On the face of it, and from an ancient perspective, it seems reasonable that a man who supports his children financially should have access to them, and that one who does not should have ties severed. There’s nothing wrong or strange about that attitude, however, it doesn’t take into account the social and legal ramifications — especially where today’s tight labor market and anti-male family law come into play.

These days, during a custody dispute, it’s pretty much no holds barred. Former spouses trash each other viciously in order to win the prize. There are precious few limits and quite a few inducements to wives who want to slander their exes. Calling the guy an abuser, a pervert and a bum are pretty much standard. These kinds of slanders are used to definitively gain custody, and they work pretty well against men.

Out of all the tools women have to malign the men they chose to have children with, should we add bankruptcy and unemployment? To do so will only give mothers an incentive to put guys out of work and destroy them financially, and believe me, they will do what they can to put a guy on the street if it gives them an edge in custody disputes. This already happens with temporary restraining orders (TROs), and is a very effective technique.

If we add being arrears in child support, women will do their best to get men fired by putting them in jail on false allegations, maligning them to employers, harrassing them at work, etc. This is because they will figure that if the guy can be forced to miss a couple payments the mother will win by default. There is no doubt that this will be used by both mothers and scummy attorneys.

So I warn men to be very careful about using traditional values to determine parental rights. The game isn’t the same as it was in the 1950s. Married men are in a precarious position, and their right to be fathers to their children cannot be undermined any more than it already is without risking a total loss of rights as a father in the event that the wife decides to go must on them.

Having had the dubious benefit of having raised a couple of children for almost five years, much of the time all by my lonesome, I’ve started to get an idea of what’s going on. One thing I can say is that raising kids, although rewarding in some incomprehensible way, is hell. I’ve never had a harder job. Doing it yourself is an exercise in masochism, or maybe martyrdom, which is why I don’t believe all the BS about “single mothers” going it alone. In fact, I’ve never, ever met a single mother who did it alone. Women are better at social networking for a reason: they need to be to get help raising kids.

Nevertheless, modern young women are particularly deluded about childrearing. Most of them have no more experience than a few weeks in total of babysitting kids during the easiest possible age bracket — between the ages of six and twelve. Your typical parent wouldn’t dream of allowing a teenage girl to babysit an infant or toddler for more than a couple of hours, and in that event would do their utmost to set everything up for the babysitter so that it went as smoothly as possible.

So young women come into marriage without a clue. In days past this wasn’t the case. Just as boys in old times would be expected to handle firearms, chop wood, and deal with large, dangerous farm animals, girls would be thrust into the business of childrearing and homemaking as soon as they had the strength to pick up a child and handle a cast-iron skillet. Now, these girls are texting on mobile phones and chatting with friends online all night as soon as they’re done with their homework.

However, the instinct to be a grown woman and mother remains, so girls dream of the traditional marriage without having any idea what it really means. Therefore, as a guy who’s been there and back again, I’d like to give other men an idea of what they really ought to be thinking about if they are serious about a traditional marriage, so I’ve come up with a few questions to ask women before tying the knot:

• Can you handle the obliteration of your former physique for at least eighteen months for each child you bear?
• Could you drive a car with someone screaming into your ear at a high volume for a prolonged period of time, day after day, without losing your cool and/or crashing?
• Would you be able to interrupt your dinner to put your hands on human excrement, and then return and finish eating?
• Can you go for weeks without sleeping more than a couple hours at a time?
• Are you prepared to handle a 1000% increase in housework?
• Can you see yourself acting as impartially as a referee in a boxing match during sibling disputes?
• If your sex life were to evaporate, would you still be able to retain a fair perspective concerning your spouse?
• Does the prospect of being chained to a few little hellions every minute of the day, at the risk of prosecution if you fail to do so, seem bearable?
• Can you sacrifice your shoe budget for family necessities?
• Would you be able to control your hormonal mood swings enough to prevent yourself from blowing your marriage sky-high?
• Do you have enough sense to stop and look for the light at the end of the tunnel?

If a woman says no to any of these, she’s a bad bet. Not to say there’d necessarily be a divorce (although chances are better than even), but the road will be very rough. Unfortunately, this probably comprises at least 75% of young American women. Their mothers, indoctrinated as they were by 1970s feminism, did a huge disservice to society. Not only did they frequently emasculate their sons; they coddled their daughters, teaching them to be the cheap facsimiles of men we are so familiar with today.

Is it possible to change a girl who has grown up within this milieu? I have my doubts. Even with game, just keeping things together with such a woman requires a Herculean effort from most men, and we have to be honest with ourselves and ask whether it’s even worth it.

