluenza? Two essential elements are that 1) the party has the means to pay child support, and naturally 2) fails to do so, because possessing said means deprives him of empathy or responsibility toward his child(ren).

Perhaps here, affluenza more accurately afflicts the Family Court in its failure to prosecute deadbeat dads for the reason that the mother either 1) had no resources to sue, or 2) was not the prevailing party.

ATTRITION AND THE AMERICAN FAMILY

Westchester, New York Assistant DA Susan Pollet sees attrition as both a strategy to avoid paying child support and as coercive behavior used by the party with greater resources (usually the father) to maintain power and control over the other (usually the mother); in other words, he “initiat[es] extensive and lengthy litigation, including filing repeated, frivolous or unnecessary petitions and motions….” Both sides must retain a lawyer, and lawyers cost money. The party who cannot afford a lawyer or who runs out of money, loses. Ultimately, the cost of litigation and nonpayment falls upon the child.

CASUALTIES OF AFFLUENZA

Author and psychotherapist Phyllis Chesler states that until June of 1981, “indigent single parents (usually mothers), were eligible for free representation in custody disputes” and “the courts helped them collect unpaid child support. After that date, family law became a more mercenary practice favoring the party with greater wealth and resources (usually fathers).”

Virtually any civil action where one party has greater resources than the other can become a contest at the whim of lawyers and legal professionals. If a lawsuit for child support is simply a contest, it serves no purpose but to waste considerable time and resources.

 

Miscarriage of Justice in Family Court

TAKING CANDY FROM A BABY

The lawyer stood in the courtroom, examining paperwork in a manilla folder while rubbing his chin. He wanted to dismiss the part of my case that concerned his client paying child support, but he faced a dilemma. I had filed a Motion to Withdraw my Petition in an attempt to convince the judges to transfer jurisdiction to my home state, according to UCCJEA rules. Once a judge awarded me sole custody, I could potentially file another lawsuit to ask a judge to award me arrears, which meant this lawyer’s client would then have to pay child support.

Despite being licensed to practice only in the State of Utah, this lawyer had succeeded in keeping judges in at least three states from hearing my petition for child support. He desperately needed to keep jurisdiction from being transferred to the state where the child lived to appease my ex husband. His vengeful client didn’t want to pay one penny in child support, and his lawyer used every trick to harass and intimidate me, even attempting to place liens on my house. The whole point of a business arrangement was that my ex-husband wouldn’t have to pay child support as long as he kept paying his lawyer. This way, the lawyer was set up to seize as much property from both parents as possible and let the Devil take the child, who would then be left out in the cold. Welcome to American family court.

Using frightening statistics and case histories, journalist Karen Winner takes us on a Guided Tour of Divorce in her 1996 book Divorced from Justice. One judge refused to compel the ex-husband/deadbeat dad to pay, even with a child support order, despite the fact that he earned over $1 million a year (see companion piece, Affluenza and Child Support).

Sociologist Amy Neustein and attorney Michael Lesher warn that “Americans believe they are safe from arbitrary abuse of governmental power,” “that constitutional protections follow them everywhere” and “that sexist stereotypes have been soundly expelled from American political life.” If you find yourself in this category, know that you keep company with some very educated lawmakers.

In late February 2014, I spoke with Neil Cahn. Mr. Cahn graduated from Yale and Hofstra University School of Law and has practiced family law for over 30 years on Long Island, New York. Despite some outstanding papers he’s published stating that “Parenting Time, Not Legal Custody, Determines Entitlement to Child Support” and “Sporadic Visitation by Father is Basis to Increase Child Support,” he could not believe I was unable to get a child support order after five and a half years. He kept asking me, “Have you been to family court? Go down there and someone will help you.” I told him my experience with my first attorney, and he said “Keep that case open and you will get child support all the way back to that point,” but I told him my lawyer had made me non-suit the case. He simply refused to believe no one would help my child get support from her father.

