Author: Advisor to Men

Father Custody Rights

The Marriage Contract Solution: A Father’s Case for Cultural Renewal
(A reflection on Stephen Baskerville’s argument for restoring marriage through father custody)

There’s a conversation we’re not having in the west, one that makes even the strongest men uncomfortable. Professor Stephen Baskerville of Warsaw University in Poland believes he’s found the key to unlocking not just the family crisis, but the west’s broader decline.

His solution is both simple and radical: make marriage legally binding again, with a presumption of father custody in divorce.

The Heart of the Matter:

Baskerville argues that our current “no-fault” divorce system has created what he calls a fraudulent contract. Imagine signing any other agreement where the other party could walk away at will, take half your assets, and remove your children from your life. You’d never sign such a document. Yet that’s exactly what marriage has become.

His proposal isn’t about fathers being superior parents—it’s about keeping families intact. When mothers know they can’t simply leave with the children, they’re far less likely to initiate divorce. When fathers know their parental rights are secure, they’re more likely to invest deeply in marriage and family life. Because that’s how it works.

The Ripple Effects:

What strikes me most about Baskerville’s argument is how he traces seemingly unrelated social problems back to this single source. Consider these connections:

Young men today lack motivation because they see no secure future in family life. Why work, save, and improve yourself when any family you build can be dismantled at will? Father custody would restore that fundamental incentive structure.

The welfare system becomes largely unnecessary when families stay together. Single motherhood, with all its associated poverty and social problems, becomes the exception rather than the rule.

Crime and social decay in our cities trace back overwhelmingly to fatherless homes. Restore the father’s role, and you restore order to communities.

The Deeper Philosophy:

There’s something profound here about authority and responsibility. Our current system has created what Baskerville calls “emasculation”—not in a crude sense, but in the deeper meaning of removing men’s authority as leaders of their children and families.

When a man cannot be certain his investment in family will be protected, when his role as father exists only at the discretion of others, we’ve fundamentally undermined the natural order that built Western civilization. Given human evolutionary history shows and still shows human children are best raised by a mother and a father and a series of helpers (alloparents) — see Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at University of California Davis and her book, Mother Nature — subverting father’s role is nothing less than unnatural.

This isn’t about domination—it’s about responsibility. A man who knows his family depends on him will rise to meet that responsibility. Again, because that’s how it works.

The Political Reality:

Baskerville suggests that even strong leaders like Trump avoid this issue because it requires confronting forces that have made careers out of the current system. The family court industrial complex, the welfare bureaucracy, the entire apparatus built around broken families—they all have vested interests in maintaining the status quo.

But here’s what I find especially compelling: this solution requires no new government programs, no massive spending, no complex bureaucracy. It simply requires restoring one principle: that marriage means something legally binding.

The Strategic Insight: Feminism’s Achilles’ Heel:

Baskerville makes a crucial observation that goes deeper than policy reform. Drawing on the work of scholar Daniel Amneus and activist Phyllis Schlafly, he argues that feminism’s entire power structure rests on one foundation: mother custody after divorce.

“The linchpin in the feminist program is mother custody following divorce,” he writes. “Pull that pin…and the feminist structure collapses.

This isn’t just about family law—it’s about understanding the source of feminist power itself.

According to Amneus, feminism’s central impulse is “the demand for unlimited sexual freedom and female-dominated reproduction.” As he put it: “A woman’s right to have a baby without having the father around is what feminism is all about.”

The historical progression reveals the strategy: after securing the vote, feminists’ first major achievement was the welfare state, followed by no-fault divorce. Both innovations served the same goal—transferring authority over children from married fathers to single mothers.

The National Association of Women Lawyers (USA) proudly called no-fault divorce “the greatest project NAWL has ever undertaken.” Are you kidding me?

This creates what Baskerville, and others call a climate of fear that extends far beyond individual families. When women can divorce at will, take the children and assets, and consign men to “state-enforced servitude,” it doesn’t just affect divorced men—it makes all men fearful of marriage itself.

Government officials learned from this matriarchal model how to create other bureaucratic tyrannies, understanding that “ordinary men heading families pose the principal impediment to their power.”

The Marriage Strike as Leverage:

Here’s where the whole argument becomes particularly interesting. We see that conventional political methods—lobbying, protesting, organizing—won’t work for men seeking to restore family stability. But men already possess a powerful form of leverage: they’re increasingly refusing to marry, date, or start families. No one is born aspiring to become an Incel.

Rather than seeing this “marriage strike” as merely a symptom of social decay, Baskerville views it as potential ammunition. Men are already voting with their feet. The question is whether this spontaneous boycott can be directed toward specific legal reforms.

