The stage is set for a scene

Consider the following scenario.

Kim is a single parent of two, a 7-year old boy and a 3-year old girl, and also the director of marketing for a small to medium-sized electronics firm. Today, Kim is scheduled to present key results from the quarterly sales report to the Board of Trustees but arrives for the meeting 15 minutes late due to having to drop the older boy at school, and the younger girl at daycare. In addition to disheveled hair, there is a noticeable stain down the left side of Kim's suit, the result of the young girl vomiting at the end of her car trip after a hurried breakfast.

Why do you think Kim is late for this meeting? Is Kim a good parent? A good employee?

More importantly, which sex have you assumed Kim to be as you answer these questions? Did you think that Kim was a man or a woman? In research I conducted, I simply asked these initial questions to encourage people to reveal their assumptions about the sex of Kim.

Divvying up the despair of divorce

Whatever the inequities of marriage, divorce surely must be a great equalizer. After all, divorce affects both the man and the woman, right? There must be equity in that, right?  

I want to take a closer look at divorce and in particular, the losses encountered by divorcees. Sure, it's going to be a man-look. A man-look is the one where he fails to see the butter in front of his face when he scans the contents of the fridge. On the other hand, it is a man-look that allows him to find his way to a destination by glancing at a map. A man-look is a different view of the world. Not wrong, just different.

Marriage is entered through a flower-festooned bower and a shower of rose-petals. Blessings arrive in the form of children. Then in approximately half of these otherwise apparently happy unions, everything goes to hell. The symbols of hope accompanying marriage and child-birth disappear as divorce is adorned with doom : 'All hope abandon ye who enter here.'

Daddy deception – ‘Who’s your daddy?’

You're cuckoo if you think it is yours!

"It's a wise child that knows their own father."

Who's your daddy? Who knows? And you maybe cuckoo to think it's yours!

The potential for a man to conceive without his knowledge is so complete as to defy counting.

So what's the big deal? This has been going on for millennia. Some men even find the idea of being a father without responsibilities appealing.

It certainly must be admitted that 'sowing your oats' is a strategy that is only available to men.

Nature is like that sometimes. Just as Nature gives women an 'advantage' over men by dominating the in-utero and post-partum experience, nature gives men an advantage over women on minimizing the time and energy they have to put into the offspring.

However, not satisfied with allowing Nature to run without constraint, human culture has generally imposed a number of rules or guidelines or norms on how the two sexes play together in the reproduction game – and in particular, how child-care will be managed. In most human cultures, men are expected to be responsible for their offspring. And women can demand that be the case – sanctioned and reinforced by law in many countries.