Whilst I am sympathetic to men who have been royally abused over by their ex-wives and the insane Family Court system in the USA and the UK, I think men also have to take a certain amount of responsibility for the way in which they have abdicated their paternal roles:
Fathers, who enjoyed absolute authority within the household for several millennia, now find themselves at the beck and call of their wives and children. Indeed, most of my male friends are not fathers in any traditional sense at all; they occupy roughly the same status in their households as the help. They don’t guide their children through the moral quandaries of life — they guide them to their extracurricular activities from behind the wheel of a Dodge minivan….
It’s pretty simple. If you are unwilling to do something that’s been demanded of you, then don’t do it. You don’t have to be an ass about it, you don’t need to be impolite about it, you don’t even necessarily have to say anything at all. Just don’t do it. And that goes for the ex-husbands too. If you don’t want to be a court-appointed slave to your ex-wife, then don’t be. Go and lead that exciting life you always kind of wanted to lead but couldn’t. Join a mercenary troop in Iraq or an outlaw drug gang in Colombia. Climb a mountain in Tibet. Become a river guide in the Amazon. Leave and don’t look back. You’re not going to be permitted to be a father to you children anyhow, so stop pretending you are and enabling the system.
We all make compromises. They’re a necessary part of life with other people. But if you’re the only one making them, then you’re not compromising, you’re just surrendering. And yes, that actually does make you less of a man. Spacebunny often points out that women could not be the overweening bitch-queens of the family if their husbands did not permit them to be. If your home life is so terrible, what are you afraid of losing?