Think about the logic: if women derive power from their ability to control access to children and sexual relationships, then men’s withdrawal from those relationships removes that source of power. It is economic pressure applied to the most fundamental human institutions.

The Path Forward:

The beauty of the father custody solution its clarity. Instead of getting lost in a dozen different battles, we are better to focus on this single, achievable goal: Make marriage contracts enforceable with father custody as the default. Watch as the incentives align to strengthen rather than destroy families.
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The claim is that this one change would accomplish more than any collection of smaller reforms. Why? Because it strikes at what he sees as the root of the problem rather than its symptoms.

Would there be challenges? Certainly. Would some bad fathers gain custody they shouldn’t have? Possibly. But Baskerville argues—and I find myself agreeing—that these costs pale beside the wholesale destruction of family life we’ve accepted as normal.

Look, she is the burdened female creator of life. He is the expendable male powerful defender of life. Together, with plenty overlap, they are Team Human.

As creator, one side has more chaos, while the other defends with order.  The culture has become so feminized and chaotic that it now requires drastic masculine order to restore balance. Enforceable marital contracts with default father custody honours children with two parents while also respecting our evolutionary history. It’s what brought us this far.

A Personal Reflection:

Reading Baskerville’s argument, I’m struck by how it connects to something deeper than policy—it touches on what it means to be a man in modern North America, Australia, Europe, and likely the West in general. We’ve created a society where a man’s most important role, as father and protector of his family, exists only at the pleasure of others. This is fucked up.

I remember arguing with my first wife about her egregious behaviour as she planned yet another overnight trip out of town to see her gal pal. I protested and she whirled about to face me on the front steps of our home. “If you don’t like it we’ll divorce and I will make sure you never see your son again!,” she said… with such vehemence I believed her. She knew I’d never leave him.

And every time I nudged her closer to marital counselling she’d provoke a fight and refuse to go. The custody issue meant she held all the cards and could pursue her dysfunction at will.

No fool, in his late teens the boy asked me why I hadn’t divorced her already. He saw, he knew. I finally left when he was 20 or so.

Perhaps that’s why this conversation makes us uncomfortable. It forces us to confront not just failed policies, but failed assumptions about human nature, family, and the proper ordering and sustainability of society.

The question isn’t whether Baskerville is completely right about every detail. The question is whether we have the courage to admit that our current approach has failed spectacularly, and whether we’re willing to try something that might actually work.

Males are taught to be men by generations of men around them — most important of which is the father. An externality of the capitalist system — that began in the Victorian era as men left home to go to work — is that this critical contact has been lost. Now, most men grow up confused, left longing for maternal acceptance learned from being over-mothered. It’s all they know.

Though the danger of nuclear war looms large on any given day, it is not global warming or communism or authoritarianism that is the biggest threat. The biggest problem is weak men. The world desperately needs powerful rank and file prosocial defender males running families… lest we continue to be led by Dark Tetradians and their hybristophillic followers.

We ought to build our cultures with the underlying premise that children have the right to both a mother and a father. We need Team Human in balance. Honour the marriage contract and you restore the foundation upon which healthy society rests.

Let yourself imagine how that might be…

Questions? Comments?

True and free…
cw

©2025 ATM NEWS
Christopher K Wallace
|Advisor to Men ™

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The Case for Father Custody Reform: Legal Talking Points

  1. The Marriage Contract Has Been Legally Nullified Marriage is now the only civil contract in which one party can walk away unilaterally, seize half the assets, and take custody of the children—with the full enforcement of the state. No other contract permits this level of one-sided breach with legal reward. That is not a contract—it is entrapment.
  2. Parens Patriae Is Overreach Masquerading as Protection The doctrine of parens patriae gives the state ultimate authority over children, not parents. It’s sold as protection, but functionally it means the state—not the family—decides what’s best. This inverts natural law and erodes the integrity of parenthood.
  3. Custody Law Ignores the Child’s Right to a Father Family courts systematically violate a child’s birthright to be raised by both parents. They treat the father as optional, conditional, and replaceable—often using vague or unproven standards like “best interest” to mask biased rulings.
  4. The Primary Custody Standard Is Institutionalized Sex Discrimination Awarding custody to mothers by default is sex-based discrimination. Imagine any other legal context where such a presumption is tolerated. This practice violates constitutional protections and equality under the law.
  5. Family Courts Operate Without Due Process Family courts routinely remove children, homes, and finances from fathers without trial, evidence, or jury. Allegations alone—without proof—are enough to restrict paternal rights. No due process. No justice.
  6. No-Fault Divorce Plus Maternal Custody = State-Sanctioned Family Sabotage Unilateral no-fault divorce, combined with custody laws that reward the initiator, encourages family breakdown. The result is state-supported family sabotage that incentivizes abandonment and punishes stability.
  7. The State Has Incentivized Divorce Through Financial Engineering Welfare programs, federal funding formulas, and legal aid structures reward father removal and subsidize single motherhood. The state profits—literally—when fathers are ousted.
  8. Presumption of Father Custody Rebalances Risk and Restores Order A legal presumption of father custody (especially when the mother initiates divorce without cause) would restore marriage as a serious contract. Men will once again invest when protected from institutional betrayal.
  9. Judicial Discretion Is a Veil for Ideological Enforcement Family law judges are not neutral. Their wide discretion enables ideological bias—often rooted in feminist legal theory or outdated maternal preference models. This discretion must be curbed.
  10. Reform Isn’t About Power—It’s About Responsibility This is not a campaign to dominate women. It is a campaign to restore accountable fatherhood as the central pillar of a stable society. Male authority and responsibility rise together. Let the law reflect that truth.