THE VICIOUS CYCLE OF ABUSE IN FAMILY COURT

“Court professionals rarely understand economic abuse as being part of domestic violence,” explains Goldstein, who says family court keeps getting it wrong because judges and administrators simply don’t have the training to recognize coercive behavior. “Most court professionals just assume the alleged abuser is acting out of love for the children and fail to look at the motive for fathers who had little involvement with the children…. I have seen repeatedly that fathers will refuse to pay child support [forcing] the mother to waste needed resources to collect.” Goldstein adds that “[c]ourts rarely recognize [the] tactic [of] litigation abuse.”

“Many men in the batterer classes I teach claim that if they earn the money, they have the sole right to decide how it will be spent. … So the use of economic abuse after the separation should be seen as a continuation of his abuse.” In a statistic that surprised even me, Goldstein stated that close to 100% of men in intimate relationships use subtle manipulation tactics to subvert women and control their behavior.

“The father’s failure to pay support yields clues about his motives for demanding custody. It proves that his actions are designed to hurt and control the mother instead of care for the child,” says Goldstein, who echoed the words of renowned domestic violence therapist and author Lundy Bancroft, explaining that men abuse women based on a sense of entitlement.

“Economic abuse is an important part of domestic violence. This means that the fathers in the contested custody cases usually control most of the family resources. Accordingly, the best way for professionals to make a lot of money is to use approaches that favor abusers,” explains Goldstein. “Custody courts turn around and pressure victims to cooperate with their abusers instead of requiring him to stop his abuse to keep up a relationship with the children.”

A FOOL FOR A CLIENT?

Phyllis Chesler, author of the book Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody writes: “It is important to note that most poor people can’t afford lawyers. Legal self-defense costs a lot of money in America. On June 1, 1981, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that indigent parents (mothers) were no longer entitled to ‘free’ legal aid in cases of wife battering, marital rape, incest, child abuse, and nonpayment of child support—nor were they entitled to this aid in custody battles.” She goes on to say that “fathers… have less trouble with their lawyers than mothers do. Fathers have more money to hire lawyers than mothers do.”

When I first realized my ex-husband would not pay child support voluntarily, I went to a lawyer, who told me to file a claim with the county. At the time of my appointment, I was told that there was no child support order and that I needed to file with agencies in the state where my ex-husband lived and in the state where we were divorced to see which one would take my case. My ex-husband was an active-duty soldier, which complicated the issue, so it took a long time to hear back from all three agencies. Everyone seemed to agree that I needed to hire a private attorney, so I began calling family law attorneys in all three states. Each lawyer I called had a unique perspective on the situation. The only one who seemed confident he could help me collect child support had an office 20 minutes down the road from where my ex-husband lived. I paid him a hefty retainer fee, and 14 months later he non-suited my case. During that time, my ex-husband made several threats to kidnap the child and then sued me in a different state for withholding visitation. I had to hire another lawyer to represent me, but he didn’t do his job. The court commissioner punished me with fines and jail instead of reprimanding the lawyer, even though I had not withheld visitation. I had to hire a third lawyer to go to a followup hearing, but he didn’t go, so my case was dismissed. It didn’t take me too long to realize lawyers wasted too much of my time and money and that I would do a better job of representing myself, at least when it came to filing the forms.

Appearances are problematic if I am forced to appear in an out-of-state hearing. In March 2014, Deborah Goldman of The Legal Resource Center told me I had to hire a lawyer in the state where jurisdiction was held to file for a change in jurisdiction, despite both the fact that attorneys there had counseled me to file in my home state, and the wording of the UCCJEA, which instructed that a hearing to determine jurisdiction could be filed in either state. Goldman said it was common practice in many courts not to let parties appear by phone, even when one party is known to live at a considerable distance, making personal appearances at hearings an extreme hardship.

THIS IS A MAN’S WORLD

Stereotypes and gender bias remain a fundamental social problem, even outside the courtroom. Some are convinced that women are now liberated and should spend as much time working as men. Others believe men and women are paid the same amount for their work, despite recent statistics showing that this simply isn’t true. Just last week, the Paycheck Fairness Act was blocked by Senate Republicans, while the week before, a Heritage Foundation panel touted the idea of marriage as the solution to income inequality.

