When the divorce industry really took off in the 70s, fathers’ rights groups soon emerged. Men were getting hammered by attorneys and judges, and there was an immediate backlash. From that moment, fathers began to frame the debate in terms of equality. There was even a widely-viewed film starring Dustin Hoffman – Kramer vs. Kramer – that (accurately) portrayed men as caring, capable parents. Many men have been involved in this struggle, including my late father, who was denied access to my little half-brother by his second wife. While there have been a few successes, the overall trend has been one of failure. We stand up and get knocked down, over and over again, like soldiers at the Somme. I’m a casualty, my father was a casualty, and my son could end up as one, too.
Yet despite this string of failures, men continue to fight with the same feeble weapon: equality. They may as well be rushing a machine gun nest armed with swords, like the Japanese in their bloody, futile banzai charges. “Equality!” we cry, inspiring amusement among feminists, who encourage this feeble tactic knowing full well that they can never lose this game.
The problem with gender equality is that it means different things to different people. Men tend to focus on the positives while ignoring the negatives. Women, on the other hand, take both into account, and strive to press their advantage where it is favorable to them. In truth, creating equality in marriage would require turning all wives into husbands, or all husbands into wives. It would be a kind of universal gay marriage without specific roles, which are common even in gay marriages. In a sense, fighting for equality in marriage is the same as fighting for what is currently referred to as “marriage equality;” i.e. gay marriage, and whatever you may feel about that, it has nothing to offer fathers in general, straight or gay.
With this in mind, one can deduce how much success your average heterosexual father will have in the courtroom when he argues for equal rights as a parent. Unless he can present himself as a eunuch, he’s going to have a very tough row to hoe. Worse, he’ll come off as dishonest, or perhaps an inadequate father. At best, he’ll be seen as a sort of poor facsimile of a mother.
I know that it is not men’s intent to deceive when they argue for equal parental rights. Fathers love their children, and are crucial in raising them. Fatherless children have always been pitied for good reason. The Biblical refrain of “widows and orphans” was to emphasize the importance of caring for the children of the community who had suffered the loss of their fathers. Kids with fathers do better on every measure, and are far safer than those without. A father is a bulwark against an unkind world, and a teacher who separates the wheat from the chaff. A child with a loving father knows he or she has a sanctuary at home, and a strong ally.
When we call for more paternal involvement in children’s lives, equality is the wrong argument to use. After all, does a child need two mothers? We should argue that fathers provide something different. Fatherhood and motherhood are not equal, and therefore both are important to children. Would one feed children only vegetables or only meat? Teach them only arithmetic or only reading? Instead of striving to prove that men are just as good at parenting as mothers, which automatically places us in the disadvantageous position of letting feminists define what good parenting means, we should argue that fathers have much to offer that mothers do not, and it is cruel to deprive children of those benefits.
So let’s get off this equality merry-go-round and adopt a different strategy. Proudly proclaim ourselves to be different from mothers, and much better fathers than they are. Conflating mothers and fathers under the label of “parents” is not productive; “Parents” are like “persons” — both are generic terms that leave little room for any unique qualities. To describe what we do when we raise children as “parenting” is to sell ourselves short. Instead, let’s call it fatherhood.
I know it may come off as mere semantics, but words embody concepts, which influence how we think and behave. We are on much more familiar territory as fathers than we are as mere parents, and staying in that frame of mind requires abandoning any pretense of parental equality. It also precludes competition between mothers and fathers, which is the worst kind of poison in any custodial arrangement. When both mother and father embrace their respective roles, both they and the children win in the long run.
