Sexual politics is damaging young men

Sexual politics is damaging young men | The Spectator

Masculinity has been in crisis for as long as anyone can remember. The usual explanation is that post-industrial society doesn’t much care for brawn. We’re all office dwellers now, mutely churning out spreadsheets for other spreadsheet producers. The theory makes sense as far as it goes. But something else has changed much more recently: a rejection of the very concept of masculinity.

The polling company YouGov found that just 8 per cent of people have positive views of white men in their twenties, by far the lowest of any ethnicity or age group. Males are routinely presented as inherently dangerous, aggressive and animalistic, incapable of controlling their own instincts. You can see it on public transport, where government adverts announce that staring is sexual harassment. Us blokes can’t even be trusted to use our eyes properly.

Teenage boys are routinely disciplined by their schools for even the most minor infractions of an insurgent sexual politics. A friend’s son at a smart English day school was recently hauled up for the crime of unprompted communication with a girl. The boy had sent a message introducing himself to a student from another school. There was, according to the friend, no sexual element to the message. It was a simple greeting. No matter. That kind of behaviour is unacceptable.

This moral shift has been encouraged by social media and an expansive higher education sector that delights in tearing down the old order. Things we once took for granted are merely ‘constructed’ – and anyone who disagrees is a misogynistic privilege-hoarder. The new believers are able to muster online, forcing their revolutionary worldview into the wider culture and on to institutions that simply want a quiet life.

Look at the ‘Global Boyhood Initiative’, which is writing a new curriculum – currently being piloted in a couple of London schools – on gender equality for children. Last year the GBI published a report on the state of UK boys that starts by suggesting that gender is ‘not tied to sex organs’ and then goes on to call families ‘gender and heterosexuality “factories”’.

A cottage industry of ‘toxic masculinity’ tutors has emerged following the Everyone’s Invited scandal, a wave of anonymous allegations of sexual impropriety at Britain’s top private schools that began in 2020. One such company is Beyond Equality, which sells its services to hundreds of UK schools, putting on workshops in which they tell boys to strip themselves of the ‘restrictive, burdensome armour’ of masculinity. The reason, they say, is to create ‘communities that are safe for everyone’ and to put a stop to ‘gender-based violence’. The implication is clear: men need to be reprogrammed.

‘Boys are now seen as potential perverts,’ explains one female former teacher, who quit the profession last year. ‘There was this obsession with the victimisation of women. I thought we had been getting somewhere with sex and relationships, teaching the children to treat people with respect, but that has been totally set back.’

A few weeks ago, a school in Essex sent a letter to parents telling them that their children were to be prohibited from having any romantic relationships with fellow students. All physical contact was to be banned, including a simple hug. In the letter, the school said the policy was designed to ‘keep your child safe. If your child is touching somebody else, whether they are consenting or not, anything could happen. It could lead to an injury, make someone feel very uncomfortable, or someone being touched inappropriately’. Who on earth really believes that children might injure themselves by holding hands?

This frantic prudery is a result not of a resurgence of conservative values, but of a progressive fear of men. Appalling behaviour is apparently everywhere. In 2021, Ofsted compiled a report that found 79 per cent of schoolgirls said sexual assault happened ‘a lot’ or ‘often’ at their school. But there seems to be an inability to hold two notions in our heads: that sexual assault is bad and that treating men as inherent sex pests is also bad. A reasonable worry about assault appears to have morphed into an institutional misandry. There is a lack of recognition that, as with all crimes, the proportion of perpetrators is vanishingly small. The awful behaviour of a few is leading to the mistreatment of all.

Another teacher, working at a London college, agrees: ‘The new sexual framework reaffirms the gender roles that boys are these really strong, insensitive masculine beings and girls are these wimpy things that need to be careful. We seem to be saying: “You’re a girl, you’re going to be taken advantage of, you need to be scared.”’ There’s a failure to contend with the idea that the awkwardness of young manhood – the playground scuffles, the stilted attempts at courtship – are the necessary growing pains of becoming a well-adjusted grown-up.

The result of all this over-policing is boys who feel uneasy, anxious and angry. Since 2017, the NHS has found that the proportion of boys with probable mental health issues has increased by more than 50 per cent, now at nearly one in five. The suicide rate for boys aged 15 to 19 has more than doubled over the past decade. The child psychologist Julie Lynn Evans supported the Everyone’s Invited movement, seeing it as a necessary response to decades of dodgy male behaviour. But now she worries the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. ‘The boys came out of lockdown into this slightly hysterical atmosphere of “Don’t touch, that’s inappropriate, that’s assault.” They are being treated as guilty until proven innocent. They can hardly move for fear of doing something wrong.’

I worry that boys are so browbeaten by activist adults that they are turning into purposeless young men. In the US, the proportion of males under 30 who haven’t had sex in the past year has tripled since 2008, now at a third. While data is still being collected, reports suggest the same trend is occurring in Britain. We have seen plenty of hand-wringing about ‘incels’ (‘involuntary celibates’), the uber-misogynists who rage against women. But I suspect that the same politics which frets about ‘toxic masculinity’ in part gives rise to the most toxic form of manhood. Tell someone enough that you dislike their character and they’ll naturally object. Resentment becomes mutual.

Inevitably, then, there has been a backlash from boys. It has come in the form of Andrew Tate, the British-American social media personality who projects an ‘ultra-masculine, ultra-luxurious lifestyle’. Tate was arrested at the end of last year at his garish Romanian party house where he is accused of exploiting trafficked women. His videos, in which he tells sad men to stop taking antidepressants and get to a gym, have caused something of a moral panic among Britain’s teachers. They fear that his self-professed ‘misogyny’ is turning boys into horrors. Female teachers have complained of teenagers writing ‘MMAS’ – ‘make me a sandwich’ – at the end of their homework.

Why are teenage boys so excited by Tate? According to the former teacher, boys would tell her: ‘I know this guy’s a tosser but he’s funny and he has a point. He’s challenging these ideas that really need challenging.’

Tate seems more symptom than cause. Young men have been moving away from progressive politics for at least the past few years. The political theorist Eric Kaufmann found that the young, specifically men, are turning to the right. In 2020, well before the likes of Tate came about, 18-year-olds were found to be as right-wing as people in their forties. Meanwhile, a majority of under-forties now believe that women’s equality has gone so far that it discriminates against men.

There’s certainly something going wrong with young men. For one thing, they are far more likely to be unemployed: a third of those aged 18 to 24 are not in work or seeking it compared with a fifth of the working-age population. Part of the problem is that British women have outperformed men in university applications since the mid-1990s. So the girls simply produce better CVs. Consider, too, the prospect of activist HR departments wanting to fulfil gender equality quotas: of course they’ll opt for the better candidate if she brings with her the glow of doing good. This explains why men on the cusp of adulthood are finding it harder to get not only jobs but girlfriends. Men tend to value physical attractiveness in partners, while women are interested in a wider set of attributes, including earning potential.

It’s almost a certainty, too, that these single, workless men are still living with their parents. After all, the enormous cost of housing means that two-thirds of people in their twenties do. So we come to a startling conclusion: young men are increasingly unloved, unemployed and unable to live independently.

Lynn Evans’s description of teenage boys could as easily apply to men in their early twenties: ‘They’re in their bedrooms and only really speaking to friends online. They’re also gaming and watching a ton of pornography. They’re living in a sort of fantasy world.’ Why bother going out into a hostile environment to find a job and a girlfriend when the need for a sense of achievement, along with sexual desire, can be sated in your childhood bedroom, however artificially?

What’s happening looks like the phenomenon of the Japanese hikikomori, adolescent males who resign themselves to their bedrooms for months, spending their days playing video games and kept alive only by sad mothers. We seem increasingly unwilling to accommodate any form of masculinity. The result is a breed of angry and unhappy young men, rejecting a world that rejects them.

 

Women leaving when their husbands lose their jobs vs Men leaving when their wives get sick

A lot of people were slamming a meme:

Patrick Safari on Twitter

"Dear Men, take your 21 days leave from work.
Go home and tell your woman that you lost your Job.

Explain further that there was some loss and you had to use your savings to settle.

Spend the next 14 days observing how you are treated at home and discover who you married."

I pointed out that a man losing his job significantly affects his chances of getting divorced since:

While marital strain also increases when a woman loses her job, divorces are more common when the man loses his job. A study of heterosexual couples showed that men who were unemployed or working just part time were 33% more likely to divorce within the year than husbands who worked full-time jobs

There's also tons of research with the same findings.

Naturally, the cope was strong, with evidence-free claims that this is because many/most such men let "their hurt ego from losing their job wreck the marriage", or that the men don't "contribute financially or domestically" and that such a man "sits on his ass moping and doing nothing".

Another cope was that men leave their wives when they get cancer / a miscarriage. As evidence for the former, I was presented with a Guardian and with an NBC article (I never got any source for the latter claim, which is even more unbelievable than the former).

The Guardian article had some anecdotes, but referenced two studies. Meanwhile the NBC article only referenced the earlier study.

I decided to look into the articles.

First of all, if one accepted the claims of the women who claimed that men leave their wives if they have cancer, one could say that they do this because their spouses are emotional, irrational and violent.

