Category Archives: courts

courts, Divorce, Men's Issues

Excerpt: A Gentleman’s Guide to Manners, Sex, and ruling the World — Divorce

Leave a comment

S. K. Baskerville

Divorce

pages 173-178

I receive letters, calls, and email messages almost daily, and they always begin with words like this: “You won’t believe what happened to me.” But I do believe it, because not only have I witnessed many such cases; I have written entire books explaining why it happens.

Here I will distill all that down to practical information, though I must confess that there is not a lot to offer. Some may sound harsh and counterintuitive, and you may have to unlearn some conventional wisdom. For the standard “how-to” manuals on divorce written by lawyers and other divorce practitioners are full of self-serving platitudes that could hurt you badly.

Continue reading Excerpt: A Gentleman’s Guide to Manners, Sex, and ruling the World — Divorce →
courts, Fathers, Feminism, gynocentrism, Me Too, Stephen Baskerville

The Sexual Left, the Welfare State, and the Divorce Revolution

Leave a comment

(originally published in the June 2021 issue of Chronicles magazine.)

How America went communist.By Stephen Baskerville

“All politics is on one level sexual politics.” —George Gilder

Extremists break out of the margins and take power when they fool opponents into advancing their agenda. By politicizing the family and sexuality, the left duped conservatives, and all of us, into becoming their accomplices.

Since last fall’s electoral coup, the United States has been well on its way toward becoming a de facto communist government. But it is not the communism that conservative Cassandras have warned against, nor did it come about as they expected. In fact, conservatives bear a huge share of the responsibility for what happened. Misunderstanding the dynamics of today’s left, they helped fulfill their own prophecies.

Americans have long prided themselves on being impervious to socialism. They even avoided creating an extensive European-style welfare state. But the U.S. was not lagging behind Europe; as always, it was leading. For Americans took a unique road to socialism: They created a government engine that bred its own class of insurgents.

Knowing that doctrinaire Marxism held little appeal for Americans, the left did an end run around this ideological obstacle. They enlisted conservatives to the cause of socialism by forsaking the rhetoric of class warfare, appealing instead to a sense of compassion for women and children that compassionate-conservative gallants could not resist.

Continue reading The Sexual Left, the Welfare State, and the Divorce Revolution →
Boys, Boys and Schools, Circumcision, courts, Domestic Violence, false accusation, Fathers, intro, Men's Health, Men's Issues, Suicide, Video

New Men’s Issues Video

Leave a comment

I have opened a Patreon page and would love to have you join in.  Plenty of free content and for as little as $2 a month you get access to a 14 video series on men and healing that was a part of an international class five years ago.  Learn about how Eric Clapton, Michael Jordan and many other men healed from very difficult losses.  You can find it here:  http://patreon.com/menaregood

This video was created 10 years ago and originally was in 4:3 format and fairly low resolution.  I have now brought it up to 16:9 and increased the resolution as much as possible while still keeping the original footage and audio.  I have also added an Epilogue on the end that takes a brief look at the carnage left since this video was created.

If you are interested in donating to the cause of more content on men’s issues here is a way to do it!  Thanks!


 

 

 

Boys, brainwashing, courts, Domestic Violence, Men's Health, mental heatlh, misandry, Propaganda

Review: The Red Pill Movie — compassion and choice for men and boys

9 Comments

{Disclaimor: I played a small part in the Red Pill Movie so I am sure that impacts my review. I was able to see a screening in Fairfax VA on November 1, 2016.}

 

Buy The Red Pill

Rent The Red Pill

The Red Pill is an amazing documentary that accomplishes an incredible task. It portrays men as human beings who deserve compassion and choice.

It first helps the viewers to see that those bringing the message of men needing compassion and choice are not women haters, not Neanderthals and not unloving oafs but are people who are concerned about the humanity of both men and women and have already taken the red pill. These folks know that men, like women, are deserving humans. People like Elam, Farrell, Pizzey, Crouch, Esmay, Hayward and Angelucci all are shown not as oafs but as caring people concerned about the humanity of men and boys.

With that task started the harder work begins. The work of showing that men and boys face hardship and discrimination and fail to engender compassion from the vast majority of our culture.

