ORIGINAL ARTICLE

By John Hawkins

Men have it rougher in America than most people realize. In part, that’s because they’re one of the few groups (along with white people, conservatives and Christians) it’s cool to crap on at every opportunity. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a non-stop assault on masculinity in America. Just to give you an idea of what I mean by that, here are articles written that show up on the first three pages of Google when you do a search for “masculinity.”
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• Mass Killings in the U.S.: Masculinity, Masculinity, Masculinity
• Die Like a Man: The Toxic Masculinity of Breaking Bad
• Why We Need to Reimagine Masculinity
• Masculinity Is Killing Men: The Roots of Men and Trauma ...
• Journeys Through Trans Masculinity - BuzzFeed
• Toxic masculinity - Geek Feminism Wiki
• Masculinity U | Rethink Masculinity.
• How Feminists Can Do More to Fight Toxic Masculinity ..

Masculinity isn’t toxic, doesn’t cause mass killings and it doesn’t need to be reimagined or rethought. Furthermore, this “masculinity is bad” mentality is driven by failed “men” and more importantly, liberal feminists. These women want men to be easily-controlled, neutered lapdogs and then they wonder why they keep getting bored with beta eunuchs who are supposedly everything they want.
Meanwhile, good women who haven’t turned into bitter, hyper-sensitive, man-hating witches end up wondering where all the “real” men have gone and why they’re stuck trying to sort through guys who have no ambition, play videogames eight hours a day or don’t seem to care about anything other than getting in their pants.

The sad truth is that men, like all people, tend to do what they’re rewarded for doing and avoid situations that punish them. The cultural changes over the last fifty years have hit “real” men particularly hard.

There was a time when a man without a college education could work hard and make enough money to take care of himself, a wife and a couple of kids. He might not have had much, but his wife treated him like a king and he could take pride in the fact that he was taking care of his family.
Fast forward to 2015 and because of computers, automation, shipping containers and the lowered cost of world transport, those men can barely take care of themselves, much less a wife and kids. Furthermore, because we dole out so much money in welfare, in many cases a woman and her kids may be better off  without a man in the house.

Then what happens to those young men who are struggling to grow up without a male role model in the house? How many punks are there in street gangs today who will spend their whole life in and out of jail? Now, how many of them would have grown up to be good and decent men if they had a “dad” who cared in the house? It’s hard to say, but you have to think more than half of them would have turned out to be productive citizens if they had a strong male role model watching over them.
Getting beyond that, what women want out of a man has changed. It used to be that they wanted a “good” man who’d take care of them financially and treat them well.

Now, more women are going to college. More women have careers. More women don’t need a man to take care of them. Those are all good things, but they also undercut a woman’s need to get married and more importantly, stay married.

Suddenly, a man may find that a woman he once would have married, won’t talk to him because she’s more educated. She also doesn’t need him to take care of her. She’s making her own money and even if she loses her job, the government will take care of her. Even if they do make it past that and get in a relationship, he finds he’s not the king of the castle; he’s in a partnership. That’s certainly not a bad thing, but even as someone who loves strong, successful, intelligent women, I have to admit it’s a step down from what most men used to have. Not every man will admit it, but with all other things being equal, the overwhelming majority of men would vastly prefer to be with a humble waitress who thinks he’s the best thing walking than an accomplished female CEO who just sees him as an acceptable man to have as a partner in marriage.

Additionally, there’s no longer a big stigma against divorce and the courts are slanted against men.
So imagine dating a woman who’s making as much money as you, who just decides she doesn’t want to be married anymore, takes your kids away from you and then to add insult to injury, you have to pay this woman who broke your heart and took your kids, your hard earned money every month while she sleeps with some other guy in a house that the two of you used to share. Almost every man reading this knows other men in this situation and because it’s so common, it makes the potential cost of entering into a marriage considerably higher for a man than it used to be.

Even if you navigate that minefield, which a lot of men do, we now live in an overly feminized society. At any time, some pathetic losers who spend their time obsessing over “microaggressions” and “trigger” words can ruin you if they hear a joke they don’t like. Imagine that: a whole lifetime of blood, sweat and tears ruined by one joke, one comment, one Facebook share that a bunch of miserable failures don’t like.

Meanwhile, you and a woman both do a little drinking and have consensual sex; then, Uh-oh, you “raped her” because both of you were drunk, but you’re the “rapist” because you’re male and she changed her mind about whether having sex with you was a good idea.

If you buy a gun legally and learn how to use it because you want to be ready to protect yourself and your family, then you’re a dangerous bad guy responsible for the actions of criminals and mental cases because liberal w*ssies wet their pants every time they look at a gun.
Want to hunt? Then you’ll be chastised for killing an animal by a bunch of idiots who’ll probably go eat a hamburger right after they’re done.

Are you a poor man? Then politicians treat you like an idiot who needs to be led around by the hand because you’re too stupid to take care of yourself. Are you a successful man? Then you're one of those greedy, evil people who are supposedly ruining America.
Turn on the TV? Then you’ll find most dads presented as hapless bumblers who are led around by their wives or saved by their kids.

