I would be interested to see if the national divorce rate dropping was because marriage rates were dropping, if by convention/expense/etc., and therefore decreasing unhappy marriage
I'm just going to repost the most upvoted comment on the original:
Randy Poulson
9 September, 2025
Where does the Author cite the number of females who have done violence to children? Same old assumption wrapped in the premise of mother is an "Angel" and men "are always" the offender. Sad reality without balanced reporting.
---
I think Randy Poulson has a point. Looking at DV statistics, women aren't that much less likely to offend: "Over 1 in 3 women (35.6%) and 1 in 4 men (28.5%) in the US have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime."
So I agree that your inference is probably correct, but it is worth pointing out that the rate which a sex experiences X from their intimate partners isn't exactly the same as the rate at which the other sex does X to their partners, namely because of non-heterosexual couples.
For example, you could imagine a world where men are significantly more likely than women to commit DV, making some subset of that 28.5% men who have suffered at the hands of other men. It would also imply that gay women are less likely to experience DV, which would widen the gap further. That said, I believe many more couples are hetero than not, so maybe it wouldn't make much of a difference.
To be clear, I'm not making this specific claim about men, just illustrating that I think the statistic quoted doesn't _directly_ justify the claim "women aren't that much less likely to offend" (although it does lend credence to it)
You’ve made the same mistake the poster you’re replying to pointed out. Women in lesbian relationships have a high rate of having experienced domestic violence in their lives, and a study reported this which has then spread around the internet as a meme of sorts. For the vast majority of those same women, the same study reported that the domestic violence they experienced was in a previous relationship, with a man.
Some quantification is needed here to make this list have any meaning. Rape stands alone, but physical violence and stalking can mean a lot in terms of damage and threat level. A single slap falls under the same general category of physical violence as a full-on fist beating. Stalking can be showing up the gym at their scheduled time, or it can be camping outside of their house.
Having a system as described where parents with evidence of abuse can't protect their kids from abusers seems absolutely unacceptable. Patching over that with the current unfair assumptions about men vs. women as suitable parents isn't better!
Domestic violence always gets rolled out by feminists in response to shared custody.
We actually had shared custody in Australia for the last 20 years! But coordinated campaigns, funding, feminist academics in government positions and political activism, all decrying how violent men were, has resulted in legislation this year to remove equal shared custody entirely, and other legislation to determine the property pool split based directly on allegations of family violence.
Well, the author of the article found several people sharing experiences that they heard from other people that seem to give credence to that view.
Hard to know at this point if the problem is with specific judges, with the way the law is written, or if the presentation of these experiences are made to seem more numerous by the way the article presents the story. It also didn't cover instances of abuse coming from mothers, so there's at least a little bias in the story.
If women feel like it is no longer safe to marry because they will be forced into equal custody, those rates would decline. Safer to stay single and childfree (from a risk management perspective).
Not that this is too far off from existing trends, so I'm unsure if measuring in Kentucky alone is enough to control against the broader national trends:
> Just 48% of young Americans say having kids is important—the lowest ranking among the six life goals we measured. It signifies a generational shift away from traditional family formation.
>If women feel like it is no longer safe to marry because they will be forced into equal custody
The word choice of your comment is beyond absurd and your usual schtick of cherry picking links to back up your point doesn't make it any less absurd.
It's mostly men who don't wanna get married and/or start a family and do all that stuff because (in states that have yet to reform their laws) they stand to lose half their shit and not even have half a kid to show for it.
I have zero sympathy for people, of any gender, for whom not being on the favorable end of unequal treatment in divorce/custody is the marginal difference that makes them not get married.
> It's mostly men who don't wanna get married and/or start a family and do all that stuff because (in states that have yet to reform their laws) they stand to lose half their shit and not even have half a kid to show for it.
> I have zero sympathy for people, of any gender, for whom not being on the favorable end of unequal treatment in divorce/custody is the marginal difference that makes them not get married.
I guess you have zero sympathy for a large chunk of men then, because first you say that men don't get married because they lose their stuff in a divorce, and then you say that you have zero sympathy for people who don't get married because of it.
