menstuff

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.
1-2…

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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Note: after watching, ask how you can apply these principles to other areas of life.
Even if a man does not have a relationship, a partner, children, etc. it STILL falls to him.
He defends meaning and freedom for all.
Nature’s system doesn’t work any other way…

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THE RESPECT & LOYALTY SHIELD

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true and free…
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WHY TAME SHAME?

WHY TAME YOUR SHAME…

Glover tells us the Nice Guy Syndrome is an anxiety and shame based syndrome sourced in abandonment fear.

As far as I am concerned, the most important understanding a man can learn is how his past is affecting his present. Oh I know, we believe we are running things, and perhaps that belief is necessary to our existence. But it’s not what’s going on.

It’s why every man should do the Taming Shame course. Now, grant you, some men will try it and abandon it because it doesn’t fit the narrative of what they are telling themselves. Why is that?

It’s because the Integrated Nervous System denies, distorts and represses inner and/or outer reality to lessen anxiety and depression. The Integrated Nervous System is also called Ego.

You have a set up that believes it is in charge, but really is not, because to understand the truth is too threatening.

That said, if you can get what I am telling you and adopt it into your life, you will find a radical responsibility take hold, as opposed to confusion, irresponsibility, and even despair.

This my good men, is where your freedom lies…

Let me repeat that you are run by your nervous system with conscious awareness along for the ride. What you feel today, you have felt before.

There is nothing new to the predictive brain which relies on past experiences to make context dependent predictions in the moment.

As you let that mouthful of a last sentence sink in, consider there is more…

Imagine how information from your surroundings is picked up by your senses and directed by the thalamus to various areas of the brain.

Realize too that the sense of smell has its own routes through two olfactory bulbs situated just above the nasal cavity under the forebrain. (More reason to groom yourself, especially if you are around women because her sense of smell is acute).

Practically speaking, there is a difference between walking down the street of a small town in the middle of the day and hustling along a sidewalk in South Chicago after dark. You know this

The environment acts on the body, be it from people, your location, from the wind, rain, sun, darkness of night or light of day, cold of winter, heat of summer, how you are dressed, etc..

These outside influences mix with your internal state.

By that I mean you might be cold or hot, tired from a sleepless night, or hungry because it’s near mealtime.

Maybe you are exhausted from working out or working at your job.

You could be suffering from seasonal allergies or a cold or flu.

Or perhaps you are thirsty and even, dehydrated.

These external and internal conditions combine to create two shades of something called affect: valence and arousal. Are you comfortable or uncomfortable, aroused or relaxed?

This affective body state gets sent upstairs by special electrical and chemical messengers to the brain stem with primary, secondary and tertiary effects.

We should mention affective reality: that’s when we give too much credence to our body state and fail to weigh alternatives. We can be fooled by this.

The body keeps the score someone said. How many times has my bad back decided my attitude and made my decisions?

In any given moment your brain is using concepts and beliefs from your databank of prior events to make a predictive guess to fit the context, and then corrects after the fact with social reality.

The same thing is happening to those around you.

Last week Missus was a little cuntish during our date. She’d had a couple of glasses of wine so I figured I’d be cool.

The next day, I knew she was feeling a little sheepish. I could surmise that her brain was alternating between justifying what she said… with doubt about her approach.

So I told her, “Honey, you know, when you get like that with me I don’t think it’s you that is showing up. You are not that mean. I think you sometimes treat me the way your mother treated you. But that is not the real you and I know it. Because you are an amazing gal and that’s the person I like to take on dates.”

She’s been walking with an extra spring in her step all week.

Her mother was and is damaged to the point most of us would describe her as evil. I can only imagine her upbringing given the way she brought up her own kids.

My Missus’ mother is not part of our lives. My children may never even meet her. That’s how it is for now.

As the powerful defender of life, one of my jobs is to recognize when grandma evil shows up, through Missus, and affects my children or is directed at me.

