Selected Quotes from The Case for Father Custody

Robert Briffault: “Where the female can derive no benefit from association with the male, no such association takes place.” ( The Mothers, I, 191)
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“[Ann] Koedt’s classic essay [‘The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm’] was no less than a declaration of sexual independence: women could now be sexual, fully orgasmic beings not only outside of marriage but apart from men,” who, she acknowledged, now had good reason to “fear that they will become sexually expendable.”
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Freud thought women had little sense of justice, this being, he supposed, “connected with the preponderance of envy in their mental life.”
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The Taming of the Shrew has this: He “cares for thee and for thy maintenance, commits his body to painful labor both by sea and land to watch the night in storms, the day in cold, whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe, and craves no other tribute at thy hands but love, fair looks, and true obedience, too little payment for so great a debt.”
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She could earn her own economic security, but she would find it hard to find a man interested in being the recipient of her free and joyous love outside of one-night stands, because the man would have no domestic security with her, no bargaining power. He would know she could dump him when she was no longer in heat, when she no longer felt like giving her love freely and joyously. Then, as the fivefold-greater divorce rate of employed women shows, she might exercise her privilege of discarding him as Betty discarded Carl, as Adrienne Rich discarded Alfred, as Marcia Clark discarded Gordon. What do such high-achieving women need husbands for?
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Society today is less energized than it was during the era of the Feminine Mystique following World War II, when America’s industrial plant, already the wonder of the world during the war, doubled in just twenty years, when the GNP grew 250 percent and per capita income increased 35 percent between 1945 and 1960. Those were the years of which Joseph Satin said “Never had so many people, anywhere, been so well off”—the pre-feminist years, when families were stable, before “they redesigned our concepts of sexuality and gender equality.”
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The notion that marriage ought to be based on free and joyous love is an affectation made so that one of the spouses, usually the wife, can later complain that love has vanished and that its absence justifies doing what Betty Friedan did to Carl. Free and joyous love between a man and a woman is an undependable basis for a child rearing institution.
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It is to prevent this female exercise of power that patriarchy makes the father the head of the household and strengthens his family ties. Exogamy minimizes the father’s ties to his family. Women like it; it permits them to be unchaste, to reject patriarchy and sexual regulation, to make the exiled boyfriends sexually second-class citizens.
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Bantu kingdoms of Africa knew only queens without princes or consorts—-the rulers took slaves or commoners as lovers, then tortured and beheaded them after use….[W]hen God was a woman, all women and all things feminine enjoyed a higher status...
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Male dominance is universal, and most women want their men to be more dominant, not less. According to the psychologist Karl Menninger for every woman who complains to her shrink that her man is a brute, there are a dozen who complain that he is a wimp—incapable of acting like a father who takes charge, accepts responsibility and gets things done.
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Woman’s yearning to be back in the driver’s seat is shown by the Annex to this book. The matriarchal forces will never give up their war against patriarchy, against evolution. There will always be feminists and their allies—sexual anarchists and homosexuals, ACLU types in the Law, Bishop Spong types in the Church, Kinsey types in schools and Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee, universities, Murphy Brown types in the media—making war against sexual law-and-order and the father-headed family.
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Its program is to sexually de-regulate women in the name of “equality,” “pluralism,” and “multiculturalism,” to destroy the family and restore the female kinship system.
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It is the purpose of patriarchy to prevent this sort of sexual foolishness and to channel the energy it represents into the creation of families. This channeling is a primary responsibility of churches and the legal and educational systems—all of which are betraying it for the bad purpose of de-regulating sexuality and restoring matriarchy and its anti- social twin, homosexuality.
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The Classificatory System is found among uncivilized peoples, whose “families” are headed by mothers—like the American Indians, the people of the Australian bush and the American ghettos, societies based on the female kinship system, where females reject sexual regulation.
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“The Greeks, and most humans before our smug twentieth century,” writes Professor Bruce Thornton, “knew that the power of woman was the power of eros, and the power of eros was the creative and destructive power of nature itself, the forces that both men and women must strive to order and control for civilization—and human beings—to exist.”