Are you a man who thinks you should get paid more than a woman who doesn’t work as hard as you, doesn’t work as long as you, or doesn’t produce as much as you? Well, then, you’re a sexist pig who’s trying to keep women down.

Do you think real courage that deserves to be admired is watered down by lauding every chubby model, every man who wants to pretend he’s a woman and every celebrity who kicks an addiction as courageous? Then not only are you sexist; you’re insensitive!

Do you think a woman should have to meet the same standards as a man to do the same dangerous job? Again, sexist pig! What if you think that even if women meet the same standards as a male policeman or soldier, they shouldn’t be put in the line of fire because there are going to be very few of them who can do it, they’re more likely to be injured and other men will take suicidal risks to rescue them because it’s a man job to protect and shield women? Well, that’s even worse! You’re really sexist if you go there.

Meanwhile, as all of this is going on, we live in a country where the government is spending so much that it’s practically a given that we’re going to have a debt-driven depression in the future, Medicare and Social Security will cease to exist in their current form and it seems like we’re taking in any and every uneducated, illegal third-worlder who wants to come here, have a kid and get on welfare so people like you can pay more in taxes to carry them along on your back for the next 18 years.

That’s the world a 20 year old millennial man is growing up in and there’s no point in complaining about it. After all, what are you going to say? “Life’s not fair.” That’s the ultimate loser’s complaint. “Life isn’t fair” for anybody; so forget about complaining, but it is worth taking the time to understand what you’re going to have to deal with to achieve the successful, productive life you’re going to want as a man.

Some “men” will just give up, play video games for 40 hours a week and live in their parents’ basement for their whole lives. Others will spend their lives mired in mediocrity waiting futilely for someone else to lift them up to a better life. More guys will give up on being real men and will be the pathetic neutered “men” liberal feminists want them to be.

That’s their choice, but as the great Abraham Maslow once said,

“If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I’d still swim. And I’d despise the one who gave up.”

People’s desires and potential are different. You don’t have to be Chuck Norris, John Wayne or Steve Jobs to be a real man. Everybody can’t be rich, a CEO or famous. Most of the best men you’ll ever meet will never be heroes to anyone except a handful of people. They also won’t be perfect. Life knocks all of us on our ass at times, but the guys who persevere in the face of adversity, have a moral code and set an example by acting like real men will be remembered after they’re gone. It may only be in the hearts and minds of their families and friends, but in the end, aren’t they the ones that matter most? So keep fighting; keep working; love your country, your family; stand for what’s right even when it’s hard. Be that man of honor, that man who raises his kids right, that man whom people call for advice on something. Do your duty, be a real man and do what you can, with what you have, where you’re at. If you’re reading this, no matter what your failings, no matter how hard it gets, you can do it.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

By R.S. McCain

“Each time a woman is catcalled, publicly humiliated, and forced to ignore it, the psychology of female objectification becomes evermore seared into the brains of all actors and bystanders involved. We’re already conditioned to look at a woman and see the raw sum of her physical components before we consider her brain. The more we reinforce this subconscious thought process, the more ingrained it becomes in our psychology.”
— Lily Calcagnini, Harvard Crimson, Oct. 6, 2015


“In contrast to young women, whose empowerment can be seen as a process of resistance to male dominated heterosexuality, young, able-bodied, heterosexual men can access power through the language, structures and identities of hegemonic masculinity.”
— Janet Holland, Caroline Ramazanoglu, Sue Sharpe and Rachel Thomson, The Male in the Head: Young People, Heterosexuality and Power (1998)

“The discourses which particularly oppress all of us, lesbians, women, and homosexual men, are those discourses which take for granted that what founds society, any society, is heterosexuality. . . . These discourses of heterosexuality oppress us in the sense that they prevent us from speaking unless we speak in their terms.”
— Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” 1978


The “discourses of heterosexuality” described by French lesbian feminist Monique Wittig are probably not the catcalls described by Lily Calcagnini, but the underlying idea is the same: Male sexual attraction to women is inherently oppressive. The “empowerment” of women requires “resistance to male dominated heterosexuality,” as Professor Holland and her colleagues explained in a book based on feminist gender theory, which regards heterosexuality and male domination as synonymous, two ways of saying the same thing. Heterosexuality reduces a woman to “the raw sum of her physical components,” as Ms. Calcagnini phrases it, and any man who would impose this condition upon her can do so only through the “power . . . of hegemonic masculinity.”

When a college sophomore asserts that we are psychologically “conditioned” to take for granted the “objectification” of women, she thereby invokes a feminist theoretical understanding of sexual behavior that extends far beyond the subject of catcalling. Consider first that Ms. Calcagnini wrote this column in the Harvard Crimson, whose readers are enrolled at arguably the world’s most prestigious institution of higher education. Next consider the sort of behavior she describes:

To the candid man who approached me, rubbing your crotch and murmuring that you could make love to me all day and night, Baby: I could probably call the cops on you at any hour, Buddy.

To the two sirs who, from the safety of your car, hurled cries of Chica, Beautiful Lady, Sexy, Mami, Honey, and Pretty One out of your windows: You made me want to cry.

