OK, that’s probably the worst idea I’ve heard in a while. I actually had to double check that it wasn’t some sort of “modest proposal”-esque satire mistakenly taken as fact. On the plus side, they’ll probably backtrack after they (almost inevitably) get their asses handed to them in court.

Off topic, Roy Hollander sort of reminds me of Harvey Dent. A lawyer who got the short end of the stick* but, instead seeking counseling, decided he’d rather screw over a bunch of people who weren’t even responsible for his predicament in the first place.

*imho, marrying someone with the sole intent of divorcing them and taking their cash isn’t exactly something feminists (or anyone) should be applauding, seeing as it’s basically con artistry and plays into the whole “women are money-grubbing harpies!” stereotype to boot.

I would suggest that the real culprit here is the Shawnee County District Attorney, who unilaterally decided to discontinue prosecuting misdemeanors because of 10% budget cut.  According to this article, about half of their misdemeanor cases last year were domestic battery cases.

The thinking, if you can call it that, on the part of Topeka’s city council is that their actions will force the DA’s office to start prosecuting these cases again instead of dumping the responsibility on the cities and towns within Shawnee County.

Attention needs to be paid to this, and pressure needs to be applied.  But it needs to be applied to the Shawnee County DA’s office, not necessarily Topeka.  There are plenty of people in that county who do not fall under Topeka’s jurisdiction, who live in even smaller towns or unicorporated areas that have even fewer resources to deal with these crimes.  It’s the DA’s responsibility, and if he’s so incompetent that a 10% budget cut is cause for such a drastic, arbitrary decision, perhaps he should no longer be a DA.

And he’s a Democrat, so we can thank him for helping to ruin the brand.

What’s the Matter With Kansas?
I recall reading an old law that said you couldn’t beat your wife with a rod thicker than your thumb.  I suppose that’s what they’d like to return to.

And I wonder what other crimes they decided to stop enforcing first.  Can you speed in Topeka now because they can’t have too many patrolmen on payroll?

That’s too bad. I was living in Kansas when I got my divorce (not Topeka, though), and when the soon-to-be ex threatened and harassed me, it was taken VERY seriously after I took out a VPO, and he spent a weekend in jail after he violated it. I was lucky in that it was enough for him to stop harassing and threatening me.

If they had to stop prosecuting something, why not parking tickets (in a university town, it’s a pretty fair bet that there are a lot of these)? Or even speeding less than 10 miles over the limit tickets (not including school zones)?

@5: tickets bring in money, so stopping prosecuting them would actually make their money problems worse. IIRC, in some cities, the local PD actually gives each officer a monthly quota of speeding tickets to issue.

I’m curious as to how many new cases there have been in Shawnee County as the article only mentions the 35 new cases in Topeka.  Now, Topeka has the greatest population center in the county, but I doubt density has any effect of increasing rates of DV.  If anything, the higher likelihood of witnesses would seem to perhaps inhibit some.

*imho, marrying someone with the sole intent of divorcing them and taking their cash isn’t exactly something feminists (or anyone) should be applauding,

First of all, this is pretty rare.  Second, very few people are actually applauding it.  Your little caveat is unnecessary and I’m not really sure why you included it.

@8: because the Jezebel post linked in the article sarcastically described it as “some foolish idea that she is his intellectual equal or better”, which kinda pissed me off. The guy’s a douchebag, as shown by how he reacted, but he did legitimately get shafted on this one. Also, since we’re discussing a specific case where it did happen, its rarity isn’t really very relevant.

What I can’t find anything about in any of these articles is non-violent drug arrests.  They can save money by reducing possession to a mere fine.  I don’t know how it’s being dealt with in this county,  however.

Only prosecuting cases with weapons also might work against women, at least typically there is a size and stregth difference and in order for the women to defend herself she may need a weapon.

Regarding Hollander, guys who go to other countries to buy wives are framing their marriage as a financial transaction from the get-go, so their shock and anger that the women they marry also view their relationship as a financial transaction is quite hypocritical.

What I can’t find anything about in any of these articles is non-violent drug arrests.  They can save money by reducing possession to a mere fine.  I don’t know how it’s being dealt with in this county,  however.

Listen, a little wife-beating never hurt anyone.  But decriminalizing small amounts of marijuana?!  That will lead to an epidemic of Reefer Madness!

  So what, this—-asshole goes to the former Soviet Union to buy somebody because she’s in such dire straits——and it’s bad for her to give him a taste of his own medicine? Bride buyers are the scum of the earth;  what’s next, going to Chechnya for hot young desperate women? Women aren’t toys you buy. How come people get upset about some asshole getting hoist by his own petard, yet the idea that they’re trading escape from horrible situations to women for pussy is just glossed over? Those guys buy much younger women who are desperate to survive.  It’s the next step or so above grave robbing,  because the situations in some areas are that bad—-if the women stay, they’re basically dead.  I’ve driven down streets in Moscow and seen men just casually haul off and hit women so hard that they knocked them over and nobody did squat. (In those situations I was with service members and they absolutely refused to let me stop and get out and do anything.) That kind of situation, where the woman knows that absolutely nobody will help her, is pretty similar to what women face in domestic violence cases. People want to side with the guy because the victim is so very often tiresome and tedious.  The woman is stuck unless she knows she can count on every person who offers help actually coming through with it—-and she often knows from experience that she can’t——then the only person whose behavior is consistent and predictable is the batterer.  Plus, she’s likely to get killed if she leaves.

  And thanks for linking to that picture, Amanda.  Put me right off my feed. He looks like the Crypt Keeper.

@12: true, but not applicable to this case, as the guy had been living in Russia for the past decade because of his job and he met someone; it’s not quite the same as just hitting up russianbrides.com or some such. Besides, even in those cases, it’s a dick move to unilaterally change the terms of the deal. If the deal was, “green card for sex”, turning that into “green card and half your stuff in exchange for jack shit” is, to put it mildly, duplicitous. It’s different if it just doesn’t work out, but in this instance, she had apparently told all her friends “that she’d married him for her green card and his money” and was planning on divorcing him asap.

And now I’ve just had to write a post essentially defending the guy. That’s why I hate asshole-on-asshole crime: somebody always concludes that one of the assholes had it coming, even on the rare occurrences when they didn’t, and I feel compelled to react like this: http://xkcd.com/386/

Um, Datasnake, if you take something that’s rare and use it to frame a common problem, you are most definitely revealing that you think it’s common.  He’s a scumbag and he got took, but hey, let’s talk about how the person he tried to exploit turned the tables on him instead.

Maybe they can require men who want to beat their wives to get a license.  That way they will have decriminalized domestic violence, and created a new revenue source without raising taxes.

