American Men Boycotting Marriage: Pseudotraditionalist FNC Hosts Say To Man Up

Found this on YouTube. I'll let some of the viewer comments do the speaking from here:

xxxxxxpimptaddyone


"50% of women are obese, 50% of women are single moms, 52% of marriages end in divorce, 70% of divorces filed by women, The average woman has a partner count in the double digits. Women get child custody 90%, they get a free house and car courtesy of the husband. She can call 911 and lie about abuse and ruin your life, the church preachers take her side and don't hold her accountable. Lifetime alimony and child support. A Real Man doesn't take that deal. A real man goes his own way"


MNeilGri

"I think this video shows just how closely feminism and traditionalism are tied together. Kind of hard for feminism to claim they are fighting the patriarchy when patriarchal values, such as these traditionalists are spouting, are just as readily heard coming from the mouths of feminists themselves. They are two sides of the same coin."

"The reality is, there is nothing in the wedding vows that is binding for women anymore. Women offer nothing in modern vows... but modern vows for men still offers his wealth and property. Furthermore, any and all expectations and/or obligations on a wife are severed upon divorce, while a man's obligations (to provide) remain intact, and government enforced. In effect, when a couple divorces, the woman is released from the marriage, the man isn't"


ZephZhang

"You derive deep satisfaction for taking responsibilities for others".

"No. I am responsible for my actions TO other people. I am not responsible FOR other people. This man has a broken sense of priorities and obviously doesn't understand the value of allowing people free choice. That a human is born with a Y chromosome does not obligate him to live or deal with the choices of another simply because they weren't. Equality means equality for everyone."


Nairby L

"These guys will understand when their wives divorce them and they have to start paying alimony and not see their kids and pay child support under threat of incarceration."


goose1077

"Its' not just child support, it's that child support is not tied to what the child needs but to what the man makes. They can take huge sums of money from a man. Of course a man should support his child but it's not up to him to support the woman who dumped him."


postwardreamz

"I finished undergrad back in 94. Grad school in 96. Every woman I met, tried to get to know wanted either perfection, or guys who thought everything was a joke. Time rolled by...the decades wore on. I used to get very depressed about this. As I crested into my forties. All of my college friends divorced and financially raped. Guys who are still married it's a cheating spouse. A loveless marriage. Everything that is wrong is "his" fault. Man, I dodged a bullet. I really did. Glad I never married."

Keeping it Real With Pope Francis: The Catholic Neo-conservative's Sticky Dilemma

In the wake of two revealing interviews with the current pontiff in recent weeks, Catholic "conservatives" are both rationalizing, and reeling over, Francis' off the cuff comments. The central matter is well summed up here:

"To be sure, many Catholics wholeheartedly embraced the change in tone and spirit in which the pope discussed difficult questions like abortion. Unfortunately, some deeply involved in the prolife movement have taken those remarks as a rebuke. That is an overreaction and misinterpretation of what the pope said. Obviously, Francis was objecting to the uncompromising and confrontational rhetoric of some Catholic activists. Why? Because that approach is simply not working. Worse, it is preventing the larger gospel message from being heard both within and beyond the Catholic community. With a third of all baptized Catholics abandoning the church, and those who remain increasingly divided on ecclesial, cultural, and political questions, the pope’s diagnosis is hard to refute. Is it not time, as Francis urged, to “find a new balance” in presenting the church’s teaching to an often doubting flock and a sometimes hostile secular world? “Otherwise,” the pope warns, “even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the gospel. The proposal of the gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow.”

"Even more refreshing was the pope’s insistence that “thinking with the church” does not mean thinking only with the hierarchy. “The church [is]…the people of God, pastors and people together. The church is the totality of God’s people.” It has been a long time since that bit of orthodox wisdom has been heard from Rome..."

The original interview can be seen here.

The American Catholic right (as distinguished from traditionalists) has had a scattered response to Francis' comments, to say the least. Just consider this initial, bang-up analysis from the online Catholic World Report..

