George Osborne’s budget last week adds up to an appalling attack on family budgets – and those who will feel the greatest pain will be the poorest and the out-of-work. Benefits reductions coupled with an increase in VAT puts the budgets of lower-income households under severe pressure at a time when jobs are hard to come by and their sustainability far from guaranteed. Even the increase in child tax credit merely compensates for the pain that’s felt elsewhere. Overall, this is a cruel, mean-minded budget for families, and one that totally fails the government’s fairness test.
To make matters worse, freezing child benefit, undermining the longterm value of safety net benefits by linking them in future to the generally lower consumer price index , removing tax credits from middle income households, re-testing claimants for disability benefits, and capping housing benefit and help with mortgage interest are only the first steps. Already the Chancellor has told us that other public expenditure can be protected only if further savings are made out of the benefits bill – clearly a softening up for more freezes and cuts. And while Iain Duncan Smith’s determination to see more claimants come off benefits and into jobs, and to make work pay, is of course incontestable in theory – indeed that was exactly the thrust of Labour’s recent welfare reforms – here too the signs are already obvious that he intends to achieve that through meaner benefits and tougher conditions rather than improving prospects at work.
Linking benefits to CPI, removing child tax credits from more and more families and freezing child benefit are highly damaging steps. Adequate out of work benefits are essential to enable families to make ends meet when jobs are lost, and to fulfil their financial commitments, avoiding the spiralling debt which in turn acts as a barrier to making work pay. But the government’s new measures will reduce the value of these benefits over time.
Freezing universal child benefit will make matters even worse. The value of this reliable, universal benefit, particularly at a time when parents are worried about job security, cannot be overstated. Freezing it now reduces the protection and stability it provides for families in uncertain times.
The decision not to progress with further rollout of the free school meals pilots puts more family budgets under pressure as parents move into work. Many parents taking up low-paid work express shock at the impact that the loss of free school meals has on disposable income. How can the government claim it wants to incentivise work, then take away this support?
The sick and disabled – a group already at greater risk of poverty – are set to suffer too. Testing more disabled claimants for Employment and Support Allowance and Disability Living Allowance will likely reduce the incomes of many disabled people, and create uncertainty and anxiety for very many more.
The cap on housing benefit announced in the budget will cause considerable hardship. Overcrowding is one of the top issues I meet in my Manchester constituency surgeries – reducing the amount families can spend on rent will exacerbate the problems overcrowded households already face. MPs across the country tell the same story: one inner London MP calculates that 84% of private tenants in her constituency pay rent above the new cap for benefit. It’s no good the government complaining about a lack of social housing, then reducing financial support for those in rented accommodation and removing housebuilding targets from local authorities. These policies will drive more families into substandard accommodation, while the restriction on help with mortgage interest increases the risk of repossessions and homelessness among homeowners too.
If all that wasn’t bad enough, it’s not just the cuts to the benefits bill that put the poorest under fire. The rise in VAT will hurt the poorest too. It’s no use ministers arguing that VAT is a progressive tax as a proportion of expenditure, or that the zero rating of some basic items means the poorest suffer less. VAT is not some sort of luxury tax – it attaches to household basics, and the disposable incomes of poorer families will be very severely stretched.
And finally we hear from the Work and Pensions Secretary that people should move around the country to take up work – the 21st century reprise of Norman Tebbit’s “on yer bike” . That would impose a further set of expectations on the poorest that would be unrealistic, unfair and cruel. Jobseekers are already required to travel reasonable distances to take up work. If Iain Duncan Smith intends to go further, the informal support networks that many rely on, family relationships, stability for children, and stronger communities will all be put at risk. No middle class parent would move around the country for work without considering the impact on their child’s’ schooling, no middle aged child of an elderly parent who relies on her daughter to pop in to do a bit of shopping and check she’s doing ok would dream of moving away and leaving her mum without access to support. Yet that’s precisely what could be expected of the poorest if these proposals go ahead.
All this makes clear that the government’s attitude to welfare reform and managing the public finances is that the demands on and expectations of the poorest should be more onerous, the consequences more painful, than for those who have the most. It’s a bad start from a government that proclaimed its budget should be judged on grounds of fairness. It totally fails that test.
Re testing people on benefits ah hold on thats what you were doing, New labour brought in the back to work test and the new medical, as for the New DLA test all that is they have brought back the old medical again the one Labour eased out.