We know that women are more neurotic, easily offended and suffer more side effects from cancer, so this is entirely plausible.

That aside, the research does not support the claim.

While the 2015 paper, In Sickness and in Health? Physical Illness as a Risk Factor for Marital Dissolution in Later Life, did find that men were more likely to leave their wives than vice versa - but only in one condition: when they had heart problems:

In our analysis examining the onset of any of four serious illnesses (cancer, heart problems, lung disease, and/or stroke), we find that only wife’s illness onset is associated with elevated risk of divorce, while either husband or wife’s illness onset is associated with elevated risk of widowhood. However, we fail to reject the null hypothesis of equality of coefficients by gender in these pooled models, which suggests that there is no difference in divorce risk depending on which spouse experiences onset of any of these conditions. When we turn to specific illnesses, we find some evidence that the relationship between ill- ness onset and divorce varies by specific illness. Wife’s (lagged) heart problems onset and stroke onset are both statistically significant positive pre- dictors of divorce, while none of the measures of husband’s illness onset are associated with divorce. In addition, we reject the null hypothesis of equality of coefficients for husband’s heart problems onset and wife’s heart problems onset (p < .05). These hypothesis tests are critical in the formal evaluation of gender differences and provide evidence that the association between heart problems and divorce depends on the gender of the spouse who becomes ill. Taking pooled and disease-specific results together, these findings suggest that the relationship between disease and divorce risk varies by gender in the case of one specific health condition—heart problems

Translating the coefficient of the multinomial logistic regression into an odds ratio suggests that if a wife has heart problems, the husband is 2.6 times more likely to leave her than if she hadn't had them. Meanwhile this is not the case for other illnesses. While the p score for the gender difference for heart problems is under 0.05, the fact that for the other 3 diseases (as well as taking all 4 diseases together), there is no gender difference is telling (i.e. it may be a statistical artefact or, as the authors theorise, reflect something unique to heart problems).

Furthermore, the authors note that "there is considerable attrition over the 18 years of the study—35% of marriages attrit before the end of the study period— more than are lost via widowhood and divorce combined"

Given the large attrition rate, we could be losing enough data to alter the conclusions. As an aside, the Guardian article misrepresents the conclusions of the study (big surprise - but liberals won't be in any hurry to condemn them).

Perhaps one might then lean on the 2009 paper, Gender disparity in the rate of partner abandonment in patients with serious medical illness, which has results that more closely match the feminist claim.

However, that paper is not as methodologically rigorous, with a sample size of 515 vs 2,701 in the 2015 paper (notably, the researchers in the latter started with a baseline sample of 4,674, which they whittled down by controlling for factors such as pre-existing disease). The 2015 paper also collected information on a lot more variables that could affect the results and the followup period was much longer (16 years vs 4-5 years for the 2009 paper).

So in summary, women are more likely to leave their husbands when the latter lose their jobs than men are to leave their wives when they get seriously sick.

Keywords: women men judged for abandoning sick partner, condemned for abandoning sick partner, abandon man woman cancer judgment, judge man abandon woman cancer

Links - 2nd August 2020 (1) (Male 'Privilege')

KeepRocking on Twitter - "Can you imagine that all this time Amber Heard has been running around being an actual human rights ambassador, all while there were actual audio tapes of her admitting to abuse and shamelessly gaslighting Johnny Depp. The nerve. THE NERVE #JusticeForJohnnyDepp"
"It doesn't surprise me, sadly. It took me over 10 years to get away from my abusive ex-wife. And even then, I was told that if a man had written the letters she wrote to me, he'd be in jail, but because she was a woman, there was nothing anyone could do."

Amber Heard exposed in new audio 'nobody will believe a white male' - "“See how many people believe you,” Amber Heard laughs at Johnny Depp for claiming he’s a domestic violence victim. She claims that the courts will take her side because she’s a beautiful young woman and not and old white guy. “Men can’t be victims of domestic violence”... Johnny Depp has already lost his role as the iconic Disney character, Captain Jack Sparrow, in the beloved family movie series Pirates of the Caribbean after Amber Heard made allegations him calling him an abusive, wife-beating, womaniser. Amber Heard continues to have a successful career in Hollywood despite being exposed admitting to punching Johnny Depp in a previously released audio tape... Johnny Depp is currently suing Amber Heard in a 50 million dollar defamation suit and promises more to drop more audio tapes exposing Amber heard in the coming months."
Amber Heard must be a feminist, because she is very aware of Depp's "male privilege" and "white privilege"

Amber Heard admits to 'hitting' ex-husband Johnny Depp and pelting him with pots and pans on tape - "Amber Heard admits to 'hitting' ex-husband Johnny Depp and pelting him with pots, pans and vases in an explosive audio confession... The Aquaman actress, 33, opens up about her violent tantrums in a series of taped conversations the estranged couple made in 2015 as they tried to talk through their marriage problems... Heard - an ambassador for women's rights and outspoken domestic violence advocate - taunts Depp for fleeing the late night dust-up, telling him: 'You are such a baby. Grow the f**k up Johnny.'... 'I left last night. Honestly, I swear to you because I just couldn't take the idea of more physicality, more physical abuse on each other,' an exasperated Depp pleads in the recording... But Heard - who filed for divorce in May 2016 accusing Depp of beating her during their toxic 18-month marriage - warns: 'I can't promise you I won't get physical again. God I f**king sometimes get so mad I lose it.'Depp filed his $50 million defamation suit in Virginia after Heard penned an op-ed for the Washington Post detailing her experiences as an alleged domestic violence victim. 'I became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture's wrath for women who speak out,' she wrote in the December 2018 article, which didn't mention the Pirates of the Caribbean actor by name. Depp claimed, nonetheless, that it implicated him as the abuser, damaging his reputation and causing him to lose his prized role of Captain Jack Sparrow.His suit says he's the victim of an 'elaborate hoax' instigated by Heard to generate positive publicity and advance her career... The pair married in February 2015 but split less than two years later when Heard had a restraining order slapped on Depp over claims he threw a cellphone in her face at their downtown Los Angeles loft.Heard claimed police had evidence of the May 27, 2016 attack but two LAPD officers later said in a deposition that they found nothing to suggest a crime took place... Heard accuses Depp of taking her for granted, behaving like a 'vacation husband' and 'splitting' every time they have an argument.Depp complains he's forced to leave when she becomes 'manic and angry', telling Heard: 'I'm not going be in a physical f**king altercation with you... you f**king hit me last night.'He goes on to add: 'I'm not the one who throws pots and whatever the f**k else at me.'Heard responds: 'That's different. That's different. One does not negate the other. That's irrelevant, that's a complete non sequitur.'Just because I've thrown pots and pans does not mean you cannot come and knock on my door. '... A spokeswoman for Heard accused Depp of 'vindictively' leaking the tape and trying to victim-blame their client."
This is amazing. Exposing an abuser is 'victim blaming'. Clearly men are always abusers and women are always victims

Amber Heard could face up to 3 years in prison for fake evidence - "She hired a Private Investigator who has failed to dig up any dirt on the 56-year-old actor, and her appeal to have the case dismissed has officially been rejected. That means that Johnny Depp has sufficient evidence against Amber Heard and the judges will most likely rule in his favour... Amber Heard claimed that Johnny Depp beat her and left her with two black eyes, however, Johnny Depp alleges to have evidence proving that those injuries were fake.In 2019 Amber Heard’s personal stylist, Samantha McMillen, went on record stating that she believes that her black eyes were fake... In the state of California fake injuries can be considered falsified evidence and California law does not look favourably upon any person who prepares or offers false evidence in any court proceeding... The maximum sentence for submitting false evidence is 3 years in a federal prison. However, it is unlikely that, even if this charge is pursued, Heard will face any prison time.This is not the first time she has submitted falsified documents or has been faced with jail time. In 2016 Heard plead guilty for supplying falsified documents when she smuggled her two dogs into Australia.The false documents charge carries a maximum penalty of a year in peison and a fine over AUD$10,000 ($7,650), but Magistrate Bernadette Callaghan sentenced Heard instead to a one-month good behaviour bond. Maintaining she paid a AU$1,000 fine if she commits any offences in Australia over the next month."

