March 9th 2008

The Lilith eZine Sunday Edition

Letter from the Editor

I know I've hit the nail on the head when I start getting a tonne of hatemail. It means I've provoked people to actually think about the subject and possibly have made some great insight.

In this case it is not so great as it is: "Why didn't I realize this sooner?"

For over 11 years now I've been writing about feminist issues. Then back in January I decided to go "behind enemy lines" and do some research. I went to anti-feminist websites and started recording the major complaints and keeping track of which ones were the most frequent complaints. It was a non-scientific survey, but it garnered interesting results.

Child support and spousal support ranked at the top, vastly outnumbering all the other complaints put together. The complaints included a variety of smaller comments about lack of money, that spousal support was like "ex-husband slavery", that they weren't sure if the kids were even theirs because they thought their ex-wife/ex-girlfriend was a slut/bitch/c-word, that women are just looking for free money/blank cheques, that they were tricked into marrying their ex-wives, that their girlfriend forgot to take their birth control pill and just wanted their money, etc.

Which made me realize that the anti-feminists, despite all the posing and maliciousness, were mostly just a bunch of Deadbeat Dads paying (or refusing to pay) child support.

So I wrote an article called "Dealing with Anti-Feminism" in which I explained my results. And then the hatemail started pouring in... from guess who? Deadbeat Dads.

Surprisingly they didn't refute my results. They didn't disagree at all. Instead they just bashed me, told me to go back to the kitchen, called me a lying c-word, a lesbian, compared me to Hitler (like WTF?) and accused me of being a communist.

It all made me laugh and I pondered the question: How does communist countries with dictatorships deal with deadbeat dads? I believe the only remaining countries where this applies is Cuba and North Korea. Do they execute them? Put them in work camps? Do they get off Scot-free?

Somehow I doubt men in Cuba and North Korea are going around impregnating women without paying some kind of social consequence.

Sincerely,
Suzanne MacNevin
Editor of the Lilith eZine


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