I'm happy to live in a time when I have the option of leaving an abusive man
That option has been around for a while in most jurisdictions, and that's not what the article is about ;-{) . Wife-beating and uxoricide have been illegal since antiquity....contrary to the "rule of thumb" hoax that claimed that Blackstone's law dictionary refers to a statutory right of husbands to beat their wives with a rod "no wider than his thumb".
A woman named Del Martin fabricated that claim in 1974. Later feminists embellished Martin's claim by stating that this was the origin of the expression "rule of thumb" (Martin had made no such claim, but had used "rule of thumb" that way herself, thereby giving her readers the impression that this was, indeed, the origin of the expression).
Blackstone's Dictionary of Common Law refers to no such sanctions. Martin invented it by twisting references for
penalties for wife-beating.
What this article is about--and the reason that I find it disturbing--is that it refers to a very real trend my wife and I have seen. A lot of my wife's colleagues have been getting rid of husbands (and also young adult male offspring) over what seem to be trivial issues. Eventually it boils down to "she wants her freedom"--where "freedom" is defined in terms of lack of social responsibility.
I have never taken "Feminism" seriously, because I'm not stupid and am quite aware of its real origins, just as I am quite aware of the hoax nature of the "rule of thumb" story. "Betty Friedan" was essentially a hoax herself; the biography associated with "Betty Friedan" is total fiction. The real-life Betty Goldstein was not a suburban housewife, and did not raise her own kids; she had servants to perform both of those functions. She also had a career of her own choosing, writing for a communist-front radical labor tabloid and engaging herself in political activism.
It was her husband Carl's brilliant idea to come up with "Betty Friedan". He was an advertising exec and knew how to create false personas to sell a product by mimicry. (I corresponded with him briefly before his passing...).
Contrary to her claims of abuse, which she later recanted when Carl told his side, she was the physically abusive one:
Quite vivid in my mind is a midnight in about 1967 - a year or so before Betty and I separated for good. We were living at our Dakota apartment then - Betty disagreed with something I said (that's all it took), went into one of her raging uncontrollable fits, screaming , her face twisted in hate and insane anger, "You (expletive) no good (expletive) you, you no-good bastard, you (explitive) bastard, " meanwhile sprinting into the kitchen. Back she came straight at me brandishing two large kitchen knives. "You (series of rather shocking expletives), I'm going to cut your (expletive) ("manhood") off - your big ("manhood") it doesn't mean a thing to me." At this I calmly picked up a kitchen chair, nailed her to the wall like a lion-tamer and took the knives away. And that was just a minor incident during that period when her explosive personality was further inflamed by amphetamines she was taking for weight loss, reinforced by alcohol.
Carl had a lot of stories like this one, that are too long to quote. They should sound quite familiar; they are the symptoms of someone with borderline personality disorder (which is rarely diagnosed), which does not seem to be at all rare. My sister-in-law has it, and so does the wife of a former friend of mine, our friendship having been destroyed by her elaborate deceptions. Both of them regularly throw things at people, threaten their husbands with castration, abuse the kids, etc. In addition to the violence there is typically one or more self-destructive risky behaviors, such as drugs, gambling, compulsive spending, ritual self-abuse (cutting themselves, burning themselves with cigarettes), dangerous sexual activities, etc.
The real-life Betty Goldstein was a Trotskyite activist; the rest was just a cover story for this:
The communist economy does away with the family. In the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat there is a transition to the single production plan and collective social consumption, and the family loses its significance as an economic unit. The external economic functions of the family disappear, and consumption ceases to be organised on an individual family basis; a network of social kitchens and canteens is established, and the making, mending and washing of clothes and other aspects of housework are integrated into the national economy. In the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat the family economic unit should be recognised as being, from the point of view of the national economy, not only useless but harmful. The family economic unit involves (a) the uneconomic expenditure of products and fuel on the part of small domestic economies, and (b) unproductive labour, especially by women, in the home - and is therefore in conflict with the interest of the workers' republic in a single economic plan and the expedient use of the labour force (including women).
Under the dictatorship of the proletariat then, the material and economic considerations in which the family was grounded cease to exist. The economic dependence of women on men and the role of the family in the care of the younger generation also disappear {day care centres, creches, public schools, etc}, as the communist elements in the workers' republic grow stronger. With the introduction of the obligation of all citizens to work, woman has a value in the national economy which is independent of her family and marital status. The economic subjugation of women in marriage and the family is done away with, and responsibility for the care of the children and their physical and spiritual education is assumed by the social collective. The family teaches and instils egoism, thus weakening the ties of the collective and hindering the construction of communism. However, in the new society relations between parents and children are freed from any element of material considerations and enter a new historic stage.
Once the family has been stripped of its economic functions and its responsibilities towards the younger generation and is no longer central to the existence of the woman, it has ceased to be a family. ...
