"Feminist misinformation is pervasive."

So says Christina Hoff Sommers, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.  In this article, she's once again taking on academic feminism in a few of its many guises (AEI, 6/29/09).  Her first example is a law school textbook on domestic violence law edited by Professor Nancy K. D. Lemon.  Sommers gets as far as the first page when she runs into this astonishing locution:

The history of women's abuse began over 2,700 years ago in the year 753 BC. It was during the reign of Romulus of Rome that wife abuse was accepted and condoned under the Laws of Chastisement. . . . The laws permitted a man to beat his wife with a rod or switch so long as its circumference was no greater than the girth of the base of the man's right thumb. The law became commonly know as 'The Rule of Thumb.' These laws established a tradition which was perpetuated in English Common Law in most of Europe.

As Sommers points out, Romulus was a fictional character and the Rule of Thumb had nothing to do with men beating their wives, whatever fantasies to the contrary feminists may choose to indulge in.  My favorite part, which Sommers doesn't mention, is the last sentence in which the writer claims that the English Common Law perpetuated traditions "in most of Europe."  Uh, no it didn't.  English Common Law governed England; the rest of Europe had its own set of laws and traditions.

As good as Sommers is at skewering this type of inanity, she gives these writers too much credit.  The paragraph quoted above looks more like the effort of a mediocre high school student who waited to write a paper until the night before it was due.  Romulus of Rome?  Can't you just see a group of high school history teachers sitting around the teacher's lounge getting a laugh out of that one?  I can.

The intellectual dishonesty of feminism has a long and sorry history.  As Sommers points out, there are plenty of feminists whose scholarship is scrupulous.  But there are plenty more who think nothing of producing the most slipshod work imaginable.

But here's another fact - if we didn't let them get away with it, they wouldn't do it.   There was a time when American academia would have shouted this stuff down with derision. 

There may have even been a time that journalists were actually expected to know what they were talking about and get their facts straight.  So if someone claimed, as feminist watchdog Katherine Hanson actually did, that over four million women are killed every year by domestic violence (she was off by a factor of about 4,000) the writer or an editor might actually have checked up on the claim and refused to publish it when it turned out to be so wildly wrong. 

And there might have been a time when Congress didn't just swallow hook, line and sinker claims of, for example, domestic violence advocates that are well-known to be wrong.

Sadly, it seems those times have passed.

Here's a link to the latest publication by RADAR (Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting).  It analyzes the claims so often made by the DV industry to support its demands for ever-greater taxpayer funding and ever-increasing numbers of men in prison.  The paper linked to reveals 50 different falsehoods and inaccuracies commonly seen in everything from news reports to congressional "findings."  It also provides factual rebuttals to most of the untruths about DV that are so common in everyday reporting.

RADAR provides an invaluable public service.  It gathers existing data in one place so that the erroneous claims we so often see can be easily rebutted.  So far, Congress, the mainstream media, the DV industry and much of academia have proven themselves to be supremely indifferent to facts that contradict the myths about DV that they've so patiently constructed.  That's what happens when an industry that takes in billions of dollars a year from taxpayers, foundations, other non-profits and individuals is faced with truths that threaten that funding.  It is much easier to ignore the facts than it is to lose the funding.

It's also what happens when facts challenge cherished myths about female virtue and male brutality.  We seem to be remarkably unwilling to disabuse (pardon the pun) ourselves of those notions.

As I've said before,  all of the disinformation we put up with shows that we as a society do not oppose domestic violence.  If we truly wanted to reduce the incidence of DV, we'd start telling ourselves the truth about who does it, why and what works to stop it.  Until we do those things we're just kidding ourselves about DV.

Thanks to RADAR and other people and organizations that actually do oppose DV, we're kidding fewer and fewer people every day.

Thanks to Jeremy for the heads-up.

The United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case interpreting the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.  Read the article here (Boston Herald, 6/29/09).  The case, Abbott vs. Abbott, involves an issue that we've run into before and that lower federal courts and the courts of various countries disagree over.

The Hague Convention was adopted in 1980 to address the then-growing problem of international parental kidnapping.  It requires signatory countries to return a kidnapped child to its home country if one parent has absconded with the child.  It's worked reasonably well except for one inconsistency.  A parent can only request that a foreign country return the child if he/she has custodial rights to the child, and that, depending on the laws of the original country can be questionable.