When Women Are The Abuser: What We Learned From Amber Heard - "People often say there is nothing useful we can learn from Hollywood celebrities. I disagree. There’s always something you can learn from celebs - namely what not to do if you want to be happy... Normally, it would be in bad taste for us to scrutinize the private life of couples who are going through a rough patch in their relationship. But in this case, the court of public opinion is open to us since Amber Heard penned her op-ed in The Washington Post condemning domestic violence, in which she stated “how institutions protect men accused of abuse.”...
1. Don’t be belligerent.
2. Don’t treat your partner like a subordinate...
if she treated her husband that way, then just imagine how she’ll treat helpless children as a mother. There is no peace or joy in living with an emotionally frenzied parent. Their children will live in fear and grow up having anxiety issues.
3. Don’t use gaslighting to manipulate your spouse...
“I’m sorry that I didn’t, uh, uh, hit you across the face in a proper slap, but I was hitting you, it was not punching you. Babe, you’re not punched. I don’t know what the motion of my actual hand was, but you’re fine. I did not hurt you. I did not punch you. I was hitting you.”
….I have no words. This sounds almost as psychotic as Mullahs from backward, Islamofascist countries approving the beating of wives, but only with a “small stick” to instill fear. Worst is, on top of the abuse, she was also gaslighting Depp to make it seem like he was the one who was imagining things.
4. Don’t be vulgar.
5. Don’t use violence...
Amber Heard’s justification of violence against Depp [is] even more disturbing when she refers to herself as an animal - “You poke an animal enough, it is eventually, it doesn’t matter how friendly it is, it’s not cool.”
6. Don’t belittle or mock your partner...
Whenever I’ve come across a happy family, I’ve noticed how it was the women who had set the tone of the household’s happiness. So the phrase “happy wife, happy life” does have some ground in reality (at least from my personal observation).The husbands who are happily married are also those who are treated with love, respect, and affection at home. As you must realize, your home needs to be a happy, comfortable, and loving place for your love life to thrive. This may be a “cringey” thing to hear since the idea of a love-filled, happy marriage has fallen out of fashion in our increasingly militant feminist, “I don’t need no man!” culture. But you know what is more cringe-worthy? A wife berating her husband like Amber Heard did."

MGTOW Worldwide - Posts - ""Women owe 67% of the student loan debt because the men, once again, have not stepped up to provide for their education. Men need to stop whining and be men."
"The days of men being a plough-horse for ugnrateful nagging women is over. You've got equality now, women can pay their own damn debts."
Equality means men providing for women
If women get degrees, or worse, graduate degrees in something that doesn't pay the bills, apparently it's men's fault

22-year-old mother arrested for sexual relations with boy, 12, she met in online game - "According to Yahoo Japan, the boy’s mother sent worried emails during this time, but Rika coached the boy on how to reply the mother so as to put her at ease... Reports on the case speculate that since this is the defendant’s first offense, she will be determined guilty but let out on probation."

Taylor Brooks Boyles Found Not Guilty of Having Sex With Student - "A former middle school teacher who argued that it was unconstitutional to charge her for having sex with a student was found not guilty on Thursday, according to multiple reports.Taylor Brooks Boyles, 30, was acquitted by a jury despite the existence of a videotape in which the former math teacher told police she’d had sex with the student, a high school senior and star of the basketball team... Under Alabama law, it is a crime for authority figures, such as school teachers, to engage in sex with victims, even if they are over the age of consent."

Bronx teacher who performed oral sex on 14-year-old gets 10 years probation, avoids jail, keeps teaching certificate - "A Bronx high school teacher who admitted to performing oral sex on her 14-year-old student won’t face jail time — and she might even return to the classroom.Dori Myers, 30, last month pleaded guilty to criminal sex act for the Nov. 2016 incident at her former workplace, New School for Leadership and the Arts in Kingsbridge, where she taught social studies... Judge Michael Obus sentenced the woman to 10 years' probation and found her to be a Level 1 sex offender. Prosecutors had asked the judge to sentence Myers to a minimum of two years in prison."

Dad with breast cancer 'rejected from support groups because he's a man' - "David McCallion, 55, was diagnosed with the illness shortly before his 30th wedding anniversary and even his own doctor assumed that his wife was the patient when they talked about the diagnosis. Facing a mastectomy, and being left to feel as though ‘real men’ don’t get breast cancer, he turned online to try and get support.But, he was told that he could not join because he was a man and it would prevent other members from opening up about their own concerns... Every year 390 men are diagnosed as having the condition in the UK and 80 of them die"
He should just have identified as a trans woman and if they'd still refused, accused them of transphobia

Katie Anne Castel, who threw a knife an her husband and killed him, appeals nine-year sentence - "A woman who threw a knife into her husband's chest and killed him after he arrived home late from work has appealed her nine-year manslaughter sentence."

Renson Seow - "Violence has no gender."She may well have had legitimate grievances about her partner's conduct..." - read - She was driven to it....Why is it OK to suggest some people have been driven to commit domestic violence?No photo description available."
"So... read the case. Where's the outrage? Where's the Brock Turner style attempt to make the judge resign? Where are the protests?(Crickets)In this age, weaponized victimhood (metoo, exaggerated gender pay gap, "microaggressions", mental labour) is the mechanism that make things move, regardless of merit.Men are used to being silent, taking it on the chin, and carrying on, but perhaps it is high time that men start voicing out when things are not fair."
If a man hits a woman, he's an asshole
If a woman hits a man, it's because he's an asshole

The Double Standard - "Donald Trump gives International Men’s Day message to women Donald Trump shocked a school in Hawaii with a surprise visit, asking the women to honor the men in their lives. Trump, visited the school Friday to offer an International Men’s Day message. “You have your fathers, brothers, boyfriends, friends in your life, honor them,” he said. “Make sure that they are feeling valued and respected. And let’s all just rally together to make International Men’s Day something that is not just on one day, but frankly feels like every day of the year.” The surprise visit took place at the Admiral Arthur W. Radford High School in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The community was the site of the sacrifice of hundreds of men fighting for freedom and protecting their families during the famous attack in WW2. In one of his duties as President of the United States, Trump urged the girls in the school assembly of 700 students to “continue to value and appreciate the men in your lives and also set the example for some women who are not seeing it that same way.” The President asked for a female volunteer to offer her thoughts on the importance of International Men’s Day. Alisha Okoye, 16, raced to the stage, greeting him with what appeared to be an air kiss to his cheek. “He really is tall!” she said as she took the podium. Trump gave her a hug and later praised her “incredible poise.” Outraged by this article? You should be just as outraged over the original: https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/meghan-markle-gives-international-womens-day-message-to-men"

Peter Shawn Taylor: When it comes to well-being, women do far better than men - "It has recently become popular within progressive circles to decry the role that gross domestic product and other economic metrics exert over our lives. Excessive focus on purely financial measures, we’re told, misses the underlying truth about standards of living. A better measure of life, we are told, should focus on what makes people truly happy, covering such things as health, social interaction, community involvement and personal growth... Across the 18 categories considered by the OECD, men outperform women in only four — most of which are old-school GDP-style indicators covering such things as earnings and rates of employment.In six categories, there’s no discernible difference between the sexes, including self-reported health, overall life satisfaction and student skills in science. The real story, however, lies in the eight categories where Canadian women perform noticeably better than men.Of these, life expectancy is the most significant. Living standards don’t matter much if you’re dead, and the four-year gender gap in Canadian life expectancy — 84 for women, 79.9 for men — ought to be considered the most important gap of all. Rest assured that if women died earlier than men, the gender death gap would be a core component of every International Women’s Day, and a perpetual scandal. Women are also more likely to report more time spent engaged in congenial social interactions and feel their views are better reflected by government. This seems noteworthy, given the popular International Women’s Day refrain about the lack of gender parity among elected officials. Perhaps gender representation does not correlate with gender influence.On several other categories, women do so much better than men that the results run off the edge of the chart, including the likelihood of being murdered, committing suicide or dying as a result of alcohol or drug use. The recent levelling off in life expectancy in Canada is almost entirely attributable to the rise in opioid deaths among young men.Finally, the greatest difference between men and women reported by the OECD concerns the deleterious effects of working long hours. Job strain is also significantly worse for men than women. We can assume this is largely because women prefer part-time work, which pays less but is often more personally satisfying, because it leaves room for other pursuits. While the standard feminist interpretation considers this sort of unequal workplace data to be evidence of a patriarchal conspiracy, adopting a well-being approach to living standards puts working to excess and climbing the corporate ladder in an entirely different light. Here, it is a detriment to happiness.This raises a rather complicated philosophical dilemma: should women continue to seek full equality with men in the workplace, knowing that such an achievement will be associated with a rather dramatic reduction in well-being? More to the point, what really matters in life? What we can say for sure is that compared to women, men work too hard, are more likely to die young and violently, don’t get as much social time and often feel excluded from government. Someday we might want to set aside some time to reflect on these glaring inequities."

PINK HEDONIST on Twitter - "“Why are there so few female CEO’s?”
Wrong question.
How many women are willing to:
- work 80 hours a week?
- be on the ‘job’ 24 hours everyday, answering client calls at 4 am if needed
- never take no for an answer & be hyper disagreeable
- neglect children & husband"

Complex on Twitter - "Lyndsey Sherrod Bates, a former special education teacher in Alabama has pleaded guilty to having sex with two students. She was sentenced to time served and three years of probation"

More teachers are having sex with their students. Here’s how schools can stop them. - The Washington Post - "In Texas, home to the largest number of teacher sexual misconduct cases in the country, investigations into alleged inappropriate teacher-student relationships has grown 27 percent over the past three years, to 179. Kentucky schools reported more than 45 sexual relationships between teachers and students in 2011, up from 25 just a year earlier. And a surge has been reported in Alabama, where the state investigated 31 cases during the year ending July 2013, nearly triple the number it had investigated just four years earlier... two things have become popular and had a massive effect on the prevalence of sexual misconduct in schools: social media and text messaging... Last year, at least 281 school employees — 36 percent of those accused or convicted of an inappropriate relationship with a student – were reported to have used social media to start or continue those relationships. I suspect the percentage actually is significantly higher, since news accounts don’t always reveal when social media was a factor in these interactions."