The film accomplishes this by describing the inhumanity that men and boys have experienced and the concerted societal effort to ignore their suffering. It succeeds in doing this through graphics, through talk, through human stories and through statistics. It powerfully builds the case that men and boys are silently suffering in a world that sees the needs and pains of women and girls as a call to action and the pain and needs of men and boys as something to ignore. The message and theme of men’s disposability is gradually brought to life along with men’s issue after men’s issue that is driven home with undeniable statistics and powerful personal stories.

red.pill_All of this likely leads to an audience that is unsettled at best. Their blue pill comfort is being shaken and challenged. Two opposing elements come crashing together. On one hand, the viewer’s worldview has likely been that men have it all, have all the power and privilege and don’t need/deserve special help or even compassion. But on the other hand they are now in the midst of seeing the Red Pill message which is elegantly and honestly challenging that worldview by exposing the hardships of men and boys and how that is very often ignored. The unavoidable dilemma is that the viewer realizes they too have been a part of this global ignoring of male pain. These two opposing forces can’t coexist. Something has to give. This is where Jaye truly shines. She seems to have predicted the audiences’ angst response and gives them a balm: she tells them about her own ambivalence, her own disbelief and struggles, and her own discomfort with this new vision of men. She intersperses what she calls video diaries throughout the film and they show her process over the 2-3 years of filming of slowly struggling with the red pill and how hard a thing this is to swallow. I am certain that most of her audience is having the exact same ambivalence, disbelief, and discomfort that Jaye so aptly portrays in the video diaries. This gives them a model, another human being who has a similar struggle. My guess is that having Jaye as a model in these video diaries makes their task of incorporating such a large dose of new information that contradicts their beliefs a bit easier. When they see a very attractive young blond feminist who is openly questioning her own previous beliefs it normalizes their own experience of the same. The audience is at a disadvantage since they do not have 2-3 years to process, they only have the less than 2 hours of the film. Dissonance. My guess is that the end product of the video diary approach is that it helps the audience swallow and process a bit of their own bias. It likely softens things a bit and it does so in a way that facilitates their feeling stunned and minimizes their rage and anger. Being stunned breeds discussion and questions of oneself and others, being furious tends to breed separation and denial.

There will be plenty of folks who can’t psychologically tolerate the message of the Red Pill even with the helpful video diaries. These folks will likely be furious after seeing the film. That is both fine, expected, and welcomed. Better furious than ignorant. Cassie Jaye has given them a good shot to come out of it with questions and feeling at least a little more intact. I’m sure their mileage will vary based on their own level of personal development.

4stonewa

 

Jaye also interviews feminists. Quite a few of them. Their words likely grate on the viewer’s psyche due to the viewer’s brand new realization of some men’s issues. The feminists tend to disregard men and boys and overtly contradict the very thing the film has been teaching. When you have seen clearly how men and boys are getting very little compassion it’s much easier to see the stark contrast of the feminist message of blaming men. It makes it very easy to see how their feminist world view is myopic and severely limited. Perhaps an even larger impact on the viewer came from the scenes of protestors trying to keep men’s issues from even being discussed. And then there was Big Red. The people I spoke with after seeing the movie unanimously referred to Big Red as extraordinarily enlightening to the hate that exists. The clips of the protestors and of Big Red were very effective in helping the viewer to understand the depth of their hatred and misandry.

The protestors chanted such hatred as “Fuck Warren Farrell.” They accused him of being a rape apologist, a misogynist, and pulled fire alarms to sabotage his talk. What was the issue they were so enraged over? Farrell was to talk on boys and suicide. Boys and suicide.   Knowing this it becomes clear that their upset was likely not about Farrell but more related to simply wanting to stop anyone from discussing men’s issues such as boys and suicide. That is a forbidden topic to them. Why? Because it challenges their worldview and they will have none of it and will do what they can to stop it. They are like flatworlders who attacked those who said the world was round. This is obvious in the film but what I want to point out now is that we are seeing the exact same dynamic from people protesting this film. Watch the movie and see that it is only about men’s and boy’s issues. That’s it. But the protests of the film, like the Farrell protestors,  are not about the content, they are personal attacks on the cast and on the director. Watch the reviews, or the attempted bannings of this movie and you will see this dynamic repeated over and over again. The worldview is challenged and the response is to make personal attacks, just like “Fuck Warren Farrell” or now “Fuck the hateful misogynist Red Pill”.   It is obvious to even a casual observer that what is driving this frantic screaming has nothing to do with the cast or the director or even the content of the film and has everything to do with the protestors’ lack of compassion for men and boys and their fear of anything that might negate their feminist ideology. Here’s a tip: when you run into someone attacking this movie just ask them if they are having a hard time having a little compassion for boys and men. That cuts through to the reality of their upset.

The film flowed easily for me. In its nearly two hours time I never looked at my watch and was engaged in the flow on screen. So many issues were presented clearly and accurately. I was especially moved by the section on circumcision. I wont’ spoil it for you but will just say that is was a powerful use of cinema to get a message across and will likely open many eyes about the barbarism of circumcision and the default disregard for the pain and trauma of little boys.

