I was watching some stupid show on cable television last night on one of those retro-channels, and nodded off.

Woke up somewhere around one in the morning. There was some other stupid family sitcom from about twenty-five years ago, give or take. The matriarch of the household was studying for her G.E.D. so she could get a better job, and the Lord of the Manor was throwing some kind of hissy-fit that she hadn’t consulted him first, and trying to stop her…to lay down the LAW. She started out all meek and submissive, and then chose to assert herself.

I nodded off again, this time until the coffeemaker went off. This time there was an entirely different family sitcom, in which the woman wore a black wig over her blond hair and the man was having some kind of conniption, once again trying to lay down the LAW. She once again, started out contrite, and then again, chose to assert herself.

It’s interesting watching what passes for comedy in one eon, through the lens of history in some “future” eon. It helps to restore your perspective. Like for example — how is it an entire society got fooled, for a whole generation, into thinking this was entertainment? Some hotshot television producer who doesn’t know jack-squat about real domestic squabbles, assembles a theatrical troop to tell those filthy commoners what they are arguing about in their living rooms, and a bunch of other bigwigs who also wouldn’t know a real domestic squabble even if it bit ’em square in what passes for their testes, get together and green-light it.

I’ve married and dated some dimwit women in my time, and it’s probably fair to say of all the tiffs you can possibly have with each other under a roof, I’ve participated in…well…probably most of them. Which is not a badge of honor by any means, but after such a sumptuous banquet I doubt there are too many dishes left from which I haven’t sampled. Trust me. TRUST me…I have never, ever, squabbled with a woman about her hair color, or thrown some kind of bitch-pitch because she wanted to acquire some new skills and make herself a better person.

This is where I get e-mail from petulant women who actually went through the experience. Save yourselves some time; I’m sure here and there, it’s happened, just like lightning strikes people sometimes, and sometimes jet planes crash into mountains. My issue is with how often such things happen — the frequency. Already, the patriarch who has some kind of beef with his wife or paramour making more money, is Number One on my list of Things I Doubt. I don’t personally know of any man who has this peeve, nor have I ever. It can’t be that common.

Why make that the point of something that is supposed to be comedy? Is this some kind of hidden agenda? Kind of a “we’ll pretend to be entertaining you, but what we’re really going to do is lecture you to be more supportive of that womens’ lib stuff.” Now and then, this can be overlooked I suppose. “Comedies” can be poignant, and every now and then they can stop being funny. I can see how this adds depth. But why should an entire generation have been defined this way?

It’s fair to say some pudgy middle-aged guy falling asleep in front of the retro-channel when he should be in bed, jolting himself awake every two hours to see what’s on the boob tube at that minute, is something of a “random sampling.” And if it’s fair to say that, what does it say that my random sampling continually ambushes me with another snotty, whimpering lecture from the Hollywood ivory-tower types, who are essentially complete strangers, that we should stop being such chauvinists and bigots? That isn’t what I call “now and then”; this is closer to what I would call “all the damn time.” And at that point, it ceases to be comedy.

It has to, right?

One more thought: If what we’re seeing here is some definition of what feminism really is, or is supposed to be, I have to ask if it was supposed to add to this assortment of other definitions, or replace them. If it is additive, well then that was quite the menagerie of agendas we went through all those years ago, wasn’t it? Given that they were all arranged under the singular banner of “feminism”? I mean, what are we up to…equal pay for equal worth; womens’ right to abort pregnancies; women going to work if they want to; smashing the glass ceiling, which is a somewhat different item from allowing women to work in the first place; coercing men into doing more chores, even if their wives are among the ones who DON’T work; promoting cultural icons of heroes who are more sensitive and less masculine, and heroines who are more caustic and unfriendly, and less feminine; making it artificially difficult to open strip bars, or to patronize them.

To that overly-complex stewpot we should toss in some other issues that seem, on the surface, to be gender neutral — but are designed to appeal to the female mindset. Things that wouldn’t have had a prayer of passage before suffrage. Nanny-state stuff. Wage and price controls, universal health care, hate crime laws, mandatory sensitivity training.