"I would get married but I don't trust my potential spouse not to screw me over" is just not something that requires sympathy. If that's how someone feels, it's probably better for everyone (them, their spouse, and society as a whole) that they don't get married. There's no virtue in being married without a strong basis of mutual trust, nor is there any shame in remaining unmarried because you haven't found someone right for you
Simply on semantic grounds, this is an unreasonable conclusion. "I will not do X unless I am given an unfair advantage" is not at all the same as "I will not do X if the system is unfairly biased against me".
I don’t believe my citations are wrong, nor that they’re out of context as it relates to demographic trends, but you’re free to provide your own if you have them.
Your thoughts of my opinions and mental models are irrelevant to me, but of course you’re free to comment as much as you’d like and mods will allow. I take no offense because I do not care, and no offense is intended in informing.
> If women feel like it is no longer safe to marry because they will be forced into equal custody, those rates would decline
IIUC, the new neutral bias applies regardless of marriage.
If a woman is looking to create a kid whom she has sole custody of, then what she is really looking for is a DIY sperm donor. I'm sure there are plenty of men downright eager to sign a contract relinquishing any paternity claim/liability as a condition of dating.
If you're talking about cases where a woman wants to create a kid, while retaining a unilateral ability to choose whether to have the man in the kid's life or not? That is a terrible dynamic and is exactly what needed reform.
> I'm sure there are plenty of men downright eager to sign a contract relinquishing any paternity claim/liability as a condition of dating.
Are there?
I don't know. I don't think most men are as mercenary as that.
As someone who was literally offered this situation (a lesbian couple I was friends with that wanted a child) I can say that it simply wasn't something I could seriously consider.
How could I exist knowing that I had a child that I had little or no relationship with? A child who would constantly wonder about their father and why I wasn't part of their life?
I don't think it's just me, I think most guys would have a problem with that.
And maybe the ones that don't wouldn't be the best choice for being a father?
> If women feel like it is no longer safe to marry because they will be forced into equal custody, those rates would decline.
What kind of a batshit characterization of women is this? You think women will only marry a man if they are guaranteed custody of any potential children in a potential divorce?
It is my belief, in the American macro of policy, it is simply rational and prudent for women to avoid marriage and children whenever possible (as a practitioner in risk management, assessing and managing risk, and a rationalist) so long as the policy is what it is. My opinion would change if the policy, macro, and experience changes and failure modes are less brutal (there’s ~$100B in child support debt outstanding, single parent outcomes are suboptimal, 23 million children live in a single parent home, etc). But as it stands, you’re setting yourself up for failure by entertaining marriage (considering 40-50% failure rates for first marriages) and children (two incomes required, $330k to raise a child 0-18 in 2023 dollars excluding daycare and college). The median household income in Kentucky as of this comment is ~$62k/year. Half of all violent crime in Kentucky over the last six years was domestic violence of both men and women. Returning to the labor force as a stay at home parent (if divorce occurs), regardless of gender, is challenging at best. Might as well skydive without a parachute and hope you’re lucky enough to fall into a tree.
People change as well. Who you marry is potentially not who you want or need a divorce from. Sometimes the economic unpleasantness can be avoided with prenups, but this is much more rare than it should be. Choices can lead to substantial long term obligations and liability, binding for one to two decades, and I think better choices can be made (based on the evidence and the data).
My opinions in this thread are not gender driven, but data driven.
(~40% of pregnancies in the US are unintended every year as well, per the Guttmacher Institute, although I don’t have Kentucky specific numbers at hand in that context)
For most men, marriage is one of the most unwise actions they can legally take in their life. This is due to it being co-opted by the state for its own purposes. Society needs a new word and a new social status for the element of marriage, but without its legal standing, e.g. "maritage" (signifying the heritage of marriage).
> I couldn't go into a playground without some thought of having to prove I wasn't a child trafficker.
I was my wife's caregiver and dad to 5 young sons over 20years. I was the sole parent taking them to playgrounds and other outdoor activities, upwards to 200x a year.