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A husband is valued for achievement, responsibility, status. The boyfriend is valued for “what his body was like, his smile, his credentials as a friend and lover and nurturer; whether he treated her respectfully and kindly, and as an equal.” This threatens and punishes high achieving males, and rewards underachieving ones. It is the husband who provides the economic base for her game-playing and he must be a responsible achiever with status, but, in feminist thinking, must have no bargaining power. What, then, is his motive for being a high achiever?
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“Independence, even in straitened and penurious forms, still offers more sexual freedom than affluence gained through marriage and dependence on one man.” They will prefer semi-impoverished independence with promiscuity to affluence with chastity. “You don’t own me! You don’t own me!” “The right to define our sexuality is the over-riding demand of the women’s movement, preceding all other demands.”
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“The male,” says feminist Barbara Seaman, “is ‘in trouble,’ or ‘endangered,’ comparatively speaking, from the moment he is conceived, for more males than females die in the womb, in the birth canal, and at every subsequent step along the way”: It is now believed, although the whys and wherefores are not yet clear, that the greater vulnerability of the male may be related to the fact that his embryonic development is less autonomous and more chancy. There are more opportunities for things to go wrong—in his body and in the male circuits of his brain….The male may be larger, on the average, and better able to lift weights, but let us not allow appearances to deceive us any longer. In many respects, including staying power, we must correctly be called the first and the stronger sex. One writer enumerated some of the female’s biological advantages: “more efficient metabolism, the more specialized organs, the greater resistance to disease, the built- in immunity to certain specific ailments, the extra X chromosome, the more convoluted brain, the stronger heart, the longer life. In nature’s plan, the male is but a ‘glorified gonad.’ The female is the species.”
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How ridiculous, then, for women to envy male achievement. How unfair to try equaling it by quotas, affirmative action and comparable worth programs to discriminate against men. Why not give a little cheer for the poor male cripple who succeeds in making the superior female envious, making her declare “Women are not inferior,” making Betty Friedan shame her sisters by telling them “Society asks so little of women”?
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But this superior male achievement which makes females envious is based on male participation in reproduction, on men being heads of patriarchal families and women’s acceptance of sexual regulation. Unmarried males are conspicuously underachievers, earning scarcely half of what married men earn.
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Marcia Clark divorced her husband Gordon Clark because she “no longer found him intellectually stimulating.”
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The judge gave her custody of Gordon’s two young sons and ordered him to pay her support money. Before she signed her book contract for 4.2 million dollars, she already earned almost twice as much as Gordon, but she asked the court to increase his support obligation so that she could buy more clothes and make a better impression on TV audiences.
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If the man imagines marriage is held together by “love” he will find out differently from her demands for post-marital subsidization, like those Ms. Friedan tried to collect from her ex-husband.
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A disproportionate amount of child abuse is committed by mothers even in two-parent homes (this is a dirty little secret feminists don’t want you to know), but the amount of abuse increases enormously when the mother becomes single. According to Patrick Fagan and William FitzGerald, “The person most likely to abuse a young child is the child’s own mother….The most dangerous place for a women and her child is an environment in which she is cohabiting with a boyfriend who is not the father of her children.
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According to Ronald Tansley, “In Oregon last year [1994] 33 children were killed as a result of child abuse. Mothers were killers in 27 of these cases.”  In Milwaukee County in 1989 there were 1,050 reported cases of child abuse. Eighty-three percent of these cases occurred in households receiving AFDC.
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According to Maggie Gallagher, “The person most likely to abuse a child physically is a single mother. The person most likely to abuse a child sexually is the mother’s boyfriend or second husband….Divorce, though usually portrayed as a protection against domestic violence, is far more frequently a contributing cause.”
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Women offer their love “freely and joyously” — but only temporarily. This is the female kinship system.
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The program implies a denial of freedom to male sex partners, who must submit to both exile from meaningful reproduction and to subsidizing women’s promiscuity.
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Female rebellion against patriarchy is natural, an expression of Briffault’s Law and an attempt by females to regain their lost female primacy.
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Feminists like Ms. Reed relish the idea that men were once mere sexual hangers-on, boyfriends, secondary creatures.
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This is the double-barreled feminist program—matriarchy with subsidization, whether by ex-husbands, as Ms. Friedan proposes, or by government.