Advisor to Men™ | Cultural Renewal Through Legal Truth www.advisortomen.com

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WOKEMARE


WOKE-MARE
Much has been done over my lifetime to confront racial inequalities, advance women’s rights, and foster gay and lesbian tolerance. Some argue these things were long overdue.

However, the pendulum of change has swung so far to the other side that western cultures now embrace feminine traits wholesale in the absence of a counter balancing masculine.

We appear to be facing an egalitarian comeuppance: a steady movement over decades towards the feminization of society, with an intolerance we sought to avoid; free speech is now in trouble.

The “woke” movement (a term originally used in reference to African American social and political issues), has been broadened to include exaggerated ideas about sexism, LGBTQ rights, racism, slavery reparations, colonial injustice, the globalist diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and white privilege. It uses power as its guiding principle and equality of outcome as its goal.

With the traditional nuclear family under attack by forces of social change in the west and elsewhere over the past several generations, Team Human has lost its footing.

As confused males failed to defend, the culture became fertile ground for chaos over order.

In describing its absurdity, professor Peter Kaufman of Birkbeck College, University of London, says woke is about “making sacred historically marginalized race, gender and sexual identity groups with equality and emotional safety as its pillars.”

The making sacred part is problematic. And since we are not all equal, so is the idea of equality.

Expecting emotional safety and fairness from mom is natural, whereas expecting it from society as an adult is irrational, irresponsible, and, ultimately, tragically immature.

Woke reaches back into history for examples of inequity, accidental or intentional, real or imagined, which are used to besmirch the character and reputation of anyone opposing the ideology.

Typical of male systemizing brains describing feminine forces, a 1990 example of this feminization emerged with Godwin’s law of Nazi analogies which asserts that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches.”

Remember, women tend to compete by maneuvering covertly using mean remarks, social exclusion, and by winning over your friends and allies (see Susan Pinker, Sexual Paradox).

Men tend to compete head on to determine expertise in a context, or status in a dominance hierarchy, which may include teasing or bullying each other, in part to test for mettle or courage.

I’ve long contended abuse of empathy is a woman’s birthright. Ask any man in a relationship and they will tell you that in an argument with their female partner she will often resort to low blows using personal information as a way to dismiss the entirety of his point of view.

Calling someone a misogynist, or a racist, or far right (or left), or homophobic, or Islamophobic, or narcissistic, or full of white privilege, or a Nazi, is too similar to ignore. The same can be said for the dismissive, “mansplaining” as a low blow kick in the nuts. You argue with a woman at your peril.

The woke trend is largely a manifestation of feminine negative emotion, be it found in women or in men. I include men in this because with male influences increasingly absent or missing from family life and because children experience family physically, many men have much of their mother’s nervous systems (which is what runs us— conscious awareness is an afterthought).

Saying we are over-mothered and under-fathered is an apt way to describe how we got here.

To be clear, feminine negative emotion is first a gift. This evolutionary adaptation allows its bearer to spot sickness in those around them and danger in the environment. Missus can spot fever in our kids a day before it shows up. My friends’ wives are the same. Undoubtedly, women see stuff that men often miss. That’s been my overwhelming experience. However, as the French say, “nous avons tous les défauts de nos qualités.” We all have the faults of our qualities.

The downside to all that negative emotion is the tendency to pathologize (and even catastrophize) widely… and sometimes indiscriminately.

And so, we see in the fem-centric early grade schools a tendency to diagnose kids with learning disabilities and dyslexia, and with ADHD and spectrum disorders at a higher than normal rate (see Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up by Abigail Shrier for more).

The confused masses dabble in queer theory despite its dishonest and unscientific flaws. I’m referring to its focus on the fluidity and subjectivity of sexual identity making the theory unfalsifiable, a requirement for valid science. Add to this its relativistic and unscientific “socially constructed” ideas versus clear biological reality to recognize it as bullshit to confuse you.