In all those events, I never experienced nor witnessed anything remotely like what you described. Not for me and not for any other solo dad. On rare occasion, I was complimented for spending time with them. That's about all the notice I got.
> I think it's fair to assume things like these are location dependent.
Well, it certainly puts the notion on the table.
Let's run with that. Let's say that qualified folks have evidenced this phenomenon; we've learned there are regions in the US where playground dads are routinely considered to be dangerous to their own kids (and presumably kids in general).
And it's not universal. This indicates there's some strong social effect that can be tightly limited to a region - be widespread and pervasive in one region and fully absent in another.
What sort of effect could mass-mold minds across an entire region yet still be so geographically limited?
> There are several anecdotes in the article about judges ignoring evidence of abuse
If the judge wasn't convinced in the anecdote when it was his job to figure it out with his career on the line, we have no right to assume that the judge got it wrong, without additional evidence. Feigning victimhood is a popular sport.
https://archive.ph/36V0N
I would be interested to see if the national divorce rate dropping was because marriage rates were dropping, if by convention/expense/etc., and therefore decreasing unhappy marriage
Or a realization that it's difficult or impossible to survive (or maintain a standard of living) in a single-income household.
> it's difficult or impossible to survive (or maintain a standard of living) in a single-income household.
You aren't wrong. We've been in a 4-income economy since 2020. Housing here is up 2x since 2020 and 5x from mid 1990s.
Very interesting I didn't realize divorce rates were dropping across the nation. Still seems like KY is ~40% better than the average.
I'm just going to repost the most upvoted comment on the original:
Randy Poulson 9 September, 2025
Where does the Author cite the number of females who have done violence to children? Same old assumption wrapped in the premise of mother is an "Angel" and men "are always" the offender. Sad reality without balanced reporting.
---
I think Randy Poulson has a point. Looking at DV statistics, women aren't that much less likely to offend: "Over 1 in 3 women (35.6%) and 1 in 4 men (28.5%) in the US have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime."
https://www.thehotline.org/stakeholders/domestic-violence-st...
So I agree that your inference is probably correct, but it is worth pointing out that the rate which a sex experiences X from their intimate partners isn't exactly the same as the rate at which the other sex does X to their partners, namely because of non-heterosexual couples.
For example, you could imagine a world where men are significantly more likely than women to commit DV, making some subset of that 28.5% men who have suffered at the hands of other men. It would also imply that gay women are less likely to experience DV, which would widen the gap further. That said, I believe many more couples are hetero than not, so maybe it wouldn't make much of a difference.
To be clear, I'm not making this specific claim about men, just illustrating that I think the statistic quoted doesn't _directly_ justify the claim "women aren't that much less likely to offend" (although it does lend credence to it)
Lesbian couples have the highest rates of DV.
You’ve made the same mistake the poster you’re replying to pointed out. Women in lesbian relationships have a high rate of having experienced domestic violence in their lives, and a study reported this which has then spread around the internet as a meme of sorts. For the vast majority of those same women, the same study reported that the domestic violence they experienced was in a previous relationship, with a man.
So, no.
> experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking
Some quantification is needed here to make this list have any meaning. Rape stands alone, but physical violence and stalking can mean a lot in terms of damage and threat level. A single slap falls under the same general category of physical violence as a full-on fist beating. Stalking can be showing up the gym at their scheduled time, or it can be camping outside of their house.
> , and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
This is absolutely the wrong statistic to apply.
This discusses the lifetime risk of ANY IPV event and does not even limit this to people who have children.
But despite being the wrong statistic, there’s 25% increase in lifetime risk for women over men
You're quoting statistics on victims but talking about offenders.
Not to mention when you start looking into domestic violence rates among lesbian couples
Having a system as described where parents with evidence of abuse can't protect their kids from abusers seems absolutely unacceptable. Patching over that with the current unfair assumptions about men vs. women as suitable parents isn't better!
Domestic violence always gets rolled out by feminists in response to shared custody.
