The Silent Siege: How the Legal System and Ideological Machinery Are Dismantling Men, By Mrs Vera West and Mrs Abigail Knight (Florida)
In the fluorescent-lit trenches of family court, where dreams dissolve faster than alimony (US)/spouse maintenance (Australia) cheques, a quiet cataclysm unfolds. Mark Keenan's The War on Men isn't hyperbole; it's a field manual for a battlefield most of us never signed up for. Picture this: You, a man in your prime, pledging forever in a tuxedo that suddenly feels like a straitjacket. Fast-forward five years: She's gone, the kids are wards of the state, and your bank account's a crime scene. Welcome to the front lines of a war waged not with bullets, but with gavels, gender studies syllabi, and a cultural script that recasts providers as predators. This isn't about bashing women, it's about dissecting how the legal scaffold and societal zeitgeist have fused into a Frankenstein's monster, engineered to hobble half the population. Satirically? It's like evolution's cruel joke: Men built the pyramids, split the atom, and now can't get joint custody without a personality transplant. Let's unpack the arsenal.
At the epicentre: The legal system, that impartial arbiter turned inquisitor. No-fault divorce, Australia and America's great liberator of the 1970s, promised escape from toxic unions. Instead, it morphed into a one-way ticket to paternal purgatory. Women initiate 70% of splits, per long-standing data, often citing "irreconcilable differences" that sound suspiciously like "he wouldn't do the dishes." Men? They enter court as presumed ATMs. Outcomes are grim: 90% of custodial parents are mums, leaving dads as weekend tourists in their own legacy. Child support? A lifetime subscription, 79% of custodial moms get it, while just 30% of dads do when roles reverse. Assets? Halved, quartered, vaporised. Average divorce costs $15K-$20K, ballooning to six figures in custody wars, per 2025 Clio stats, pocket change for the ex, apocalypse for the everyman. The state? It rakes in billions via enforcement fees, turning heartbreak into a revenue stream. No-fault didn't free families; it franchised family court as Big Brother's divorce depot.
This isn't accident, it's architecture. Rooted in Roman civil law, marriage is no sacred vow but a state-sanctioned LLC where Uncle Sam holds the veto pen. Kids? Mere "fruit" of the contract, ripe for CPS plucking. Judges wield discretion like despots: Bias tilts toward "tender years doctrine" relics, assuming mums are default nurturers. False allegations? A prosecutor's wet dream, easy to lob, hell to disprove. Depp's decade-long defamation duel cost $10M+ and his sanity; multiply that despair by a million voiceless Joes sleeping in cars to fund two households. Satirically? It's the ultimate prenup: You keep the noose; she gets the house. Rational men? They're opting out, marriage rates cratering 60% since 1970, birth rates tanking, as no sane general charges a minefield marked "equal rights."
Layer on the ideological framework, and the siege turns siege mentality. Feminism's waves, once tidal surges for suffrage, now lap at the shores of state-sponsored emasculation. No-fault? Feminism's gift horse, galloping alongside welfare expansions that recast wives as wards, husbands as hazards. Enter "toxic masculinity" seminars in schools and HR cubicles, mandatory mea culpas where boys learn vulnerability is valour, but vulnerability in court is villainy. The media? A megaphone for the matriarchy: #BelieveWomen hashtags drown due process, while male victims of DV (1 in 7, per CDC) get the side-eye. Social engineering? Aaron Russo's elite confessional rings true: Fund the bras-burning to bust the breadwinners, swelling tax rolls with single-mom subsidies and state-raised spawn. Result? A generation of soy-sipping sons, fatherless stats exploding: 85% of youth in prisons sans dads, per DOJ echoes. The ideology whispers, "Men are the problem," while the law hammers, "And we'll fix you."
The carnage? Quantifiable carnage. Divorced men? 9x likelier to suicide than divorced women, per UC Riverside's grim ledger, 2.4x overall vs. married peers. Why? Paternal bonds severed like umbilical cords in a C-section society, undervalued and under-enforced. Homeless? 70% male, many post-divorce evictees. Mental health? Triple the suicide rate, depression's dark twin. No-fault's "gains," 8-16% female suicide drop, 30% DV plunge, ring hollow when men's bodies pile up unchecked. It's a zero-sum slaughter: Her liberation, his ledger in red.
Keenan's clarion? Not rage, but reckoning. Awareness is armament: Vet partners like VCs vet startups, red flags over rose-tinted glasses. Prenups? Bulletproof vests in a bias-riddled arena. Purpose? Reclaim the forge, masculinity's forge of fire, not fragility. Speak: X's manosphere murmurs grow to roars, demanding 50/50 custody defaults (Florida's 2023 nod a start).
This war's endgame? Civilisation's crumble. Men, the architects of aqueducts and Apollo, reduced to rubble? Societies teeter. Keenan's tome isn't defeat, it's the dawn dispatch: Arm the fallen, rally the ranks. In this ideological inquisition, surrender's suicide. Rise, rebuild, reclaim. The courts may be rigged, but lawful resistance is the revolution no judge can jail.
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