Lets get something right New labour would have done the same, or would Brown have done something different like sack Darling.
Do not blame the Tories for carrying on with what you started.
Ann begg on TV now she is happy with the Tories , so life goes on.
It might appear that men‘s equality sits on a mountaintop too high to reach in our lifetime. Feminist hegemony seems to reign like the Catholic Church in the age of Copernicus. Academics, government, media and the judicial system look like little more than extensions of feminist dogma. The workplace and even the social strata appear to have become feminist property. For a number of years, average men have been acting as though they lived in 1936 Berlin or 1970 Moscow, measuring their words carefully and casting a quick, vigilant glance over their shoulder before speaking. Others extol the virtues of feminism with sincerity that can only be properly expressed with help from a straw hat, a cane and some Vaudeville piano. And Some men are the real deal, born again believers in feminism, dancing though the socio-political morass like Hare Krishna’s in an airport, complete with dirty faces and donation baskets. Meanwhile, many Men’s Rights Activists, genuinely passionate about the cause, work under assumed names because of the very real danger of personal and professional retaliation if they are “discovered.” Vee know vaht you haff been dooink. It’s a sad testament to the reality that the thought police are not just imagined characters in some novelists dystopian fantasies. Men who mix the truth with their identities can be hurt by it, and have been. But there is trouble brewing for feminists. Not just annoyances from the cacophony of uppity MRA’s that plague their online comment threads, but real trouble of the catastrophic variety. In fact, feminism as we know it is going to unravel sooner than you might think. The First Great Wave of masculism is on its way. It isn’t a revolutionary tsunami, but it is happening fast, like flood waters rising with deceptive speed and force. And in the end, it will drown the feminist orthodoxy before they even notice the waterline is over their nostrils. If you think this is wishful thinking, keep reading. MRA’s are already influencing and shaping a new Zeitgeist. The evidence of that is clear and measurable and is already changing the collective consciousness of the western world. In little more than the past year we have witnessed events in the Men’s Rights Movement that range from relatively impressive to significant…to groundbreaking. There were two major court decisions in California and West Virginia that were very real, judicial cuts at the corrupt, feminist controlled domestic violence industry. Very recently the European Court of Human Rights dealt a severe blow to anti-father laws in Germany. In the last year we witnessed fathers rights protests in the presumably unlikely country of Mexico and the emergence of the movement in India. Men in Missouri recently won the right to use paternity testing in child support cases. And as just reported on Men’s News Daily, The On Step Institute issued a press release announcing a convention on creating men’s studies programs at the university level. This is not just more of what we have seen in the past in men’s studies, which amounted to nothing more than a women’s studies program dressed up with a fake beard and a pair of plastic, pin-on cajones. It’s an effort that will ultimately produce a tectonic shift in the academic landscape with lasting, positive effects for men in western culture. All these things leave one wondering what precisely has happened in recent times to spark such a flurry of events, seemingly unrelated, yet all bound to the common theme of positive changes on behalf of men. Why, after decades of trying, are things finally starting to happen, and why so fast? The answer isn’t complicated. The idea of speaking up for men is finally gaining acceptance. And that acceptance is all the culture ever needed to effect positive changes, the first of which was unclenching the vitriolic stranglehold that feminism had taken on our common sense. Feminists are no longer The Untouchables of western politics, and once that reality spreads some more, and it certainly will, the proverbial gig will be up. For this it is easy to credit to people like Warren Farrell and Christina Hoff Sommers; Kathleen Parker and Stephen Baskerville. Or the handful of others published and well known within the men’s rights community. And no doubt they have done much good. But there is something else afoot here; something even more powerful. It is rooted in the collective consciousness of the society we live in, and it is much more dynamic than any given handful of writers or activists. Forty years ago feminists steamrolled their way into the limelight of our attentions. Riding on the coat tails of the civil rights movement, they forced, with a less than legitimate agenda, a pendulum swing of such momentum that it literally swung out of sight. It moved so far away so fast that it appeared primacy in the gender dialogue belonged to feminists, and always would. That pendulum is swinging back Recently a fellow MRA pointed me to some very interesting statistics regarding the internet and gender activism. And what they reflect is that MRA’s are taking over the online world. Fact is, we already have. In 2007 if you did a google search on both men’s rights and women’s rights you would have gotten the following results. Women’s rights: 4,270,000 