As you pounded the center of your steering wheel with the palm of your hand, commanding the attention of additional passers-by with each honk of your horn, you encouraged others to join in your objectification game. Powerless, I waited for your traffic light to change, so you would speed away towards the next corner and the next girl.

Are we to believe that these lecherous brutes are Harvard students, so that by writing about their uncouth behavior in the Crimson, Ms. Calcagnini thinks she is addressing the perpetrators directly? Of course not. There might be men at Harvard who occasionally get a bit rowdy, but they are not honking their horns while yelling chica at girls.

In 2015, no man smart enough to go college would ever dare express sexual interest in a female classmate for fear of being accused of “harassment.” Feminists have made university life in the 21st-century a Danger Zone for heterosexual males, who are at risk of expulsion if they even attempt to become intimate with a woman on campus.

She does not need any evidence in order to accuse him of sexual assault. Once accused, a male student will discover he has no due-process rightsin the Title IX hearings where accused males are automatically presumed guilty. These accusations may be made long after an alleged incident. A male student may find himself accused of sexually assaulting an ex-girlfriend whom he continued dating (and having consensual sex with) for many months after whatever incident she may claim was non-consensual whenever a desire for post-breakup revenge strikes her. In other words, your freshman-year girlfriend could wait until your senior year to accuse you of having raped her three years earlier, and thereby quite possibly prevent you from graduating. This is “equality” in 2015.

Feminism’s anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology promotes a sexual paranoia I call “Fear and Loathing of the Penis,” and this in turn has helped incentivize false accusations of rape. At Harvard in 2014, there were 33 reports of sexual assault, of which six were “determined to be ‘unfounded,’ i.e. ‘false or baseless.’” This climate of anti-male fanaticism has led to the enactment of so-called “affirmative consent” policies, with the practical result that is never safe to assume that any sexual activity on campus is legal, as Ashe Schow of the Washington Examiner has explained. At an elite school like Harvard, where tuition is $45,278 a year, a male student would be a fool to take the risk of becoming sexually involved with a female classmate, since Harvard women evidently are willing to make “false or baseless” rape accusations.

Analyzing the Harvard sexual assault data, Reason magazine’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown determined that a “worst-case-scenario assumption means that about one in 114 female undergraduates reported rapes at Harvard last year” — a far cry from the 1-in-5 rate of campus sexual assault claimed by radical feminists (a claim promoted by President Obama, among others). If more than 99% of Harvard women are not at risk of rape, however, this doesn’t prevent Ms. Calcagnini from indicting all male heterosexuals as complicit in harassment:

Catcalls are arresting because they decontextualize the language of physical attraction that might be meaningful when exchanged between lovers. I’m flattered to know that someone who cares deeply about me also finds me beautiful, but this is only because I know that they appreciate my personhood more than my biological ability to have sex.

Using the same language, a catcall is vapid. It reduces my worth to that of my appearance. In the public context of the street, coming from the mouth of a stranger, a catcall exploits the verbiage of intimacy and makes me feel both objectified and powerless to rebuke my objectification.

Moreover, there is implicit sexual intent in a catcall by nature of the fact that it is spoken aloud. Since anyone can enjoyably objectify me without my knowing, I must take a man’s brazen expression of arousal to mean that he’s hoping for some favor in return. Hoping that he’s singled out a woman whose self-esteem is low. Hoping that I’ll forget I’m en route to Spanish and will instead fulfill his sexual fantasies in an alley. Hoping that, to quote the gallant young man who followed me around Harvard Square yesterday, I will “suck his d–k.” . . .

Perpetrators of this kind of objectification may not realize how many women they undermine when they insult one. Their comments dismantle the significant, but clearly still inadequate, social progress that feminists have made for all women.
Who was that young man who followed Ms. Calcagnini around Harvard Square, soliciting her to perform oral sex? You could safely wager $100 that he is not a Harvard student, that he does not read the Crimson, and thus is not confronted with her accusation that his crude behavior is dismantling “social progress,” about which he almost certainly does not give a damn. No, this denunciation of catcalling is a signifying gesture which affords Ms. Calcagnini the opportunity to inform Harvard men that “objectification” — a feminist term for normal male appreciation of female beauty — is unacceptable. She describes how men “enjoyably objectify me without my knowing” (i.e., she is aware that men derive pleasure from looking at her), but is offended by any vocal expression of male sexual interest, because this “reduces my worth to that of my appearance.” Rather than this type of interest, she desires instead “someone who cares deeply about me,” and who therefore will “appreciate my personhood more than my biological ability to have sex.”

Did anyone besides me notice that Ms. Calcagnini uses gender-neutral language (“someone who cares deeply about me . . . they appreciate my personhood”) to describe the sort of attention she welcomes whereas, by contrast, it is “a man’s brazen expression of arousal” and “his sexual fantasies” that she makes clear are undermining “social progress that feminists have made”? While there is no specific reason to suspect that Ms. Calcagnini is a lesbian — other than the fact that she attends Harvard and calls herself a feminist — why else would she use the pages of theCrimson to excoriate heterosexual males this way?

