He did not give himself airs or praise. He was an ordinary Joe. Jon actually. Jonathan Bornstein. Nor did he pick on this Tavern as his first port in a storm, but here he gets to speak out too as so many other poor sods have found a compassionate ear in this company.
Just how many times does a chap have to tell the same story - one he thought he was alone in telling - before people listen?
The few occasions when you might see the same or similar tales told in the 'mainstream' it is usually annotated with cries of 'Stop whining", or 'Man-up", as though that were the end of the matter.
But this is serious.
So, I will just relate in his own words and you can make your own mind up. I will pull a few pints.
I am coming out of the closet. Yep. Like many, it took me a long time to come to peace with it, years of soul-searching and introspection. But now I have come out to myself and to the world, and I feel like a weight has been taken off my chest.
I am a men’s rights activist.Growing up in the cradle of western feminism, the Upper West Side of New York City, and attending enlightened and well-funded public schools (where as kids we labored over the guilt-inducing importance of the failed Equal Rights Amendment), I was raised to be a feminist. A full-blown—male—feminist.While I never advocated a policy of feminism, I am indeed the product of it.
A complete product of it. I had brilliant female teachers who advocated feminism. I shared co-ed classrooms with brilliant young girls whom I admired, whose intelligence I wished I could emulate. We wrote papers on the first female Supreme Court Jurist, Sandra Day O’Connor.
While Dad turned me on to the Yankees, Mom took me to the ballet and exposed me to her interests: The Met, Lincoln Center, refined stuff, etc. Mom worked; she was an accomplished full-time educator raising two boys along with my father in our nuclear family. Our synagogues were egalitarian.Never was I exposed to any messages that specifically reduced women or girls. That was just philistine! Any suggestion that women were on their own merits inferior to men would have been met with rejection and ridicule. Looking back on this indoctrination now, I see a lot of mixed messages.See, radical feminism exploits the natural confidence of young boys. It seizes boys’ engrained disposition that girls are separate and it guilts them.
Yes, girls are separate from boys, aren’t they? Us boys are taught from a young age that girls are indeed separate.
After all, men are 'Privileged, aren't we.We are taught to be gentle with girls, not rough-house with them, to treat them as ladies, to defer to their feelings, to please them.
Young boys are taught to exalt girls. Boys are the dirty ones who ride bikes and fight over a touchdown. Girls are sugar and spice and everything nice.
Then, BAM! We enter adolescence and we are told that girls are oppressed, sidelined, overlook, victimized by some boogie-man patriarchy.
What the hell just happened?
First I was trained to separate and elevate them, to regard them as fully equals. Now they are ringing the bell of cosmic victimization. Did I miss something?I finally became acquainted with radical feminist policy when
my role as a father was legally shattered.
Enter adultery by my wife, followed by an allegation of invisible domestic violence. Jon’s life, over.
No proof of a crime. Whatever one thinks of my character, (fine, I am obviously scum), let’s assume the worst of me, for argument’s sake. The crucial point is that without a shred of proof, but with complaints spoken by an admitted and exposed adulterer, my life was ruined.
Where are the witnesses? The hospital record? The photos? The police reports? None to be found.This low threshold of “proof” raises the obvious constitutional question about the role of the state. Should the state be so reactive that fathers are removed from children because of the words of a hysterical and adulterous woman who, as a person with the sudden liability of abandoning the marriage, has an interest in my removal?
I cannot think of a more tragic sexist policy.
And with this I was removed from my children, my home, my clothes, my heirlooms, my photos, my books. My whole life.The state’s mobilization to remove me was the result of the Radical Feminist Legal Complex.Look, I get it. If a dude hits his wife, charge him. Take him down. Felony. Existing statutes provide for this.
But this dilemma is far more insidious. Apparently, New York operates along the thought-crime-like premise that domestic violence need not be “violent”—a concept at war with language and reason, as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently wrote.
New York entertains something called implied violence. It is absurdia infinitum.
My adulterous wife conveniently claimed fear of me.
This is violence to New York.
I see it all the time. And, what is more I can see a strange and twisted logic in it. The criminal also 'FEARS' the consequences of being found out and punished, so he/she avoids the police and decent company.
But our 'social', domestic laws say that it is illegal for a woman to fear, and anyone who is in the vicinity and/or that she has harmed must be guilty of making her afraid. HE gets punished. Men are 'oppressors' we are told, and 'Privileged'.
Another matter to point out is that Jonathon had no choice but to register for the military, otherwise he would not have been able to have even a driving licence let alone go to University. His sister did not have to register.Since that day in September 2010, I have been to hell and back. Every participant in the systemic process has responded to my pleas with an apathy the likes of which I never thought could exist in a government to which I paid taxed, that once employed me, whose military I was prepared to join, whose public universities educated me.