Why Are So Many Female Teachers Sleeping With Students? - "In 2014, Abbott said, two-thirds of reported teacher-related sexual misconduct cases with students involved men; that means one-third of the cases involved female teachers.If Abbott’s statistics are accurate, it would represent an enormous increase from just a decade ago, when female teachers accounted for as little as four percent of reported sex crimes involving students"

The women demonised for championing men's rights - "Alison Bushell, 57, from Suffolk, runs a social work consultancy.
Britain's family courts are engaged in practices that separate fathers from their children, knowingly or not, Alison believes. She says: 'The pressure groups springing up, some of which are advising the Ministry of Justice on domestic violence cases, have an anti-male agenda.' In 20 years as a statutory social worker she saw a lack of effort to keep families together and an 'airbrushing out' of many dads... In England there were more than 3,600 beds in safe houses for women in 2017, but just 20 for men...
Belinda Brown, 54, is a social anthropologist and co-founder of Men For Tomorrow. A widow with two children, she lives in London...
'Most men work extremely hard to provide for their families, often at considerable cost to themselves. For women to ignore these sacrifices and instead blame men for all the problems in the world, it's divisive and damaging to gender cohesion.'...
Erin Pizzey, 80, founded women's charity Refuge. She is now a patron of the charity Families Need Fathers. She lives in South London and is divorced with two children.
'I'm all for equality of the sexes,' Erin Pizzey says.'But equality isn't the endgame for those feminists who believe women would be far better off without men.'This may sound odd coming from the founder of the first women's refuge... Erin became a pariah, as she insisted many female victims were also violent.'Of the first 100 women who came into my refuge, 62 were as violent or more violent than the men they had left,' she says.'Therefore, domestic violence can't be a gender issue, it can't be just men, because we girls are just as badly affected.'She became a hate figure for saying so. 'They branded me a 'victim blamer'. 'After a bomb scare, the police suggested my post be sent to them for inspection.'In the Seventies, she tried to set up a refuge for men, with little success. 'The rich men who were willing to fund my projects for women refused to give any money to male victims.'... 'I am fighting for my son, my grandsons and my great grandsons, so that they might have a future where men are no longer demonised.'"

Simon Lanham stabbed by his girlfriend faces double standards - "Simon Lanham, now 42, was stabbed five times by his then-girlfriend, Sheree Maxfield... During his stay in hospital he claims one doctor said; 'So mate, we are all dying to know did you deserve it?'... Mr Lanham said that the stabbing wasn't the first time he was physically attacked by his partner. From around three months into the relationship his partner would run at him from behind, jump onto him and 'bite his trapeze muscle'... Sheree Maxfield was ordered to serve a three year community corrections order after the assault by a judge from the Supreme Court of Victoria.'You were fortunate indeed that you did not kill your victim. The offence is one which ordinarily would demand a term of immediate imprisonment, and a substantial term at that.The judge went on to explain that Maxfield would see a reduced sentence because she 'clearly' has 'a mild intellectual disability'."
Male privilege!

Construction company allowed to 'discriminate' based on sex - "A labour-hire provider will be allowed to discriminate based on sex in a bid to employ more women to build transport infrastructure for the Queensland government.Protech Personnel Pty Ltd sought an exemption from the Anti-Discrimination Act to allow it to target recruitment for women. At the moment it recruits 9 per cent of women in non-traditional roles."

Chart of the day: For every 100 girls/women….. | American Enterprise Institute - AEI - "The data in the table show that on many, many measures of: a) educational, behavioral and mental health outcomes, b) alcohol, drug addiction, and drug overdoses, c) suicide, murder, violent crimes, and incarceration, d) job fatalities and e) homelessness, boys and men are faring much worse than girls and women. And yet despite the fact that boys and men are at so much greater risk than girls and women on so many different measures, those significant gender disparities that disproportionately and adversely affect men get almost no attention. In fact, it’s girls and women who get a disproportionate amount of attention, resources, and financial support...
There are hundreds of single-sex, girl-only summer (and other) STEM programs at universities all over the country that illegally discriminate against boys in violation of Title IX’s prohibition of sex discrimination, including sex discrimination against males. More than 70 of those programs are currently being challenged for violating Title IX and more than 30 programs are now subject to federal investigations for civil rights violations. At least six of those programs have either been discontinued, supplemented with boy-only programs, or converted to co-ed programs open to students of all gender identities."

Women get to be "plus-sized," but men are overweight. And not good enough for them. : fatlogic - "Plus-Sized women admit they aren't attracted to overweight men"
If" it were the other way around the men would be slammed for hypocrisy. As usual only women get to have standards

Gad Saad - Posts - "I’m watching a @cnn report on how apparently countries run by women have performed better than those run by those run by “disgusting toxic pathologies” known as men. Noble Female @SamanthaJPower explained why: Women are driven by both empathy and rigor.
Imagine for a moment if a man were to make a similar statement about women. He would have been fired, ostracized, insulted, ruined. But, insult men and it is perfectly progressive."

Teachers 'give higher marks to girls' - "An OECD report on gender in education, across more than 60 countries, found that girls receive higher marks compared with boys of the same ability.Researchers suggest girls are better behaved in class and this influences how teachers perceive their work.Differences in school results can sometimes "have little to do with ability"... Teachers are said to reward "organisational skills, good behaviour and compliance" rather than objectively marking pupils' work.The findings suggested that teachers needed to be aware of "gender bias".It also raised questions about whether this really benefited girls."Is it a good thing? Maybe in the short run, you get a better school certificate," said the OECD's education director, Andreas Schleicher."In the long run, the world is going to penalise you because the labour market doesn't pay you for your school marks, it pays you for what you can do.""

Perpetrators vs victims | Understanding the difference | Changing for Good - "In seeking to minimise and justify their violence, some men will claim to be a victim of violence from their female partner, yet actually be perpetrators of violence. We also recognise that men may be genuine victims of violence from a female partner."
From MensLine Australia
Anyone talking about women claiming to be victims of violence would be smeared as a misogynist

More men are killed than women, so why focus on violence against women? - "Violence against women is unique, and entrenched in our society, where she and many other experts note that social structures “perpetuate and maintain gender inequalities.” The term “femicide” isn’t meant to convey women are being killed more often than men, Dawson says.“It’s about underscoring that when women and girls are killed, it is in ways that are very distinct from the ways in which men and boys are killed and, therefore, prevention requires an approach that recognizes those differences.”It’s about power, says Nadine Wathen, a Western University professor and Canada research chair in mobilizing knowledge on gender-based violence... Overall, more men are murdered: 485 in 2017 versus 173 women... The way men are murdered almost always has “nothing to do with [intimate] relationships and power-based crime,” Moghadami says, which is why violence against women warrants a national action plan as opposed to an action plan that doesn’t distinguish between genders. Look at the media and the work researchers have been doing on violence against men and boys, says Dawson, and you’ll see stories about them that are never accompanied by, “why aren’t you focusing on women and girls?” It’s all about the context: “The subject of violence against women makes people uncomfortable,” says Dawson, which might be because of who is perpetrating the violence... One of the questions that keeps her up at night is how to better explain this to the men in her life who want equality but don’t always see their actions, including things like interrupting women frequently when they speak, through an equity lens.“The people who are more marginalized need a bit of extra resourcing at the front end to get us to equal outcomes.” Ultimately, Dawson says, she doesn’t think there would be such a backlash to researchers and media reports that focus on violence against women “if our society valued women and girls.”... “Those who deny this are choosing to ignore this reality for a specific purpose.”"
Basically men are evil. Which is why though many more men are murdered, we must focus on women

'Domestic violence against men is real': Woman walks free from court after car she was driving hit and killed her boyfriend - leaving his shattered mother weeping in rage - "Ms Oates was given bail on Sunday by the Hobart Magistrates Court, enraging Mr Wise's mother Faith Tkalac.She claimed if it he, as a man, who had breached the FVO he would still be in jail.'I don't understand this, domestic violence against men is real... my son is never going to walk through my door again,' she said.'My son most definitely wouldn't be bailed [if the roles were reversed].'

Texas teacher AVOIDS prison after pleading guilty to rape - "A Texas teacher was sentenced to no time behind bars and kept off the sex offender registry despite confessing to having inappropriate sexual relationships with two of her students. Haeli Wey, a 29-year-old teacher from Austin, was given 10 years of probation and ordered to complete 200 hours of community service after one of her students said the two had sex more than 10 times over the course of a two-month period and another detailed how she seduced him in a public park... District Judge David Wahlberg let her walk free after a sentencing hearing that lasted less than four minutes... her lawyer said her behavior was the result of a personal tragedy she had suffered at the time.Larry Sauer, who represented the disgraced teacher, said that while his client accepted full responsibility for her actions, she was distraught at that time having recently witnessed the death of a teenager at Austin Ridge Bible Church, where she worked as a camp counselor over the summer."

The Honey Badger Radio official Facebook group - "Woman who stabbed husband to death has sentence reduced"
"Good. Women are always judged more harshly than men."