Permit me to confess that my wife’s “biological ability to have sex” was so high on the list of qualities that attracted my attention, I could scarcely comprehend her “personhood” otherwise. If I may be allowed to “decontextualize the language of physical attraction” here, exactly how does Ms. Calcagnini suppose a heterosexual man experiences “arousal”? What aspect of her “personhood” does any woman expect a normal man to “appreciate” more than her “biological ability to have sex”? Is this not the sine qua non of heterosexuality?

Civilized men do not yell crude comments from car windows at women on the street, but if we assume that readers of the Harvard Crimson are civilized, what is the point of lecturing them about this? Quite clearly, Ms. Calcagnini’s column had some ulterior purpose, perhaps to guilt-trip any heterosexual male reader who might “enjoyably objectify” her — i.e., look at her and like what he sees — because she is disgusted by the thought that he is aware of her “biological ability to have sex.”

Have I been “conditioned to look at a woman and see the raw sum of her physical components”? If so, who “conditioned” me this way and how, and at such an early age that in kindergarten I developed a crush on Priscilla Yates, a slightly plump brunette with a gap between her front teeth and freckles on her nose? Early and often did I “objectify” girls — Janet Howton, Joanna Richardson and Carol Purdy, to name three objects of my elementary school crushes — before I had even a remote understanding of how “the raw sum of her physical components” related to the “biological ability to have sex.” The idea that male admiration for female beauty is “conditioned” is as ridiculous as the assertion that this entirely natural “objectification” precludes men from being able also to “consider her brain” or appreciate her “personhood.” Are men at Harvard so stupid that they cannot likewise differentiate these concepts? Why does Ms. Calcagnini presume she can accuse the Crimson‘s highly educated male readers of stupidity without anyone answering her insulting imputation? Is it because she knows that no man at Harvard would risk the feminist outrage if he dared publish an answer?
SCANDAL: Man Likes Good-Looking Women;

Expelled by Harvard for ‘Objectification’
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‘These Discourses of Heterosexuality Oppress Us!’
Normal male behavior is now a human rights violation. The man who expresses a preference for beautiful women could “dismantle the . . . social progress that feminists have made for all women.”
Used to be, you could get locked up in a lunatic asylum for spewing that kind of deranged gibberish. Now they send you to Harvard.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

• Men are responsible for many great achievements but getting a raw deal
• New book claims men have been unfairly undermined by modern feminism
• Men are doing more, working harder and getting none of the credit, it says 
  
  

By PETER LLOYD FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 19:34 EST, 17 April 2015 | UPDATED: 09:53 EST, 18 April 2015

Men are brilliant. Seriously, we are. We invented philosophy, medicine, architecture, cars, trains, helicopters, submarines and the internet. Not to mention the jet engine, IVF, electricity and modern medicine.

We’ve led all the industrial revolutions and sent rockets into Space. We’ve fought wars with tin hats and bayonets and won them. The world we live in would be nothing without Alexander Graham Bell, Sigmund Freud, Horatio Nelson, Winston Churchill, William Shakespeare and Albert Einstein. The geniuses Leonardo da Vinci, Stephen Hawking, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Charles Darwin and Michael Faraday have all contributed immeasurably to our modern lives.

So why is it that, today, there has there never been a worse time to be a man? Rubbishing the male of the species and everything he stands for is a disturbing — and growing — 21st century phenomenon. It is the fashionable fascism of millions of women — and many, many men, too. Instead of feeling proud of our achievements, we men are forced to spend our time apologising for them. When people chide us for not being able to multi-task or use a washing machine we join in the mocking laughter — even though we invented the damned thing in the first place.

Rubbishing the male of the species and everything he stands for is a disturbing 21st century phenomenon

If ever we do manage to do something well we’re told it’s because our achievements were handed to us on a plate — probably at the expense of women — and not because we’re skilled and work hard. And, naturally, the problems of the world are all our fault.

In 2013 the Labour MP Diane Abbott made a damning speech about Britain’s men and boys, smugly announcing that masculinity was ‘in crisis’.

The then shadow Public Health Minister declared that male culture is a ‘celebration of heartlessness; a lack of respect for women’s autonomy and the normalisation of homophobia’.

She sneered that men were choosing to stay in ‘extended adolescence’ by living at home with their parents — which has nothing to do with rising house prices, of course, but everything, according to Ms Abbott, with men being ‘resentful of family life’. If it weren't so tragic it would be funny.

s it is, this kind of stiletto sexism — popularised by an army of female media commentators such as Julie Burchill, Suzanne Moore and Barbara Ellen — has become a depressingly familiar feature of modern British life. And it shows no sign of going away.

Consider the statistics. If you become a father to twins — one girl, one boy — current data proves that your son will die younger, leave school with fewer qualifications and be less eligible for work than your daughter.

Our universities and further education institutions are dominated by women at a proportion of ten to every seven men, with the Royal Veterinary College formally identifying boys as an under-represented group.

Across the Russell Group of Britain’s leading 20 universities, just three have a majority of male students.

This means your son will be more likely to join the ranks of the unemployed, the majority of whom are now — yes, you’ve guessed it — men.

The Office of National Statistics noted that in the summer of 2014 a total of 1,147,511 British men were out of work, compared with 887,892 women.

Psychologically, your son will be more likely to suffer from depression and attempt suicide than his sibling, but there’ll be less support in place to save him.