"Hours after the interview was released, the dissenting group Catholics United (see the August 2012 CWR article, “The Catholic Con Continues”) released a press statement penned by the CU communications director, Chris Pumpelly. The statement opens by claiming that “Francis articulates his vision of moving the priorities of the Catholic faith away from divisive social issues, like what he calls an 'obsession' with gay marriage, abortion and contraception, while refocusing on core Gospel teachings relating to poverty.” That statement is misleading at best, as “the priorities of the Catholic faith” have always been focused on proclaiming the gospel, even if many individual Catholics—laity, clergy, and religious alike—fail to do so. Pumpelly, like so many “progressives”, seeks to create a faulty “either/or” approach that seeks the silencing of those who uphold the clear and consistent teaching of the Church about sexuality, morality, and marriage.

"...Pope Francis has his own style, which reflects his unique personality and background, but it is also evident that he has the same central goal as his predecessors: to “proclaim the word; be persistent whether it is convenient or inconvenient; convince, reprimand, encourage through all patience and teaching” (2 Tim 4:2)."

He's still on our side, you guys!!! But NOT SO FAST. According to this write-up by Catholic right-wing writer and scholar John Zmirak:

"The pope’s most controversial statements seem to arise from a single motive: He doesn’t like “right-wing” Catholics, and wants to make it clear to all the world that he’s not one of them...I have met this kind of smug zealot up here in the U.S...who joke about burning heretics or who condemn the American founding because so many Founders were Freemasons...Some right-wing Catholics embrace a hardline agenda because they feel weak and irrelevant, and prefer magnificent fantasies of wielding power over their neighbors to the slow grunt work of evangelizing.

Zmirak, though, ultimately concludes:

"We are not living in fascist Argentina. The Culture of Death does not answer to men like General Galtieri, but to the likes of George Soros and Barack Obama. The bitterest traditionalists are not serving as tools of a grasping government which seeks to impose an anti-Christian ideology. Angry conservatives are not the cat’s paws of a potent political movement that seeks to marginalize the Church. The mass murder occurring throughout the West is not happening with the connivance of the Catholic right, but of the Catholic left, which pretends a moral equivalence between fundamental issues like abortion and prudential disputes over poverty programs and immigration totals, as a pretext for supporting candidates who oppose the natural law and the sanctity of life...

"Holy Father: Absurd as some of us are, we on the Catholic right are not your enemy."

Francis is clearly not their friend, either. That's going to become painfully apparent in the weeks and months ahead. Francis had this to say to La Repubblica as well: "It also happens to me that when I meet a clericalist, I suddenly become anti-clerical. Clericalism should not have anything to do with Christianity. St. Paul, who was the first to speak to the Gentiles, the pagans, to believers in other religions, was the first to teach us that."

Now, the pope's the "dissenter," and what are we to do? The absolute foolishness of the neocon ecclesiology has been laid bare, as now we can't just blindly follow all that Pope Francis says. So let's "guard the office" from the tainting of his unscripted, off the cuff interviews, and try to filter what he says ourselves to suit our agenda. JPII disliked left wingers because of the political history of his homeland. Francis dislikes right wingers, also because of the political history of his homeland. This translated into JPII's embrace of right wingers from other countries as well, and looks like it will mean Francis casting them aside. He's got their number, well beyond the secular politics he finds objectionable. The neocons are heavily clericalist, and like many Jesuits today, Francis loathes clericalism.

This could mean the complete undermining of entities like E.W.T.N. and its popular lay surrogates. They've always been tacked on to the papacy, but now what? Dissent from it? Save the papal office from the current pope, when all popes before him in the last century were 'saints?' The attempted integration of Catholicism into the public square (per the late Father Richard John Neuhaus and First Things) has been a disaster...former First Things editor Joseph Bottum now endorses gay marriage. Why? because there's no way back now. Rather than enforcing the Church's points of morality through the secular government (via the G.O.P.) onto non-Catholics, it's now high time to follow the REAL mission of this pope, and fix the Church from within, from the top-down. Now not only curia figures are being tossed out, but ordinary bishops (like Archbishop John J. Myers in Newark) are as well. Stay tuned there.

