From: dgross@polyslo.csc.calpoly.edu (Dave Gross)
Subject: Men's Issues Newsbriefs #50
Date: Mon, 07 Sep 92 23:05:10 GMT
Organization: Mousebat, Follicle, Goosecreature, Ampersand, Spong, Wapcaplet,                 Looseliver, Vendetta & Pang
Reply-To: dgross@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Dave Gross)

Subject:  Men's Issues Newsbriefs #50

	From: noraa@cbnewsk.cb.att.com (aaron.l.hoffmeyer)
	Original article by Asa Baber
	Source: Playboy Magazine (September 1992)
	WHY CITIES BURN
	--------------------------------------------------

I really like John McLaughlin.  He is a crusty, amusing, tough-minded man with
an ability to laugh at himself.  He is also one of the few hosts on national
TV that understands the problems that men face today in this culture.

I was a guest on *John McLaughlin's One on One* last May.  I got on one of my
favorite topics and said, "I believe that until we stop separating fathers
from their children, we are going to have a society in which we burn down our
cities and have muggings in the streets.  The only answer to these problems is
to bring fathers back into the community."  (This, let the record show, was
ten days before Dan Quayle blamed Murphy Brown for the burning of Los Angeles.)

According to conventional wisdom, the causes of our urban ills are as follows:
chronic unemployment, drug consumption and merchandising, police brutality,
racial strife, a breakdown in law and order, miserly government funding,
redlining by banks and real estate developers, citizen disinterest, cultural
myopia and economic depression.

An incident occurs, a population explodes, a city burns, a city is looted, a
city tries to recover, a postmortem is held and the usual analyses and
explanations are paraded before us.  Some action is taken, some money is
handed out, some government grants and bank loans are restructured.  There is
a fuss.  Briefly.  But inevitably, the media lose interest, and life in the
mean streets goes back to "normal."

The reason the problem of urban violence has not been effectively addressed,
my fellow Americans, is that the single most important cause of urban unrest
is usually ignored.

The deepest and most pernicious cause of our widespread national agony is the
disappearance of fathers and mentors from the community.  We have allowed
fathers to become expendable in their children's lives, and we are paying
dearly for our cavalier attitude.

You will find millions of dollars allocated to rebuild businesses and clean up
city streets.  But you will find no significantly funded programs designed to
bring fathers and mentors back into the community.  The megabucks go for
window dressing, not radical rethinking.

For the moment, consider what a negative impact the absent father has on his
sons.  In the introduction to my recently published collection of *Men*
columns (_Naked at the Gender Gap_), I wrote the following about the universal
need for fathers and mentors:

"When a young man grows up without valid mentors, when he is deserted and
misled and abandoned, he is placed in a terrible psychological limbo.  He is
basically left without definition as a man.  He remains uninitiated,
uninformed, and lost in confusion, sometimes for his entire life.  He also
remains angry and embittered, feeling he has been cheated by the men he
depended on."

There you have it.  When the father is expendable, when he is disposable and
disrespected, when his vital and necessary role in the growth of his children
is unacknowledged, young men (and, I believe, young women, too) become
rebellious.  They yearn to burn.  They carry within their hearts what seems to
be limitless anger.

What can we do?  The following agenda will seem either incendiary or foolish
to some of you.  But I assure you that I mean every word of it.

We must change our child support and custody laws.  We must signify that the
father-child relationship is sacred and that the state cannot step in and
abolish it.  We must have a better understanding of the pressures a father
faces, and we must reconstruct our social contract so that he is encouraged --
not forbidden -- to see his children and be involved with them.

One day, I hope, the following practices will be common in our culture:

     1. *Joint custody.*  The state will admit that it cannot declare
	fathers null and void.  Unless proved abusive or derelict in a
	court of law, the father will always retain full parental
	rights in the eyes of the state.  From the beginning, the
	father-child relationship will be considered sacred under the
	law.