He’s also more likely to endure everyday violence than women, with the latest crime statistics for England and Wales noting that two-thirds of homicide victims were men.

If he’s seduced by his female teacher, she’ll leave court with a slapped wrist thanks to a legal system which is frequently lenient with women. But if your daughter has an affair with her male maths teacher he’ll be chalking up numbers on a prison wall before you can say: ‘burn your bra’.

By the time your son is 18, he will probably have absorbed the social message that his dad is much less valuable as a parent than his mother — that fathers in families are an added bonus, not a crucial cog.

Then, if he starts his own family and his relationship doesn’t last, he may become one of the four million UK men who have no access to their children, yet are forced to fund them.

To cap it all, he’ll be progressively neglected by British healthcare despite being more likely to get — and die from — nine out of the top ten killer diseases. You know, the biggies: these include cancer, heart conditions, strokes, pneumonia, diabetes and cirrhosis of the liver.

Across the Russell Group of Britain’s leading 20 universities, just three have a majority of male students

Fifteen years ago the UK Men’s Health Forum showed that, for every £1 spent on men’s health, £8 was spent on women’s. Since then little has changed, for no good reason. Or rather, one very bad reason: we live in a medical matriarchy. In other words, male life is cheap. Bargain basement, last-day-of-the-sale cheap.

The ultimate insult? It’s all done at our expense. The National Health Service is funded by the public purse, but it’s men — yes, men — who pay a whopping 70 per cent of UK income tax. Yet we are thrown nothing but crumbs in return.

Currently, women are screened for breast cancer, ovarian and cervical cancer. This is great, but excuse me if I don’t jump for joy. There’s still no screening programme for prostate cancer, even though it kills four times more men than cervical cancer does women.

And while we’re on the subject of statistics, we men will die five years earlier than our wives, sisters, daughters and girlfriends in a life expectancy gap that’s increased 400 per cent since 1920.

Oh, and if we are lucky enough to survive the NHS long enough to be able to go on holiday and sit next to a child on a commercial airline such as British Airways, he’ll be moved in case he sexually abuses them. Your grown-up daughter won’t, even if she has previous form.

Fifteen years ago the UK Men’s Health Forum showed that, for every £1 spent on men’s health, £8 was spent on women’s. Since then little has changed, for no good reason.

All in all, the outlook for your son is pretty bleak, isn’t it? Sadly, he will accept the way things are because over the past couple of decades or so it’s what men have done.

In our anxiety to support women’s emancipation — which men agree with, by the way — we have allowed our intellectual ability, our emotional intelligence and our capacity for commitment to be endlessly ridiculed.

Obviously, this isn’t to say that girls are having a brilliant time of it. Most of society is well versed in the problems and pressures faced by women — the same women who have spent years trying to prove their worth beyond motherhood and housework.

But, unlike us, they get column inches and air time. They get government funding and MPs. They have a vocal community who will stand in their defence.

We men, on the other hand, have nobody. We are of no interest to MPs, UN panels or charities. If we want somebody to fight our corner, we are going to have to do it ourselves.

And fight it we must, before it’s too late. We don’t want to undo or compete with feminism — far from it. But we urgently need our own version of women’s lib to stop our sons being permanently deflated, downgraded and disenfranchised. Remember the suffragettes? We are the suffragents.

So here are my suggestions for a new, improved approach to masculinity. It may not be politically correct, but look where political correctness has got us.

Let’s start by ditching a few of those everyday myths about being a bloke in the 21st century. First up, the wage gap. For years men have been guilt-tripped over a supposed discrepancy in pay that apparently sees women lose thousands of pounds every year compared with their male colleagues.

The great news? According to experts who understand it, this simply isn’t true.

The claim has been debunked by leading economists, including Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, both professors of economics at Harvard University, and Christina Hoff-Somers of the American Enterprise Institute.

‘The wage gap myth has been repeatedly discredited but it will not die,’ says Hoff-Somers. ‘The 23 per cent gap is the difference between average earnings for all men and all women, but it does not take into account differences in occupation, expertise, job tenure and hours worked. When it does, the so-called wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing.’ Essentially, this means a woman who works as a primary school teacher isn’t going to be paid the same as a man who works as a brain surgeon. Which is how it should be. This is about salaries structured on skill, difficulty and reward.

Many women work fewer hours than men. Many choose comfortable, low-paying jobs that fit in with their many other commitments, perhaps to children and ageing parents rather than strenuous, dangerous and life-threatening ones. These naturally bring higher pay for men, but — according to the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health — also put male workplace fatalities at 94 per cent of the total.

Which suddenly makes women’s career choices look very much more sensible, whatever the pay difference. And make no mistake about it, a choice there has to be. When it comes to careers and families, something has to give.

But that’s as it should be.

In 2013 the Labour MP Diane Abbott made a damning speech about Britain’s men and boys, smugly announcing that masculinity was ‘in crisis’

It’s a mathematical fact there aren’t enough hours in the day for anyone, male or female, to work 60-hour weeks all year, raise children and run a house full-time. So the idea that it should be split down the middle to prove some political point might sound right-on, but in reality it’s the cause of so much unnecessary marital conflict.