Specifically, what we might call the noncustodial parent often is judged, under the Convention, to have only rights of access to the child, not rights of custody.  Therefore, if a custodial parent in the United States takes a child to another signatory nation, the noncustodial parent may find him/herself without a remedy under the Convention.

That has even been found in cases in which a parent sought to protect him/herself via a ne exeat clause in the custody order.  A ne exeat clause orders the custodial parent to keep the child within a particular geographic area unless the court allows a move.

As I said, lower federal courts disagree on whether that is the correct reading of the treaty language and the U.S. Supreme Court has decided to rule on the matter.  The Obama administration, through the U.S. Justice Department, has filed a brief in Abbott on behalf of the noncustodial father.

In an earlier case, Croll vs. Croll, the federal appellate court for the Second Circuit ruled that, even in cases in which the noncustodial parent has a ne exeat clause, he/she is not a custodial parent under the Convention and therefore has no remedy.  In that case, Judge Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the majority opinion and argued for a broader interpretation of custody to permit noncustodial parents to be able to enforce the provisions of the Convention.

So, if she's confirmed, Sotomayor will have an opportunity to convince her new colleagues read the Convention as granting a remedy to noncustodial parents whose children have been kidnapped by the other parent.  But she may face an uphill battle; the conservative court majority often wants to take a narrow view of statutory language.  If that view wins in Abbott, noncustodial parents lose.

Stay tuned.

If you're really super-interested in this issue, here's a law review article on it (Brooklyn Journal of International Law).

Here's an article on the death of Heath Ledger.  According to former Monty Python member, Terry Gilliam, his custody battle over his daughter Matilda had a lot to do with it (Vanity Fair, 6/29/09).  That, combined with overwork, illness and lack of sleep seem to have done him in.  But Ledger was adamant about having custody of his daughter and that seems to have snowballed into enough lawyers that multiplied, according to Gilliam, "as if they were breeding." 

(I've seen it myself; divorce and custody, that can be so simple, become, when one party has a lot of money, donnybrooks.  The greater the acrimony, the longer the case lasts.  The longer the case lasts, the larger the attorney's fees.  It's why we should do everything we can to get divorce and custody out of courts, out of the hands of lawyers and into the hands of those who care about the needs of children.)

Ledger's friends advised him to just drop the custody issue and walk away, but he refused, adding to the stress that eventually killed him.

Again, I thought of my son's question. Why? Why are so many male characters in books such idiots?

That's what William Leith asks in this article that raises a lot of good questions, but ultimately gets sidetracked (Daily Mail, 6/2/09).

Leith has a young son to whom he reads.  And recently Leith has had a revelation - his son's books are "full of bad male stereotypes - deadbeat dads, absent fathers, wimps and fools."  Now, that's not exactly news to anyone but Leith.  Although I'm not aware of studies done on misandry in children's books, there've been plenty done on other parts of pop culture that have been around for years.  Nathanson and Young's Spreading Misandry was first published in 2001 and Jim McNamara of the University of Western Sydney did an extensive study of misandry on television in 2005.

So Leith's dramatic realization of the education he was giving his son through the books they were reading comes a bit late.  But, in my opinion, better late than never.  Leith, like all of us, is a product of his time.  He grew up swimming in a sea of misandric social messages, so it's hard for him to stand outside his own cultural learning and understand that it doesn't have to be this way and indeed, for most of history, hasn't been.

Unfortunately, he turns to Susan Faludi for help - always a bad move.  Here's a rule to live by: if you want to know something about the nature of masculinity or how to live as a man in today's world, don't ask a radical feminist.  Take my word on that; it's an invariable rule.

For several decades now, feminists have been explaining to all and sundry what men are like, and, not surprisingly, they got it wrong.  More to the point, masculinity, according to radical feminists, is a very narrow set of behaviors, most of them violent and all of them bad.  Men are rapists and murderers.  Men have all power but deserve none of it.  Men's sole aim in any situation is to dominate, particularly in relationships with women; the masculine principle asks only one question, "who's top dog?"  Etc., etc.