I loved this film but if I had one nit to pick it would have to be the omission of the role of gynocentrism. The film does a great job of showing that men and boys have faced difficulties and their problems have been ignored but it fails to help the viewer understand why this might be. Yes, feminism is a problem but the question is what is fueling feminism? Why has it been so successful? Why has it been so easy to over run the needs of men and boys while tending to the needs of women and girls? The answer lies in gynocentrism which has been around for eons as compared to feminism which is a newcomer and basically a parasite of gynocentrism. In a nutshell, gynocentrism is about providing and protecting women and children at the expense of men. You know, the old “women and children first” meme. This is not a totally bad thing since it has been what has built our culture and many others for thousands of years. It does however impact our interest in women’s issues and our turning away from men’s issues. If you are curious about your own degree of gynocentrism you can try an exercise here. If you want to learn more about this I wrote an article Gynocentrism 2.0 that goes into much more detail. (or a youtube video here) Maybe the next documentary will explain this in detail.

Jaye has had the guts/balls to make this film and tell her story, the men’s story, the feminist’s story and let it all stand on its own. When she interviews both MHRA’s and feminists she doesn’t take sides, she lets people talk. She doesn’t interrupt or challenge or try to change minds. She just listens. Through most of the film she just puts the story into the film. This is a gift to the viewer. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to her for this. When you see this movie you will likely join me in that feeling and importantly, will be left to decide on your own.

Jaye has produced a ground breaking documentary that exposes the default lack of compassion for the needs and problems of men and boys. In some ways the film is a litmus test. It will accurately tell you how much compassion you have for boys and men. Those who flail their arms in the air and scream patriarchy, patriarchy, patriarchy are letting you know that they failed the litmus test. They are lacking in compassion for boys and men.

Thank you Cassie Jaye for having the courage to make this critically important film. Thanks too for the unmistakable message that underlies the Red Pill:  Men Are Good!

 

Buy The Red Pill

Rent The Red Pill

courts, gynocentrism, misandry

Sticks and Stones, but Words will never hurt you.

1 Comment

 

Sticks and stones can break your bones but words will never hurt you.

Right.

The woman pictured above, Michelle Carter,  is now on trial for manslaughter.  It seems she encouraged a young man to take his own life.  In fact it is worse that that, when the young man was in his pickup truck in the process of asphyxiating himself he had second thoughts about ending his own life.  She promptly told him to get back in the truck and do this.   Apparently just before his suicide she said via text that “You just have to do it like you said.”  But it gets worse.  She was telling her friends how worried she was over his mental state while simultaneously telling him he needed to end his life.

It will be interesting to see how the court will handle this. We all know that women for the same crime are arrested less than men, prosecuted less than men and then if convicted get about 20% less jail time then their male counterparts for the same crime. (barbed wire ceiling?)  This is gynocentrism at work.  Since nearly every male and female on the planet have a bad case of gynocentrism it will be likely she gets off or gets a slap on the wrist. Of course the gynocentric  ACLU is in the act of defending this woman.  We will see how things turn out.

In my mind this is a petri dish to observe the world’s reaction to relational violence.  We have spent 50 years getting tougher on physical violence, and rightly so.  But that same 50 years has passed by without much of a whimper about relational violence.  It is clear in this case that relational violence was deadly.  It killed.  But will she pay a price in the same way that men spend years in prison for their violence?  I would bet not.

From my perspective relational violence needs to be called out.  I have spent years working with couples who are struggling.  I have seen plenty of fights and many if not most are ignited by relational violence.  Usually the woman, but not always.  She knows just what will ignite him, just where his soft spot is, just where it hurts the most and that is just where she goes.  Whether it is sexual failures, business failures, or some personal weakness or blemish she goes there and the fight is on. Men who have a great deal of patience can weather such attacks.  Many men cannot.  Some men, a minority actually, can’t take it and will lash out physically.  Once he makes this mistake the ball game is over.  She has won and she knows it.  If the couple go for therapy the entire time will be spent on his violence and inconsiderate behavior towards her.  If they go to the police it is worse.  You know what happens there.  In both scenarios he pays a serious price and she is held accountable for NOTHING.  But wait a minute, she threw the match in that lit the fire.  She is the arson but he is the felon.

Most therapists will fall for this in a heartbeat.  They will focus on the evil man and his brutish behavior and do everything to protect poor ol innocent her.

Can you see what is wrong with this picture?

We are leaving out any accountability of the woman and holding the man totally responsible.

It’s time we started seeing the injurious nature of relational violence and holding women accountable.

Know what I mean?

Let’s see what happens with Michelle Carter.