Stop blaming single mothers, asshats

I am sick and fokking tired of pundits and frowny-faced concern trolls lambasting single mothers for the poverty and problems America is going through. For one thing, it is a lack of living-wage and manufacturing jobs that is causing massive poverty in America, and if the Fat Cats would stop outsourcing all the damn jobs and using the banking system as a casino we wouldn’t be in such a mess. However, the Ur-Rich have way too much political clout for anyone to call them out on their bullshit, so they go after single mothers instead.

Yes, single moms are more likely to be poor, but lets look at some facts shall we? The large majority of women having babies while unmarried are women in their 20’s or older, not kids, and 83% of those moms were in serious relationships with the baby daddy. Many were living together, and many expected to get married. 

Moreover, an article on Jezebel pointed out that women who have babies while unmarried are the smallest share of single moms – despite the myths of those low-class losers having babies for the welfare check, “Almost two-thirds of single women raising kids on their own had been married or were still married, and the children’s father had simply left.” And the guys abandoning their families aren’t still helping out much either, since “in 2009, only 41% of single, custodial parents (mostly women) were paid the child support they were owed.”

The daddy’s hightail it outta there even though the “men actually want most of these children. At least, they say they do. Nelson noted that, during the course of his interviews with dozens of unmarried male parents, “For some of them, it seemed like they desired the children more than the actual romantic partner that they were having the children with.” But thanks to a number of factors, once the child comes along, unmarried fathers can become stressed out and discouraged. Raising kids is crazy expensive, for one thing, and during the early part of the recession, blue collar men disproportionately lost their jobs and had difficulty finding other ways to earn income. This was understandably depressing, and stressful. But rather than handle the stress of parenthood, poverty, and joblessness, the men opted to flee that which they could — the parenthood. Unfortunately, this “discouraged father effect” left unmarried mothers down an income, down an extra set of hands and eyes, and up an unfed mouth.”

Two questions:

1) Why is no one going after those deadbeat asshats who abandon their families?

2) Why isn’t father child-abandonment the subject of scads of opinion pieces and pearl-clutching?

Oh yeah, we are in a patriarchy so it’s a shitload easier to yell and scream about women and children since they are never, ever going to be full-fledged members of the hegemony. Plus, men are constructed as the solid, rational sex by contrasting women as weak-willed ninnies. Thus it is really, really non-patriarchal to point out the people who are most responsible for childhood poverty in single moms is the guys who couldn’t handle the hardship of adulthood responsibilities, and the the hegemonic bastards who determine the economic disenfranchisement of the working-class that means parents of either sex cannot get a job that would make ends meet.

Instead, politicians and far-right demagogues wail and tear their hair about the “entitlement programs” that are a burden on the “American Taxpayer”, which is code for poor, black ‘Welfare Queens’ living it up with 44 kids while Bubba and Bubbette have to pay taxes. That way Bubba and Bubbette will be so busy being bigoted dipshits that they won’t catch-on to the fact they are getting screwed buy those at the tip-top, not those at the bottom.

Mammon laughed, and didn’t pay his child support either.

About these ads