Woman Who Falsely Accused A 13-Year-Old Of Rape And Allegedly Distributed Child Porn And Groomed A Teenage Girl For Sex Gets NO Jail Time - "She was facing five years in prison (still a short amount of time for what she did) for the computer charge. Instead, she will serve 18 months on home confinement while the remaining three-and-a-half years were suspended with probation. She also received one year of home confinement for each of the false reports she made to police, but her sentences are to be served concurrently, meaning she only received two years of home confinement for falsely accusing a teenager of rape, possessing child pornography, and allegedly forcing a teenage girl to perform sex acts. Shannon’s plea deal led to five additional charges being dropped, and most infuriating of all, she won’t have to register as a sex offender. No man in a similar position would get such a deal."

Lauren Chen on Twitter - "If more women die than men: Men are oppressing women If more men die than women: Women are just naturally superior to men Funny how that works out"
Yet if more ethnic minorities die...

Man who set up camera to catch a ghost instead catches girlfriend's affair with his 16-year-old son - " The woman was sentenced to a year in jail with a six months suspended sentence on condition of good behaviour"
Alleged photos

Helai Toorpakai's answer to What are some commonly accepted double standards? - Quora - "I've noted that women can generally get away with slapping men, because they're women, and we're supposed to think it's alright, and even cute, in Jane's case.In movies, it's pretty okay to have a scene like this. You could never have one with a mortal man slapping the Goddess of Thunder though (or any man slapping a woman), just because he “had missed her so much that he couldn't believe she was real”. Or even better, because she took so long to come back to Earth to meet him, after she was done fighting great battles across the galaxy/universe.Why then is it acceptable for Jane to slap Thor? People obviously speak about feminism, and equal roles for women in movies, but turn a blind eye on this. It's actually not even turning a blind eye, because that would imply you at least think it is wrong. And I'm a girl saying this!"
Power relations means never having to say you're sorry. But of course we know feminism isn't really about equality, but women's rights, so.
Comment: "The thing about the Captain America scene that makes it so bad is not just the violence, but the motive, and the context. The double-standard here is manifold. Peggy isn’t just being violent she’s also being disturbingly possessive. She literally acts like Steve belongs to her, getting so infuriated at the mere possibility he might be involved with someone else she literally fires a gun at him.Worse since we know Peggy is a trained operative and expert shooter she would have had it drilled into her skull that you don’t fire, no you don’t even draw a gun or even take the safety off unless you’re at a range with clear lines of fire or in a combat situation. To do otherwise would be to invite serious disciplinary action, and if such a breach involved actually opening fire in a crowded, sealed room, or even threatening to you might literally be shot-dead then and there.Seriously opening fire without warning like that in a military context is the sort of thing that is likely to have you facing a court martial if it didn’t get you killed, but she does it anyway, and all because she thought (wrongly) that the guy she a crush on had kissed some other girl. Something he had every right to do. Yet we’re all supposed chuckle at the unresolved sexual tension instead of wondering what kind of psycho reacts like this instead of using their words."

Ex-Ravens cheerleader sentenced for rape of 15-year-old boy - "Ex-Ravens cheerleader Molly Shattuck must spend every other weekend in a Delaware work-release detention center for nearly two years, a judge decided in sentencing her for having raped a 15-year-old boy in Bethany Beach... The mother and father of the victim asked Superior Court Judge E. Scott Bradley to sentence Shattuck to more than just probation time.“What she did to my son is heinous. The fact that she paraded her pedophilia in front of her own son is even more disturbing,” the mother said. “Any adult who rapes a child deserves to be in prison. Please hold her accountable.”... Deputy Attorney General John Donahue pressed Bradley for a sentence of more than just probation, noting the guidelines called for a sentence between zero and 22 months. “This is a classic case of grooming behavior,” Donahue said. “This was not a momentary lapse in judgment.” The law, he said, makes no distinction between adult men and adult women who sexually abuse minor children... “The competing interests in this case have been very difficult to weigh,” Bradley said, noting both the victim’s pain — the boy’s father said the family considered moving away from Maryland to avoid scrutiny and embarrassment — and Shattuck’s long fall from a privileged perch in society after her arrest."
Weekend detention for rape.

Woman Avoids Jail After Sex With Dad in Competition With Sister - "A Nebraska woman will not go to jail despite marrying her father as part of a competition with her half-sister to have sex with their dad first... Samantha Kershner, 21, met her biological father, Travis Fieldgrove, 40, at the age of 17 after begging her mother to learn the identify of her father in order to meet him."
Sexism aside, love apparently isn't love

Americans who owe child support won't get stimulus checks - "If you owe back taxes  of other debt to the government that's not a problem, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the chairman of the Finance Committee and key author of the stimulus bill said.The legislation "turns off nearly all administrative offsets that ordinarily may reduce tax refunds for individuals who have past tax debts, or who are behind on other payments to federal or state governments, including student loan payments""
Apparently not in the wording of the bill, but still.

Ex-dinner lady who had sex with 14-year-old boy spared prison spell because it would have put her four children into foster care - "the pair played a sex game on New Year’s Eve in 2014 where the ‘loser’ had to massage the back of the ‘winner’.The mum-of-four, who often had sex with the boy after drinking sessions, denied all the charges but was found guilty on seven of them when she was tried last year... Defending Spragg, her lawyer Rufus Taylor said she was a vulnerable single mother and had suffered a recent bereavement as well as a miscarriage.He said: “This relationship gave her some sort of self-worth.”"

Woman cries 'isolation is getting to me' after stabbing boyfriend and cutting up his clothes - "A healthcare assistant cut her boyfriends clothes before stabbing him in the hand in a drunken row.Michelle Ashcroft, 31, attacked Zac Cheetham at her home in the early hours of the morning.She then rang the police and confessed to stabbing him, before telling officers she had used a kitchen knife.However, Mr Cheetham said it was actually a pair of scissors and refused to make a police statement.Ashcroft was spared jail after explaining she was under a lot of pressure during the coronavirus pandemic... When arrested and interviewed, Ashcroft said they were drinking, then "everything kicked off" but she didn't know why.She said she felt sick when shown police bodycam footage of his injury and couldn't remember why she cut up his clothes... Ashcroft, who admitted assault causing actual bodily harm and criminal damage, has two previous convictions for three offences.The court heard they included a battery and a criminal damage, at which point Ashcroft started crying... "it's a case that seems unlikely to have come to the attention of the police at all, had it not been for Miss Ashcroft's call to the police."In my submission that demonstrates her remorse. It's clearly an incident that paints her in a poor light."Judge Flewitt said: "It's the second conviction for violence isn't it. Eventually somebody is going to send her to prison."Ms Willmott said Ashcroft was fined for her past offences, meaning she didn't receive any support from the Probation Service.She said her client faced "difficulties" and the public and Ashcroft would benefit if she was given help... "The reason that you did that was because you had been drinking too much and the reason as I understand it you had been drinking too much was because you were under a great deal of pressure."
Strange, usually having been drinking is an aggravating factor

Financial crisis caused 5,000 suicides - "The stresses of recession and unemployment triggered by the global financial crash of 2008 led to a spike in suicides among men in Europe and North America... there was very little change in suicide levels among women."

Student who stabbed boyfriend loses appeal against sentence - "An Oxford University medical student who avoided jail after stabbing her boyfriend with a bread knife has lost an appeal against her suspended sentence.Lavinia Woodward, 25, attacked her then partner after she had been drinking at her university accommodation at Christ Church college. She was given a 10-month prison term suspended for 18 months after admitting unlawful wounding last September at Oxford crown court... Woodward challenged her sentence at the court of appeal. Her lawyers argued the exceptional circumstances of her case, including her mental health difficulties, meant she could have been given a conditional discharge or a fine. Jim Sturman QC said the suspended sentence has affected her ability to find work. “I appreciate it would be an exceptional course, but she is an exceptional candidate”... A character reference from a former professor at Oxford said she was the most talented undergraduate he had seen in his laboratory over the past 25 years. The court heard she had made an observation while studying that had led to the founding of a research department at the university."
Amazing he even appealed

Eloise Moss On A Modern History Of Burglary

Eloise Moss On A Modern History Of Burglary | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra

"[On the late 19th/early 20th century] What's really distinctive about the history of crime in this period, but specifically the history of burglary is that the law itself has a very, very specific set of criteria for what actually counts as a burglary.

So, today, if someone breaks into your home at any time of day or even any kind of property in any sense, it can be classified as a burglary. Now before 1968, which was when the Theft Act made that the case, before that point, burglary by law was defined as breaking into an exclusively domestic environment, so, an inhabited residential space between what are legally defined as the nighttime hours of 9pm and 6am.

And for that reason, burglary has a kind of really sinister aspect to it because essentially, when the burglar is nearby, you are going to be in bed, asleep, vulnerable. Potentially undressed, even, around the presence of that intruder, so it carries a life sentence, because it's entwined with ideas of vulnerability. It's entwined with ideas of rape, and it's even imagined as a kind of a rape of your home, that penetrating into the sanctity of your own personal space in a period where privacy is really a marker of particularly being a middle and upper class person. Privacy is is sacrosanct. So the idea of what's usually characterized as some working class person breaking into that space is horror, you know, and then purloining your valuables...

