Divorce Corp, narrated by television’s favorite therapist, Drew Pinsky, is a surprising documentary. I say that it is surprising because a parade of Harvard Law professors and television personalities go on the record explaining the asset-looting sham that is the institution of no-fault divorce.
It was difficult for me to sit through the movie without entertaining homicidal thoughts. Or rather, I had to take several breaks while viewing it to entertain my homicidal thoughts. And then to quell them by telling myself that all the people that I want to kill are going to suffer a worse fate in Hell than I could ever inflict. Not that I’m likely to go someplace different.
The film discusses many topics that should be familiar to most readers (or people who have lived through a divorce). The mechanism of divorce is the means by which marital property can be legally confiscated by lawyers, wives, and (in some rare cases) husbands who don’t make much money.
The one clever hack that I learned from the movie is that if you are hiring a lawyer, be sure to hire one who has made campaign donations to the judge. This is more important than most other factors in determining whether or not you will win the case. It can also be good to simply buy out the judge — the number quoted in the film is about $350,000.
Another curious angle that it explores is the pervasive corruption among psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and other ‘evaluatators’ called in to determine the fitness of each parent. The film brings up a colorful example of a flamboyantly homosexual evaluator who repeatedly would shake down parents in return for positive evaluations.
Towards the end of the film, Pinsky characterizes divorce as becoming a ‘public health problem,’ because children of divorced couples are so often responsible for crime, self-harm, and other forms of risky behavior.
The narrators hold up Scandanavia as an example of a region that handles divorce better — but it would be more accurate to say that those tiny, homogeneous countries handle it in a less destructive way.
Given the distinct Harvard flavor of many of the interviewees, it’s clear that some marginalized elements in the leadership class are beginning to comprehend just how badly the youngest generational cohort has been damaged by the legal experiment in no-fault divorce pioneered by Lenin in Russia and signed into law by Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California.
Pinsky, by bringing up Scandanavia, suggests reform that still maintains the creed of feminism. However, what he misses is that merely making a proposal and then attempting to ‘start a movement’ with a film is not sufficient to defeat what amounts to an organized criminal network that has a hold on every major propaganda outlet in the country.
Divorce is perhaps the most important interpersonal event in the lives of a large portion of Americans, but it is rarely discussed except in positive terms by women’s interest columnists. Conservatives will occasionally broach it, but almost no one dares to criticize the fundamental Leninist policy that no-fault divorce represents, and no one respectable is permitted to defend the patriarchal family structure that has made up the basic unit of Western Civilization for thousands of years.
The proposed solution (join a movement, make your voice heard) is moronic. What would be better would be for Harvard Law School to purge itself of feminist professors. The people quoted in the movie could have an enormous impact — even Drew Pinsky and the director could have a larger impact — by cleaning house in their own highly placed communities.
Attempting to outsource leadership responsibility to the wretched masses is the problem with post-1789 political culture. It is why this well-made film would have been better if it had been targeted to only Harvard Law students.
The New York Times buried its tiny review on the 16th page of the arts section. A critical issue that will impact the lives of half of its married readers (among its most affluent) gets lower billing than the latest missing plane or unhinged lone gunman. Other reviews are similarly mixed, but are curiously unwilling to discuss how this interacts with larger developments in Anglo-American culture.
The people who made this movie represent the remnants of the reasonable wing of liberal democratic governance in the United States. It is on page C16.
The front pages of the rest of the sections are an unending march of propaganda stories excusing the latest enormous criminal schemes enacted by high prestige American institutions. For whatever reason, these remnants have not received the memo that the society cannot be reformed by the same means (government by the masses) that corrupted it.
fwiw, people — apparently decent people — are continually surprised that I (the wife) asked for literally nothing in my own “starter marriage,” no kids divorce. in fact, I paid the last joint credit card bill and the remaining several months of rent on the marital home. it just seemed like common decency to me, not like I was getting taken for a ride…
somehow the twisted logic of divorce has become: *because* he was supporting you/improving your quality of life before the divorce, he owes you *more* afterwards, not less. even when there are zero kids being affected. go fucking figure.
when and if I marry again, I will agree to sign a reasonable prenup as a signal of good faith. anyone worth marrying would be smart enough to at least consider one, given the state of our current marriage climate. smh.
I appreciate that you noted the “remnants of the reasonable wing of liberal democratic governance.” Yes, there is such a thing, though it’s probably a paltry 10 percent of Congress and Demopublican national figures. It’s somewhat higher in certain western U.S. state legislatures. Is it a majority anywhere?
Hell, no.
Divorce as an industry will be difficult to dislodge, for sure, but the fact that this film has even been made is a small shaft of daylight.
I doubt that it can be dislodged without regime change.
It is sort of like complaining about the bad behavior of Baath party members at this point.
The result of the divorce industry is a growing number of armed single men who have few, if any, attachments and who refuse to marry. Note the rather different results for Clive Bundy vs Ruby Ridge. And the presence of modern smartphones helped as well.
The Cathedral should shut down the divorce industry and throw its functionaries and feminists in prison… For its own sake.
Would be a surprising turn, but not entirely impossible. I would almost definitely be indistinguishable from Matt Yglesias if my parents had not divorced.