Advertise it as a vacation destination for men who want to straighten her out without going to jail: What happens in Topeka stays in Topeka!...

Data, since he basically saw his marriage as a transaction, I don’t mind his ex-wife getting the most money out of him she could. That’s capitalism, isn’t it? He’s just moaning because he wants the courts to forcibly lower the price, but free markets and all that. She was able to get him to pay more, and I support that.

“In case that is hard to register, let me repeat: it is now basically legal to beat your wife in Topeka.”

Come on, Amanda!

Can’t you be fair and balanced about this one?

It is also now basically legal to beat your husband in Topeka. The patriarchy doesn’t take kindly to men who can’t handle their own business. The wives of Topeka need to embrace this new freedom.

I mean, she probably had to fuck him a number of times! Ew. I doubt what she got out of it was probably well below what the compensation for touching his dick should be.

Yeah, Datasnake, that actually makes it worse, because he knew what he was doing.  You’re quite determined to ignore the fact that Hollander held all the cards because the women had either bad or horrible choices and he used it to bargain for pussy.  Who cares if they had a deal? It was a shitty deal, and he’s a shitty person for looking at a bad situation and thinking, “I still don’t have the total and complete power I want over women.” 

He lived and worked in Moscow, I see, where the situation is so bad for women, the female to male ratio so skewed, that women wear astonishing outfits to attract attention from men. Any guy is going to be a catch in that situation, but an American?

Something else, too: How did this become asshole-on-asshole? Rich powerful guy looking for victims versus desperate woman? You see those two as equal?

Trophy wives really don’t get paid enough in many circumstances. I’m happy to see one get something out of it; a lot of trophy wives think they’re going to be set for life if they just touch this foul motherfucker’s dick enough, but sadly, our society—-as evidenced by DataSnake—-has so little regard for the hard work of trophy wife-ing, and they have very few employment protections.

From the Politico article, it sounds like the decriminalization of domestic violence is just a political stunt to raise the stakes in a budget dispute between the city and the surrounding county. They chose domestic violence precisely because it would get more attention than drug possession or code enforcement. It’s still a reckless move and something they’d never do with, say, bank robbery.

And yeah, that Hollander guy is repulsive.  He didn’t necessarily go to Russia to buy a bride—it says he worked there for ten years before bringing her back to the US. He wants to make this country into just another shitty bastion of male privilege, that’s all. He reminds me of my ex, who in hindsight probably married me because he thought I was foreign enough not to be a feminist (I was born in Latin America) but white enough not to bother him with my weird foreign culture. Too bad he guessed wrong on both counts.

@ganews @#3 —I am pretty sure that the “rod no bigger than your thumb” thing isn’t found anywhere in law. It gets mentioned in a few legal cases in the 19th century as something that’s known, or a doctrine, or a custom, but I don’t think anyone has show an actual law saying that.

(I only know this because I went to college with someone who insisted that was the source of the term “A Rule of Thumb” - although her version was it originated in the US Colonies and most other people I’ve heard repeat that myth locate it in English Common Law.)

I call bullshit on the notion that Roy Den Hollander was just an innocent dupe who fell in love while abroad.  I guarantee you that he was always one of these guys who talks about how selfish and materialistic American women are and how submissive and pure non-American women are.  I know more than one of these guys personally.  They were nasty pieces of work before they went off to buy a wife.  As Ginmar said, they go to areas of the world where people are in dire financial straits and exploit that vulnerability for their own gain.  Then they drag these women back to the States where they are completely cut off from all family and friends, and many times do not even speak English.

Then these guys find out the hard way that even women from other countries are human beings with their own personalities and motivations and not the subservient blow-up dolls they want them to be.

I remain 100% unconvinced that it’s just a coincidence that a guy committed to a bride-buying ideology happened into a Russian wife who was enduring him in order to get a green card. Hey, some times there’s coincidences in life, but that, I fear, is just not plausible. Everyone knew going in what was going to happen; he was just hoping that the immigration system could be finagled to trap his trophy wife/mail order-ish bride a little longer than he was able to do.

Back to the Topeka situation, I want to repost the conclusion of Feministing’s post on the topic, which I think basically sums it up:

“But regardless of how this ultimately gets resolved, the message has already been heard loud and clear: Not one, not two, but three arms of government in Topeka don’t care enough about prosecuting domestic violence to pay for it unless they are absolutely, positively, back-against-the-wall forced to.”

The fact that this is political gamesmanship just makes it worse—it would be one thing if Topeka was so broke that they had to stop prosecuting misdemeanors across the board or something, but to single out a non-victimless crime as a bargaining chip is just disgusting.  These are people’s lives that are being played with, and there is no excuse.

Also, if you read the stuff he says about this woman, it makes it pretty clear that he’s quite an unreliable narrator in this story.  So, she used VAWA to lie about being abused by him in order to get her citizenship as she divorced him.  His Russian “intelligence contacts” have told him that she is a mafia prostitute with connections to the Chechen Special Islamic Regiment.  Her mother is also a whore, according to him.

When asked if she lied about being abused, his response was: “Well, yes, basically. She came at me twice with a knife, but since I know martial arts, it wasn’t a problem. I probably did bruise her arm. But she, you know she twisted it around, the thing about the knife, and she got the restraining order. But what matters is that the court dismissed it.”

He also says that he takes dance classes to meet young women, and will only go out with women in their “teens or twenties.”  Because that’s what Mother Nature tells him to do.  He also blames his ex-wife for his drug use, and will go on and on about his martial arts training.  This guy is a raging asshole.  That’s crystal clear if you read a few interviews with him.

I agree with most of this, but I don’t think you can pretend that all domestic violence charges are valid. In “must arrest” states, the police will show up and arrest someone if some nosy neighbors call the cops hear a loud fight between a drunk couple. There have been cases where the defendant, the victim, and witnesses all agree that something transpired such as she threw something at him, or hit him, and he shoved her back. That happened with some people I knew back in college. Everyone agreed—including the woman’s friends, who were watching—that they were both drunk, she kept repeatedly hitting and slapping at him, and he grabbed her arms and pushed her away. When the cops showed up, they said “did you put your hands on her?” and when he said, “well, yeah, because I wanted her to back off” they arrested him. He got some hysterically harsh punishment for that. Not that you should be getting drunk and fighting, but thinking anyone—men and women—should be labeled “abusers” for those incidents is nothing but extremism.

