u/Exercise-Delicious

The Temperance Movement (Part 3) | Of bourgeoisie women, drunk on power

The Temperance Movement (Part 3) | Of bourgeoisie women, drunk on power

In my final main post about this topic, I want to quickly highlight how significant the women's temperance movement was, real quick. Henry Ford, for instance, grew up around it.

https://preview.redd.it/ei75cazf65ih1.png?width=2254&format=png&auto=webp&s=f22470c1f0180d881145a403a0ee135f72d2df7c

This man who later became a well known factory driving capitalist, was side by side with oppressive, law abusive feminist groups like the WCTU, and clearly, some of that psychopathy and controlling behaviour, rubbed off on the man who later went on to surveil his own workers, all for the sake of his money making machinery. Just as women did to men. 

Phase 3 (1860 - 1910): The Post-War Meat-Grinder, Militant Vigilantism, and the Consolidation of Moral Police

This 3rd and final phase of temperance represents a transition into open, militant coercion by women, through an abuse of law and terrorism. 

Emerging from the physical wreckage of the American Civil War, Phase 3 dropped the earlier posturing of Christian suasion and pity. It replaced moral suasion with direct physical property destruction, paramilitary saloon swarming, and the total militarization of the state administrative apparatus.

War had arguably sobered men up from women's quest for power and control over them momentarily. The major life changing and debilitating events constituent of the civil war, made society in general become less receptive to 'passages about how God' and 'abuse being driven by alcohol or driving otherwise pleasant families into ruin via a drunkard man's reckless spending in the saloons. 

To combat this, women stepped up their game, turning to even more violence and legislative harassment of the male underclass, with success. 

Eventually, a society that had just butchered and maimed an entire generation of working-class men in the Civil War turned around and pathologized those same traumatized, self-medicating veterans as "subhuman drunkards," while expanding state-backed female administrative and political power.

The Civil War Leverage & Phase 3 Trajectory

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────. ┐
│                       THE PHASE 3 STRUCTURAL ENGINE                           │
├──────────────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────. ┤
│ 1. Civil War Male Siphoning          │ 2. Female Administrative Capture       │
│ • $600,000+$ dead; hundreds of       │ • Monopoly over public nursing, pension│
│   thousands physically/mentally mained│   bureaucracy, and common schools     │
│ • Forced conscription (1863 Draft)   │ • Expanded Married Women's Property    │
│ • Saloons become PTSD self-medication│   Acts (earning protections)           │
│   and veteran mutual aid hubs        │                                        │
├──────────────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────. ┤
│ 3. The Militant Moral Assault        │ 4. Statutory Monopoly                  │
│ • The Woman's Crusade (1873–74)      │ • Anti-Saloon League (1893)            │
│ • WCTU "Do Everything" Policy        │ • Criminalization of male non-support. │
│ • Carrie Nation "Hatchetation"       │ • Precursor to 18th Amendment          │
└──────────────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────. ┘

1. The Civil War Prelude: Male Meat-Grinder vs. Female Administrative Expansion (1861 - 1865)

To understand the intense hostility directed at working-class male spaces in the 1870s, one must first analyze the structural extraction executed during the Civil War (1861 - 1865). This is important when dissecting fake sob stories of Carrie Amelia, for eg.

A. The Conscription of Male Bodies and the 1863 Draft Riots

The Civil War was a catastrophic demographic meat-grinder that consumed male capital and male flesh on an unprecedented scale:

  • Mass Casualty Rates: Over 600,000 soldiers died, and hundreds of thousands returned home with amputated limbs, chronic dysentery, severe nerve damage, and what was then termed "soldier's heart" (modern PTSD).
  • Class-Based Conscription: The Enrollment Act of 1863 instituted forced conscription for working-class men while allowing wealthy patricians to purchase a replacement or pay a \$300 commutation fee (1863\text{ Draft Commutation}).
  • The 1863 New York City Draft Riots: Working-class male laborers - facing mandatory military extraction while living under starvation wages - rebelled in July 1863. The uprising was a direct, violent protest against a state apparatus that viewed working-class male life as expendable fuel for military objectives.

B. The Exploitation of the Black Male Body

Free and formerly enslaved Black men were heavily recruited and drafted into the United States Colored Troops (USCT). Black male regiments suffered disproportionate casualty rates, were assigned lethal fatigue labor, and were paid lower wages than white enlistees.

When Black veterans returned home, they faced systematic racial terror and disenfranchisement. When these Black veterans assembled in urban taverns, saloons, or fraternal lodges for mutual support, moral reform networks doubly pathologized them as "racially prone to intemperance and criminality."

C. The Post-War Institutional "Goodies" Captured by Female Coalitions

While men were being slaughtered on the battlefield, middle- and upper-class female organizations converted wartime relief efforts into permanent institutional monopolies on the state payroll:

  1. The U.S. Sanitary Commission Network: Middle-class women captured the administration of military hospital networks, medical logistics, and soldier relief funds, establishing a permanent foothold in state welfare bureaucracy.
  2. The Pension Bureau Monopoly: The surge of Union army pensions created the nation's first massive federal welfare state. Middle-class female claims-agents and organizers established lucrative careers assisting widows and wives in extracting federal pension payouts from state treasuries.
  3. Statutory Revisions to Property Acts: Building upon the New York Married Women's Property Act of 1848, states across the North revised property laws in the 1860\text{s} to explicitly protect female earnings and real estate from disabled, unemployed, or traumatized veteran husbands. Wives secured sole legal authority over their independent incomes while retaining state-enforced claims on male wages.

2. The Forty-Eighters and the Urban Saloon Clash (1850 - 1870)

A major catalyst for Phase 3 temperance violence was the arrival of European political refugees following the failed Revolutions of 1848 in Prussia and German-speaking Europe.

  1848 Prussian Revolutions ──► German "Forty-Eighter" Migration to US Cities
                                              │
                                              ▼
  German Saloon Culture     ──► Secular Assembly, Sunday Beer Gardens,
  (Gemütlichkeit)               Labor Unionization & Political Debate
                                              │
                                              ▼
  Anglo-Protestant Female   ──► Pathologized as "Un-American," Sabbatarian
  Temperance Apparatus          Violation, and Anti-Christian Crime

A. German Gemütlichkeit vs. Anglo-Sabbatarianism

German immigrants brought a vibrant, family-oriented saloon and beer garden culture (Gemütlichkeit). This by the way is when taverns officially started being called saloons. Unlike the insular Anglo-American tavern, German beer gardens were open social hubs where men, women, and children gathered on Sundays to listen to music, debate politics, and organize early labor unions. This piece here is crucial to explain the later link between capitalists and the ASL down the line.

B. Xenophobic Moral Panic

To the Anglo-Protestant temperance apparatus (led by women’s church groups), German Sunday drinking was viewed as an existential threat:

  • It violated strict Puritan Sabbatarian laws (banning business and leisure on Sundays).
  • It provided an un-monitored, secular space where working-class men debated radical labor rights and socialist theory outside the reach of Protestant pulpit control.
  • Temperance literature re-branded these German and Irish social hubs as centers of "foreign subversion" and moral filth, justifying direct state intervention to close saloons on the only day working men had off from factory labor.

Interestingly, despite Irish immigrants largely being Roman Catholic or Jewish, and the stereotype of drunkard Irish Catholics perpetuated by members of Temperance, the group responsible for 'saloon culture', were the Germans, who were far more mixed in religious faith. 

3. The Shift to Paramilitary Vigilantism: The Woman's Crusade (1873 - 1874)

By 1873, moral persuasion was formally discarded in favor of aggressive, physical intimidation. The tipping point occurred in December 1873 in Hillsboro, Ohio, launching The Woman's Crusade.

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                       THE WOMAN'S CRUSADE TACTICAL PLAYBOOK                 │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  1. Mass Swarming ────────► Direct physical blocking of saloon doorways     │
│  2. Public Doxxing ───────► Publishing names of male patrons in local papers│
│  3. Financial Warfare ────► Pressuring landlords to cancel saloon leases    │
│  4. Intimidation ─────────► Kneeling on floors, singing hymns, praying aloud│
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

A. Swarming and Economic Sabotage

Organized by figures like Eliza Thompson, groups of hundreds of women marched on local saloons, pharmacies, and hotels:

  • Physical Blockades: Women physically crowded the entrances of working-class saloons, preventing patrons from entering or leaving.
  • Public Doxxing: Crusaders sat outside saloons with clipboards, writing down the names of every working-class male patron who entered. They published these names in local newspapers, exposing the men to employer termination, church expulsion, and social ruin.
  • Marathon Pray-Ins: Women entered private establishments, knelt on the floors, and loudly prayed for the souls of the "evil saloonkeepers," paralyzing commercial operations for weeks at a time.

In tandem with the crushing weight of corporate consolidation, the Woman's Crusade forcibly shut down or bankrupted almost 1,000 saloons across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, proving that middle-class women could deploy extra-legal physical disruption without facing police intervention.

4. Institutionalizing Terror: Frances Willard and the WCTU (1874 - 1890)

In $1874$, the momentum of the Woman’s Crusade was formalized into the **Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)**. Under the leadership of **Frances Willard** (who served as president from $1879$ to $1898$), the WCTU grew into the largest and most powerful female political organization in world history, in which young capitalists such as Henry Ford grew up in. 


┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                    FRANCES WILLARD'S "DO EVERYTHING" POLICY                 │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                                                                             │
│                       ┌─────────────────────────┐                           │
│                       │   THE WCTU APPARATUS    │                           │
│                       └────────────┬────────────┘                           │
│                                    │                                        │
│         ┌──────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────┐             │
│         ▼                          ▼                          ▼             │
│  Female Suffrage         Scientific Temperance      Home Protection         │
│  (The Ballot as an       Instruction (Mandatory     (Statutory Police       │
│  Anti-Male Weapon)       School Indoctrination)     Power over Household)   │
│                                                                             │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

A. The "Do Everything" Strategy

Willard realized that temperance could serve as an umbrella cause to advance female political leverage across every layer of society:

  1. "Home Protection" Franchise: Willard rebranded female suffrage as a weapon for "Home Protection." She argued that women needed the vote not out of abstract egalitarianism, but to outlaw working-class male assembly and deploy police power directly into male social spaces.
  2. Scientific Temperance Instruction (STI): Led by Mary Hunt, the WCTU lobbied state legislatures to pass mandatory laws requiring every public school to teach "Scientific Temperance." Children were taught distorted physiology - including claims that a single drop of alcohol would cause human organs to spontaneously combust or turn a father into a violent maniac. This placed female moral instruction directly into public education curriculum standards.
  3. The White Ribbon Surveillance Network: The WCTU built local chapters in almost every town in America, operating as a localized surveillance network that reported non-compliant saloon owners and non-supporting husbands to municipal authorities.

5. The Peak of Psychopathy: Carrie Nation and "Hatchetation" (1890-1910)

The logical climax of Phase 3’s pathologization of male culture arrived in the person of Carrie Amelia Nation. Standing at 6ft tall and dressed in black deaconess robes, Nation elevated saloon harassment into direct physical destruction—a practice she called "Hatchetation."

To this day, there is this purported myth that Carrie Amelia was abused in her first marriage by her drunkard husband, and that is why she became who she was - a champion against alcohol. That is not true. Carrie abandoned her drunk husband, who was drunk following the civil war, which left him scarred. Hateful of her broken mule, she invented a narrative that she was abused, divorce raped him, and went on to abuse men in saloons. That is who this champion of temperance and feminism is. 

A stalker, a harasser, a vandal, and a psychopath. 

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                        THE LOGIC OF "HATCHETATION"                          │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Kansas Prohibition Laws (1881) ──► Unenforced in Working-Class Wards       │
│                                              │                              │
│                                              ▼                              │
│  Carrie Nation Terrorism        ──► Armed Property Destruction              │
│                                     (Smashing Mirror, Casks, Fixtures)      │
│                                              │                              │
│                                              ▼                              │
│  Asymmetric Legal Immunity      ──► Male Owners Arrested if They Resisted;  │
│                                     Nation Celebrated by Moral Elites       │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

A. The Mechanics of the Hatchet Raids

Beginning in Kansas in 1899\text{--}1900, Nation claimed direct divine command to destroy male social spaces:

  • Physical Assault on Property: Armed with hatchets, sledgehammers, and rocks wrapped in paper ("smashers"), Nation and her followers invaded saloons, smashing expensive bar mirrors, chopping up mahogany counters, breaking liquor casks, and destroying art fixtures.
  • Targeting Working-Class Investments: Saloons were frequently owned by working-class male immigrants who had invested their life savings into their businesses. Nation’s raids inflicted thousands of dollars in uninsured damage, bankrupting working-class owners overnight.

And remember, these men in these saloons were largely single men with no prospects, and they were being dubbed as threats to society, and harassed. Sound familiar like how we treat a certain group of disenfranchised single men? 

B. Double Standards and Legal Immunity

When working-class male saloonkeepers attempted to defend their private property or physically remove Nation from their premises, they faced public outrage and immediate arrest by local police.

Nation was arrested over 30 times, but her fines were routinely paid by wealthy WCTU benefactors. She financed her national tour by selling souvenir miniature hatchets and lecture tickets. The moral establishment framed her extra-legal violence as "righteous holy rage," while the male property owners whose livelihoods she destroyed were given zero legal compensation or police protection.

So even as 'early' as the late 1800s, American society was funding terrorist campaigns against men's spaces, through the state, universities, and the WCTU. 

6. Statutory Consolidation: The Anti-Saloon League and Pre-Prohibition Realignment (1893 - 1910)

As Phase 3 drew to a close, the overt physical violence of Carrie Nation was merged with industrial capital to form the ultimate political lobbying machine: The Anti-Saloon League (ASL), founded in 1893.

  Phase 3 Vigilantism (Nation/WCTU) ──► Corporate Capital (Ford, Rockefeller)
                                                  │
                                                  ▼
  Anti-Saloon League (ASL)          ──► Single-Issue Legislative Monopoly
                                                  │
                                                  ▼
  18th Amendment & Volstead Act     ──► Universal Criminalization of Male Assembly

A. Industrial Capital Joins the Alliance (specifically the ASL)

Major corporate industrialists - including Henry FordJohn D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie - poured millions of dollars into the ASL. Industrialists wanted prohibition to enforce workplace attendance, eliminate Monday absenteeism, and suppress wage demands by stripping workers of leisure outlets.

Notice how capitalists were in cahoots with temperance and feminism. 

https://preview.redd.it/34pfco3n75ih1.png?width=1730&format=png&auto=webp&s=d65a2465bad68673f43e17e13b4678a3fffb43b3

In the 1900s, Henry Ford became concerned about the impact alcohol had on workplace efficiency - factors such as high labor turnover and soaring absenteeism plagued the output of automobiles, and drinking was seen as a contributor.

Ford even fired workers who drank and hired private detectives to ensure they weren't sneaking alcohol. Ford ran private surveillance on his own workforce's drinking habits.

B. Draconian Family and Non-Support Laws

With their successful weaponisation of the idea of 'female fragility', state legal codes were rewritten to further marginalize vulnerable men:

  1. Criminalization of Desertion and Non-Support: Between 1890 and 1910, states enacted strict statutory criminal non-support laws. A husband who lost his job or suffered from war/industrial injuries could be imprisoned at hard labor if he failed to pay court-mandated spousal support. Notice how as early as in 1849 in the case involving Fanny Kemble and Pierce Butler, Fanny deserted her plantation husband, and beyond avoiding any sort of punishment or penalty, she got awarded alimony. Half a century later, and men were the ones being punished for ever doing the same to their wives, on top of already having been bound to the women they deserted via coverture laws.
  2. Expansion of Lifetime Alimony Precedents: Building upon late 19th century divorce court rulings, courts routinely awarded wives full ownership of marital property, child custody, and lifetime alimony, while stripping fathers of access to their children if they were branded as "intemperate."

Chronological Developmental Timeline (1861-1919)

Year Historical Event Institutional & Cultural Impact
1861-1865 American Civil War Mass slaughter of male bodies; female expansion into federal pension and Sanitary Commission welfare state.
1863 NYC Draft Riots Working-class male rebellion against class-biased military conscription.
1860-1870 Forty-Eighter German Migration German secular beer gardens clash with Anglo-Protestant female Sabbatarian temperance groups.
1873-1874 The Woman's Crusade Mass female swarming, doxxing, and physical blockading of working-class saloons across the Midwest.
1874 WCTU Founded Formation of the world's largest female political lobbying machine.
1879 Frances Willard assumes WCTU Presidency Launch of "Do Everything" policy; links female suffrage directly to state prohibition power.
1881 Kansas passes Statewide Prohibition State prohibition enacted, setting the stage for illegal saloon operations in working-class wards.
1893 Anti-Saloon League (ASL) Founded Merger of female moral crusade with industrial capital (Rockefeller, Ford) for legislative control.
1899-1910 Carrie Nation's "Hatchetation" Raids Direct extra-legal property destruction of saloons using hatchets; asymmetric legal immunity for female raiders.
1919 Ratification of the 18th Amendment National Prohibition enacted, completing the statutory criminalization of male assembly.

The Legacy of Women's temperance

Phase 3 (1860 - 1910) completed the structural trajectory that began in the early 1800s:

  1. Extraction of Male Bodies: The state deployed working-class men as disposable assets in military conflict (Civil War), while female organizations captured the resulting administrative welfare apparatus (pensions, nursing, public education).
  2. Pathologization of Male Trauma: War-maimed, traumatized, and largely single veterans using saloons for self-medication and mutual aid were stripped of empathy and rebranded as "drunkard beasts of husbands". There is a familiar layer of cruelty of accusing and punishing men of crimes that they have never committed, especially against men who have been deselected here. This could be worth exploring in greater detail. 
  3. Militarized Moral Surveillance: The Woman's Crusade, the WCTU, and Carrie Nation established precedents where middle-class women deployed physical property destruction and public doxxing with total legal immunity.
  4. Corporate-State Monopoly: The Anti-Saloon League united female moral lobbying with corporate capital, converting extra-legal harassment into the permanent police power of the 18\text{th} Amendment.

Temperance and otherwise, driven by the ego of women

CC has commented on this before, that there is a reason why alcohol is legal today, despite all this history. Women wanted to get drunk, and examining how and where they went about it is very illucidating.

Be it in matters regarding colonialism, or war, or genocides, women are more than happy to admit their role in perpetuating so, if it allows them to be painted in a positive light, and here is a snippet of that ego on full display

https://preview.redd.it/2obob1te65ih1.png?width=1572&format=png&auto=webp&s=002bb59bebc3ab868a83f1249a7942cc4688261c

Temperance eviscerated the male only spaces being saloons, pathologized men, brought about threat narratives and the myriad of divorce laws that plague and plunder men in family courts, and this woman here, has been more than happy in demonstrating how fulfilling that is. It's almost as if..