I can't begin to go into all the variations on the theme, but radical feminism always had a political purpose to its narrative of male brutality - to so narrowly confine our understanding of masculinity that it comes to be understood as something that is per se bad and therefore in need of change.

And that's precisely where Faludi is coming from.  The only thing clever about her particular refinement of the feminist mythology is that she pretends to sympathize with men's plight.  So according to her, men are (as feminists have always claimed and as she unquestioningly accepts) beasts and, since society, technology, etc. have so changed, male qualities of aggressiveness and violence are in little demand.  Hence, men feel lost, at sea, and Faludi affects the sincerest sympathy.

All of which is perfectly self-consistent, and all perfectly wrong.  The glitch comes in the conception of masculinity by radical feminists.  If men actually aren't all rapists, if we really aren't the ravening animals that the Andrea Dworkin, Marilyn French and countless others would prefer us to be, the entirety of their carefully-constructed mythology falls to pieces.  If people ever start to simply look at men, how we actually behave and what we accomplish, the feminist narrative will vanish like morning mist.

As I've said before, throughout history, people have understood men and masculinity far better than we do today.  Humans, essentially in all places and at all times, have understood the richness and depth of men and our roles in society.  Men have rightly been seen not only as warriors and kings, but as spiritual leaders, artists and healers.  We've always been known as scientists and engineers, explorers, musicians and poets.  None of that is new or unusual except to people like Susan Faludi and, sadly, William Leith.

Leith concludes by saying that men have "messed up.  And everybody knows it."  Hmm, really?  Of course what he, and everyone else who spouts that line, forget is that in order to "mess up" one has to endeavor in the first place.  Among the many almost uniformly ignored (these days) facts of human history is that, for the most part, women haven't attempted very much.  And when you don't try, you don't fail.  That's not a very positive way to live life, but there you have it.

Which brings us to whether one sees the glass as half empty or half full.  Leith sees it as half empty.  The world is undeniably a product of masculine striving, and men, according to him, have "messed up."  Well, that's one way to look at things, and few would deny that, from the threat of nuclear holocaust to global warming, to AIDS, much is wrong with humankind.

But isn't it fascinating that the people who, like Leith, seem to see nothing but wretchedness and waste, are by far the most privileged and well-off the world has ever seen?  I, for one, am finding it harder and harder to take seriously people in the U.S., Western Europe, Canada, etc., who have the highest standards of living, the best health,the greatest longevity, the best education and the greatest freedom, moaning like occupants of the ninth level of the Inferno.

Without overlooking all that is wrong with the world, I suggest that we look at all the things that are right with it too.  Leith wails about the evils men did in the twentieth century, but overlooks everything from polio vaccine to the discovery of DNA to jazz music to solar power.  He doubtless sees that Hitler and Stalin were men who wrought unspeakable horrors on humankind, but ignores the fact that plenty of women in Germany and the Soviet Union avidly supported their atrocities.  Into the bargain, he shows no sign of knowing that, overwhelmingly, it was men who fought and died to defeat fascism and communism.  Leith, like so many others, condemns all men for the wrongs of a few, but forgets to credit men for their manifold contributions to the welfare of all.  That, Mr. Leith is not our fault, it's yours.

Leith begins by realizing some of the misandry in popular culture, but concludes that it's justified.  It's not, unless you scrupulously ignore all the contributions men have made, and make daily, to the betterment of the human condition.  And if you do that, it says a lot more about you than it does about men.  Come to think of it, it makes you look a lot like the authors of the children's books Leith so reviles.

Thanks to Duncan for the heads-up.

This fine piece is by Paul Nathanson, co-author with Katherine Young of the pioneering works Spreading Misandry and Legalizing Misandry (Ottawa Citizen, 6/23/09).  On the occasion of Father's Day, he writes about his own father, the unique role fathers play in children's lives and the barriers western societies have placed between fathers and children.

Nathanson says that in childhood, he preferred his mother who gave him unconditional love, to his father who made demands, and whose love at times seemed contingent on his meeting them.  But that very form of paternal love had its effects on Nathanson in later life, as he describes.

But it was Dad who first taught me to be independent -- that is, as I eventually understood, to think for myself but within a larger moral context. He taught me to become more fully human, in other words, not to embrace either conformity or "autonomy" (an overused and misused word these days).