"‘There's a romance about burglary in this period that is associated with so many people experiencing economic deprivation. And the idea that certain burglars have kind of taken more initiative than others to clamber up and over into people's properties and therefore avoid the police altogether because they're not operating at street level, they're clambering over and above the the level of the streets. Is actually viewed as sort of slightly inspirational.

There's a historian called Gillian Spraggs, who suggests that we have a cult of the robber In England dating from the medieval period with characters like Robin Hood through the 18th century with real life highwaymen like Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard, who have been idolized in songs and ballads and in stories for as long as we can remember’...

‘You mentioned that there is almost an erotic connotation to it as well. You did touch on it when you were talking about the invasion of the boudoir’...

‘The idea of a very handsome young man dressed in black and he's very athletic, clambering up into your bedroom by night is not viewed as necessarily a bad thing by everyone and there's a lot of quite trashy semi erotica written around that possibility in stories of the period’...

‘There were women burglars, there are women burglars, but in the period that of this book 1860-1968, as far as the government was concerned, and as far as the judicial system was concerned, no there weren’t... women was viewed as so integral to domesticity, to home life, to maintaining the stability of homes and relationships in this era, the idea that a woman would kind of ignore all that ideology to break into a house to threaten a family, to threaten their prosperity and their sense of safety and stability and to threaten the relationships at the core of that family by their presence, by making the home less safe, was really something that contemporaries fought against...

They were given either much lighter sentences, and often the ones having been captured for burglary that charge would then be changed into being an accomplice of a man. So a lot of women burglars actually become quite canny about this and say, oh, no, it wasn't me, it was my boyfriend or my husband who had lured me into doing this, or who gave me these things and then it turned out they were stolen, who knew? You know, poor me. And they say this in court.

And they are believed because people want to believe that a woman will not have been able to commit this crime, both on moral grounds and actually in terms of skills as well, because as much as the burger is seen as the aristocrat of crime, they're associated with being particularly clever and particularly skilled. And again, this is a period in which largely women are thought to be far less intelligent than men"


Patriarchy!

Links - 17th December 2019 (2) ("Male Privilege")

Baby batterer who left tot brain damaged then moaned about missing haircut appointment dodges jail - "A woman who left a baby brain damaged then moaned about missing a haircut appointment has been spared jail.Shannon Soutter walked free after a judge said it “neither appropriate or necessary” to lock her up.The 23-year-old attacked the wee girl over a two month period while apparently looking after her at a house in Arbroath, Angus .The child had brain injuries in April 2018 as well as fractures to her skull, ribs and ankle.She may also have permanent blindness with medics describing her prognosis as “poor”."

UK: Judge Releases Mother Who Went Clubbing With Infant Who Died While She Was Partying - "Marina Tilby, 26, from Aberaeron, Ceredigion, Wales, had been seen out nightclubbing with her baby boy before returning to a caravan with two men she had met on that night... Tilby was jailed for two years and four months by Swansea Crown Court... Judges later released Tilby at a London court of appeals after reducing the sentence to 16 months suspended."

Orwell & Goode on Twitter - "Men have no friends and women bear the burden" - Harpers Bazaar
"Men have no friends; women most affected"
After all, women are the primary victims of war even though men are the ones who die

Woman who said she was too pretty for jail gets no time - "Lauren Cutshaw went viral last year when she said she was too pretty to go to jail after she was arrested for DUI. The judge in her case seems to agree as Cutshaw, 34, is being given a sweet deal, including no time behind bars. She even gets to keep her driver's license. Cutshaw, a real estate agent from South Carolina, was pulled over after blowing through a stop sign at more than twice the speed limit on Aug. 5, 2018"

Brooke Skylar Richardson is found NOT GUILTY of murder or manslaughter - "The cheerleader who buried her baby in her backyard after giving birth in secret was found not guilty of murder, manslaughter and child endangerment on Thursday.Skylar Richardson, 20, had been facing life in prison if convicted of all the charges.They included aggravated murder, manslaughter, gross abuse of a corpse and child endangerment. She has also been charged with tampering with evidence but the judge removed that count during the trial... She was convicted of gross abuse of a corpse and now faces a maximum of one year behind bars... Skylar said she gave birth to a stillborn on the toilet in the upstairs bathroom of her family home in Carlisle, Ohio. She buried the baby afterwards in her backyard and was caught two months later when she tearfully confessed to a gynecologist what she had done.Prosecutors believe the baby was born alive and that Skylar killed her because she did not want her to intervene with her 'perfect life'.They also claimed that she set fire to it, initially basing the allegation on the finding from a pathologist who said the bones - once they had been excavated - looked burned.The pathologist later recanted her claim but before she did, detectives interviewed Skylar for a second time.During that interview she confessed to 'trying to cremate her a little' after being told by them repeatedly that they 'knew she did something with fire'... They also referred back to a text message Skylar sent her mother in the hours after she delivered the baby where she said she was happy to have her 'belly back'.The message read: 'I'm literally speachless (sic) with how happy am... I am literally so excited now just for dinner to wear something cute yayyyy my belly is back and now I'm takin(sic) this opportunity to make it amazing.'... they called on a psychologist who had treated Skylar when she was younger to testify.He said that she had been sexually abused... Prosecutors objected to the testimony, claiming it was irrelevant.Other witnesses called to the stand were high school teachers at her school who said she often sat with autistic children at lunch so that they did not have to eat alone, and her classmates who say she was so meek at school that they had to defend her from bullies... Her younger brother, Jackson, also testified.He described her as his 'best friend' and recalled how she would sneak food, like donuts, while her parents were not home. Skylar cried as he spoke.The defense's final witness was a marketing expert who had made a virtual design of the family's home.It is unclear why they called him beyond trying to humanize Skylar and show the bathroom where she gave birth and her bedroom."

Sydney Watson on Twitter - "Male privilege nutshelled - When a woman cannot pay child support, they get public housing. When a man cannot do the same, they get prison time."

FAQ: Do Women Have to Pay Child Support? - Mitchell & Crunk - "shocking is that non-custodial mothers are less likely to pay child support than non-custodial fathers. One-quarter of custodial mothers have not received child support payments from the father, while 32 percent of custodial fathers have not received payments from the mother, according to data provided by the U.S Census Bureau. Not only is nonpayment of child support common among both genders, non-payment tends to be more common among mothers mandated to pay it to their ex-spouses."

WATCH: Rape accuser 'attacks Neymar in Paris hotel' - "Footage reportedly showing Brazilian football star Neymar being attacked by the woman who has accused him of rape in a Paris hotel room has been shared online.The video is said to have been filmed in May, the day after the alleged sexual assault, and reportedly shows Neymar lying on a bed with accuser Najila Trindade Mendes de Souza before she begins to lash out at him. "But I'm going to hit you, you know why? Because you attacked me yesterday and left me here alone," she is heard shouting as the man said to be Neymar is seen attempting to defend himself."
Now they can prosecute him for filming her without consent

Moment teacher is seen kicking student's chair - as judge OVERTURNS her conviction for assault - "Kimberley Peschi, 42, of Galloway, was originally found guilty of simple assault after she was accused of pulling a 12-year-old student’s chair backwards at Belhaven Middle School in Linwood in 2017.The sixth-grader, whom she was supervising during lunch in the cafeteria, had been leaning back in the chair when Peschi kicked the legs out from the chair, causing him to fall and hit his head on the floor... Peschi can be seen walking across the room towards the student, wearing a lilac cardigan. She lifts her right leg and kicks out at his chair.The child can be seen toppling over before getting back up. The teacher walks away... Superior Court Judge John Rauh overturned the guilty verdict on May 3 this year and took the order requiring her to forfeit her teaching license off the table.Rauh said that, after looking at the video, Peschi’s claim that she was trying to stabilize the chair was 'plausible'"

Northwest Arkansas woman gets probation for framing husband with child porn, rape - "A Northwest Arkansas woman will serve six years of probation after admitting to framing her husband by putting child pornography on his phone and falsely telling police he sexually assaulted a girl."

Serial drink driver who crashed car after downing bottle of wine is spared jailed because she's a WOMAN - "Victoria Parry was told by a female judge if she was a man "it would be straight down the stairs" to prison but was instead handed a suspended sentence and a driving ban...
MEN are more likely to be jailed than women, Ministry of Justice figures have revealed.Ten per cent of male defendants were immediately sent to prison in 2017 - but just two per cent of women were.Men are also more likely to be hit with suspended sentences, with 6 per cent of defendants being handed one at court.But just three per cent of women get one.A massive 89 per cent of women were handed fines or community sentences - compared to a mere 78 per cent of men"
Meanwhile feminists are saying we shouldn't send women to prison - equality!