Men aren't allowed to enjoy themselves in their own spaces, they are drunkard beasts for that, but women are allowed to do so. In fact, if you exclude me from such spaces, we will annihilate and assassinate your character, and your legal standing in family courts

This is the impression I get from Temperance. 

A. Pre-Prohibition vs. The Speakeasy Culture

  • Before 1920: Traditional saloons were strictly male-only spaces; societal norms barred "respectable" women from entering bars. Women’s alcohol consumption was largely limited to private home settings or medicinal patent tonics (which often contained up to 40% alcohol).
  • The Speakeasy Revolution (1920s): When National Prohibition (the 18th Amendment) shut down legal saloons, it gave rise to illicit, underground speakeasies. Unlike old saloons, speakeasies actively welcomed women. Drinking became a symbol of modern, youthful rebellion and social liberation for 1920s "flappers". Women began drinking cocktails in public alongside men in unprecedented numbers.

B. The WONPR: Women Who Fought to Kill Prohibition

By the late 1920s, the most prominent force pushing to repeal Prohibition was not a men's group, but a massive women's organizationThe Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR), founded in 1929 by Pauline Sabin.

Alcohol Problems and Solutions

  • Why They Turned Against It: Sabin (a wealthy political activist) was disgusted by the hypocrisy of the WCTU and the immense crime, corruption, bootleg violence, and binge drinking sparked by the 18th Amendment. When WCTU President Ella Boole claimed before Congress, "I represent the women of America!", Sabin responded by forming the WONPR.
  • Outnumbering the WCTU: Within three years, the pro-repeal WONPR grew to over 1.5 million female members—outnumbering the WCTU several times over.
  • The Final Blow: The WONPR effectively destroyed the moral myth that "all American women wanted Prohibition." Their massive political mobilization provided the crucial political coverage needed for Congress and state legislatures to ratify the 21st Amendment in 1933, officially ending Prohibition.

C. The WONPR Leadership: Who Mainlined the Repeal Machine?

While working-class men had their social infrastructure padlocked and criminalized, the leadership that ultimately dismantled Prohibition came from the absolute upper crust of American female society.

Pauline Sabin, founder of the WONPR (1929), very rich woman

The Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR) was not founded by factory workers or disenfranchised laborers; it was engineered by elite, wealthy women who held immense social leverage:

  • Pauline Morton Sabin: The undisputed architect of Repeal. Sabin was a wealthy heiress (daughter of a former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture) and prominent Republican political strategist.
  • Mrs. Coffin Van Rensselaer & Mrs. Pierre S. du Pont: Ultra-wealthy high-society figures who brought massive financial backing and immediate social legitimacy to the movement.
  • The "Wonpr" Cadre: The leadership board consisted of high-society hostesses, industrialists' wives, and prominent party organizers. Because of their immense wealth and social standing, they were immune to the traditional evangelical shaming tactics used against lower-class voices.

D. Why Was the Whole Debate "Decided" by Women? The Monopoly on Political Capital

A central paradox of the 1920s is why the entire fate of alcohol - its banning and its eventual restoration - seemed to be a political chessboard played almost exclusively between opposing factions of women (the WCTU vs. the WONPR).

Where were the men whose spaces had been annihilated? They were politically silenced and legally checkmated by two structural forces:

1. The Weaponized "Moral Degenerate" Trap

Throughout the 1890s to 1920s, Wayne Wheeler and the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) established a reign of political terror over American legislators.

  • Any male politician, union organizer, or community leader who dared speak out against Prohibition was immediately targeted by a smear apparatus funded by the evangelical temperance cartel.
  • He was publicly branded a "moral degenerate," a defender of "vice," an abuser of women, and an agent of saloon corruption.
  • Male politicians were terrified of losing their seats to the highly organized "Dry" female voting bloc. As a result, male elected officials fell in line, voting for draconian enforcement laws simply to protect their own careers.

2. The Asymmetry of Moral Authority

Because the 19th-century Temperance movement had successfully established the cultural myth that women are the sole moral guardians of the home while men are inherently prone to beastly vicea man defending the saloon was seen as a guilty addict defending his fix.

A working-class man arguing for his local tavern was dismissed as an irresponsible drunkard. But when Pauline Sabinand 1.5 million women marched onto Capitol Hill demanding Repeal under the banner of "Protecting our children from bootleg crime and hypocrisy," the political cartel had no defense. It took women to defeat women, because the culture had stripped men of the moral standing to defend their own institutions.

E. Deconstructing the Modern Feminist Framing: Erasure of the Oppressed Class

When modern mainstream commentary looks back at this era—such as popular retrospective framing—it routinely flips the historical reality on its head.

Articles frequently celebrate Prohibition-era women as "pioneers of social liberation" while completely dehumanizing the very working-class men who were victimized by state policy:

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                        THE HISTORICAL FRAMEWORK FLIP                            |
|                                                                                 |
|  MODERN CELEBRATORY NARRATIVE   ---> Frames speakeasy culture and the WONPR as   |
|                                      triumphs of female autonomy, glamour,      |
|                                      and social liberation.                     |
|                                                                                 |
|  THE CRITICAL HISTORICAL REALITY ---> Ignores that working-class male spaces   |
|                                      were violently destroyed first, their      |
|                                      character assassinated, and their legal    |
|                                      standing gutted in family courts.          |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

The Hypocrisy Exposed

  1. Character Assassination as Policy: When working-class men gathered in saloons for mutual aid, check-cashing, and unionizing, they were pathologized as "subhuman drunkards" who deserved to have their spaces padlocked, raided, and militarized by state police power.
  2. Glamour for Me, Criminalization for Thee: Yet, when middle- and upper-class women entered illegal speakeasies in the 1920s to drink cocktails, the narrative shifted toward celebrating their "youthful rebellion and social liberation."
  3. The Family Court Connection: The very threat narratives manufactured during the Temperance era - framing the workingman as an inherently dangerous, financially irresponsible creature - became permanently institutionalized in family court frameworks and divorce precedents. Women gained the legal exit ramps and asset extractions, while men lost their autonomous spaces, their social standing, and their constitutional protections.

Questions for Further Reflection

Since there has been some mention of concern about what to write and reflect on, here are some potential questions for potential writers to mull over:

  1. On the Monopoly of Space: Is male-only assembly historically treated as an inherent threat that must be infiltrated or destroyed, while female-only organizing is celebrated as necessary self-protection? What are other examples that you can think of similar to tempereance?
  2. On Manufactured Narratives: If the "brutish drunkard husband" narrative was an inflated propaganda trope used to justify asset extractions (like the Married Women's Property Acts) and state expansion, how much of our modern family law framework still relies on that exact same 19th-century caricature?
  3. On Political Capital: How did elite reformers successfully trick the working class into believing that criminalizing their own social spaces was a form of "moral progress"?
  4. Can you think of other instances in which women have pathologized men or men's spaces in history?
  5. What are the levers in society that need to be dismantled to avoid repeated instances like this from our history?
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u/Exercise-Delicious — 12 days ago

The Temperance Movement (Part 2) | Of Taverns, Tradesmen, and Temperance

Portland Rum Riots (1855)

Phase 2 (1836 - 1850): Manufactured Abuse Narratives, Legal Exit Ramps, and Statutory Consolidation

Note: Prior to German immigrant beer-hall culture from the 1850s - 60s onward, the name or concept of 'saloons' wasn't really prevalent. These venues whereby mostly single men with no homes of their own frequented, were typically called taverns, groggeries, dram shops, or "groceries". We will be using these terms interchangeably, for simplicity sake.

If Phase 1 (1800 - 1830) laid the ideological groundwork by pathologizing working-class male assembly in taverns, Phase 2 (1836 - 1850) completed the conversion of moral shaming into direct statutory power, legal exit ramps, and institutionalized state enforcement.

At the absolute center of this transformation was the Temperance Movement. Far from being a mere public health crusade or a passive moral crusade, Temperance was the primary engine driving 19th-century social engineering. It generated, amplified, and normalized the pervasive cultural trope of men as "drunkard beasts" and innate domestic threats—a calculated narrative strategy that paved the way for the legal colonization of male authority, capital, and institutional power.

Executive Synthesis: Deconstructing the Conventional Misconception

A prominent conventional misconception in traditional historiography asserts that the 1830-1850s witnessed two separate, parallel reform movements responding to the same cultural fear (the improvident, drink-ruined husband endangering the family), but proposing structurally distinct solutions:

  1. The Moral Reform Track: Asking women to reform men through moral influence, spiritual suasion, and domestic piety from within the traditional household.
  2. The Legal Exit Track: Asking the state to enact statutory property reforms (Married Women’s Property Acts) and legal exit ramps to liberate women from economic dependence on men.

​

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                 THE CONVENTIONAL HISTORIOGRAPHICAL FALLACY                  │
├──────────────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────┤
│ PERSUASION TRACK (Conventional View) │ EXIT TRACK (Conventional View)       │
│ • "Moral influence from within home" │ • "Statutory legal liberation"       │
│ • Focus on domestic piety & pledges  │ • Focus on property rights & courts  │
└──────────────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────┘
                                   │
                                   ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                       THE REVISED SYSTEMIC REALITY                          │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  A SINGLE, INTEGRATED STRATEGIC ENGINE (Phase 2 Temperance Coalition)       │
│  • Step 1: Character assassination pathologizing men as "drunkard beasts"   │
│  • Step 2: Infiltration of secular male spaces (Washingtonians)             │
│  • Step 3: Statutory extraction of male capital (Property Acts of 1839/1848) │
│  • Step 4: Deployment of state police power against male assembly (Maine Law)│
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

In structural reality, there were never two distinct movements. They were two integrated components of a single strategic mechanism. The character assassination of men as "drunkard beasts" via temperance literature provided the indispensable moral and social predicate required to justify legal extraction.

Without the pathologization of male headship engineered by temperance activists, the state would have lacked the political cover to dismantle common-law marital structures, establish lifetime alimony precedents, and transfer male capital into independent female hands. Both tactics operated in tandem to disempower men, delegitimize male governance, and colonize male resources.

1. Sequential Timeline of Legal & Cultural Transformation (1836 - 1855)

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                       CHRONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTAL ARC                       │
├─────────┬───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ 1836  │ Ernestine Rose begins petitioning in NY for married property rights │
│ 1837  │ Panic of 1837; *Fisher v. Allen* protects Chickasaw female title    │
│ 1839  │ Mississippi passes 1st Married Women's Property Act (Asset Shield)  │
│ 1840  │ Washingtonian Movement founded in Baltimore (Working-Class Aid)     │
│ 1842  │ Martha Washingtonians infiltrate halls; reframe male drinking       │
│ 1848  │ NY Married Women's Property Act passed; Seneca Falls Convention     │
│ 1849  │ Kemble v. Butler divorce finalized (Lifetime Alimony Precedent)     │
│ 1851  │ Neal Dow drafts and passes Maine Law (1st statewide prohibition)    │
│ 1852  │ Anthony & Stanton found Woman's NY State Temperance Society         │
│ 1855  │ Portland Rum Riot: Dow deploys militia against working-class men    │
└─────────┴───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

2. The Legal Precedents: From Asset Shielding to Universal Exit Ramps (1836 - 1839)

The statutory revolution surrounding women’s property rights did not originate as an abstract ideal of individual liberty; it began as a class-based asset preservation mechanism following financial collapse, which was quickly co-opted into a universal exit ramp.

A. Early Agitation: Ernestine Rose (1836)

In 1836, Polish-born Jewish immigrant Ernestine Rose began circulating petitions in New York demanding independent property rights for married women. Though initially met with intense hostility, her campaign established the foundational legal arguments later picked up by Paulina Wright Davis and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

  Ernestine Rose ($1836$)       Paulina Wright Davis &        Seneca Falls ($1848$)
  [Early NY Petitions]  ──►    Elizabeth Cady Stanton  ──►   [Declaration of
                               [Broad Political Lobbying]     Sentiments Grievances]

B. The Chickasaw Precedent & Southern Asset Shielding (1837 - 1839)

https://preview.redd.it/alwd65msbrgh1.png?width=428&format=png&auto=webp&s=e230dc9a1f8dfa3822784395e120b886a15875c5

Following the catastrophic Panic of 1837, Southern agrarian families faced massive foreclosures. Patrician fathers and slaveholders sought legal mechanisms to insulate family wealth from the debts and liabilities of volatile husbands.

  • Fisher v. Allen (1837): In the Chickasaw Nation, Betsy Love (a Native woman) had inherited enslaved property. When creditors attempted to seize this property to pay her white husband’s debts, state courts ruled in her favor, recognizing Chickasaw customary norms that kept female-inherited property separate from male debts.
  • The Mississippi Act of 1839**:** Capitalizing on the Fisher precedent, Mississippi passed the nation’s first Married Women’s Property Act in 1839. The statute allowed married women to hold separate title to real estate and enslaved people. While husbands retained management of the labor, the wife's separate ownership shielded family capital from male creditors.

Slave ownership was the precursor to establishing married women's property act... Unsurprising. 

3. The Washingtonian Mirage: Subverting Working-Class Male Mutual Aid (1840 - 1843)

When working-class men attempted to address alcohol abuse on their own terms through the Washingtonian Temperance Society (founded in April 1840 by six Baltimore artisans), they presented a secular, horizontal model of mutual aid that rejected clergy lectures, top-down moralizing, and statutory prohibition.

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                       THE WASHINGTONIAN STRATEGIC MIRAGE                    │
├──────────────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Operational Reality (1840-1842)│ Strategic Utility (1843-1850s)  │
├──────────────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────┤
│ • Fragile, localized artisan pact    │ • Inflated into an "existential"     │
│ • Lacked institutional capital       │   male threat to church & family     │
│ • Rapidly collapsed under internal   │ • Weaponized to justify abandoning   │
│   political and religious rifts      │   voluntary persuasion for state laws│
└──────────────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────┘

To the elite temperance apparatus, secular working-class self-help was an existential threat. If men could reform themselves without religious conversion or female moral oversight, the pathologization of male headship would fail.

Middle-class female auxiliaries (The Martha Washingtonians) infiltrated the halls, re-introducing female supervision and reframing male drinking not as an economic coping mechanism under volatile industrial capitalism, but as willful, innate domestic terror against women and children.

4. Manufacturing the "Drunkard Beast" & Statutory Consolidation (1848)

To convert public sympathy into statutory power, temperance literature during the 1840s systematically shifted public discourse from alcohol as a vice to the male husband as a predatory beast.

The New York Married Women’s Property Act (1848)

https://preview.redd.it/mccypqzxbrgh1.png?width=451&format=png&auto=webp&s=70f2e2e199150c1503d26321e7139c3df47bca52

In April 1848, New York passed its landmark Married Women’s Property Act, expanding far beyond Mississippi's 1839 asset-shielding model. The law declared that a married woman’s property:

>

The Seneca Falls Compact (July 1848)

Just months after the New York Act passed, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and others convened the Seneca Falls Convention. The resulting Declaration of Sentiments explicitly listed coverture’s property restrictions and male legal headship as primary moral grievances, formalizing the legal alliance between property rights, temperance rhetoric, and political franchise.

5. Case Study: Fanny Kemble vs. Pierce Butler (1848 - 1849)

https://preview.redd.it/urzhl277crgh1.png?width=228&format=png&auto=webp&s=fce39b237762290b01a936619425b832b3b320c3

The high-profile legal battle between British actress Fanny Kemble and her wealthy American husband Pierce Butlerexemplifies how elite women deployed political causes and claims of domestic tyranny to secure lifetime financial autonomy.

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                    THE KEMBLE-BUTLER STRATEGIC PIVOT                        │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Ideological Clash (Slavery / Autonomy) ──► Public Claims of Cruelty/Abuse  │
│                                              │                              │
│                                              ▼                              │
│  Abolitionist & Reform Moral Authority  ──► Secured Lifetime Alimony ($1849$)│
│  (Social Legitimacy & Public Support)        & Independent Earnings Control │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
  1. The Dispute: Kemble married Butler (heir to Georgia rice/cotton plantations) in 1834. When the marriage broke down (Fanny deserted Butler), Butler filed for divorce on grounds of abandonment. Kemble fought back in the press and legal filings, framing Butler as a tyrannical husband.
  2. Moral Leverage: Aligning with Northern abolitionist and moral reform networks provided Kemble with immense public sympathy, reframing a marital dispute over headship into a heroic crusade against patriarchal overreach.
  3. The Outcome (1849): Kemble secured a substantial annual lifetime alimony settlement (\$1,500/\text{year}) while retaining 100\% control over her independent earnings from public performance tours.

6. Common Schools & The State Payroll (1840 - 1850s)

Simultaneously, Horace Mann and Catharine Beecher (National Board of Popular Education) expanded the public school system to socialize working-class children into industrial discipline before they reached adulthood.

  Pathologized Male Labor Force ──► Framed as Uncivilized / Alcoholic
                                              │
                                              ▼
  Common School System           ──► State-Funded Moral Re-Education
                                              │
                                              ▼
  Female Normal Graduates        ──► Women Institutionalized on State Payrolls
                                     as Administrative Moral Regulators

Beecher successfully argued that women possessed a "natural moral superiority" over men, pitching female teachers to local governments.. This institutionalized middle-class women as professional agents of state moral regulation directly on local tax rolls.

7. The Suffrage-Prohibition Compact & Neal Dow’s State Coercion (1851 - 1855)

By the early 1850s, moral shaming merged directly with state police power. The pivotal agent of this transformation was Neal Dow - a wealthy Portland industrialist, Quaker merchant, and politician dubbed the "Napoleon of Temperance."

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                    NEAL DOW'S COERCIVE LEGISLATIVE PIPELINE                 │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Abandonment of Moral Suasion ──► State Monopoly & Prohibition ($1851$)    │
│  (Persuasion is Inefficient)       (Search Warrants & Taverns Banned)       │
│                                              │                              │
│                                              ▼                              │
│  Working-Class Resistance     ──► Armed State Violence ($1855$)             │
│  (Portland Rum Riot)               (Militia Fired on Unarmed Laborers)      │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

A. Neal Dow and the Maine Law (1851)

https://preview.redd.it/9actundecrgh1.png?width=1042&format=png&auto=webp&s=d8a890413c7d2984d883364e99519f19556e0262

In 1851, as Mayor of Portland, Neal Dow drafted and successfully lobbied for the enactment of the Maine Law - the nation's first statewide statutory prohibition ban:

  • State Police Power: The law made the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors illegal, authorizing search warrants without traditional probable cause and allowing municipal authorities to seize liquid assets.
  • Targeting Working-Class Male Assembly: The law explicitly targeted working-class taverns, saloons, and immigrant social spaces (particularly Irish laborers), while protecting private home cellars owned by affluent patricians who could afford to stock personal supplies prior to statutory bans.
  • The Woman’s NY State Temperance Society (1852): Founded by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton following Dow’s legislative blueprint, the society formally argued that an "intemperate" or "abusive" husband legally forfeited his right to patriarchal authority, child custody, and marital assets—linking female suffrage directly to state police power.