Please, before you think of defending this guy in any way, please read the New Yorker profile.  Among other things, he reveals that his pickup strategy is to isolate the woman.  Then, he shares this little gem:  “What I think will happen,” he said, “is that clubs will reduce the price for guys and increase it for girls. Every guy will have ten or fifteen more dollars in his pocket, which the girls will then manipulate into getting more drinks out of him. If they drink more, they’ll have more fun, and so will us guys. And then when she wakes up in the morning she’ll be able to do what she always does: blame the man.”  This guy hates women, and he did not fall in love with his Russian doll and have his heart broken.  He married someone because she was beautiful and submissive and docile and was pissed when she got away.  I have no sympathy for him—he was using another person, and found out that she wasn’t an object, and it sent him over the edge. 

Oh, come on. Cops are such assholes when it comes to prosecuting rapes——and are often rapists themselves——but they suddenly turn white knight when the subject is domestic violence?

“Hysterically” harsh? Yeah. No.

  Wonderful victim-blaming. If that’s your thing.

Sorry, I don’t think one person involved in a two-person fight should go to jail for a shove. And I know it’s happened because I’ve seen it.

And no, I’m not one of those believers in the claim that woman-on-man DV is just as widespread and destructive as man-on-woman. Male abusers do way more physical damage to their partners, statistically, and use much more force. But if you live in a “must-arrest” area like I do (I don’t know if it varies by state or court district), if some nosy neighbor overhears a fight and reports it to the police as “domestic violence,” they MUST ARREST someone. Just like the law says. Even if there is absolutely no evidence it was anything but a loud argument. I’ve been in about 3 of those with my husband this week.

@27:
So they were each planning on stabbing each other in the back, and she was just a little quicker with the knife. That’s pretty much a textbook definition of asshole-on-asshole. And yes, I guess that is more likely than him thinking she was really into him, I guess it never occurred to me that anyone would be capable of something THAT sociopathic.

So you believe any random person should go to jail on someone’s say-so, do you? That’s what “must arrest” means. Imagine this applying to DUIs. Someone driving behind you calls the cops and says there’s a drunk driver on the road. They pull you over and if they think you might have had a drink or just accept the other person’s word, they arrest—no breathalyzer or sobriety test necessary. Sure, you might get out of it later by persuading a court it never happened—but only after you’ve been handcuffed, docked, had your name in the paper (if it publishes police blotters), hired a lawyer, and paid court fees.

Nevermind, looks like in most states you do need probable cause (so in my DUI comparison, you’d need a sobriety test). I thought they were required to arrest someone if they merely showed up in response to a call.

Yeah, looks like my info came from an credible-sounding web site that actually has MRA sympathies. Sorry.

“He got some hysterically harsh punishment for that.”

You had such detail regarding what transpired that night, but then you make this claim near the end without any details.  I’m not saying I disbelieve you, but what was the hysterically harsh punishment that he received?

And how is this at all comparable to your DUI scenario?  Part of the problem with DV disputes is that you’re having to base things on the testimony of the people involved.  Showing that someone is driving drunk is much more clear-cut, so why on earth would they suddenly stop sobriety tests and breathalyzers?

I’ve called the cops on a neighbor before.  And they weren’t just yelling at each other.  I could hear their children screaming in terror and something heavy being slammed onto the floor repeatedly.

“But regardless of how this ultimately gets resolved, the message has already been heard loud and clear: Not one, not two, but three arms of government in Topeka don’t care enough about prosecuting domestic violence to pay for it unless they are absolutely, positively, back-against-the-wall forced to.”

This is the real issue.  While it is notable and sad that the first people thrown under the bus are victims of domestic violence, the right-wing’s refusal to even consider raising taxes to pay for necessary government services has now gone beyond just crumbling infrastructure to a basic inability to enforce the laws to keep people safe.

Focus on this.

If anyone wants to donate to the Topeka YWCA, you can here.

This sends a terrible message.  I do hope for women in Topeka that authorities will still prosecute violations of restraining orders, temporary or otherwise.

Datasnake’s determination to minimize Hollander’s disgusting sexism while maximizing whatever the wife might have done—-and we only have Hollander’s word for that——ought to be taken note of, as it’s a useful example for later discussions on the topic.

I’ve been in about 3 of those with my husband this week.

And your neighbors enjoyed the impromptu aural soap opera that you provided them every time.

Oh, for fuck’s sake.  He or she is pointing out how this dipshit has all this overblown action movie/CIA agent secret sooper spy shit to explain how his wife wound up bruised and he would up with a restraining order. 

It’s credible only if you think Hollander has any credibility. Which he doesn’t.

The leap to, “You’re not actually implying,” is MRA crap, though.

“While it is notable and sad that the first people thrown under the bus are victims of domestic violence, the right-wing’s refusal to even consider raising taxes to pay for necessary government services has now gone beyond just crumbling infrastructure to a basic inability to enforce the laws to keep people safe.”

...I’m just amazed that the Reichwing can turn the US into a dysfunctional hell-hole, right before our eyes, and then capitalize on the fact that it’s all turned into a hell-hole to get themselves elected.  To “clean up the mess”.  Which they themselves caused to begin with.  And do it in the name of notorious atheist Ayn Rand.  And in the name of Jesus “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven” Christ.

I guess if it takes balls to execute an innocent man (as admiring wingnut audience said of Rick Perry), then it must take really big stainless-steel balls to wreck a country and then proclaim yourself the only way to rescue that country from the effects of your own predation…

@43:
actually, reading more of the story, it was a case of shooting my e-mouth off without fact-checking first.
See, I was inferring (largely from the Jezebel piece, I’m not quite dumb enough to take his account at face value) that she pretended to really like him until they were safely in the states, at which point she took him for everything he was worth, which she’d been planning to do from the beginning. Upon further reading, it looks more like she gave the relationship a shot, but when he turned abusive she bailed, which puts her firmly in the right.

tl;dr I was wrong, sorry I derailed your thread.

I live in and have prosecuted DV crimes in a mandatory arrest jurisdiction.  It does NOT mean that the police have to arrest “the man” anytime they’re called for a domestic, Alex, but nice try.  It means that if they determine that there is probable cause to believe that person A assaulted person B, they are required to arrest person A.  (I’ve seen women arrested under this policy, and I have prosecuted those women.)  It does not mean that the prosecutor is required to press charges.  There are legitimate concerns about the unintended effects of a mandatory arrest policy, and there are no doubt police who misapply it, but the law does not require cops to arrest the man in all circumstances.

  I shoulda bet money on that whole “But what about teh Menz” crap, dammit.

@Alex Weaver #46

Guess what, Alex - any victimization that a few men might face as a result of domestic violence laws is also a result of misogyny and attitudes that uphold a patriarchical mindset.  Removing much-needed protection from other victims of domestic abuse is not going to fix anything, for either gender.  So rather than stick to your “but women hurt menz too, and that’s much worse because they get no sympathy”, try to think about the root causes of that, work to create positive change.  Sexism and violence hurts everybody, no matter who the recipient is.