I never would have been able to do that kind of defending without first taming my own shame all those years ago. My own defensiveness would have kicked in and… mayhem.

I had a man recently message in the TS community that he bought the course last year and left it aside after starting it. Something made him take it up again and BOOM! he had a breakthrough.

Now he’s formed a relationship with his Younger Self and is well on his way to Integration.

I want that for everyone of you. 600 men have taken the course, don’t leave that stone unturned. Every man should take it.

Someone else wrote “Feelings are predictive, not reactive?”
and a day or two later sends “Chris, this is spot on for me. I’m working this program diligently…”

He even added to this today, “This reparenting program is really helping me. It sounded Oogabooga, but it’s working…”

Lastly, I can assure you as someone who has read a book per week minimum my whole life and studied behavioural sciences for almost 4 decades, there is no replacement for the work.

You simply must train your nervous system to act differently in the world and in the course of daily existence in order to live intentionally and fulfill your desires and promise.

Because that’s how it works.

Questions? Comments?

true and free…
CW

© Christopher K Wallace 16 July 2024

chris@advisortomen.com
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CERTAINTY vs UNCERTAINTY


CERTAINTY & UNCERTAINTY

AWE

The more we focus on our own emotions and thoughts, the more we tend to suffer from anxiety and depression. Rumination = Omphaloskepsis (navel gazing)

I have a whole course on anxiety which is probably too much for most people even though it contains everything you need to know about the subject.

(^ Don’t be like one of these muthas)

It is obvious that since the beginning of Homo Sapiens we developed under a prayerful spirituality which attempts to reconcile our situation on earth in relation to the heavens above.

To this point, let me tell you about the week before my mother died.

I was visiting with her in hospital. Cancer had spread from her bowel to her liver, and she had days to live. We spoke about many things including her lifelong devotion to the Catholic church.

She was one of those women who, after spending a couple of decades knitting mitts and sweaters for her nine children, continued to do the same for the less fortunate. She collected pop can tabs and engaged in whatever other initiatives her church undertook to help others. She was one of those gals who were trusted to count the offerings from the faithful after mass each week.

She served. Ten pregnancies in twelve years. With a brood like hers, what else could she be?

At one point during this last private conversation, as we reviewed her Christian life, and curious, I asked her if now, looking back, she still saw things the same way.

She was in pain but reached over and patted my arm with her left hand and said unreservedly, “Oh yes, Christopher, you’ve got to have a bit of faith.”

It was to be her last advice.

At the time, I remember searching my heart and mind for a way I could appease her with some kind of reassurance that I too would have faith. That her dying words would be meaningful enough to take with me as her gift and remain useful in her name long after she was gone.

I’d been an altar boy at our French Catholic church as a young boy (unmolested). In my thirties, I attended Anglican mass most Sundays and even converted to Anglicanism because they allowed women priests. Having four sisters instills that kind of loyalty to the sisterhood, I suppose.

I found I was not able to match her faith, so I promised I’d keep room in my life for mystery.

She seemed content with that, as if that would do.

I, in turn, have kept my word.

Because, you see, at the edges of mystery is where you find awe.

Awe is what you see in the magnificence of sunrises and sunsets, in the majesty of mountains and the expanses of oceans. It is what you feel experiencing the Aurora Borealis or a sky full of planets and distant stars while surveying the Milky Way far away from the lights of the city.

Awe and mystery allow for both gratitude and wonder, and more importantly, for possibility.

NUTS AND BOLTS
Let me repeat that you are run by your nervous system with conscious awareness along for the ride. What you feel today, you have felt before. There is nothing new to the predictive brain which relies on past experiences to make context dependent predictions in the moment.

As you let that mouthful of a last sentence sink in, consider there is more…

Imagine how information from your surroundings is picked up by your senses and directed by the thalamus to various areas of the brain.  Realize too that the sense of smell has its own routes through two olfactory bulbs situated just above the nasal cavity under the forebrain.

Practically speaking, there is a difference between walking down the street of a small town in the middle of the day and hustling along a sidewalk in South Chicago after dark.