hits Men’s rights: 511,000 hits Exactly two years later you can do the same search with these results: Women’s rights: 48,300,000 hits Men’s rights: 70,600,000 hits In other words, we went from lagging by over 400% to a very substantial lead in two years flat. You may wonder why the internet matters considering the feminist influence in the mainstream media. It matters very much. Some elements of the mainstream media, largely as a result of the internet, are on the decline. Print media is clamoring against ever narrowing profit margins, cutting costs as much as possible but still falling behind the curve. Cable and network news outlets have been forced to integrate the internet into standard operations to reach the increasingly valued demographic of consumers who blend traditional and online sources for news. Political discussion forums and online campaigning are growing astronomically. Even political fledglings are using social networking sites like Facebook to launch their ambitions. It all points in the same direction. The internet is the mainstream media of the future, and it’s nature doesn’t allow the traditional gags to be placed on alternative ideas. In other words, in the online world, when the media talks, we get to talk back. And that fact makes it impossible to ignore any group with sufficient numbers and the will to voice their ideas. MRA’s have the drive and will, and the exponentially growing numbers. We are literally changing the way people think each and every day. And feminists are hardly in a place any more to stand in the way. Their dominance in so many areas has been long taken for granted, standard operating procedure if you will. But it is highly vulnerable for a variety of reasons. After a generation of debunked assertions, bad science and overtly sexist propaganda, their legacy of lies is finally making it’s karmic return to the source. Keeping a grip on power at some point hinges on having a grip on reality. Failing at this, modern feminism has become a paper tiger, caged in it’s own hypocrisy, subsisting on a diet of delusion and hubris. Which is another way of saying they are eating their own excrement. A once almost unassailable socio-political fortress, the gynocracy is now gimcrack on it‘s way to rubble, and feminism’s no longer a sustainable movement, but just a profoundly neurotic hitch in social evolution that is in the early stages of being corrected. Going though demographic information provided by sites like Alexa.com and others, you get a pretty clear picture of average people keeping abreast of gender issues. When you compare feminist websites like Feministing.com to sites like mensnewsdaily.com® it paints a pretty embarrassing contrast for feminists, assuming they can be embarrassed. Their demographics, particularly in education, look to be drawn from a mosh pit in an urban hell hole. Intelligent, informed people seldom stay with shaky logic and false premises. As feminism continues to exceed the average life expectancy of bad ideas, those that cling to it are often the only ones dumbed-down enough for the job, or those so hopelessly brainwashed that they no longer can tell reality apart from deified victimhood. So while men’s rights activism is on a steamroll and will soon be barreling like a locomotive right at the feminist power structure, the gate keepers won’t mount much of defense. The worm has already turned; consciousness of the truth is already being instilled into the culture on a growing scale. And truth is the ultimately terminal blow at any bogus ideology. We won’t know about this from picketing, shrill demonstrations or flaming effigies on the streets. There won’t be a trumpet call or a celebratory parade. We can simply see that the tide is turning each time a court inflicts justice on the tainted domestic violence industry. Our evidence will be the demise, one by one, of rape shield laws, the prosecution of paternity fraud and lying for the purpose of a restraining order. Or crying rape when sex was consensual to cover guilt, or simply to cover the “victims” reputation with the person to which they were supposedly committed, but betrayed. We will witness it in the eventual end of Title IV-D funding to corrupt family courts and the enforcement of shared parenting. The groundwork, and more importantly, the consciousness, for all this is being laid out as we live and breathe. This movement will find it’s way into social circles where statements like “Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them,” are met with stone cold glares and the righteous indignation they deserve. And we will know how real it all is as we hear the increased wailing of feminists who claim MRA’s are about misogyny and denying equal rights, followed by the dull thud as it falls flat on ears that grow more and more weary of histrionics and crying wolf. Feminism will die from a synergistic overdose of stupidity, smugness and sexism. And the men’s rights agenda will prevail because it is one of justice and equality under the law. That agenda isn’t just carried by those in the limelight. It is a groundswell of outrage that has been corked up for nearly a half a century. It is legions of men and women who are finally waking up and deciding that enough is enough. We have reached the time that if you want to get on the train, you will have to get a move on for a good seat. But it will be worth the effort. Or, as I recently read from another MRA, “This train is the only one that knows where it’s going.” All aboard.