Besides, even in those cases, it’s a dick move to unilaterally change the terms of the deal. If the deal was, “green card for sex”, turning that into “green card and half your stuff in exchange for jack shit” is, to put it mildly, duplicitous.

Yeah, and what about drug stings, huh? We had an agreement that you would provide me with three keys of llello, and suddenly now I find out that it’s baby powder, and you’re going to put me away for 10 to 20? Not cool man, not cool. I thought we had a deal.

But, hey.  It’s a MAN.  He probably deserved it for some other reason anyway.  Right?

You should probably stop talking now.

“And your neighbors enjoyed the impromptu aural soap opera that you provided them every time.”

Oh, fuck you. Nobody heard it. The apartments below and next to us are vacant, and they’re two-story apartments. And some man was making a ruckus by actually hitting the woman, would that be a “soap opera” that interfered with your quiet time?

    Stephen Suh at 2: So the victims of domestic violence are going to have to suffer because of a budget cut to government body that even most libertarians accept as legitimate? This is horrible. Everything decent in this country is going down becuase the rich refuse to pay their taxes.

...you know, ignoring what people actually SAY and responding to some stereotype you have in your head doesn’t even rise to the level of “arguing in bad faith.”  It’s straight up trolling.

You know what’s straight up trolling? Hijacking a thread about decriminalizing a crime that disproportionately affects women to talk about the much rarer instances where innocent men are victimized by poorly written DV laws. Also, this:

There are jurisdictions in which cops are legally required to automatically arrest the man if they’re called for a domestic dispute.  Even if he’s the one who called them because his wife is assaulting him.

Please, link me to a government site that shows such a law exists. I’ll be over here, conspicuously not holding my breath.

Just so we’re clear on this, you’re not actually implying that a man wouldn’t be justified in using martial arts to defend himself if a woman had actually assaulted him with a knife, right?

Ginmar already covered it in #45.  His self-aggrandizement, his assertions that she’s a mafia prostitute who hooked him on drugs, and his constant reference to how physically awesome he is makes it pretty clear he thinks he’s starring in his own James Bond movie.  And no, I don’t believe anything he says.  He’s more than proven himself to be an unreliable narrator.

So what, this—-asshole goes to the former Soviet Union to buy somebody because she’s in such dire straits——and it’s bad for her to give him a taste of his own medicine? Bride buyers are the scum of the earth;  what’s next, going to Chechnya for hot young desperate women? Women aren’t toys you buy. How come people get upset about some asshole getting hoist by his own petard, yet the idea that they’re trading escape from horrible situations to women for pussy is just glossed over? Those guys buy much younger women who are desperate to survive.  It’s the next step or so above grave robbing,  because the situations in some areas are that bad—-if the women stay, they’re basically dead.  I’ve driven down streets in Moscow and seen men just casually haul off and hit women so hard that they knocked them over and nobody did squat. (In those situations I was with service members and they absolutely refused to let me stop and get out and do anything.) That kind of situation, where the woman knows that absolutely nobody will help her, is pretty similar to what women face in domestic violence cases. People want to side with the guy because the victim is so very often tiresome and tedious.  The woman is stuck unless she knows she can count on every person who offers help actually coming through with it—-and she often knows from experience that she can’t——then the only person whose behavior is consistent and predictable is the batterer.  Plus, she’s likely to get killed if she leaves.

A few years ago there was a case where some 60 year old dude was trying to buy himself an 18 year old from a mail order bride company.  He claimed they ripped him off and he sued them.  The judge, also an older white dude, was deeply sympathetic to the plaintiff and came down like a ton of bricks on company.  I got into an argument with my bf (at the time) about it.  I was like “why am I supposed to feel sorry for some gross old dude because he got cheated out of the hot young sex slave he felt he was entitled to?”

@ Alex Weaver #53

If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck…

Others might say that “trolling” is coming onto a thread about domestic abuse and sarcastically implying that the commentor you were responding to thinks that domestic violence against a man is completely okay because he’s a MAN and therefore probably did something to deserve it.

While you pointed out some sexist attitudes in your comment “Women are helpless and weak, and men are predatory monsters” - the one that I was thinking of when I responded to you were “I own this person, and can beat him/her if I want to”.

Trophy wives really don’t get paid enough in many circumstances. I’m happy to see one get something out of it; a lot of trophy wives think they’re going to be set for life if they just touch this foul motherfucker’s dick enough, but sadly, our society—-as evidenced by DataSnake—-has so little regard for the hard work of trophy wife-ing, and they have very few employment protections.

No shit.  I used to live in an area that was thick with trophy wives.  I didn’t envy them at all.  Many of them substitute alcohol and cocaine for food to maintain impossibly thin figures and seem to live relentlessly boring monotonous lives.  And yeah, no employment protection.  People think large divorce settlements are common but more often than not he gets a better lawyer and fucks her over.

    Jesus, how many of these morons that think they’re starring in their own combination James Bond/abused woobie hubbie-who-deservers-a-nineteen-year-old-Russian-Supermodels are there? Alex takes dipshit’s word on his ‘martial arts’ seriously and springboards from that to a tutting over how mean we are to battered men. 

It’s the glaringly obvious attempt at false modesty in the original guy’s comment that gets to me. “Oh, pshaw, I’m just your ordinary martial arts superlawyer expert knife fighter guy <i>who somehow didn’t catch onto the fact that his wife was a member of a Russian mafia conspiracy with a heroin addiction every day kind of dude.”  The fact that he’s going after such young women says a lot, too.

Alex,  did you lose a bet on The Spearhead or something?

Wait, Alex, what?  You’re complaining that “ironclad certainty is required for any statements of purported fact that are rhetorically inconvenient to the majority opinion, but a vague sense of verisimilitude is sufficient to justify assumptions that are rhetorically convenient.”  After admitting this: “I’ve been told that, and it’s entirely consistent with the general bent of sexist laws that treat women as inherently weak and helpless….  I suppose it’s possible that this isn’t true as stated; if so I withdraw it.”

Yeah, so withdraw it, because it’s not true, and whoever told you that is stupid or lying.  And stop being such a fucking troll.

At this point, when Alex posts all I get is a vague buzzing noise, like a mosquito flying past my ear.

Jesus’ General had a couple of postings recently about the Christian Domestic Discipline movement and a blog by propronent Leah Kelly, who gets “maintenance spankings” from her hustband when she doesn’t keep up with the housework or the home schooling.  I hope this is somebody’s weird fantasy and not a weird movement.

Ginmar @14, it doesn’t sound like it was his petard that he was getting hoist by….