The environment acts on the body, be it from people, your location, from the wind, rain, sun, darkness of night or light of day, cold of winter, heat of summer, how you are dressed, etc..

These outside influences mix with your internal state. By that I mean you might be cold or hot, tired from a sleepless night, or hungry because it’s near mealtime. Maybe you are exhausted from working out or working at your job. You could be suffering from seasonal allergies or a cold or flu.  Or perhaps you are thirsty and even, dehydrated.

These external and internal conditions combine to create two shades of something called affect: valence and arousal. Are you comfortable or uncomfortable, aroused or relaxed?

This affective body state gets sent upstairs by special electrical and chemical messengers to the brain stem with primary, secondary and tertiary effects.

We should mention affective reality: that’s when we give too much credence to our body state and fail to weigh alternatives. We can be fooled by this. The body keeps the score someone said. How many times has my bad back decided my attitude and made my decisions?

Primary signaling involves seven emotional mechanisms: seeking, lust, care, rage, fear, panic/grief and play. Of these seeking is used the most. It’s your “getting stuff” feeling. That’s you as pursuer looking for food, water, sleep, fun, safety, pussy, or just trying to get shit done. Seeking.

When something thwarts seeking, rage (anger) kicks in to punish or correct the interference.

Lust, fear, care, and play are obvious emotional mechanisms requiring no explanation.

Note though, in 1995, a meta-analysis of 60 years of attachment studies found that our whole emotional system was tied to belonging.  When we fulfill our need to belong, our emotions rise, when we disconnect, our emotions fall.

That’s why of the seven mechanisms, panic/grief is the strongest.  Anything that separates us from the herd gets our attention at an existential level. It’s why grieving over a deceased loved one can be devastating. It’s why breaking up is so hard to do.

It’s also how abandonment fear is installed in a child to leverage survival and sociability. In fact, no matter the parent’s sensitivity, some abandonment fear in a child is unavoidable.

These seven basic emotional mechanisms are further processed through the amygdala, basal ganglia, and the infra-limbic (emotional) centers to influence how well you interact with others. It is here that empathy, trust, blame, pride, guilt and shame occur.

At the top, or tertiary level of signaling, is the neo cortex. This is your conscious awareness and includes all the ways you label feelings, imagine things, daydream, and so forth.

Note the prefrontal cortex is where you carry the judgments and rules installed in you with language, primarily by parents and other caregivers. Freud called this your Super Ego. When you ruminate, that’s whose pattern of ancient judgments you are following.

Most of the 30-40 trillion cells of your body have a limited lifespan and are replaced forthwith by cloning themselves and dying off under the processes of apoptosis and autophagy.

The skin sloughs off monthly, the digestive track every couple of weeks. Your bones turn over every 7-10 years.  Not so the 86 billion neurons of the brain and the 500 million neurons of the body.

You may have lost some of these to illness, concussions, or drunken black outs (if you were like me), but overall, you have the same neurons you were born with (you added some over time as you aged and grew).  These hold your memories and feelings and create your thoughts.

From your experiences the body brain’s neurons are trained to form concepts and beliefs, like a set of rules used in the future to make predictions. Then you confirm or deny these suppositions or best-guesses according to the social reality before you.

Change only comes with awareness. Most people haven’t a clue of these things. It means you have less free will than you think and more that when aware you have a version of “free won’t.”

UNCERTAIN vs CERTAIN
So why am I telling you this? Because few men realize the extent to which past experiences are driving their present thoughts and feelings. This offers an opportunity for radical responsibility.

After all, you own just three things in this world: your thoughts, feelings and behaviour.

So you might ask “should I trust my gut more?” The answer is maybe, maybe not.

After all, the two hemispheres of the brain evolved so you can see and focus on what is in front of you while also keeping in mind the bigger picture of what is a little further outside your purview.

There are characteristic ways the left and right hemispheres of the brain operate. The left speaks in language and logic, analysis and judgment. The right understands language but speaks in feelings and flashes of insight.