And now we have: Encouraging family squabbles about hair color and other such trivial nonsense.

Looking back on the feminist movement — if it was more sincere, wouldn’t it have been somewhat simpler?

I oppose illegal immigration. Some people agree with me, because they’re a bunch of damned racists…and people like me, are engaged in a never-ending struggle to promote our cause, while separating ourselves from people like them. That job is NEVER done. Well…some feminists support equal-pay for equal-worth, because that’s fair — and other feminists genuinely hate men. The sitcoms I saw last night, were put together to appeal to people of both sexes who genuinely hate men. People who like to indulge in extravagant fantasies about men ordering their wives around, make your hair this color, don’t get an education, don’t work. I don’t think equal-pay for equal-worth has an awful lot to do with that. This was hate, pure and simple, disguised as something that was supposed to draw laughter.

Not as bad as feeding Christians to lions…but sort of meandering off in that general direction. And we’re still tolerating it after thirty-five years.

How come equivalent pressure wasn’t put on the feminists, and still isn’t put on them to this very day, to clarify the message so the rest of us can be assured that hate isn’t part of it?

Hmm. Things would’ve been different if someone explained this to me when I was sixteen.

Watch out! Toxic Wife Syndrome is rampant and droves of gold diggers are prowling in search of rich prey to join the tribe.

So says journalist Tara Winter Wilson whose guide to spotting a potential toxic wife touched a raw nerve with hordes of victims contacting her about the so-called syndrome.

Her warning is stark: “Unless you marry an equal who is going to pay her own way, you will end up with a lazy, indulgent, over-pampered slug.”

“Marriage is being clouded by Toxic Wife Syndrome. Ridiculous amounts of money keep being awarded to these women in divorce settlements.”

Winter Wilson, staggered by the flood of heartfelt feedback she got after first naming the syndrome in a lifestyle article for the Daily Telegraph newspaper, said: “Many women see it as a career choice.”

“After leaving university, they stay on the party circuit until they trap someone. They try to get the most by doing the least. They develop an extraordinary sense of entitlement, becoming very judgmental and shrewish,” she told Reuters.

Hmm. It never would have occurred to me to correlate the most vicious golddiggers in my past…with judgmentalism. Makes a certain amount of sense.

Interesting the way our society works. You’re a middle-age six-foot right-handed white guy with a receeding hairline…and a blog…and you have opinions. Holy smokes, the things people say about that. Trust me on that one. Most of the people who argue with me about blogging, I’d guess three-quarters of them — they don’t argue with me about anything. They just squeak. Let me be known they disapprove. Disapprove of the practice of coming to a conclusion about something, and letting it be known. They have nothing to say about anything specific…and they’re far-and-away in the majority. BUT. You are a babe who looks good in a short skirt, fresh out of university, staying on the party circuit. You’re looking for an old guy to tell you his bank balance seconds after meeting you. You have opinions.

What do we say about that? “She’s courageous.” “She speaks her mind.” Et cetera.

Well personally, I’m all in favor of people of both sexes having opinions. Even stupid, sucky opinions are better than none at all. But this is an interesting double-standard we’ve formed here. And I think it’s linked, from what I’ve seen, to Toxic Wife Syndrome. I know, in addition to my own relationship disasters, I’ve come to be aware of other married couples experiencing turmoil. Said turmoil invariably ends badly.

What do these couples all have in common? It seems that the bride is always quicker to form opinions than her bridegroom. That’s an indictment against neither one of them, by the way; it’s a relative observation. It seems a lady quick to judge, has a shot at a happy marriage, if she marries a gentleman who’s just as quick, or quicker.

And, if she isn’t a lazy, indulgent, over-pampered slug.

And if she wants a long happy marriage. But there, we run into Tara Winter Wilson’s observation about a “career choice.” But married ladies are supposed to want their marriages to succeed, aren’t they? We’re told so.