’ve been an MRA (Men’s Rights Activist) promoting gender equalitarianism for over twenty years. Recently I have been downright giddy over the emerging voices of men and women who have had enough of feminists, and are throwing the lies promulgated by them right back in their faces. This is especially true on the internet. These days, if it gets loud enough on the internet, even the sycophants in the mainstream media start paying attention. But I have to say it is time to stop, at least for a moment. The real problem we have now isn’t feminists, it’s men. I am not talking about MRA’s, at least not most of them, but about Joe Average next door. I might be talking about you. And so I am here to do some male bashing of my own. And men now have that coming to them far more than feminists. I am not going to reinforce the stupid ideas about men that feminists have spread for so long, but to point out the stupid actions of men that have enabled feminists to keep grabbing more power without much of a challenge. We have had a gender war, guys. The problem is that you didn‘t show up. While men, and by that I mean you, your brothers, fathers, sons and friends get bent over and raped in openly rigged family courts, you look the other way. While your sons get marginalized and fall behind in ever more female centered schools systems (they now only represent 42% of college students), you have pretty much reacted by making sure the TIVO is set to get the next ball game. While the media has portrayed you as one dimensional idiots, bumbling fools who couldn’t buy an analgesic without instructions and supervision from your wife, you have validated that idiotic treatment by tolerating it, and have indeed begun to emulate it. While your sons are used as cannon fodder in illicit wars and are simultaneously excoriated by society for having too much power, your response has largely been: “Man, look at the caboose on her!” You have taken to reading magazines like Men’s Health, the COSMO for the new age male, so you can learn how to get those six pack abs and make princess take a second look at you. And five years from now, when princess robs you of your children, your income, your property and your dignity, your best friend will console you with something really profound and helpful, like “Dude, that really sucks. Want a beer?” It will happen to more than half of you that get married, but somewhere along your way in life, you hung a vacancy sign on your common sense, and you are likely helping your sons hang that same sign on theirs. It is enough to make someone say, “Wake the hell up!” You know, that may be the wrong thing to say. Most of you aren’t asleep, you’re in a coma; anesthetized by a thoughtless existence, you’re crippled by one of the few things feminists have said about you that happens to be true. You think with your penis. And you know, though you likely won’t admit it, when you think with your penis, the first thing it does is take your spine out of the picture. With that goes your values and credibility. And that is how most of you live, in a penis dictated servitude; as trained seals fearful of saying or doing anything that might cause princess to get upset with you, or, God forbid, that might keep you from getting laid. Personally, I have seen enough of this garbage from men to last me a lifetime. There are men and women out here right now, fighting an uphill battle you can’t imagine just to give you a fair shot at justice when the wife calls in the lawyers and the state to dissolve your marriage and your assets; to dissolve your life. You don’t owe them or me anything, but you might, if you can pull your head out for five minutes, think about what you owe your sons. Many of you who have already been destroyed by family courts are still raising your daughters to be replicas the princess that handed you your head, and your sons to be the pack animals that will carry the weight for them through life, only to be discarded when they are used up. Just like you were. And you are still more interested in big screens than the big picture. It’s completely pathetic. This chosen ignorance is fatal. Men die more frequently of all the top killer diseases than women, though women get the lions share of gender specific medical research money. Women outlive men by seven years, and though they have had a national office for women’s health for decades, we are just now hearing the first inklings that we might have one for men. It hasn’t happened yet, and wise men aren’t holding their breath. Maybe you don’t care if you die of heart disease or prostate cancer before you are sixty. But if you have a son, at least give him the honesty to turn to him and tell him you don’t care if he does either. That’s not shame, it’s blame. And if you are the “average” man in western culture, you deserve a boatload of it. I imagine that more than a few of you won’t much like what I have to say. You’ll have to just imagine my concern about that. But if it upsets you, it won’t last. All you need is fifteen minutes of acting like a lap dog for the nearest feminist, or hiding your cowardice behind words like traditionalism, manliness and chivalry. Say all three like you actually believe yourself and you’ll be right as rain. But if you are so upset that you want to do something about it, then I have a suggestion. Instead of buying those tickets to the ball game, or that next 12 pack, send the money to a fathers rights organization that is doing work for which you do not have the sense or the nerve. Or how about this? The next time you hear someone take a stupid, bigoted stab at men, say something about it. And if it happens to be a woman, don’t say something agreeable so you can score points. Don’t lie now, you know you have done it. After all, what is self respect compared to some tail? Your sons can live on their knees, too, though it is an ironic life for a species distinguished by it’s ability to stand upright. But if you can’t manage a single moment of real backbone, please just keep your mouth shut. You are quite skilled at that one, anyway. There are men our here trying to do for you and your sons what you won’t. There are already enough obstacles in the way. The last thing we need is foolish beneficiaries to shoot us down. Just let us do what we do. Let us be the advocates for your sons that you fail to be. Like I said, feminists are not the real problem any more. Men are. Youare. They launched a gender war and, rather than fight back, men just blindly followed, out of fear, out of biological programming and out of abject weakness. What else can we call it but weak when men and their sons get flogged with rampant injustice and they react, in a thunderous collective voice, saying: “How ‘bout them cowboys?” I know, this is a rant, and after I have unleashed all my hostilities I am supposed heave a sigh of relief and say something conciliatory, like “Sorry if I offended.” But the truth is that if this stuff applies to you, then you need to be offended. You need, I dare say, whatever it takes to get you to spine up and learn to think past the next ball game or round of the horizontal bop. If that is as far as you can reach, then you don’t deserve to be heard at all. The following are descriptions and links to organizations that deserve some of your hard earned bucks for the cause. National Coalition For Men Uses lawsuits to challenge laws that discriminate against men. Successfully overturned a law in California that denied public funds to male victims of domestic violence. Advocates for men on a broad array of issues, not just fathers.