MikeEss @47, I think the kind of balls that kind of man has are usually made of tantalum, but I expect stainless steel would serve as well.

Sorry, folks, I seem to only have genitalia jokes today.

@67 - I remember the CDD from some time ago. It always just seemed a way for the kinksters who want to embrace a particular right-wing view to get their groove on.

“You rarely see such a stellar example of how enforcing the law can cause a dramatic drop in crime”

The enforcement provisions/federal remedies of the VAWA were struck down by the Supreme Court in US v. Morrison. It’s hard to fathom how “enforcing” it could have lead to such a precipitous drop in crime.

All jokes aside, this new decision by Topeka is intensely dangerous. The rationale for it is they don’t have the money to prosecute domestic violence cases any longer, and because of this, they’re basically letting abusers go home to their victims, no doubt filled with rage that said bitches dared called the cops on them in the first place.

“Rationale”?  How do you know that that’s not the exact truth?

Budget-cutting past a certain point leads to all sorts of faaaaascinating cost-benefit exercises that show priorities.  It’s not as if a few more women with broken bones actually threaten law and order, or the business interests, is it?

Librarians are well aware of the difference between the lip service paid to values, and the actual priorities revealed when money gets tight.

As the grizzled eminence on this thread, I’m probably the only woman who survived a domestic abuse situation before domestic abuse laws, no less the application of those laws 35 years ago.

It was frightening to be alone, and relatively helpless.

Everyone thought he was the nicest guy in the world. After a time of quiet in the relationship, he became more and more controlling, a situation I stayed in for too long, probably because my father had been controlling and emotionally abusive. And in the early ‘70s, domestic abuse was a dirty secret, not talked about, no less prosecuted, and somehow the woman’s fault.

We ended up arguing endlessly, especially after he declared that we were to be married, move out of New York into the suburbs, after we bought his parents’ home. He didn’t ask me, he told me we were to be married.

I didn’t agree and wanted to break up, have him leave my apartment, even threatening him with my father.

Which he found amusing: he was over a foot taller than I, 100 pounds heavier, and had gone to college on a football scholarship.

One such argument led to a panic attack on my part, at the time I thought I was having a heart attack: he wasn’t particularly concerned in either case.

The last straw for me was the day when something provoked him while we were out in public, he grabbed me, shook me, put his hands on my throat, and said, “Wait until I get you home.”

A couple was walking by and I said to the woman, “Call the police.”

Luckily, she did. But when the police arrived, they stood back, and first asked if he was my pimp (!) I answered that I worked for a magazine and he was a computer engineer.

They still refused to do anything, and finally I pleaded with the police to just hold him there for a time, until I could get away safely.

The cops reluctantly agreed, I fled to a friend’s apartment. And later called him and told him he had three days to leave my apartment.

He said he wasn’t going anywhere, and that I’d be coming back to him.

Luckily, the apartment was under my name alone, so on the third day I changed the locks, called him at work to inform him when he could get his things.

I called the police again and asked if they could be on hand when he returned for his stuff. They refused.

My women friends were too frightened, as well. So I packed his things up, put them into the hallway, and locked myself in the apartment.

Which was a good thing, because he showed up with his three brothers to “help” him with the one box of clothes, and pounded on the metal door until it became apparent they wouldn’t be able break it down.

But someone scratched, “Bitch” into the paint.

Soon after, his mother called to ask me why I hadn’t married him, it took all my courage to tell her that I believed he was going to start beating me.

A silence on the line, and she replied, “His father beats me, and it ruined my life.” Possibly the first time, she’d ever said that sentence. They were Catholic, he appeared to be the nicest guy in the world, she’d had four children in a row, and nobody talked about domestic abuse then, and if they did it was somehow the woman’s fault.

Six months later, I ran into a secretary in my ex’s office. She’d always had a crush on Mr. Nice Guy, so I wasn’t surprised when she told me they were engaged.

However, she didn’t appear happy in announcing that engagement, and she’d developed dark circles under her eyes, and I thought, “He’s already started in on her.”

That’s the hell Topeka is forcing women back into, three decades later. The war on women continues, and we’re still just bargaining chips.

If Topeka gets away with this, you can be sure other municipalities also will adopt these “cost saving” mechanisms.

CTD, the statistics on the effecacy of the enforcement of Domestic Abuse laws are easily available via the Google.

Doubting they exist, without linking to any proof yourself, well, it says more about you than your ability to Google.

I don’t really buy the “game of chicken” explanation. It’s sort of like the explanation that it’s always abortion rights that have to get thrown under the bus to pass some other piece of federal legislation.
Imagine just how much faster the DA would be getting the money if he’d announced he was going to stop prosecuting drug-possession or dealing-without-a-weapon charges.

  Jesus, how many of these morons that think they’re starring in their own combination James Bond/abused woobie hubbie-who-deservers-a-nineteen-year-old-Russian-Supermodels are there?

Are you familiar with the words “Walter” and “Mitty”?

It’s entirely consistent with the general bent of sexist laws that treat women as inherently weak and helpless, even above and beyond having been told by police officer that I would be arrested if I defended myself when assaulted by a woman (IE, the elementary school I attended had an EXPLICIT POLICY that sexual harassment was only recognized if committed by a male against a female).  I suppose it’s possible that this isn’t true as stated; if so I withdraw it.
Comment #59: Alex Weaver on 10/12 at 01:06 PM

There is a requirement in some jurisdictions that officers take into account who’s the dominant aggressor when there is mutual combat.  Because men are bigger and stronger on average, they may more often be considered the bigger threat, but that’s not the only factor.

http://circlevt.org/eventspress/press/154-the-dominate-aggressor.html for example says:

So when police show up at what they call a “domestic” (by the way, according to national studies, 33% of all calls police receive are domestic-violence related), they first try to determine who did what to whom (after making sure everyone is safe and uninjured, of course).  Police must determine which party posed the most serious threat. The dominant aggressor is not necessarily the first person to engage in assaultive behavior, but rather the one with the most ability and inclination to inflict physical injury.

When determining the dominant aggressor, police officers gather all relevant information.  Cause for an arrest is not assumed based only on visual evidence.  Here are ways police determine who is the dominant aggressor: a history of service calls to the home; a history of domestic violence in the relationship;  prior assault convictions or current or previous restraining (protection) orders of;  the weight and height of the parties;  the proportional nature of injuries inflicted on each person;  whether injuries are offensive or defensive; evidence one party acted in self-defense (abrasions, bite marks, use of a defensive “weapon”);  presence of fear in one party; presence of other normal responses to trauma (crying); presence of controlling behavior in one party; need for protection; and potential for future injury.