Why should it work that way all the time, though? Um…you know, why should it work that way some of the time? Divorced women are supposed to experience financial hardship — well, we’ve canxed that. They’re supposed to experience stigma — whoops, we got rid of that. So what’s left is, they’re going to want their children to continue a relationship with their father. But that’s assuming they’re his — assuming she approves of his fathering — and assuming she cares.

And then there’s that “love” stuff. Here’s a secret for younger men: That doesn’t cut it. A husband, first-and-foremost, opens doorways to the future a lady desires for herself, and shows himself ready to share that future with her. As a distant second, he is someone she “loves.” The marriage is on much more solid footing, when the knight brings his lady the first of those two and not the second, than the other way ’round.

It’s a sad thing to say, but from what I know and what I’ve seen, we’ve had this upsurge in Toxic Wife Syndrome because it has become so difficult to define. In the final analysis, they’re simply women who refuse to be disappointed. And nowadays, who has ever raised a young girl into womanhood, fully and truly prepared for disappointment?

It’s like a biblical plague of Egypt. But we’ve done it to ourselves.

Double-whammy for Richard Parker, who first found out his three-year-old son is not his, and found out he’s still on the hook to pay support.

“We find that the balance of policy considerations favors protecting the best interests of the child over protecting the interests of one parent defrauded by the other parent in the midst of a divorce proceeding,” writes Justice Kenneth Bell for the [Florida Supreme] court.

“We recognize that the former husband in this case may feel victimized,” he writes. He then quotes a scholar to explain the ruling: “While some individuals are innocent victims of deceptive partners, adults are aware of the high incidence of infidelity and only they, not the children, are able to act to ensure that the biological ties they may deem essential are present.”

Huh. It’s the guy’s fault for trusting his wife.

So…as more and more men marry later or not at all, and as their mothers and sisters and girlfriends cluck their tongues at them for holding fast to bachelorhood, and womankind in general gets all cheesed off about this trend — link, link, link, link — it’s nice to have Florida’s highest court tell us that’s exactly the way it’s supposed to be.

We need a new legal term to describe the affront to justice taking place here. It’s not limited to the simple tried-and-true “rule against whoever has a penis” thing. It’s a subset of judicial activism, and it has to do with declaring that justice can be upheld while one person’s rights are unapologetically denied, by pronouncing those rights to be mutually exclusive from, and subordinate to, someone else’s rights. In effect, saying, “As a judge I can’t be fair to everyone…so I’ll just do my duty to the benefit of this person over here, and not for that person over there — day’s work is done! Sucks to be you!”

Selective justice, I suppose you could call it.

Flashback to U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Hugo Black’s comments in Toyosaburo Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944) regarding Japanese internment:

We uphold the exclusion order as of the time it was made and when the petitioner violated it. In doing so, we are not unmindful of the hardships imposed by it upon a large group of American citizens. But hardships are part of war, and war is an aggregation of hardships. All citizens alike, both in and out of uniform, feel the impact of war in greater or lesser measure. Citizenship has its responsibilities as well as its privileges, and in time of war the burden is always heavier.

Now reviled as a low nadir in the annals of Supreme Court common sense. But the logic is exactly the same.

Not sure what the best language is to use here, since I’m not a lawyer. But surely there is an implied contract here that is being abandoned; a contract that says when you’re a judge, there are things you’re supposed to be doing. Most of us have the expectation that when we go to court, at the end of the trial it ought to be said that the outcome wasn’t necessarily pleasant for all concerned, but it was — something else. Like fair. Just. The redress of grievances was fulfilled. All parties extracted from the situation what they got comin’ to ’em, whether they liked it or not.

This practice is quite plain and simply a deviation from that contract. Mutual exclusivity says everyone can’t possibly get what they rightfully deserve…so as a judicial officer, that lets me off the hook, and I’m just going to give some of the participants what they rightfully deserve and thumb my nose at the rest.