The idea is to NOT just “trust your gut” infallibly. Neither is the idea to over-judge nor suffer a condition known as “paralysis by analysis” every time you face something new.

So, here’s a rule: If you know a lot about a subject, give more credence to your gut feelings because they are probably right. However, when you don’t know much about what you are considering, use your analytical brain and enlist feedback from others to make a judgment in the moment and be willing to course-correct if necessary.

Men Defend, Deliver and Decide. Knowing the above will help you make better decisions.

As an aside, I suspect what frustrates men about how women think is sourced in this dual hemispheric thinking, where many women trust their gut even when they know little of the subject. But when a women knows the subject well, it’s worth listening to her more carefully.

Many of our problems arise because we refuse to trust our guts when we should, or we trust our intuitive selves when a thorough analysis of a problem and potential solutions would be better. Use the rule to stack the odds in favour of good decision making.

Realize what a human says is not fully representative of who they are. Rather, most of what we say to each other is a trial balloon floated for feedback. Stay humble, it’s another best guess.

I say anxiety (like depression) is a temporary loss of faith in the future. That’s tough for humans because facing uncertainty means the unknown is staring back at us from the abyss. Oh no!

We need a few things, needs let’s call them, and certainty is one of them. It’s nice to know who will still be in your life tomorrow, where you are waking up, or how you will pay your bills next month.

Certainty is by no means certain and is constantly being fucked with by uncertainty.  The thing to keep in mind is that we also need uncertainty. Imagine if everything was predictable and everyone knew exactly how things were about to unfold. What a boring life that’d be.

It is uncertainty that forces us to consider new options and explore new territory, to come up with novel ideas and find new paths forward. Uncertainty is what happens every time a woman gets naked in front of you for the first time.  Uncertainty is both fear and excitement, depending.

Which brings me to my point about awe.

With a little practice, when you invite awe and allow for mystery in your life you begin to notice it everywhere: in the world at large, in the people around you, and even, in yourself.


My ma could use her faith to find answers to unanswerable questions. Me, not so much.

I prefer to see God as a metaphor for nature and leave room for mystery. This allows me to experience life on that edge between excitement and fear, and nurture states of awe.

Not a chance I’m perfect at it but it does allow me to make more room for the 3Ps: possibility, potential, and promise. At times, I even begin to see the interconnectivity of all things.

If you follow me, I’m suggestion a good balance between uncertainty and certainty is awe.

From there, anxiety has little chance of taking hold with any lasting effect.

Mystery brings possibility, potential, and the promise of awe. It’s curiousity on steroids.

In the end, what matter most is to remember that we are all staring at the same heavens.

Questions? Comments?

true and free…
cw

 

CHRISTOPHER K WALLACE, BST, CH, CPIC
Counsellor, Mentor, and Advisor to Men ™
chris@advisortomen.com
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OEDIPAL MALE

OEDIPAL MALE

You can look up the original story of Oedipus Rex, a play by Sophocles some 2400 years ago.

The short form is that a King is warned by an oracle that his son would slay him. When his wife has a baby boy, he tells her to leave the kid in the mountains to die. The boy is rescued by a sympathetic shepherd who gives him to a messenger who gives him to a different king.

Later as an adult, the boy consults an oracle himself and is told he is fated to kill his father and marry his mother. Pissed, he leaves and swears to never return home.

So, he fucks off towards the city of Thebes. On his way there, he ends up killing a man in a quarrel over who has the right of way out on the road. Road rage has a long history apparently.

When he gets to the city of Thebes, he finds at its entrance a Sphinx devouring humans who don’t answer a question correctly.

Our man solves the riddle posed by the Sphinx to get in. Thus defeated, the Sphinx departs. The locals are so impressed that our man is awarded the kingdom and its Queen.

Sure enough, he moves in with the Queen, who, it just so happens, had been recently widowed… after her King was killed while out on the road. Some time later, after our man is well settled in, a wizard reveals to them the truth of the oracle’s predictions.