I am viewed differently now. As farm dung that fertilizes a massive—MASSIVE!—governmental process. There is an unmatched zeal “to get me”: law enforcement, DAs, judges, court-appointed psychologists, attorneys ad litim—all shielded with immunity.Today I have a new education to boast. I now know of VAWA, child support, orders of protection available like condoms at the health center, the Duluth model of domestic violence re-education theories, a complicit legal guild, Title IX, Title IV-D, university sexism, a consumer culture that mocks dads, prison, etc.
There is an endless horizon of sexual-politics, radical-feminism policies that are reshaping every sense about manhood and fatherhood with which I was raised to see as proper and good. And took as holy. How stupid, right?And I also learned something else:
I am hated.
Hated. Yes. I am hated. I get no presumption of favor—ever.
The more I seek to remain a dad, the more I am told I am “angry” and thus unfit.
The state is deaf to me and to what it does to me. I am also painfully alone.I have tried to get my story out to every media outlet I can think of. I have found no support anywhere in my fight to be a father. Seems only fellow dads care about dads.
Lawyers want money. Cops sneer or arrest. Legislatures are insanely politicized, as are judiciaries.
Most dads’ groups are seen as “reactive” and “unfocused.”
The silence of unavailable resources tortures me.All of this is the result of a social/legal policy informed by vengeful radical feminist ideology, one that seeks to swing with a hammer than to extract with a tweezer.Look, I am a lot of things: a loving father is paramount. The last thing I wanted is to be “that guy,” embittered and ranting about feminism.
Jonathon has drinking rights in the Knight & Drummer. He has friends here who understand.I just cannot figure out when I became such a bad guy.So why am I now a men’s rights activist? My children. These policies keep me from them. I love them. They need me. And I need them. If this is a bad impulse, I am nothing.http://womenformen.org/2014/07/19/the-state-is-deaf-to-me/http://www.avoiceformen.com/mens-rights/why-im-a-mens-rights-activist-now/Jonathan Bornstein is a life-long resident of New York City. He spent many years as a High School educator; today he is in the private sector. His greatest role was as a Dad. Since 2010 he has been victimized by the state's oppressive and persecutorial policies that keep him alienated from his two children, Aaron and Lillianne.
Pax
Among the many paradoxes and horrors that men learn when they are awakened to the fact that they really are second-class citizens in their country, I think the insidious bias against them wanting to be a father is among the worse. The negative attitude, pushed from feminist organisations in press releases to the media and in lobbying efforts, restricts a father's choice to have a family, and removes children's rights to half of their parentage. According to the destroyers of families, if a man makes no effort to see his children, he is a waster and a 'dead-beat' but if he does make the effort, then he is angry, vindictive and unable to prove his worth as a father (no-one ever asks a mother to prove her worth).
ReplyDeleteYes. Damned if you are a good father or bad. Shafted by the courts whether you are faithful of not. Condemned if you are innocent or not.
DeleteWomen just do not see it and they are half the population. Only in the most rare of cases dow it happen to them. Most men do not see it because it hasn't happened to them.... Yet.
How I sympathise with fathers in this situation, and how I wish my children had a father such as this. For I am on the 'other side'...I have a husband who chose solitude over family life.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, there are fathers who for one reason or another separate from their families when they still have a duty toward them. That puts hardship and heartache for which a sympathetic ear and the good company of the Tavern are given too. But that is a far cry from the forced and contemptuous treatment handed out by society to fathers who have no wish to be parted from their families. Without in any way diminishing your plight, Anonymous, it is rare. I will raise a glass and say a prayer in the Crypt for you, as I will for Jonathan.
DeleteI pray that man finds a woman who LOVES the kind of man he is.
ReplyDeleteAlthough, sadly, the schools systems have done a good job brainwashing the women.
Sad story in the tavern, but very common.
Still seething about the stacked CSA.
ReplyDeleteNo one wants to believe these things are true, but they are.
ReplyDeleteThe unfortunate fact is that many men need to awaken to this reality before it beats them over the head like this (oftentimes literally).
I believe it all involves abandoning machismo--embracing the value of ourselves, the importance of the harm done to us, allowing ourselves to grieve, helping each other through today's culture, and finally, fighting back.
Most importantly, it's the opportunity for men to find the love of Christ in all this. The world's justice is flawed, its love unreliable, but that's where faith in our God saves us in times like these.
Indeed. A message that I am constantly giving to young men especially in the MRM. Thank you for making it again. They must establish their 'right' value, accepting that each has a lot of improving to do rather than resting on their patch of dirt. Far too few have a sense of their real value, accepting as they mostly do the 'standards' of the woeful culture around us. Few have a solid morality based on sound Christian principles. Hilary's Village is under the skin of most people.
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