A point that has completely escaped me on, what for lack of a better term, one might call the masculinist side, is the attitude towards a man’s theoretical bastards. Now, I’m as opposed to divorce-at-will as anyone and I personally feel* that a woman who take a man’s children away from him simply because she isn’t happy at the moment deserves to be strangled with her fallopian tubes.
And yet, if I were to learn that a child of mine was not, in fact, mine biologically, I cannot fathom the notion of loving that child any less. To be honest, were I to learn that Big Chilly or – Cthulhu forfend – Bane were the actual father, my first thought would be to shake his hand and thank him for a gift of such inestimable value. I might even have tears of gratitude in my eyes, although I’m not a Bane-class weeper.
Now, I’m not saying that I wouldn’t eventually get around to kicking his ass on the whole cuckoldry thing, of course, as well as wreaking a degree of just havoc on the other party responsible. But what does this have to do with the child? I am not saying that men should ever be held legally responsible for that which is provably not theirs, but I strongly suspect that most of those men who are so militantly against the thought of raising another man’s child do not have children of their own.
I’ve seen far too much love on the part of adoptive parents to believe otherwise. One of the stories that most amused me growing up was hearing how a Korean neighbor, adopted as an infant, went to her white parents and demanded to know if she was adopted. She was ten. And despite the glaring differences between her and her blond-haired, blue-eyed Scandinavian siblings, the thought that she didn’t belong with them had literally never crossed her mind.
*in other words, this is not my rational and reasoned position on the matter, it’s simply how I feel. I have no interest in attempting to debate or discuss my feelings. If you have a burning desire to do so, go away and watch Oprah or something.