Instead, let’s be realistic. Whether it’s an unwelcome truth or not, most new mothers like to nurture the baby they’ve been carrying for nine months, while fathers typically return to work and help bankroll it.

This is absolutely OK.

Think about it: women carry life. That’s the ultimate. We men can’t compete with that, so our purpose is to provide for that life.

That’s our identity as fathers and what we bring to the table. It’s been this way since time immemorial because it’s cost-effective, practical and sensible.

Recent legislative changes tried to rewrite this fact when the Coalition brought in extended paternity leave in 2011, taking it beyond the standard two weeks. But it failed miserably. Fewer than one in 50 used it. In fact, for various reasons, a quarter of new fathers took no leave at all.

This is also absolutely OK if it’s what both partners want.

Eventually, in every relationship, somebody will need to take the bulk of childcare responsibility, while the other manages the rest. Personally, I don’t care who assumes the traditional breadwinner role, but unless you can afford a nanny (or manny) to do the child rearing for you, it can’t be both of you.

Whatever the outcome, just remember: it’s not a choice that must be adjudicated by feminist harridans. I say this because whenever working fathers are discussed in the media, the insinuation is that they don’t pull their weight.

Actually, the opposite is true: aside from proving we can multi-task just fine, research collated by the Fatherhood Institute shows that British dads work the longest hours in Europe — an average of 46.9 hours per week, compared with 45.5 hours in Portugal, 41.5 hours in Germany and 40 hours in France.

Around one in eight UK fathers works excessively long hours — 60 or more — while almost 40 per cent graft more than 48 hours each week. Contrary to popular opinion, we don’t leave the house every morning for the sole purpose of jumping into bed with our secretaries. And when we do get home to spend time with our children we’re no slackers either.

In the late Nineties, fathers of children under five were devoting an average of two hours per day on child-related activities, compared with under 15 minutes in the mid-Seventies.

Today, fathers’ time spent with their children currently accounts for one-third of total parental childcare, even though many of them are working full-time as well.

In the late Nineties, fathers of children under five were devoting an average of two hours per day on child-related activities, compared with under 15 minutes in the mid-Seventies

So we’ve established that men are, in fact, pulling their weight at home, and that the pay gap is not what it’s cracked up to be.

Indeed, in many cases it’s going the other way: the Chartered Management Institute found recently that female managers in their 20s are now bringing home 2.1 per cent more than men of the same age.

So why, I ask, are men still expected to pay for nights out? I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve sat in restaurants observing men financing lavish dinners while their glamorous guests freeze at the sight of the credit card machine — even though, dripping with jewellery, they could clearly afford to cough up.

Don’t get me wrong. Plenty of women do go Dutch. Plenty more settle the tab themselves. We like these women. We like them when they allow us to treat them — and likewise, we enjoy it when they spoil us. What we’re after here is a mutually beneficial sharing of bills, as well as minds.

That’s not to say we should throw out chivalrous behaviour altogether. There are plenty of aspects of it — otherwise referred to as ‘being nice’ — that are worth keeping. Holding a door open for a woman, for example, just makes the minutiae of daily life a bit easier for everyone. It’s a kind and respectful thing to do.

All I’m asking for is that we men get a bit of respect in return. Because at the moment we’re being exploited and abused — not least, as I’ll explain on Monday, when it comes to our most important roles of all: as husbands and fathers.

Stand By Your Manhood by Peter Lloyd is published by Biteback at £16.99. © 2015 Peter Lloyd. To buy a copy for £13.59 visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0808 272 0808. Discount until May 2, p&p free for a limited time only.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Robin Morgan

• "I feel that 'man-hating' is an honourable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them."[1]
  
  

• "I haven't the faintest notion what possible revolutionary role white hetero-sexual men could fulfill, since they are the very embodiment of reactionary-vested-interest-power. But then, I have great difficulty examining what men in general could possibly do about all this. In addition to doing the sh*twork that women have been doing for generations, possibly not exist? No, I really don't mean that. Yes, I really do."[2][3]
  
  

• "We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage."[4]
  
  

• "I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire."[5]
  
  

Andrea Dworkin

• "Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice."[6]
  
  

• "Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies."[6]
  
  

• "In my own life, I don't have intercourse. That is my choice."[7]
  
  

• Q: People think you are very hostile to men. A: "I am."[8]
  
  

• "Men use the night to erase us."[9]
  
  

• "The annihilation of a woman's personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male sexuality."[9]
  
  

Marilyn French

• "As long as some men use physical force to subjugate females, all men need not. The knowledge that some men do suffices to threaten all women. He can beat or kill the woman he claims to love; he can rape women ... he can sexually molest his daughters ... THE VAST MAJORITY OF MEN IN THE WORLD DO ONE OR MORE OF THE ABOVE" - The War Against Women, p. 182 (her emphasis)[10]
  
  

• "All patriarchists exalt the home and family as sacred, demanding it remain inviolate from prying eyes. Men want privacy for their violations of women ... All women learn in childhood that women as a sex are men's prey" - The War Against Women, p. 186 [11]
  
  