We actually had shared custody in Australia for the last 20 years! But coordinated campaigns, funding, feminist academics in government positions and political activism, all decrying how violent men were, has resulted in legislation this year to remove equal shared custody entirely, and other legislation to determine the property pool split based directly on allegations of family violence.
I am a feminist here commenting in support of shared custody.
oh is that how it's described?
Well, the author of the article found several people sharing experiences that they heard from other people that seem to give credence to that view.
Hard to know at this point if the problem is with specific judges, with the way the law is written, or if the presentation of these experiences are made to seem more numerous by the way the article presents the story. It also didn't cover instances of abuse coming from mothers, so there's at least a little bias in the story.
I’d be curious to see what the marriage and fertility rate is over the next five years.
Not sure what the causal connection would be there.
If women feel like it is no longer safe to marry because they will be forced into equal custody, those rates would decline. Safer to stay single and childfree (from a risk management perspective).
Not that this is too far off from existing trends, so I'm unsure if measuring in Kentucky alone is enough to control against the broader national trends:
https://www.morganstanley.com/ideas/womens-impact-on-the-eco...
> 45% of prime working age women (ages 25-44) will be single by 2030—the largest share in history—up from 41% in 2018.
https://iop.harvard.edu/youth-poll/50th-edition-spring-2025
> Just 48% of young Americans say having kids is important—the lowest ranking among the six life goals we measured. It signifies a generational shift away from traditional family formation.
>If women feel like it is no longer safe to marry because they will be forced into equal custody
The word choice of your comment is beyond absurd and your usual schtick of cherry picking links to back up your point doesn't make it any less absurd.
It's mostly men who don't wanna get married and/or start a family and do all that stuff because (in states that have yet to reform their laws) they stand to lose half their shit and not even have half a kid to show for it.
I have zero sympathy for people, of any gender, for whom not being on the favorable end of unequal treatment in divorce/custody is the marginal difference that makes them not get married.
> It's mostly men who don't wanna get married and/or start a family and do all that stuff because (in states that have yet to reform their laws) they stand to lose half their shit and not even have half a kid to show for it.
> I have zero sympathy for people, of any gender, for whom not being on the favorable end of unequal treatment in divorce/custody is the marginal difference that makes them not get married.
I guess you have zero sympathy for a large chunk of men then, because first you say that men don't get married because they lose their stuff in a divorce, and then you say that you have zero sympathy for people who don't get married because of it.
"I would get married but I don't trust my potential spouse not to screw me over" is just not something that requires sympathy. If that's how someone feels, it's probably better for everyone (them, their spouse, and society as a whole) that they don't get married. There's no virtue in being married without a strong basis of mutual trust, nor is there any shame in remaining unmarried because you haven't found someone right for you
Simply on semantic grounds, this is an unreasonable conclusion. "I will not do X unless I am given an unfair advantage" is not at all the same as "I will not do X if the system is unfairly biased against me".
Where's the contradiction? No sympathy for those that don't marry, sympathy for those that do.
I don’t believe my citations are wrong, nor that they’re out of context as it relates to demographic trends, but you’re free to provide your own if you have them.
Additional citations below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UThiu3Q_NcQ
https://19thnews.org/2025/09/poll-traditional-family-gender-...
https://19thnews.org/2025/09/polling-2025/
Its not your citations that are wrong, regardless of quality or bias I'm sure they back up your opinion.
It's your opinion that I take issue with.
Your thoughts of my opinions and mental models are irrelevant to me, but of course you’re free to comment as much as you’d like and mods will allow. I take no offense because I do not care, and no offense is intended in informing.
> If women feel like it is no longer safe to marry because they will be forced into equal custody, those rates would decline
IIUC, the new neutral bias applies regardless of marriage.
If a woman is looking to create a kid whom she has sole custody of, then what she is really looking for is a DIY sperm donor. I'm sure there are plenty of men downright eager to sign a contract relinquishing any paternity claim/liability as a condition of dating.
If you're talking about cases where a woman wants to create a kid, while retaining a unilateral ability to choose whether to have the man in the kid's life or not? That is a terrible dynamic and is exactly what needed reform.
