I was led to write about the falling standard of living in the middle class to touch on a thorny subject: that of alimony. Alimony for the poor is about three hundred reais, and in fact the expenses usually weigh on the woman. In fact, it is easy for a poor person to disappear in Brazil and it actually makes sense to make the State’s hand available to help the mother of her abandoned child. And an important detail: if a woman decides to harass a man using his son to extract money as a form of revenge, she will attract wrath, and the Brazilian State is not well known for its ability to prevent bloody crimes, let alone punish them. them. You will not see women taking drug dealers to court to pay for food.
The Maria da Penha law does not prevent any man from killing any woman. What the law does is give the woman a piece of paper saying that So-and-So is an aggressor and cannot come that far near her. If so-and-so is really an aggressor, the little piece of paper is useless. He’s going to kill his ex-wife and the case will come out in Datena later, along with so many others. If so-and-so is not an aggressor, the state paper is there anyway saying he is. The piece of paper is used for the ex-wife or ex-girlfriend to harass So-and-so, disappear with the children, defame, etc.
Contracted men and well in the tape
I don’t think I’m too flamboyant to say that there is a widespread misandry in the middle class. It’s even cute for the ladies to come out saying they were raped. I believe that, paradoxically, this is a result of men being more likely to dedicate themselves to public life than women. Which is easier: telling a Swede that being Brazilian is horrible, as bad as being born in the Belgian Congo, or telling a Brazilian? Brazilian knows what it’s like to be Brazilian. Likewise, women know what it’s like to be a woman, and men are easier to trick when it comes to “gender oppression.” If there are more self-employed men in the public space than self-employed women (I say self-employed as opposed to pole), it is natural that feminist victimhood is common.
In addition, men are less prone to victimization. than that of women. A woman gets a man if she proves to be too fragile – it’s harder for her to get a man if she’s strong like an Olympic judoka. A man doesn’t get a woman if he’s too fragile. Woman keeps complaining about structural fatphobia; in fat activism, there are only women and gay people. On the other hand, the bearded ones in flowered shirts and thick-rimmed glasses, however deconstructed they may be, will not organize themselves to campaign for the acceptance of the small dick.
Last, but not least, has cute misandria. Before they suffer a heartbreak and start gorging on ice cream or abusing illicit substances, they have the natural beauty of youth. Then men will nod to what a mob of crazy brats says to be okay with them.
The unbalanced say “Oh my God, how bad men are! Pass this bill over here, you toxic, virile, intoxicating man!” And men find it beautiful to say: “How bad men are! Almost none are as good as me. The defenseless ladies count on my exceptional magnanimous heart to defend them!” And so the bills come out. All with the heated support of the zap-zap uncles, the politicized middle class. Then, when the anti-family laws pass, it’s all the fault of the PT, cultural Marxism, feminazis, Globo, globalism, the UN, – even when it’s Bolsonaro and his base evangelicals.
Indeed, women must denounce misandry. I’m doing it myself here, and I highlight the work of the duo Dámaris Nunis and Karen Marins. However, as the majority of the population engaged in ideological and partisan politics is male, change cannot be expected without a review of male behavior. Dear Male Readers: Misandrical flattery isn’t even worth it in the short term (when they’re still cute), because they can put you in jail! Whether the misandrist is a feminist or an evangelical, the way is jail. If your problem is chivalry, it’s time to wake up to life and remember that women are human beings too, therefore, they are capable of petty motivations. It is necessary to question their motivations as much as those of men.
Is alimony alimony?
Among the poor, I am willing to believe that alimony serve to contribute to the feeding of children. In the middle and upper classes, things are completely different. We see news of parents being arrested for multimillion-dollar pension debts, and no one asks why the judge set such a high figure. Feminists see the non-payment of astronomical pensions as just the umpteenth proof of male wickedness.
No one in their right mind believes that well-fed women who ask for millions of delayed alimony ask because they need to ensure that their children are fed. . Therefore, the pension is not alimony. I agree that parents with conditions should not only pay for their children’s food, but it is the fact that the pension is based on food that justifies the debtor’s imprisonment. As the offspring cannot go hungry, it is necessary to arrest them and make them pay. But if the man actually wants to kill his ex-wife with a knife – and not from hunger – then it’s not a case of prison, it’s a case of paperwork.
