There is a new push under way for women who divorce to be rewarded with even greater amounts of cash and prizes. Dr. Helen tackles this in Elizabeth Warren Wants Men to ‘Share the Pain’. It isn’t just Elizabeth Warren lobbying for an increase in cash and prizes; The Atlantic has a new article out titled The Divorce Gap, painting a picture of men frivolously divorcing and kicking their hapless wives out on the street:
…her husband told her to leave their house, and filed for a divorce she couldn’t afford. “He said he was tired of my medical issues, and unwilling to work on things,” she said, citing her severe rheumatoid arthritis and OCD, both of which she manages with medication. “He kicked me out of my own house, with no job and no home, and then my only recourse was to lawyer up. I’m paying them on credit.”
No doubt The Atlantic found this kind of one in a million case, but it is incredibly dishonest to pretend that this is how the family courts function. All they did was take reality and switch the sexes, and all to generate support for increasing the rewards to women who blow up their families. As every divorce lawyer knows, while there are very rare exceptions the system is designed to eject the husband from the home and replace him with an income stream for the wife. Likewise, both Christian and secular marriage counselors will tell you that it is women, not men, who struggle most with commitment. As Dr. Harley asks in Why Women Leave Men:
Why do women seem so dissatisfied with marriage? What do they want from their husbands? What bothers them so much about marriage that most are willing to risk their families’ future to escape it?
Elsewhere Dr Harley explains that 80% of divorces are initiated by women who become unhappy and divorce with little or no warning.
Even if you don’t talk to divorce lawyers or marriage counselors, and even if you don’t look into the academic research, everyone knows what the score is here. It is women, not men, who not only initiate the vast majority of divorces, but shamelessly fantasize about divorce as “empowerment”. As the very first comment on the Atlantic article notes:
The Atlantic understands the reality of who initiates divorce (and why) better than most, because they are in the entertainment business. If you want to keep the interest of your female audience, part of your offering needs to be stories of women frivolous divorcing so they can imagine doing the same. But this only applies to women; this is why there is no counterpart to Eat Pray Love or Fireproof for men, and why only women can make a living writing about the pain they caused by blowing up their families. A man fantasizing about destroying his family would be seen as disgusting, but for women this is not only normal and empowering, but good for business.
And again, The Atlantic knows this because this is the business they are in. When The Atlantic isn’t publishing articles like The Divorce Gap complaining that women don’t get enough cash and prizes for divorcing, they are publishing articles like Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off:
The author is ending her marriage. Isn’t it time you did the same?
To make sure their audience knows they aren’t advocating something so gauche as men abandoning their families, the accompanying image features a group of women escaping out of the windows of their homes. Since this isn’t a piece lobbying for more cash and prizes, The Atlantic can afford to be honest about not only the real initiators of divorce, but the real reason as well. The piece opens with:
SADLY, AND TO my horror, I am divorcing. This was a 20-year partnership. My husband is a good man, though he did travel 20 weeks a year for work. I am a 47-year-old woman whose commitment to monogamy, at the very end, came unglued.
Leave a Reply