{p. 227} Thus the workers' collective has to establish its attitude not to economic relationships but to the form of relationships between the sexes. What kind of relations between the sexes are in the best interests of the workers' collective? What form of relations would strengthen, not weaken, the collective in the transitional stage between capitalism and communism and would thus assist the construction of the new society? The laws and the morality that the workers' system is evolving are beginning to give an answer to this question.
Once relations between the sexes cease to perform the economic and social function of the former family, they are no longer the concern of the workers' collective. It is not the relationships between the sexes but the result - the child - that concerns the collective. The workers' state recognises its responsibility to provide for maternity, i.e. to guarantee the well-being of the woman and the child, but it does not recognise the couple as a legal unit separate from the workers' collective. The decrees on marriage issued by the workers' republic establishing the mutual rights of the married couple (the right to demand material support from the partner for yourself or the child), and thus giving legal encouragement to the separation of this unit and its interests from the general interests of the workers' social collective (the right of wives to be transferred to the town or village where their husbands are working), are survivals of the past; they contradict the interests of the collective and weaken its bonds, and should therefore be reviewed and changed.
The law ought to emphasise the interest of the workers' collective in maternity and eliminate the situation where the child is dependent on the relationship between its parents. The law of the workers' collective replaces the right of the parents, and the workers' collective keeps a close watch, in the interests of the unified economy and of present and future labour resources. In the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat there must, instead of marriage law, be regulation of the relationship of the government to maternity, of the relationship between mother and child and of the relationship between the mother and the workers' collective (i.e. legal norms must regulate the protection of female labour, the welfare of expectant and nursing mothers, the welfare of children and their social education). Legal norms must regulate the relationship between the mother and the socially educated child, and between the father and the child.
--Trotskyite activist Alexandra Kollontai
The Bolsheviks worked for the bankers--Das Kapital was all about creating monopolies on Kapital under the cover of abolishing them!!! The immediate objectives were...
* To take away people's (INCLUDING AND ESPECIALLY WOMEN'S) private social support networks, to make them more vulnerable to attack and more compliant to the orders of the state...
* To regulate demographics...
* To make women's economic contributions subject to taxation and regulation, and exchangeable only through the use of monopoly fiat money...
* To transfer women to the fields factories so as to intentionally displace men...
* ...to displace men from fields and factories to transfer them to the trenches, to carry out the Trotskyite "
Permanent war for permanent revolution"
The neocons have profoundly Trotskyite roots (neoconservativism seems to be an amalgamation of right-wing Trotskyism combined with a really bad reading of Friedrich Nietzsche), which is one reason I regard them the same way I do commies. They talk about "values" but are at best strangely silent about, and more often than not actually supportive of, the damage their cousins on the Left did to family and community structures.
The problem is that there were reasons they were so successful. They tapped into a serendipitous wellspring that was just waiting to burst to the surface.
It is probably best-known by Virginia Wolf's reference to "a room of her own", which was about writing, but struck a lot of women as being true in general.
I believe that the sociologists, psychologists, and feminists had it 180 degrees backwards: it's not that women crave the autonomy that men ostensibly have and that they don't, but rather, that women have stronger needs for autonomy than men have!
In the "matriarchy belt" of Africa, women live alone or with small children in their own hut. I believe this is true of the tiny matriarchal minority in China, among the Mieu people. Extended families occur seemingly exclusively in agrarian-patriarchal societies, like Old China, India, and Iran. (Furthermore, the families are usually extended on the male line, so that the men are mostly related and the women mostly not).
What my wife is seeing is that a lot of her colleagues...
* Long before the divorce, they start expressing feelings of being overwhelmed, of not having enough personal time, of depression (often the post-partum kind), of wanting to run away, etc.
* If they get the personal time--such as personal vacations, party that husband wasn't invited to, personal activities that are usually family-oriented but she starts doing by herself--that is almost always a symptom that a divorce is imminent. My wife and I have both seen it ourselves, and it is now frequently cited on the "old boy network" that she's about to file.
* Initiate divorces for lifestyle reasons, citing "independence", not wanting to put up with someone else's personal habits, etc.
* Often express that their ex-husbands, who were shocked or "broadsided", "should have seen it coming".
* Might want boyfriends, but don't want to live with them or commit to anything (contrary to stereotypes claiming that it's the other way around).
* Promptly expel adult children, especially boys, regardless of whether he can support himself, regardless of actual opportunities, or their own failure to make sure that their offspring had marketable skills, and regardless if he actually has a job and contributes to rent and groceries. This by the way has turned into a very popular taunt: "still lives with his mother". In some cultures that would be considered normal!
* Frequently express the feeling that they are much happier now, and openly encourage their women friends to do the same.
The reason the editorial struck a chord is because I have been hearing very similar attitudes expressed among real women, not just public relations plants. This is certainly PR, but the thing is, it's working, because the audience is receptive.
These attitudes and choices have consequences that the women who engage in them do not realize.
The vast majority of them will end up on the street in their old age, if they live that long. I will comment more later.