In some cases of mutual assault in domestic violence situations, law enforcement and criminal justice professionals sometimes cannot determine who is the dominant aggressor.  It is simply not clear.  Sometimes, it’s pretty easy to figure out. For instance, she admits she slapped him after he was repeatedly verbally abusive to her and then, in response, he hit her numerous times with his fist causing major bruising and welts. When the process of figuring out who is the dominant aggressor is bypassed, victims are not served well, and worse, the offender may come to believe he will never be held accountable.

Any examples you may have of people lying about what happened in a DV situation are kind of irrelevant, since all other crimes can involve liars, too.

The enforcement provisions/federal remedies of the VAWA were struck down by the Supreme Court in US v. Morrison. It’s hard to fathom how “enforcing” it could have lead to such a precipitous drop in crime.

The rate of female against male spousal homicide have dropped by over 50% since the 70’s.  You’re correct that this is probably not directly linked to VAWA, since it’s a thirty year trend.  However, Amanda’s interpretation of why the numbers have dropped is the generally agreed upon interpretation—as domestic violence is treated seriously and women are given more opportunities to leave their abusers, they do not resort to homicide. 

Interestingly, there is no such drop in spousal murder rates when we look at male against female homicide.  Men are still murdering their spouses at roughly the same rate they were thirty years ago.

You can find these stats very easily at the Uniform Crime Report.

“Doubting they exist, without linking to any proof yourself, well, it says more about you than your ability to Google.”

And that says a lot about your level of reading comprehension. Where did I say that reports of domestic assaults have not gone down?

I don’t need to Google anything. My point was a logical one. How could a law that had it’s enforcement provisions struck over a decade ago down be responsible for a sharp decline in reported crime due to “enforcement?”

Comment #77: Blitzgal

Then why does she she specifically cite VAWA and praise it’s efficacy?

Straining at gnats, are you, CTD?

DataSnake, #48 - why should a mail-order bride be obliged to “give the relationship a shot”? It’s an economic transaction, not a love match. The customer isn’t marrying for love. He wants a fuckhole, a scullery maid, and sometimes a broodmare. Meanwhile, the woman has to survive. Personally, Roy Den Hollander deserves to wind up with the most mercenary mail-order brides in existence.

“Rationale”?  How do you know that that’s not the exact truth?

Let me just follow up and expand on that.  The assumption I’m getting under using the term “rationale” is that of an active evil, of Amanda implicitly claiming that the Topeka authorities are deliberately throwing domestic abuse victims under the bus.

I think it’s possible it really is a more insidious passive evil, a bureaucratic framing of priorities in which these victims matter in a formal sense, but are assessed with such a low prioirty that given the framing it is logical not to prosecute.  The evil is not due to an active decision but embedded in the framework by which domestic abuse is perceived.

There’s a book I was always impressed with called “If Women Counted” by Marilyn Waring that pointed out how the framing of economics and national accounting disappeared away women’s and domestic work.  They weren’t measured, and therefore they didn’t count.

Topeka may be making a perfectly logical decision.  It’s the set of assumptions on which that decision is made which is evil.

why should a mail-order bride be obliged to “give the relationship a shot”?

I don’t think that DS was saying that she was obliged to do that, I think they were saying that it undermines the scheming whore/asshole-on-asshole crime narratives.

Then why does she she specifically cite VAWA and praise it’s efficacy?

In the first part of the paragraph she specifically cites Bill Scher, who indicates that there has been a 50% drop in non-fatal domestic assaults since the implementation of VAWA.  She THEN goes on to talk about the homicide rate.  But now I feel like I’m just re-reading the post for you when you can do that yourself.  I don’t know if you’re being disingenuous or you’re honestly missing the point.

Well the good news is I’m still capable of being horrified…

Well the good news is I’m still capable of being horrified…

  Gretchen at 67: No, I think the Christian Domestic Discipline movement is depressingly real like NAMBLA and the Koch brothers. There are all sorts of really strange organizations and groups that really shouldn’t exist but do. Like LC, I strongly suspect that they are people who really into BDSM but feel dirty about it and are looking for some sort of cover and justification. This makes them seem even weirder than the regular BDSM community to the regular public. The phrase “maintenance spankings” speaks volumes about their world view.

Amanda was added to Register-Her.com as a bigot.

There’s a system for registering bigots now? That’s awesome. I hope all the black, female and gay bigots finally get what’s coming to them.

Well, fuck the site ate my fucking comment. Fuck.

Dammit. 

All it takes to get ‘registered’ on Register Her or whatever is to not offer blowjobs to any poor, deluded, angry MRA around.

A relative of mine was told by the family priest that if she were a better wife perhaps her husband wouldn’t beat her as much.

What the drop in male homicides by desperate women says is this:

1. IF given a chance, women will flee rather than kill, and:

2. Men are so determined to keep women bound that they’ll kill. But we already know that.

I don’t believe in raising one’s voice in an argument, mainly because my siblings and I had to put up with our parents’ ‘disagreements’, and volume doesn’t lend any more credence to one’s position.

The apartments below and next to us are vacant, and they’re two-story apartments.

Depending on whether your windows were open or closed, and the topography around you, you might be surprised how far your voice carried.

And some man was making a ruckus by actually hitting the woman, would that be a “soap opera” that interfered with your quiet time?

I hear my loud-mouthed neighbor being forceful and tyrannical to his niece and nephew whom his wife babysits until their mother gets off work a few times a week.

If I thought it tipped into physical child abuse, I would have no compunction in dropping a dime on him for that or for spousal abuse, he has a job where he would be fired if he was arrested for such an offense(not in LEO, he hastens to add), but I would put human safety before anything else.

I should mention that when I volunteered in the ER at Barnes Hospital, St. Louis, MO, in the late 70s, I witnessed the aftermath of domestic violence on several occasions, including a case where a woman was stabbed in the eyeball by her boyfriend.

Just don’t move next door on my north side, and I think we can get along

There’s a book I was always impressed with called “If Women Counted” by Marilyn Waring that pointed out how the framing of economics and national accounting disappeared away women’s and domestic work.  They weren’t measured, and therefore they didn’t count.

There is one place where it counts, and that’s life insurance.

It’s often common for the policy amount to be as high for a SAH spouse taking care of the children as it is for the breadwinner.

The rationale is that you need as much money to pay for the child care, housework, cooking, etc, that the SAH spouse provided for free.

Why not just cut prosecutions by 90%? Even a one in ten chance of being prosecuted would be a deterrent, and you still get 90% savings.

Interestingly, there is no such drop in spousal murder rates when we look at male against female homicide.