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Women are allowed to play the Motherhood Card; men are forbidden to play the Money Card. This is how the cause of feminism is served, how the family is destroyed.
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but still more serious is the fact that, according to David Popenoe, “Juvenile delinquency and violence are clearly generated disproportionately by youths in mother-only households and in other households where the father is not present.
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This is one reason why they want to work. Work offers them the lure of economic independence, consequently sexual independence, meeting males and having innocent flirtations and adulteries on the job.
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“Many men, at first,” writes Erin Pizzey, former feminist, “responded with cries of delight. Blinded by lust and the lure of relationships without any responsibility, many men fully concurred with the women’s movement.” But then: Slowly, as women moved into positions of power, men began to feel the iron fist of the women’s movement on their backs….Today, millions of men look back at the devastation this movement created in their lives….A generation of young men in their early twenties is now adrift in a sea of misandry….No wonder they turn to mental illness, suicide and drugs….What we have left, thanks to this evil movement, is a vast number of lone women trying to keep what is left of family life going.
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On most Saturday and Sunday mornings, students search from floor to floor to find a bathroom they can use….Most of the bathrooms are just plain unusable. The floors are covered with vomit and stale beer, toilets have been stopped up, cans and bottles litter the sinks….Pornography is everywhere. Not just inside the dorm rooms but on the outsides of doors…. disgusting, degrading photos. And it’s not just male students who display pornography. Many women now decorate their walls and doors with pictures of naked men….Fornication is central to dormitory living. Nearly all university students fornicate—about 85 percent according to most statistics….If you’ve been inside a big secular universities—or smaller colleges — you know this is true, not just at the University of Michigan but all over the country.
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For every one of the “girls having babies” who has been drawn away from marriage by the triumph of feminism there is an unattached, probably underachieving and possibly disruptive male wondering what society wants him to do, and there are probably some underachieving, possibly messed-up kids. Mom and the kids are economic liabilities to society, dependent to a greater or lesser degree on society’s Backup System. The feminist campaign against motherhood has succeeded only with educated women who ought to be mothers.
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Feminist Carolyn Shaw Bell actually proposes taxing all men to subsidize all women. Similarly feminist Martha Sawyer proposes the subsidization of women by “the most advantaged class in society, white males.”
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Emancipation from patriarchy is, as feminist Ellen Willis says, “real progress for women, open[ing] up the possibility of a livelihood independent of fathers and husbands…enabl[ing] women to fight for basic perquisites of citizenship and ultimately to make the far more radical demand for control over their sexual and reproductive lives.”
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It gave children fathers. The “problem that has no name” of which Ms. Friedan complained was the result of women having had most of their other problems solved by the patriarchal system and being confronted with the problem at the apex of the “hierarchy of needs,” the spiritual problem of finding enlarged meaning in life.
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Betty Friedan, an unspiritual lady, imagined the vacuum might be filled by an elitist career, an economic solution. It hasn’t worked out. Most liberated women are more miserable than ever.
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The Australian females, says Dr. Eylmann, appear, many of them, to be absolute nymphomaniacs. It is difficult to restrain young girls even in the mission schools; the teachers themselves are not immune from their direct solicitations. It has been found impossible to conduct mixed classes of aboriginal children, even of the tenderest age.
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“Wherever,” says Briffault, ”individual women enjoy, in a cultured society, a position of power, they avail themselves of their independence to exercise a sexual liberty.”
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The feminist revolution and the Mother Daughter Revolution and the anthropological evidence offered by Briffault show that women left to themselves do not manifest “the intelligent and controlled female sexuality that makes civilized human communities possible.”
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Chaucer’s Wyf of Bath told us that what women want most is mastery over their husbands. Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs tell us “The clitorally aware woman is sexually voracious to the point of being a threat to the social order.”
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Women who have premarital sex have an eighty percent higher divorce rate.
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Children have to put up with father-deprivation in order that their Moms may be free to “thrive.” Boys must accept matriarchy and a high probability of rolelessness. Girls may like their freedom from sexual regulation but they too are trapped in the role of impoverished single motherhood, where they wonder where the men are.
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If men realized that they were primarily responsible to be fathers to their children, not sugar daddies to Mom, not willing handmaidens and servitors to the stupid judges who are wrecking over half of society’s families.