However, if you are a guy who wants to knuckle under and go for it anyway, ask these questions. If you can’t ask your girlfriend, at least ask yourself about her and try to detach yourself from your feelings for her so that you can be as honest as possible about the answers. Although the conclusion might be depressing, it could save you from a kind of pain you never suspected you could be subjected to.

I’ve got nothing against servers, but I hate tipping. I always do it, and my tips fall between 15-20% about 95% of the time. However, if I ran a restaurant, I’d include the gratuity in the price of food. Selling a sandwich for $5? Raise it a buck and give the extra to the server. $1 for a soda-pop? Make it $1.20. I detest feeling that somehow I have to prove my worth by giving the server some exorbitant fee for showing cleavage as she bends over to serve me food. And that’s really what this comes down to — as women have come to dominate food service they’ve sexualized it to the point of something near pole dancing.

Frankly, I’d rather a guy serve me my food. He’ll usually do a better job and not try to use some physical assets to try to open my wallet. Same goes for a therapeutic massage. After getting run over by an old lady doing a thankless, low-wage job that I should have been tipped for, but never was (courier), I had a few sessions of much-needed massage therapy to minimize scar tissue in my neck and back. By far the most useless practitioners were females. Not only were they weak and ineffective, they seemed to feel that I owed them $60/hour simply for them having deigned to touch my back. As a young guy who had no shortage of female attention at the time and definitely needed a therapeutic massage, I certainly didn’t see it that way, and after a couple sessions with lazy, pathetic masseuses I made it a point to demand a masseur – preferably a strong one – or no go.

I’m getting to that point with waitresses. I am quite frankly sick of their entitled, bitchy attitudes. I don’t care if they serve me a sandwich underneath a couple of pushed-up, scented breasts; I don’t go to restaurants to masturbate, after all. Give me a professional, deft man who handles the table with skill and reserve and I’ll be all too happy to pay him what he deserves. But after reading Ms. Raskin’s bitchy, greedy little screed, I’ve vowed that the next slut who tries to squeeze some extra cash out of me by shoving her tits into the center of my visual field gets 10% and no more.

Whatever the case, if I had my way I’d eliminate tips altogether and have waiters work on commission, as I suggested before. If their 20% is in the menu price, I know exactly what I’m getting into when I look at the menu and there’s no reason to complain. If the service is bad, I simply don’t go back to that restaurant. If guys want gussied up little hussies, they can go back over and over again, but as for me I’ll be happy to patronize pleasant places with a touch more class. Pardon me if I’ve been a bit uncouth in this post, but to be quite honest I find Ms. Raskins’ attitude pretty offensive and simply replied in kind.

I’d like to hear Chuck Ross’s take on this.

Tom, who has a deadline on Friday, used sheer force of will to get me to come along, saying that he needed to go TODAY or he wouldn’t finish his work. After dropping the kids off with grandma this morning, I got some much needed time to clear my head, and when Tom called I relented and packed a bottle of water and a couple sandwiches for the trip.

We drove to the trailhead in North Bend and began our little journey into the hills, which started out on a steep grade. No problem for the first mile or so. We were moving along and chatting happily as we wended our way through the woods and ferns. “What a happy little hike,” we remarked. However, trouble struck around the halfway point, when I misinterpreted a sign, leading us to a rock-climbing ledge on a sheer cliff, cut through only by a meager trail fit for goats at best. Tom and I heroically lugged our hefty frames some 100 yards up the diversion, until it became clear that something was wrong when we saw climbing ropes snaking past us into a mossy abyss. Looking down was out of the question — our grim fate was written all too clearly on the faces of defiant boulders many stories below. So we held on, grasping the slanting rocks for dear life, clinging to the diminishing trail, which mocked us with every narrow neck and slick protrusion. Fortunately, we made it back down in one piece, and continued on our way along a far more tame route up the hill.

But I digress.

Despite our brush with a gory demise, there was something else remarkable about our hike up the mountain. On the way up, we came across a number of young women, some coupled and some alone, who really stood out for their physique. Healthy, trim, fresh and happy, they greeted us like valkyries on our ascent. Every single young woman we saw on this hike was well above average in terms of looks. They emerged from the trees with little backpacks, trim legs and ponytails. It was a wonderland up there that bore no relation to the world I see around me every day in Seattle. In fact, the closest I can get to it is at daybreak, when younger career women go for their morning jogs, but they hardly compare to the fresh-faced, leggy girls I saw today.

I mentioned this to my friend, suggesting that perhaps selection bias is at work here. In fact, it must be. The two of us had a rough go of it hauling ourselves up some 1,200 feet in the two miles to the peak. Your typical city girl would dread this kind of exertion, as moderate as it actually was. But the girls I saw on the trail were so at ease that they had no problem stopping to chat with a couple sweaty, red-faced guys from the city.

