Marriage strike

A ‘marriage strike’ is the social phenomenon of men seeking to avoid marriage. The ‘marriage strike’ specifically refers to the action of men living within the Western world. Advocates of the marriage strike believe that after a considered cost-benefit analysis, the legal contract that is modern marriage no longer represents an attractive option for men living in the West’s changed legal, economic, sociological, cultural and demographic environment.
Introduction

Advocates of the marriage strike hold that through the combination of laws permitting no-fault divorce and prevailing conditions in divorce courts that are substantially more likely to favor the wife over the husband in disputes over child custody, visitation rights, ownership of the family residence and other shared property, child support, and alimony. It is possible for a woman to divorce her husband unilaterally while simultaneously depriving him of the right to see his offspring and financially crippling him. They argue that since the divorce rate is high, and since women are more likely than men to seek no-fault divorce, scenarios like the above are a likely outcome of marriage, and that many men, fearing such an outcome, choose not to marry. There have been numerous studies showing that a range of 60 to 93 percent of no-fault divorces in the United States were initiated by women, usually against a man who works a blue-collar job, for grounds cited as “emotional unfulfillment.”
Legal Causations of Emerging Western Marriage Strike
Divorce Penalty

Marriage, while being publicly understood as a union between man and woman, is also a legal contract. On divorce, the court deems that a legal contract is considered broken, and legal consequences come into effect. There is a dissolution of the previously shared financial assets of the married couple. Assets are divided for distribution to both parties by a court ruling. Typically, a woman will receive 50% ownership of the couple’s assets on initiation of divorce. These assets include property, housing, vehicles, savings, and investments.
No-fault divorce

No-fault divorce is divorce in which the dissolution of a marriage does not require fault of either party to be shown, or, indeed, any evidentiary proceedings at all. It occurs on petition to the court, typically a family court by either party, without the requirement that the petitioner show fault on the part of the other party. Either party may request, and receive, the dissolution of the marriage, despite the objections of the other party.
Divorce and Children

In the Western world, family law is structurally more likely to award child custody to a child’s mother in the case of divorce . This legal situation results in fathers often having very limited access to their children after divorce. In an attempt to balance the rights and needs of the mother, father, and children, courts may award a couple joint custody of their children after divorce.
Male Alternatives to Marriage
Cohabitation Without Marriage

Proponents of the marriage strike advise that men should simply cohabit (live with a girlfriend), and not actually marry. Living with a girlfriend presents a legally safer alternative, with marriage’s benefits to men, with a reduction in the penalties found within marriage.

De-facto Law:

However, it should be noted that family law can also be applied in some Western nations (eg, Australia) and other nations (eg Brazil) to de-facto relationships such as these. After a certain length of time, the breakup of a non-marriage, live-in relationship can legally result in a man losing his assets to his ‘de-facto wife’, as considered by the law.
Pre-nuptial Agreement

A prenuptial agreement, commonly abbreviated to ‘prenup’, is a contract entered into by two people prior to marriage. The content of a prenuptial agreement can vary widely, but commonly includes provisions for the division of property should the couple divorce and any rights to spousal support during or after the dissolution of marriage.

Prenuptial agreements are not always fully recognized by law in case of divorce. Prenuptial agreements are, at best, a partial solution to obviating some of the risks of marital property disputes in times of divorce. They are not the final word.
Foreign Women

Full article: Mail-order bride

Another form of the marriage strike is to single out only American women, or women from any English-speaking country (such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand) for shunning. English-speaking women are characterized as rude, aloof, selfish and brainwashed by feminism. Instead, such marriage strikers encourage men to marry women from other, usually developing, countries. Most often mentioned countries are Latin American, Eastern European, or Asian countries, such as the Philippines, Thailand, Japan, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Russia, Ukraine and Poland. They state that such women are more likely to appreciate marriage than American women and are much less likely to divorce. Some even go so far as to urge the men to move to the other country and live there rather than bring the foreign wife back to the United States, in case she gets “infected” by feminist ideas; citing horror stories of foreign women using the man for a green card and ripping him off.

In 2005, the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act was attached to the Violence Against Women Act and was passed. The passage of IMBRA includes placing restrictions on visas given to women who meet an American man through an online dating service. Many marriage strikers have assailed the law as a spiteful attempt to protect American women from foreign competition, as a sort of “love tariff”. In fact, despite the term “mail-order bride”, most marriages between American men and foreign women do not use “mail-order bride” services. However, IMBRA can come into effect from any online correspondence, not just through a dating service.
See also

* Alimony
* Bachelor
* Child support
* Families Need Fathers
* Family law
* Fathers’ rights
* Involuntary celibacy
* Masculism
* Misandry
* Palimony

Research

* US National Center for Health Statistics: Divorce rate in 2003 was 50% of the marriage rate
* 15% of men are awarded custody, unchanged since 1994 (see p. 1).
* As a matter of routine in family court, fathers are awarded four days a month visitation to see their children.
* Annual support payments increase 18% to $40 billion paid by 7.8 million separated parents, 6.6 million are fathers
* Up to $4.1 billion available to states that create support and arrearage orders, and then collect (see 6B, 6C, & 6D).
* Divorced/separated men commit suicide 400% more than women (see # 5, 15).

Further reading

* Dump Your Wife NOW! Blog – A blog united with the men’s movement. Thought provoking original articles on men’s liberation, masculism, as well as articles taking aim at radical feminism and the marriage strike.
* No Marriage – A case study against marriage to an American woman
* Why Men Won’t Commit: Exploring Young Men’s Attitudes About Sex, Dating and Marriage by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead PhD and David Popenoe PhD
* The Marriage No-Shows by Carey Roberts
* Have Anti-Father Family Court Policies Led to a Men’s Marriage Strike? By Glenn Sacks and Dianna Thompson
* Women Lose When Feminists Bash by Carey Roberts
* The Marriage Strike by Wendy McElroy
* Lysistrata Complete text of the play Lysistrata by Aristophanes
* Eternal Bachelor blog – The thoughts and musings of a man who has cheated a woman out of a divorce settlement.
* Stay Single, Young Man! – by Vox Day.
* Don’t Make Her Mad – Thwart the false pretext of a divorce (domestic violence/fear thereof) via surveillance of the false allegation.

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This article is based on “Marriage strike” from the free encyclopedia Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation Licencse. In the Wikipedia you can find a list of the authors by visiting the following address: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Marriage+strike&action=history