GMP’s Noah Brand was interviewed for The Globe and Mail about a documentary by Sarah Polley financed by the National Film Board of Canada. Polley details how her family discovered and then dealt with the fact that the man she called Dad was not her biological father.
In 2007 I was on set in Montreal, shooting a scene for the film Mr. Nobody. I received a phone call from a friend warning me that a journalist had found out a piece of information about my life that I had kept a secret for a year. I got in touch with the journalist and begged him not to print the story. It was a story that I had kept secret from many people in my life including my father. It took some time and many tears to convince the journalist not to print the story within the week, but I left that conversation convinced that it was not a secret I could keep for long, and that if I wanted the people in my life and outside my life to know the story in my own words, I would have to take action.
I flew to Toronto that night to tell my father the news. He was not my biological father. This had been confirmed by a DNA test with a man I had met a year earlier. I had met my biological father almost by accident, though I had long suspected based on family jokes and rumours that my mother may have had an affair that led to my conception.
The father’s passivity upon learning the news is striking. In the movie’s trailer he says “this is a great, great story.” To be blunt, it’s no wonder that something like this happened to him:
My father’s response to this staggering piece of news was extraordinary. He has always been a man who responds to things in unusual ways, for better or for worse. He was shocked, but not angry. His chief concern, almost immediately, was that my siblings and I not put any blame on my mother for her straying outside of their marriage. He was candid about his own lack of responsiveness towards her and how that may have led her to the point where she sought out the affection of another person. And then he began to write. And write and write and write.
This film is a further denigration of the cuckolded man, a celebration of women’s unfettered sexual choice and all for the sake of having a good story to tell. Polley attempts to throw art into the mix, but it’s merely an excuse to wallow in their own familial filth. And it’s all held together by the tricked man laughing at his own ineptness. Some might say that he is enlightened or easy-going or whatever. Or maybe he’s fully fixed with a deep self-loathing by which he excuses transgressions passed against him. He is first a human, then a man, but then also a proponent of liberalism and feminism. Those have killed his human and masculine instinct and now, to complete his humiliation, he wants the story to be told.* “Because it’s such a good story and I’m a good liberal who cannot hide a good story just because I’m the sucker in it.” He wants to own his degradation in front of the world and of course the capitalizing daughter who is despicable enough to hide an important secret from her father in the first place is willing to pull it all together. And it all stems from a sick, dishonest act that at least one person should come along and put their finger on. The mother was sick; the father is sick; the daughter seems sick and dishonest and horrible as well.
*It’s a given that if a husband had duped his wife in any way (obviously not in her maternity but something else) there would be no celebration of it, no telling of the “good story” of his dishonesty, no excuse-making.
The thing that struck me about the trailer was the horrible lightness of it all. It’s a part of life and life just keeps going and what can you do but accept life, and so on. It was like a fucking Coke ad. Amazing how unserious ‘intellectuals’ are these days.
It all comes back to egalitarianism. Forget tradition and evaluate all things on the basis of pure logic. Man equals woman. A married man being unfaithful is equal to a married woman being unfaithful. A married man having a kid out of wedlock is equal to a married woman having another man’s kid within her own marriage.
If you follow this thinking then it is perfectly rational to get to this place -
There was none of the screaming or chair-tossing often found in mainstream portrayals of cuckoldry, as men’s paternity is announced or renounced from a manila envelope, Maury Povich style.
“There’s this idea people have that men’s commitment to fatherhood is this fragile thing, easily shattered,” said Noah Brand, editor-in-chief of the Good Men Project, an online magazine. “It’s not an absolute rule.”
But what we really have is – a whore of a mother, a bitch of a daughter and a joke of a non-father.
It sounds like your reaction is that of a person who empathizes too much. That is: Shit, this could happen to me! And so you label them as sick etc. Perhaps also you are pissed at the obvious attempt to manipulate public sentiment further towards allowing women to dow whatever they want without consequence.