There is a problem with the women in this culture. Yes, I know, there are problems with men, too. Believe me, I have heard about them for the last forty years. Some of it true and fair, much of it neither. It was a necessary dialogue just the same. So is this. To understand this we need a brief look at history. Women, in the past, were denied voting rights, couldn’t own land and didn’t have much access to employment that would give them the freedom to make it on their own. This needed to change, and of course, did, as can be confirmed with a cursory glance at the world around you. I laud those changes. But the problem was in how we got here. The reality is that the gender roles of our history were traps for both men and women. Women were relegated to home and children; men to sacrificial roles as protectors and providers. It wasn’t a conspiracy. It was just a matter of survival, and for many thousands of years it worked quite well to that end. But once men made the environment safe enough for women to metaphorically “leave the cave,” it was only natural and right that men change and allow that to happen. And ladies, we did. This is the simple but accurate truth of the matter. Men and women developed gender roles that facilitated the survival of the species. And once those roles were not necessary, they did begin the often complicated path to change. The problem here is that your knowledge of these historical events is largely shaped, convoluted rather, by feminism. Feminists taught you that your history with men was of unremitting evil; that you were chattel, slaves to men who held all power and shut you out with extreme intent. They even gave it a name. Patriarchy. It is a word that has become synonymous with oppression. But feminists were loathe to remind you that “Women and children first,” was the patriarchal mantra, and that much of the social norms, even when misguided, were a product of a code adopted for the sole purpose of preserving your life. It wasn’t always fair, but the unfairness wasn’t always yours. Men died by that code, and trained their sons to do the same. The fact that we still do is the subject for another essay. So what happened? As feminist distortions were increasingly embraced, and intertwined with the legitimate need for change, men did what they usually do. They reacted to the message and not the messenger and unblocked the entrance to that cave. Many of you spit on us on the way out. Many of you still do. It has to stop. This isn’t just about decency. And it is not just about the chasm of mistrust that separates us from each other, or the legions of the walking wounded from this godforsaken gender war. It is about our future. The vilification of men that you have accepted as appropriate now translates to catastrophe for our sons, for your sons. The problem is that what we say, think and feel about people invariably translates into what we actually do to them. Nowhere is this more evident than with our sons, in the here and now. If you take an honest look at the academic environment to which our boys are subjected, you will see that their masculinity itself is under attack with ideology that teaches them they are inherently flawed. Christina Hoff Sommers documented this in her highly recommended book “The War Against Boys.” She writes, “The pedagogy is designed to valorize females, such as teaching history in a woman-centered way. Boys are to be inspired to revere Anita Hill and to “enjoy” quilting. At the same time, schools discourage activities that are natural and traditional to boys, such as playing ball together.” She goes on to say, with sad accuracy, “Most parents have no idea what their children are facing in the gender-charged atmosphere of the public schools.” What Sommers didn’t add to that but I will is the fact that most parents have no idea about this because they choose not to. As girls and girls programs increasingly flourish, boys are falling to the sidelines in ever growing numbers. The results of that are chilling. Boys are more likely than ever to drop out of school and engage in delinquency and other problems. They are representing less college graduates every year. With this diminishing education and wholesale marginalization, they are on a fast track to being the “second sex,” that position that so many feminists touted as the greatest evil of human history when they claimed it applied to women. This is the lasting legacy of spitting on men. Your sons will not be the exception. Young men now grow up to be destroyed in corrupt family court systems where women are encouraged to and even praised for using children, their children, like pawns in order to drain the father of assets. And those same children also have their badly needed connection to their fathers severed in the process. When those exploited, abused children start quite naturally to act out and get in trouble, we blame the father who was removed against his will, for of all things, being absent. And the “freedom” women gained on this frenzied path of vengeance and victimization? It doesn’t appear to have settled well. Women are growing increasingly violent. They are matching men in domestic violence, blow for