"The War Against Boys" second edition: Where were Dr. Sommers' G.O.P. and conservative comrades after the first edition?

For more background on The War Against Boys, please see this.

Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers has been a guiding luminary in the quest to combat the excesses of the women's liberation movement for many years now. She is one of just a handful of scholarly researchers and authors - including Dr. Warren Farrell and Cathy Young - who have persistently and thoroughly exposed and debunked the politics of radical "gender feminism" for what is really is. In completing my own non-academic journalism fellowship on male-female relations (and its tragic condition today), I first met Dr. Sommers at least eight years ago at a D.C. conference, hosted by a well-known right-wing women's group. She and I subsequently chatted over the phone the following spring. But she was never quite available to have a full, on-the-record discussion. The thrust of my concern for Dr. Sommers, a resident scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, was then and remains the same:

"You first published The War Against Boys in 2000. Following that was eight years of the Republican George W. Bush administration-led Department of Education. Laura Bush even said repeatedly that she wanted to help our nation's boys. In that time-span, the G.O.P. held Congress for six years. You now write that it's 'inconceivable that reports on the US boy gap would emanate from US Congress.' Why is it that one of radical feminism's central dogmas, which is that girls continue to suffer from massive disadvantage -- held dear as a cause by left-wingers -- is being sidestepped in such left-leaning countries as Canada, the U.K. and Australia? As you now point out, their governments have been intervening on behalf of males in schools for years. Why is it so different here in America, especially during and after lengthy conservative and Republican leadership, where the situation for boys is getting worse?"

Apparently, much didn't happen in the U.S. that should have, and Obama's and Biden's radical feminist sympathies have compounded the problems, thus calling for a second edition of this classic narrative. But with all their railing against excessive feminism among their most noted members, what have the G.O.P. right, including academic icons like Bill Bennett, ever done for boys? I can appreciate the change of the book's subtitle between editions, now omitting "misguided feminism." But I was hoping that this would allow for an elaboration of the way the modern right, and the G.O.P., is in some ways just as gynocentric as the left.

Surely, some who are right-of-center agree with much of modern feminism in general. But more of the political and cultural right seems to be based in misguided chivalry, which is equally paternalistically protective of females -- but in different ways. Just attend one of those conservative women's group conferences down in the D.C. area sometime to see what I mean. While emphasizing sex differences, as does Dr. Sommers, they'll lay bare their expectations of being wined and dined by male suitors, of women being able to "marry well," and then "stay home" as wives and mothers. As such, they'll rail that women being "driven to work outside the home" is more of a conspiracy by unmanly, non-committal sex-seeking men than any choice or cause carried out by women. This has been proven to be drivel many times over.

Of course, they'll give Dr. Sommers (and a few others like her) a time slot to give a breakdown of just how badly boys are treated in the American education system (including higher ed), the appeal being Dr. Sommers' arguments based on sex differences. But, as Dr. Sommers certainly makes clear by outlining the vast male underachievement in this new edition, the sorts of "manly, good providers" these ladies so desperately seek are going the way of tag games at recess. Of course, some of the pearl necklace G.O.P. ladies will give speeches reassuring themselves that most real men can still "make a decent living" without four-year degrees (at now-mostly liberal dominated campuses), or in some cases, without even two-year voc-tec programs past high school. If that's the case, a war against boys in formal classrooms, leading to their academic underachievement, wouldn't matter so much.

