Dutch Treat

I've written two posts talking about my mother saying "If I'm going to insult someone, I'm going to get very personal." One is here and another elsewhere.

That got me to thinking about bastardy and the fact that we currently use the word bastard as an insult largely unrelated to the original meaning of a fatherless child. It's an insult because historically being born out of wedlock to a single mother meant you had a tough life and probably little to no hope of things improving, so you were probably a pretty awful person as a consequence of your harsh life.

Then in the US, someone passed a law intended to take care of probably war widows and their children and didn't carefully exclude bastards born out of wedlock and their "trash" mothers because there were very few such people. It was such a harsh life, it was inconceivable that anyone would intentionally choose to have a child out of wedlock just because we provided a little relief.

In the US, where Blacks are last hired, first fired and used to literally be paid half as much as White employees and where men are highly likely to end up incarcerated and the women are the backbone of the community, this has the unintended consequence that benefits Whites view as too little to live on looks like a good deal to a lot of Blacks.

So actually not having a father rarely gets spoken of anymore as bastardy while the word bastard remains an insult largely divorced from your social status and origin story because the social contract changed. Those children no longer get thrown to the wolves by society.

I've thought a lot about the fact that men have a lot of complaints about how women don't want to put out and women are only after their money and they seem oblivious to the social pressures driving that. When you stop harshly punishing women by utterly ruining their lives for putting out, well, gee, they stop being so "uptight."

The Netherlands has a better than average track record for women's rights and my online acquaintance with a Dutchman has had me think some and write some about that. I've written about the concept of Dutch Treat a few times elsewhere.

I was friends with a friend of his and ended up knowing way too much about a man I barely spoke with and I eventually realized he was living with a younger woman and had two children with her and they never married though other people tended to assume he was married. And that's not really that weird in the Netherlands and I guess he felt no compulsion to correct ignorant foreigners with judgy attitudes from backwards cultures.

She wasn't even Dutch. So I'm quite clear that in addition to a child being a commitment he would keep without a ring or a piece of paper, The Netherlands has to SOMEHOW have policies that made both of them shockingly comfortable with her just living with him and having kids and not ever getting married.

So if you are someone wondering about policies that might foster a less crappy world, I will suggest that the policies of The Netherlands would be a good thing to look at and study.

Tom Fejeran is the only man who ever told me he was sexually abused. But Jack inadvertently taught me that's probably far more common than people think and I'm not really trying to suggest he was molested.

But like every man who was ever important to me, he had substantial trauma in his life and that was part of why he was drawn to me. And most people seem to have absolutely no idea how abusively he was treated.

Jack describes himself as a high school dropout and he's a self-made millionaire. I knew him through Hacker News and I stopped talking about the fact that he's a high school dropout and self-made millionaire because it got me hatred from people who seemed to think I was insulting him rather than saying he is successful and some kind of positive example.

I don't think he's really a high school dropout. We both spent a lot of time on Hacker News at one time and my mind just organizes information a particular way and I have no idea why other people seem to not see what I see, but the story I pieced together mostly from public comments by him is that he was bullied in high school until one day he lost his shit and put some guy in the hospital.

He's one of the most genuinely, sincerely deeds-not-words kind people I have ever been acquainted with and I'm extremely confident this means the abuse from one or more bullies was really bad and over a long period of time and the guy deserved to end up in the hospital over it.

Most likely, Jack was actually expelled and that's why he didn't finish high school. And he's a self-made millionaire because he doesn't publicly cry in his coffee about this egregious injustice and just got on with trying to figure out how to earn a living in spite of a criminal record and lack of diploma.

Tom told me he had been molested and made it very clear his best friend didn't know and I was not to tell him or anyone else. Jack politely glosses over how terribly he was abused to protect his privacy and look like a real man, not a pathetic victim.

And then gets involved with gals like me who have ISSUES where that word could be the size of the Hollywood sign, so I'm guessing that's somehow a feature, not a bug, to someone who also has ISSUES and speaks of them to no one at all ever.

I deeply respect and care about this man who left such a positive impact on my life while barely speaking to me whom I have never met. And I'm certain whatever happened to him, he's living proof that men desperately need resources they don't have for dealing with private problems they dare not talk about for fear of losing all respect from people and their livelihood with it.

There are good and kind men quietly enduring a private hell they have no means to put down. And this is not a good thing.