Material Incentives Against Divorce?

One of the main topics in the manosphere is the harsh divorce regime that every married man risks being  subjected to. Since family courts can be quite arbitrary and tend to be pro-female, a man could face a serious reduction in the quality of his life if his wife decides to divorce him.

Some manosphere commentators, notably TFH, have argued that the main reason why divorce is so common is because women do not face a reduction in their standard of living when they divorce. They point out that the divorce rate in many third-world and second-world countries is quite low compared to many developed countries (the Status of Men Index backs this up). I find this assertion difficult to dispute. It seems that once again, economics rules.

This got me thinking about how to set up an economically-based anti-divorce incentive system in a first-world country. Obviously, you can't make it so that the woman is impoverished if she divorces you, nor can you really make it so that her standard of living drops below your level. This is in part because women have extensive access to high-paying employment, despite the gnashing of teeth over the 77-cent statistic. My idea (tell me if it's been mentioned before) is to set up cash incentives against divorce. In other words, elevate her standard of living ABOVE yours while she is married to you, so it drops to your level if she divorces you.

Now there are several problems with this. Family court judges can be arbitrary, and may order you to still pay these incentives after the divorce. However, I don't think they would have much legal precedent to do so, and a good attorney could probably shift things in your favor. The details of how it would be setup are also murky; I am no expert on these matters. You'd probably have to divide assets 50/50 in the beginning.

There is also the problem of feeding an entitlement complex, since she would come to expect the rewards, and could decide to divorce you if she stops getting them for whatever reason (say you lose your job or something). So you can see that there are some questionable aspects to such a setup, and I don't even know if it'll work. I need feedback.

The War on Sex

In "The Prudes are Winning," Salon.com writer Tracy Clark-Flory interviews sex therapist Marty Klein, asking him how the mainstream views of sex have changed in America. He first mentions that Republicans have been quite successful at threatening rights that used to be a given, such as contraception and abortion. In fact, Arizona recently successfully passed several abortion restrictions. More - not fewer - things can put you on a sex offender list. Banning porn is becoming a legitimate topic of political discussion.

Why is this happening? Well, according to Klein, people have all kinds of sexual hangups because of the misinformation that is being fed to them. Due to the insane emphasis on extended abstinence that I mentioned earlier, people are growing up sexually fucked-up with a huge number of hangups and neuroses, because it's an unrealistic goal. How do they cope with this? There are two possibilities: 1) Confront the reality of their sexuality and deal with it out in the open or 2) try to deny it and sweep everything under the rug. Apparently, there is a big emotional desire for the latter:

We’re looking at people who are desperately frightened and lonely and sad and upset about their own sexual impulses and they’re turning to any place they can find to comfort themselves. Ironically, the religious right and the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party and Fox media, they’re offering a kind of comfort. It’s a Pyrrhic victory because the public doesn’t walk away feeling, “Oh, I have this wonderful sexuality and this wonderful body.” No, no, no. People get to walk away with, “Phew, I dodged a bullet, here are the sexual restrictions that alleviate my guilt, lower my anxiety about my neighbor’s sexuality, that make me as a parent feel less anxious.” People walk away with their sexuality diminished but they feel less anxious about the complicated world in which they live.

So you see how such neuroses drive unhinged policy, but policy is not the only area where damage is caused. Women are strongly driven by emotion, and this feeds into their treatment of men. If women see sex as disgusting, they will tend to see men as disgusting. Every man suffers somewhat as a result, especially men who end up in relationships with such women. I have not met a religious woman who was not somehow sexually hung up in a weird way, and who didn't see natural male sexuality as predatory and perverse.

This manifests in ways such as the following, where a man is unwilling to admit that he goes to strip clubs to supplement his sexual appetite:

As long as you have homes where Joe goes to strip clubs on his lunch hour and his wife doesn’t know, because if his wife knew she’d kill him, as long as you have a home like that, Joe is not going to want to go to a city council member or his county board of supervisors or his state assembly member and say, “Excuse me, I go to strip cubs, cut it out.” Joe’s going to have to say to his spouse: “Honey, don’t take this personally, but every once in a while I go to a strip cub. It’s really a lot of fun. If you want to come that’s great, if you don’t that’s OK with me, but I just want you to know that I go to strip clubs.” Believe it or not, that would be a building block toward political action on the legislative level. Because right now, people can’t go to their legislators because they’re not willing to come out.

If the average American guy today admitted that he went to a strip club, his wife would crucify him. She might even divorce him (note that the traitorous churches support divorce based on such premises). So due to the ruination he risks, he doesn't push to maintain strip clubs and other male sexual outlets, and they end up being restricted/dismantled by legislation. I think a similar thing is going on with the (almost literally) Puritanical war on prostitution.

So you see how this stuff is directly relevant to Men's Rights. Abstinence brainwashing makes women sexually frigid. They see men as disgusting, which probably means that they need harder "gaming," and less-aggressive guys are left out in the cold. Men are seen as sexual predators, which leads to severe sexual harassment laws, child porn hysteria, and porn hysteria in general. Divorce laws are made extremely pro-woman, and sex offender lists nearly include sneezing in public. Low-status men are seen as dirt and scum even more so than they otherwise would be (probably one reason why the prison system is so draconian).

And men who try to relieve themselves from their sexually frigid wives are punished harshly (viewed porn? went to a strip club? DIVORCE TIME!) Men who try to get action outside of "sanctioned" methods are punished because sex is seen as dirty and sinful (see: severely-enforced prostitution bans.) They then become mentally fucked-up themselves and become more likely to commit sex crimes. See how this stuff feeds back on itself? In the end, everybody is less happy.

Barry Goldwater was right when he said that the dominance of the Religious Right would be one of the worst things to happen to this country. And Dalrock is right in that social conservatism and feminism are practically linked at the hip. "You hold him down while I rob him" indeed.

Marriage and Risks

Something that always bugged me about marriage is the risks posed to you by a woman who becomes unfaithful. In the past, woman's unfaithfulness was punished, either by social ostracization, economic concerns, or legal barriers such as needing to provide a reason for divorce. Nowadays, none of those barriers exist anymore. A woman is not shamed for infidelity, in fact, if her friends see it as something good (like, say, if I'm not being a good enough husband for whatever reason, like being tired out after a long day at work) then they'll support her cheating and employ scary levels or rationalization that will make you wonder if women have any sense of morality at all. She's not threatened economically, so there goes that incentive, and she can divorce for whatever reason (no-fault divorce). So she basically has carte blanche to ruin your life. Who would enter into such an agreement? A sucker, that's who.

As Dalrock states,

a man actually loses protection from cuckolding and is placed at a disadvantage regarding custody if he marries. The only potential benefit a man gains by marrying is the moral force the marriage vows hold on his wife.

And as there's no longer any real material incentive behind the "moral force," (or really any moral incentive as I explained above) it's a really shaky thing to base your life on. The only thing holding a woman back is if other women shame and ostracize her. Which is less likely to happen nowadays and even if it does, she can always shop for friends who will agree with her.

Women don't seem to understand this. They don't realize the potential life-destroying problems a man could suffer if the wife doesn't feel "satisfied" or "happy" in the relationship. It's totally unbalanced and totally unfair. Unrestrained female choice completely supported on the backs of men.

Women seem to live in this fantasy world when it comes to marriage. They don't want to think about what'll happen if it goes bad, preferring to keep it all mysterious. I guess they don't really have an incentive to do so anymore.