B. Neal Dow’s Operational Advice: The Albany Incident (January 1852)

In January 1852, Susan B. Anthony attended the New York State Temperance Convention in Albany as a delegate. When she stood up to speak on an issue, the conservative male chairman shut her down, famously declaring:

>

An enraged Susan B. Anthony, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and several other women, walked out of the hall.

Neal Dow stepped in:

Neal Dow - who had successfully passed his famous statewide Maine Law just seven months prior in June 1851 was the featured keynote superstar at the convention. Dow was a ruthless political strategist. He recognized that conservative ministers were an impediment to absolute legal prohibition, while middle-class women were his most fanatic, devoted foot soldiers.

Dow met with Anthony and the walkout delegates and gave them direct strategic counsel:

  1. Stop begging for permission from conservative clerical bodies.
  2. Form an independent, women-only state organization where women held all executive offices, managed all treasury funds, and controlled the podium.
  3. Use prohibition as the wedge issue to demand the political franchise (the vote), arguing that women needed the ballot to legally protect their homes from male drinking.

Taking Dow’s advice, Anthony and Stanton immediately founded the Woman’s New York State Temperance Society in April 1852 - with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as President and Susan B. Anthony as state agent. It became the first autonomous, statewide political women's organization in American history.

C. The Portland Rum Riot (1855): State Violence and Monopoly

https://preview.redd.it/bpcu3m0jcrgh1.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=78583d63317b0b5b0a3ba4b9a38be3b859f057c4

The ultimate exposure of temperance as a mechanism of elite state violence occurred on June 2, 1855, in Portland, Maine:

  1. The Municipal Monopoly: Under a loophole in his own law, Dow authorised the city to purchase $1,500 worth of alcohol for "medicinal and mechanical use," storing it at City Hall. Dow held personal responsibility for the purchase, effectively giving him a municipal monopoly over liquor while criminalizing working-class citizens.
  2. The Working-Class Uprising: When working-class men and Irish immigrant laborers learned of Dow's private stash, a crowd of over 1,000 assembled outside the City Hall vault demanding equal enforcement of the law.
  3. Armed State Crackdown: Rather than negotiating or distributing the assets, Dow ordered the Portland Light Infantry militia to open fire on the crowd. The militia killed John Robbins (an unarmed 22 sailor) and wounded seven others.

The Portland Rum Riot shattered the illusion that Temperance was a peaceful, Christian movement of moral suasion, proving that it had evolved into an armed state apparatus willing to deploy lethal police power to enforce elite social control over working-class men.

Concluding remarks

Phase 2 established the structural template for modern social governance across four integrated stages:

  1. Asset Protection (1837 - 1839): Post-panic economic realities (Fisher v. Allen) established the initial mechanisms to separate female property titles from male liabilities.
  2. Manufactured Abuse Narratives (1840): Working-class male assembly was pathologized as "drunkard criminality" to dismantle voluntary mutual aid (Washingtonians) in favor of top-down state regulation.
  3. Statutory Exit Ramps (1848 - 1849): The NY Act of 1848, Seneca Falls, and high-profile divorces (Kemble v. Butler) established precedents where women retained separate capital and secured lifetime claims on male income.
  4. State Police Power (1851 - 1855): Public education placed female moral oversight on state payrolls, while Neal Dow, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton consolidated suffrage with prohibition - culminating in armed state violence against working-class male assembly.
reddit.com
u/Exercise-Delicious — 19 days ago

A little review of the film 'Obsession' | Feminists peddling domestic and sexual abuse against men

I am a little disappointed in the fact that we as a group, still do not have any people, willing to dig through the disgusting feminist trash that is film. Aside from CC, there need to be more people who are willing and able to review products of the feminist zeitgeist, and critique them.

While I have glanced through some snippets of the movie myself, I noticed a number of problematic elements that have not been discussed yet.

If there are any actual enthusiasts of film, especially of narrative, please consider this. This is well beyond my element. I avoid films because I have always found most if not all films, problematic against men. But if we do not have anybody braving the trenches that is the entertainment industry, we as a movement will become blind and ill-equipped to counter the ever evolving beast that is misandry.

Below is a little post I attempted to drum up quickly about how Obsession peddles domestic abuse, stalking, sexual abuse against men, and how the feminist dogma has potentially obscured this fact, hoodwinking us men, into employing an almost defensive position against them, instead of pinpointing the fundamental problem of this film.

This film doesn't JUST paint men's desires for women as evil, but it ALSO normalises, and attempts to sell the idea that 'men should be ok, and happy with women who stalk and sexually abuse them, and consider themselves unjustly lucky for having that happen to them'

Calling the abused, the abuser: How Curry Barker’s Obsession Pathologizes Male Trauma and Excuses Domestic Abuse from women

Upon its release, Curry Barker’s psychological horror film Obsession (2025) was widely celebrated by critics as a "feminist horror masterpiece" and a scathing indictment of the "nice guy" trope. The mainstream narrative surrounding the film is clear-cut: Bear (Michael Johnston) is the ultimate villain, an entitled "incel" who strips his childhood friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) of her bodily autonomy and consent by wishing for her love on a supernatural "One Wish Willow."

However, beneath this fashionable ideological framing lies a deeply troubling subtext. By examining the narrative through the lens of domestic violence, psychological coercion, and the pathologization of male survival, a wildly different picture emerges. Obsession serves as a massive exercise in narrative gaslighting, depicting a man subjected to extreme physical, psychological, domestic, and sexual terror, while demanding that the audience view him as the predator and his abuser as the sole tragic victim.

1. The Modern Birth of a Nation: Hollywood’s History of Aestheticized Erasure

To fully understand how Obsession has been allowed to pass as a "masterpiece of empowerment" while depicting the systematic destruction of an abuse victim, we must look to the history of cinema. This is not the first time Hollywood has used groundbreaking aesthetic genius to package, sanitize, and celebrate a horrific lie.

In 1915, D.W. Griffith released The Birth of a Nation. It was a technical marvel, pioneering cinematic grammar - cross-cutting, close-ups, and dramatic pacing. It changed filmmaking forever. An unparalleled artistic triumph, even screened at the White House by Woodrow Wilson, who reportedly described it as "like writing history with lightning." Beneath this virtuoso craft lay a venomous, white-supremacist text. The film relied on the "Black brute" myth, pathologizing Black men as hypersexual, predatory beasts threatening white innocence and female consent, while framing the Ku Klux Klan as heroic defenders of society. The aesthetic brilliance of the film was weaponized to blind the public to its profound moral rot, legitimizing decades of physical and structural violence.

Obsession is the modern, inverted successor to this legacy. Curry Barker’s film is indisputably well-crafted.

Just as Griffith used filmic genius to rewrite predators into heroes and victims into threats, Barker uses modern tropes to a smuggle in a harrowing depiction and celebration of domestic captive abuse. By wrapping the story in the fashionable vocabulary of "male entitlement," the film gaslights the audience into viewing a traumatized, physically assaulted, and sexually coerced man as a monster - while celebrating his female abuser as a tragic martyr of "stolen consent." In other words, this is akin to terrorist, supremacist propaganda.

2. The Involuntary Enslavement Fallacy: Dismantling the "Predatory Intent" of a dollar store wish

The foundational argument for Bear's status as a "villain" hinges on the idea that he actively chose to "enslave" Nikki. This argument demands that we retroactively apply supernatural logic to a character operating in a non-magical, real-world mindset.

When Bear purchases the "One Wish Willow," it is presented as a cheap, plastic $6.99$ novelty toy at a local crystal shop. In a rational, modern world, no human being expects a plastic stick to actually harbor cosmic, reality-warping entities that can hijack a human soul. Bear’s act of snapping the twig and making his desperate wish—"I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone in the whole f--king world"—was not a calculated act of magical kidnapping. It was a pathetic, low-stakes expression of pining and romantic rejection-sensitivity.

To suggest that Bear is a predatory mastermind because a cheap toy actually worked is a massive narrative reach. Once the magic takes hold, Bear does not celebrate his "enslavement" of Nikki; instead, he is immediately thrust into a waking, inescapable nightmare that he spends the rest of the runtime desperately trying to escape or undo.

How DARE he love someone. How DARE he covet someone. Does this baboon not know their place?! I feel like we are being lectured by a Fanny Kemble, as she has her plantation owning husband whip us disgusting violent men into shape.

3. The Love Spell Double Standard: From "Girly Mischief" to Masculine "Kidnapping"

To understand the hypocrisy of how the film (and its critics) pathologize Bear’s wish, one must examine the vast history of the "love spell" trope in pop culture and real-life feminine aesthetics.

For decades, the desire to magically capture, ensnare, or manipulate a man’s romantic interest has been framed as a harmless, cute, and entirely acceptable feminine behavior:

  • Real-World "Witchcraft" as Consumerism: Across platforms like Etsy, Pinterest, and TikTok, thousands of women actively buy and sell "obsession spells," "love potions," and "honey jars" designed to explicitly strip a target man of his romantic free will. This is marketed under the aesthetic of "girly manifestation" and female empowerment. It is treated as a quirky, harmless spiritual hobby.
  • The Harry Potter Pass: In mainstream pop culture, the deployment of literal magical roofies is treated as a hilarious gag. In Harry Potter, schoolgirls openly purchase love potions from Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes to slip to boys. When Romilda Vane laces chocolates with a love potion to ensnare Harry, and Ron accidentally consumes them - resulting in severe cognitive impairment, forced infatuation, and near-fatal poisoning - the narrative treats it as a humorous teenage mishap.

When a woman uses magical coercion to force a man to love her (i.e. a form of rape), society codes it as a quirky, desperate expression of infatuation - a "funny haha" plotline about teenage pining.

It isn't even limited to that. Remember, Netflix published a tv show called "May December" in 2023! What was that show about? A real life incident where a woman statutorily raped a 12 year old boy. They had kids together and everything, and the man today has even said that he felt coerced (i.e. raped), and the media machine made him feel that he was silly for feeling victimised lmao. Same types of people here are moralising about how Bear is a rapist. Remember that with zionists and feminists - every accusation is a confession.

When Bear does the exact same thing that silly teenage girls did in Harry Potter, by snapping a cheap novelty toy, the narrative and cultural commentary retroactively code his act as a violent assault equivalent to rape, genocide and pedophilia. The double standard is stark: a woman wishing to control a man's heart is a romantic comedy; a man wishing for the same is a crime of "male entitlement" that justifies his physical and psychological destruction.

4. Textbook Domestic Violence: The Empirical Reality of Female-Perpetrated Coercion

If we strip away the supernatural framing and analyze the literal physical actions occurring on screen, the relationship between Nikki and Bear is a textbook depiction of severe, escalating domestic abuse.

Indeed, empirical data consistently shatters the myth that domestic coercion is a unidirectional, male-on-female phenomenon. According to the groundbreaking National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health published in the American Journal of Public Health (Whitaker et al., 2007), in relationships characterized by non-reciprocal intimate partner violence (IPV), women were the sole perpetrators in over 70% of cases. Bear’s horrifying captivity in Obsession is not a bizarre, supernatural anomaly; it is a direct dramatic representation of a heavily suppressed, real-world statistical demographic.

Throughout the film, the possessed Nikki subjects Bear to a horrifying campaign of physical and psychological terror:

  • Extreme Isolation: Nikki violently guards Bear from his social circle, ultimately murdering their mutual friends Ian and Sarah to ensure Bear has no external support network.
  • Psychological Gaslighting and Instability: Nikki subjects Bear to erratic, terrifying outbursts, such as screaming hysterically and stabbing herself in the face with a broken bottle during a party. This forces Bear into a state of hyper-vigilance, walking on eggshells in his own home to prevent further violence.
  • Animal Cruelty as Coercion: In one of the film's most stomach-churning sequences, Nikki literally feeds Bear's dead cat to him. In real-world domestic abuse studies, the abuse or killing of a partner's pet is recognized as a primary tool of extreme psychological domination and terror.
  • Captivity and Threat of Death: Bear is effectively held hostage in his own home. He is trapped in a house with a homicidal, manic entity that peels the skin off their dead friend Sarah to wear it as a disguise.

If these exact physical actions were committed by a male character against a female character, the film would be universally recognized as a harrowing thriller about a woman surviving domestic captivity. Yet, because the perpetrator is a woman under a "spell" the narrative refuses to validate Bear’s trauma, framing his terror as nothing more than the inconveniences of his "selfish fantasy."

Even if Bear had committed all these acts under a spell instead, it would have never been pitched as a men's rights film. The people reacting to this film are just as big of a problem as the predatory director is.

5. The Coercion Paradigm: Sexual Abuse and the Double Standard of Consent

A dominant talking point in reviews of Obsession is that because the "real" Nikki was trapped in a "sunken place" inside her body, every intimate or sexual encounter she had with Bear constituted sexual assault by Bear. This analysis establishes a massive, misandrist double standard regarding consent under coercion.

The narrative entirely ignores the fact that Bear was also incapable of consenting.

Bear is trapped in an intimate space with a hypersexual, violently psychotic entity that has already demonstrated a willingness to murder anyone who gets in her way. When a victim complies with the sexual demands of a partner out of absolute terror, that compliance is not "consent"; it is survival under duress. Women are more than happy to pull on this thread, but whether it be in real life or in fiction, men are the recipients of this abuse, and are never afforded this protection - protection from being coerced under duress.

By framing Bear as the sexual predator in this dynamic, the film guides the audience into ignoring the classic mechanics of sexual abuse against men. The movie implies that because Bear is a man, he must inherently want and enjoy the sexual attention of a beautiful woman, regardless of whether she is a violent, unpredictable entity who has held him psychologically hostage.

6. Pathologizing Survival: Historical and Cinematic Precedents of Male Degradation

The moral climax of Obsession relies on the ultimate victim-blaming trope: demanding that the victim sacrifice their own life to "atone" for their abuse. When Bear seeks help to reverse the curse, the retail clerk gives him a horrifying ultimatum: the only way to free Nikki is for Bear to die.

This erasure of female-perpetrated abuse and the systemic pathologization of male survival is deeply rooted in our historical and cultural narratives:

  • The Historical Erasure of Male Manipulation: The romanticization of female-led domestic manipulation is a recurring historical strategy. For centuries, the domestic and psychological manipulation of young, inexperienced, or shy men has been historically rewritten to protect the female perpetrator. A prime historical example is the courtly narrative surrounding King Louis XVI - a deeply insecure, socially isolated young man who was systematically managed, manipulated, and politically isolated by Marie Antoinette. While her historical legacy is routinely sanitized as that of a tragic, misunderstood victim of circumstance, her active role in the domestic coercion and eventual physical ruin of her husband is entirely erased.
  • The Silencing of Teenage Sexual Assault: The cultural blind spot regarding sexual violence against young boys remains incredibly stark. The late rap artist Tupac Shakur recounted in biographical interviews being sexually abused and groomed as a 14-15 year old teenager by a much older female associate of his mother. Yet, mainstream culture completely erased this early domestic and sexual trauma, preferring instead to pathologize Shakur as an inherently violent, hyper-sexualized male beast. By framing the victim of early adolescent abuse as a lifelong threat, the cultural establishment executed the exact same gaslighting maneuver we see in Obsession: converting a traumatized male youth into a predator to justify his systematic destruction.
  • The Cinematic Ritual of Male Humiliation: This pattern has reached a fever pitch in modern cinema, where Hollywood happily depicts the graphic, non-consensual physical and sexual degradation of broken men who dare to challenge unlivable conditions or seek basic human connection. In Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux (2024), the ultimate psychological and emotional brokenness of Arthur Fleck is sealed through systemic, graphic physical and sexual abuse by Arkham prison guards. The narrative punishes Fleck for his desperate, broken search for love and justice, treating his physical degradation and ultimate disposal as a form of moral "accountability."

Obsession uses the exact same playbook. When Bear swallows the oxycodone pills in a desperate attempt to end the nightmare, only to panic and try to induce vomiting when faced with the terrifying reality of death, the film frames this as his ultimate "cowardice" and "selfishness."

Against a backdrop of male suicide, this film director and women as a whole, are literally revealing themselves to be calling for male genocide. Israelis and feminists really have more in common than they like to publicly admit. Calling for the perpetual victimisation and genocide of the people that they are oppressing, harassing and in this film's case as well, sexually abusing.

It pathologizes a victim's basic, hardwired biological survival instinct. The movie demands Bear's literal death as the only acceptable form of "accountability" for a magical accident he did not understand, while completely absolving the physical perpetrator of the actual murders.

7. The Architects of the Gaslight: Cast, Crew, and Creative Complicity

This calculated inversion of trauma is not an accidental byproduct of a clumsy script; it is a deliberate, proudly championed thesis enacted by the film’s creators and cast. To understand the depth of this moral failure, one must look at the specific creative decisions and statements made by those who brought Obsession to life.

  • Curry Barker (Writer/Director/Editor): Barker, a former YouTube sketch comedian, has admitted that during development, he actively rejected a 2 million dollar offer to rewrite the script to make Bear a traditional hero. He chose instead to retain a narrative that systematically punishes Bear. By prioritizing "the twisted ideas of the manosphere" as his target, Barker deliberately sacrificed the reality of male domestic trauma on the altar of cultural relevance. His directing choices—prolonging scenes of Bear’s terror for dark humor—reveal a filmmaker who treats the physical and sexual torture of a male lead as a punchline.
  • Michael Johnston (Bear): The moral failure extends directly to the cast. Johnston, who plays Bear, has actively participated in the public victim-blaming of his own character. In interviews, Johnston described Bear's biological panic when trying to vomit the lethal pills as the ultimate proof of his unredeemable nature: *"It was the one thing that he could have done [to redeem himself] — and he doesn't do it. I think that perfectly sums up who he is."*Through this statement, Johnston normalizes the horrifying premise that an abuse victim's failure to successfully commit suicide is a moral failing rather than a basic survival instinct. By framing Bear as "selfish" for wanting to live, Johnston serves as an active agent in the film's campaign of psychological gaslighting.
  • Inde Navarrette (Nikki): Celebrated by critics for her "astonishing, chillingly good" performance, Navarrette’s portrayal of "Freaky Nikki" is routinely framed as an empowering, preternatural showcase of female agency. Yet, this praise completely erases the reality of her character's actions. Navarrette's character murders her friends, slaughters a pet, and violently imprisons her partner. To celebrate this as a triumph of female performance while ignoring the horrific, real-world domestic violence mechanics it represents is to participate in the total erasure of male abuse victims.

Remember my post about knowing your players? This is what I would hope from someone who would review movies. Identify the group that is dehumanising you, calling for your death, depicting sexual assault and rape scenes of your group as a means to punish you. Identifying the source of the problem, is the first step to making the world a better place for men. We cannot be allowing this sort of rhetoric to stand.