     2. *No strings access.*  There will be a certain number of days
	per week in which a father may be with his children.  No
	strings, no conditions, no excuses.  The children cannot be
	withheld from him at this time.  He is their father.  He has a
	right to be with them.  Period.  If there are disputes over
	child support payments or other issues, they are not reason
	enough to bar the father from seeing his children on these
	special days.

     3. *Accountable use of child support payments.*  The state will
	spend as much energy ensuring that child support payments are
	being responsibly used by the mother as it will in pursuing the
	father for those payments.  And the father will be given
	evidence of that accounting.  He will not simply hand over his
	money to someone he may not trust to be spent without his
	knowledge.

     4. *Enforced cooperation.*  If games are played with these
	arrangements and if fathers are barred from reasonable time
	with their children, the state will be vigorous in supporting
	the fathers' rights to have access to their kids.

     5. *Definition of reasonable time.*  This is the most important
	element in the revised legal code.  Instead of assuming that a
	fathers' importance to his children's growth is minimal, the
	law will finally acknowledge that the father is crucial to a
	healthy child, family and community.  Fathers will be awarded
	maximum time with their kids.

If and when we reach these conditions, we will have a healthier and safer
society, and we will have taken one giant step toward our survival as a
people.  If we continue to ignore this issue, our cities will burn and our
culture will die.

The choice is ours.

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	From: Mary Jacobs <U45301@uicvm.uic.edu>
	CLINTON/GORE TAKE ON DEADBEAT DADS
	Excerpts from a campaign release
	----------------------------------------

It's time not only to make women full partners in government, but also to make
government work for American women....

[Clinton/Gore Program:]

	* Hire and appoint more women at all levels of government
          so that a Clinton/Gore Administration better reflects
          this country's population.

	* Crack down on deadbeat parents by reporting them to credit
	  agencies, so they can't borrow money for themselves when
          they're not taking care of their children.

	* Use the Internal Revenue Service to collect child support,
          start a national deadbeat databank, and make it a felony
          to cross state lines to avoid paying support.

	* Sign into law the Women's Health Research Act, the Reproductive
	  Health Equity Act and similar legislative measures designed to
	  address current deficiencies in the treatment of women's health
	  problems.

	* Crack down on violence against women

	* Sign the Violence Against Women Act, which would provide
	  tougher enforcement and stiffer penalties to deter domestic
          violence.

[Governor Clinton:]

Led efforts to pass a law mandating that deadbeat parents with overdue child
support payments be reported to consumer credit agencies; established a
rebuttable presumption of paternity if the father's name and social security
number are recorded on birth certificates.

The Arkansas Child Support Enforcement Unit has received national recognition
for identifying deadbeat parents and for aggressive enforcement of child
support payments.

Al Gore supported legislation to create an Office of Research on Women's
Health to ensure that research on women's health is a priority in the National
Institutes of Health.

Senator Gore cosponsored the Violence Against Women Act, which helps make
streets, campuses, and homes safe for women.  The Act creates the first
federal laws to help protect women from spousal abuse.  It also defines
gender-motivated crimes as bias or hate crimes that violate civil rights.

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	Original article by Dave Gross
	DO MEN HAVE REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS?
	--------------------------------

Politically this is being billed as the Year of the Woman.  At the center of
the storm that's been raining on the parade of more than one politician is one
issue -- abortion.  What the reproductive rights of women are, and who will
decide the limits of these rights, is a defining issue not only of this
political campaign, but of this quarter-century.

But in the midst of this storm, some men are wondering if -they- have any
reproductive rights, and if so what they are, and if not why not.  "I made up
a riddle last night," writes Fred Hayward.  "What would you call it if women
lost not only the right to terminate the pregnancy when they wanted to abort
it, but even lost the right -not- to terminate it when they did not want to
abort it?  If she were forced to have a fetus aborted that she wanted to
raise?  You give up?  It would be called -equality-, because that is the
present status of men."