The War Against Boys (2013) shifts some of the focus off of organized, institutional feminism's warped, anti-male campaigns (that have received plenty of coverage) onto every day, local level, garden variety initiatives, including the scaling back of recess (for either more formal academic time or to curb aggressive behavior), zero-tolerance policies (to presumably curb at-school violence), and against single-sex schooling (that feminists once championed to improve girls' outcomes). Much of Sommers' original 1990s research illustrating boy-averse patterns remains in the new edition, and unfortunately remains relevant. The re-do of Chapter 1 is profound in itself: while the 90s figures pointed to several gaps, these latest figures depict more of a rift between the sexes. Test scores for boys are evermore lower than girls, on average, but now men's wages are falling off the cliff, with younger female workers in large metropolises out earning (after out learning) their peer males.

Many skilled, technically-based, decently-paid jobs are going unfilled today. The now-untrained, potential workers for many of them would otherwise be younger men. The economy and society simply cannot sustain this course. But Dr. Sommers describes some of this in the future-tense, as problems still yet to come IF we don't implement solutions. But it seems to many that they're already here. The White Knight-ism of some right-wingers sentimentally and indignantly declares that, no matter, what, "men and women aren't competitors," as though gender feminists comply with this view on some level. Women, these right wingers say, study humanities in college more often, while men are more likely to go to college and study the much higher-paid STEM fields, and they figure that this (along with eternal sex differences) is enough to combat any "imbalance." Otherwise, they would have lined up with Dr. Sommers ten years ago, and Congress would have acknowledged and explored this dreadful achievement gap between girls and boys.

I think it would be beneficial for Dr. Sommers to address the role of conservatives (or lack of), as the problems she keeps writing about remain partly due to them.

Blogger's Note

In the past year of blogging, I have posted much about the Catholic Church. However, I do NOT want this blog to be mistaken as a "Catholic Blog." I am an individual in practicing communion with the Catholic Church, who believes there exists much misguided understanding about it, both from within, and on the outside. It is an entity that somewhat predominates the religious landscape in much of the Western world, and love it or hate it, and cite whatever trends, but it is not going away anytime soon. Understanding it is integral to both current political and cultural literacy, regardless of what emotions Catholicism make evoke.

This is a blog on sociopolitical themes and trends (this includes religion, as just explained), and should be considered somewhat anti-establishment. The "establishment" generally refers to the ruling, political elite of the day. For our purposes, it includes those in lockstep with corporate, as well as government interests. But it also pertains to certain predominate social interests, like political correctness, which can be rather amorphous. On the political front, my fervent opposition to the G.O.P. establishment -- which hinges on corporate primacy,government statism, and interventionism -- is unmistaken.

You Might Be In a Neo-con Parish If:

Our friends at the National Catholic Register have done it again with this one:

You Might Be In a Liberal Parish If…

...your family has to split up to find the tabernacle.

...the pastor wears an Izod shirt and introduces himself as "Steve."

...there's maraca's in the band.

...your pastor's last name starts with "Pf".

OR HOW ABOUT

..."Steve" quotes Hans Kung in his sermon.

...There's more Eucharistic ministers than parishioners receiving Communion.

...The sign of peace last twenty minutes and includes bear hugs.

...The scariest four letter words to your parish council aren't H.E.L.L but EWTN.

...the DRE is a female Episcopalian priest.

Absolutely classic. But what's really the prevailing alternative? How do you know you're in a "faithful," modern-day, EWTN-oriented American neoconservative Catholic parish? You know, truly devoted to the pontiff, to insulate your immortal soul from all this now-disappearing dissent? Each point is a little more detailed, but here are a few clues to look for at your church.

You might be at a neocon parish if:

...they play "traditional" music, that is, by the St. Louis Jesuits and David Hass, or "On Eagles Wings," but on the pipe organ accompanied by a violin. Sometimes even with bagpipes. How solemn, at least no guitars and drums, though!

...Every Sunday Mass includes a meditative post-Communion rendition in Latin, alternating between either Franck's "Panis Angelicus" or Schubert's "Ave Maria" ONLY. That is, with a synthesizer backdrop.

...the pastor is 35 years old, and really does look like he's wearing a black skirt while prancing around the parish center in his cassock.