With the gig up, the queen kills herself for breaking the incest taboo and banging her own son. Meanwhile, the son gouges out his eyes in disgrace for having witnessed his mother’s carnal love.

Some versions say he rules blind until his death while other another version mentions he’s sent packing. Either way, it’s creepy shit.  Fucking Greeks eh?

Freud seized upon this tragedy to speak of the Oedipal male: the boy in love with his mother and who secretly hates his father while seeing him as a rival for her love.

This my friends, lies at the core of male weakness all over the world. Man boys get stuck here.

My son was five when he overheard me call missus my woman at the supper table. “Dad,” he said, “Mommy is MY woman” he insisted. What ensued was the sweetest exchange between father and son, a push and pull that has gone on for two years (and is still ongoing).

Last year, I overheard him telling his mother he was going to marry her when he grew up. She told him she couldn’t but that he would always be her “Little Bear.” That’s her pet name for him.

Over the past two years he’s grown more accustomed to me. I’ve taught him a few things and let him hit the heavy bag in the garage. He accompanied me on walks after dark in the forest, testing the limits of his fear. He pushes the 5 lbs. dumbbells in my office. He tells me of how he will defeat all sorts of imaginary enemies. Now he sits with me on the couch sometimes. Recently, just to see, I asked him about whose woman mommy was, he told me, “How about we share her…” He is making progress.

And of course we do share her. Just as surely as he will slowly withdraw from the influence of his mother over the coming years and come more and more under mine. He will need this as the demands of life on a little boy add up and compound through adolescence to where he requires the powerful masculine to help him negotiate obstacles that are sure to be in his path.

This is the “cure” for the oedipal male: to move away from the feminine and towards the masculine. It is every male’s rite of passage, a necessity of male maturation. For now my son must bask in the glory of feeling fully loved by his mom. He must see her as his primary “angel of mercy” as she nurses him through his first ten years. He is delicate of heart, and my son’s medical conditions mean his mother is vigilant and near. He is secure in her love and attention and his confidence shows it. He’s fearless with people, will talk to anyone. And day by day he gains more masculine power from the safety of her support.

But eventually, her love and attention will suffocate him. His lifeforce will be that much stronger for having had her in his corner, as a foundation of security and tenderness he may call upon forever more. However, he will need to shed her chaos and move towards masculine order to find meaning and freedom.

At some point, the boy must leave the mother to become a man.

Absent this natural transition, and without this period of reveling in the embrace and security of her feminine love, the danger is that he will seek her out in others for many years.

Some men do this for life, and never get the message, never feeling satiated, carrying a mother wanting with them into every decade and into every failed or unsatisfying relationship. Every addict and pick up artist suffers from this effect. Many other men are needy and weak or tyrants and aloof. It’s the mother wound: a maelstrom of confusion and anxiety and expectations and fear…

And just as it is natural for my little boy to slowly move into the masculine, such is the cure for the adult Oedipal male. He must find men and learn to absorb the masculine while abandoning his over-reliance on the feminine. He must confront his weakness and find his power. He must reclaim his masculinity while getting out from under the spellbinding power of the feminine. Later he finds his own feminine aspect rather than look for his mother in others. The anima. He welcomes back his feminine side only after first finding his masculine.

He must reverse the flow. He grows to no longer expect love at all, but rather realizes he has an abundant reserve of masculine power and love within him to share with others. He must get out of his head and instead, open his heart. Not to receive, but to give.

He uses his power and love in service of himself and others to find meaning and freedom.

For he realizes that the only person in the world upon whom he may reliably count on with any confidence for unconditional love is himself.

Anything less and he remains a boy…

Stay powerful, never give up, This is the day…

©2021 CHRISTOPHER K WALLACE

Advisor to Men ™

 

REACH ME
Trained behavioural science counsellor for 35 years.
I do free calls for members and sometimes agree to work with a man: |https://go.oncehub.com/ChristopherWallace

MEN LEAD, WOMEN COMMAND

MEN LEAD, WOMEN COMMAND
(lead or be commanded)

A critical way to look at this idea of how to carry your relationship is that you live your life and you make room for her in it.

