ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Robin Morgan
3. In response to a question concerning China's policy of compulsory abortion after the first child, Molly Yard responded, "I consider the Chinese government's policy among the most intelligent in the world" - Gary Bauer, "Abetting Coercion in China" The Washington Times, Oct. 10, 1989 4. "Overthrowing capitalism is too small for us. We must overthrow the whole ... patriarch!" - Gloria Steinem, radical feminist leader, editor of Ms. Magazine 5. "Marriage has existed for the benefit of men; and has been a legally sanctioned method of control over women.... We must work to destroy it. The end of the institution of marriage is a necessary condition for the liberation of women. Therefore it is important for us to encourage women to leave their husbands and not to live individually with men ... All of history must be re-written in terms of oppression of women. We must go back to ancient female religions like witchcraft" (from "The Declaration of Feminism" November, 1971) 6. "By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God" - Gloria Steinem, editor of Ms. Magazine) 7. "Let's forget about the mythical Jesus and look for encouragement, solace, and inspiration from real women ... Two thousand years of patriarchal rule under the shadow of the cross ought to be enough to turn women toward the feminist 'salvation' of this world" - Annie Laurie Gaylor, "Feminist Salvation," The Humanist, p. 37, July/August 1988 8. "In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them" - Dr. Mary Jo Bane, feminist and assistant professor of education at Wellesley College, and associate director of the school's Center for Research on Woman 9. "Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession... The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family- maker is a choice that shouldn't be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that" - Vivian Gornick, feminist author, University of Illinois, The Daily Illini, April 25, 1981 10. "The most merciful thing a large family can to do one of its infant members is to kill it" - Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, in "Women and the New Race" p. 67
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"Introducing the rarely used word misandry, defined as the hatred of men and the equivalent of misogyny (the difference being that we've all heard of misogyny). Examines the negative portrayal of men in the media and the negative associations that are made when the word men is used. Looks at how the deaths of men are hidden in news reporting. • Why is it always "women and children" and never "men and children"? NB For those peeps who think that a woman appears at approx 5:23 in the 'craftsmen' section, be aware that it's actually a man with long hair." ORIGINAL ARTICLE
By Peter Lloyd For The Mail On Sunday When John Prescott revealed he had bulimia, the world laughed. Yes, eating disorders are funny. Who knew? The former Deputy Prime Minister had revealed his struggle, no doubt hoping to help others blighted by the condition. But one award-winning political commentator declared a misdiagnosis, saying Prescott was ‘more likely just a greedy incompetent, who gobbled every treat going’. This wasn’t an isolated jibe. Feminist website Jezebel produced a What Prezza Was Eating… Daily Guidelines For Men – complete with fat and carbohydrate content. Would women be spoken about like this? Would it be tolerated? No way. I thought back to Prescott’s revelation in 2008 during the recent uproar over Victoria’s Secret, which launched an advertising campaign called The Perfect Body, showcasing the variety of underwear it sells. Women were outraged, it seems, because all the models were lithe and toned. US advertising trade publication Adweek reported that within days of posters going up, 10,000 people had signed a petition demanding the company ‘apologise for and amend the irresponsible marketing of your new bra range’. Complainants said the advert played on women’s insecurities, sent out damaging messages, and failed to celebrate diversity. Can you imagine if men made a similar response to the David Gandy posters for Marks & Spencer? Many of the same women who later went on to denounce Victoria’s Secret used their newspaper columns to leer at the images in ways that would make a builder blush. ‘Well done M&S on that autumn ad campaign. I’ve spent most of the past fortnight alternately lusting over David Gandy in his pants and that orange coat. But mainly David Gandy,’ said one. A broadsheet interviewer spent an entire article making jokes such as: ‘I’ve just buried my face in David Gandy’s underpants… it was heaven.’ And one famous feminist added: ‘It’s nice to see that objectification sometimes runs both ways.’ But a diet of David Beckham and Gandy, or whichever Hollywood muscle man of the moment is gracing the cover of Men’s Health, is unarguably as damaging to male self-perception as The Perfect Body is to females. More than 1.6million Britons suffer an eating disorder, ten per cent of whom are men. We have to contend with ‘bigorexia’, which sees men pump their bodies with hormones and protein shakes to get a bigger chest and arms. One leading rugby coach told me that anabolic steroid abuse was endemic among teenage players, desperate to emulate the muscular physiques of their sporting heroes. And at least two British teenage boys have died over the past few years after taking the banned slimming pill called DNP. One was apparently trying to get a ‘six-pack’. Ultimately, there is a wider malaise surrounding male health in general. Not only is there a lack of empathy for our health concerns, there is also a lack of medical care. For example, women are screened for breast, ovarian and cervical cancer, which is great. But there’s no screening programme for prostate cancer, even though it kills four times more men than cervical cancer does women. Research from Cancer Research UK illustrates that men are 16 per cent more likely to develop every form of unisex cancer in the first place, then 40 per cent more likely to die from it. Despite cases of oral cancer having risen by 50 per cent among UK men since 1989 – accounting for almost 2,000 deaths annually – there is no vaccination for young men against HPV, which causes it. Between 2007 and 2012, NHS Primary Care Trusts in the London boroughs of Haringey, Hammersmith and Fulham, Brent and Camden ‘spent £4,830,095 commissioning women’s services outside the NHS… and nothing on men’s’. It’s a trend that is visible nationally, with female care almost constantly ranked above that of men. Rather than being the subject of sympathetic public concern or the odd fundraising gala, men are repeatedly told it’s all their fault. But in truth, men aren’t dying sooner because they’re ignorant or proud. When men don’t discuss their health concerns it’s not because they’re wired this way – it’s because if they say anything, they’ll be greeted with shaming tactics to stop them, just like Prescott. I shall leave it to Dr Timothy Spector, Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at London’s King’s College, to summarise: ‘Compared to women, men have shorter markers of longevity, called telomeres – suggesting there’ll always be a biological difference [which justifies the need for men to get greater care]. The state needs to realise men are discriminated against by the set-up of the current UK system.’ I couldn’t have said it better myself. Stand By Your Manhood, by Peter Lloyd, is published this week by Biteback, priced £16.99. BY Shikha Dalmia | October 21, 2014
Liberal backers of feminists seem to be trading their long-cherished principle that the "ends don't justify the means" for the battle cry of "by any means necessary." How else to interpret theunabashed support that Ezra Klein, among the most influential young liberals in the country, recently extended to affirmative consent (or "yes means yes") laws that are proliferating across American campuses to deal with an alleged rape epidemic? To his credit, Klein unflinchingly and rightly acknowledges that California's law constitutes a draconian assault on the due process rights of men whom it would regard as guilty until proven otherwise, vastly increasing the prospects of false convictions. (I made a similar point in a previous columnhere.) But then Klein goes off the rails. He declares that this "terrible law is necessary." Why? Because there is an ugly "culture of entitlement" among American men and "ugly problems don't have pretty solutions." What's truly ugly is accepting totalitarian notions of justice to address a problem that is nowhere near as rampant as the proponents of "yes means yes" laws claim. What's driving Klein to such extremism is a 2007 Justice Department study that one in five women experience sexual assault on campus. If this factoid (it would dignify it too much to call it a statistic) were true, it would dwarf the crime rate even in the most brutal African ethnic wars, Heather MacDonald points out. Indeed, she notes, in 2012, Newark's rate of all violent crimes — murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault — was 1.1 percent. (And she has little reason to dismiss the statistic because it offers an excuse to return women to their chastity belts.) So how did Justice arrive at this figure, which has become gospel through repetition in feminist circles? Via a poorly constructed study that relied on responses from a self selected — not a random — sample of students at two colleges, and deployed a rather loose definition of "assault" that included an unwanted kiss. Klein — ironically, a champion of the hot new genre of supposedly fact-based "explanatory" journalism — swallowed this figure whole, even though it was effectively debunked by the National Crime and Victimization Survey conducted by the federal government's own Bureau of Justice Statistics last year. Widely regarded as the "gold standard" for accurately assessing crime rates even in categories like rape where a large portion go unreported, the survey found that the proportion of women subjected to rape or sexual assault fell 64 percent between 1995 and 2005, standing at a mere 1.1 per 1,000 women in 2010. What's more, 18- to 24-year-olds in college were no more likely to face rape or assault than peers who weren't in college. This isn't to minimize the terrible trauma endured by young women who have been the victims of sexual assault — it is only to place them in the proper numerical context. And there are plenty of other indicators beyond statistics suggesting that many American women don't exactly feel like they live in a vicious rape culture. If they did, Scout Willis, Bruce Willis and Demi Moore's daughter, wouldn't have fearlessly strolled topless in Manhattan to protest Instagram's policies against nude pictures last summer. Sure, she's quasi-famous. Nonetheless, try doing that in the pre-sexual revolution America or modern-day India (my native country) without getting assaulted or worse. Willis chose going topless as her form of protest precisely because, contrary