Still later, as a fully mature man, Nathanson experienced a kind of rite of passage that only his father could have provided.  It's the type of event that tribal cultures are wise enough to ritualize but that western societies leave to inadvertence.

One day, in the middle of some argument, he suddenly turned to me and said, "Paul, you're a learned man." Okay, I was much too old by then for those words to give me a sense of self-confidence. But we both realized immediately that this was a moment of profound fulfillment; a father had symbolically conferred manhood on his son.

Nathanson contrasts motherhood and fatherhood.  In the process, he gives support to the by-now-well-known social science finding that mothers and fathers parent differently and the different styles complement each other in the child's maturation and personality development.

Fathers, unlike mothers, must require their children to earn love -- respect, which is a form of love -- in order to leave home mature enough to give and receive it as adults. And fathers, unlike mothers, cannot measure their effectiveness adequately in terms of immediate emotional gratification.

And,

In short, fathering is inherently more complicated, more ambiguous, and more perilous (though not, of course, more important) than mothering. It requires a massive cultural effort to promote fathering and not merely to bribe or threaten fathers into providing material resources.

Of course, it is that very "massive cultural effort to promote fathering" that so many individuals and organizations  are trying so hard to accomplish in the face of much push-back from anti-father forces and a largely indifferent press and political establishment.  One result is,

Boys now learn directly or indirectly, that there will be no room for them as men in family life and that they will therefore have no moral stake as men in the future of society. If that isn't an ominous sign, what is?

That's a good question.  The separation of children from their fathers is arguably the single worst development in our society over the past 40 years or so.  Its dislocations run widely and deeply.  They touch every part of society and culture.  We know the benefits of father-involvement and the detriments of father absence, and yet we plunge ahead as if we don't or it doesn't matter.  We're like sleepwalkers in traffic.

This piece by Sandra Tsing Loh has gotten a good bit of attention lately, much of it deservedly bad (The Atlantic Monthly, July/August, 2009).

Loh had been married for 20 years when she decided she wanted a divorce.  She and her husband have two elementary-school-aged children.  She has nothing bad to say about her husband, but seemingly the magic just wasn't there any longer.  Loh's oblique way of letting us know about her extramarital affair is to say that her "commitment to monogamy...came unglued."  (Can you hear Mark Sanford or Eliot Spitzer saying that?)

And having done so, she found that "I would not be able to replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image of my husband..."

So off she went in a cloud of guilt.  Sadly for readers of The Atlantic Monthly, Loh expends several thousand words attempting to convince herself that what she did - divorcing a good man and the father of her children when they were in elementary school - was OK.

The truth is far simpler than Loh makes out.  It is this: if you don't have kids, feel free to divorce as often as you like; no one will be hurt but you and your spouse, and you're both adults and can handle it.  But when you have children, you make a commitment to them, if to no one else, to provide them the most stable, supportive, loving home life you can until they're out of the nest.  If you can't make that commitment, don't have children.  If you have children, honor your commitment.

Are there exceptions?  Of course they are, but no amount of inability to "replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image of my (husband/wife/significant other)" is one.

Loh's desperate attempt to explain herself to herself (and unfortunately to us) is the same, self-absorbed mewling we see periodically from the privileged.  Her description of her attorney friend's house, a Craftsman bungalow filled with Mission furniture and Tiffany lamps, should let every reader know that, whatever Loh has to say will not apply to about 98% of the population.

Like Emily Bazelon writing in The New York Times in April, who tried to convince readers that single motherhood really is just as good for children as a two-parent upbringing, Loh dismisses the probable effects of her divorce on her children.  Her sole comments on the subject are that the girls "appear unfazed," and "seem content."  So much for the mountains of social science that show that, if Loh's daughters are like most kids, they'll suffer a range of ills later in life stemming directly from her divorce.

By the bottom of page one, Loh is quoting sociologist Andrew Cherlin for the proposition that it's not so much single parenthood that troubles kids, it's the upset of changed circumstances attending divorce.  There's some data that suggest that a child who's born into a stable, single-parent home will do, if not well, at least better than a child of divorce.  Amazingly, Loh seems not to notice that she's doing the latter, not the former.  Cherlin preaches domestic stability; Loh does the opposite and seems to think Cherlin is on her side.