I got married, and it didn’t work for me. My employed husband had money for a divorce lawyer but I did not. After I got physical custody of our child in 2008, I sued to get the support order changed in 2009, spending my computer money on a retainer fee. This hurt my performance at school, resulting in more travel time back and forth to use school computers due to which, ultimately, my projects suffered. I had to take a leave of absence in late 2010 as a result of family court hearings requiring me to go to the father’s home state, which adversely affected my ability to finish coursework. I lost my house in 2011, after which I developed chronic kidney disease and high blood pressure. I lost my car in 2012. Quite a few single mothers I know have given up trying to get the fathers of their children to pay support. Instead they go on welfare, taking cash assistance and food stamps. Some of them live in homeless shelters. With family courts in the state they’re in, marriage is definitely NOT a solution to income inequality.

Former attorney of 30 years and leading domestic violence expert Barry Goldstein believes our policies toward childcare would be different if women were paid the same as men, but concedes women would still face economic disadvantages, since we are the ones expected to take time off to care for children and family members. Sexism is a bipartisan issue, he says.

“People tend to pay more attention to what men say than to what women say because women tend to be objectified more while they’re talking,” says Goldstein, citing a study which compared public opinion of female candidates Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin to that of their male counterparts in the 2008 presidential election. And who suffers from eating and body image disorders? It is predominantly women who are forced to live up to higher standards than men, especially as spouses and parents.

“Context is critical in issues of domestic violence,” explains Goldstein. “There is nothing about women or women’s actions that cause their partners to abuse them.

“The initial reaction of society to domestic violence cases was to compare women who were being abused to those who weren’t.” Goldstein remembers that “the first standard response to a woman [who had been beaten by her husband] was to advise her to greet him at the door wearing a sexy negligee.”

“Good people engage in gender bias without realizing it,” says Goldstein. He mentioned a case study in Lynn Hecht Schafran’s article, Evaluating the Evaluators, where a new psychologist gave the single dad’s living conditions, though worse than the mother’s, a free pass by referring to them as “a typical bachelor’s apartment.” In this manner, Goldstein explains, single mothers are held to a much higher standard than single fathers because of social stereotypes.

Likewise, he explains that “the courts create a false equivalency between parents. Children need their primary attachment parent more than the other parent, and they need the ‘safe’ parent more than the ‘abusive’ one. For a judge to say ‘children need both parents equally’ sounds reasonable, but often fails to regard past parenting, because when mothers and fathers are NOT the same, it’s an unfair assessment.”

Abolish Marriage Redux

I wrote my original post with the similar title for an assignment, but a recent news item came to my attention today, and I figured a follow up entry would be appropriate. My second marriage was to a Mormon return missionary in the mid-1990s, and it happened under the most unlikely circumstances. I figured I’d make the best of it, though, for as long as it lasted, and try to see the Will of God in the whole situation.

One early autumn day in 1996, my husband came into the little room that had been mine alone prior to his having moved in, sat down on my bed, put his arm around me and said, “Dear, let’s vote Republican this year.”

“Okay, honey,” I said obediently, and we rushed out to the polls within the next few days where both of us cast our vote for Bob Dole. When Clinton won his second term, I was neither surprised nor disappointed, but I found myself wondering as years passed how many Republican women are secretly seething balls of passive aggression. Conversely, I found it odd that the white male Mormons I knew at church vocally assumed all Mormons were Republican at gatherings.

Does enforcement of this type of circular logic help remove the personhood of the wife? I wondered. Or does it just help her be more Republican? I’m almost embarrassed to admit what a relief it was when I finally quit the church. Then I could feel comfortable choosing birth control for those special occasions, instead of obliging my lawfully-wedded husband and praying I wouldn’t get pregnant.

Mind control is a conscious choice we make as women doing our darndest to fit into the wrong peer group. No one reminds us better than writer and panelist Mona Charen, who spoke Monday at a Heritage Foundation panel in honor of Women’s History Month. She attributes women’s unhappiness to feminism and suggests that the solution to income inequality is… surprise! Marriage.

Charen argued that “it is the decline of marriage that is the lodestar for why people’s voting behavior is what it is,” and Hemingway asserted that “we do not have a sex gap here in voting. We have a marriage gap.” ….

