[Note added 8.6.14: This has just been published as an article by A Voice for Men, the most-visited and most influential men’s human rights advocacy website in the world.]
Welcome to a website set up in 2014 by Mike Buchanan, the leader of the British political party Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them) – J4MB. In May 2020 he handed over the party leadership to Elizabeth Hobson, 31, the party’s Director of Communications for the preceding two years. In March 2021 Elizabeth stood down, after realising that her new full-time job wouldn’t allow her to devote the necessary time and energy to her J4MB role. Mike re-assumed the party leadership rule at the same time.
Mike was the creator of the website Laughing at Feminists.
J4MB campaigns against the state’s many assaults on the human rights of men and boys. The party’s 2015 general election manifesto explored 20 areas in which those rights have long been assaulted by the state’s actions and inactions, almost always to privilege women and girls. There are no areas in which the British state specifically assaults the human rights of women and girls today.
The single area in which the largest number of men’s rights have been assaulted is in the divorce courts and family law system.
J4MB considers marriage and the nuclear family to be cornerstones of a civilised society. However, for decade after decade, successive governments have undermined the institutions. About 50% of the marriages entered into today will end in divorce, and women instigate around 75% of divorces. The median duration of a marriage now is 11 years, i.e. 50% of marriages will last no longer than that, and many will last for much shorter periods.
The government actively supports women who choose to be mothers despite not having supportive partners. More on this shortly. Let’s consider the issue of risk for a moment.
Imagine a group of ten men, most of them in their 20s or 30s, in a plane. They’re all wearing parachutes, and they’re about to jump out of the plane at 10,000 feet, to carry out the first and possibly only parachute jumps of their lives, to raise money for charity.
With less than a minute to go before the first of the men will jump, a panel in the side of the plane opens, and the men are just a few feet away from where they’ll shortly be exiting the plane. Suddenly, the voice of the pilot is heard by the men through their helmets:
I have some news for you. The parachute manufacturer has just warned us of a design fault with the parachutes. About half of them won’t open when you pull the ripcord, and if this happens in your case, you’ll fall to a certain death.
The men aren’t troubled by this information, and duly jump out of the plane. Five land safely, five plummet to their deaths. Given the divorce rate over recent decades, men who marry can be likened to these men, blithely ignoring the risks implicit in their decisions.
In some estates in Britain today, 75% of children are raised by single mothers. British men pay almost three-quarters of the income tax collected each year, women little more than a quarter. So it’s overwhelmingly men who financially support single mothers. The state incentivises women to replace reliance on men as partners, with reliance on men as taxpayers. The state has been ever more hostile towards the nuclear family, towards men in general (and married men in particular) over the past 30+ years. The radical feminist Germaine Greer said the following in the early 1970s:
Women’s liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly, so let’s get on with it.
Women have little incentive to make their marriages work. Men usually bring more financial resources than women to marriages, and typically earn considerably more during the course of them, so when women decide to end their marriages, they often personally stand to gain financially. It’s just one of the reasons three-quarters of divorce applications are filed by women.
The prime casualties of failed marriages are children. 24% of children in Britain today have no contact with their biological fathers, which leads many of them to become dysfunctional, and causes them and others untold misery. The family courts system rarely enforces contact orders, thereby enabling vindictive women to continue denying their children contact with their fathers, grandparents, and others. We consider this extreme emotional abuse of children and all these other people, yet the state enables it. Fathers are forced by the state to continue paying for the support of children who the state ensures they may never see again.
The state gives wives considerable power over husbands on their wedding days, by giving them the prospect of highly preferential treatment in divorce settlements. It’s as if the state gives wives loaded guns to use at any point during their marriages, however well they’re treated by their husbands. This is toxic for marriage. Our downloadable poster illustrates the point.
Even if you bring most of the financial resources into your marriage, and earn much more than your wife during it, you’ll probably find your financial position devastated by divorce, and you’ll have to start rebuilding your wealth from a low base, possibly at a stage in your life when that will be very difficult, if not impossible.
It’s time to block the beginning of the pipeline of misery which ends in the divorce courts and the family law system. Put simply, if men don’t marry, they won’t divorce, and they won’t suffer any of the grave consequences of divorce.
The solution for the men in the plane was simple. They shouldn’t have jumped. The solution for men who are considering getting married is simple. They shouldn’t marry, at least not until and unless such time that marriage becomes far less risky for men. There’s no sign that will happen in the foreseeable future.
If you’re determined to marry anyway, you might be tempted to believe that the solution to possible financial ruin could be a prenuptial agreement (‘prenup’). You’d be wrong, as this article explains.
Quite apart from risk issues associated with how the divorce and family law systems work, is there anything you can do to establish the likelihood that your marriage will be a success, if you decide to make this foolish move? My book The Marriage Delusion: the fraud of the rings? was published in 2009. In the course of my extensive research I encountered a book which I felt gave particularly sound advice about individual and couple aptitudes for marriage, and how they impacted on the prospects of individual marriages being successful. The book includes some excellent questionnaires.
It was written by Jeffry Larson, and it has the snappy title Should We Stay Together? A Scientifically Proven Method for Enhancing Your Relationship and Improving its Chances for Long-Term Success. Buying the book might spare you from marrying a woman you shouldn’t marry – that’s around 99.9% of women, give or take – and spare you the enormous emotional and financial turmoil of a failed marriage.
Feel free to email or call me at any time.
Mike Buchanan
E: mikebuchananuk@gmail.com
T: 07967 026163
Men shouldn't marry 