I have had some recent experience with the world of social work, and although I’ve tried to have an open mind, I certainly haven’t been too impressed by it. Yesterday evening I was in an “anger management” class, and the teacher embraced what appeared to be a Daoist ideology. He described emotions as “energy,” which sounds suspiciously like “Qi” — the vital force in Daoism. There is really nothing scientific about Daoism, but it does contain a lot of valuable insights about nature, spirituality, human perception of the world, etc. However, the American understanding of Qi is necessarily primitive, it not being a millennia-old cultural concept here, so I’m not sure what value it holds for people without any background in Chinese religion.
The office and classroom were adjacent to a couple of naturopaths, whose profession seems to me to be rather superfluous in our society, but if someone’s willing to pay for it I guess that’s fine. However, as I discovered yesterday, much of the money flowing in the direction of these practitioners of ancient methods of healing and foreign spirituality comes directly from the taxpayer, and attendance is mandated by courts in the case of divorce, and, for all I know, various other civil and minor criminal issues. As far as I could tell, about half of the attendees had been arrested in domestic violence incidents, and most of the others were going through contested divorces. One poor guy was ordered to attend for losing his temper during mediation, which is very ironic to me, having been yelled at and threatened by a mediator in a failed attempt to get a reaction out of me in my only mediation session. A few others, like me, were persuaded to take the class by their own attorneys as a kind of protection against the exceedingly common tactic of calling the spouse angry and dangerous (I have seen this over and over in court, and promise to write about it soon).
The teacher quite plainly stated in class that the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has contributed greatly to his business. That all but two of the attendees were men, the majority of whom would probably rather clean the gutters than attend new age classes, would appear to validate this statement. He told stories about how things have changed since he was younger, and warned that even touching someone while angry, e.g. poking them with an index finger, can result in a “life-changing” arrest. Because this is true, I have to give the guy credit for warning people about this and at least attempting to keep guys out of jail, but he isn’t offering a cure so much as a palliative treatment. In fact, one could call these kinds of programs hospices for broken hearts.
During the class we learned about the physical damage anger and stress can cause, and the teacher suggested a few techniques for dealing with these feelings. They probably work, and some, such as getting a massage, seemed perfectly agreeable. However, at one point, when he said that anger is often used as a cover for other feelings, I asked him whether being angry is really worse than being depressed. He had no real answer to this, but he implied that being sad is better than being in jail, and that was probably the most important lesson of the day as well as the most poignant critique of our judicial regime.
An overzealous system of family law, and the criminal law that has been developed to support it, has made it necessary to scour the world in search of exotic solutions to the very problems created by “fixing” what wasn’t really broken. Now that the traditional concepts of marriage, family and relationships have been discarded, we are treated to half-baked notions of “energy” to help people cope with the devastation wrought by contemporary family law. In the long run, I doubt that pop psychology can have much more than a marginal effect, and in some ways these classes border on punitive, but they may do some good for a few people. However, the real problem – the injustice inherent in unnatural family law – will have to be addressed before significant relief can be obtained and people can go back to leading happier, less stressful lives.
3 responses so far ↓
1 whiskey // May 7, 2009 at 7:22 pm
I think what you will get is simply men opting out of marriage in favor of “spread your seed” actions as in the Black Community, or White British Underclass, or increasingly, White British Middle Classes and Upper Classes.
If you have sex with as many women as possible, have little to no regular contact with them, and leave them on your own, in the failure of the nuclear family, this seems to make most men in these demographic slices reasonably happy. They reproduce. They have sex.
That they have little investment in society and don’t care about it seems to be viewed as a net positive by Yuppie elitists and women. Both of whom benefit immensely by the withdrawal from the public sphere by most men.
What’s striking to me is how many men in the Yuppie Class who are married seem “gay” in manner and attitude. Watch National Geographic’s “Dog Whisperer” and HGTV’s “House Hunters” for the straight couples (both shows feature far more gays and lesbian couples than are demographically representative in America, i.e. over-represented on the shows) and you’ll see what I mean.
