Thursday is Anxiety Day at MSN!
For the women: is enjoying casual dates with more than one man at a time the same thing as spitting in the face of God? Possibly. You should let church peer pressure make that decision for you.
Just ask Suzanne Thomas (not her real name), who was dating two men until the folks at her church chided her for it. “They acted like I was doing something wrong,” she recalls. “Like I was sinning. I wasn’t sleeping with these men, I was just trying to figure out which one I liked best.”
Under pressure, she stopped seeing both of them and is now single. “I’ve joined the singles ministry and have decided from now on I’ll only date one man at a time. I’d rather do that than deal with the judgment.”
For the men, a real kick in the balls: Is your child really yours? No really. Have you checked?
After recently reviewing 67 studies on the subject, University of Oklahoma researchers found that PD (paternal discrepancy) rates tend to be much higher among men who have reason to believe there’s been more than one dog in the yard. No surprise there. But leave out these men and you end up with a number that can safely be assumed to represent the rest of us. That number is 3.85 percent. Another review of 19 studies by a group at Liverpool John Moores University backs this up, putting the figure at 3.7 percent of dads. It may not seem like a lot—until you do the math. According to a 2005 U.S. Census Bureau report, there are 27,940,000 fathers nationwide with a child under 18. That means over a million guys out there are taking care of some other man’s kid.
…If there’s any lesson here for a man, it’s this: The medical establishment is not on your side, the legal establishment may or may not be on your side, and you can be damn sure that the woman who lied to you isn’t on your side, which makes it all the more important that you stick up for yourself. More important, perhaps, asking a few painful questions in the beginning could save you—and the ones you love—a lot of pain later on. No man can be blamed for believing in the woman he loves. You can’t go into love doubting. But nor can you live without truth.
“But nor can you live without truth.”
There’s apparently over a million men out there who would beg to differ.
I know what I’m about to say sounds crazy in a post-CSI world, and that it’s practically sacrilege coming from a former bio major. But I think geneticists need to remember that we know virtually nothing about how DNA influences early embryonic development. Karen Keegan and Lydia Fairchild should be keeping researchers up at night.
Monogamy? Ewww!
Monogamy? Ewww!
I’ve been saying the same thing!
Jeremy: I don’t want to get married.
Kyso: Me niether, but at least you don’t have a fiance acting like that’s unreasonable.
good to know that a parent’s unconditional love for their child is so very conditional.
good to know that a parent’s unconditional love for their child is so very conditional.
Only the father’s, I guess. There’s a bit in there about how men are programmed by evolution to not waste resources on other people’s kids, but women, eh, not so picky. The whole article is three pages long and had kind of a creepy MRA bias going on.
Thursday is Anxiety Day at MSN!
As opposed to every other day.
Because heaven knows that if you’ve raised a kid for ten years, and you then find out you’re not its biological father, you magically quit loving that child. Like flipping a switch. That’s why adoption never ever works out, I guess.
P.S. Newsflash: chances are it’s the parents who raised the kid (provided they did a decent job, that is) who’ll get visited by the grown-up kid when they’re old and in a nursing home. It takes about fifteen minutes (and that’s an optimistic estimate) to become a biological father. It takes YEARS of effort to be a parent, and guess what the kid remembers when it’s all grown-up? Hint: not the thing that happened before it was even conceived, let alone born.
All I can say is, poor men, they have it so hard these days.. waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!
good to know that a parent’s unconditional love for their child is so very conditional.
Shit. I knew this without having some paternity test done. All love is conditional, and men are raised to view “their children” as special possessions and all that “carry on the family line” BS (like women can’t carry on family lines, too? is not half the genetics and most of the care put into a child generally theirs?).
I am not surprised that a bunch of up-tight yuppy assholes with trophy wives first had this problem and second that it fucks up their relationship with their children.
Which might be a rant. :p
Cause children and wives aren’t people, they are things that you pat on the head and leave to go to work. Better make sure you’re only raising the one that your penis spurted to create!
Typical media, focusing on the results of female infidelity without even mentioning the percentage of poor, unsuspecting women unknowingly raising the fruit of their cheating husbands.
Typical media, burying the fact that this is not a problem for 97% of men in the middle, and then ending with a passionate “Can you afford not to know?”
This line alone: “The medical establishment is not on your side, the legal establishment may or may not be on your side, and you can be damn sure that the woman who lied to you isn’t on your side, which makes it all the more important that you stick up for yourself.” makes the whole article suspect.
Sophist – whenever a woman tells me she’s pregnant my first impulse is to ask “Are you sure it’s yours?” Usually I can restrain myself, but I’ve gotten some fantastic quizzical looks when my restraint fails.