Not you live your life with her and make room in it for your life.

If you do that… stop it, stop it right now. Shift this imbalance immediately.

A man’s relationships should always come from his power as a man and not be his power. If not her, someone else.

Now, that doesn’t mean you’re ready to drop your love at the “drop of a hat.” It’s just that she needs a powerful man in her life.

With few exceptions, that holds true.

It’s not that you’re being a dipshit egotist, and it’s more that… this is what she needs. In fact, it’s what you need too.

She hitches her wagon to your horse cowboy, and it rarely works well the other way around.

Let her lead and you may find yourself off trail and into the snakes and cactus.

Why? Because wherever you go in the world, women are the caregivers. That takes a lot out of a self-interested brain.

So nature set things up so men would hold reserves of power and love for them both, and shore her up when she’s depleted.

He makes sure she doesn’t lose herself to the caregiving spirit present in almost every woman.

When you are weak, you know it… and you feel it… inside… all the way to your testicles.

Hear me here: To her, if you are needy, she has failed in her pact with the universe. She must face the reality that she has chosen wrong. This is a tragedy for her.

For most men will one day be fathers and it was left to her to find herself a powerful man to sire her brood and face life with a defender.

Sorry man, you don’t get to lean on her much: men are the expendable sex.

She is more precious because she carries the egg and the babe for a year. She may nurse for another half dozen years hence. She may do that several times. Ma did it 10 times in 12 years. Then cooked 33 meals a day until all the kids were out of the house decades later.

So, who should lead in that instance?

Who should “man the fucking wheel” brother?

If you are needy there’s a good chance you are looking for your mom in your relationships. The boy must leave the mother to become a man.

That’s the facts as I know them…

Chasing tail one after another? Addicted Lover shadow archetype… looking for mom.

Want to abstain from sex entirely for a religious reason? Saving yourself… for mom.

Are you still living at home at age thirty? You may be your mom’s subconscious husband.

One of the reasons men build cultures (women stress-test them) is because we are more social. We can easily have relationships with many different individuals from a variety of groups. We can travel among gatherings of people far more easily than can women. We are more superficial you could say.

Why? Because there is less risk to the tribe.

Why? Because we are less valuable.

Is that fair? It’s just the way it is, so… get over it.

Women seem to require one or two, to rarely as many as five,  much deeper female relationships—girlfriends, besties, sisters, gal pals, BFFs, etc.—whom she uses for emotional regulation. She guards these relationships jealously.

Why? Because they help her survive.

Without them, she is cast adrift emotionally. Men don’t tend to have this need… at all.


And, that men stay faithful to one woman is more in part a function of his adaptable nature (we can get used to anything). More importantly, his faithfulness is sustained by her loyalty and his sense of honour (defined as the esteem of those we care about).

That’s by far not a page from the narcissist’s playbook. No, not at all.

Superficial in his case is functional, not selfish. This is nature, neither ideology nor psychiatry.

It is also understanding that men need to have their own mission and purpose in life to even begin to be attractive. Remember her model for love is dad, probably the only one who could say no to mom. If it wasn’t dad, it was the principal of her school. If not them, the doctor, the repairman, the garbage collector. 

I also don’t think you can extrapolate down from entire cultures to individual families so easily (but we do it anyways). A family unit is almost always a man and woman banding together against life’s hardships to benefit from each other’s strengths and shore up each other’s weaknesses.

It is in this vein, while conceding and celebrating women can pretty much do anything a man can do and will step into leadership when it is absent, we notice they tend to have preferences. Enduring preferences… based on being feminine. Women caregive, men man the perimeter.