• "The media treat male assaults on women like rape, beating, and murder of wives and female lovers, or male incest with children, as individual aberrations ... obscuring the fact that all male violence toward women is part of a concerted campaign" - The War Against Women, p. 21[12]
  
  

In fiction authored by Marilyn French

• My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don't even need to shrug. I simply don't care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don't matter" - The Women's Room
  
  

• "All men are rapists and that's all they are" - The character Mia in her novel The Women's Room, p. 462[13]
  
  
  

Other

• "The nuclear family must be destroyed ... Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process" - Linda Gordon
  
  

• "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)
  
  

• "I'm furious with the Women's Liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming women are brighter than men. That's true, but it should be kept quiet or it ruins the whole racket" - Anita Loos
  

• "Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex" -Valerie Solanas, author of the SCUM Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men)
  
  

• "The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness...can be trained to do most things" - Jilly Cooper
  
  

• "Since marriage constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the women's movement must concentrate on attacking this institution. Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage" - Sheila Cronin, the leader of the feminist organization NOW
  
  

• "The institution of sexual intercourse is anti-feminist" - Ti-Grace Atkinson
  
  

• "It matters more what's in a woman's face than what's on it." - Claudette Colbert, quoted in Kindling the Spirit by Lois P. Frankel
  
  

• "Rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear" - Susan Brownmiller; Authoress of Against Our Will p.6
  
  

• "When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression" - Sheila Jeffrys
  
  

• "Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated" - Catharine MacKinnon
  
  

• "All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman" - Catharine MacKinnon
  
  

• "You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs" - Catharine MacKinnon (Prominent legal feminist scholar; Universities of Michigan & Yale)
  
  

• "In a patriarchal society, all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent" - Catharine MacKinnon, quoted in Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies
  
  

• "The more famous and powerful I get the more power I have to hurt men" - Sharon Stone, Actress
  
  

• "Ninety-five percent of women's experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive ... women didn't go to Vietnam and blow things up. They are not Rambo" - Jodie Foster, Actress - as quoted in The New York Times Magazine
  
  

• "The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race" - Sally Miller Gearhart, in The Future - If There Is One - Is Female
  
  

• "And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual (male), it may be mainly a quantitative difference" - Susan Griffin, Rape: The All-American Crime
  
  

• "If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males" - Mary Daly, former Professor at Boston College, 2001
  
  

• "If anyone is prosecuted for filing a false report, then victims of real attacks will be less likely to report them" - David Angier
  
  

• "To use the word [rape] carefully would be to be careful for the sake of the violator, and the survivors don't care a hoot about him. … They [men unjustly accused of rape] have a lot of pain, but it is not a pain that I would necessarily have spared them. I think it ideally initiates a process of self-exploration. 'How do I see women?' 'If I didn't violate her, could I have?' 'Do I have the potential to do to her what they say I did?' Those are good questions." - Catherine Comins, assistant dean of student life at Vassar in 1991 [15]
  
  

• "I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He's just incapable of it" - Barbara Jordan, former congresswoman
  
  

• "Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release" - Germaine Greer
  
  

• "Man-hating is everywhere, but everywhere it is twisted and transformed, disguised, tranquilized, and qualified. It coexists, never peacefully, with the love, desire, respect, and need women also feel for men. Always man-hating is shadowed by its milder, more diplomatic and doubtful twin, ambivalence" - Judith Levine, Authoress
  
  

• "I feel what they feel: man-hating, that volatile admixture of pity, contempt, disgust, envy, alienation, fear, and rage at men. It is hatred not only for the anonymous man who makes sucking noises on the street, not only for the rapist or the judge who acquits him, but for what the Greeks called philo-aphilos, 'hate in love' for the men women share their lives with - husbands, lovers, friends, fathers, brothers, sons, co-workers." - Judith Levine, Authoress of My Enemy, My love
  
  

• "There are no boundaries between affectionate sex and slavery in (the male) world. Distinctions between pleasure and danger are academic; the dirty-laundrylist of 'sex acts' ... includes rape, foot binding, fellatio, intercourse, auto eroticism, incest, anal intercourse, use and production of pornography, cunnilingus, sexual harassment, and murder" - Judith Levine; summarizing comment on the WAS document (A Southern Women's Writing Collective: Women Against Sex)
  
  

• ((Delaney Nickerson, of the American Coalition for ABUSE AWARENESS, refers to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation as "The F---ing Molesters Society" (Miami Herald, April 3, 1995) The ACAA is a lobbying group, which includes Ellen Bass (co-author of THE COURAGE TO HEAL), and Rene Frederickson, leading feminist psychotherapist and strong proponent of repressed memory theory))
  
  

• ((At the STONE ANGELS satanic ritual abuse conference in Thunder Bay in February, 1995, the following was contained in the handouts at a conference supported financially by the Ontario Government: FMS stands for: FULL OF MOSTLY SH*T; FOR MORE SADISM; FELONS, MURDERERS, SCUMBALLS; FREQUENT MOLESTERS SOCIETY))
  
  

• "I was, in reality, bred by my parents as my father's concubine... What we take for granted as the stability of family life may well depend on the sexual slavery of our children. What's more, this is a cynical arrangement our institutions have colluded to conceal" - Sylvia Fraser, Journalist
  