This statement is flatly wrong.  The total number of wives murdered by their husbands has only gone down ~30% since 1970, but the population has gone up ~50%.  The spousal homicide rate by men is about half of what it was 40 years ago.  (And the spousal homicide rate by wives is less than a quarter of what it was, yes).

None of that is really surprising, violent crimes across the board have been dropping since the 70s.

http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/homicide/intimates.cfm

What’s with the fucking pile-on to a couple people pointing out that a specific type of anti-domestic violence law ‘must arrest someone’ works out badly because it forces the system to prosecute someone whether or not both did or did not deserve it?

Inventing what someone else said is not helpful.

Anyone else listening to NPR right now? Amanda, this commentary is absurd. Once in a while it’s ok to put down the five foot thick gender lens.

This statement is flatly wrong.  The total number of wives murdered by their husbands has only gone down ~30% since 1970, but the population has gone up ~50%.

According to your link, they’ve dropped 26% between 1976 and 2005, or a total of 406 fewer murders in that thirty year span.  On the other hand, the rate of women killing their male partners has dropped from 1,304 in 1976 to 329 in 2005.  That’s a 75% decrease in the same time period.  That difference in percentage is extremely significant, and the larger point still stands.  If women have the option of leaving, they don’t kill, and women are killing for different reasons than men are.

The stat I was recalling had further broken the victims down by race, and I believe it was the rate of white women who are killed by their male partners that hasn’t budged that much.  But now I can’t find the page again.

http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/homicide/tables/intimatestab.cfm

It turns out this was all just a big game of chicken.

If they drink more, they’ll have more fun, and so will us guys. And then when she wakes up in the morning she’ll be able to do what she always does: blame the man.”

Holy shit, I think I just threw up in my mouth.

I thought that a big part of their rationale was that these are already crimes that the county can prosecute, so they can relieve the burden on the city courts by transferring the crimes (and costs of dealing with them) to the county system.  The county isn’t interested in picking up the work, but the people at the City making the decision felt that the county would HAVE to step in.  With that background in mind, I could see that the decision has a certain rationality.  Now, perhaps we would feel better about the whole thing if they did the same thing with other offenses that are crimes under both systems.  Let’s see if they do that.  And if there weren’t already empirical evidence that the county is not prosecuting.  Perhaps it will take a dead women (yes, I know it would be her own fault for staying with the abuser after the police released him, again) to get the priorities changed.  Or a dead white woman.

If they drink more, they’ll have more fun, and so will us guys. And then when she wakes up in the morning she’ll be able to do what she always does: blame the man.

Wait, blame the man for what? Being terrible in bed? Being heinously ugly enough to require beer goggles to look at? Does this guy realize not everyone is doing much blaming the morning after?

It turns out this was all just a big game of chicken.

Yep, once again it’s worthless women who are pawns in a game for the important people who matter.  We’re always the bargaining chip or the game piece.

What’s with the fucking pile-on to a couple people pointing out that a specific type of anti-domestic violence law ‘must arrest someone’ works out badly because it forces the system to prosecute someone whether or not both did or did not deserve it?

Because this thing that people are “pointing out” is bullshit. A person earlier in the thread claimed that there was a law that police had to arrest “the man.” Of course, this is ludicrous. Even the less ridiculous version that “must arrest” literally means that police have to arrest a person on every domestic violence call is wrong. People with directly relevant experience (did you skip the post where the prosecutor said how it actually works in reality?) have explained that this is not, in fact, accurate. Even in “must-arrest” jurisdictions, police go through many criteria to determine if someone should be arrested and who.

You have now added your extra imaginary twist, which is that “it forces the system to prosecute someone.” In the U.S., prosecutors have discretion—they don’t have to prosecute every alleged crime that police bring to them. Typically, a charging prosecutor will read through the police reports and decide whether the reports indicate probable cause of a crime. Prosecutors are required to have probable cause before bringing any charges, and if they don’t have probable cause, a judge will toss the case out of court. So no, the system is never *forced* to prosecute even if prosecutors think the person doesn’t deserve it.

I have also prosecuted domestic violence, and taken classes on domestic violence policy where we discussed actual “must arrest” statutes and the real debate about whether they are effective. But please, continue to believe the person who read something on some random MRA website instead.

Yes, I heard the NPR piece.  The prosecutor was saying this had never been their responsibility, and it was dropped on them after their budget process was complete, and they’d already had massive budget cuts, and were running out of places to cut.  All makes sense.  But I really wished the reporter had asked if they were going to stop prosecuting other offenses - say, small amounts of drug possession.  She didn’t go there.
Unfortunately, I live in Kansas.  Our psycho-governor, Sam Brownback, is trying to figure out how to cut taxes even more.  The schools still have some, if not enough money.  More corporate tax cuts!  And he wants to flatten the income tax so the rich pay less and the poor pay more.  Not enough to prosecute domestic violence or fund the schools, but native sons the Koch brothers get all they want.

And I really wish everybody wouldn’t see internet marriages as all black and white.  Sure many are MRA’s who want to find a docile foreign gal, but some are just lonely people finding each other.  My brother-in-law married a Phillippina he met over the internet - she was working as a domestic in Hong Kong at the time.  His mother was really worried that she was just using him to get a green card, and we wondered why he couldn’t find an American.  We could see that her decision was pretty easy - marry him, a good-looking, nice guy with a comfortable life,  or stay in Hong Kong scrubbing floors and getting screamed at in Chinese.  But it turns out she’s a wonderful, strong, brave woman.  He loves her, she loves him, and both their lives are better than they were before. She’s very gregarious, and met another Filippena in the airport, plugged into the local Phillipino community, and was getting more phone calls than he was by the time she’d been here a month.  She’s a treasured member of our family
It’s terrible that women are so desperate that take huge chances to get out of their situations.  But not all the guys who marry them are exploitive jerks.

Safron, you didn’t quote, nor did I find, anything to back up the assertion that someone said there was a law ‘to arrest the man’.

Do that first, please?  Actual quote.

Comment #46, Crissa.

There are jurisdictions in which cops are legally required to automatically arrest the man if they’re called for a domestic dispute.  Even if he’s the one who called them because his wife is assaulting him.

You’re welcome.

Hey Gretchen, if your brother in law didn’t purchase a mail order bride then we’re not talking about him.

In my circle of acquaintance, the “mail order bride” is the last option for the nerd who forgot to get married and have kids. If you look for someone age appropriate at 45, your chances of having a chip off the old block are slim. These guys are not shucking the mother of their children to go for someone half their age. They’re searching for A wife, not a trophy wife.

But there are a fair number of Asian women willing to consider marrying a nerd ten or fifteen years older. And from what I’ve seen, Asian women can adapt to the nerd’s personality, and they seem reasonably content.