blow, and they are causing the lions share of injury and death to children in the home. But we don’t speak of these things. We are not supposed to. In your position as the identified victim, and mine as the identified perpetrator, there is supposed to be an indelible silence on these matters. For the most part, there is. That silence is destroying us. And it is a silence that is maintained with the collusion of shallow, weak men and misguided, self-serving women, which is to say most of the culture. The only answer I can think of is for men, and for women, to change. Perhaps you will consider this before concluding that men’s rights activists are whiners or woman haters or products of bad mothers. You might actually decide that most men’s rights activists are men who above all else, seek justice. For their children, for themselves, and ultimately for you. I hope that a few of you will read this and consider it the next time you hear someone say “men are pigs,” or when you hear a woman refer to her first born child as “the insurance policy,” or before you nod your head in unconsidered agreement with whatever negatives about men happen to be making the rounds. All of this will be visited on your sons, and their sons. I hope too, that some of you look at your sons and think, and ask yourself what kind of world in which you really want them to live. When your sons choose wives and marry, I hope you consider the agony they will go through when “taken to the cleaners” and robbed of their children in the family courts. You will be forced to stand by powerlessly and watch them have their hearts ripped out. As always, it will look much different to you when the system you help maintain with your silence crushes your son, and not just some obscure, unknown male whom you quietly think is getting what he deserves. It will happen to more than half of them. The best prevention for this last one is to teach our sons to choose carefully; to scrutinize a woman before committing his life and work to her; to evaluate her morals and values as a woman prior to putting a ring on her finger. or even whether it is wise any more to marry in the first place. But how can we do this if we keep teaching them that such evaluations are the stuff of misogyny? Indeed, how can we do this if scrutinizing women at all is such a taboo? And therein lies the rub, ladies. It is indeed time, just as it was for men, for women to be held to scrutiny, and to account. More importantly, it is time for women to do this on their own. I’ll do my best to provide a fair and compassionate mirror in my writings. It is always up to you whether that mirror is a place you want to look.
I’ve been just sitting here for 30 minutes now. My hands have been poised over my laptop, but they’re frozen. Actually they have a slight tremble, like all the keys are painted with cyanide and my fingers know it. I have decided to do a piece offering some marital advice to men. And I know men pretty well. I might as well be doing a porn review for the readers of Ms. Magazine. But I am feeling dangerous and my fingers are starting to work, so here goes. My first piece of advice when it comes to marriage is simple. Don’t. And I do mean never. And, yes, that means you. I don’t cotton much to psychobabble, so I won’t make a hypocrite of myself by putting you though it. Thankfully, it is not necessary. For it isn’t relationship dynamics that will get you. It’s math. And the numbers are scary. First, and most of you know this, more than half of all marriages end in divorce, not counting the ones that end in murder, suicide and psychiatric facilities. But that doesn’t mean that only half of marriages are failures. There is a lot of failed marriages that don’t end up as divorces. These are people who stay married and make a hobby of hating each other like Palestinians and Israelis. And the math on marriage isn’t near as disturbing as the numbers you will be faced with when it‘s over. The equation goes roughly something like this. 1 angry wife + 1 lawyer + 1 family court = 1 impoverished man living in a studio apartment and driving a 1981 Buick Skylark. Numbers are sometimes ugly, but they don’t lie. But wait, you say, I can change that equation with a pre-nup! Yes, you can. Here are the factor weighed results. 1 angry wife + 1 lawyer + 1 family court + 1 prenuptial agreement = 1 impoverished man living in a studio apartment and driving a1982 Buick Skylark. Pre-nups take more time to draw up than the courts take tossing them aside. The fact of the matter is that in modern culture men are better off downing ten shots of tequila and stumbling blindfolded through a mine field. The odds are better. Think about it for a moment. Marriage is quite literally an investment of not only your heart, but all of your work, income and future income, especially when children are involved. Now, if an investment broker told you he had a deal in which you could invest, with mostly intangible returns, and there was more than a 50% chance that you would be wiped out and spend most of the rest of your life paying the margin call or going to jail, how much would you invest? Well? Oh, come on now, you might be saying. It’s