June 20, 2013 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
The Huffington Post UK, a radical feminist and Father’s Day – a bad combination. Here it is (Huffington Post UK, 6/14/13). The piece is by radical feminist Louise Pennington and may qualify as the worst piece of misandric claptrap to come down the sewer pipe of HuffPo UK in some time. And friends, that’s putting the bar pretty high. Pennington’s piece reaches levels rightly denominated as deranged, even rabid. Truly, it’s hard to describe the piece and do it justice.
It’s not just that it seizes on the one day out of the year that’s designed to honor fathers to denigrate those very guys; plenty of articles do that every year. But most of them at least take a perfunctory stab at disguising their disdain for men who dare to father children. Pennington is far more honest. From her very first sentence, she lets her man-hating flag fly high. To her, fathers are mere sperm donors and have no right to be honored for same.
After that, her piece is little more than a series of utterly false, or at least unsupportable, reiterations of Louise Pennington’s blind hatred of men. There’s not enough in the world for her to hate, so she just makes stuff up. Her prose is all hatred and bitterness. Care to take a taste?
We have arrived at a point in our culture where violent men are considered “good enough” fathers.
Really? I wonder why anyone would say such a stupid thing. In point of fact, even the best fathers are routinely denigrated in popular culture, the news media and the courts. Men proven to be at all violent don’t have a chance. So where does Pennington get her idea? She doesn’t let on, but then, how could she?
Or how about these gems?
Why do so many men assume that they should face no consequences for fathering a child?
Oh, like who? Pennington doesn’t tell us.
And, why does the government support the right of these men to fuck women with impunity whilst “slut-shaming” those women for having sex?
Again, I ask, “who are you talking about, Ms. Pennington?” Name a single person. But of course you didn’t name one did you. Given the opportunity to back up what you say with a single fact, you opted not to.
Why are women the only ones who have to take responsibility for the consequences of having sex?
Let’s see. Over 40% of women choose to bear children without being married, and this is the men’s fault? Men pay child support for 18 years for children they often have no say in raising and often enough no say in their very existence. Was the child even fathered by the man supporting it? That’s up to Mom to say. Overwhelmingly men and not women are thrown out of their children’s lives on the whim of a mother or a court and refused access to the kids they love. Almost 90% of the parents rendered mere wallets in their children’s lives are men, not women. Those same men see their so-called “visitation rights” routinely ignored by the mothers of their children and unenforced by courts. On the off chance a dad does get custody, he’s far less likely to have a child support order and she’s less likely to pay it than a father would be. “Women are the only ones who have to take responsibility for the consequences of having sex?” Please.
Why does the government think it should punish some women for withholding contact from abusive men without punishing those same men for the abuse or their failure to pay maintenance?
This is just loony. The government doesn’t punish men for failure to pay child support? Huh? I guess Pennington’s never heard of the debtors’ prison we have especially for poor dads here in the United States. Somehow she’s never heard of the interest rates on child support indebtedness that in some states hit 10%.
Children live in poverty because their fathers refuse to take responsibility for them. Fathers are responsible for the feminisation of poverty in the UK.
A fascinating theory. Here in the United States, single women with children earn on average $23,000. Single men with children by contrast, earn over 50% more – about $36,000. And child support doesn’t have anything to do with the discrepancy. Only 30% single fathers with custody of children have a child support order in effect compared with about 56% of custodial mothers. And non-custodial mothers are ordered to pay less than are non-custodial fathers, but even then they pay a smaller percentage of what they owe. All that’s factual information courtesy of the Census Bureau.
So in fact, as opposed to Pennington’s nutty feminist fantasy, the reason single mothers tend to be impoverished is that they don’t do much paid work. In Pennington’s UK, the same is true as a government report indicated four years ago. It found that the chief reason for the single mothers’ low incomes is their lack of “involvement in paid work.” Damn! There’s a catch to everything. It turns out if you want money, you have to work and earn it. Who knew?
Essentially all of Pennington’s claims are just made up, which is bad enough, but eventually she descends into unhinged babbling.
Why do men get to do whatever they want whenever they want with no legal or moral requirement for them to act like an adult?
Words fail. Truly they do. This is the question of someone whose hatred of men has gotten the better of her. She’s lost all reason, all judgment. Here is someone who has marinated for so long in her own vitriol that she’s lost sight of how her words appear to her readers. This is a woman who needs help. If this article is any indication, Pennington is delusional; she can’t differentiate fantasy from reality. The notion, seriously set forth in an article for a significant publication, that men face no legal or moral strictures on their behavior can’t be explained any other way.
The rest of Pennington’s hate-filled screed is a list of what fathers have to do. Needless to say, if we reversed the sexes and made a few tweaks, the piece would be equally applicable to women, but a man-hater like Pennington would never even notice that, much less pen such an article.
All in all, hers is the worst bit of misandry I’ve seen in the mainstream press in I don’t know when.
Still, it has its virtues. Seriously, I’m glad HuffPo ran it. I’m glad because all too often we’re treated to feminists pretending that feminism isn’t misandric and that all feminists want is a nice egalitarian world. So it’s nice to have Pennington’s vitriol to offer as Exhibit 500,000 for the opposite proposition. Honestly, no one reading it will be able to seriously think of feminism as what some feminists like to claim it is.
Don’t believe me? Just read the comments to Pennington’s article. “One-sided diatribe,” “feminism has become a hate movement,” “she hates men,” “the author of this piece is really living in unreality,” “feminist bigotry,” “what planet do you live on?” are some of the kinder ones.
Recently, the U.S. version of HuffPo collaborated on a survey that showed that some 80% of Americans don’t call themselves feminists. And just recently, Yasmin Brown in the UK penned an article excoriating young women for eschewing the feminist label. Well, they don’t have to look any further than Louise Pennington’s piece to see why. Who on earth would join a club with her as a member?
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