Although making it to the peak was a satisfying accomplishment, I think the lesson I learned today will stand out in my memory in far sharper detail than the view from the top: if you want to find healthy, attractive women, engage in some healthy, active pursuits.

This is what I have in mind when I think of social conservatives. Essentially, I see them as people who have a strong impulse to judge and punish others – men in particular – for flimsy or backward reasons. They justify their sadism by portraying themselves as defenders of virtuous, defenseless young maidens who, not coincidentally, are the objects of their lust. This is why one can see some very odd intersections between policy advocated by lesbians and social conservatives, who disagree violently on some other issues, such as abortion — they both have similar motives in the matter of relationships between females and other men.

Christians may know well the words “Judge not lest ye be judged,” but this is only the first line in a profound statement, and needs to be read in its proper context:

Judge not, that ye be not judged.
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

Matthew 7:1-2

So when I criticize social conservatives, I’m not thinking of good, religious people, but rather those hypocrites and liars who hide their base instincts in a cloak of righteousness. They are the Pharisees of today; the kinds of people who mask their avarice and lust with legal constructs and false piety. The PUA, who openly declares what he is doing and honestly explains why is morally of a far higher stature from my point of view. He is like the heathen barbarian for whom salvation is an open possibility.

As for the social cons, I can’t say I’m all that optimistic. They’ve led us down a long, strange path to a dark, ugly place, and still they urge us along.

But I leave open the possibility that the term “social conservatism” may not be the best choice. However, language has a funny way of overriding our personal objections, so I’ve learned to take a utilitarian (or Daoist?) attitude toward it.

A young black man and woman were in his courtroom over a disputed loan and wrecked car. The young man had fathered a child with the woman, but was no longer with her. Even so, he was trying to help her out for the benefit of his three-year-old son. He loaned her about $1,500 and had let her use his car. The woman lied about why she needed the money and wrecked the guy’s car with her new boyfriend.

When the story came out, Judge Brown really laid into the girl, telling her that the reason so many young men were behaving poorly was exactly because of ignorant, cheating, lying mothers like her. he admonished the father for choosing this particular woman and having a child with her, but otherwise was totally sympathetic to him. This young woman got a tongue-lashing I have never seen on one of these trashy judge shows.

That women’s bad behavior is even being exposed and denounced on popular TV says quite a bit, because not long ago I saw Geraldo, that short, ugly, stupid and annoying little pimp, arguing that all men who owed child support should be rounded up and thrown in jail. Donahue, for his part, made a living off of being a TV pimp, and never would have suggested that men have any role besides paying women for one service or the other.

But not Judge Joe Brown. He ordered the lying woman to pay her son’s father back every cent she owed and gave her a severe tongue-lashing as well.

I know that these court shows are largely a farce, but I also know that they have a big influence on your average woman’s concept of justice. In our intellectualized bubble, it’s easy to forget that average isn’t all that discerning, and that average derives a great deal of its morality from TV, but it is very true.

That an intelligent black man would be outraged by the behavior of women in his community hardly surprises me — I think a public airing of these feelings is long overdue. For too long, men of the lower socioeconomic classes, black and white, have been the whipping boys of pundits and TV spokesmen. As it becomes increasingly clear that the behavior of women in these cohorts is surpassing men in wicked disregard for society and children, perhaps it is inevitable that people start to lay the blame where it truly belongs.

Mrs. Rubenstein’s solution (poor Mr. Rubenstein), is to force the man to do more of the jobs she wants him to do. As she complains about how he doesn’t handle the endless activities and chores she engages in, it becomes quite clear that Mrs. Rubenstein – and not Mr. Rubenstein – is the one who sees these things as important. He doesn’t do these chores or take on these projects because they were not his idea in the first place. But to Mrs. Rubenstein, and to millions of wives around America, that is not the point. Actually, they are totally missing the point.

Rubenstein’s proposed solution is an expansion of the wife’s authority and dominance to deal with the problems that very dominance has created. This is just another “women take charge” push like all the others we have come to be so familiar with. Is it any wonder that men drop out of family life when women start calling all the shots?

