While I can certainly appreciate the emotional and financial damages done to men who have been victims of paternity fraud, it just seems to me that, like many other subjects that have been brought up on this thread, there is a counter-harm done to women concerning illegitimacy which seems to (in a sense) “balance out” the idea that this is a male-only issue.
Please allow me to explain, and feel free to disagree/debate: While there is no doubt that a man who has been required to provide for a child that is not his makes him a victim of female manipulation, are women not also victims when their male partners/husbands conceive children through extra-marital affairs? What happens when a woman who has been faithful to her man must suffer a loss of family income when he is unfaithful and fathers a child by another woman, who then claims child support from him? In these cases, the faithful wife’s income is reduced due to his infidelity. Both are wrong, but there seems to be the possibility of protection for the male against infidelity which is not granted to the female, and therefore it would appear to become a masculinist, in opposition to a feminist, issue. While I can sympathize with the men on this, I can also sympathize with women who are victims of male infidelity, and issues of illegitimacy need to take both genders into consideration. I can only envision that as more men fight to protect themselves from female promiscuity, more women will be requiring justice on their side. As it currently stands, there is protection already in place for men against this - DNA testing. Now, what are we going to do about all of these Casanovas who force their women to share their resources with others? (you can see a can of worms being opened up here
)
In regards to circumcision, there are a couple of reasons I would classify this into a *human *rights issues, and not a *men’s *rights issue: In the first place, it is not women who have pushed and encouraged circumcision upon men, whereas male-dominated societies have certainly enforced the custom of FGM against women. Circumcision absolutely *cannot *be laid at the feet of feminists, it was men themselves who adopted and promoted this practice.
Secondly, while a comparison between circumcision and FGM can be made on the grounds of mutiliation alone, the two are not entirely comparable when we take into consideration the motives and intentions behind them. I don’t mean to sound blase about it (in fact, I have recently begun in the past year or so to question the validity of the practice, whereas before I never gave it a second thought and would have emphatically defended it), but still I maintain that one is not “as bad” as the other (for lack of a better way to phrase it). Circumcision was never intended to rob a man of his climax in order to promote faithfulness toward his spouse. It was never an outright attack on male sexual pleasure, while FGM sought to rob women of their greatest source of pleasure for purely selfish reasons. So, while I would whole-heartedly support a parent’s decision not to circumcize, I don’t find it to be nearly as destructive to men as FGM is to women, and I deny the notion that this practice was somehow inflicted upon men by feminism, as opposed to medically-questionable advice.
Thirdly, men who are protesting circumcision will need to be prepared for accusations of anti-semitism if they attempt to change laws surrounding this (take a look at what happened in Germany recently). There is no possible way (legally speaking) to favor children’s rights on basis of religion - that is, if it’s considered child abuse, then it will be considered child abuse against
all, religious tradition aside. I just don’t see this happening, realistically speaking (though men are certainly entitled to pursue this if it is important to them).