to Klein's assertion, there is no longer a "culture of entitlement" among American men. Her stunt was possible only because social mores that used to work against women now work for them. Far from facing any sanction, she could count on those around her acknowledging — even cheering (like me) — her right to wield her sexuality as she saw fit without becoming prey to jerks who believe she's "asking for it." But social mores can't be enforced in a bedroom. No amount of attitude adjustment can protect every woman in every private setting where all she can rely on for her personal safety is the internal moral compass and mental balance of her partner. However, if there were a big disjunction between the broader culture and the personal morality of men, women would automatically adjust their behavior — just as one automatically locks one's home in an unsafe neighborhood. They would take common sense precautions and avoid excessive drinking or sleeping with multiple partners so as to reduce the odds of running into a creep. But if the hook-up culture is pervasive on campuses, it's because they don't find the risk they take to be incommensurable with the sexual upside they expect. That such a culture exists suggests that "yes means yes" laws are an overreaction to a vanishing problem. The sexual revolution gave women control over their sexual destiny by letting them conduct their sexual lives based on their own individual risk-reward assessment without being stigmatized as prudes or sluts. Its promise never was and never will be to guarantee complete safety — an impossible goal. What's more, this revolution managed to deliver its gains without sacrificing liberal norms of justice. It is implausible and dangerous to suggest that after all these gains these norms now must be trampled for further progress. This is why it is a very welcome development that 28 current and former Harvard law faculty members mounted a counter offensive to the left's jihad on men this week. They issued a statement denouncing their university's affirmative consent policy as lacking in "the most basic elements of fairness and due process [and being] overwhelmingly stacked against the accused," and urged Harvard to throw it out, even if that meant losing federal dollars. Throwing sons and brothers under the bus for crimes they haven't committed in a utopian quest to protect women from their lovers perverts justice, and reminds us that utopianism and totalitarianism are often two sides of the same coin. This column originally appeared in The Week. You can find Ms. Dalmia's full Week archivehere. ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Posted By Helen Smith By now, we have all heard (endlessly) about the video depicting a woman being catcalled by men in NYC. I wrote about this phenomenon in the conclusion of Men on Strike. Here is my take: Many years ago, I lived in New York City for graduate school and I worked as a psychologist for the state. My favorite pastime while walking to work or school was to stop and watch the construction workers building these incredible high structures all across the city. Sometimes, they were just working on old buildings to make sure they were in good repair. I would stand with wonder and watch the men as they balanced on beams, hosed down sidewalks, and handled heavy material like it was nothing. Though you might want to get Freudian here and think that I had some kind of penis envy—the hose and all—my feeling was one of admiration, not envy. I was grateful that these men were willing to build such incredible structures at the risk of their own life so that I, and my fellow New Yorkers, might have a better one. By the time I got to work or school, however, the sentiment of my fellow New Yorkers about the construction workers was not so positive. Often, women would complain that the men yelled out some kind of compliment or leer such as “looking good” or they would smack their lips. I can understand that this is not welcome for most women who just want to get to work or school without a leering squad. However, this is the only quality that these women remembered about the construction workers or men around the city who were providing services to them on a daily basis; the men’s better qualities and what they were doing escaped them. Many of the women were very angry and wanted something done about the men looking at them on the street. Gathering them up and putting them in jail for simply looking was fair justice for some of these women. I look around every day at the wonder of men, how many of them are the building blocks of our society, quietly going about their day around my office planting trees and doing the landscaping, or mowing lawns, running businesses that hire people, working as doctors to help people get better, or just making society a better place by their perseverance and abilities. But mainly what our society focuses on now is the negative traits that they perceive men to have. Misandry is so common that no one even questions it. Writer Camille Paglia offers a refreshing exception to this disparagement of men, as pointed out by Christina Hoff Sommers: For Paglia, male aggressiveness and competitiveness are animating principles of creativity: “Masculinity is aggressive, unstable, and combustible. It is also the most creative cultural force in history.” Speaking of the “fashionable disdain for ‘patriarchal society’ to which nothing good is ever attributed,” she writes, “But it is the patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman. It is capitalism that has given me the leisure to sit at this desk writing this book. Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture.” “Men,” writes Paglia, “created the world we live in and the luxuries we enjoy”: “When I cross the George Washington Bridge or any of America’s great bridges, I think–men have done this. Construction is a sublime male poetry.” Our society has become the angry leered-at woman who doesn’t care that men can build buildings or do amazing things like be good dads, husbands and sons. She focuses instead on the small flaws that some men have and extrapolates to all men; they are all dogs, rapists, perverts, deadbeats and worthless. Who needs them? We do. Our society has forgotten the wonder of men in its quest for retribution against men and boys who often weren’t even alive when women were being discriminated against. Many men understand the war that is going on against them and they are going underground or withdrawing their talents and going on strike in marriage, fatherhood, education and in society in general. They may not speak about it or use a megaphone to let the world know of their pain, frustration, and anger or just plain apathy, but it is there—raw and just underneath the surface. We as a society must wake up to what we are doing to men before it is too late and we live in a world that has left male potential in a wasteland. Our society is made better by men who are productive, happy and treated with fairness. We have only ourselves to blame if we do not turn the tide of the war on men, for without half the human experience, our society can crumble, just as surely as those New York buildings would if they no longer had men to work their sublime male poetry on them. Is that the world you want to live in? I don’t. Women and their Uncle Tims have declared a war on men — believe it. This catcall business, along with the focus on getting rid of sports, videogames and unsupervised sex for college men, is just another weapon in their arsenal for soon making it illegal to exhibit any stereotypical male traits. Fight back and don’t let them make typical male traits illegal or at least undesirable and questionable enough to warrant federal or state intervention. It is fine to let young men know the boundaries for interacting with women in a more appropriate way than catcalling or bothering women on the street. But to make typical male behavior an aberration is to give up not only men’s autonomy in what should be a free society but the “most creative cultural force in history.” ORIGINAL ARTICLE
"With human cloning technology just around the corner and enough frozen sperm in the world to already populate many generations, perhaps we should perform a cost-benefit analysis." [W]omen live longer, are healthier and are far less likely to commit a violent offense. If men were cars, who would buy the model that doesn’t last as long, is given to lethal incidents and ends up impounded more often?That's from the NYT, which is, of course, written for women. Stuff like this is considered light entertainment. It will be interspersed with serious articles about the "war on women." Enjoy! *** That last link goes to a search within the NYT for "war on women." I was amused by the old things that popped up. From 1927: "Berlin Men War on Women Who 'Doll Up' at Meals." Also 1927: "Stanley (Wis.) Bachelors War On Nuptial Lures by Women." (I don't want to buy the article, but I can see this snippet: "... of Stanley have declared 'war on women.' An organization has been tentatively for 'mutual protection from devices now used by the fair sex to entangle single...'") 1911: "WAR ON WOMEN GAMBLERS.; Chicago Detective Visits Fashionable Houses to Stop Poker Games." ("Chief of Police McWeeny declared war to-day on poker playing by women in private.") 1972: "The Church's War on Women." ("Pope Paul VI has reaffirmed the rules of priestly celibacy and debarred women from formal investiture by bishops in Roman Catholic orders. There were to be no female deacons, let alone female priests.") 1943: "Dr. Mead, Anthropologist, Reports On Effect of War on Women's Garb; She Tells Members of Fashion Group, Inc., That Utility Clothes in England Will Do Much to Reduce Class Consciousness." (What? Again I'm not paying to get to the article, but, Googling, I found a Smithsonian article saying that during WWII, the U.S. and British commands commissioned Margaret Mead to try to figure out why American and British soldiers had trouble understanding each other. She discovered that the British couldn't answer the question what's your favorite color without getting all complicated about it and concluded it had to do with their class consciousness.) Most apt, when it comes to the 2012 election, is this February 2011 editorial, "The War on Women." These are treacherous times for women’s reproductive rights and access to essential health care. House Republicans mistakenly believe they have a mandate to drastically scale back both even as abortion warfare is accelerating in the states. To stop them, President Obama’s firm leadership will be crucial. So will the rising voices of alarmed Americans.I'm guessing that the current usage of the term began right there. Posted by Ann Althouse at 7:36 PM By GREG HAMPIKIAN MAMMALS are named after their defining characteristic, the glands capable of sustaining a life for years after birth — glands that are functional only in the female. And yet while the term “mammal” is based on an objective analysis of shared traits, the genus name for human beings, Homo, reflects an 18th-century masculine