However, the most important thing here is to not let it happen to you.
Finally, consider that the mother’s sons might actually carry the same genes and might be cuckolded as well. I suspect too, that there are men out there who are good at detecting and resisting manipulative, cuckolding bitches.
Let’s say this was a baby switched at birth, and the mother wasn’t the mother. Would it be just as amusing?
There is a qualitative difference between that and cuckoldry. In the case of a baby switched at birth, the mother still has a child out there (unless it was switched to an abusive family.) Even though she is raising someone else’s child, her child is also being raised by someone else.
In the case of cuckoldry, the man is raising someone else’s child and gets nothing in return.
It’s a sticky situation. As Dalrock would say, infidelity does not necessarily require divorce.
“It was the most manly-in-a-good-sense part of it. He was taking responsibility because it was his marriage. That is deeply admirable in my mind.”
Except, the deception that was his life is not all his responsibility. There is a difference between taking responsibility for the mistakes of your life and ignoring the wrongs done against you.
I can’t imagine how I would react in this man’s situation – finding out his late wife cheated and his adult child was not really his. But, I can guarantee that it wouldn’t be “Say, this would make a great documentary.” That they are congratulating this man for pushing all of the feelings of hurt, anger and shame says all you need to know about the definition of masculinity they expect us to embrace.
The point of this attitude is to seperate man from his biology. To the marxist/feminist crowd (even those that don’t know they are marxist/feminist), sex is not about procreation. The “purpose” of sex is pleasure. It’s not about forming close bonds. It’s not about making babies. It’s for pleasing oneself. Ignore the millions of years of evolution that preceded the invention of birth control. The “modern” era with all of its new sociological definitions is all we have to concern ourselves with. We should love everyone equally regardless of whether they are related or not. We could all exchange our children and the love would just transfer over, because, genes are all the same anyways. Men just have to fall in line with what women want.
In the same way you guys have limited sympathy for women who use their best years chasing men who won’t commit, I have limited sympathy for this man. It sounds like his wife was openly having an affair and yet he stayed with her. He is the wronged party, and it’s on him to stand up for himself. Maybe he has so little masculinity, he doesn’t care.
“Maybe he has so little masculinity, he doesn’t care.”
Maybe masculinity has been denegrated so badly that he abandoned all he had. The feminine equivalent would be a body-building power-executive married to a loafer who fathered and supported children with her money while she was working until all hours of the night.
“*It’s a given that if a husband had duped his wife in any way (obviously not in her maternity but something else) there would be no celebration of it, no telling of the “good story” of his dishonesty, no excuse-making.”
Damn right. Think about what happens in those “switched at birth” cases, where it’s consider high crime and treason to do such a thing and the media makes a pity-circus of it. Yet when it’s dad who is duped, people are like “shrug.” Something is truly off about this society.
What bothers me is the way that they imply that men shouldn’t care about paternity, but they use highly atypical cases like this one to demonstrate it.
Sarah Polley was a child actress, so for most of her childhood, she would have been bringing in a lot more money than it would have cost to raise her. She was on one of the most popular TV shows in Canada when she was a kid, so financially, she was a goldmine. Since then, she’s become a (relatively) famous actress as an adult, so her dad can be assured of being taken care of in his old age. So whatever he invested in her as a child, it paid off wonderfully.
I wonder if Noah Brand ever asked himself if the father would be so happy with this revelation if Sarah Polley had turned out to just be some crackwhore, in and out of rehab all her life. Maybe he would’ve. Maybe he’s that much of a tool. We’ll never know, but either way, the situation he was in is nothing like the situation most cuckolded fathers are in. Especially since he apparently has a few other real kids to pass on his genes.
What is fucking enraging is that Sarah Polley is cut from the same cuckolding cloth. How long did she plan on sitting on the news? One year? Two years? Forever?
I hate cases that use the mother’s vibrant and extroverted personality to assume that cuckold is just a normal thing that would happen.
