Thursday, March 20, 2008

Can anyone explain how this is fair?

In case anyone ever wanted hard-coded proof that men are second-class citizens in our culture:

It's okay to have one-sided statutory rape laws, really!

The law defined unlawful sexual intercourse as "an act of sexual intercourse accomplished with a female not the wife of the perpetrator, where the female is under the age of 18 years."

Nice. If you said, "this means that only males can be punished for underage sex," you'd be right!

This is the best part, though:

In a plurality decision, the Court held that the law did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, noting that "young men and young women are not similarly situated with respect to the problems and the risks of sexual intercourse." The Court found that the state had a strong interest in preventing "illegitimate pregnancy." The Court noted that "[i]t is hardly unreasonable for a legislature acting to protect minor females to exclude them from punishment. Moreover, the risk of pregnancy itself constitutes a substantial deterrence to young females. No similar natural sanctions deter males."

Uh huh.

No similar natural sanctions to pregnancy exist? Garsh, how about the "unnatural sanction" of an oppressive two decades worth of child support payments? Maybe that's a bit of a disincentive?

Now, I bet you that if you had a chat with young men in California - a state with notorious "equal treatment" laws - if such an anti-male law could possibly exist, I bet you they wouldn't believe it for a second.

This is why I have ALWAYS believed that we are doing our young men a disservice by not educating them on how shafted they are by child, family and sex laws. Of course, if the true gravity of the situation were shown to them, society as we know it would probably come to an end in 2 generations.

What a joke. What a sick, freaking joke.

4 comments:

Robert Vollman said...

No one is immune to discrimination. The big difference is that everyone thinks that men have it made.

- Shorter life span
- More likely to be the victim of a violent assault
- More likely to be murdered
- More likely to end their own lives
- More likely to be homeless
- More likely to go to prison
- More likely to be sent (unvoluntarily) to war, and die
- Less likely to finish high school
- Less likely to get a post-secondary education
- More likely to be depicted negatively in the media
- More likely to be injured or die on the job (more likely to work in dangerous jobs)
- Less likely to receive custody of (or access to) their children
- Pay the most in taxes, receive the least in government services

The list actually goes on, but I'll stop there.

I'm not saying that men have it WORSE I'm just saying that if men have it better, it ain't by much.

Drewjitsu said...

As one friend of mine put it when I told him about the shrinking have status of white males age 18-34, he put it succinctly:

"At the end of the day, it really doesn't matter, do you know why? because every time, someone says they're being held down by the man, I realize that's me. I'm the fucking man."

So no matter what the shenanigans you see out there, you're probably going to end up pretty well off.

Because you're the fuckin' man.

--Anders.

Charles "Alpha Lackey" Mousseau said...

Anders,

if your friend were a seventeen year old male having consensual sex with a seventeen year old female in California, I'm guessing that he would not be so glib about it.

I'm not convinced that the white male is the best status group in society. Women have gigantic edges in family law, courtship, warfare (in terms of getting equal credit for their 'sacrifice' and equal benefits from a just war won, despite being 0.00001% of our war dead), athletics and education -- just off the top of my head.

And to explain the courtship thing, well .. in our society, a man cannot say "I will buy you X and Y if you have sex with me", but a woman can say "buy me X and Y and I might sleep with you!" Sex sells but you cannot buy sex.

Robert Vollman said...

You know Anders, that's the one beauty of it all.

Girls are raised to think that they're better than everyone else, but that they really can't do anything without help because the world is just too tough on women.

Boys, on the other hand, are raised to believe that they're stupid, violent and incompetent AND YET somehow they will manage to be in charge and get things done without anyone's help. Because they're men.

When you put it that way, I'd rather suffer from male stereotypes than the female. We're the man!