If not this time, the next opportunity that arises, we must dust this archive off, and present it to potential supporters of our cause.

8. The Financial Cartel: Commodifying Trauma for the "Midnight Madness" Bidding War

Behind the creative team stands a predatory financial apparatus that recognized the immense profitability of marketing male trauma as a "feminist victory." Obsession is a monument to how corporate Hollywood exploits social anxieties for unprecedented profit margins.

The film was shot as an independent project on a microscopic budget of just 750k under the "Midnight Madness" banner, a frenzied corporate bidding war ensued.Focus Features ultimately acquired the distribution rights for a staggering 14-15 million dollars. The highest price commanded by a genre film in TIFF history.

Soon after, Jason Blum boarded the project as an executive producer under Blumhouse Productions, while Universal Pictures took over international distribution. For these corporate giants, the film’s graphic depictions of pet slaughter, captivity, and psychological torture were not a moral concern; they were a goldmine of opportunity. By branding the movie as a "scathing indictment of male entitlement," the financial cartel successfully transformed a graphic thriller about captive domestic abuse into a highly marketable, culturally sanctioned product.

This transaction allowed Jason Blum to secure a lucrative 17m payout, while the film went on to gross over 430m globally. The corporate enablers - including production partners Capstone Studios and Tea Shop Productions - proved that in modern cinema, there is no boundary to the exploitation of domestic abuse, provided the victim is a man and the trauma can be repackaged under fashionable ideological banners.

9. The Climax and the Triumph of Narrative Gaslighting

The final act of Obsession completes the narrative gaslighting of the audience. After Bear panics and tries to throw up the pills, he is suddenly hit by a counter-curse. Nikki has used a final "One Wish Willow" to force Bear to love her as intensely as she loves him.

Bear's autonomy is violently stripped away in his final moments. He is hollowed out, forced to smile and embrace his abuser, and dies of an overdose in her arms. Except for the fact of course that, Bear never had any autonomy over his life. Bear was akin to a slave, wishing for justice in this world. Wishing for some solace in a cruel, lonely world. And like the slave owners that feminists are, they pathologized and thoroughly lynched and punished the slave, just as Carolyn Bryant did to Emmett Till, for existing as a black boy, in her vicinity.

Because Bear dies, the curse is instantly lifted. The "real" Nikki wakes up, surrounded by the bodies of her best friends, and begins to scream in horror. The movie ends on her anguish, expecting the audience to weep for her because she has to live with the trauma of witnessing these murders.

This is the ultimate insult to the viewer's intelligence:

  1. Bear is dead.
  2. His friends are dead.
  3. His cat is dead.
  4. He was subjected to psychological and physical torture, sexually coerced, and ultimately stripped of his mind and life.
  5. Yet, the film positions the physical perpetrator of the carnage (Nikki) as the sole tragic survivor, completely erasing Bear's victimhood.

Now imagine reality. Imagine how just it would feel, for women, for all the alimony and child support that they had coerced out of men for centuries, to be forcefully repaid to men, until they met a similar fate to Bear.

Imagine how it would feel, to have all the money and power that women had accumulated through coercion/force, to be forcefully repaid back to men.

Just imagine. The reason why colonisers and supremacists dominate media, is because to maintain power over the colonised, they must control their minds.

Whether Nikki was 'on her pills' or not, Bear was never in control. That is what this movie is ultimately about. This movie is about telling the slaves that they have under their control, even in fiction, you will lose. Even with power, you will be enslaved. Keep your head down, and don't you ever dream of my crown.

That is what Obsession is. A pillaging, a public lashing on the cultural plantation, executed to remind the captives exactly who owns the field.

Parallels with other shows

Many shows have pathologized male desire.

The show Adventure time for eg, made Finn become 'curiously hateful and problematic' in his relationship with the flame princess, and made her end up get into fights for his own amusement, amongst other things. Finn almost became a passenger in his own body, I was horrified by what the show was depicting him as here. It later got brought to my attention that the entire staff were essentially feminist scum who hated boys and men, and this explained so much else.

Finn also later gets raped in the cartoon show about boys who explore the world. Finn is effectively neutered as a man and not allowed to demonstrate any form of love or affection unless they are approved of by a female character. All the male characters for the most part are cast as hateful, unreliable, unintelligent creatures, while the female characters in Adventure time are almost entirely good and nuanced characters, who are even permitted to engage in sexual assault and rape at times. The men aren't allowed to express any form of frustration against the women, whatsoever.

The parallels between fiction and reality are clear.

This is what feminists want to be done to boys and men. They want men to raped and punished in their name of poetic justice (Joker 2). They want men to die en masse for them as a form of a romantic gesture - i.e. Titanic, or the white feather movement.

Conclusion: The Players Behind this Projection

We must remember the names of the entities that happily package and profit from the systematic degradation of male victims:

  • Focus Features and Universal Pictures: The distribution arms that recognized the massive profit margins of turning a graphic domestic captivity nightmare into a highly marketable, culturally sanctioned "feminist victory."
  • Blumhouse Productions and Capstone Studios: The corporate engines that funded, elevated, and distributed a film where the physical and sexual torture of a male lead is treated as a narrative punchline and a tool for moral "purification."
  • The Festival Gatekeepers (TIFF & SXSW): The prestigious tastemakers who provide the elite, intellectual cover necessary to normalize films that weaponize technical virtuosity to mask the non-consensual torture of male victims.
  • The Creative Collaborators (Barker, Johnston, & Navarrette): The writer, director, and cast who actively participated in the public victim-blaming of their own characters, normalizing the premise that a male victim's survival instinct is a moral failing, and his forced suicide is a form of justice.

We must stop letting aesthetic genius serve as a shield for moral bankruptcy. If we continue to remain silent, we validate a culture that actively repackages male trauma as "male entitlement" to satisfy a fashionable ideological narrative.

The ledger is open. The players are named. The choice of where we direct our attention, our respect, and our capital is entirely ours.

I don't support Alex Meyers' position sadly. In his original video, he was routinely vilifying Bear every chance that he got, giving hypotheticals about how 'he totally should have been called an incel, misogynist loser if he ever disliked Nikki's past relationship with Ian, his friend'. And other nonsense. We as men, have allowed capitulating losers like Sargon, and various others to hijack men's issues with flowery, 'PhD in both sidesism' majors' opinions. His lukewarm take on the film got him canceled, destroyed. Meanwhile..

In South Korea, or even China at times, when a producer, a voice actor or whoever else, was found to have been a feminist, or peddling feminist talking points, they get canceled. Anybody who likes Obsession would ideally get canceled in the future. This is the level of advocacy men deserve.

Feminism is a hate movement, and this film is one of their many Birth of a Nations.

u/Exercise-Delicious — 1 month ago

The Temperance Movement (Part 1) | A feminist scramble for power and capital

The Temperance Movement was the first major domestic sandbox where early feminism, class warfare, and a rewritten theology merged to form a moral policing cartel.

To understand how they pulled off the ultimate bait-and-switch, we have to look at Phase 1 (roughly 1800–1840s). This is the era where the ideological foundation was laid, the American economy began to industrialize, and the prototype of the "civilizing female" was deployed against the working-class man.

1. The American Feme Sole and the Avoidance of Marriage

To understand the origins of Temperance, we must destroy the myth that all women in early America were powerless dependents waiting to be rescued by later legislation.

Under the English common law inherited by the colonies, a married woman (feme covert) 'surrendered' her property and financial autonomy to her husband (this is the conventional reading of coverture and marriage law - ignoring the male debt and legal servitude to the woman) . But an unmarried woman or widow - a feme sole - had full legal rights to sign contracts, own property, sue in court, and operate businesses. Additionally, women marry for status (this means money and power). So women simply didn't marry much back then (this is commonly quoted as the European Marriage Pattern - which is fancy terminology for women already made lots of money of their own following events like the Enlightenment, so they didn't need to marry men for money).

Modern narratives claim women were trapped until concessions like the 1848 Married Women’s Property Act in New York. The reality? Women with money simply avoided marriage. Decades before these laws existed, wealthy American spinsters and widows used their feme sole status to maintain absolute control over their capital. They ran merchant shops in Boston, owned vast tracts of land, and held shares in shipping fleets, funding colonialism.

Unless a man brought a massive amount of capital to a marital merger, a wealthy feme sole had zero interest in marrying him. In the young American empire, a single female merchant held exponentially more legal and economic power than the common, landless male laborer.

2. The Great Inversion: Manufacturing Moral Power

As the United States moved into the 1800s, the demographics of the country shifted. Wealthy women held capital in eastern cities, while a massive population of transient, working-class men swelled on the frontier. The old Calvinist framework of "equal depravity" collapsed under the emotional fires of the Second Great Awakening.

Lyman Beecher, one of the key figures behind this religious shift, saw an opportunity. In 1826, he published his Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasions, Signs, Evils, and Remedy of Intemperance. Beecher pioneered a new form of emotional, shame-based moral campaigning. He didn't just target the men; he weaponized the newly minted narrative that women were "innately pure" and therefore spiritually superior to their brutish, capitalist husbands. He told women it was their gendered duty to reform the nation.

To distribute this message, Beecher’s daughter, Catharine Beecher, and the media mogul Sarah Josepha Hale provided the necessary PR. Hale, editor of the massively influential Godey’s Lady’s Book, used her magazine to preach the "Cult of Domesticity" to millions of middle-class women, while Catharine Beecher wrote the definitive manuals on how women should rule the moral sphere of the home. They effectively codified the idea that because women were spiritually superior, they possessed the supreme right to dictate the moral behavior of the nation. They built the ideological armor that shielded the Temperance movement from criticism: how could you attack women who were just trying to civilize men?

3. The Consumer Pivot: Ale vs. Tea

The Temperance movement was ultimately an engine for a market pivot.

It is vital to know that before the Temperance movement, brewing and tavern-keeping were trades heavily populated by women. Magistrates routinely granted licenses to feme soles as a form of poor-relief or because these women owned the property. But as alcohol production industrialized, moving out of the female-dominated domestic sphere and into the capitalized, male-dominated industrial sphere, these women faced a market squeeze.

Faced with this exclusion, elite and middle-class women executed a brilliant, predatory pivot. The Temperance movement did not just demonize whiskey; it mandated a massive consumer shift. They pushed for the consumption of tea and sugar - colonial imports directly tied to the coastal merchant shipping fleets that many wealthy feme soles had invested their capital into for generations. By pathologizing the male-dominated saloon, they redirected consumer spending toward their own portfolios.

This wasn't unique to America! Tea was explicitly promoted as the moral alternative to alcohol by temperance organizations across Britain, Ireland, and North America from the 1820s onward, and groups like the Quakers, who were heavily involved in the tea trade, were also disproportionately active in temperance advocacy 

Brewing was labor-intensive, local, and domestic. It was a closed loop where the grain was local and the profit remained local.

Tea and sugar were the "Globalist Commodities." They required long-distance trade, colonial plantations, and massive merchant shipping fleets. By pathologizing the neighborhood tavern (which served local ale), the Temperance movement was effectively lobbying for a consumption shift toward colonial imports. The Quakers, who were massive players in the tea and textile trade, were the primary financiers of the American Temperance Society (ATS). They weren't just saving souls; they were expanding the market for their own colonial imports.

4. Class Warfare by Proxy

This shift found its ultimate propagandist in Lucius Manlius Sargent, an ultra-wealthy Boston Brahmin. In the 1830s, Sargent wrote Temperance Tales, a series of stories that depicted alcohol as the single root of all poverty and crime.

Sargent’s work represents the ultimate class warfare of Phase 1. He was an elite man who collaborated with the female moral cartel to write propaganda pathologizing the working class. His stories diverted attention away from low wages and brutal industrial conditions, blaming the systemic poverty of the era entirely on the "moral failings" and drinking habits of the poor.

Sargent’s writing did not blame the factory owners for child labor, low wages, or 14-hour workdays. He blamed the worker for his poverty. If a worker couldn't afford bread, Sargent’s books argued it was because he spent his coins on whiskey. This was the original "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" propaganda. It allowed the emerging industrialist class to look at the massive, volatile, and increasingly dangerous immigrant population in Boston and tell them: "Your poverty is not a structural problem of the economy; it is a moral failure of your own drinking." It was the ultimate way to defuse labor unrest without raising wages.

By 1826, the American Temperance Society (ATS) provided the bureaucracy for this machine. Within a decade, the ATS grew to over 1.5 million members, and crucially, over 50% were women. Because women could not 'vote', the ATS provided them with a vehicle for public political organization. They learned how to run petitions, manage finances, and pressure male legislators. The ATS was the nursery where the political machinery of the first feminist wave was constructed.

5. From Merchants to Moral Managers

The women driving the Temperance crusade - the daughters of the established clerical and mercantile elite, the investors in the new shipping syndicates, the feme soles managing family estates - were not retreating from power. They were rebranding it to fit the burgeoning industrial landscape.

The old Mercantile model-where elite women held power as independent investors and tavern landlords was being cannibalized. Factory systems, mass manufacturing, and the rise of the landless, transient urban proletariat were rendering the "Merchant/Tavern" era obsolete.

The Temperance movement was the vehicle for this transition.

By weaponizing the "Cult of Domesticity," figures like Catharine Beecher and Sarah Josepha Hale essentially launched a hostile takeover of social status. They rebranded the home, turning it from a private space into a "Moral Factory" for the new Industrial Age. If you were part of the elite, you followed their rules: you practiced Temperance, you adhered to their strict domestic codes, and you consumed the "respectable" colonial imports (tea and textiles) that their class interests were tied to.

If you were a transient laborer who drank local ale in a tavern-an institution that stood outside of this new bourgeois moral supply chain, you were not just "sinning." You were unproductive and socially deviant.

This wasn't a struggle for "women's rights." It was a strategic pivot by the ruling class. These women traded their status as independent merchant-landlords for a much more powerful, far-reaching role: the Moral Architects of the Industrial Bourgeoisie. They didn't lose power to the new industrial economy; they built the walls that defined it. They ensured that even as the industrial machine churned on, the definition of what was "civilized" and "respectable" remained firmly under their management, leaving the common man to fight not for wages or conditions, but for the right to be considered "respectable" by the very people who were industrializing him into poverty.

Concluding remarks

Phase 1 of the Temperance Movement was not a health campaign. It was a structural realignment of class and gender power.

By dismantling the old Calvinist view of equal human depravity, the elite created a new caste system: the morally compromised, expendable male worker vs. the innately pure, civilizing female guardian.

Elite women recognized that the newly capitalized, industrial economy was shifting away from their spheres of influence. They traded their interest in localized taverns for a national empire of moral surveillance, backed by powerful media figures like Hale and Beecher.

Once this moral infrastructure was securely in place, the stage was set for Phase 2 - where the moral cartel would stop asking nicely. Led by men like Neal Dow, they were about to use the raw power of the state to enforce absolute prohibition

u/Exercise-Delicious — 1 month ago

Erasing men from statistics | Statistical gerrymandering in Iran by the Human Rights Monitor of Iran (Iran HRM)

Source article: https://iran-hrm.com/2025/10/08/executions-in-iran-a-deadly-record-in-2025/

Making a quick post before another one later. Got inspired by a post earlier here: https://www.reddit.com/r/CityCrusherYT/comments/1uwd8li/empathy_towards_female_serial_killers/

Talking about how a song made by some band was showing undeserved empathy to female serial killers. We see this in a variety of instances beyond just entertainment. In case some were interested. For instance, Australia had an incident with Corbie Jean Walpole, where she burned a man alive for making a crass joke. Both of them were drunk, and the female judge who decided her sentence stated that she 'always avoided putting women in jail but unfortunately she has to a little for such an offence'.

There is also the case regarding Iran, and the international organisations that pass judgement on Iran.

I have previously covered Iran and the many reasons why Iran is effectively another feminist country

61 women vs 1730 men executed

That is the number of executions in 2025 by the state of Iran. They were all for drugs and murder.

And not only did Iran HRM dehumanise and only verbalise executing women as a violation of human rights, but it also wrote this beautiful article where they made these plots that went out of their way to NOT classify men as a demographic of people who are executed.

For those who are interested, 1730/1791 = 0.966 = 96.6%

96.6% of those executed by the country Iran in 2025 were men. And the Iran HRM engages in this gerrymandering that I have been mentioning before.

Feminists are effectively, terrorists

Here are some points in case people feel squeamish about that phrasing

  • Armenian Genocide denial: The Ottoman and later Turkish state has for over a century avoided the word "genocide," reframed the 1915–1923 deaths as wartime casualties or mutual conflict, and Turkish domestic reporting and education have long omitted or minimized Armenian death tolls.
  • Khmer Rouge record-keeping: Cambodia's Democratic Kampuchea regime kept extensive internal records but systematically avoided ethnic/class identification of victims in ways that obscured the scale of who was being killed and why.
  • Myanmar and the Rohingya: Rohingya were denied recognition as an official ethnic group and largely excluded from the census; state and military reporting on "security operations" in Rakhine State routinely avoided civilian casualty figures for this specific group.
  • ISIS propaganda: Publications like Dabiq and Rumiyah discussed governance, "achievements," and enemies at length but essentially never acknowledged the systematic massacre and enslavement of Yazidis as victims — that population was framed instead as legitimate captives, not people who could be wronged.

In all of these instances, terrorists have engaged in minimising the out group that they are targeting, and attempting to terrorise. Obscuring their out group as a legitimate category in statistics depicting fatalities is a common terrorist tactic.

Wishing pardon for female murderers

Look up the following, objectively...

70% of women sentenced to death in Iran for murder are charged with killing their male partner

Akhtar Ghorbanlou

Rana Faraj Oghli

These are the names of 2 women who allegedly murdered their husbands because they claimed that they were suffering domestic abuse. The evidence to speak of? None.

They also claimed that they were child brides, but the manner in which they determined that was by the UN's standards, which states that 'regardless of whatever the legal age to consent or marriage is, any woman/girl under the age of 18 who is married off is considered to be a child bride'.

Most of the child marriages that DO occur in the world (and by child marriage we are going to go with <16 for instance) are not a product of religiosity or some 'rich pedophile billionaire taking advantage of a small underaged girl', but by loan programmes in very poor provinces that act out this marriage in desperation, to qualify for the loan.

But the vast majority of what the UN calls child marriages are not, child marriages. Let alone any manifestation of pedophilia.

These gross simplifications and appeals to misandrist feminist power fantasies give rise to celebrations of these female killers.

The UN, Amnesty, Iran HRM (a more local, supported Iranian feminist group) routinely argue that executing female killers is morally wrong, because they suffered gender-based violence, while completely green lighting and supporting, the execution of men, and even making arguments that not enough men are being executed.

