How Father’s Rights is a Woman’s Issue

One of the biggest questions I started getting right off the bat after making a TikTok channel blatantly branded for the purpose of advocating for dads was: “Why?”

If I pretend that I’m a completely selfless person, I’d say I just happened to see something bad happening to a dad on the street and I thought – you know what? I’ll dedicate an enormous amount of time to learning all about common and international family law practices and covering the various underlying corruptions of them all just for the heck of it.

But quite frankly, father’s issues effect my life directly, and they affect many, many women.

For me personally, I got caught in the proverbial wake of father’s issues when I became a stepmom. For others, they are introduced to the effects of parental alienation after separation that men experience in far greater numbers than women by being the mothers, grandmothers, sisters, cousins, friends, or even daughters of a father going through these things.

For a long time, it’s been easy for court systems to bully around fathers for their money, being that men were far more often the higher earners if not the sole providers, and being that government bodies and prison systems – especially while in collusion – do an excellent job of turning the average man into a money and labor piñata.

But while women may not be as affected by such issues as men, and many even benefit from them (financial orders such as child support and alimony are overwhelmingly awarded to pay the woman) we would be completely irresponsible to simply turn our cheek to this.

The thing is, we really made it, ladies.

We did what we set out to accomplish, truly – we are equal to men in the work force at this point, in many areas even occupying the work spaces with more educational backgrounds than our male counterparts, and a growing number of us out-earning our male counterparts.

The workforce is reliant on us – I’m sure any of you reading can agree the pressures we face as women to work. Over half of all families in the US are dual-income.

That being said, what now is stopping the court systems from treating women with the equal financial responsibilities as men?

Keep in mind, following a divorce, alimony and child support generally get calculated in together and that is most typically ordered in the sum of 40-50% of that payer’s income. So if you do make more than your male partner, are you prepared to pay him that for 18+ years?

Now also pay in mind that it is not typical that the payer is also the custodial parent. Meaning, the courts would be incentivized to award custody to the payee, meaning not only will you be paying your male partner as the earner, it will be assumed that you have less available time due to working so much and you will now be an every other weekend mom.

Additionally keep in mind that should you fall delinquent on any of your payments, it is not taken very lightly and it doesn’t take much to have your drivers license suspended (quite costly to renew as well) as well as any of your business, occupational and recreational licenses, or you may face jail time. This is actually becoming increasingly more common for women.

If none of those things sounded appealing to you, you might just be a father’s rights advocate.

Quite frankly most of us will simply never get it until it happens to us, but if it doesn’t end up hitting us peripherally through the ones we love, increasingly the attacks of a damaged system are coming for us all – yes, women too.

And please don’t think that father’s rights groups are just complaining about child support.

Most men have a full understanding that their child costs money and a metric f*** ton of it, and they want to provide it. However…

Men, and women, are also entitled to wanting autonomy over their own financial decisions and the ability to pay for necessities without the involvement of the state or their ex.

They are entitled to wanting an adequate amount of time with their child.

And the problem is, no matter how much money fathers are providing, they are by and large not receiving adequate time with their children.

And while the state won’t waste a moment to penalize fathers with fines, jail time and suspensions the moment payments fall behind, mothers very rarely will ever face consequences when denying parenting time.

Quite frankly, the enforcement of custodial interference as a felony is held up as often as Montana’s law against married women going fishing on Sundays.

Generally, when a parent unilaterally refuses parenting time, police will do absolutely nothing about the issue citing that it is a “civil issue”.

Best you can do at that point is file a contempt of court charge for custodial interference but that will also be about as effective as asking them to please not do that again.

These pervasive systems make it easier and easier to make an entire kidnapping be defined as “a civil matter“.

Many women remain hesitant to support reform for family court systems, assuming that the systems as they stand now fight in the best interest of the mothers and the children, or believing they will benefit from them…

What happens when the other shoe falls?

As a true feminist I stand with fathers who simply want to be equal parents to their children.

And as a woman with a very realistic view of what the future holds for us, I selfishly never want to have to go through what so many single fathers in America have to suffer through.

Advocacy for shared parenting – not one custodial and one non-custodial, not one parent and one visitor – deserves all of our voices, so that none of us become victims without it.