> I'm sure there are plenty of men downright eager to sign a contract relinquishing any paternity claim/liability as a condition of dating.
Are there?
I don't know. I don't think most men are as mercenary as that.
As someone who was literally offered this situation (a lesbian couple I was friends with that wanted a child) I can say that it simply wasn't something I could seriously consider.
How could I exist knowing that I had a child that I had little or no relationship with? A child who would constantly wonder about their father and why I wasn't part of their life?
I don't think it's just me, I think most guys would have a problem with that.
And maybe the ones that don't wouldn't be the best choice for being a father?
> If women feel like it is no longer safe to marry because they will be forced into equal custody, those rates would decline.
What kind of a batshit characterization of women is this? You think women will only marry a man if they are guaranteed custody of any potential children in a potential divorce?
It is my belief, in the American macro of policy, it is simply rational and prudent for women to avoid marriage and children whenever possible (as a practitioner in risk management, assessing and managing risk, and a rationalist) so long as the policy is what it is. My opinion would change if the policy, macro, and experience changes and failure modes are less brutal (there’s ~$100B in child support debt outstanding, single parent outcomes are suboptimal, 23 million children live in a single parent home, etc). But as it stands, you’re setting yourself up for failure by entertaining marriage (considering 40-50% failure rates for first marriages) and children (two incomes required, $330k to raise a child 0-18 in 2023 dollars excluding daycare and college). The median household income in Kentucky as of this comment is ~$62k/year. Half of all violent crime in Kentucky over the last six years was domestic violence of both men and women. Returning to the labor force as a stay at home parent (if divorce occurs), regardless of gender, is challenging at best. Might as well skydive without a parachute and hope you’re lucky enough to fall into a tree.
People change as well. Who you marry is potentially not who you want or need a divorce from. Sometimes the economic unpleasantness can be avoided with prenups, but this is much more rare than it should be. Choices can lead to substantial long term obligations and liability, binding for one to two decades, and I think better choices can be made (based on the evidence and the data).
My opinions in this thread are not gender driven, but data driven.
(~40% of pregnancies in the US are unintended every year as well, per the Guttmacher Institute, although I don’t have Kentucky specific numbers at hand in that context)
For most men, marriage is one of the most unwise actions they can legally take in their life. This is due to it being co-opted by the state for its own purposes. Society needs a new word and a new social status for the element of marriage, but without its legal standing, e.g. "maritage" (signifying the heritage of marriage).
It's always been co-opted. It's just now it's a way worse deal than it used to be.
[dead]
> I couldn't go into a playground without some thought of having to prove I wasn't a child trafficker.
I was my wife's caregiver and dad to 5 young sons over 20years. I was the sole parent taking them to playgrounds and other outdoor activities, upwards to 200x a year.
In all those events, I never experienced nor witnessed anything remotely like what you described. Not for me and not for any other solo dad. On rare occasion, I was complimented for spending time with them. That's about all the notice I got.
Thanks for the anecdote.
Thanks! This particular one occurred over 1000x. I made my kids sick of every playground within 50 miles.
I think it's fair to assume things like these are location dependent.
> I think it's fair to assume things like these are location dependent.
Well, it certainly puts the notion on the table.
Let's run with that. Let's say that qualified folks have evidenced this phenomenon; we've learned there are regions in the US where playground dads are routinely considered to be dangerous to their own kids (and presumably kids in general).
And it's not universal. This indicates there's some strong social effect that can be tightly limited to a region - be widespread and pervasive in one region and fully absent in another.
What sort of effect could mass-mold minds across an entire region yet still be so geographically limited?
They can fix the law without abandoning the 50/50 principle. There are several anecdotes in the article about judges ignoring evidence of abuse.
> There are several anecdotes in the article about judges ignoring evidence of abuse
If the judge wasn't convinced in the anecdote when it was his job to figure it out with his career on the line, we have no right to assume that the judge got it wrong, without additional evidence. Feigning victimhood is a popular sport.