They do this by arbitrarily referring to the fact that honour killings exist and alleging that 'men are allowed to murder their wives if they even suspect them of cheating'. Completely, utterly untrue. Islam is another woman worshipping religion just like any other religion. Here's an excerpt against this

Honour killings are not unique to Iran or to Islam specifically, which is worth being precise about. Citing a UN Special Rapporteur review, legal provisions offering full or partial defense for killing over sexual conduct exist in the penal codes of numerous countries - Argentina, Ecuador, Egypt, Guatemala, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Peru, Syria, Venezuela, and the Palestinian territories among them. And notably, the same source states that laws providing leniency for these killings largely trace historically to the French Napoleonic Code's "crime of passion" doctrine (in force in France itself until 1975), not to Islamic jurisprudence specifically.

It also cites Islamic legal scholar Jonathan A.C. Brown noting that mainstream Islamic jurists have historically not endorsed a man killing a wife or sister for "honor" establishing adultery under classical Islamic law actually requires either confession or four eyewitnesses to penetration, a far higher bar than Article 630 sets.

4 eyewitnesses to penetration to prove adultery. Remember that Prophet Muhammad invented the law of Ghibah, when his wife Aisha was being accused of being unfaithful by some of his male followers, after they witnesses her leaving some place with a young man.

In response, Muhammad invented this law, stating that if the case is not proven true (not necessarily false), the case is thrown out forever, never to be examined again, and the men are to receive 80 lashes.

Notice how, when men are accusing someone, the legal systems from whichever institutions, suddenly forget that 'just because an accusation isn't true doesn't mean it's false' and are more than happy to torture, maim and silence men with abuse? As opposed to women? Notice how these laws that could be used against women (honour killing laws), are almost always impeded by muslims themselves, including their own beloved Prophet?

No space for male victimhood

'Women, minorities and the poor'

It is never ok to highlight the fact that most, if not all of the victims of executions are men. The fact that 61 women were executed is one of the highest in the world for women proves my point exactly. Men are killed literally 2 orders above women, and yet women, even in the darkest hour, seek to colonise men's sense of vulnerability, humanity for themselves.

All of these groups, like Amnesty and a variety of NGOs, engage in this form of gerrymandering. They dehumanise men, and single women out to indicate the importance of an issue.

They endlessly seek to dehumanise the out group of their choosing, in order to 'center relief efforts around themselves as opposed to them', i.e. to disproportionately murder them.

In other words, terrorism.

u/Exercise-Delicious — 1 month ago

What the term 'Violence against women' is

Once again, I come here with a short post, to clear up a misunderstanding about the intentions behind a phrase.

Violence against women

Colonisation | Colonisers as the victim

People really need to examine how colonisers appropriate people's spaces. There is a physical component, but there is and always has been a social component to colonialism that is essential to maintaining power.

It is quite rare in history to find instances of colonisers being HONEST about what they are doing. In fact, the battle for colonialism, MUST start with a narrative that justifies that colonialism.

Simple examples of these include ( that I think some interested readers could make separate posts about to expand on )

  1. The British Empire: The "Black Hole of Calcutta" | 1756
  2. United States: "Manifest Destiny" | 1800s
  3. Apartheid South Africa: The "Existential Threat" to White Rule
  4. The Belgian Congo: Leopold and Rubber | 1885 - 1908
  5. Israel & Palestine | 1897 -
  6. The French "Mission Civilisatrice" | 15th-20th century

All of these projects, involved marking the oppressed peoples, as the oppressors.

"I said I was the victim first"

There is another point that needs to be made clear - you must be first.

Human psychology is anchored by the first draft of history. Whichever narrative is broadcast first becomes the default lens through which all subsequent events are filtered. If the oppressor claims victimhood first, the actual victims are forced into a defensive crouch, spending all their energy denying the oppressor's claims rather than stating their own suffering.

The audience of your announcement is also important, the one with a larger audience, that is also informed earlier, WINS. This is why propaganda is so important, but it is not something that you just throw out whenever, the timing is crucial to winning.

  1. The Rwandan Genocide (1994) – The Hutu Extremists' 100-Day Head Start
  2. Nazi Germany – The Reichstag Fire (1933)
  3. The US Gulf of Tonkin Incident (1964) – The 48-Hour Narrative Shift
  4. Israel 6 day war in 1967

All of these operations involved a swift distribution of propaganda to quickly manufacture consent for war or colony efforts, with as little opposition as possible.

This is what women are doing and have been doing.

Violence ... against <my group>

The very CHOICE to carve out and highlight violence, as 'violence against women', is not an accident. It is a means to elevate women's victimhood above men's. That is the entire point of that statement. Everytime we highlight victims of homicide for eg, and how men make up the vast majority (90%++ of all homicides), women come in and say that exact thing - 'women get murdered for being women, men get murdered because it's just cause, who cares'.

Coining a sense of extra value in your soul over the outgroup's

The point of mentioning violence as being violence against women, is not as simple as, addressing someone with their pronouns or something. It is to smuggle in and define this idea that women being killed or hurt is far more important than men getting hurt.

They retrieve this God-like status that makes their murder more unbecoming and unthinkable by mentioning phrases like 'violence against women'.

Taking advantage of the underlying systemic oppression of the colonised to further colonise them

Prior to that, violence has always just been phrased as a gender neutral thing

This minimises the male component to begin with!

By highlighting female victims, they are doing what nationalists are doing when they talk about white genocide in South Africa. They are colonising the sense of victimhood.

Responding with, 'oh but men are recipients of violence too' does NOT correct for that.

Women aren't disproportionately victims of violent crimes, AND men's proclivity for being victims of violence has never been seriously addressed for centuries. And instead of going in that direction, to investigate and solve this multi century problem, women are diverting that attention, towards themselves.

The end goal

The objective of this btw, is not simply to be sadistic, but to appropriate all financial and other means from that which they are oppressing.

We observed this with UNWomen, where up until about year ago, they were either peddling liberal Zionist talking points, OR, trying to dehumanise male victims by grouping women and children as one group, and mentioning that those are the majority of the victims. Feminists like Hillary Clinton also said this famously in their political campaigns.

However, as feminists gain more and more power, they can afford to be more honest, and we get articles from UNGeneva, UNWomen etc, that now outright say stuff like 'women and girls are the primary victims of the genocide'. They might not have said it outright, but they employed a very slimy tactic to give that false impression.

To remind everyone, please have a look again at this post.

Even prior to the genocide, 80% of the fatalities of Israel's operations in Gaza were men and boys, but that of course, went underreported. Women are consistently doing everything they can to reduce and dehumanise men, and the end goal of that is effectively androcide.

Look at Russia. Really think about what happened to Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed. Russian men were already getting conscripted, during, after and EVEN BEFORE the Bolsheviks, under the Tsar. Where did most of the 'relief' governed by the UN go? Women. And we now have one of the largest life expectancy gaps there, and these vermin have the audacity to blame it on alcohol.

Beyond a mile

This post is not to give any impression that 'if you give em an inch, they'll take a mile'. That's not what's happening when women use the phrase, 'violence against women'. It is what they have always been doing throughout history, elevating the value of women's lives over everyone else's, so as to colonise resources/wealth/relief efforts for themselves.

That is what the phrase 'violence against women' MEANS. It is not some harmless phrase that simply functions to add colour to some words, it is effectively a call to violence, to dehumanise, and to colonise.

u/Exercise-Delicious — 1 month ago

Knowing Your Players: A mini glossary of the architects and proliferators of temperance

Serving as the 2nd half of my prelude to the Temperance movement. I want to bring to light the major players of the temperance movement in this separate post. I will be attempting to string together the events of the temperance movement in the later posts in a proper write up later down the line.

If you spend any time tracking the modern machinery of family law, the endless loop of anti-male media tropes, or the systematic extraction of men's assets in the family court system, you can hit a wall of profound exhaustion.

Everywhere you look, the problem is framed as an amorphous, shape-shifting monster. It's "systemic," "cultural,", and these statements are true. But remember, these are enforced. Forgetting that denomination, one's thinking can delve into considering this a natural evolution of progress.

This framing can be psychological trap. It breeds learned helplessness. When you tell men that they are fighting an invisible, multi-headed historical ghost, you paralyze them. If a system has no authors, no blueprint, and no coordinates, it cannot be fought.

But here is the cold, liberating reality: The legal and moral matrix that weaponizes female vulnerability and enforces male liability is not a force of nature. It was engineered by people, specific people.

If you want to stop feeling helpless, you have to stop looking at the system as a ghost and start treating it as an apparatus. It’s time to get familiar with some of these people.

Ideological Manufacturers

To understand how the modern family court can pathologize a man’s behavior based on un-falsifiable, subjective "mental injury" while leaving his lifetime financial liabilities entirely intact, you have to go back to the early 19th century.

When the Industrial Revolution pulled physical work out of the household and moved it into the marketplace, the elite daughters of the fading New England agrarian aristocracy faced a material crisis: they had lost their traditional economic utility and their marriage market value.

To survive, they didn’t launch a revolution for absolute equality. Instead, they formed a highly organized literary and moral cartel to manufacture a brand-new asset class: Female Moral Superiority and Psychological Fragility.

Here are the key historical players who coded the software that still runs our legal system today:

1. Catharine Beecher [1800–1878]: The High Priestess of "Indirect Power"

Catharine Beecher was the chief ideological architect of the "Separation of Spheres."

  • In her masterwork, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), Beecher executed a theological inversion. She threw out the old Calvinist view that women were morally weak, replacing it with the myth that women possessed a naturally superior, pristine spiritual essence.
  • Beecher explicitly opposed women’s suffrage and told women to stay out of public politics. Why? Because she realized that by remaining an "insulated angel" in the home, a woman could claim total moral neutrality while leveraging intense, un-falsifiable psychological influence over the men who funded her. She taught a generation of bourgeois women how to trade formal power for absolute, state-enforced protection.

2. Sarah Josepha Hale [1788-1879] | The Print Cartel: Godey’s Lady’s Book

Led by editor Sarah Josepha Hale, this mid-19th-century media powerhouse reached an unprecedented 150,000 subscribers, operating exactly like the high-society afternoon media algorithms of today.

  • The Product: Godey’s did not just sell fashion plates; it sold a standardized, class-conscious performance of female fragility. It taught middle-class women that having a sensitive nervous system, suffering from "languor," and requiring absolute emotional deference from men was the ultimate marker of high social status.
  • The Consequence: They successfully transformed a woman's emotional comfort from a private marital dynamic into a high-value, socially recognized asset class that men were culturally obligated to finance.

3. The Abolitionist Proxy: Harriet Beecher Stowe [1811-1896]

Catharine Beecher's sister.

Catharine Beecher’s sister was Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

  • The Blueprint: While celebrated as an anti-slavery text, Uncle Tom’s Cabin subtly operated as a massive vehicle for the innate moral superiority of the female gender and white maternal dominance. Stowe argued that the economic system of slavery was a uniquely "masculine," market-driven, materialist evil.
  • The Value Proposition: To counter it, she didn't just argue for black liberation; she positioned the Christian home and the maternal white woman as the ultimate, supreme moral authority capable of purifying the nation. She used the horrific reality of slavery as a proxy to argue that men’s public systems (politics, commerce, law) were inherently corrupt, and that society could only be saved if it submitted to the moral sensibilities of women. Fun fact: this moral repositioning was essential to women nominating themselves as more appropriate leaders of colonial projects, and extended to other colonial projects/conflicts such as that in South Africa, with concentration camps in the Boer war.

Positioning yourself with minority groups who are actually oppressed, is a tactic that feminists do today with gay people, black people etc, as a means to siphon some sort of political legitimacy. They are thrown out when inconvenient (i.e. tokens are spent).

4. The Father of Temperance : Lyman Beecher [1775-1863]

Lyman Beecher (father to Catharine, Harriet, and Henry Ward Beecher) was universally considered one of the primary "Fathers of the Temperance Movement" in America.

Lyman Beecher is the literal bridge to frontier colonization. He authored a massively influential text called A Plea for the West (1835). In it, he argued that the American West (the frontier being carved out of native lands) was a spiritual battlefield.

This colonisation project, is tied to the moral panic narratives and divorce laws that were afforded to women. By making marriage more appealing to women, more 'families' could be borne, as a means to 'civilise' the land.

5. Mary Hanchett Hunt [1830–1906]: The Institutional Brainwasher

If Catharine Beecher wrote the software, Mary Hanchett Hunt was the one who hard-coded it into the brains of every child in the United States.

  • The Role: She was the Superintendent of the Scientific Temperance Instruction department of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).
  • The Threat Narrative: Hunt recognized that adults could resist pamphlets, so she targeted the school system. She successfully lobbied state legislatures to make temperance education mandatory in every public school.
  • The Propaganda: She forced publishers to rewrite biology textbooks to include absolute fictions (sound familiar?). Her textbooks taught children that a single drop of alcohol would permanently burn a hole in their stomachs, cause their blood to turn to water, and inevitably transform their fathers into violent, slavering maniacs who would murder them in their sleep. She raised two entire generations of Americans to view masculine social behavior as a literal biological threat to national survival

6. Frances Willard [1839–1898]: The Totalitarian Strategist

Frances Willard was the long-time president of the WCTU and arguably the most powerful political organizer in American history. She explicitly tied the threat narrative directly to state dominance.

  • The "Do Everything" Policy: Willard took the WCTU from a simple anti-alcohol club and transformed it into a multi-tiered political cartel. Her motto was "Do Everything." She argued that to protect the home from the predatory male, women needed to control everything: prison reform, education, labor laws, and the police.
  • Willard was the master of using the "Home Protection" argument to expand state police powers. She told politicians that if the state did not grant women the vote and the power to police the community, the frontier would collapse into savage anarchy. She successfully weaponized the illusion of female vulnerability to secure massive funding for state surveillance, prison houses for "deviant" men, and the total bureaucratic framework that modern family courts still use to monitor male behavior.

For eg, they created the Department of Social Purity. This department if you dig a little deeper, was involved in placing WCTU agents inside local police departments, courts, and municipal boards.

Frances Willard specifically, engaged in reforming the police system that we know of in America today. Specifically, the Invention of the Police Matron and the Sex-Segregated Reformatory.

Before this person, the American penal system was physically unsegregated. Men and women arrested for public crimes (vagrancy, drunkenness, theft) were thrown into the same local jails and precinct lock-ups, all staffed exclusively by male guards.

Frances pushed for 2 things

  1. Police Matrons (female prison guards) - The WCTU launched a massive, state-by-state legislative blitz demanding that municipal police departments hire Police Matrons : "virtuous, middle-class women" who would hold exclusive custody over any arrested women or juveniles.

This was the first time in history that the state's coercive law enforcement apparatus was legally split by gender. It institutionalized a permanent bureaucratic foothold for women reformers directly inside police precincts, allowing them to oversee arrests and dictate municipal moral policy

  1. The Separate Women's Reformatory System - Examples of this are the Massachusetts Reformatory Prison for Women at Framingham (1877) or the WCTU-backed local homes for "fallen women" established across the West

By convincing the state to build separate, specialized reformatories to rehabilitate women, the standard, harsh, punitive state prison system was left as an apparatus designated almost exclusively for the punishment and forced labor of men. The state hard-coded a system where criminalized women received therapeutic, maternal rehabilitation, while criminalized men received raw carceral punishment.

While female prisons are not necessarily the same to this, it is paramount to understand that the separation of prisons was part and parcel of the broader feminist narrative that was present during and building before the official beginning of the temperance movement.

The primary concern for police matrons for eg, came about from feminist concerns regarding protecting female inmates from abuse by male guards, and rehabilitative (vs. purely punitive) treatment for women.

7. Timothy Shay Arthur [1809-1885] - the male feminist ally/writer

T.S. Arthur was an explicit ally of the early feminist movement. 

Was a highly successful, self-taught male writer who realized that selling the narrative of female moral superiority to bourgeois women was the most lucrative literary formula in 19th-century America.

failed out of traditional schooling early.

Couldn't work the mills due to bad eyesight

In the 1830s, he broke into the booming market of domestic magazines, becoming one of the most prolific contributors to Godey's Lady’s Book

Launched his own carbon-copy publication, Arthur's Home Magazine

Explicitly targeted middle-class women, writing over 150 books and selling over a million copies

Vastly more commercially successful in his lifetime than other public figures

Created visual horror shows of broken domestic sanctuaries. He portrayed working-class men as naturally destructive beasts and wives as helpless, angelic martyrs.

8. L.M. Sargent (Lucius Manlius Sargent): The Wealthy OG "Trauma-Porn" Pioneer [1786–1867]

Wealthy, elite New England aristocrat who used his fortune to bankroll early temperance propaganda.

Wrote Temperance Tales (1835–1843).

Featured graphic, highly exaggerated accounts of men transforming into demonic beasts the moment they took a drink, abandoning their pristine, angelic wives to freeze to death in winter storms. He proved that before you can pass laws to strip men of their contractual rights, you must first spend a decade conditioning the public to view them as domestic monsters.

9. Mary A. Livermore [1820–1905]: The Political Bridge

Mary Livermore  is a critical player because she bridges the gap between the Beecher sisters, the WCTU, and the Suffrage movement.

  • She wrote a massive bestseller titled Thirty Years Too Late (1847) and later edited the Agitator, a radical suffrage and temperance newspaper.
  • The Narrative: Livermore didn’t just write fiction; she explicitly argued that the traditional marriage contract was an engine of male tyranny fueled by alcohol. She used her platform to mass-produce the threat narrative that women were trapped in a state of perpetual physical danger, arguing that the state had a moral obligation to step inside the home, monitor the husband, and grant the wife unilateral control over the family's assets.
  • Wrote about book called A Woman of the Century (1893) — a massive biographical encyclopedia of American women, co-edited with Frances Willard

The Political Executioners: Turning Moral Panic Into Civil Law

Once the software of "female moral superiority" was deeply embedded in the cultural psyche, a new faction of players emerged to hard-code it into the legal system. Their weapon of choice was the first massive, organized anti-male moral panic in American history: The Temperance Movement.

1. Elizabeth Cady Stanton [1815-1902]

While mainstream history celebrates Stanton exclusively for the Seneca Falls Convention, her most material, devastating work occurred in the trenches of early divorce law reform and the Temperance crusade.

  • The Tactic: Stanton and her networks did not lead their campaigns with abstract arguments about personal autonomy. Instead, they mass-produced highly sensationalized, moralistic pamphlets pathologizing the male population as "drunken monsters" destroying the fragile, holy sanctuary of the domestic home.
  • The Theft of Contract: They used this acute moral panic to aggressively lobby state legislatures to rewrite the civil code. Under the guise of protecting "vulnerable women and children," they successfully engineered the earliest versions of fault-free legal separation and lifetime maintenance.