But Republicans will be waiting a long time if they think they can improve their fortunes by persuading more women to get hitched. Essentially, they’re saying that Republicans aren’t the ones who need to change — women are.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post quoted in St. Louis Today finds:

“If we truly want women to thrive,” Charen concurred, “we have to revive the marriage norm.”

This, they argued, also would have the felicitous effect of making women more Republican.

The fact is that creating a class system based on marriage is a temporary fallacy that the women touting it neither possess nor control. Last Friday, Jon Stewart derided so-called ‘Princeton Mom’ Susan Patton who advises young women to “get their Mrs. degrees” in college in her recent book Marry Smart. What this charming snake oil saleswoman cannot cure is the inherent difficulty finding a compatible mate to begin with. The goal cannot simply be to “get a husband.” Republican women, not seeing the need to plan ahead, don’t value the social safety net voting Democrat provides, in the event the breadwinner husband runs out.

How wonderful it must be as a young Republican wife, to imagine, among other things, that single mothers don’t count because they are not married, while assuming you will never get old or tiresome to your husband, that he will never divorce you, that he will always treat you like a caring husband should and not “leave you for the nanny” as a guest said to Chris Matthews on Hardball last night. As I have learned through my own experience, such talk by the panelists of the Heritage Foundation smacks of the purest folly, selling the most dangerous delusions to young women that are laughable to men, most especially Republican men.

 

(Special thanks to MSNBC’s Hardball, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, TIME Magazine, Slate.com and other bloggers and news sites whose contributions I’ve referenced through links in my post.)

Typeface and Business Identity

As an office temporary in Chicago fresh out of high school, I often found I wasn’t content to simply edit letters for people’s business correspondence. Sometimes I experimented with formats or how ideas were separated into paragraphs. Certain sentences, I discovered, helped present an idea more effectively heading up the following paragraph instead of ending the previous one, and vice-versa.

But the most fun I ever had in an era when office typists were just wading into the computer age was changing the fonts on the documents. I was pretty bold about it, too, no pun intended. I would just traipse into the boss’s office with a handful of letters that I had globally changed from Helvetica to Verdana or Geneva, or from Times Roman to a different serif font, say, Palatino, Georgia, or my favorite, Century Schoolbook. The boss would frown at the typeface but generally wouldn’t say anything. Something was different, but he couldn’t quite figure out what. I really liked Garamond a lot. It made me think of the Renaissance, and using it made me feel like royalty. This is probably because it was created in 16th-century France for the king by Claude Garamond, in contrast with Times New Roman, designed by Stanley Morison for the Times of London in 1929. When you know what you like right away, it’s most efficient to simply make your choice without putting too much thought into it, but upon comparing both fonts I become aware that at least two characteristics of Garamond make it easier to read than Times New Roman.

First, because the strokes of the letter forms are thinner, Garamond letter forms are granted a thicker cushion of white space. (Remember white space, the advertiser’s dream?) Secondly, lower case letters are less than half the height of the capital letters, whereas Times New Roman lower case are greater than half the height of its capital letters.

These qualities of a nearly 500-year-old typeface apparently have another advantage over the more modern Times New Roman. Last week, a 14-year-old Pittsburgh sixth grader calculated that switching from Times New Roman to Garamond could save his school 24% of its toner budget. Suvir Mirchandani then thought about state and federal tax forms printed by the Government and calculated that (depending who you ask) switching to the older font could save the government in total anywhere between $136 million and $467 million annually, between 30–60% of printing costs.

One or two skeptics insist that the youngster failed to consider font size discrepancies, offset lithography and other complexities of adult business practices. Oh well, Mr. Mirchandani. So much for proposing tax savings strategies to the IRS.

My own fascination with fonts never did much for my career as an office temporary. People I worked for always seemed to find something unsettling about me, but they couldn’t quite figure out what. Maybe I should have taken up accounting.

😉

(Special thanks to Forbes online, The Guardian and other local news sites and bloggers I linked to in this post.)