Cases like this are why even married guys need to join the manosphere and learn game. It’s not just that he’s less likely to get cheated on and end up being the victim of some alpha’s nuclear AMOG (being charged with raising his child for him). I think a guy who proactively learns relationship game and puts it into practice feels a lot less personal guilt when something like this happens and is more ready to lower the boom and get emotionally past it when he’s in that position. He knows he didn’t wimp out and if the worst happens, he doesn’t beat himself up about it and excuse a slut in so doing. That matters a lot when it comes to what comes out of it, where does he go from here and does it ruin him. No matter how alpha you are you can still get screwed over, but knowing game is useful both ways. If you win you win bigger, if you lose you’re still better off for knowing game. Reproduction is now, and has always been, an ugly sordid business, and women will always seek to window-dress it and hide the real truth, from men and even from themselves. You can go down that rabbit hole yourself or be dragged into it, but you can’t escape what people are.
Doctors know when a man is being cuckolded because doctors know which blood types a child can have when his parents are of a certain blood type. For instances, if both of the supposed parents are “A” blood type, then the child can only be “A” or “O” blood type. If the kid ends up with an “AB” blood type, then that means the “father” is not the father.
The doctors keep their mouths shut though; they have the sucker sign the birth certificate. Meanwhile doctors go out of their way to make sure the MOTHER gets the right kid.
What “manly-in-a-good-sense” reaction is possible other than: “Ah, I see. My lying, cheating, whore of an wife spawned a lying, manipulative bitch of a daughter. This concludes my interest in either of them. Pardon me while I check the paternity of ‘my’ other children.”
Hammerhead makes some good points. Also, Diane was in her 40s and had already had 4 kids when she was unfaithful. She wasn’t some young, hot thing who would have inspired sexual jealousy in him.
I’m starting to have a new appreciation for these stories because of what they imply. Tacit in such tales is the unstated notion that contrary to all the talk about women and sacrifice, even feminists cannot get away from the truth that men are stronger and more capable of enduring horribleness so that innocents won’t suffer unnecessarily. No one ever hypothesizes on how the cheating mom could correct the situation.
Think about what happens in those “switched at birth” cases, where it’s consider high crime and treason to do such a thing and the media makes a pity-circus of it. Yet when it’s dad who is duped, people are like “shrug.” Something is truly off about this society.
I think this is all manufactured. The reality is that through evolutionary time women have very rarely had to deal with babies switched at birth. And thus they have no visceral emotional feelings about it, regardless of any learned feelings.
The more likely thing to happen is that in groups where high male input is required a pregnant woman is abandoned or a male is cuckolded. In most males, cuckoldry evokes a visceral level of anger that is amazing. Similarly, many white women experience enormous amounts of emotional pain when abandoned like that.
well, if we are in a society of gender equality, Mrs. Woods should’ve been arrested when she gave Tiger the Tiger Beatdown ™. You’d arrested a man who attacked his wife for cheating, wouldn’t ya know….
I think dad lost his man card decades ago – from the sound of it, he probably knew his wife was having an affair, and didn’t care enough to do anything about it.
I’m not so sure I’d give the daughter too much grief – she’s an adult when she found out, mom’s dead for years and years, dad probably suspected anyway. What is there to do about it now?
Sooooo…Mum’s been dead for years and years…how, exactly, did she perish?
Dad is (acting) disinterested in her fucking around on him? Sort of – no, actually, he is joking about it?
Perhaps “Dad” is satisfied that Mum is roasting in Hell for her marital oathbreaking.
Or, perhaps, “Dad” had a thumb in sending her out of this world, and is downplaying the situation to protect himself against a murder charge. A man using his own faux feminism as a beard to protect himself from a whore-o-cide accusation? She was so full of life – until daddy found out?
Now, THAT would be a good story.
The Bibo Sez “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves” (Matthew 7:15).