They replaced relatively objective legal standards (like actual physical violence) with subjective, un-falsifiable metrics of "mental cruelty" (a precedent famously detonated by the high-society Butler v. Butler case - 1849). They created a pipeline where a woman could use the state's coercive power to exit a union with the assets, while keeping the man legally bound to fund her delicate lifestyle under penalty of imprisonment.

2. Joel Prentiss Bishop [1814-1901]

"foremost law writer of the age" in 19th-century America

In 1852, he published Commentaries on the Law of Marriage and Divorce, the single most influential legal treatise on the subject in American history. Bishop argued that law was not just a cold set of rules, but a reflection of "God-given moral sense."

As we know from an earlier post, Prentiss Bishop here is responsible for the 1872 Civil code, which invented the concept of 'extreme cruelty', playing a much larger role in family courts then no fault divorce law arguably did. The liberal application of this characterisation to extract more from men in courts, is exactly the same way that courts are now framing 'psychological abuse' in marriages, against men in marriages TODAY. Which really brings home the point that the issues that we as men are facing have not changed over the centuries.

3. Neal Dow [1804-1897]

The 'Napoleon' of the temperance movement.

"Father of Prohibition"

Mayor of Portland, Maine

Dow authored the "Maine Law" of 1851, the first total statutory prohibition of alcohol in the U.S. The law had a devastating mechanism: any three voters could apply for a search warrant to have the state seize a man's property based on mere suspicion.

The Portland Rum Riot (1855): When working-class Irish immigrants—who saw the Maine Law as a thinly veiled class and cultural attack on their lives—discovered Dow was secretly storing $1,600 worth of alcohol in the city vaults, they surrounded the building. Dow didn't de-escalate; he called out the state militia and ordered them to fire into the crowd of protesters, killing a working-class sailor named John Robbins and wounding seven others.

4. Susan B. Anthony [1820-1906]

Worked hand-in-hand with Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the early 1850s as a fierce Temperance mobilizer.

  • The Legislative Target: Anthony was the boots-on-the-ground organizer who aggressively lobbied for the expansion of the Married Women’s Property Acts (specifically the New York acts of 1848 and 1860). - Coincidentally, a year before the Butler v Butler case in 1849 which sparked talk about 'expanding the grounds for divorce' via 'extreme cruelty'
  • The Catch: While modern feminists frame these acts as simple financial independence for women, Anthony and Stanton explicitly marketed them to the public using the Temperance threat narrative. They told legislatures that these laws were necessary to protect "fragile wives" from having their assets seized by "drunken, abusive husbands."
  • The Reality: By using the extreme archetype of the drunken abuser as a proxy, they successfully rewrote the baseline civil code to allow a wife to separate her assets from the marriage while the husband remained legally responsible for all household debts, maintenance, and liabilities.

5. Carrie Moore "Carry A. Nation" [1846–1911]

A terrorist

You cannot write a field guide to anti-male moral panics without naming the 6-foot-tall, hatchet-wielding manifestation of pure moral absolutism: Carry A. Nation .

  • The Tactic: Carry Nation did not care about the slow, legislative process. Operating under what she called "Hatchetations," she would march into bars and saloons dressed in severe black-and-white clothing, singing hymns while violently demolishing the bar fixtures, mirrors, and stock with a massive hatchet and pockets full of rocks.
  • The Weaponization of Chivalry: Her strategy relied entirely on a massive gender double standard. Men were bound by the strict codes of Victorian chivalry, meaning male patrons and bartenders were socially paralyzed and could not physically strike an older woman without causing a public riot. She leveraged this protection to inflict thousands of dollars in property damage, paying off her subsequent jail fines by selling miniature souvenir hatchets to her massive network of bourgeois female supporters.
  • The Media Engine: She funded her militant group, the Home Defender’s Army, by publishing radical newsletters like The Smasher’s Mail and The Hatchet, explicitly framing her property destruction as a holy crusade to protect the "delicate home" from the ungodly, masculine marketplace.

Carrie had 2 husbands. The first named, Charles Gloyd, whom she left, because the man was a drunk, who was drinking due to 2 reasons

i. Alcohol was cheap

ii. PTSD from the civil war (1861-1865)

They met right around the END of the civil war in America. They got married in 1867. Wikipedia and other sources frame this disingenuously here

Rather, he was an abusive alcoholic who drank himself to death just 16 months after their marriage, leaving her widowed, pregnant, and in deep financial ruin.

Gloyd got left by Carrie, after which he drank himself to death.

Yet, you know how history paints Gloyd?

"Someone who abused Carrie, via devastating neglect, psychological torment, and abandonment"

If you recall, divorce law entered around framing 'extreme cruelty' as a righteous means for divorce. This is the narrative with which she divorced her 1st husband, and left him to die.

THIS, is a champion of the temperance movement. And you know what supporters of her would say instead? They engage in feminist revisionism of history, and it is deplorable.

Feminist revision of saloons

Prohibition didn't work but the temperance movement was so intertwined with women's rights/suffrage for a reason. Men had complete control over households and family finances and it wasn't uncommon for a man to get paid and immediately go spend most of it at the local bar while the family suffered. Alcohol also helped (and still does) fuel domestic violence. Carrie's first husband was a severe alcoholic who died very young from it. To her seeing bars everywhere was probably like seeing drug dealers on every corner. In her later years she opened one of the first women's shelters for wives and children of alcoholics.

The amount of projection in this statement is laughable. This is how you know history is feminist. Without proper context, feminists would have you believing that the victims are the perpetrators and the perpetrators the victims.

She was literally known for harassing and smashing up saloon stock - the only place where men of this class were able to afford sustenance.

Here is a quick counter to this disgusting misandrist feminist invention.

Firstly, most men in these saloons were single.

They had no wives to abuse.

The bachelor population in urban areas only grew faster after the Civil War. Consequently, single men often greatly outnumbered single women in the cities. This gender imbalance, along with the rising costs of living, resulted in young men putting off marriage longer than previous generations of bachelors. By 1890, the average marrying age for a man was close to our modern marrying age: 26. With so many men putting off marriage, a feedback loop formed that increased the proportion of urban single men even more. In that same year, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that 67 percent of all men between the ages of 15 and 34 were bachelors.

AND

The golden age of the bachelor was also the golden age of the saloon. By 1895, American cities had, on average, one saloon for every 317 residents and the primary customer was single men (women, who were not prostitutes, were typically banned outright). For many bachelors living in cities, the saloon wasn’t just a place where they could grab a pint of beer and play cards with friends after work. Saloons also provided other services that bachelors needed, including banking services (like check cashing and credit extension) and mail services.

The most important service saloons offered bachelors was providing food. Back in the late 19th century, many cities required bars and saloons to provide free food to patrons. For just the cost of a pint of beer, a young and hungry bachelor could fill himself with some hearty victuals. For many urban bachelors, saloon food was their only source of sustenance. Immigrant Oscar Ameringer described the kind of free food you could get in an 1880s Cincinnati bar: “By investing five cents in a schooner of beer and holding on to the evidence of purchase, one could eat one’s fill of such delicacies as rye bread, cheese, hams, sausage, pickled and smoked herring, sardines, onions, radishes, and pumpernickel.”

SECONDLY

Almost none of the women leading the temperance crusades or smashing up saloons were married to working-class men, let alone alcoholics. Carry was an exception, never got abused by her 1st husband, and left him to die, justifying the divorce as her escaping his 'psychological abuse'.

The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the street crusaders were comprised almost exclusively of wealthy, white, Protestant, middle-to-upper-class bourgeois wives.

The temperance movement was simply another act of top-down class imperialism. They looked out their windows at the immigrant, working-class populations (largely Irish and German Catholics) who utilized saloons, and they branded their cultural and communal habits as "savage," "unrefined," and a threat to the Protestant social order. Just like how British women viewed Indian men. There is no imagination, wit or creativity in women's bigotry against men. It is the same tired narrative.

Purpose | Putting names to your oppression

The purpose of this post is to hopefully spur some interest in some readers to do the same.

When we talk about how the TeaOnHerApp got banned but not the original app, Nancy Mace is to blame. Who is Nancy Mace? Some conservative politician who has a history of falsely accusing most of her sexual partners of being rapists and child abusers.

When we talk about how Switzerland and Austria maintaining conscription for men only in a referendum, and how women managed to vote in that referendum to determine what we get to do with our own bodies, point to people like Cyrielle Huguenot - head of equality, family and migration issues at the Swiss Trade Union Federation (USS).

There are numerous issues that we have that have instigators that deserve naming.

Contextualising your systemic issues in the form of names, not just organisations, helps discretise and clarify these issues. As I have hopefully illustrated, these people who are oppressing you have families, hobbies, jobs, institutions they report to regularly. If they play chess, it could be considered relevant AFAIK.

u/Exercise-Delicious — 2 months ago

Women, Divorce and the Vulnerable Wife Industry | Neurasthenia, 'Mental/Extreme cruelty' and 'purity of the woman'

This post is meant to serve as a prelude to the Temperance movement. I realised that if I started talking about the temperance movement, it would very likely appear to be something independent of other issues that we discuss with respect to feminism. Part of the reason for the failure of various men's rights activism, is that we regularly commit recency bias. Feel free to examine my original assertion on that here. As I often like to point out, there is a continuous nature to the oppression that men face, and we are not actually going through anything unique here in 2026, or 1926.

No fault divorce (1969)

A number of discussions that some of us might have had generally involve mention of this dubious idea that 'no fault divorce is the reason that marriages are falling apart'. I've been victim to this framing myself.

No fault divorce was inscribed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1969 in the California’s Family Law Act.

He thought he was putting a humane end to the "melancholy charade". The institutionalized perjury where couples had to stage fake scandals just to secure an amicable split.

To be specific, his motivation for putting this into law, was personal and that I believe was the fundamental flaw in his motion.

Reagan was driven by the lingering trauma of his own 1948 divorce from Jane Wyman, where he had been forced to sit silently as Hollywood tabloids broadcasting her allegations of "mental cruelty" weaponized his private life for public consumption. He thought that by removing "fault" entirely, he would strip bitter spouses of the legal leverage used to extort men through character assassination.

Modern critics look at the wreckage of family law and blame the 1970s (No-Fault). But if you step into a time machine and set the dial to 1872 or 1849, you find a society panicking over the exact same thing except they didn't have "No-Fault" to blame. Instead, they blamed alcohol and moral decay, and they used the law to trap men in a permanent provider role (coverture) while treating women as fragile subjects, prone to neurasthenia.

Charade about charades in divorce court

Monetary incentives that 'propel women to divorce their men', were manufactured by women themselves.

It is widely believed that couples that simply wanted to amicably split up, and were 'working with each other' to finally get the right to separate.

While I am sure there are instances of that being true, I want to highlight something that might have been missed in this.

Alimony was and still is being paid to the wife upon divorce. This is a general rule. The concept that a man would willingly separate from their wife with the same desires, is about as believable as a man saying that they and their wife 'divorced amicably' today. Men tend to bottle up, curl up and withstand abuse. How are dead bedrooms a thing?

The present has data that supports this.

What % of divorces are initiated by men today? Surely it is the same % that actually had an equally willing husband and wife to divorce.

What is far more believable to me, is that wives were giving their husbands 2 choices.

1 Accept my deal to divorce, go along with the charade, and we will divorce amicably, with minimal as possible damages to your finances as possible OR

2 I will drag your name through the mud, and make your financial situation far worse.

And this dynamic, exists to this day, nothing has changed about how couples divorce and how women might compel their men to accept bargain deals.

This sort of dynamic makes this notion of couples agreeing to divorce and tricking the courts, disingenuous in my opinion, and was how politicians manufactured consent for no fault divorce in the first place.

Divorce & Monetary incentives

Divorce itself was made more accessible by feminists, with the invention of threat narratives.

I would like to try to dispel the idea that 'the reason that divorces happen, is because women were given incentives to divorce due to the cash prize' at the end. This statement implies that women did not work at all in any shape or regard, to push for legislative restructuring, to extract money and resources from the husband in divorce. Women have actively done that through history.

This statement inadvertently implies that women act as passive actors, and had no participation in the legal restructuring of divorce law. (something I plan to expand on in a later post)

While men are enablers of this behaviour, the idea that women are 'incentivised' by forces external to them assumes 2 things

1 Firstly, it assumes that men would engage in this behaviour if given the opportunity

2 It assumes that men crafted this system independently of women, without pressure from them in the first place

Divorce was existent in history, and the manner in which they unfolded is similar.

Going back further in time

We observe the nature of family courts today because of a longstanding history in America (and arguably the rest of the world), since its inception.

We are going to go through 2 hallmark cases in divorce law, that arguably created this domino effect we are observing today, one in

1 1892 and its impacts and

2 1849.

Cornerstone case about 'cruelty' & divorce | 1892 Barnes v. Barnes

How being suspicious of an unfaithful wife got a husband divorced

If there is a single, smoking-gun court case that permanently shifted the definition of legal cruelty away from physical safety and into the realm of subjective emotional perception, it is the California Supreme Court landmark case Barnes v. Barnes (1892) 95 Cal. 171.

This case officially established the legal blueprint for the subjective "mental cruelty" backdoor that swept across family courts nationwide, laying the direct groundwork for the modern divorce system.

This was a case, where the husband allegedly was accusing his wife of cheating on him. This was what the wife used, as literal grounds for divorce - citing the accusations as a form of 'extreme cruelty'.

Before Barnes, a divorce trial required relatively objective, falsifiable evidence: medical logs of bruises, broken bones, or eyewitnesses to physical threats.

After Barnes, the legal standard became entirely subjective and un-falsifiable. If a wife testified that her husband's disposition or words caused her "grievous mental anguish," it was virtually impossible for a man to legally disprove her internal feelings.

By achieving this precedent, Barnes v. Barnes effectively turned "extreme cruelty" into a universal, open backdoor for unilateral divorce. It handed women the absolute legal leverage to threaten a husband with a public, reputation-ruining defamation suit guaranteeing that she could walk away with the assets and the children under the guise of protecting her "delicate sensibilities," while leaving the husband entirely holding the bag for all remaining marital debts and liabilities.

This is what arguably marked a permanent scar on the marriage landscape.

This all hinged on the introduced concept of 'mental suffering' from California Civil Code of 1872. A mere 20 years after its inception, its began fulfilling its purpose.

California Civil Code of 1872

The legal architect was Joel Prentiss Bishop, a towering legal theorist whose deep roots in evangelical Protestantism heavily influenced family law across the United States. Bishop used a case, Butler v. Butler in 1849 as a precedent to argue that if a husband’s constant, harsh disposition or ungrounded accusations ruined a wife’s peace of mind, it was a direct assault on her health.

Reason 1 for the 1872 civil code

Lawmakers like Prentiss were not acting in a vacuum.

They were folding under immense, highly coordinated pressure from first-wave feminist lobbies and evangelical women's societies.

Activists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton had spent decades aggressively petitioning legislatures, explicitly using the moral authority of the Church to demand that the state police the domestic sphere. Lawmakers didn't invent the 'delicate female victim' framework because they wanted to... they codified it because organized women's movements gave them a political ultimatum

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the key figures, actively painting the idea of the "Nurturing, Vulnerable Female Mind". For eg, here are some instrumental quotes from her, predating this legal precedent in 1872

"...experience teaches us that man cannot legislate for woman. If the object of government is to protect the weak against the strong, how unwise to place the power wholly in the hands of the strong?"

"...that womanhood is such a subtle essence of frivolities and contradictions that it needs some special code of laws to meet its exigencies..."

"The male element is a destructive force, stern, selfish, aggrandizing, loving war, violence, conquest, acquisition, breeding in the material and moral world alike discord, disorder, disease, and death"

"The need of this hour is ... a new evangel of womanhood, to exalt purity, virtue, morality, true religion, to lift man up into the higher realms of thought and action."

That last quote especially, and many others from other members of the Temperance movement, exemplifies what I am talking about. The vulnerable, fragile, elevated and superior mind of the woman, over the man.

Reason 2 for the 1872 civil code

Secondly...

Early Western states like California were desperate to attract white, middle-class women to settle the frontier.

Women’s advocacy groups completely understood this leverage. They explicitly conditioned their migration and civilization of the West on the state providing strict legal protections for their domestic safety and emotional dignity.

The impact of the 1892 Barnes v Barnes ruling

Barnes v Barnes was directly used in setting off more precedents in divorce law that live on to this day.

Resultant/'Domino' divorce cases

1 | Mahnken v. Mahnken (1900) – North Dakota Supreme Court

The wife sought a divorce based on harsh language and mental distress. The defense argued that because her physical health wasn't explicitly failing or impaired, it didn't cross the threshold of legal cruelty.

The court used Barnes v. Barnes (along side Fleming v. Fleming) to cement a radical new rule in North Dakota: "Grievous mental suffering is sufficient ground for divorce as extreme cruelty although it does not impair the health."

This case officially exported the California framework to other states, legally decoupling "mental anguish" from "physical injury." It established that a woman didn't even have to prove that her husband’s disposition made her physically ill—the mere wounding of her mental feelings was enough to dissolve the contract and split the property.

2 | Fleming v. Fleming (1892) – Supreme Court of California

Decided only months after Barnes, this case involved a wife suing for divorce because her husband had made a pass at their domestic servant, causing the wife deep embarrassment and distress.

The court immediately reached back to its brand-new Barnes ruling to confirm that any unjustifiable conduct that "grievously wounds the mental feelings" or "utterly destroys the peace of mind" constitutes extreme cruelty.

3 | Maloof v. Maloof (1917) & Parnay v. Parnay (1942) – California Appellate Courts

Over the next several decades, men frequently attempted to fight back against subjective cruelty divorces by pointing out that their behaviour was just standard marital friction, penuriousness (being stingy with money), or harsh arguments.

In Maloof (and subsequently cited in Parnay), the courts routinely shut down male defense attempts by citing Barnes as the immutable baseline rule: Whether or not harsh treatment causes 'grievous mental suffering' is purely a question of fact, to be deduced from all the circumstances of each particular case.

4 | LaMar v. LaMar (1947) – Supreme Court of California

A mid-century case was one of the final stepping stones right before Ronald Reagan’s era. The court was evaluating whether a pattern of cold, indifferent, and critical behavior entirely devoid of threats or violence... met the standard for "extreme cruelty".

While it does mention allegations of adultery as well, there was no investigation into the credibility of that allegation and there was not even any mention of that allegation into the findings of judgement of the case. The results were purely deliberated in the context of the husband allegedly being cruel, and therefore, granted the entire marital estate to the wife, except for 2500 dollars to the husband.

The reasoning behind them determining cruelty was purely hinged on the sensibility of the person alleging the cruelty

"Whether in any given case there has been inflicted this 'grievous mental suffering' is a pure question of fact, to be deduced from all the circumstances of each particular case, keeping always in view the intelligence, apparent refinement, and delicacy of sentiment of the complaining party; and no arbitrary rule as to what particular probative facts shall exist in order to justify a finding of the ultimate facts of its existence can be given." 

