Fathers Are Legally & Politically 2ND CLASS Parents (Patriarchy???)

In the 1970s in America, 40% of university applicants were women and 60% were men. And then they brought in Title 9, which obviously addressed that to make it to bring the balance 50, 50. So it started in 1970, in 1981 we were at parity. So half of students were women, half of students were men. I would say the patriarchy was smashed at that point, but we carried on, we just carried on. So now it's crossed over and now we've crossed over so much that boys are now further behind than, than girls were 50 years ago. And we're still going, we're still going. And it's like you like, at what point do we stop? At what point do we like take our foot off the gas and just let boys get back into education? So I would present facts like that and ask them, when is it smashed? What is their criteria for said smashing and when does it stop? When did it stop? And yeah, just set a better example. Don't fall down the rabbit hole of getting into big endless arguments of idiots in your comment section and spend your time elsewhere having conversations such as this one. Not like, get that right. I mean I do, I do up sometimes. I do get dragged into these endless feuds in the comments, but I try not to.

Yeah, every, every once in a while there's that person that just gets.

Sometimes it's like, oh.

Really?

I know I had, I had a, I had a man named Stephen Jenkinson on the show years ago and we were talking about patriarchy and, and he talked about like the sort of Latin origin of it and you know, being upholding the father right to be under the arch of the father, to uphold the father.

But do you know in how many states in America fathers have equal rights to mothers? It's like three states and pretty much all states, fathers do not have equal rights to their children. In the whole of uk, fathers don't have rights to the, don't have equal rights to their children. So fathers are legally and politically second class parents, like literally by law they don't have equal rights and they're treated as clowns that we're seen also seen by society as babysitters or like even predators, like a single man. I get so many messages from men who take their children to the park and they're just getting these like side eyes from a lot of women thinking that they're pedophiles. And then you turn on the TV and you get these awful, literal, cartoonish portrayals of like men like Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin and Hal and just these dreadful archetypes of fatherhood. So it's just like right across the board we see fathers as secondary to mothers and yet patriarchy theory tells us that the father is the ruler of the family. And I'm like, well, what sort of ruler doesn't have rights to his own children? Even in the most literal sense, it doesn't make sense to me. And I'd question yourself, like, is your father the ruler of his family? And like, just look around you, let's.

Say when you say that if a father is a second class citizen and doesn't have rights over his children or doesn't have rights with his children, what do you mean by that? Like when divorce happens, they don't have access or can you expand on that?

So in, I can talk about in the uk. So parental rights in the UK are called parental responsibility. And whoever has parental responsibility decides everything. So they decide on where the kid lives, what the kid's called, where they go to school, what sort of religion they follow, what sort of, you know, medicine, like healthcare, they get vaccinations, all of that, all of that is parental responsibility. And by law, a mother has full parental responsibility over their child in every single circumstance. So if she's married, single, divorced, separated, doesn't matter, full parental responsibility for her, which is, which is quite right. But a dad has to either be married to the mother or be named on the birth certificate. And even then I'd say he's still secondary, but without those two things you have no rights. And both those things are controlled by the mother. So she can just decide not to name him, obviously not to marry him, in which case he is irrelevant, he has much rights over his child than I would. And that's how it works in the uk, it's written in the Children's act and that's how it's been for as long as I've been alive in America. It's not dissimilar, depending on the state you're talking about, but you see it most when parents separate and they'll go into family courts. And a lot of campaigners are trying to get judges to adopt what's called a presumption of joint custody, which means that both parents arrive into court and it's like it's a level playing field and you presume that they're going to have joint custody and then both parents will build their arguments on there, but that's not happening. It's seen as the mother is the, is the primary parent and the dad has to fight to even keep up with her. And.

In Florida, for example, they, they tried to bring in the presumption of shared custody. And it was actually feminist groups such as the National Organization for Women that stopped it from happening. So organized feminist groups stopping fathers getting equal rights. And it is like indefensible. It's horrific. And like if you meet a father who's lost his child, that is not a pretty silent.

No, he's devastated. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, it's interesting because I think, I mean I've, you know, I've been working with men from around the world for a decade and the amount of men who have been just gutted and destroyed by not having access to their kids is wild to me. It's really heartbreaking. And. Yeah, go ahead.

I was just gonna say like Martin Seeger, who's a friend of mine and a psychologist, he's, he's done research that's tied about 20% of male suicides to losing children, family courts and relationship breakdown. So it makes total sense. Like a lot of parents, including fathers, would say their child is the most important thing to them. And to lose that is, you can see how that would end in so many suicides. And it is causing suicides. It's not like a trivial matter. It's causing deaths of men. And not in a small way like 20% in the UK. Yeah.

I mean, when I married my wife, I drove my father in law across the country from New Jersey to Vancouver BC, 3,000 miles because he wouldn't get on a plane. And we talked about, I interviewed him. I said, if I'm going to drive you across the country, you're going to let me interview you. And he's in his 80s and he's 100% Lebanese and grew up.

In Virginia in the time of segregation. And so I said, you're going to let me interview you? I said, if you could go back and do your whole life over again.

What would you prioritize? What would you actually focus more in on? And he said, I would probably want to be a full time parent. And he said, being a parent was the greatest joy in my life. And I said, interesting. And he, my wife wouldn't mind me talking about this, but she, because she's talked about it openly, her parents got divorced and they proceeded to go through the longest at the time, the longest divorce battle in the state of New Jersey, in the state of New Jersey's history because he was adamant that he was going to have equal access to his daughter. And he fought mercilessly to get it. And like, he fired lawyers. He went through. I mean, he. Like, really. It wasn't the best situation, to say the least. But I think in. I think in many ways there's an example of. I mean, he spent a lot of time and money and energy and, you know, focus to just get equal access to his child. And I think it was like seven years, seven or eight years of this ongoing battle to make sure that he could maintain and retain just equal custody of his child. And that, you know, I think for a lot of guys, they don't have the wherewithal or the knowledge or the, you know, the funds or whatever it is to be able to do that. And so the system comes in and basically says, here's what you're going to have to deal with. And they're put in a position of not being able to actually.

Be a parent to the child in the way that they ultimately want and the way that their child ultimately needs. So I think that's an example.

I just thought. Yeah, you pretty much took the words out of my mouth. Everyone talks about fathers should have a right to their children, which is fair enough, but the real elephant in the room is a child should have a right to both their parents. That's what's most important. A child has a right to his or her father and his or her mother. That's. It's not about a child having ownership of the. Of his child. It's about the child should have access to both parents as much as possible, and it's what's in the child's interest that is most important, and no one could possibly disagree with that.