One of the stupidest post and some of the most ridiculous commenters I have seen on this site. You people sound like insecure little bitches terrified that your woman is going to cuckold you, whatever that means.
Get this – regardless of what child they are raising, men get exactly the same thing out of raising a child – nothing. I say nothing unless you have a superstitious belief that those little gobs of poo are somehow gifts of god.
Mike,
The next time you start thinking like that, think about this. One hundred years from now, what influence are you going to have on the world? If you don’t find a good woman and make babies with her, it’s likely going to be none. Unless, of course, you can write a lot better than your last comments.
Me, on the other hand, my kids might still be alive. There’s a good chance I’ll have grandchildren, great-grandchildren etc., etc. Not only will they be carrying my genes, which I think are worth carrying on, but they’ll probably know who I was and what I did. If that’s not important to you, then MGTOW all you want. If you want to leave something behind in this world, having children is your best bet.
The thing that struck me about the trailer was the horrible lightness of it all. It’s a part of life and life just keeps going and what can you do but accept life, and so on. It was like a fucking Coke ad. Amazing how unserious ‘intellectuals’ are these days.
It all comes back to egalitarianism. Forget tradition and evaluate all things on the basis of pure logic. Man equals woman. A married man being unfaithful is equal to a married woman being unfaithful. A married man having a kid out of wedlock is equal to a married woman having another man’s kid within her own marriage.
If you follow this thinking then it is perfectly rational to get to this place -
There was none of the screaming or chair-tossing often found in mainstream portrayals of cuckoldry, as men’s paternity is announced or renounced from a manila envelope, Maury Povich style.
“There’s this idea people have that men’s commitment to fatherhood is this fragile thing, easily shattered,” said Noah Brand, editor-in-chief of the Good Men Project, an online magazine. “It’s not an absolute rule.”
But what we really have is – a whore of a mother, a bitch of a daughter and a joke of a non-father.
It sounds like your reaction is that of a person who empathizes too much. That is: Shit, this could happen to me! And so you label them as sick etc. Perhaps also you are pissed at the obvious attempt to manipulate public sentiment further towards allowing women to dow whatever they want without consequence.
However, the most important thing here is to not let it happen to you.
Finally, consider that the mother’s sons might actually carry the same genes and might be cuckolded as well. I suspect too, that there are men out there who are good at detecting and resisting manipulative, cuckolding bitches.
Let’s say this was a baby switched at birth, and the mother wasn’t the mother. Would it be just as amusing?
It might be.
On the other hand, women often tend to get very angry about this.
Let’s say this was a baby switched at birth, and the mother wasn’t the mother. Would it be just as amusing?
There is a qualitative difference between that and cuckoldry. In the case of a baby switched at birth, the mother still has a child out there (unless it was switched to an abusive family.) Even though she is raising someone else’s child, her child is also being raised by someone else.
In the case of cuckoldry, the man is raising someone else’s child and gets nothing in return.
It’s a sticky situation. As Dalrock would say, infidelity does not necessarily require divorce.
“It was the most manly-in-a-good-sense part of it. He was taking responsibility because it was his marriage. That is deeply admirable in my mind.”
Except, the deception that was his life is not all his responsibility. There is a difference between taking responsibility for the mistakes of your life and ignoring the wrongs done against you.
I can’t imagine how I would react in this man’s situation – finding out his late wife cheated and his adult child was not really his. But, I can guarantee that it wouldn’t be “Say, this would make a great documentary.” That they are congratulating this man for pushing all of the feelings of hurt, anger and shame says all you need to know about the definition of masculinity they expect us to embrace.
The point of this attitude is to seperate man from his biology. To the marxist/feminist crowd (even those that don’t know they are marxist/feminist), sex is not about procreation. The “purpose” of sex is pleasure. It’s not about forming close bonds. It’s not about making babies. It’s for pleasing oneself. Ignore the millions of years of evolution that preceded the invention of birth control. The “modern” era with all of its new sociological definitions is all we have to concern ourselves with. We should love everyone equally regardless of whether they are related or not. We could all exchange our children and the love would just transfer over, because, genes are all the same anyways. Men just have to fall in line with what women want.