LaMar used Barnes to fully institutionalize gender-based double standards in family court. Under this ruling, the wealthier or more "refined" a woman was, the lower her threshold for claiming "mental cruelty" became. A husband could be found guilty of extreme cruelty simply because his language or demeanor was deemed too unrefined for his wife's elite, delicate sensibilities.

The Evolution of the Structural Victim: Butler v. Butler (1849)

Barnes v Barnes in turn, was only possible due to a famous ruling in 1849.

Looking further back than the 1872 California Civil Code. We have to look at Pennsylvania in 1849 with the foundational case of Butler v. Butler.

Before Butler, the law was arguably relatively grounded in physical reality. Cruelty meant visible violence that endangered life or limb. But in Butler, the court began to entertain a radical new legal fiction: that a woman's unique, delicate disposition made her susceptible to "mental injury" that could physically waste her away.

Fun facts about the Butler couple

There are alot of noteworthy features to the Butler case. For one, Pierce Mease Butler was a very wealthy plantation owner, who owned about 700 slaves, and he was the grandson of one of the founding fathers, Pierce Butler. His status and wealth were what had attracted Fanny, the actress to him.

Fanny claimed extreme cruelty, while Butler was claiming that she had simply abandoned him, and was hunting for alimony.

Fanny would later go on to talk about the cruelty of slavery, but only after she confirmed that she would win custody and alimony. Butler was made to pay 1500 dollars a year to her. And this was done after she managed to solidify a plea deal with Butler, that if she gets paid that amount, she would not further allege anymore abuse from him. That was the deal.

Fanny also had a diary where she kept notes on the Georgia plantations in 1838–1839, but she only released in 1863, well after the divorce and in the middle of the American Civil War. She released it in England explicitly to weaponize public opinion against the Confederacy and stop Britain from intervening on behalf of the South.

Fanny Kemble's alignment with the Union and British abolitionists allowed her to ride a wave of righteous political necessity. Her personal grievances against her husband were successfully retrofitted into a broader, noble crusade for human rights, granting her an elite level of political legitimacy that a divorced actress of the era could never have achieved on her own. Her partnership with the abolitionist movement, against slavery was arguably similar to how the Temperance movement had one.

This is another classic weaponisation of the "Nurturing, Vulnerable Female Mind".

Concluding remarks

The invention of the 'nurturing, vulnerable female mind', privy to neurasthenia was the underpinning to how women fought for control over men: a legal system that evaluates injury and wrongdoing based on the perceived social refinement of the victim. And we will hopefully see this again, when we address the Temperance movement, that occured in a similar time frame to these cases.

The legal fiction born in Butler (1849), codified in the California Civil Code of 1872, and weaponized in Barnes (1892) had a medical stamp of approval. Women were clinically and legally defined as inherently fragile, uniquely pure, and entirely vulnerable to the unrefined dispositions of men.

u/Exercise-Delicious — 2 months ago

French Revolution | Marie Antoinette, 'the woman who did nothing wrong' and her foolish king

I really enjoyed the coverage by everyone here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPRFYKM0tPc

There was a bit where Contrapoints' argued that 'Marie Antoinette shouldn't have been killed because she recently lost her husband', conveniently glossing over the fact that she was being executed for the same reason her husband was. For betraying their own people. For plotting against their own people, and that their capitulations to the revolution were lies.

There was a level of psychopathy in there. Somehow Antoinette being a 'widow', a woman, gave her special status, beyond the traditional punishments of the time.

I remember learning a couple other facts about this duo, that I thought might be interesting that were also similarly, not covered.

SpookyScarySocialist, the author of the video that was being criticised, said that he was 'always open for feminist revisions/interpretations of history, and that history was often very male centric'.

That is false. But how about I give a snippet of what a male centric analysis of this duo would be like? Apologies in advance, if there are some inaccuracies, it's been a while since I read about the French.

Marie Antoinette and her king

Pop culture loves to paint Marie Antoinette as a tragic, misunderstood teenager who was thrown to the wolves because her husband was a bumbling, useless idiot. The narrative usually goes: She was just a naive girl who did nothing wrong, doomed by a man who couldn't lead.

The dynamic between **Louis-Auguste (King Louis XVI of France)**and his Queen tells a very different, much darker story.

1 The King Was Completely Faithful to the Queen | She Was Not

Louis XVI is one of the only kings in French history who never took an official mistress. In a royal court where cheating was practically a government requirement, Louis took his Catholic vows incredibly seriously. He was deeply devoted to her.

Marie Antoinette? Not so much. She engaged in a passionate, lifelong affair with a Swedish nobleman and military officer named Count Axel von Fersen. For centuries, historians tried to claim it was just "platonic," until 2016 when scientists used X-ray fluorescence to decrypt heavily censored letters between them. The hidden ink revealed phrases like: "I love you madly and never, ever can I exist a moment without adoring you."

2 She Financially Exploited His Passivity

Louis XVI wasn’t naturally "bumbling"—he was a deeply analytical, passive man who hated conflict and just wanted to make his wife happy. She weaponized this exact weakness.

  • She racked up catastrophic, high-stakes gambling debts, knowing the King would quietly pay them off from his private funds to avoid a scandal.
  • She bullied him into giving massive, unearned government salaries and pensions to her inner circle of friends (the Polignac family), bleeding the state dry.
  • When he gifted her the Petit Trianon as a private getaway estate, she literally changed the locks and refused to let the King inside without her explicit written invitation. Btw, this is one of the first times ever, where French royalty began to ascribe separate spaces that are beyond even the King's reign of control, shortly before the revolution of course

Some records try to sweep this away from her by saying that

Gambling obsessed all levels of French society during the Enlightenment. Louis XIV (the previous king) held appartements du roi given over to gambling three times a week at Versailles, the queen hosted a nightly game, and courtiers scheduled additional occasions for play. Hosts so frequently acted as bankers for games to entertain their guests that satirists, chroniclers, and moralists complained that compulsive gambling had destroyed other forms of social entertainment. In Paris ten authorized maisons de jeux operated games involving some degree of skill (jeux de commerce) but essentially they served as fronts for more lucrative chance-driven games (jeux de hasard). Gambling also took place at the two great Paris fairs during almost four months of the year, all year long at foreign embassies, and eventually at gambling houses at the Hotel de Gesvres and later at the Hotel de Soissons. 

But the King married to Antoinette here, had zero interest in gambling. He was naturally frugal, highly pious, and a creature of strict routine. In fact...

She begged her husband to let her have one last game. He gave permission, and naughty Antoinette made sure the game went on for three days. Louis was disgusted.

3 Invented the first formal concept of an authority above a King, by virtue of being female

The Petit Trianon and its English-style gardens were a direct rejection of the formal French gardens of Versailles, which were symbols of absolutism and kingly control

Historical records claim that this was just a gift that King Louis XVI just gifted her. But they have no evidence for this. This appears to be another form of manipulation utilised by women in relationships. It's the result of the dominance she had in the relationship.

4 She Sabotaged Their Only Chance at Survival

When the French Revolution exploded and the royal family finally decided to flee Paris in 1791 (the Flight to Varennes), Marie Antoinette was the mastermind of the escape. But she is also the reason it failed.

The military general organizing the escape begged them to split up and travel in fast, light carriages. The Queen outright refused. She threw a fit and demanded that the entire royal family travel together in a massive, custom-built, six-horse luxury coach. The carriage was so heavy and moved so incredibly slow that they missed all their military checkpoints, got recognized by a local postmaster, and were dragged back to Paris to be executed.

I would like to add, that part of the reason that the Crusades were deadly, was because of similar plans by the nobility, oftentimes of the female nobility, to have extravagant modes of travel like this. It seems like a pattern that deserves some exploration in the future.

The Verdict

King Louis XVI was absolutely a foolish king—but his greatest foolishness was his blind, indulgent devotion to his wife. He was a man trapped in an impossible job who gave her everything she asked for. In return, she took his money, bypassed his authority, broke her vows, and ultimately insisted on the very luxury coach that drove them straight to the guillotine.

Here's another fun fact

It took Louis XVI seven years before he finally made a child with Antoinette. He was shy and uncomfortable around her, and she was marrying into them from a more powerful family.

Marie Antoinette is remembered as a victim of circumstance, especially by these hateful feminists, but upon closer inspection, I found Louis to be a far more compelling perspective of male vulnerability.

Louis appeared to be far more of a submissive individual, a geeky king, who was being effectively taken advantage of, just like Contrapoints takes advantage of people's lack of historical knowledge, to peddle her hate movement.

It's quite intriguing to see so much pseudo intellectual slop gets passed as political analysis, as long as that analysis is bigoted, hateful and prejudiced, against the gender proletarit.

u/Exercise-Delicious — 2 months ago

Female pedophiles and sexual abusers | The ongoing epidemic of rapists

With a landscape that entertains itself endlessly to fantasies about lynching pedophiles, let's reflect on the epidemic of pedophiles who not only, get away with engaging in pedophilia, but explore rhetoric that makes a mockery of and even encourages pedophilia and the associated predatory behaviour, against men and boys

While some women worry about a billionaire soliciting sex from them, the day to day man has to worry about normal day to day women, be it their neighbours, teachers, peers, guardians, and even parents, of committing sexual abuse against them or other fellow men and boys.

Since a post like this can seem hyperbolic to some, let's go over a list of male victims of sexual abuse, even going as far as statutory rape, being unaddressed.

Tupac Shakur

raped by a mother's friend at 15

Tupac is known for having been arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting a fan, which he has previously denied. Some have even gone as far as to argue that Tupac was covering for 2 others who might have been implicated instead.

But did you know that Tupac was a victim of statutory rape?

Nobody cares to remember this, unsurprisingly.

According to the biography, Tupac’s second encounter occurred shortly after with one of his mother’s friends, former Black Panther Afeni Shakur. The experience left him emotionally overwhelmed.

Afeni Shakur is his mother. The friend has not been named. But this person was probably not a billionaire funded by a foreign country. By all accounts, this was the average, day to day woman on the prowl. And she had found yet another underaged teenager to sexually exploit.

He later told girlfriend Simi Cruise, “The next day I thought I was in love with my mom’s friend. But she ignored me. She was a woman and I was a boy. It changed the way I thought about sex. It wasn’t love. It was just sex.”

But of course, nobody considers to have maybe informed a very concerning and precarious life later on for Shakur. Who cares? Surely he enjoyed it, right?

Jimmy Bennett

sexually abused by the mother of the MeToo movement

Asia Argento was one of the loudest, most prominent public faces of the #MeToo movement - the absolute vanguard of moral accountability. And she was another sexual abuser, in fact, one of the very best of them all. How many predators do you know get to start an entire movement about sexual assault, while being a perpetrator of one? And one who even paid hush money at that?

  • The Case: In 2018, it was leaked that Argento had quietly paid a $380,000 hush-money settlement to young actor Jimmy Bennett. Why? Because in 2013, when Bennett was just 17 years old (below the age of consent in California) and she was 37, she sexually assaulted him in a hotel room.
  • The Dismissive Attitude: When the news broke, the mainstream media scrambled into damage control. Argento wasn't universally canceled, locked up, or treated like a monster. Instead, mainstream figures framed it as "complicated" or a "tragic misunderstanding." Her career suffered minor friction, but there were no handcuffs. The system actively tried to protect her status as an activist leader, proving that a female predator can literally buy silence and maintain moral authority.

Aaron Carter

raped by sister for 4 years

His sister Leslie raped him from age 10 to 13 when she was off her bipolar medication, and separately accused his brother Nick of abusing him throughout his life. He also claimed he was abused by backup dancers early in his career. None of these allegations resulted in criminal cases — they surfaced through tweets during a personal crisis, and Aaron died in 2022 before any resolution. His sister Leslie had already died in 2012

Vili Fualaau

groomed by female teacher, Letourneau

even got married and divorced later in 2019

Letourneau, 34 and a married mother of four, began a sexual relationship with her 12-year-old sixth-grade student Vili Fualaau in summer 1996. She pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree child rape and was sentenced to seven and a half years, but all but six months was suspended on condition of treatment and no contact.

She went back to jail after having re-offended, having met with this 12 now 14 year old boy again...

..on February 6, Judge Lau reinstated Letourneau’s original sentence and sent her back to prison. In October of that year, Letourneau gave birth to her second child with Fualaau, a daughter named Georgia. The children were raised by Fualaau’s mother while Letourneau remained in prison. Fualaau and his mother, Soona, later sued the Highline School District and city of Des Moines, Washington, for over $2 million, claiming police and school officials didn’t do enough to protect Vili. In May 2002, a jury ruled the Fualaaus were not entitled to any money.

Oprah Winfrey had a show with this person, talking about this as love. And this was part of the conversation apparently

During their conversation, Winfrey asked the once-respected grade-school teacher - whose fall from grace has become an international story - if she and the boy had considered marriage.

Letourneau’s response was indirect, according to Schultz: “I think the families would like that,” Letourneau told Winfrey.

Can you imagine this with the genders reversed?

More examples of female teachers being sexual abusers/rapists etc

here are some more examples that I would invite readers to examine and even make posts about if something piques your interest

Kaci Pomerenke (Texas)

Alexandria Vera (Texas)

Sarah Jones (Kentucky, 2012) 

Debra Lafave (Florida, 2004) 

Michelle Blosser (Ohio) 

Christina Carbone (Arizona, age 23)

Lynnette McIntyre (Illinois, age 44)

Kendall Jaye Phillips (Texas, 2025) 

Shawnee Nicole Despain (Texas, 2025)

Tara Driscoll (New York)

Structural responses to female pedophilia

For any detractors, suggesting that these are one-offs, let me highlight the Vili Fualaau case again.

They made a fucking movie romanticising this. They made a fucking movie, celebrating a female pedophile stalking, grooming, marrying a boy they groomed.

On top of that, feminists studying this case, cast this as a 'mysterious elucidating case that may be worth exploring', maybe it was a simple, sexy accident that this beautiful woman went through.

The case fascinated the public as it was unclear whether Letourneau’s affinity for Fualaau was an aberration in the behavior of an otherwise well-adjusted woman or symptomatic of a more deep-seated pathology. Letourneau and Fualaau's story even inspired a film, May December (2023). 

Please. Remember 3 things.

1 Epstein was a billionaire. A fucking billionaire.

2 This is some woman who was a daughter of some hilly billy somewhere, who gives a shit. And she stalks, grooms, married

3 This woman, had 2 children: Audrey Lokelani Fualaau and Georgia Fualaau, with Vili Fualaau, who again, she groomed and had sex with at 12.

The difference in treatment of male pedophiles and female ones has been mentioned before, it's nothing new.

Not in the field of law at least. In statistics, we have a rather different story.

Rape Apologia

I want to highlight that I have gone out of my way, as many other men have, in demonstrating numerous examples. It is ridiculous to assume that 'nothing is going on here'. Nobody is celebrating pedophilia as much as female pedophilia. How many movies do you know that are 'inspired' by a story of a pedophile teacher grooming, fucking and marrying a 12 year old boy and student? None.

Well, you will happy to know that Jason D. Lamm, doesn't believe that there is a problem. Wanna know why?

Having represented dozens of individuals charged with sex offenses, including numerous teachers and coaches alleged to have had sexual relationships with students, there is always the lingering question of whether do women convicted of sex crimes get lighter sentences.

FEMALE ARIZONA TEACHER GETS 20 YEARS FOR MOLESTING STUDENT

Former Goodyear teacher, Brittany Zamora, was sentenced in Maricopa County Superior Court to a 20 year prison after pleading guilty to having a sexual relationship with a one of her 13 year old students. Once released from prison, Zamora will be on probation for life and will have to register as a sex offender.

MALE ARIZONA TEACHER GETS 10 YEARS FOR SEXUAL CONDUCT WITH A MINOR

In contrast, Scottsdale coach Chris McKenna received only a 10 year sentence for having a sexual relationship with a student. Despite being arrested for having contact with his victim while already on bail, McKenna nonetheless received a sentence that was far less than Zamora.

IT’S NOT ABOUT GENDER, IT’S ABOUT HAVING THE RIGHT CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY

Because he nitpicked 2 examples, and found the opposite, so it's totally fine guys. Nothing to see here.

As someone who has worked with divorce lawyers before, I would just like to point out, that lawyers who run practices are as sleazy as any Youtuber selling courses, or showing an ad for Honey, or Raid Shadow Legends. Hell, they're worse. They will stomp on men's issues wherever appropriate if they find some money in it, and this is what this clown is doing here.

Feminists and women know that 'did you cum' is an inexcusable defence against rape

I don't want to burden this post too much with the obvious, but here are some references for that. Women and feminists have been very well aware of this. Of course, this is a feminist frame of reference.

  • Martha Burt (1980) – "Cultural Myths and Supports for Rape" (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) – the foundational study defining and measuring rape myth acceptance, including myths that victims "enjoyed it."
  • Koss, Gidycz & Wisniewski (1987) – Landmark study on rape prevalence that also examined how victims are doubted or blamed.
  • Suarez & Gadalla (2010) – "Stop Blaming the Victim: A Meta-Analysis on Rape Myths" (Journal of Interpersonal Violence) – reviews myths including those tied to physical response.
  • Levin & van Berlo (2004) – "Sexual Arousal and Orgasm in Subjects Who Experience Forced or Non-Consensual Sexual Stimulation" (Journal of Clinical Forensic Medicine) – directly addresses involuntary physiological response during assault.
  • Chivers et al. (2010) – Research on genital response vs. subjective arousal showing the two are frequently non-concordant — physical response does not equal desire or consent.
  • Campbell & Raja (1999) – "Secondary Victimization of Rape Victims" (Violence and Victims) – examines how victims are retraumatized by disbelieving or dismissive responses.
  • Ullman (1996) – "Social Reactions, Coping Strategies, and Self-Blame Attributions in Adjustment to Sexual Assault" – looks at how negative social reactions worsen outcomes for survivors.

Women are more likely to victim blame rape victims than men

This part surprised me a bit, here are some sources that demonstrate this tendency to victim blame being more present in women than men, wrt rape.

  • Temkin & Krahé (2008) – Sexual Assault and the Justice Gap – documented that female jurors and investigatorssometimes applied harsher scrutiny to rape complainants than male counterparts.
  • Sinclair & Bourne (1998) 
  • Fisher, Daigle, & Cullen, 2008

These could be further explored in a different post, by one of the readers potentially. Could serve as a good exercise.

Statistics

Regardless of how many publicised examples I highlight, it is also a fact that statistics, with a proper representative sample, trumps everything.

At least this is the most popular argument that people run to. As someone with that background, I would like to highlight 5 important facts that make the landscape of pedophilia, not such a trivial year 1 university problem that anyone can solve.