In the most egalitarian societies where equality of opportunity is most advanced, women have been found to choose professions like nursing, administration, teaching and care giving of some kind, etc., at an even higher rate than less equal countries… despite it all the “progress.” The Scandinavian Paradox they call it. Doesn’t surprise me.

Is this all just “conditioning?” Perhaps some, but nah…I don’t think patriarchy is responsible.For one thing, women do the choosing and we evolved through sexual selection. This means that men do the things they do because women have rewarded them over the eons with their fertility. So much for the patriarchy argument…

 

Run girls against boys in grade school and the girls will post best times. Run boys against boys and the boys will run best times. Run girls against girls and their times drop. No one wants to stand out. Tall poppy syndrome you’d call it Down Under.  The risk of social exclusion from the other girls is too great.

A woman can and will lead a family but will feel as if she is playing two roles.

Both masculine and feminine energies exist in us all. But if one is at her core feminine (98% of women), playing wearing the pants is emotionally and physically taxing.

It is this imbalance which often creates sexless marriages as the man fails to meet his own masculine destiny.

She might stay with him, but she might also see him as a weak, even failed at maturation, or worse, she may see him as a boy.

She may grow to accept this, depending on her upbringing, how many mouths he’s feeding, or perhaps even religious affiliations.

More so if he’s been diagnosed with an illness or psychological disorder… and has a good pension.


Every woman has some of the warrior archetype capacity like the one found in any man.
Archetypes are a kind of mankind’s memory.A person who unconsciously sacrifices for family may live in the masochist shadow (self-pitying). Whereas as one who does so consciously because it needs to be done is living his/her warrior in full. See the difference?And, in fact, when a woman buckles down and plays both roles in the family because of circumstances she lives as the Queen in her full by creating order.That doesn’t mean she’s happy. No, not by a long shot.

Absent these mitigating circumstances she might resent her predicament. She may rub salt in the wounds of his weakness to create some kind of motivating pain (and his reaction tells her he is vested in the relationship). She may (likely) develop contempt for her partner.

Sex is out at that point.

Women neither fuck boys nor their girlfriends.

Good women all try to get their men to be better. Once a man understands this, he can see her in a different light. He might see her pushing is part of her nature.

That’s one reason I often say a man with a loyal woman by his side has the wind at his back… but he’d better stay out in front of her to feel it move him.

Not say, “How high” whenever she says “jump” but rather, he’s ahead of her, leading and taking care of business.

If a man fails to see this and act accordingly, he can expect a sexless marriage.

Men lead; women command is from a song by Leonard Cohen. The monk-poet who gave us many songs, from Suzanne to Hallelujah. He was an introspective Canadian treasure.

Something I learned in the corporate world training with Gallup is that even in this era of supposedly unprecedented equality, most women prefer a male boss.

Go figure. Lead gentleman. It’s what we do best.


What part of leading don’t you get? If you don’t lead, she’ll command. Is that what you want?

There are few women leaders who can galvanize people the way men can. Indira Gandhi maybe—until she was whacked. Golda Meir maybe though I was young when she was around. Thatcher was a tough broad and I remember her having balls.

But you can see the tendency in the way women prefer a male boss. Why is that?

I suggest it’s because it meets the natural order of things, in that a woman’s archetype for power is the father, less so the mother.

In families, men tend to lead, women tend to bark. Until dad puts his foot down and takes control if he’s not being listened to.

One of the jobs for men in a relationship is to rescue an overthinking woman from her insanity.

If you fail to man the fuck up and do this, you could wind up in a Will Smith conundrum…

Also, if a man is barking he is living the tyrant or expressing the frustrated feminine. He’s perverting his anima.

Only men can establish that love shall prevail in a home. It falls to you.

Every generality breaks down in the face of exceptions and no one “rule” applies to all.

Yet, these preferences among men and women seem to hold up well.

Besides, an exception doesn’t disprove the rule.

Lead muthas… or be commanded.

Questions? Comments?

Power & Love.
True and Free!
cw

©CHRIS WALLACE, 2020, all rights reserved advisortomen.com

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