Women are frustrated that men won’t do everything the women want, and all they can see is men being lazy, incompetent and immature. Here is a very illuminating comment on Rubenstein’s website:

Loren

what the heck happened?!

my husband was a bachelor for 7 years. he took care of his household, children, bills, decisions, meals, all by himself and took much pride in it. when he came along in my life i was so impressed with his “take charge” attitude! i was so grateful! finally, a man who didn’t mind being a MAN! we’ve been married two years and everything has stopped. he makes no decisions, asks me if he can have something to eat everytime he goes to the kitchen, no longer takes me out. if we go out i have to plan it and yes, i have to drive! i am so disillusioned right now. this man planned our honeymoon! i didn’t encourage this behavior either! everytime he asks me if he can “eat something” i look at him and say, “i can’t believe you’re asking me this, you’re a grown man.” he still does it! what happened?! women (at least this woman) need their men to be MEN!!!

Someone should tell Loren that this is her fault, since she apparently has deficient logical faculties. If he was independent and in charge before she came along, and then shortly after she came into his life he became defeatist and passive, Loren herself is the obvious reason for the change. But does anyone believe Mrs. Rubenstein would ever hold Loren accountable for this? I hope not, because she is trying to sell books and I seriously doubt any woman would pay for advice that blamed them for anything (it isn’t in their nature to seek anything but validation of their behavior, no matter how bad it may have been).

Another revealing comment that happens to be fairly amusing follows:

Carol Austin

Are you kidding?

Shoes? She is being told to “ask” before she buys a pair of shoes? This is not nagging, this is controlling, and destined to get worse. If he doesn’t trust her to make a good decision about shoes (of any price) than they really need to sit down and have a serious heart to heart about the deeper issues here.

This is in response to another comment, written by a man, that brings up the problems his wife’s expenditures have introduced into the marriage. It is amusing to me, because my ex had enough shoes to fill a hefty bag when we separated. I always did wonder where all that money was going, and when I cleared out and packed up her wardrobe it became pretty obvious. Nevertheless, women like Carol Austin see spending on shoes as a sacred rite. No wonder men give up. When women place the importance of their footwear on such a high priority what can a man do these days?

This women’s empowerment movement is becoming a farce of itself. Women are superior, so they need to be even more superior, and don’t even think about messing with their shoe budget!

Men, if this is what you want to deal with, by all means be a social conservative and continue to believe the outrageous lies about female virtue. However, if you want true happiness and freedom, don’t even try to cooperate. Set your boundaries and don’t budge one inch. Remember: it is a big world out there, and despite the illusion of endless female opportunity, men can have a great deal of autonomy and choice if they only reject dependence.

One of the biggest failures of our society is its utter lack of appreciation for the favor we’re all getting when good men marry. Men may gain some in marriage, but their sacrifices are at least as great. It may be a reward in and of itself for men to sacrifice, which is one of the most lofty traits of masculinity, but we would be lower than beasts in the field if we didn’t recognize, reward and defend those who do so.

Sometimes, I think it is truly a miracle that men still take on these responsibilities, despite the thankless treatment they receive. In fact, it reinforces my own belief, because I can’t see it in any context other than martyrdom.

Therefore, I think it’s incumbent on all of us to give thanks for the men who take on this burden, with all its sorrow and joy, and for us to act as witnesses and guardians of the sacred vows. Of course, I leave it to my readers how they honor my friend’s marriage (if they choose to do so), but as for myself, I pledge to stand as a sentinel and witness, and never to waver in my defense of his sacred vows.

These guys who played the music are about Novaseeker’s age, give or take a couple years. I was a young teenager at the time, and they were my heroes. That generation of post-boomer men – born in the late 60s – must have felt and expressed the most angst of any generation since that of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. They may not have been all that intellectually articulate as youths, but they sure gave us a dose of their raw emotion. We Seattle children swam in it like fish, buying Sub-Pop LPs on vinyl and picking our favorite bands and musicians. I liked Soundgarden — Chris Cornell was my working-class hero. When we wanted to feel the dirty, rough chords we went with Mudhoney. Nirvana was a bit of a joke at first, being from the redneck logging town of Aberdeen, but they earned their respect in due course and Cobain came to define the cultural phenomenon. This was fitting, perhaps.

Today, I brushed up against a remnant of this in my kids’ preschool parent/teacher meeting. One of the central figures in the culture ended up sitting right next to me. I actually had no idea who he was when I first saw him — I thought he was your typical 40-something Seattle herb. He was dressed and coiffed like a contractor, but didn’t have the requisite physique. He was a somewhat small man with faded jeans, longish hair, a t-shirt and Vans. I hardly gave him a second look. However, when it came time to introduce ourselves, I definitely knew the name. It almost sounded like a joke at first, but there he was: a polite, mild-mannered dad at a parent meeting representing his little girl, who is my daughter’s age. I’m not going to identify the guy, because I wouldn’t want that myself, and it would be pretty low of me to do so, but he’s one of about a dozen major figures in the Seattle music scene from the 80s/90s and everyone reading would recognize his band.