1 | Pedophilia is a remarkably understudied social phenomena in academia

Before statistics comes, test design. Before test design comes common sense. So always ask yourself this question,

How easy it is it to measure something?

In our instance,

How easy is it to get people to admit to pedophilia?

Well, it's a crime to have committed it, might that have some impact on the availability of such results?

Pedophilia studies are very sparse for a reason. So when someone yells at you for say, complaining about a study ONLY having 300/400/500 people surveyed, be sure that you employ some common sense.

Alot of people who just wish to win internet arguments all day, just copy and paste a paper you cite into ChatGPT, and vomit out whatever hackneyed response they can come up with. One of the easiest limitations to always point out is to say, 'lol not enough data'.

We live in a world, with social consequences for the things we admit, say and do. Data surrounding such a sensitive topic is obviously going to be very tricky to get. I know most people in this group are more than intelligent enough to understand this, but please remember that this is also a very strong argument against people who try to nitpick certain sources.

Btw, this applies to arguments that the results were not 'statistically significant'. For context, pedophiles, in reality, are about 0.1% of the population, potentially even less. That is the scale of the social phenomenon we are measuring here.

2 | Social desirability bias

Secondly, there is some evidence that females are less likely to admit use and are more likely to be non-responders than males.

So, for eg, when a study called 'When Kinks Come to Life: An Exploration of Paraphilic Behaviors and Underlying Predictors' in 2024 shows that

2.4% of sampled women admitted to having engaged in pedophilia compared to 1.4% of sampled men

The extent to which men may underrepresent their behaviour, is very likely to be less than the extent to which women underrepresent their behaviour - i.e. pedophilia.

Which was why I was so surprised that there were genuinely detractors who wanted to come out and start quoting the 'social desirability' argument in response to the table I quoted. That is not the win that one thinks it is.

Women are more likely to underreport socially undesirable traits than men.

Here is another important point I want to add.

Women will not generally answer questions regarding sexual behaviours unless it is dressed, in a 'non threatening way'.

Because some respondents may perceive questions about sexual behaviors as threatening (Fisher et al., 1988; Schaeffer, 2000), a direct measure of participants’ comfort with disclosing such material was included as a potential moderator of the experimental condition on data quality.

This is why the study that directly compared men and women's prevalence of pedophilia, strictly pedophilia, was named in such a snazzy, fashion magazine sort of way.

'When kinks come to life'. Would you have ever imagined a study that would quantify pedophilia and the prevalence of pedophilic ACTS to be named in such an unserious manner? It is to make it attractive for respondents.

This brings me to my 3rd point that I believe is further proof of this.

3 | There are 0 standalone studies for female pedophilia

You will not find a singular study that quantifies the prevalence of female pedophilia on its own, there are literally dozens thirsting for getting as high a % as possible to quantify male pedophilia.

A German study went as far as surveying 8718 men, just men, to admit if they are pedophiles or not. For what it's worth, it gave a figure that was more grounded in reality. 0.1% of surveyed men, admitted to a preference for prepubescents compared to other age groups.

Academia is so desperate in fact, that

4 | All studies that claim that men are disproportionately pedophiles

coalesce pedophilia with hebephilia or hebophilia to obtain their result. And I mean almost all of them.

Hebephilia/Hebophilia is a newer term that these papers btw, do not care to define. And this is important, because in a more modern application, hebephilia is actually referring to the preference for the romantic AND sexual preference for pre or partially pre-pubescents. But in older less formal definitions, it just meant 14-18 year olds. Most papers that quantify hebephliia, do not clarify what definition they are referring to, so it is currently a nebulous classification that doesn't make sense.

There is only 1 study that I have seen that quantified male pedophilia to be more frequent than female pedophilia. That paper was so wrought with grammatical and even statistical testing errors, that I do not have any faith in their methodology, which they did not even care to state. It was an Egyptian study with a sample size of 400 for those curious.

5 | Female sexual abuse

If nothing else, remember these 2 statements

A If a child has been sexually abused by a biological parent, it is 4.6 times likely for the perpetrator to be female

B If a child has previously reported sexual abuse and has gotten sexually abused again, it is 1.8 times likely that the perpetrator was female

Concluding remark: Chutzpah of the Insulated Class

I apologise if this is a bit of a long read. All in all, I think I was fundamentally hoping to address the message of the images that were brought to my attention, about the onslaught of female pedophilia, and the dominant attitude towards female pedophilia and male abuse victims of SA and rape.

While not something to ever wish for, with the popping up of more and more incidents like these, I hope people here and elsewhere, can become increasingly diligent in documenting the instance of rape apologia that feminists have been adopting for decades if not centuries wrt sexual abuse.

u/Exercise-Delicious — 2 months ago
▲ 73 r/CityCrusherYT+1 crossposts

Women and colonialism | The Biological and Financial Hardware of the East India Company

I have made posts earlier about women and colonialism.

The short of it is that colonialism is a 2 step process

1 Proto-colonialism: Women deselect men, for they outgrow the need for them (called feme soles in the ~17th century), and the deselected men go to foreign lands to gain wealth and status. Some achieved domestic happiness within India itself, via their status as foreigners - earning the derogatory title of 'Nabob'.

2 Memsahibs and fishing fleets: With the invention of the steamships in the mid 1800s, women got to safely journey to these colonies at a near 0% mortality rate, unlike the men's 50% or so, and institute laws forbidding these men from utilising their newfound wealth, should they race mix.

I am writing this post to expand on the first phase, proto colonialism. The stage that is marked by some level of cultural integration between the deselected men (the nominal vanguards of colonialism), and the people of the land.

FYI Please note that inside alot of literature, 'colonialism' gets swapped out by 'global trade' or some other words. This is to maintain that mental distance between women and colonialism throughout history.

Women were the primary drivers of the EIC, as early as in the stage of proto-colonialism

And by that I mean the financial side of it. I did not explore this part as much as I had the other parts in my posts.

'Spinster' women, i.e. feme soles abstained from marriage, deselecting men, not because of 'restrictive marriage laws' but because the men did not have enough for them leech off of for a better life. Sound familiar?

My main argument is this.

Women in the 17th-19th century were en masse, rejecting marriage. Having accrued tonnes of wealth, instead of getting married, they drove colonial shipping routes as one of the primary venture capital forces.

Women held shares in the major banks

 Paper bonds and financial transactions show us that women signed up to shares in the Bank of England, the Land Bank, the East India Company and the South Sea Island company. 

Some were even 'middle women'. The following quotes are from here.

Some women used middle men to buy their shares for them, but many women acted as the “middle woman“ themselves by buying shares for other people and taking a small commission. From early archives we can see for example that Bruce James a merchant in Leadenhall sent his wife to the bank to purchase shares in his place, and that Anne Mason of Westminster Hall came to the bank herself and bought £1000 worth of stock in her own name. 

From all walks of life, women had opportunities to participate in the markets

One of the other significant vehicles to manage government debt from 1694 was the State Lottery. The lottery offered tickets which paid an annuity with prizes of either a larger annuity or a cash sum. The attraction of the lottery was not just the chance of winning, it was also ideal for those with fewer resources who wanted to take part in the new financial markets. 

You could also buy your tickets without the intervention of “discredited stock jobbers’. It was seen as a good solid investment, and women from all walks of life bought tickets – aristocracy to nobility to wives , widows and servants. 

It was commonplace.

We know from literature and letters that London was “awash with lottery talk’. A newspaper reported in 1720 that “ stocks, shares and lottery tickets were now so popular amongst women that a great many ladies forsake their tea, cards and chat to go to Change Alley”.

Women admit to their significant contributions to colonialism, when you replace it with something else

Join me on Power, Profit, and Progress: Women in the City of London walk to learn more and hear remarkable stories of women in the City of London whose contributions helped the City become the global financial powerhouse that it is today.

Aside from this there is this source here that shows in more detail and more linked sources accordingly, that women were in a managerial position of global trade, i.e. colonialism.

The following quotes below are from here.

Despite limitations for women during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, they were politically and economically active on a national and local level.[20] In relation to the EIC, women were involved through investments and the management of global trade.[21] Aske Laursen Brock and Misha Ewen argue that women were active, both formally and informally, in the EIC. Brock and Ewen use Elizabeth Dale, Rebecka Duteil and Mary Goodal as examples of the public role women had and their involvement in the EIC.

There were women who played an active role in business and established themselves as competent professionals.

Asian women helped bolster the EIC too

Let's not be racist here. Asian women had a good relationship in propping up the EIC as well!

In southeast Asia, women had more freedom than in Europe. Men and women had separate

roles within society however there were certain areas that overlapped which did not exist in

European culture.[31] In southeast Asia, women were very prominent in trade and marketing as in the pre-colonial years, it was seen as the ‘female domain’.[32] Traders would often be working with female merchants. A 1727 source reported that ‘the women of Siam are the only merchants in buying goods, and [...] trade very considerably’.[33] This source reveals that the EIC relied heavily on women when trading. In order to establish the Company in southeast Asia, it was necessary to trade with women, which prompted their growth. A 1699 source also reported that in China, ‘money-changing is a great profession [...] managed by women’.[34] There were numerous economic professions which women contributed heavily to. Women were vitally important in the expansion of the EIC and their establishment in southeast Asia, as their trading networks included women.

Marriages with the foreign women also drove the EIC's influence success

In the expansion and entrenchment of Madras, the role of women was very important due to the connections that emerged from a marriage. Many of the women in these marriages were from wealthy or connected families in the area and this was beneficial to the EIC as it opened up new avenues to pursue in terms of trade.

Remember that the deselected men from Britain who came over to India or wherever else, were generally marrying into higher status families, because that was what mattered to these women. These women of the higher status, did not and do not to this day, see themselves as 'part of the colony that is being exploited'. They are one as a class with the colonising force, for they have more status.

It follows that these women actively supported and grew the EIC, and thus, enabled colonialism.

In other words, the local elite women in Madras and Siam weren’t being "subjugated" by the EIC; they were merging corporate interests with it. While the native working-class population was systematically strip-mined of its resources, these high-status women traded local infrastructure access for British global liquidity. British women, and Asian women of high enough status and opportunity, fed on the blood of the colonised, and the 20-30 million Indians that died due to famine, are because of these people.

Whitewashing deselection, colonialism and global subjugation with the 'EMP'

Sociologists of course, brand this entire period to having played witness to a mysterious phenomenon called the European Marriage Pattern. That eludes all the typical analysis of the crucial role women played in promulgating colonialism. They use gender neutral language regarding what unfolded to plant the seed of colonialism, and even go as far as to not acknowledge colonialism.. as colonialism.

No, it was just a magical boom that Europe had, conveniently in the same time period that Europe was engaging in 'global trade'.

EMP is denoted by 4 traits

1 A late age of first marriage for both men and women

2 A substantial fraction of men and women never marrying

3 Unrestricted fertility within marriage

4 Sexual abstinence before engaging to marry

This is very similar to tournament species behaviour - which is characterised by

  • No Male Parenting: Winners move on quickly and provide no help raising offspring.
  • Territoriality: Males defend large territories to attract multiple females.

Some might even call this, hypergamy.

Women's colonialism and harvest of foreign land brought 'gender equality and higher levels of education and income'

When sociologists look at this data, they invent clean, clinical software terms to mask a savage biological realignment. 

Academia celebrates colonialism if you give them the opportunity. If I whitewash colonialism, with the 'European Marriage Pattern', suddenly the period in which colonialism occurred was a great thing! Especially for women! Here is a snippet from Gregory Kitson Clark, From Syddansk Universitet, Odense, Denmark.

The EMP has been proposed as a key mechanism for the rise of Western Europe economically 1400–1800*. By limiting fertility and delaying marriage for women, the EMP has been claimed to have fostered a society with more gender equality and higher levels of education and income**

There is a alot of whitewashing of women enriching themselves off of the blood of foreign countries, as 'opportunities', 'economic booms' and 'flourishing moments of gender equality'. I find it to be a perfect reflection of what women view to being a 'good relationship with a good man' to be like. Her a slave master, and him a slave.

Colonialism is a female/feminist project, not a male one

The ultimate historical irony is that modern feminism paints this entire era as a dark age of patriarchal confinement where women were locked out of the world. The archival hardware proves the exact opposite: women were the protected shareholders, the venture capitalists, the lottery speculators, and the elite local trading partners who sat safely in the metropolitan core while the deselected male tier absorbed a 50% mortality rate acting as the disposable enforcement machinery.

When academia celebrates the EMP for fostering "gender equality, higher education, and income," they are celebrating the birth of the modern insulated state. The political software changes, but the hardware remains identical: the system thrives by treating the young male body as high-risk, expendable collateral, while ensuring the wealth he extracts is funneled directly back to fund the comfort, literacy, and equity of the domestic tier.

This is why we need to claim the history, lessons and literature of colonialism as a relevant topic of discussion wrt men's issues.

Colonialism is the natural result of women's increased access to the economy.

The rationalisations, and stories that feminists conjured up to justify colonialism back then, are IDENTICAL, to the rationalisations feminists come up with TODAY to justify colonising our spaces online - games, TVs, movies. We are savages to be tamed. Our spaces are to be made more appropriate and safe for their sisters, just like the British women/Memsahibs wanted to save their indian sisters.

I hope this post could serve to educate some of us here to understand. Colonialism is not a racial issue. It is not a white on non-white issue fundamentally. It is a female-driven conquest for resources, and it is governed by the same forces that are colonising our spaces today. It is also these same forces that have lead and continue to lead us into war and conflict.

This is why history is so important.

u/Exercise-Delicious — 2 months ago

"Being an egalitarian" | Balancing accounts

A quick note I would like to stickie to people here.

You cannot balance accounts without an account of history

You cannot be egalitarian, you cannot balance the scales, when you have no account of history.

This is akin to wanting to solve the conflict between Israel and Palestine, and thinking that 'this all started on October 7 2023'.

We witnessed this historical blindness whenever people try to critique the modern machinery of feminism, family law, or state-enforced marriage contracts. The moment you point out current, systemic issues, a self-proclaimed "egalitarian" will invariably pop up to derail the conversation with uneducated, weaponized historical myths.

For instance, a certain Berserk inspired character recently said something along the lines of

Well, we need these systems because 500 years ago in Europe, fathers literally sold their daughters as brides

Women had zero economic agency.

Boomers were blindsided by courts starting to take advantage of men to extract their wealth.

There is a lot of recency bias that this person is committing. There's an older post here that covers some of this, and it appears that we need to bring this up again.

This is a multi-layered flaw in perspective. Let’s look at the actual historical "hardware" to understand why this tactical argument is completely wrong:

1. The Myth of the "Sold Bride"

When people look at early European law, they see the old Germanic word for bride-price (Brautpreis or Mundium) and translate it using a modern, commercial dictionary. They imagine a livestock market.

Historians, linguists, and anthropologists have thoroughly debunked this:

  • The Insurance Bond: The Mundium (guardianship fee) paid by a groom to a father was not a commercial purchase; it was mathematically pegged to the Wergeld—the literal legal value of a human life used to settle murder blood feuds.
  • The Screening Process: The father was demanding a massive financial deposit up front. This served as a high-capital barrier to vet the groom, proving he had the resources to protect the woman.
  • The Indirect Endowment: The father did not pocket this money. Legally, it was held in trust and transformed into the Morgengabe (morning-gift), which became the exclusive personal property of the bride. If the husband abused her or died, the husband’s family forfeited the deposit, and the woman walked away with full financial autonomy. It was an insurance policy, not a sale.

2. The Illusion of "Zero Agency" (Coverture)

Detractors love to point to historical frameworks like coverture—where a married couple was viewed as a single legal entity under the husband—as absolute proof of female slavery. They completely ignore the massive liability trade-off:

  • Criminal Immunity: Under coverture, if a married woman committed a civil crime, fraud, or property damage, the law legally presumed she was coerced by her husband. The state did not prosecute her; it arrested, sued, and fined the husband.
  • The Debt Trap: The moment a man married, he legally inherited all of his wife's pre-existing debts. A wife also held the legal right to buy goods and luxuries on her husband's credit. If the family went bankrupt, the husband was thrown into a freezing debtor's prison, while the wife's personal marriage settlements and trusts were legally shielded from his ruin. The husband didn't "own" his wife; he insured her with his physical body.

3. Divorce and Wealth Extraction Are Not "New" Phenomona

The idea that using a courtroom to strip a man of his resources is a "modern invention that shocked Boomer men" is historically illiterate.

  • For over 500 years, English Courts of Equity (Chancery) routinely bypassed standard marriage laws to establish "Separate Estate Trusts," locking husbands out of family wealth while guaranteeing wives independent incomes.
  • If a couple separated, Ecclesiastical (Church) Courts regularly issued mandates for separate maintenance (alimony), throwing insolvent husbands into debtor's prisons until they complied.
  • For over a millennium in Ottoman and Persian Sharia courts, wives routinely used the Mahr (marriage endowment) system as a legal sword, utilizing local judges to freeze their husbands' commercial businesses and liquidate their assets for domestic maintenance.

How about some other historical facts about divorce?

No fault divorce gets critiqued as being a 'main driver of breaking families today', but did you know that on September 5, 1969, as Governor of California, Ronald Reagan signed the Family Law Act of 1969, making California the very first state in the United States to institute a "pure" no-fault divorce framework. No-fault divorce law came from Ronald Reagan. Now why would have he signed such a framework in?

Because women were abusing the system of divorce, before no fault divorce, just as they are abusing it today.

Under the old system, a person could only secure a divorce if they legally proved their spouse had committed a severe "fault" (such as adultery, extreme physical abuse, or abandonment). If both spouses desperately wanted to separate but neither had committed a crime, they were legally trapped.

Couples would conspire to fabricate evidence, but a lesser studied version, is one in of which, the wife would fake being abused by the husband, to get to enjoy a divorce with goodies.

Nothing has functionally changed with the no fault divorce law.

It is very simple to claim that no fault divorce is the issue, but divorce itself has been weaponised by women for centuries, and even in 'traditional' settings, still is. The Mahr system is a perfect example of this. Allistair was quick to point to a fictitious point in history in Europe that women were sold as brides. But in Iran or other muslim countries today, men are being jailed for not being able to produce the equivalent of millions of their currency, as per the slave agreement that they signed to get a female companion in their life.

Did you know that countries that were dominated by Catholicism, were the latest to adopt the female vote and 'emancipation' in general? Why? Because women were able to divorce their husbands already under their religion.

Nothing has changed about these issues.

I think it is helpful to revisit how we frame certain issues, and avoid painting things as being uniquely happening in our time. It gives detractors the privilege of 'downplaying the issue as a hiccup/bump in the road that we can buff out', or 'adopting passivity as a novel solution to a newfound problem'.

Pointing to history can serve to center the conversation. It teaches us that there is a backlog of solutions that have previously failed to solve the very systemic issues we are faced with today.

u/Exercise-Delicious — 3 months ago