Not really surprised that guy got cheated on.
In the same way you guys have limited sympathy for women who use their best years chasing men who won’t commit, I have limited sympathy for this man. It sounds like his wife was openly having an affair and yet he stayed with her. He is the wronged party, and it’s on him to stand up for himself. Maybe he has so little masculinity, he doesn’t care.
“Maybe he has so little masculinity, he doesn’t care.”
Maybe masculinity has been denegrated so badly that he abandoned all he had. The feminine equivalent would be a body-building power-executive married to a loafer who fathered and supported children with her money while she was working until all hours of the night.
“*It’s a given that if a husband had duped his wife in any way (obviously not in her maternity but something else) there would be no celebration of it, no telling of the “good story” of his dishonesty, no excuse-making.”
Damn right. Think about what happens in those “switched at birth” cases, where it’s consider high crime and treason to do such a thing and the media makes a pity-circus of it. Yet when it’s dad who is duped, people are like “shrug.” Something is truly off about this society.
What bothers me is the way that they imply that men shouldn’t care about paternity, but they use highly atypical cases like this one to demonstrate it.
Sarah Polley was a child actress, so for most of her childhood, she would have been bringing in a lot more money than it would have cost to raise her. She was on one of the most popular TV shows in Canada when she was a kid, so financially, she was a goldmine. Since then, she’s become a (relatively) famous actress as an adult, so her dad can be assured of being taken care of in his old age. So whatever he invested in her as a child, it paid off wonderfully.
I wonder if Noah Brand ever asked himself if the father would be so happy with this revelation if Sarah Polley had turned out to just be some crackwhore, in and out of rehab all her life. Maybe he would’ve. Maybe he’s that much of a tool. We’ll never know, but either way, the situation he was in is nothing like the situation most cuckolded fathers are in. Especially since he apparently has a few other real kids to pass on his genes.
He has to be wondering about the other kids. Them too.
What is fucking enraging is that Sarah Polley is cut from the same cuckolding cloth. How long did she plan on sitting on the news? One year? Two years? Forever?
I hate cases that use the mother’s vibrant and extroverted personality to assume that cuckold is just a normal thing that would happen.
Cases like this are why even married guys need to join the manosphere and learn game. It’s not just that he’s less likely to get cheated on and end up being the victim of some alpha’s nuclear AMOG (being charged with raising his child for him). I think a guy who proactively learns relationship game and puts it into practice feels a lot less personal guilt when something like this happens and is more ready to lower the boom and get emotionally past it when he’s in that position. He knows he didn’t wimp out and if the worst happens, he doesn’t beat himself up about it and excuse a slut in so doing. That matters a lot when it comes to what comes out of it, where does he go from here and does it ruin him. No matter how alpha you are you can still get screwed over, but knowing game is useful both ways. If you win you win bigger, if you lose you’re still better off for knowing game. Reproduction is now, and has always been, an ugly sordid business, and women will always seek to window-dress it and hide the real truth, from men and even from themselves. You can go down that rabbit hole yourself or be dragged into it, but you can’t escape what people are.
Doctors know when a man is being cuckolded because doctors know which blood types a child can have when his parents are of a certain blood type. For instances, if both of the supposed parents are “A” blood type, then the child can only be “A” or “O” blood type. If the kid ends up with an “AB” blood type, then that means the “father” is not the father.
The doctors keep their mouths shut though; they have the sucker sign the birth certificate. Meanwhile doctors go out of their way to make sure the MOTHER gets the right kid.
What “manly-in-a-good-sense” reaction is possible other than: “Ah, I see. My lying, cheating, whore of an wife spawned a lying, manipulative bitch of a daughter. This concludes my interest in either of them. Pardon me while I check the paternity of ‘my’ other children.”
