And yet, ironically, in the last five years in which twice as many men have started seeking alimony, women’s earnings dollar for dollar compared to men’s have dropped from 77 cents to 75. “If you imagine a woman who was not working and had a long marriage come to an end, no one objects to her application,” he points out And the courts seem to agree, on certain conditions. When a man can convince a judge that he has been a stay-at-home dad, has stood by his wife for an impressive stretch of time or has become sick and cannot reasonably support himself, he is well on his way to that monthly cheque. After all, what precisely do the tens of thousands go to? Beer and pizza? Aftershave? Gym memberships?Stanley Siller finds something wrong with such tacit assumptions of male parasitism.

But that still leaves a tidy sum, and for the husbands who have no child support to pay, it leaves a virtual cash bonanza. To the female doctors and lawyers, businesswomen and other professionals who have slogged up the corporate hill to earn salaries in the low six figures, the idea that they should be held legally liable to pay tens of thousands to their five-to-no-figure-earning exes, doesn’t seem fair. In nearly all divorces that involve children, the wife gets custody. Many of the husbands who receive alimony use part of it to pay for child support.

As one 37-year-old male writer comments, “It’s kind of wimpy.” And as the American TV journalist Joan Lunden famously remarked during her own acrimonious divorce, “Why the courts don’t tell a husband who has been living off his wife to go out and get a job is beyond me.”But in a society where women have as many career options available to them as men, why shouldn’t a wife who has been living off her husband also go out and pound the pavement herself? Stanley Siller, the founder of the National Organization for Men, thinks that is a very good question. That situation doesn’t play too well with the bowling crowd.” Nor does it impress a judge.The fact is, on common sense grounds alone, many Americans have a hard time understanding why a man needs alimony at all. “I have applied for alimony or maintenance for male clients many times over the last ten or 12 years, and had it denied,” he complains. “Judges do not consider the application on the same level that they would an application for a woman.” Why don’t they? As Raoul Felder explains, “The usual profile is that we get a very wealthy woman, and the man basically marries the woman for the money. But back then, the feeling was that any man who regarded his wife as a meal ticket was a cad In some quarters, it still is.