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 [1788-1979] | 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

2. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.