… a New Use of an Old Phrase
(draft) 2020, Davd
This web-log is not about marriage especially; it is about making men better in character and well-being. The phrase that I use for its title, was once commonly pledged as part of covenant marriage ceremonies… but if such ceremonies are conducted under present Canadian marriage law, they represent wishful thinking or reference to an authority other than “the Law.”
Lifetime covenant marriage conflicts logically with “no fault divorce.” Since Canadian law guarantees the privilege of no-fault divorce to all under its jurisdiction, covenant marriage is “thereby”, prevented. And yes, I chose the title of this blog partly to make the point, that lifetime marriage has been eliminated by Canadian Federal Government legislation1.
The death of covenant marriage has been accompanied by high divorce rates. A majority of children in secular Canada do not live under the same roof as their fathers2 — and research this century and last, indicates that fatherless youth have higher rates of crime, addiction, and other “social problems” — especially the boys (cf. Gurian, 1999. [e.g. p. 182: “The single most important factor in determining if a male will end up incarcerated later in life is .. whether or not he has a father in the home”]… which is consistent with the criminology maxim “There’s no market for Father’s Day cards in prison.” )
Taking “For Better or For Worse”, for life, out of marriage and replacing it with no-fault divorce; has hurt children as well as ex-husbands, and in the aggregate, “has hurt society”. Sadly, I cannot offer a plan, cannot offer a social design, for putting it back in. I have the impression that the resurgence of Orthodox Christianity in Russia might include the restoration of covenant marriage there, but cannot read Russian to confirm that and learn specifics.
“It follows, that what follows” might be futile. Perhaps the destruction of covenant marriage will lead over 2-3 generations time3, to the destruction of the society, or at least of the Canadian State which made such a law.
Perhaps Canada, the U$A, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and several European states will survive. Perhaps some will persist and some not. Perhaps a way will be found and effected, to revive lifetime covenants as a legally supported option. (Perhaps societies elsewhere can learn from “North American” mistakes.)
My main purpose is to use that “For Better or For Worse” phrase in a quite different way, as the question mark implies:
‣ What social conditions, what social practices make for better men (and for better women)?
‣ What make men and women better in character and social contribution; and distinctly, what make men and women “better-off” materially and in personal satisfaction?
‣ What make men and women worse in character, and worse-off?
‣ Are the effects the same for both sexes (or more precisely, what conditions and practices have the same effects on both sexes, what have different effects, and what are those effects?)
And in another distinct usage, what social, legal, and cultural beliefs and practices distort assessment of boys vs. girls, men vs. women? so that estimates of better and worse performance, better and lesser ability, are biased between genders?
Covenant marriage is one important example of a social practice that is good for society, good for children, and good for the husbands and wives who keep the covenant. When it prevailed, some UK evidence suggests, women were actually happier (Koster, 2009).
There are some indications that the same conditions or the same practices will not always be good for either the character or the well-being of both sexes4. Boys, for instance, seem to learn better moving around and humming, than sitting still Nicely as is typically prescribed by schoolteachers and school systems (Sax, 2009). Girls seem better able to learn sitting still Nicely, as schools typically demand, than boys. This is one way that “education” is misandric — biased in favour of female people and against us who are male.
“Educational misandry” seems to result from gynocentric school designs and practices (cf, Pinker, 2008, Sexton, 19605.) In fact, though Pinker (2008) cites several sources showing that the variance in intelligence and other talents is greater among men and boys than among women and girls, resulting in more men of very high and very low ability; girls and women dominate schools from Grade 1 through universities… and in Canada, dominate government jobs6.
Men’s performance and well-being would be served by removing misandric “Affirmative Action” practices which now operate to increase rather than reduce gender differences in school and workplace success.
Men work at more dangerous jobs on average, and this is true even if military and police work be excluded from the comparisons. If men and women have equal basic human value, then men are morally entitled to “hazard pay” when we do dangerous jobs (as are the smaller fraction of women who do such jobs with equal competence.) Comparisons of pay by gender should consider danger as well as skill.
The above is “just a beginning.” many more gender differences in capability and in societal support, exist. Schooling and work dangers are two examples that are fairly well documented; Affirmative Action programs that have come to favor the sex that is already “ahead”, give obvious opportunities to increase fairness while decreasing tax expenditure and bureaucracy.
Not all social comparisons will show sex differences, and it seems quite reasonable to ignore differences that are small compared to variance within each sex. Consider exercise and nutrition, for example:
It seems that both aerobic exercise and upper-body strength exercise will benefit both sexes; and that the optimal amounts of dietary protein, fiber, and many vitamins are approximately the same for both. This “basic equality” should perhaps be asserted relative to body size: Men may need more food and have higher exercise optima, because we average larger; women before menopause may need more of some nutrients because of losses during “moon time”.
Pregnant women may need more calcium especially, and I have seen many brochures recently (during the past 5 years approximately) insisting that pregnant women abstain absolutely from alcoholic drink. So while human nutrition is much the same for both sexes, it is not exactly the same.