Male childcare worker: 'I face discrimination every day' - "I was working in a prep centre, in the kindy with 2-4 year olds. The kids were all having a nap, all was peaceful, and it seemed like an average day. A pair of parents walked past and clocked me, just sitting there.The next thing I knew, they’d reported me to the police for touching their child inappropriately.It hit me like a bus.They started an active campaign against me, even though I’d done nothing wrong.They put posters of my face with my name and where I worked, saying I was a child molester.It was plastered everywhere around traffic lights and in the streets. They spread lies about me throughout the community.I had to go for an interview with child protection services. I was terrified. I knew I’d done absolutely nothing wrong, but if I were found guilty of something it would affect my entire life... I had to be moved to another childcare centre. They said the claims had been proven to be false. They’d interviewed the parents and it turned out they’d put words in the little girl’s mouth.I asked why, and was told, “Because the parents don’t believe men should be working in childcare.”... I had a huge moment of clarity; this is the way society is now.Men are judged and the prejudice is fierce.The truth was, if I stayed in this line of work, every time I would move to a new centre I’d have to prove myself to be trustworthy. I’d have to start all over again.Ultimately, it would be just a matter of time before something awful like that happened again. And, it would only get more difficult as I got older. I saw a woman on the news recently who doesn’t let men babysit her kids. That’s the kind of discrimination I’m talking about.Children need men around in their life too. We’re not all monsters; some of us just love kids and want to be a positive influence.It’s a really negative side effect of feminist ideology - and it’s getting worse. We need to stop and think about what we’re teaching our children because they do pick up on it... Male teachers tell me, ‘Be very careful, anything you say can be used against you. You need to protect yourself.’... That’s it for me, I’ve decided to pursue a career in a different field.”"

Boy 15, made to sign sex offenders register after he and girl 15, swapped nudes - "The unnamed youngster got chatting to two girls – aged 15 and 17, while visiting the Future Farmers of America conference in 2012.Both girls believed they were in a relationship with the boy. The youngster, from Colorado, sent both a photo of his erect penis and asked them to send a naked selfie in return.After initially resisting, both girls sent the nude photo of themselves... A 2018 survey found that one in four teenagers polled had received a sext, with one in seven respondents admitting sending one themselves."
Yet even the older girl didn't have to register as a sex offender

Men need not apply: university set to open jobs just to women - "A Dutch engineering university is taking radical action to increase its share of female academics by opening job vacancies to women only.Starting on 1 July, the Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE) in the Netherlands will not allow men to apply for permanent academic jobs for the first 6 months of the recruitment process under a new fellowship program... Dutch and EU laws allow policies to recruit underrepresented groups"
So since men are underrepresented in universities, can universities open places just to them?

Ex-dinner lady who had sex with 14-year-old boy spared prison spell because it would have put her four children into foster care - "A FORMER dinner lady who had sex with a 14-year-old boy has been spared a prison term because it would have meant her four children would be put into foster care. Terri Spragg, 35, had sex with the young lad on several occasions – including on the kitchen floor – warned him not tell anyone because it was illegal."

Mother who killed her toddler twins will NOT face murder trial - "A mother who killed her 23-month-old twin son and daughter will no longer face a murder trial, a court heard today.Samantha Ford, 38, admitted manslaughter by diminished responsibility following the deaths of toddlers Jake and Chloe and the prosecution accepted her plea today... Ford, of Westwood, later admitted she had drowned the children after the breakdown of her marriage"

VIDEO: Woman Avoids Being Charged With Sexual Assault On Officer Despite Video - "“Oh yeah?” she yelled out seductively, as she rubbed her rear end against the officer’s thigh and pelvis. “You like that? You like that?”"

Drunk woman who had sex with 14-year-old at party is cleared of abuse - "Kimberly Abell, 33, seduced the 14-year-old in front of his friend after getting drunk at a teenager’s birthday party.  A court heard she drank half a bottle of vodka, half a bottle of Disaronno liqueur and shots before asking the schoolboy: “Aren’t you going to f*** me?”... “She had previously had a conversation with the boy’s mother about their respective children, and would know roughly how old he was.”"

Judges told: 'be more lenient to women criminals' - ""It is now well recognised that a misplaced conception of equality has resulted in some very unequal treatment for women and girls.""
Apparently equality means being lenient to female criminals

Considering the Male Disposability Hypothesis

Considering the Male Disposability Hypothesis

"In her analysis “Women and Genocide in Rwanda,” the former Rwandan politician Aloysia Inyumba stated that “The genocide in Rwanda is a far-reaching tragedy that has taken a particularly hard toll on women. They now comprise 70 percent of the population, since the genocide chiefly exterminated the male population.”

In a 1998 speech delivered before a domestic violence conference in El Salvador, former US senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that “Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat.”

These statements are illustrative of a wider trend of “male disposability.”

“Male disposability” describes the tendency to be less concerned about the safety and well-being of men than of women. This night sound surprising given the emphasis in contemporary Western discourse on the oppression of women by men...

A 2016 study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science found that people are more willing to sacrifice men than women in a time of crisis and that they are more willing to inflict harm on men than on women. In 2017, an attempt to replicate the Milgram experiment in Poland provided some (inconclusive) evidence that people are more willing to deliver severe electric shocks to men than to women...

A 2000 study found that among vehicular homicides, drivers who kill women tend to receive longer sentences than drivers who kill men. Another study found that, in Texas in 1991, offenders who victimized females received longer sentences than those who victimized males. There is at least some evidence that “women and children first” is a principle still employed during rescue efforts in natural disaster zones. Some social scientists have also noted that the media is more likely to focus on female victims than male victims. This is especially true for white female victims.

It is interesting to consider the above in light of the following: Men are more likely to be murdered than women and, in some cases, they are more likely to be physically assaulted. In most countries, men are more likely to die from suicide, they are more likely to be homeless, they’re more likely to be killed by the police, and they are more likely to work in dangerous jobs. Some countries also specifically criminalize male homosexuality, and male homosexuals seem to be more likely to be victims of hate crimes. The wartime rape and sexual abuse of men are also believed to be more prevalent than most people realize.

Despite all this, the media appear to focus overwhelmingly on violence against women and whole international organizations and movements have been founded to end violence against women and girls. You will be incredibly hard-pressed to find similar resources when it comes to ending violence against men...

When pressured to admit that violence against men is largely normalized and ignored compared to violence against women, many respond by trying to justify the imbalance. For example, some contend that violence against women is “gendered” and should therefore be taken more seriously. However, a lot of violence against men is also gender-based... Even if we were to accept that violence against men is not gendered, that would not justify ignoring the more common and widespread victimization of men and boys.

A related argument holds that because men are usually victimized by other men, it is less important than violence inflicted on men and women arbitrarily. For some reason this is not considered “gendered” violence, because it is assumed that men cannot target other men for being men. This line of thinking is highly unsatisfactory. Men tend to be quite competitive with other men and there is at least some evidence that women like women more than men like other men...

A third excuse, usually not explicitly stated but strongly implied, is that men somehow “deserve” to be victimized. After all, if men are the majority of the perpetrators, then it is somehow just that they get a taste of their own medicine...

'The standard operating procedure in feminist scholarship and activism dictates that when a complex social phenomenon like murder is addressed, certain rules must be followed. Briefly put, trends that evoke concern and sympathy for women—in this case, the sharp rise in women’s murder rates in Ciudad Juárez—must be carefully separated out and presented in isolation. Data that threaten to offset or contextualize the portrait, perhaps to the detriment of an emphasis on female victims, must be ignored or suppressed. Hence the invisibility of the nine-tenths of Juárez’s murder victims who are male. […] This feminist strategy reflects, and exploits, cultural convictions about men that are nearly universal. Men are seen as the “natural” victims of homicidal killing, for two main reasons. In part, this is because in most cases, men’s killers are other men—and we all know that “boys will be boys.” Second, men are viewed as implicated victims.'

In other words, men are generally perceived as responsible for their own victimization on some level. Women, on the other hand, are largely innocent so violence committed against them is a more serious crime. This is merely a doctrine of collective guilt and punishment.

The question is, why does society frequently appear to care more about the well-being of women?...

At least one study conducted by evolutionary psychologists has found that men are more willing to make the anti-utilitarian choice to let three members of the same sex die in order to save one member of the opposite sex, especially when there are fewer potential sexual partners. This suggests that men’s willingness to sacrifice men to save women may be tied to their need for sexual and reproductive success. Scientist David Brin argues that women in many ways physically resemble children more than men do (neoteny) and that they evolved that way to inspire protective impulses in men. However, this doesn’t explain the findings of other studies which suggest that women are also more willing to sacrifice men. Another possible explanation is that both men and women evolved to be protective of women because one man can impregnate several women, while a woman will usually only bear one child at a time, so it makes sense for societies to keep women safe so they can reproduce.

It’s hard to say which theory is more accurate or if all of them have some basis in truth. There is shockingly little research on the subject. Researching male victims is not compelling precisely because men are disposable “lesser victims” and male disposability tends to be reinforced by this tendency to ignore the phenomenon...

Do we want to eliminate male disposability? Do we want to send more women into combat? Do we want to have more women in dangerous jobs? Do we want to focus on male and female victims equally? I think this kind of equality is a laudable goal, but it will surely meet some resistance from society. Men themselves are often hesitant to see themselves as victims, traditionalists (male and female) would resist such a challenge to gender norms, and many feminists would resist the idea that male victims should receive greater attention."


Men like women, women like women, nobody likes men

Evidence for a true sexist double standard

Misreading Masculinity: Speculations on the Great Gender Gap in Writing

Misreading Masculinity: Speculations on the Great Gender Gap in Writing

"In middle school, during one of her periodic bouts of frustration,
my older daughter met with one of her male friends
to talk through her troubles. Midway through he stopped her,
“I have an idea—do you have a bicycle?”
“Yeah,” she said, puzzled.
“Well, ride it.”
“Whatever!”