...Father Connell, the young pastor, prays in Latin with a lisp.

...Father Connell's best friend, Gary, is a layman. But he's always at the church helping out, also wearing a cassock.

...The tabernacle is in the center of the sanctuary alright, behind the altar. But it's bronze and the size and shape of a mini-refrigerator.

...The incense Father uses smells like frankincense with a mothball preservant.

..."John Paul," not "Francis," is Pope.

...When Pope Francis is referenced, it's about "how much like" John Paul II he really is.

...No social justice committee here. Pro-life dominates.

...But we don't want to degrade younger women with the Pro-life message. So the pro-life committee mostly talks about how younger, potentially impregnating men just need to "man up" and "find jobs."

...Air-conditioning the church was so costly, that those new Mary and Joseph statues are both made of Styrofoam.

..."The Crusades" refers to Bush's War On Terror.

...The votive candle stands in the narthex are electric.

...The pastor is always saying how all 20 teenagers in the youth group constitutes a "huge faith revival."

...There's incredible preaching about True Mortal Sin. That is, believing anything "negative" that the secular media says about the Church.

...The DRE (Director of Religious Education) is an ex-Legion of Christ seminarian who scratches out all reference to Fr. Maciel, the true author of his photocopied handouts to the students.

...Father's vestments aren't the 1970's tie-dye ones at all. Rather, they look like they're made of actual fancy Italian restaurant tablecloth fabric.

Now the stereotypical liberal parish (as described) has been fast disappearing since the 1990s, along with the clapping and banjo-guided singing. But what's been replacing it is a bunch of sanctimonious, hyper-sentimentalist, clericalist drivel. Hyperbolizing the liberal parish as anything "typical," nowadays, only steers attention away from the new set of problems now in place.

Even some "liberal" parishes evolve:

Whoopee for Wal-Mart, the New Bastion for R.I. and MA Employment

According to the Providence Business News, the economically hard-hit regions of Rhode Island and nearby Bristol County, MA, are in for a treat. Wal Mart is again hiring:

It’s no wonder they’re excited about the jobs. Even though Massachusetts’ unemployment rate was at 6.6 percent in May, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Fall River’s unemployment rate that month was 12.5 percent, according to the Massachusetts Office of Labor and Workforce Development. The Fall River store is one of four Sam’s Clubs and Wal-Mart stores in Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts in hiring mode. All together, the four stores are hiring for more than 450 jobs. Sam’s is owned and operated by Wal-Mart Stores Inc...Wal-Mart is hiring for 85 newly created jobs at each of its two relocated stores in Massachusetts, one in Fall River and the other in Swansea...
The Fall River Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart stores are bright spots on the employment landscape in what’s been a long, “tough time” for the city, said Jay Pateakos, vice president of business development for the Fall River Area Chamber of Commerce & Industry.
“We appreciate the kinds of jobs the big-box stores are bringing. People need to be employed,” said Pateakos, pointing to Fall River’s double-digit unemployment rate, traditionally one of the highest in the state, the decline of manufacturing and some of the city’s devastating job losses, such as Quaker Fabric...

Moreover:

Currently, Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart employ 11,000 people in Massachusetts and 2,400 in Rhode Island, said Scott.
The average wage is $13.86 an hour for regular full-time employees, with benefits, he added

But how many new hires are full-time versus part-time is not clear. Overwhelmingly, these stores hire employees part time. According to America magazine, the national Jesuit weekly:

Ms. Aubrey, 55, has been working for Walmart off and on for years. She earns $10.10 an hour and can barely afford her rent. “I am clearing less than $250 a week; I have been on food stamps since they cut my hours,” she complains. “They give you a measly 40 cent raise each year, then they increase health care costs or something else and take it all back.” According to Ms. Aubrey, only the department managers at her store are able to get full-time hours and “some of the old-time employees.”

She says, “The rest of us are part-timers. There’s a lot of single moms in my store and many of them, because of the part-time hours, get government assistance. There’s not only a lot of them on food stamps, there is a lot of them that qualify for Medicaid.”

