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:

Men would likely initiate the divorces that they do today — which are about 25% of the total.

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.

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.

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.