Divorce Culture: Why Men Rape

When we hear the phrase “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” we tend to think of Adolf Hitler. Though some of us attribute the quote to historian and moralist Lord Acton, whose full name was John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton (1834–1902), the idea of someone’s utter corruption through unchecked authority was also remarked on by French poet Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine (1790-1869) and prior to that, by William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham (1708-1778). These men may have believed they were talking about abuse of power in government, referring specifically to those individuals with the authority and influence to subject others to their wills, including slaveowners. Certainly they had no reason to consider women.

It may be helpful to understand that, in every state except for New Jersey, American women lost the right to vote nearly 150 years before they won it back. In 1776, John Adams responds to his wife’s letter of two weeks prior, writing:

We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bonds of government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians, and negroes grew insolent to their masters. But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, were grown discontented.

Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems…. We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight.

This was because she asked him, several months prior to the birth of a new nation in 1776, to “remember the ladies.”

Male privilege has a way of fading into shades of gray. In history books depicting men of different nations shooting and stabbing each other in the rise to power, the struggles of women may seem insignificant. Rape of women of all ages seems justifiable, even a cultural tradition. An Australian study shows that in Papua, New Guinea, gender based violence (GBV) is a problem with widespread social and economic impact. The study finds that:

There is a discrepancy in the level of reporting of violence between the women and men surveyed in Bougainville, with men reporting a higher prevalence of intimate partner violence than women. This difference is a reminder of the inherent challenges in gathering this type of data. The report suggests a number of reasons for this: that in contexts in which partner violence is rela­tively normalized, there is less shame and stigma for men to admit perpetrating violence than for women to admit experiencing it; where impunity is common, women’s fear of further violence is likely greater than men’s fear of legal repercussions; and that men (and women) may fail to recog­nize the coercive nature of their (or their partner’s) behavior when it comes to sex within marriage.

Gender violence against women has proven to have negative economic impact on societies worldwide. A researcher named Olufunmilayo I. Fawole asserts that economic violence leads to a deepening of poverty, and asserts that governments should assist in its prevention.

So, why do men rape? An informal study on AskReddit in July 2012 generated interesting admissions from the rapists themselves. A more recent survey suggests “the answers…lie in correcting the mindset that leads to such incidents.” Myths about rape and even pregnancy during rape, interestingly enough, are perpetuated by the government, or men in power. One of the myths is that rape is about sex or love when it is really about one person gaining power over another. This is one reason why men rape children.

If a legal system isn’t in place to educate men and tell them rape is wrong, that it’s socially unacceptable; if it instead reinforces cultural messages depicting women as the property of men to be used sexually, then the United States will wind up in a third-world economic predicament because the women have no rights to property or even to their own bodies.

As Abigail Adams wrote to her husband in 1776, “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. … That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute….” These words are true today, along with the saying that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

 

(Special thanks to the bloggers and news sources to whom I’ve linked their contributions to this post.)

Letter to the Commanding Officer of a Deadbeat Dad

I am writing to thank you for your recent transfer of CW NAME WITHHELD to Washington State so that child support can be assessed. I appreciate the U.S. Army’s commitment to serving American families.

There remain two factors that continue to impede collection of child support from the soldier father and these are that 1) he is able to make changes to his legal state of residence regardless of where he is stationed for the sake of avoiding prosecution and 2) that he earns too much money. These factors impede child support collection attempts in two ways that I will explain below.

I first sued CW NAME WITHHELD for child support in Texas in 2009 but my attorney forced me to nonsuit the case 14 months later after giving CW NAME WITHHELD time to change his state of residence on his LES form and claiming all prior forms were shredded and the military was not obliged to provide information as to his state of residence. I can make court documents available to you proving this is what he did. He is now paying his Utah lawyer an undisclosed sum of money to influence judges in Utah to hold hearings denying me due process and refusing to withdraw my petition for child support in Utah for it to be handled in Washington. Again, there is confusion as to where CW NAME WITHHELD lives: is it Washington State or is it Utah? Only his commanding officer in the U.S. Army knows for sure, and we need answers.

While it is obviously up to the soldier’s own discretion how he spends his salary and bonuses and it is also his choice whom he hates, a soldier cannot be trusted to faithfully serve his country when he deprives his own family basic financial support and shows contempt to the mother of his children, as CW NAME WITHHELD has done for five and a half years and continues to do.