Toward the end, Loh seems to lose her bearings altogether.  Marriage, according to her is the "Old World" and, well, something, presumbaly non-marriage (she never says), is the "New World."  And since women are the ones initiating divorce, it's clear to Loh that women, or at least those who either divorce or never marry, are New Worlders.  And this, she goes on to explain, is in the finest American tradition as described by de Tocqueville as our typically restless character.  To Loh, this is an unalloyed good, even though de Tocqueville had a vastly more nuanced understanding of it.

Now I, or anyone with a college education, could write a book on all the ways that is just plain silly, but Loh actually tops it in her final section on what to do about it all.  Without ever pausing to consider the possibility that what she's describing in her own life may be pretty closely confined to a narrow sliver of the population at the top of the food chain, Loh decides that (did you doubt it?) everything must be changed.

And here's how: if a woman is sexually unsatisfied by her husband, she should have two men, one to do the chores around the house and the other to do sexual service on the side, but whom the kids never see.  If neither partner has much interest in sex, then they agree to just be companions.  And that, according to Loh, covers the waterfront.  If there are any other permutations of male/female intimacy, Loh doesn't let on about them.  Really, I kid you not.

And kids?  Loh says that from ages 1-5 (what happened to birth-to-one year old?) children should be raised "tribally" by a group of women.  Men would come in periodically to do chores and provide sex.  After age five or so, men would take over parenting.

I know; you think I'm making this up.  You're thinking of all the hundreds of gaping holes in her arguments, the wholesale ignorance of basic facts, the final descent into utter fantasy.  Well, I thought of that too and I tell you, it's too much to take on, so I won't even try.  As every attorney knows, sometimes it's better to just shut up and let your opponent's argument fall of its own weight.

But consider two things.  The same writer who ends with the advice "avoid marriage," began by admitting "I don't generally even enjoy men."  Aye, there's the rub.  I'll venture to say that it's just possible that a woman who doesn't like men may not be the best person to advise us on marriage issues.

And then there's the title of Loh's article, "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off."  I wonder who decided on that.  Did Loh?  Or did an Atlantic editor?  Whoever did, it's obviously a reference to the old Gershwin song.  "Tomato, To-mah-to, Potato, Po-tah-to.  Let's call the whole thing off."  Those lines were meant to satirize people who were incapable of commitment.  Something as trivial as differing pronunciations constituted an insuperable barrier to their continued relationships.  It's a clever skewering of a certain mindset.

Not incidentally, that title says more about Loh and her desperate search for self-acceptance than the whole rest of her article.

This comes to us courtesy of our 'resident historian,' Richard Stephens.

Previously we saw what Seattle Judge Rhea M. Whitehead, had so say about chivalry justice.  The highest ranking female judge of the period, Florence Ellinwood Allen of Cleveland, was of like mind. Here is Judge Allen speaking before the Women Lawyers’ Association, on the same topic, chivalry justice, the tendency of men jurors to render verdicts in favor of women litigants on sentimental grounds whether the woman be the accused or the accuser:

“This fault should be corrected. It is not born of chivalry, but of what men choose to call chivalry, something totally different.”

“’Criminal men take advantage of this condition. They use woman to perform acts essential to crime, counting on a woman to serve as a screen and as a blind. They figure that if she is arrested she will be acquitted and that would weaken the case against them. It is quite true that all men – lawyers, judges, prosecuting attorneys, witnesses and jurors – are inclined to be lenient with a woman on trial or in any way connected with a case. The leniency is not deliberate, but instinctive. Pretty women are all too likely to make a man loose (sic) his balance.’”

Judge Florence Allen was the descendant of American Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen. A dedicated women’s suffrage campaigner, she was elected judge in 1920. In March 1934 President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Allen was the was the first woman to sit on any federal bench of general jurisdiction. She held the seat until her retirement in 1959 at the age of 75.