not fair to reduce the institution of marriage into a financial equation. Well, yes it is. Believe me, if the woman you marry doesn’t heavily consider your income prior to saying yes, she is the infinitesimal exception. And for those of you who still think it is natural and right for a man to be the breadwinner and the head of the family, please know that would be the same head that gets lobbed off in the family court where more than half of you will end up. And even if you don’t think, for who knows what reasons, that marriage is about money, you better believe that divorce is. Reducing holy matrimony to assets and liabilities is precisely what family courts are designed to do. And they do it with brutal efficiency. If you walk in to one of those places as a man in western culture, you will find that out in the most sobering ways imaginable. Your experience there will leave you with a mental block. You won’t even be able to say the words “family court” again, for they will find you, shivering in the corner, mumbling incoherently about “that place.” A lot of married men already know this. Those are the guys in the other half of the marriage statistics. You know, the group that is “successful?” Plenty of them have consulted lawyers because they wanted to escape insufferably nasty, horrifically high maintenance wives, but the more legal realities they heard, the more those banshees they were married to began to resemble June Cleaver. As soon as they coined the phrase “Take him to the cleaners,” the follow up, “cheaper to keep her,” wasn’t far behind. Just don’t do it. Living with a woman may be a better option, but you need to be careful with that one, too. Depending on the laws where you live, you could end up married without knowing it. So gather your facts. Yes guys, that means go see a lawyer, one that understands men’s legal issues, before you even shack up. Do it the moment she asks if she can leave some clothes in your closet. Better yet, do it now, while you don’t have a girlfriend and can still think from the neck up. Consider the legal consult the investment of a lifetime, because it is. And having children? Sure. Just be prepared to have every connection to those children severed when it’s over, except, of course, for the financial connection. That will be maintained at gunpoint. So choose that Skylark carefully. You’ll be driving it for a long time. I know that some of you are thinking, “Oh, that will never happen to me.” All I can say is that more than half of you are deluding yourselves, and the rest of you have no reliable way to know just how lucky you will be. For those who maintain that adolescent sense of invulnerability, such admonitions will fall on deaf ears. Never underestimate the power of denial. I also know that some of you, especially some women that are reading this, are saying “Hey, wait! Not all women are like that! They are not all the same!” And you are right. But all family courts are the same. Screwed in L.A. Shafted in New York. Swindled in London. They are all the same. Just don’t do it. But, in the rare case you are not going to listen to me and make your own decisions, and you insist on taking that plunge, I have some suggestions on finding a suitable bride that might help with damage control down the road. First, never finance a relationship. Only date women that pay their own way from the start. Admittedly that reduces your chances of dating, much less marriage, but there is a sound reason for it. It leaves you with a better, if less common, class of woman. For if a woman feels that she is entitled to ride your wallet though life when she is infatuated with you, when you can do no wrong and are the most amazing man she ever met, just imagine how she will feel about your wallet when she hates the very sight of you and the sound of your voice makes her want to claw her own eyes out. Watch her behavior and learn from it. How does she act when you disappoint her? What is her reaction to hearing the word “no,” or when you choose your way instead of her way? If she takes it in stride and moves on, then you might have a keeper, inflection on the word might. However, if she responds to the fact that you went golfing when she didn’t want you to by cutting you off in the bedroom for a few days, or by telling you how selfish and immature you are for having any interests that don’t revolve around her, what do you imagine she will do when she fully believes that you are the anti-Christ and are responsible for every ill in her miserable life? And that, gentlemen, is precisely the woman you will face in a divorce. She won’t be rational or reasonable or even principled. She will be, quite literally, your mortal enemy. And she will have the full force of the state on her side. Make that a 1971 Pinto. And so there you have it, guys. A brief primer on the potential house of horrors we call marriage. All you need to do to have a fighting chance, though, is find a woman who makes her own money and considers it natural to pay her own way; a woman who understands that no one is the center of the universe and that meeting in the middle is the only sane path to a partnership. In other words, just don’t do it.