``..I would suggest to start with the most abstract level, and while qualifying that never letting it disappear from view: the united states is a male-supremacist social order...'' Carrol
---------
Taking the above at face value, is why I was reluctant to expand on Joanna's question. What is really at issue isn't quite the battle of the sexes over the kids and the money. What seems to underlay what I was trying to describe was the difficulty of re-negotiating masculinity in its contexts of fathers and children. There is or should be a much more comprehensive confrontation over this, since the traditional systems of values can be profoundly challenged by simply refusing to reproduce these systems.
There is something seriously wrong with the presumption of an abstract male supremacy uber alles. It doesn't track in whole realms of social ordering in the US, in quite the way that it is theoretically supposed to. The basic schema is women nurture, men provide. If this were accurate, we would be living in an Old Testament fundamentalist state---where we might be headed in any case.
None of this is to deny that most of the social-legal institutions I was describing are in fact heavily dominated by male hierarchies of power. They are with out doubt. The problem is what this power circumscribes as masculine.
Chuck Grimes