Several years ago, a young female attorney came to me for advice.  She worked at a medium-sized firm (about 70 attorneys), whose managing partner was a woman and a 70s-era feminist.  The problem was that the young attorney was pregnant and astonished to find that the firm had no policy on pregnancy leave.  She was terrified that when she started to 'show,' she'd get fired on some trumped-up basis.  She was particularly terrified of the managing partner whose take on the work/family balance for women was all work and no family.  I advised the young attorney on some common-sense steps to take to protect herself, and, the last I heard, all had turned out well.

That personal story of the antipathy many women feel for other women concerning pregnancy, childcare and work is by way of introducing this article by Judith Warner (The New York Times, 6/25/09).  It's about all the petty grief meted out to mothers on a daily basis, often by strangers.  Warner asks,

Why do people so often permit themselves to dump — verbally, emotionally, with a surgically precise ability to wound viscerally — on mothers? Why do they so easily dare, not just to judge, but to give expression to their disdain, disapproval, smug superiority? And why — perhaps most to the point — do we put up with it?  

She relates incident after incident in her life and her friends' in which other people take it upon themselves to criticize the most trivial of parenting behavior.  Warner recruits author Ayelet Waldman to provide still more examples of the same behavior.

Now, interestingly enough, Warner never gets around to saying just who it is who does this - men or women.  But her description of the behavior (above) sounds to me like it's done by women.  And in all of the examples in which the sex of the offender is revealed, she's a woman.  In all the other examples, the offender sounds like a woman, e.g. a school official who criticizes a cake because it wasn't baked in a Bundt pan.  I could be wrong, but the barbs Warner describes just don't sound to me like anything men would direct at women, but women would.

Whatever the case, Warner's reticence to say just who it is that's doing this is telling.

But more importantly, what she's describing is the flip side of what the young attorney came to me about.  Warner and Waldman are talking about women sticking the knife in other women for being perceived to be insufficient in the motherhood department.  In some cases, that may be because they're trying to work and mother, but in other cases it's got nothing to do with that.  In most of the cases Warner describes, the other woman has no idea of what, if anything, Warner does for a living.

The conclusion that Waldman comes to and Warner adopts is that the "Bad Mother police" aren't out to protect children but to punish mothers. 

That may well be true, but neither author asks the question "why?"  Why would mothers punish other mothers?  I'd venture to say that it's female socialization in action.  It's women telling women how to be women, and more specifically, how to be mothers.  It looks a lot like anxiety on the part of women about their changing roles away from motherhood and towards work.

There are a lot of societal messages out there telling women that motherhood is their highest calling, that to be too involved in a career is to deny their true selves.  It's worth remembering that the most powerful of those messages come from women themselves.   

Here's another from our 'resident historian,' Richard Stephens.

Back in 1921 there were only a few female judges on the bench. But those that were around were no shrinking violets. They were vocal and firm in their challenge to the status quo. Here is what Judge Rhea M. Whitehead, presiding member of the Superior Court of Seattle, had to say on the topic of equality of the sexes in respect to the justice system:

“A Husband is going to get a square deal in my court. Too many men are convicted on sobby tales of wives!’”

According to the Boston Globe reporter who reported on Whitehead’s reformist aims: “The condition which this learned woman jurist deplores can be seen anywhere in the country in any court where domestic woes are aired, some husbands aver. The scene and the setting are identical, they say. The husband is arraigned before the court. His wife, her relatives and friends occupying the front benches, steps forward. The complaining wife then unburdens herself. Occasionally she may punctuate her recital with looks of injured feelings vaguely cast in the direction of her recalcitrant spouse. Then, having skillfully constructed her atmosphere much as a dramatist leads to a climax, she suddenly produces her handkerchief, clutches the railing before her, lets forth a heart-rending sob and the flood-gates of her tears. Thereupon the Court thunders a denunciation of the prisoner and enters an order of commitment or fine or alimony, as the case may be, and all the men on hand applaud in their hearts and cry out that here is a just judge and a rascally husband.”

Judge Rhea M. Whitehead pulled no punches in her attack on such prejudicial treatment:

“In my court, men and women will stand equal. That a woman is a dependent, helpless creature is an outworn notion, and I have absolutely no patience with a woman who comes into my court charging her husband with nonsupport merely to have the law make him stand and deliver. Some masculine judges are so sentimental that they often enter judgments against husbands without even giving the defendant a chance to be heard.”

If only we had Judge Rhea M. Whitehead with us today.