He seemed to be a pretty normal, decent guy with a whole lot of money, and without a trace of the angst that animated grunge music. I think it’s for the best to see a guy who was once part of a scene that glorified waste, death and dissipation to be fostering life, but it’s doubtless been a long road. In fact, it’s been a long road for too many of us, and there are those left behind that we should remember in the coming autumn days of death’s remembrance. What it says to me is that, despite the absence of catastrophic war, disaster or pestilence, we still have reaped a grim harvest over the last couple of decades. To see men in their 40s reborn is an encouraging sign, because in their 20s these guys were masters of futility and doom.

Sometimes I think it is up to us somewhat younger men to interpret what happened in those dark years, but we need the input from those who were at their forefront, even if they didn’t fully understand or articulate what was going on at the time. Essentially, we need to distill their experiences into something powerful and meaningful not only on a spiritual and emotional basis, but on the intellectual plane as well. I know that Justin will have some of his own ideas about the dark message of grunge from that era, but I have come up with a fairly radical hypothesis concerning the spiritual phenomenon that he ought to find pretty interesting, and I’d like to explore it in collaboration with others who are interested in the spiritual bases of these trends.

For now, it would be interesting to see what these artists’ contemporaries have to say about this point in history. Sitting next to this unassuming, youngish former rock star who had a little daughter brought some questions to the fore — especially concerning the survivors of the era he defined. That generation of men that raged against a system stacked against them remains a mystery, but it is a mystery that can be unlocked and understood to a degree with stories and reflection. Just as I looked up to these guys as heroes as an adolescent, I still look to the spirit of that generation, which was thrown on the guns of “progress” and cut down in droves. Young men and their sons have many questions, and we need your experience to answer them. It was a distinct time, and it can’t be understood without your voice.

A lot of creative types and leaders are not the most obedient people, nor do they always pursue the goals society expects them to strive for. Many have mediocre credentials from your typical corporate or professional standpoint. However, what they do tend to have is a great deal of experience or native charisma — the kind you can’t measure with diplomas (a lot of them are highly intelligent as well, but that’s another matter).

Some of our greatest generals, such as Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower, had rather undistinguished performances at West Point, but went on to become essential to victory. Neither Steve Jobs nor Bill Gates finished college, and we all know what they went on to achieve. The examples go on and on, the point being that people can succeed and effect change through unconventional routes. And, given the great achievements of some of these unconventional types, it would be foolish to attempt to shut off all but the conventional paths to success.

Unfortunately, our society is becoming more and more obsessed with standardized credentials, even as there has been a broad devaluation of the credentials themselves. This means that although it no longer means all that much to have a higher degree (due to affirmative action, grade inflation and other factors), the degrees themselves have become more of a necessity for even entry-level jobs that require few skills beyond typing and filing. This is preventing plenty of talented people – mainly young men – from obtaining positions in organizations in which they could potentially contribute a great deal.

For example, the recently departed John Hughes, who directed a number of popular teen movies during the 1980s, got his start as a copywriter after dropping out of the University of Arizona at the age of twenty. After working on some successful ad campaigns, Hughes tried his hand at writing screenplays, eventually succeeding with films such as The Breakfast Club that those of us in my demographic grew up with.

Today, John Hughes likely wouldn’t have gone anywhere. He would have applied for a copywriting job and been passed over, most likely in favor of a young, single urban female with an MA in English. If he had eventually succeeded as a writer, it would have been in spite of the fact that he would have had to take jobs outside of the creative field, and probably later in life. It is doubtful that he would have enjoyed the same degree of success, even in the unlikely event that he did manage to support himself in a creative field.

Of course, there are fields where credentials are important, such as law, medicine and architecture, but even here we have a bit of a structural problem. Getting into these fields requires an initial four-year degree before specialization. Why not allow young people with two-year degrees to apply directly to law school or medical school? The truth is that the extra two years of college are redundant for those who go on to become high-level professionals, and might discourage unconventional types from following through and joining professions in which they could be quite successful. Additionally, most Americans do not obtain four-year degrees, and most that do do not need them.

All we are doing with this overemphasis on credentials is locking the door to talented young people and wasting the energy and money of others who could be gainfully employed or in training a couple years earlier than otherwise. For young men, many of whom are not suited to the culture of the modern educational institution, this is becoming an increasingly onerous burden. It is time to break the monopoly on young lives held by higher education, and cut it down to the proper size. We should give the young some more freedom to define themselves, and clear the path to a career and meaningful participation in society instead of shutting them off behind an ivy curtain.