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Even on the absurd assumption that they could frighten 90 percent of males into being chaste, the remaining 10 percent would sire as many bastards as the 90 percent, if women are unchaste. The obvious, tried and successful way for making men sexually responsible is by allowing them to be heads of families.
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“The sexual autonomy of women in the religion of the Goddess,” says Merlin Stone, posed a continual threat. It undermined the far-reaching goals of the men, perhaps led or influenced by Indo-European peoples, who viewed women as property and aimed at a society in which male kinship was the rule, as it had long been in the Indo-European nations.
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The basic unit of people-production is the monogamous heterosexual family. Sex itself is locked up in secrecy, privacy, darkness, embarrassment, and guilt. That’s how the industrial system manages to keep it under control.
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The good new life as seen by Ann Landers (“Cheating on spouses is now an equal-opportunity sport”) is the same as that described by Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs, where young single women crowd into the cities in search of sexual adventures.
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This is feminism. Women’s reproductive independence means pretty much getting rid of the two-parent family (“the way my mother lived”), reducing fatherhood to meaninglessness by a sixty percent divorce rate and a thirty percent illegitimacy rate.
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Katherine Anthony: “Such an opportunity came with the declaration of war in Germany, when the soldiers’ wives suddenly found themselves in possession of a cash pittance from the government and so lost their heads that their behavior was considered a public scandal. Writing about these women in the Frauenfrage, Anna Pappritz asked, ‘On whom does this situation reflect, on the women themselves or the economic subjection in which they have been kept? For many of these women, dependence is so oppressive that they feel their present independence as a veritable salvation. This legalized humiliation of the married woman is the humiliation of all women, and until the economic position of the married woman is improved the subjection of women will continue to endure.’” ( Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia, p. 202)
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“Women were not formerly immured in houses and dependent upon husbands and relatives. They used to go about freely, enjoying themselves as best they pleased….They did not then adhere to their husbands faithfully;…they were not regarded as sinful, for that was the sanctioned usage of the times. Indeed, that usage, so lenient to women, hath the sanction of antiquity. The present practice, however, of women being confined to one husband for life hath been established but lately.” (Quoted in Briffault, The Mothers, I, 346)
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Barbara Seaman: “Today it seems to me, a great many young women are merely swapping the old-fashioned sex-is-for-men sexual masochism of their mothers for a new type of self-punitive behavior. They are trying to copy the worst sexual behaviors of men, the promiscuity and exploitation. Sometimes they bed down with people who hardly attract them at all, merely to add another conquest to the ‘list.’ (Indeed, I know of one high school sorority where the girls are actually keeping such lists. The ‘champ,’ a pretty 17-year-old, has 121 entries on it.)”
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Riane Eisler: “[A] psychoanalyst who accepted a contract to work in Saudi Arabia (being a woman, this meant working only with women) told me how shocked she was by all the unconscious ways in which women in that society expressed this resentment toward men. She reported acts such as sexual abuse of male babies (for instance, grandmothers sucking baby boys’ penises) and women egging their sons on to ever greater recklessness (reflected in the many abandoned Cadillacs and other expensive foreign cars found on Saudi Arabian roads after crashes due to driving at incredibly high speeds) [personal communication with a psychoanalyst who did not wish to have her name revealed].” ( Sacred Pleasure, p. 447)
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Eva Keuls: “It is clear that the Athenian man, after excluding women from all the significant aspects of public life, felt uneasy about them. As the surviving dramas show, men fantasized hysterically about women rebelling against male supremacy. They peopled their tragic and comic stages with women taking their revenge by slaughtering husbands and sons and defying the social order.” ( The Reign of the Phallus, pp. 124f.)
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Dr. Barker warned that ‘within 15 years we can be faced with a generation of psychopaths—adults who are superficial, manipulative and unable to maintain mutually satisfactory relationships with others.” ( Together Again, pp. 201-3)
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Susan Faludi: “Men are also more devastated than women by the breakup—and time doesn’t cure the pain or close the gap. A 1982 survey of divorced people a year after the breakup found that 60 percent of the women were happier, compared with only half the men; a majority of the women said they had more self-respect while only a minority of the men felt that way.
