{"id":1405,"date":"2005-03-10T04:30:09","date_gmt":"2005-03-10T12:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/03\/10\/but-women-do-it-too\/"},"modified":"2005-03-10T04:30:09","modified_gmt":"2005-03-10T12:30:09","slug":"but-women-do-it-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1405","title":{"rendered":"But Women Do It, Too"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bean quotes<\/a> from this Jack Straton essay about child custody<\/a>, and I can’t resist reproducing the same quote here:<\/p>\n

In the process, I am going to talk today about the effects of male power and control over children, not about parental power and control. I know that it is popular these days to de-gender family conflict, to talk about “spouse abuse” and “family violence” rather than “wife beating” and “rape.” I know that we want a society in which men nurture children to the same extent that women do.<\/p>\n

I know that fathers and mothers should both be capable parents. But if you ask “What about the kids?” I want to give you a serious answer. I cannot seriously entertain the myth that our society really is gender neutral, so to consider “What about the kids?” while pretending such neutrality is to engage in denial and cognitive dissonance. I cannot hope to arrive at an answer that will positively affect reality if my underlying assumptions are based on fantasy.<\/p>\n

So I am going to talk today about the effects of male power and control over children, not about parental power and control. As I cite examples, some of you may hear your internal voice saying, “But women do that, too.” As this happens I would ask you to be aware that such voices are often the voice of guilt that try to distract us from what we really know about men’s violence so that we need not take responsibility for this violence.<\/p>\n

It is true, for example, that some women do batter men. But the number of severe cases of this type is so low when compared with the virtual war of men’s violence against women, that they cannot be seen above the statistical noise. This voice that says “But women do that, too” has as its purpose, not compassion for battered men or lesbians, but a distraction from the noble goal of ending battering of women.<\/p>\n

So as you hear this voice today, become consciously aware of it. Let it into your conscious mind for a moment, and then let it drift on. It is just a tape recording that you can always come back to in an hour or two if there is a need. If you find that you just can’t contain this voice, that others must hear this tape recording, please do not hesitate to raise a hand or even to shout it out. We will pause to give it some space.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Straton’s essay argues that abusers should not ever be given child custody (as Lorenzo <\/a>says in Bean’s comments<\/a>, “it is infuriating that the link between wife-battering and child abuse by abusive men should have to be argued for and empirically demonstrated at all”).<\/p>\n

Straton, drawing on Martha Fineman’s arguments, also argues that custody should be determined not by a hard-to-define “best interests of the child” standard, but instead by a “primary caretaker” standard. The idea is that in child custody cases in which one parent clearly was the child’s primary caretaker (measured by such things as who made doctor appointments for the kid, who took the kid clothes-shopping, who drove the kid to soccer practice, etc), that parent should have a presumption of custody.<\/p>\n

This makes a lot of sense to me. First of all, because in many cases “who made sure Junior got dressed every morning and attended parent-teacher conferences” is much less nebulous than “best interests,” a primary caretaker standard will encourage clarity and discourage drawn-out child custody lawsuits – and also discourage parents from threatening a child custody case as a ploy to lower child support payments.<\/p>\n

More importantly, it puts the emphasis on creating gender equality where it should be – on what happens before <\/i>the divorce. I agree with men’s rights activists that ideally, fathers and mothers should be taking equal care of the kids; but they seem to concentrate nearly all their concern for equality on the teeny, tiny percentage of families in which a judge decides custody. If we want equality of child-rearing post-divorce, the way to get it is to try and bring about equality of child-rearing in families in general.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bean quotes from this Jack Straton essay about child custody, and I can’t resist reproducing the same quote here: In the process, I am going to talk today about the effects of male power and control over children, not about … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[95,116,96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anti-feminists-and-their-pals","category-families-structures-divorce-etc","category-rape-intimate-violence-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1405\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}