What men like Fred Hayward are upset about isn't abortion itself -- these men
are pro-choice -- it's the fact that women are currently allowed to make
decisions that have a great impact on men's lives unilaterally and without
their input.  If a pregnant woman wants to abort and the man wants to be a
father, tough luck for him.  If she wants to bear the child, and the man
isn't ready to be a father, well, see you in paternity court when it comes
time for child support, buster.

Among these men who are debating their reproductive rights, a small minority
believe that a woman should have the consent of the father before having an
abortion.  Most believe that because the woman's body is carrying the
pregnancy, the decision is ultimately hers.  The debate centers mostly on two
issues:  How this should affect male sexuality, and whether men should be
forced into parenthood through programs like mandatory child support or
whether instead men, too, have the right to decide when to become a parent.

"Male heterosexual responsibility," according to Richard Newman, "should begin
with the realization that once we fertilize the egg -- unless we have agreed
beforehand with our partner on the consequences -- what happens thereafter is
beyond our control."  Newman believes that men, unlike women, have no rights
whatsoever after pregnancy, and accordingly, they should make decisions about
procreation before sexual activity.

"If a man who believes abortion is murder finds himself involved with a woman
who explicitly says she will have an abortion should she become pregnant,
that man has a responsibility to himself to avoid -completely- the
possibility of her becoming pregnant.  Since he cannot question her right to
an abortion, the moral dilemma if she gets pregnant is his, not hers."

Unfortunately, he acknowledges that this "means that our choice of sexual
partners and the character of our sexual relationships will be determined by
our sexual biology (not a comfortable situation for anyone)."  What he
glosses over is that in real life women don't make hard and fast agreements
before the fact about what they will do if confronted with an unintended
pregnancy, and that even if they do, they are under no legal obligation to
follow through.  Newman's solution, then, if taken to its natural
conclusion, is either vasectomy or homosexuality or abstinence -- none of
which are for everyone.

Author Harlan Ellison came to that conclusion, though, and shared it with his
readers in the introduction to "Croatoan:"  "I wrote this story after an
affair with a woman who led me to believe she was on The Pill, who became
pregnant, and who subsequently had an abortion...  The point, which obsessed
me, was that if people whose lives touched by mine failed to take
responsibility for their own lives, than I had to do it for them...  Two
weeks after writing 'Croatoan' I had my vasectomy."

The other half of the problem Ellison experienced is when the woman decides
to carry an unexpected pregnancy to term despite the father's wishes (or the
father's ignorance of the situation).  One man wrote to Ann Landers to tell
the story of his 21-year-old sister who "despises men, but she wants a
family."  She got pregnant and said, when asked if she knew who the father
was, "I picked him out.  It was no love affair.  He thought I was on the
pill."

Ann's response, without a word deleted:  "It was, indeed, selfish of your
sister to do this, but don't make a bad situation worse by interfering.  Lisa
should get some advice from someone whose head is on straighter than hers.  I
hope she will talk to her doctor, a clergyman, a social worker or a
counselor.  She needs to know that the baby's father is legally responsible
for child support, even though she deceived him and doesn't want his
financial help.  Show her this column and good luck to all of you."

She's right, of course, the baby's father -is- legally responsible, even
though the mother deceived him, and even if she doesn't want his support.
Even if he doesn't know he's a father yet.  The courts will be happy to take a
chunk out of his paycheck every month, and add a little retroactive support in
for those few months he didn't realize he was the family breadwinner.  And if
he loses his job or decides he'd prefer not to work or to work a lower paying
job, well, that's too bad.  He'll pay up or he'll go to jail.

A woman has the absolute right to decide when to become a parent.  A man is
at the mercy of technology, biology, and the woman's decision.  A condom that
breaks (or a woman who falsely claims to be on The Pill) can be translated to
two decades of hard labor, working extra hours to support a child a man may
not even be able to see, or may not even want to know.