Then there's this from The American Conservative blog:

Mark Krikorian and Stephen Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies recently said something that got me thinking about the curious phenomenon of the capitalist welfare state. They pointed out that although low-skilled immigrants receive a disproportionate amount of government benefits, the recipients are, for the most part, employed. In effect, employers are getting the taxpayer to subsidize wages: instead of Megalo-Mart paying workers enough to put a roof over their heads, it pays less and lets the public make up the difference. The company gets the labor and profit it wants while externalizing part of the cost of wages.

And there's a big slice of that 50 percent of households receiving government benefits: working ones. So much for the GOP's anti-idleness ideologues telling the chronically unemployed to get up and find jobs, because the Party has it where these prospective workers will still be on the dole. IDIOTS.

So much for all those gainful, full-time jobs coming to Fall River. Goes to show what kind of journalism the Providence Business News purveys.

First and Last in America

The other day, President Obama made this statement in reaction to the ongoing Trevon Martin saga:




While the not guilty verdict for George Zimmerman will stand, the president has more than a few salient points. Besides his own genuine experiences as described, with "a woman clutching her purse...," young African American males are, among other things, more likely to be incarcerated than matriculated in college or voc-tech, and the most impoverished and homicide-prone of all groups. There are certainly competing interpretations of this on the socio-political level, certainly when it comes to finding solutions.

But if one group is last in America, then which group is first? hint: the one that is among the least homicide-prone, absolutely the most educated, and brought up to routinely compete with and successfully beat their supposed oppressors. This manifests in their higher average incomes compared with their male peers. All of this while operating under a similar aura of oppression as the young, black male, courtesy of today's irrational, institutional feminism.

CASE IN POINT, this parody:

Judge Rules White Girl Will Be Tried As Black Adult

Here, I'm talking about the young, Millennial, Caucasian American female. Long prioritized by society, she's entitled to the best of both worlds from men and society, access to the full gamut of marketplace opportunity, and still a large swath of Victorian female privileges. They can openly blame the male species for their pelvic mishaps, and do so frequently.

Well, the true price tag has arrived, folks. Hold on to your armor, white knight baby-boomer daddies:

See it here:
And down here, too:

Helen Smith.

Author, "Men on Strike."

8 Reasons Straight Men Don't Want To Get Married

It seems that fewer and fewer people in general are getting married these days, and even fewer men seem interested. Men no longer see marriage as being as important as they did even 15 years ago. "According to Pew Research Center, the share of women ages eighteen to thirty-four that say having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their lives rose nine percentage points since 1997--from 28 percent to 37%. For men, the opposite occurred. The share voicing this opinion dropped, from 35 percent to 29 percent." Why?

1. You'll lose respect. A couple of generations ago, a man wasn't considered fully adult until he was married with kids. But today, fathers are figures of fun more than figures of respect: The schlubby guy with the flowered diaper bag at the mall, or one of the endless array of buffoonish TV dads in sitcoms and commercials. In today's culture, father never knows best. It's no better in the news media. As communications professor James Macnamara reports, "by volume, 69 percent of mass media reporting and commentary on men was unfavorable, compared with just 12 percent favorable and 19 percent neutral or balanced."

2. You'll lose out on sex. Married men have more sex than single men, on average - but much less than men who are cohabiting with their partners outside of marriage, especially as time goes on. Research even suggests that married women are more likely to gain weight than women who are cohabiting without marriage. A Men's Health article mentioned one study that followed 2,737 people for six years and found that cohabiters said they were happier and more confident than married couples and singles.