It is tacit in the middle class that men must pay the high sums that the judge determines. What is difficult to discern is the purpose of this. First of all, it is worth asking: does everyone believe that men are all scoundrels who refuse to help their children? I don’t even believe it. So why not leave things on the basis of good faith and make deals in private, without putting the State in the middle? Let’s say that a man’s income drops – something common especially now, in the pandemic. If he has fallen, he will have to go to court to ask for a reduction in his pension based on the reduction in his income. Justice is not quick – and the cases that gained prominence in the press, namely, the player Giba and the rap singer Falcão, have to do with this reduction in income.
So let’s admit right away that alimony is a mechanism by which women dumped against the men who dumped them. They prefer to do for evil what could be done for good.
But does that explain everything? And the children’s side? After all, the pension continues: it goes up to 24 years if the son is still studying, and even then, I don’t know why, the pension lasts until the father takes courage and goes to court against the son. Among pedestrians this will be embarrassing, but among lawyers, businessmen, teachers, it is normal.
The new normal
I got to thinking about the subject because I traveled to see my family in the Southeast – an event that almost always has the air of an anthropological expedition. In this, I discovered that I am an exception in saying that I did not need alimony while I was a daughter who studied. I wanted to say I’m bragging in writing this, but no. It’s like I’ve discovered that in the entire scene everyone has daggers and daggers ready to shove each other down their throats except me. We brag when we’re comfortable, not when we’re in a minefield. Then I thought that I shouldn’t have been scared, because, in fact, I see middle-class people talking very naturally about stretched pensions ad infinitum, about fights in the justice (almost always told by the mother, who is not ashamed) and even parents who think they have a good relationship with their child because they have already stipulated a future date for the end of the pension. (If the relationship is good, why not stop the obligation now? Among gentlemen, it is better to avoid the police threat. If I were a father, I would be telling my children from childhood how I expect a decent person to behave.)
Then I recovered in memory my reasoning for giving up alimony. I don’t think I should even have to reason, but when we pass for a fool, we have to give justifications.
The question was: do I need this money? No, because I’ve already found a source of income that, although modest, allows me not to ask anyone for money as long as I have a roof over my head, and there’s still plenty left over. If I need money, I’d rather ask my dad than make him do it. If he didn’t want to give it to me out of pure meanness (and not because he was tight), it would be better for me to exclude him from my personal relationships and stay only with relatives I could count on.
This reasoning elementary is what people don’t do. In addition, my behavior was always frugal, I spent only on books and beer, standing stiffly, taking the bus or walking. The only financial gain I would deem important in my life would be one that allowed me to keep a house. This demands stability of income – which, for me, translated into the need to find a profession, an almost impossible mission for an academic in the middle of the implosion of the academy bubble. In the end, I would finish my doctorate in less time, not needing months of scholarship, because scholarship has an expiration date and, therefore, does not allow for a stable ceiling. I think another atypical trait of mine is rushing into problems in order to resolve them soon. This explosive temper can be a problem in itself, but I don’t suffer from one evil: pushing problems with my belly and living with them indefinitely. And this is a very common evil.
So my mentality is atypical today for a moral issue (it’s not right to force my father to give me money); frugality and a personality trait (I prefer to anticipate problems rather than delay them). This last trait is quite atypical and needs no comment. I think it’s quite common for people to push problems with the belly and that’s not always a bad thing.
If I know the atypical (which is myself), then I can extract what is the typical. We live in a flattening of the middle class and people typically want to have a better life than their parents. They are far from frugal; they don’t even dream of walking. They pay to use Uber and they pay to burn in the gym what they could burn on foot. They don’t learn to make everyday food; when they put their little feet in the kitchen, it’s to do something like a TV chef. In a word: they don’t even have the conditions to have a frugal life, but they want luxury.
These young people grew up with a woman who was always blaming someone else – a man – for her own misfortunes. The broth of victimism comes from society as a whole and also from the mother herself. They are not encouraged to judge their own merits. They learned from their mother that it’s always someone else’s fault, and they deserve everything themselves. The world owes them, as the father owes the mother.
And so they live with a standard that the father owes them, with the problem of their own unsustainability going on with their belly. The father will die one day, and God only knows what will become of these people when they no longer have fathers. In the meantime, the middle class is being torn apart in an intergenerational internecine war, with the standard of the older people being reduced to the provisional benefit of the younger ones.