Regarding the paternity issues, there’s an interesting school of thought at work here. It has merit…but in my lifetime, I’ve never seen it quite get the thoughtful inspection I think it deserves, before our entire system of family law is surrendered to it.

The idea behind the deadline is that any action taken in a marriage breakup should be completed while the child is as young as possible to avoid a major disruption during the most formative years.

“We don’t want a system where a child is 10 years old and you have people who come in and undo what has been put in place many years before,” says Susan Paikin of the Center for the Support of Families in Silver Spring, Md.

Ms. Paikin says that it is up to the adults in the relationship to thoroughly investigate any paternity issues at the time of the divorce.

We really don’t want that kind of system? Gee, I dunno. Mr. Parker’s kid is three, not ten. Formative years? Certainly. But…the issue is who’s going to take on the role of Dad, not who is going to be stuck with the bill. Those are two different things. We seem to be presuming one course of action will have some devastating effect on the child’s status quo under the most beneficial circumstances, and the other course will have none at all. I find both of those premises to be on the shaky side.

Might they be opened to inspection sometime?

Here’s a thought. Hire a private investigator. Obviously, finding a biological dad is not a task that can be guaranteed a successful completion in all cases — but try. The gumshoe wouldn’t be needed unless the Mom refuses to say who the real father is. Or does not know. She has control over the situation. So if you need to bring in a P.I., charge the bill to her.

Just like an insurance company giving up after some point, and eventually settling on a building they “know” was burned deliberately just to make the whole thing go away. Fine, there’s a point of diminishing returns, and after awhile you give up. But first, try to find him.

Try, to the tune of…let’s say, five thousand dollars. If she doesn’t work and is depending on her ex-husband’s alimony, give the ex-husband credit on the alimony. She’ll just have to go with basic cable for awhile, until the court finds out what she doesn’t want to tell them. Meanwhile, the jilted husband can go on being “dad” — should he want to — so the kid’s life isn’t disrupted. What would be the problem with that?

Some cock-and-bull story about hurting the kid? Or, it would tick off the wrong people?

Judges and lawyers are often heard to say that the justice system is a vital underpinning to a civilized society. If “justice” is a term that stipulates Mr. Parker should be stuck with the tab, then someone needs to sit down and have an open discussion about what the word means.

There is justice; there is anarchy. Contrary to popular belief, both may be dispensed in doses large and small; you can have little teaspoon-sized servings of anarchy. Does that mean a little bit o’anarchy will send us down a slippery slope, to a Mad Max type of society? Maybe not — but I think most people would agree when a judge makes a decision about whether to serve justice or anarchy, is oath should be compelling him to opt for the former. Regardless of which activist groups want to use the “FOR THE CHILLLLLDDDDDRRRRREEEEENNNN…!!!” meme to allow their constituents to get away with deliberate fraud.

What an interesting idea this is. Worth pondering on the eve of that peculiar “buy crap for women”…er…holiday.

Now with retirement looming, the 56-year-old [Mitsutoshi Fukatsu] wants to get to know his wife better. He calls her by her name, Setsuko, instead of just grunting.

Calling your woman by her first name. Huh. So all those folks who said I should’ve been doing that with ol’ what’s-her-name, they must have been trying to get me to be more Japanese.

And he says he recently learned a new phrase: “I love you.”

Ahhh…pussy.
Reminds me of something I saw on Miss Cellania’s website yesterday morning:

TOP TEN REASONS MEN DON’T SAY “I LOVE YOU”
1. They don’t mean it.
2. They want to get laid, but not *that* bad.
3. Their fathers didn’t say it to their mothers.
:
10. If they say it, their penises will fall off.

TOP TEN REASONS WOMEN WANT MEN TO SAY “I LOVE YOU”
1. They like the words.
2. Girls, at times, think that the “words” are important.
3. They can brag to their friends that they got him to do it.
:
10. The woman wants to see his penis fall off.

I just knew it.