When she told me the story, his logic made perfect sense: simply recounting what makes you sad won’t change anything. What you need to do is act, move, release this frustration. Talk, in other words, is an avoidance of action, of resolution, of decision-making. But when I told this story to a female friend of mine, her reaction was that his advice amounted to avoidance: rather than confronting the problems by talking through the frustration, he seemed to say you can run away—or at least ride away—from them. Furthermore, in a classic example of the mismatches that Tannen (1992) has made part of our gender folklore, my daughter’s friend saw his role as offering advice, when my daughter wanted a listening partner who might share his own frustrations rather than fix hers.

If we view writing as drawing on strongly gendered attitudes, such as the ones on display in this conversation, it is small wonder that the writing of boys and girls differ... the biggest gender gap that now exists is not in the areas that have received the most attention, girls falling behind boys in mathematics (a gap which is closing). It exists in writing (where the gap is not closing) (Cole, 1997). According to the most recent reports of the Educational Testing Service, the gap in writing between males and females at the eighth-grade level is over six times greater than the differences in mathematical reasoning (Cole, 1997, p. 15).

Another way to look at the magnitude of this gap is to compare it to the differences in writing performance of ethnic and racial groups. In the 1996 NAEP assessment for eighth graders, White students outperformed Black students by 29 points (on a 500-point scale) and Hispanic students by 21 points; females outperformed males by 25 points (Campbell, Voelkl, & Donohue, 1997, p. 167). In other words, the gap between females and males is comparable to that between Whites and racial/ethnic groups that have suffered systematic social and economic discrimination in this country...

Since Donald Graves’ research on gender differences in the early 70s, researchers have documented consistent gender differences in writing:

• When first graders were asked to imagine themselves as an animal in a story they might write, there were clear gender differences in the choices. Girls tend to choose domesticated animals (cat, horse), while boys choose animals that are dangerous and wild (cougar, monster) or comic (monkey) (Ollila, Bullen, & Collis, 1989).

• Second-grade girls tend to choose “primary territory” (home, school, parents, friends) as topics for writing. Boys consistently choose secondary territory (professions) or extended territory (wars, presidents, space) (Graves, 1973; McAuliffe, 1994).

• Second-grade boys write stories which focus on contests, physical and social, in which the protagonists act alone. Success is determined by winning or losing in these combative tests. By contrast, girls’ writing tends to focus more on joint action and protagonists who struggle to remain connected to the community (McAuliffe, 1994; Trepanier-Street, Romatowski, & McNair, 1990).

• When boys include females in their stories, they tend to be passive and, not coincidentally, professionless (Gray-Schlegel & Gray-Schlegel, 1995–96; Many, 1989). They tend to write about males in traditional roles of authority. When, for example, boys were asked to invert gender roles and write about a male nurse, one had the hospital invaded by aliens to change the terms of the task (Trepanier-Street, Romatowksi, & McNair, 1990).

• Because boys’ writing deals so consistently with physical contests, it is far more violent than girls’ writing (S. Peterson, 1998), a trend one pair of researchers called “disturbing” (Gray-Schlegel & Gray-Schlegel, 1995–6, p. 167).

• In a study of first-year college students, women wrote autobiographical essays that were judged better than those of their male counterparts (Peterson, 1991). In analyzing the differences, she found that males tended to write about times when they acted individually, often in physical challenge that built confidence. Women tended to write about a crisis in a relationship (boyfriend, family, or an encounter with culturally different persons). In terms of writing qualities, males showed no deficit at rendering detail; their lower scores were due to a perceived difficulty in rendering “significance,” in the capacity to reflect on the meaning of the experience.

• Boys’ preferences in reading and writing narratives are more closely aligned with visually mediated storytelling—film, TV, video games, computer graphics. They also rank humor higher than girls do. Millard (1997) suggests that the traditional literaturebased curriculum may ignore the more visuallymediated narratives that boys prefer.

It is one small step to turn these differences into deficits. The writing of males can be read as endorsing a whole set of antisocial values: the use of violence to resolve conflict; the lack of empathy for victims of violence; the subordination of women; extreme individualism and competition; and escapism. Even to allow such writing might be seen as complicity in a culture that condones male violence. Boys might also be viewed as drawing inspiration not from good literature, but from the morally questionable and exploitative visual media/toy culture. It is only one more small step to take on a missionary role or at least a prohibitionary role—to ban the violence, convert boys to more realistic and socially responsible fiction, wean them from space and aliens, guns and blood. Yet I suspect that any frontal assault on boyhood, as it has been culturally constructed, is a misreading of male students that is doomed to failure.

A major difficulty with the debate about “violence,” as it relates to the media’s effect on boys, is the almost unlimited scope of the term, often covering everything from the first 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan (Bryce, 1998) to Roadrunner cartoons, from the Kennedy assassination to the death of Kenny on South Park, from mass suicides to hockey games. Of course, a waiver is granted to the violence in great literature— Grimm’s fairy tales, Hamlet, the Bible—which for some reason uplifts and humanizes us. Can anyone doubt that the medieval audience listening to Beowulf, which would become the first classic of British literature, didn’t delight in Grendel’s sheer awfulness? This waiver raises the question: is the criticism really about violence or is it about taste? Is it about all violence or just “low class” violence in the more popular media?

There is also a troubling—and in my view sexist—assumption of extreme male susceptibility to any presentation of violence. During one of the crackdowns on violent rap music, noted African American scholar Henry Louis Gates often claimed that the critics of rap were holding a double standard. Black males, he argued, were being treated as “dry tinder” ready to ignite when they heard the rappers advocate violence. Yet no one worried that White women would start imitating Madonna (except in a campy way); everybody would assume that White women would maintain some ironic detachment, some bemusement at Madonna’s antics, a presumption they would not extend to Black males. While I’m still troubled by some of the lyrics Gates defends, I think his caution is a good place to start in looking at boys’ writing about violence. It is a mistake, I feel, to automatically equate boys’ use of violence in writing with any desire to be vicious or sadistic. To do so ignores the possibility that “violence” can be mediated, viewed with humorous detachment, and appropriated for a variety of non-violent ends, including the maintenance of friendship...

Literacy gets in the way of the need to move, to talk, to play, to live in and with one’s own body. In one sense, writing represents the choice of language over physical action; yet this choice can be mitigated by stressing action in the writing. Watch any first-grade boys composing and you will see the drama of hands simulating explosions, accompanied by sound effects, with intervals of consultation with friends about who is in which space ship. When I have asked boys how their writing differs from that of girls, they are dismissive of the lack of action in the girls’ stories. As one said, making a face, “They write about walking home together.”...

Normally collaboration is seen as the means to the end of producing a piece of writing. From the child’s standpoint, though, writing may be viewed as a means to collaborate, a ticket to participate; the fundamental attraction is not producing a piece of writing but the social opportunities the writing opens up and maintains.

For boys, this language of affiliation will often be coded in the language of violence and assault, so it is essential to read the subtext of the message. While Andrew was repeatedly using his attack sharks to tear “Jon” apart, he was in fact maintaining a channel of friendship. And a decade later, he looks back to these stories as the high point of his literacy history...

A literature-based curriculum for teenage readers usually stresses novels which explore character and making sense of individual experience. In her interviews with boys, these books were often dismissed because “nothing of consequence ever happened” (p. 43). Yet realistic, introspective fiction often is considered “better literature” than comedy, science fiction, crime novels, and nonfiction, in other words, genres that traditionally appeal to boys and could form the models for their writing. Millard claims the school curricula have “naturalized” a novel-reading practice that in the 19th century was enjoyed almost exclusively by women...

As Millard (1997) has shown, crossdressing comes easier to females than males; “tomboy” has never been the pejorative term for girls that “sissy” is for boys. If masculinity is a more tightly constructed cultural category, with sharper penalties for deviance toward the feminine, it follows that to create equity in access to literacy, teachers will need to acknowledge the cultural materials (e.g. the affection for parody and action, interest in professional sports, cartoons, videos games) that boys (and many girls) bring into the classroom (for an example see Salvio, 1994). To fully engage this cultural material, it is necessary to understand the masculine distaste for sincerity, and the complex ways that the positive can be encoded in the negative, praise in criticism, friendship in violence, love in death.

One key to working with this cultural material is recognizing the openness of even the most “violent” writing to parody and humor. In fact, much of the violence boys like is “violence with a wink,” violence that parodies itself or at least suggests its own unreality (the James Bond movies are full of such moments). The student who can engineer humor within the context of an action story almost invariably gains status. So, while it is tempting to bring boys into the “realistic fiction” camp, another strategy is to explore the ways in which they honor parody in their own stylized “violent” writing...

The most serious mistake, it seems to me, is viewing these preferences as pathologies, as anti-social ways of being that must be modified, or, if that is not possible, banned. I view this attitude as a form of cultural suppression that is sure to alienate male students from literacy and the school culture in general. Boys become the “natives” to be converted to more socially responsible preferences. It calls to mind W.E.B. Dubois’ question— “How does it feel to be a problem?” (1989, p. 3)"