Almost every Yuppie man is … well “gay” in appearance and attitude and particularly, voice. Passive, effeminate, and very prissy. This seems to be what their women want. It’s really striking, particularly in contrast to the few “Middle American” type couples who are around.
Dog Whisperer had the Marley and Me author on, I almost fell out of my chair when he spoke. If he didn’t have a family, wife and kids, I would have sworn he was gay. His wife seemed to like that attitude however. So go figure.
2 novaseeker // May 8, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Welmer –
A very fine post.
I have a rather dark view on these things, as you might guess. I think that the state knows quite well that the system it has set up — which in effect works to remove fathers from their families, and separate fathers and their children from each other — was going to create intense feelings of anger in men who are subjected to the process. Any process whereby the state forcibly separates fathers from their children is going to provoke angry reactions in many men.
So what does the state do? It sets up classes to deal with the anger that the state itself has provoked, and makes people go to these classes to deal with anger that was manufactured by the government’s family court system and practices. It makes courthouses into high security facilities — as you undoubtedly know, these measures were taken mostly to deal with angry fathers and to protect the courts from them. And all of this is done, all of these extraordinary measures are taken, simply to allow the courts to proceed with the removal of fathers from families, and the separation of children from their fathers.
It is immoral. It is unnatural. It is outrageous. It is unconstitutional. And for all of those reasons, the state must take these extra measures to deal with the “fallout” of what it has done — namely handed all of the power over children and families unequivocally to women.
Your class sounds fairly tame, and you are lucky. There are other classes — like the infamous PARS classes in Canada — that are intense brainwashing sessions, designed to get men to admit that they are filled with anger and hatred towards women, that they are all designed to abuse and behave violently toward women, that they need to abandon their masculinity because only a feminine and female-led society can end the “vicious cycle of violence against women” — all using hard-headed psychological techniques that are used by cults and CIA interrogators. And funded, of course, by the taxpayers.
The entire system is criminal. Stephen Baskerville’s book is required reading on this. But the issue, as you note, is that too many people rely on the system for a living. The whole array of attorneys, mediators, psychologists, therapists, child support enforcers, shelter staff and so on — it’s a huge industry. And the lynchpin of keeping these jobs going is mandating mother custody most of the time. Why is that? Because everyone knows that if the norm were either shared physical custody, or if there were real risks that fathers would get custody as often as mothers do, much, much fewer women would seek divorce. It’s simply the case that if they had a real risk of either losing the kids or sharing them, many women would not take that risk. Men would likely initiate the divorces that they do today — which are about 25% of the total. So the entire system, in terms of keeping a goodly number of cases churning through it and lining everyone’s pockets, is based on mother custody. And it’s precisely that overwhelming result that makes men very angry indeed.
3 Epoxytocin No. 87 // May 23, 2009 at 3:45 am
Nova, beautiful post.
I have seen the workings of these court-mandated programs, and they are every bit as bad as you say they are.
I only take issue with one thing that you wrote – and it’s an understatement. Namely:
I bet you could cut this number by at least half.
I know four men who have initiated divorces. All four of them had been married to wives who were literally, certifiably, neurotic – drunk on the power given to them by the family law system, no doubt – and simply couldn’t take it anymore. With the exception of one, who had carefully placed his assets in trusts or signed them over to other members of his closely knit Middle Eastern family, all of them incurred massive losses in their divorces.
Yes, I know that the plural of anecdote is not data, but I’d bet big money that many, or most, male-initiated divorces are of this sort. With the changes you’ve proposed, these divorces, too, mostly wouldn’t happen.
The old canard of men walking out on their families is just that – an old canard.
It’s possible that there would be a concomitant rise in the number of men initiating divorce for frivolous reasons (because they wouldn’t lose everything by doing so anymore), but I don’t think that would be a big factor.
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