Hammerhead makes some good points. Also, Diane was in her 40s and had already had 4 kids when she was unfaithful. She wasn’t some young, hot thing who would have inspired sexual jealousy in him.
I’m starting to have a new appreciation for these stories because of what they imply. Tacit in such tales is the unstated notion that contrary to all the talk about women and sacrifice, even feminists cannot get away from the truth that men are stronger and more capable of enduring horribleness so that innocents won’t suffer unnecessarily. No one ever hypothesizes on how the cheating mom could correct the situation.
Think about what happens in those “switched at birth” cases, where it’s consider high crime and treason to do such a thing and the media makes a pity-circus of it. Yet when it’s dad who is duped, people are like “shrug.” Something is truly off about this society.
I think this is all manufactured. The reality is that through evolutionary time women have very rarely had to deal with babies switched at birth. And thus they have no visceral emotional feelings about it, regardless of any learned feelings.
The more likely thing to happen is that in groups where high male input is required a pregnant woman is abandoned or a male is cuckolded. In most males, cuckoldry evokes a visceral level of anger that is amazing. Similarly, many white women experience enormous amounts of emotional pain when abandoned like that.
Not a fan of Ludacris but he did make a fitting tune that should have been the backing track for that video:
Islam would be too good for these All-American scumbags.
No, something else entirely is called for.
The mom died when she was 11. I think this one goes down into the “what the fuck are you going to do” category.
well, if we are in a society of gender equality, Mrs. Woods should’ve been arrested when she gave Tiger the Tiger Beatdown ™. You’d arrested a man who attacked his wife for cheating, wouldn’t ya know….
My opinion would be based on the treatment of the biological father.
I think dad lost his man card decades ago – from the sound of it, he probably knew his wife was having an affair, and didn’t care enough to do anything about it.
I’m not so sure I’d give the daughter too much grief – she’s an adult when she found out, mom’s dead for years and years, dad probably suspected anyway. What is there to do about it now?
What is there to do about it now?
How about “don’t turn the family dirty laundry into an Oprahrriffic documentary celebrating cuckoldry”, for starters?
My Dearest Beloveds…
Sooooo…Mum’s been dead for years and years…how, exactly, did she perish?
Dad is (acting) disinterested in her fucking around on him? Sort of – no, actually, he is joking about it?
Perhaps “Dad” is satisfied that Mum is roasting in Hell for her marital oathbreaking.
Or, perhaps, “Dad” had a thumb in sending her out of this world, and is downplaying the situation to protect himself against a murder charge. A man using his own faux feminism as a beard to protect himself from a whore-o-cide accusation? She was so full of life – until daddy found out?
Now, THAT would be a good story.
The Bibo Sez “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves” (Matthew 7:15).
And that is what the Bibo Sez.
Bless you!
“The doctors keep their mouths shut though; they have the sucker sign the birth certificate. ”
Apparently hospitals have trouble collecting payment otherwise.
One of the stupidest post and some of the most ridiculous commenters I have seen on this site. You people sound like insecure little bitches terrified that your woman is going to cuckold you, whatever that means.
Get this – regardless of what child they are raising, men get exactly the same thing out of raising a child – nothing. I say nothing unless you have a superstitious belief that those little gobs of poo are somehow gifts of god.
You people are stupid.
update: sorry about that last post. I was drunk. My girl just cheated on me. Looks like I’m a big gob of poo myself.
Mike,
The next time you start thinking like that, think about this. One hundred years from now, what influence are you going to have on the world? If you don’t find a good woman and make babies with her, it’s likely going to be none. Unless, of course, you can write a lot better than your last comments.
Me, on the other hand, my kids might still be alive. There’s a good chance I’ll have grandchildren, great-grandchildren etc., etc. Not only will they be carrying my genes, which I think are worth carrying on, but they’ll probably know who I was and what I did. If that’s not important to you, then MGTOW all you want. If you want to leave something behind in this world, having children is your best bet.
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