  

• Catharine MacKinnon maintains that "the private is a sphere of battery, marital rape and women's exploited labor." In this way, privacy and family are reduced to nothing more than aspects of the master plan, which is male domination. Democratic freedoms and the need to keep the state's nose out of our personal affairs are rendered meaningless. The real reason our society cherishes privacy is because men have invented it as an excuse to conceal their criminality. If people still insist that the traditional family is about love and mutual aid - ideals which, admittedly, are sometimes betrayed - they're "hiding from the truth" The family isn't a place where battery and marital rape sometimes happen but where little else apparently does. Sick men don't simply molest their daughters, they operate in league with their wives to "breed" them for that purpose - Donna Laframboise; The Princess at the Window (in a critical explication of the Catharine MacKinnon, Gloria Steinem et al, tenets of misandric belief)
  
  

• "If the classroom situation is very heteropatriarchal - a large beginning class of 50 to 60 students, say, with few feminist students - I am likely to define my task as largely one of recruitment ... of persuading students that women are oppressed" - Professor Joyce Trebilcot of Washington University, as quoted in Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women
  
  

• "Men, as a group, tend to be abusive, either verbally, sexually or emotionally. There are always the exceptions, but they are few and far between (I am married to one of them). There are different levels of violence and abuse and individual men buy into this system by varying degrees. But the male power structure always remains intact." - Message on FEMISA, responding to a request for arguments that men are unnecessary for a child to grow into mature adulthood.
  
  

• Another posting on FEMISA: "Considering the nature and pervasiveness of men's violence, I would say that without question, children are better off being raised without the presence of men. Assaults on women and children are mostly perpetrated by men whom they are supposed to love and trust: fathers, brothers, uncles, grandfathers, step-fathers." (Both above quotes taken from Daphne Patai's excellent critical work, Heterophobia)
  
  

• "At Brandies I discovered Feminism. And I instantly became a convert... writing brilliant papers in my Myths of Patriarchy class, in which I likened my fate as a woman to other victims throughout the ages."[Citation Needed] - Heather Hart 7
  
  

• Here are 10 reasons why we are concerned about feminism and the National Organisation for Women
  
  

2. "Since marriage constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the women's movement must concentrate on attacking this institution. Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage" - feminist leader Sheila Cronan

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

• "Women's chains have been forged by men, not by anatomy." - Estelle R. Ramey

• "I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Our Girls"

• "We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men" - Elizabeth Cady Stanton, from her diary of December 27, 1890, quoting a letter she wrote. [16]
  
  
  

From 'A feminist Dictionary; ed. Kramarae and Triechler, Pandora Press, 1985:

• MALE: ... represents a variant of or deviation from the category of female. The first males were mutants ... the male sex represents a degeneration and deformity of the female

• MAN: ... an obsolete life form ... an ordinary creature who needs to be watched ...a contradictory baby-man ...

• TESTOSTERONE POISONING: ... 'Until now it has been though that the level of testosterone in men is normal simply because they have it. But if you consider how abnormal their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all men are suffering from "testosterone poisoning"

• Letter to editor: "Women's Turn to Dominate" "... Clearly you are not yet a free-thinking feminist but rather one of those women who bounce off the male-dominated, male-controlled social structures. Who cares how men feel or what they do or whether they suffer? They have had over 2000 years to dominate and made a complete hash of it. Now it is our turn. My only comment to men is: if you don't like it, bad luck - and if you get in my way I'll run you down" Signed: Liberated Women, Boronia Herald-Sun, Melbourne, Australia. 9 February, 1996

• “Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism” - Catharine MacKinnon

• The English novelist and critic Rebecca West said [17] :

• "I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."

References

1. ↑ From "Sisterhood is Powerful"(1970)
2. ↑ From her introduction to "Sisterhood is Powerful"
3. ↑ http://www.feministcampus.org/network/chat/morgan04232003.asp
4. ↑ From "Sisterhood is Powerful"
5. ↑ From "Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape"
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 From her book "Letters from a War Zone"
7. ↑ Andrea Dworkin: "'They took my body from me and used it'" (Guardian Unlimited)
8. ↑ "Nervous Interview", 1978 (Background: "Norman Mailer managed to publish lots of interviews with himself, none of which made much sense, all of which were taken seriously by literati of various stripes. So this is half parody of him and his chosen form and half parody of myself and my chosen movement.")
9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 The Night and Danger
10. ↑ http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/034538248X/ref=sib_dp_pt#
11. ↑ http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/034538248X/ref=sib_dp_pt#
12. ↑ http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/034538248X/ref=sib_dp_pt#
13. ↑ http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0345353617/ref=sib_dp_pt#
14. ↑ http://www.gainesvillehumanists.org/patr.htm
15. ↑ http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,973077-6,00.html
16. ↑ http://books.google.com/books?id=CIsEAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA270&lpg=PA270&dq=%22we+are+as+a+sex+infinitely+superior+to+men%22&source=web&ots=FqYVyWK-s6&sig=tnXoiGvopCcO1vFaoF7nmSvtXPM&hl=en#PPA270,M1
17. ↑ http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/rebecca_west.html

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!

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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.