Some men are seriously debating whether there ought to be a pro-choice option
for men.  Should a man, they ask, be able to say, when confronted with an
unintended pregnancy -- "I don't want to be a father.  You have the right to
have an abortion, but if you choose not to, it's your choice and it's your
child and you will have to pay your own way."

Men who have been analyzing reproductive rights laws might be pleased by some
of the reasoning in the Supreme Court's latest abortion decision.  The
justices did not touch on child support directly, but while striking down a
Husband Consent measure in an anti-abortion law, they seemed to imply that
reproductive rights is a two-way street.

"The Constitution protects individuals, men and women alike, from unjustified
state interference, even when that interference is enacted into law for the
benefit of their spouses...  The Constitution protects individuals, male or
female, married or unmarried, from the abuse of governmental power, even
where that power is employed for the supposed benefit of a member of the
individual's family."

Is there a way that men can exercise reproductive choice without infringing
on women's reproductive rights?  Hjalmar Gerber thinks so.  "Male choice," he
says, "does -not- force any action on a women -- it merely presents her with
more choices (and dilemmas).  The male -partner- in a pregnancy should have the
-choice- as to whether he is going to support the result of a pregnancy -- this
may influence (but does not invalidate) the female -partner's- choice (abortion
or birth).  The only qualification is that the male partner should exercise his
choice within a reasonable period after being informed of the pregnancy."

Is this an acceptable compromise?  Not to most feminists, who have been
hostile to the idea.  Pro-choice has implicitly meant not only the freedom to
decide whether or not to have an abortion, but the availability of a man to
subsidize the choice to bear a child.  This compromise offers only to take
away a benefit from women in the name of equality, to demand that a woman's
unilateral decision-making power be accompanied by unilateral responsibility.
In language eerily reminiscent of the anti-abortion movement, these women say
"if he didn't want to be financially responsible for a child, he shouldn't
have had sex."  Or, "it's a child; not a choice."

Pro-lifers are universally hostile to the compromise.  Primarily because it
presupposes legal abortion.  But also, many, like the heretical "Feminists
For Life" group, have always suspected that abortion was a male plot to evade
responsibility for their sexuality and to get "free sex" from women.  This talk
of equal rights for men only confirms their suspicions.

And the idea of men being able to "abort" their responsibilities to an unborn
child is a long way from igniting the imagination of the press, the people, or
the politicians.  In fact, this year the term "Deadbeat Dad" is easily as
potent in the political arena as the term "Welfare Mom" was in 1980.

But the fact that these questions are being raised, and are being debated,
promises to expose a new facet of the debate over abortion, over reproductive
rights in general, and over the question of whether biology is destiny.  It is
clear, for instance, that much of the rhetoric of the current pro-choice
movement would support this radical notion of male choice.  If the idea catches
on, the pro choice movement will have to change its philosophical tack, or at
least its bumperstickers, to clarify why they believe women deserve choice and
men deserve to pick up the check.

And men, for their part, may just discover a reason to get more passionate
about the abortion issue -- and may find that they potentially have a big
stake in making sure that abortion remains legal.

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	Source: San Luis Obispo Telegram Tribune (9/7/92)
	NORTH AMERICAN MEN WORK LONGER HOURS THAN WOMEN
	-------------------------------------------------

The International Labor Organization released a report today showing that in
many areas women work longer hours for less pay than men.  In North America
and Australia, however, women had more leisure time than men -- men working
an average of 49 hours a week, compared with 47.5 for women.

The ILO Labor Day report was designed to include housework and child care.
Women's working hours were more likely to be in domestic labor than men's
working hours.

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-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- dgross@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
"Can there be equal rights if only women are allowed to say, `I know a child
 has been conceived but -- I don't want to be a parent right now!'"
                                        -- Fred Hayward
Newsgroups: soc.men