The one mistake the nerd might make is if he expects his future wife to match a stereotype, and be docile and submit to his will. The Chinese, Vietnamese, and Filipina wives I know seem very much in control of family life. A friend who married a Filipina found himself providing a home not only her mother, but her sister and her sister’s children as well. He just smiles and plays along. He would invite us to their parties, so he would have some one there speaking a language other than Tagalog. Although he eventually did achieve conversational fluency in Tagalog.

Ex-Soviet wives are rarer, although the neighbor’s kid—a nerd with who lifted weights and rode a Harley—did marry one he met when he turned 40. But she was a divorcee who already had a green card. And I have met a couple of old geezers with ex-Soviet wives half their age. I wasn’t around long enough to find out how things turned out, but they all seemed reasonably happy. The guys prided themselves on being active though. They were in good shape.

I just read Den Hollander’s court pleading. You would think that a former litigation associate at Cravath, Swaine and Moore would do enough due diligence before marriage that he would find out his bride-to-be had spent the previous year as a hooker.

But what he wants is the same as what most employers of illegal immigrants do: if the immigrant makes trouble for the master by asserting her rights, she should be immediately deported.

Hey Gretchen, if your brother in law didn’t purchase a mail order bride then we’re not talking about him.

Neither did Roy Den Hollander.  He lived in Russia for 10 years and married a woman he met there.

**Please don’t construe this as an endorsement of Roy Den Hollander’s ideology**

Iam138, you have that backwards.  The laws were on the books for both county and city.  The county covered all of them beginning in about 2000.  The county just started not covering them recently, dumping them back on to Topeka (and the other cities/towns) and leaving those in unincorporated areas or the county wholy abandoned/unprotected after more than a decade with no warning.  Shawnee Co, not Topeka, is the government entity that suddenly changed the rules without warning regarding who paid for what. 
Both are in the wrong, IMO.

Roy Den Hollander is too much of a douche to feel the least bit sorry for.

In my circle of acquaintance, the “mail order bride” is the last option for the nerd who forgot to get married and have kids.

Yes, because men are absolutely entitled to have a wife and kids, so if they are too pathetic to get one the normal way, they should just buy one.

But those women who forget to get married and have kids?  Yeah, they’re not entitled to anything except a bunch of condescending magazine articles scolding them for not hooking a man sooner.

  Hector at 109: I’m 31 and I really never had a girlfriend in my life. My prospects in that department do not look that good either. If faced with the choice of dying single and virgin and resorting to either a mail order bride or resorting to prostitution, I’d choose to deny single and virgin. There is no reason to inflict misery on others to satisfy my own desires even if it means misery for myself.

so if they are too pathetic to get one the normal way

What is the normal way? Craigslist? All the Indian dudes I worked with had wives picked out by their parents. That was normal for them. Their marriages seem just as happy as anyone else’s.

A local guy’s first marriage to woman he met in college ended after three years. But the one with the woman he met via a classified ad (pre-Internet) is still going strong 25 years later. Does “normal” mean “likely to end in divorce”?

If faced with the choice of dying single and virgin and resorting to either a mail order bride… inflict misery

“Inflict misery”? If you think you would not be even an average spouse, I would seek counseling.

Sexism and violence hurts everybody, no matter who the recipient is.
Comment #51: mythbri on 10/12 at 12:27 PM

I actually have to disagree here.  Violent sexist brutes benefit from being violent sexist brutes.

Sure, you could say on down the line they are miserable sad old men, but the immediate calculus favors them if there’s no one to defend their victims.  They wouldn’t do it otherwise.

So not the point, Hector. The point is your underlying assumption that those poor, unattractive, socially inept men are entitled to “buy” a wife. The fact that such men of your acquaintance don’t abuse their wives — at least, not that you know of — is beside the point as well. Why do we have a society in which it’s considered okay for unattractive, socially inept men to “buy” a wife, but unattractive, socially inept women are told to “fix themselves” or deal with being alone? Hint: Ev-psy nonsense is the wrong answer.

Also, your generalizing about what Asian women can “adapt” to is more than a little gross. Asian women comprise a vast swath of humanity and cultures, with of course individual personalities.

Thank you, Helen, for that clarification.  I knew there was some multi-jurisdictional hanky-panky going on.

In my circle of acquaintance, the “mail order bride” is the last option for the nerd who forgot to get married and have kids.

Forgot? When did finding someone and getting married become a to-do item on a checklist?  “Let’s see, I have to wash the dishes, drop the car off to get repaired, get married to some foreign gal, get milk at the store…”

What is with this obsession our culture has of getting married being something you need to do?  Why can’t it just be something you WANT to do?

Well, crap, never even occurred to me that “niggling” might be interpreted as a derivation of That Word.  Even though I’m the kind of liberal-guilt dork who literally inserts “n-word” when I’m singing along to Cypress Hill (same syllable count, though the rhyme scheme is off).  Have only ever once let the actual word pass my lips, even in denunciation, and that was after a couple minutes of trying to explain, you know, they said THAT WORD.  Huh?  You know, THAT WORD, finally gave up and was like, c’mon, you know, “n-word” and I said it for the first time in my life.  (Don’t think I even had to say/type the actual word during college discussion of Huck Finn.  But you know, there was some poem we had to reconstruct in late HS english class that mentioned “what they did to Tom Sawyer” and when the teacher asked what that meant, I was like, duh, Tom Sawyer has been turned into a children’s story with no deep meaning, while Huck Finn became college-level lit, with major levels.

On the “lame” front, I guess my distinction is that I have never once in my entire (late 30s) years heard it to refer to a person that’s physically disabled.  Not even Flintstones theme songs.  It’s always meant “pathetic” and usually in reference to an activity, and only super-rarely an animal.  (Lame horse, ok, I’ve read that in old lit, lame duck - ok, technically that refers to a person, but in a very specific context of someone who should have power, but doesn’t, due to timing of power change).  But, I have no real attachment to lame, while it does’t hit my ear as offensive the way the R-word does, I don’t use it myself, I use “pathetic”  Well, with the exception of “lame duck” - if there were any other phrase commonly understood to refer to the same thing, I have no problem switching.  Guess I draw the line at either mammals (since lame horse now bugs me) or non-completely idiomatic metaphors for which there is no equivalent.

What is with this obsession our culture has of getting married being something you need to do?  Why can’t it just be something you WANT to do?

Because to your average woman-hating unmarriageable asshole with no looks and no personality, dying single is worse than marrying a woman you’ll resent and make fun of in front of your friends for the rest of your life. You get a maid, a punching bag, and a shred of evidence that you don’t suck so badly that every single person on earth would literally rather commit suicide than spend time around you.