3. You'll lose friends. "Those wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine." That's an old song, but it's true. When married, men's ties with friends from school and work tend to fade. Although both men and women lose friends after marriage, it tends to affect men's self-esteem more, perhaps because men tend to be less social in general. >

4. You'll lose space. We hear a lot about men retreating to their "man caves," but why do they retreat? Because they've lost the battle for the rest of the house. The Art of Manliness blog mourns "The Decline of Male Space," and notes that the development of suburban lifestyles, intended to bring the family together, resulted in the elimination of male spaces in the main part of the house, and the exile of men to attics, garages, basements - the least desirable part of the home. As a commenter to the post observes: "There was no sadder scene to a movie than in 'Juno' when married guy Jason Bateman realized that in his entire huge, house, he had only a large closet to keep all the stuff he loved in. That hit me like a punch in the face."

5. You could lose your kids, and your money. And they may not even be your kids. Lots of men I spoke with were keenly aware of the dangers of divorce, and worried that if they were married and it went sour, the woman might take everything, including the kids. Other men were concerned that they might wind up paying child support for kids who aren't even theirs - a very real possibility in many states. On my blog, I polled over 3200 men to ask how they would react to finding out that a child wasn't theirs after all. 32 percent said they would feel "anger and fury at the mother," 6 percent said they would feel "depression," 18 percent said "anger and depression," 2 percent said "none of the above," 32 percent said "angry at the system that forced them to pay," and only 2 percent "didn't care." One man commented that his ex-wife had taunted him with the knowledge that his 11-year old son wasn't actually his: "I was angry at the mother...I severed all ties to the boy. Some may see this as a failing. I see it as self-preservation, and to those that ask the question of whether or not the courts will make a non-biological parent pay child support, pay attention: YES THEY WILL! They see you as nothing more than a source of cash for the child. It seems that a person in these situations should be able to sue the real father for child support."

6. You'll lose in court. Men often complain that the family court legal system is stacked against them, and in fact it seems to be. Women gain custody and child support the majority of the time, as pointed out in this ABC News article: "Despite the increases in men seeking and receiving alimony, advocates warn against linking the trend to equality in the courtroom. Family court judges still tend to favor women, said Ned Holstein, the founder of Fathers & Families, a group advocating family court reform. "'Family court still gives custody overwhelmingly to mothers, child support overwhelmingly to mothers, and courts still give almony overwhelmingly to mothers and women,' he said. 'The family courts came into existence years ago in order to give things to mothers that mothers needed," he said. 'The times have changed and the courts have not.'"

7. You'll lose your freedom. At least, if you're charged with child support that you can't pay, you can be put in jail - and if you can't afford a lawyer, you don't have the right to have one appointed because, according to the Supreme Court, it's technically a civil matter, never mind the jail time. Fathers and Families found that it's the men who are jailed rather than women: "A new report concludes that between 95% and 98.5% of all incarcerations in Massachusetts sentenced from the Massachusetts Probate and Family Courts from 2001 through 2011 have been men. Moreover, this percentage may be increasing, with an average of 94.5% from 2001 to 2008, and 96.2% from 2009 through 2011. It is likely that most of these incarcerations are for incomplete payment of child support. Further analysis suggests that women who fail to pay all of their child support are incarcerated only one-eighth as often as men with similar violations."

8. Single life is better than ever. While the value of marriage to men has declined, the quality of single life has improved. Single men were once looked on with suspicion, passed over for promotion for important jobs, which usually valued "stable family men," and often subjected to social opprobrium. It was hard to have a love life that wasn't aimed at marriage, and premarital sex was risky and frowned upon. Now, no one looks askance at the single lifestyle, dating is easy, and employers probably prefer employees with no conflicting family responsibilities. Plus, video games, cable TV, and the Internet provide entertainment that didn't used to be available. Is this good for society? Probably not, as falling birth rates and increasing single-motherhood demonstrate. But people respond to incentives. If you want more men to marry, it needs to be a more attractive proposition.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Get off your high horses, you Catholo-New Feminists. And most other self-described "feminists" as well. And Victorian traditionalists. Return to the living wage of the bygone era if you truly want your daughters to be well "taken care of," for starters. DISCLAIMER: I don't agree with every point that every author makes. I do not accept cohabitation.