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The nation’s largest study on the long-term effects of divorce found that five years after divorce, two-thirds of the women were happier with their lives; only 50 percent of the men were. By the ten- year mark, the men who said their quality of life was no better or worse had risen from one-half to two-thirds. While 80 percent of the women ten years after divorce said it was the right decision, only 50 percent of the ex-husbands agreed.” ( Backlash, p. 26)
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The absent father tends to have passive, dependent sons, lacking in achievement, motivation, and independence.
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Among boys, father absence has been linked to greater effeminacy, and exaggerated aggressiveness.
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“‘These men are appeasers,’ says the therapist Michael Thomas, referring to the battered husbands he counsels in Seattle. ‘They always back down to keep things calm, to keep the conflict from escalating. In my experience, the women [in these particular marriages] have a lot of problems with anger control. They are much more likely to throw things, they’re more likely to hit or kick when he’s not looking or asleep or driving. He doesn’t hit back because, number one, he’s conditioned to 47 T he Case for Father Custody believe that you never hit a woman. Two, he’s afraid of losing his kids. Three, [our society] doesn’t think of violence as mutual—it’s always ‘him’ doing it to ‘her.’ So if he hits back, the attention shifts to him and he knows that he’ll be up against the wall.” ( When She Was Bad, pp. 123, 129)
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Patricia Pearson: “Women can operate the system to their advantage. Donning the feminine mask, they can manipulate the biases of family and community…in order to set men up. If he tries to leave, or fight back, a fateful moment comes when she reaches for the phone, dials 911, and has him arrested on the strength of her word: ‘Officer, he hit me.’
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Female psychopaths and other hard-core female abusers have an extremely effective means to up the ante and win the game….The most common theme among abused men is their tales not of physical anguish but of dispossession—losing custody of children due to accusations of physical and sexual abuse, and having criminal records that permanently shatter their integrity as loving men and decent human beings.” ( Ibid, pp. 142f.)
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The message being conveyed is that women, being blameless, are entitled to victimize without consequence. It was in that context that Aileen Wuornos killed, and in that climate of sanctimonious wrath that she gained her sympathizers. As Candice Skrapec observed in 1993, in an essay about female serial killers, ‘A woman’s anger and need for empowerment will be directed at the power-brokers, those she has experienced as victimizing her. She will seek to punish them for being men.’ With what result? ‘The victim becomes the victimizer.’” ( Ibid., p. 232)
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Lynne Segal: “Virginia Woolf, Vera Brittain and many other feminists and pacifists recalling those days of war, were well aware that many women loved the war. They had excellent reasons for loving it: it liberated many women for the first time from the isolation and stifling shackles of the home.” ( Is The Future Female?, p. 171)
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Eva Keuls: “The Athenian preoccupation with legendary tales of wives murdering their husbands was nothing short of obsessive….In vase paintings Clytemnestra frequently appears running with an ax toward a closed door….The theme of the murderous Danaids was one of the most, 54 The Case for Father Custody perhaps the most, widely dramatized motifs in Greek culture.” ( The Reign of the Phallus, p. 337)
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Bruce Thornton: “Then we liberated Eros. We weakened those traditional social restraints as archaic, repressive impediments to the marriage of true hearts and minds. We dismissed them as puritanical inhibitions stifling the expression of our authentic selves. Guilt and shame were discarded as hurtful and hypocritical; no fault divorce reduced marriage to a lifestyle choice as changeable as a car or a job; reason was dismissed as the instrument of repression and neurosis. The result of this novel experiment? Look around you—venereal plagues, illegitimacy, weakening of the nuclear family, debasement of women, vulgarization of sex in popular culture, chronic dissatisfaction with our sexual identities—all testify to the costs of slighting Eros’ dark power. A modern-day Medea drowns her two children because her boyfriend doesn’t want them; a kindergarten beauty queen is raped and murdered; countless women are stalked and butchered by estranged and deranged boyfriends and spouses. We search everywhere for the answer except in the nature of eros itself and its potential for madness and violence. ( Los Angeles Times, 14 Feb, 1997)
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Robert Briffault: “Wherever individual women enjoy, in a cultured society, a position of power, they avail themselves of their independence to exercise sexual liberty.” ( The Mothers, abridged by G. R. Taylor, p. 386)
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