Similar irrational arguments apply to critical race theory and implicit bias testing. While mild awareness of personal prejudices serve society as a whole (people have preferences), seeing race as the central organizing feature of a group is an oversimplification which omits class, gender, and most critically, individual agency in the success or failure of an individual. The theory is divisive… and also unfalsifiable, making it equally invalid scientifically. It’s more bullshit to make people feel bad.

Colonialism is another oversimplification which ignores historical context. It neglects diverse perspectives and motivations as well as the norms and ethics of the time. It concentrates solely on exploitation and oppression while ignoring adaptation and resistance. It posits moral certainty and passes anachronistic judgments and fails to consider counterfactual benefits.

Flora and fauna have moved around the earth since the beginning exploiting available environmental niches to make life possible. Humans do the same… only we can defend borders. If you can’t or won’t defend your borders, you don’t have a country. That’s how it works.

Moreover, applying contemporary ethics to historical events is an act of “presentism” which any rookie historian will tell you is dishonest because it’s bound to lack nuance and leaves one open to ideological bias. The colonial decriers make many of you responsible for history: more bullshit.

White privilege is another unfalsifiable boondoggle which hits all the unscientific hallmarks. It’s ambiguous and too broad to be measurable, focusing as it does on group identity over the individual. At some point you may have read about the sacrosanct statistical rule, “correlation is not causation,” something ignored in this case. And there are plenty of losers who are white ffs.

It makes black success an anomaly.  That means if you are white your success was because you were white, if you are black and do well, you got lucky. More victimizing bullshit.

All of these forces, queer theory and gender as socially constructed, critical race theory and implicit biases, and white privilege and colonialism, are manifestations of a doom and gloom “heavens are falling,” feminine negative emotion. Confused men do it too.

This has implications around the ideas of climate change, overpopulation, and other supposed threats. It’s not that we don’t have real problems to solve, it’s that the gift spots sickness in those nearby and danger in the larger environment with a downside that, well, misery loves company…

How will we answer for our modern hysterias and social contagions in the years to come? What will we tell our grandchildren when they asked why it is we dropped the ball?

Let me give you some essential truths, something you as an individual can apply to your own approach to life forevermore (and even teach to your children and maybe your friends).

You own just three things, and you have but three things to offer. All of us, no exceptions.

You own your thoughts, feelings and behaviour. That’s it. Everything else is transiently impermanent. You have three things to offer the world: your time, your talent, and your effort. These are the great equalizers.

Your thoughts are all yours, thousands per day, mostly repetitive, some new, all based on concepts formed from your databank of prior experiences.

Your feelings, however fleeting, are also all yours and no one can make you feel anything.

You own what you do, good and bad, and these actions will largely define you.

And, you have but three things to offer this world. Just three.

You spend your time wisely or foolishly, ultimately under your prerogative and control.

You have measures of talent, to be sharpened as if taking stone to steel and honed into strengths.

You decide how much effort to expend at what, hopefully making a positive difference each day.

If you came to my house and asked my two children, “What is happiness,” both will answer immediately, “It’s a decision.” As humans mature, optimistically they come to realize that no one makes us happy, or sad, without our full permission.

To that end, men need to reclaim responsibility for their part in the culture. Team Human requires collaboration, problem solving, and responsibility. That’s the path to meaning.

You were chosen for life by heavens of infinite wisdom and safeguarded for a time under the promise of orderly good intentions coupled with the chaotic reality of perfectly imperfect parenting.

You need to realize that you were once the boy your caregivers made but, as an adult, you build a man from your own experiences.

An adult male in a male-female relationship must know to not take things personally. He accepts her negative emotion as the downside of her gifts and doesn’t allow it to move him off his mission.

In this way, he defends the both of them. Society requires the same masculine force for good.

This is how he moves past the egocentricity of a childish reliance on maternal acceptance and is no longer beholden to those maternal forces which at one time were the center of his universe.

This is how he operates beyond leveraged compliance under the demands of threat and reward parenting and the insinuated possibility of abandonment.

There are women in the culture who ably team up with men and form an effective yang force in counter to the challenges of the destructive yin force and its manifest woke’isms.

These blessed sisters stress tested the culture and having found it amiss, sounded alarms.

But they are few… and they cannot fix things without partnering with male culture builders.

It is men who must emerge from their confusing hypnosis and stand for Team Human.

Only men working together can ensure society awakens from this nightmare.

Questions? Comments? 

True and free…
cw

* from the upcoming book, Reverse The Flow, due out by 14Feb2025

 

CHRISTOPHER K WALLACE, BST, CH, CPIC Father, Husband, Counsellor, Mentor, and Advisor to Men ™
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