bias in science. That bias, however, is becoming harder to sustain, as men become less relevant to both reproduction and parenting. Women aren’t just becoming men’s equals. It’s increasingly clear that “mankind” itself is a gross misnomer: an uninterrupted, intimate and essential maternal connection defines our species. The central behaviors of mammals revolve around how we bear and raise our young, and humans are the parenting champions of the class. In the United States, for nearly 20 percent of our life span we are considered the legal responsibility of our parents. With expanding reproductive choices, we can expect to see more women choose to reproduce without men entirely. Fortunately, the data for children raised by only females is encouraging. As the Princeton sociologist Sara S. McLanahan has shown, poverty is what hurts children, not the number or gender of parents. That’s good, since women are both necessary and sufficient for reproduction, and men are neither. From the production of the first cell (egg) to the development of the fetus and the birth and breast-feeding of the child, fathers can be absent. They can be at work, at home, in prison or at war, living or dead. Think about your own history. Your life as an egg actually started in your mother’s developing ovary, before she was born; you were wrapped in your mother’s fetal body as it developed within your grandmother. After the two of you left Grandma’s womb, you enjoyed the protection of your mother’s prepubescent ovary. Then, sometime between 12 and 50 years after the two of you left your grandmother, you burst forth and were sucked by her fimbriae into the fallopian tube. You glided along the oviduct, surviving happily on the stored nutrients and genetic messages that Mom packed for you. Then, at some point, your father spent a few minutes close by, but then left. A little while later, you encountered some very odd tiny cells that he had shed. They did not merge with you, or give you any cell membranes or nutrients — just an infinitesimally small packet of DNA, less than one-millionth of your mass. Over the next nine months, you stole minerals from your mother’s bones and oxygen from her blood, and you received all your nutrition, energy and immune protection from her. By the time you were born your mother had contributed six to eight pounds of your weight. Then as a parting gift, she swathed you in billions of bacteria from her birth canal and groin that continue to protect your skin, digestive system and general health. In contrast, your father’s 3.3 picograms of DNA comes out to less than one pound of male contribution since the beginning of Homo sapiens 107 billion babies ago. And while birth seems like a separation, for us mammals it’s just a new form of attachment to our female parent. If your mother breast-fed you, as our species has done for nearly our entire existence, then you suckled from her all your water, protein, sugar, fats and even immune protection. She sampled your diseases by holding you close and kissing you, just as your father might have done; but unlike your father, she responded to your infections by making antibodies that she passed to you in breast milk. I don’t dismiss the years I put in as a doting father, or my year at home as a house husband with two young kids. And I credit my own father as the more influential parent in my life. Fathers are of great benefit. But that is a far cry from “necessary and sufficient” for reproduction. If a woman wants to have a baby without a man, she just needs to secure sperm (fresh or frozen) from a donor (living or dead). The only technology the self-impregnating woman needs is a straw or turkey baster, and the basic technique hasn’t changed much since Talmudic scholars debated the religious implications of insemination without sex in the fifth century. If all the men on earth died tonight, the species could continue on frozen sperm. If the women disappear, it’s extinction. Ultimately the question is, does “mankind” really need men? With human cloning technology just around the corner and enough frozen sperm in the world to already populate many generations, perhaps we should perform a cost-benefit analysis. It’s true that men have traditionally been the breadwinners. But women have been a majority of college graduates since the 1980s, and their numbers are growing. It’s also true that men have, on average, a bit more muscle mass than women. But in the age of ubiquitous weapons, the one with the better firepower (and knowledge of the law) triumphs. Meanwhile women live longer, are healthier and are far less likely to commit a violent offense. If men were cars, who would buy the model that doesn’t last as long, is given to lethal incidents and ends up impounded more often? Recently, the geneticist J. Craig Venter showed that the entire genetic material of an organism can be synthesized by a machine and then put into what he called an “artificial cell.” This was actually a bit of press-release hyperbole: Mr. Venter started with a fully functional cell, then swapped out its DNA. In doing so, he unwittingly demonstrated that the female component of sexual reproduction, the egg cell, cannot be manufactured, but the male can. When I explained this to a female colleague and asked her if she thought that there was yet anything irreplaceable about men, she answered, “They’re entertaining.” Gentlemen, let’s hope that’s enough. Greg Hampikian is a professor of biology and criminal justice at Boise State University and the director of the Idaho Innocence Project. |