Both men and women are “pack animals” who flourish best in small groups (not in solitude nor in crowds like herds of bison or gnu); but during many thousands of years of hunting and gathering, man nature was formed for team hunting, woman nature, for pregnancy, lactation, and gathering.
This “web log” has been a beginning at refocusing everyman.ca around the motto it proclaimed before I ever published here: The World Changes When We Do. Some of the 200+ blogs I have published since April 2011 have been about men’s health and well-being; “several” have addressed prostate cancer and other health issues of more interest to men than to women; more than 40 have been about food and about cooking to our likings. (I don’t like sweet baking as much as I like roast beef and homemade bread, or a good pot roast or chicken stew.)
I don’t insist on being the only or even the chief writer here — indeed, I’d rather not be. How would you like to change your life? .. your friends’ lives, especially men friends? .. and the “world” around us.
In other words, what makes men better, and what makes men better-off? I’ll close this “turning a corner” blog by re-naming two social practices I don’t believe do men good (with a link to an earlier blog related to each): No-fault divorce, and women showing their sexuality off when they don’t want to get it into action. There are many others, which I hope you’ll write about; and you’re welcome to write about these also. There are social practices that do us good, to expound, of which brotherhood and fatherhood deserve much more societal support than they have lately had.
How shall we change the world for our benefit, and that of decent men generally?
References:
Brown, Grant A., 2013. Ideology And Dysfunction In Family Law : How Courts Disenfranchise Fathers. Calgary and Winnipeg: Canadian Constitution Foundation and Frontier Centre For Public Policy
Catton, William R., Jr., 1980 Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Urbana, London, and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Paperback 1982
“Futurist”, 2010. The Misandry Bubble. January 1.
Glubb, John Bagot, 1978. The Fate of Empires. Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons Ltd.
Gurian, Michael, 1999. ‘The Good Son: Shaping the Moral Development of our Boys and Young Men.NY: Jeremy Tarcher. [182: “The single most important factor in determining if a male will end up incarcerated later in life is .. whether or not he has a father in the home.”] This is consistent with the criminology maxim “There’s no market for Father’s Day cards in prison.”
Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2001. Spreading Misandry:“The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press
Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2006. Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Pinker, Stephen, 2002: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. NY: Viking. [p 344: “.. confirming an expectation from evolutionary psychology, for many traits the bell curve for males is flatter and wider than the curve for females. That is, there are proportionately more males at the extremes.” cited by his sister [2008: 273]
Pinker, Susan, 2008. The Sexual Paradox: Extreme Men, Gifted Women and the Real Gender Gap. [no city listed in flyleaf] Random House of Canada; New York: Simon and Schuster.
Sax [Sachs?}, Leonard , 2009. Radio interview, CBC (Canadian Broadcasting) Radio The Current October 23 Cr. Mr. Sax[chs?] represented the [US] National Association for Single Sex Public Education. Girls, he stated, are more motivated in conventional schools. 6-year-old boys learn better standing, humming. Boys care about team-competition. Co-ed schools “are about” who’s cute, who’s likes who erotically, … more than about learning.
Sexton, Patricia Cayo, 1969. The Feminized Male; classrooms, white collars, & the decline of manliness. New York: Random House.
Vincent, Norah, 2006. Self Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man. New York: Viking Penguin.
Wells, H. G. 1920: The Outline of History: The Whole Story of Man. New York: Macmillan. Cited in the Project Gutenberg Ebook edition, 2014.
Notes:
1… with “Royal Assent” on behalf of Her Majesty Elizabeth II Windsor, Regina. Since Her Majesty is also head of the Anglican Church, which until recently mandated covenant marriage, the monarchy may have moral and legal issues to deal with rather more serious than the recent independence initiatives of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex or the alleged sexual peccadilloes of Prince Andrew.
2. “as due qualification” I should note that this is an estimate, based on the premises that [1] Christian marriages especially, and marriages in other “major religions” to some extent, are much less likely than secular marriages to end by divorce; and [2] that these more durable “religious” marriages produce more children per couple than secular marriages.
3. Indigenous traditions in several places enshrine a “7-generation perspective” for estimating the consequences of any prospective change. Perhaps it will take longer than three generations for the elimination of covenant marriage to effect societal collapse.
4. I see too little merit in research on other “social genders” than the biological male and female. A correspondent retired from the practice of law wrote me last year:
“Apparently gender studies practitioners have forgotten that humans are mammals and like all mammals we are ‘binary’; any individual born with mixed sexual characteristics is an aberration. I’m amazed at the traction this movement has gotten both on campus and throughout the culture.”
5… note that both these authors are women.
6. (Nathanson and Young, 2006: 99 say: “affirmative action has been used to correct for fewer women than men in some fields, but not for fewer men than women in fields such as social work, education, and nursing.” MacDonald [2017] reports that “while women are still a designated group for the purposes of preferential hiring in the public service, they now have most of the jobs and at least half of the most senior jobs.”
