Links - 12th December 2019 (2) (#MeToo / Male Feminists)

Robert De Niro sued for gender discrimination, wage violations - "Robert De Niro is the Raging Bull — and a chauvinist pig who subjected an employee to unwanted touching, sexist behavior and lewd jokes about his Viagra prescription, the woman charges in a new lawsuit.Graham Chase Robinson claims she was routinely demeaned and abused by the actor — including in vicious voicemails where he railed that her job was “f–king history!” and called her a “spoiled brat.”The $12 million lawsuit cites the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and old-school sexist behavior — charging that De Niro, 76, still operates with that mindset. “Robert De Niro is someone who has clung to old mores. He does not accept the idea that men should treat women as equals,” says Robinson’s complaint filed Thursday in Manhattan federal court. "
The Trump curse strikes again!

The Myth of the Male Feminist - "As we close out 2017, let’s take some time to reflect on lessons learned over the past 12 months. In an act of no holds barred brutal honesty, this year completely obliterated the myth of the male feminist. Though these men claim to be champions of women’s rights, we’ve seen time and time again how they are nothing but wolves in sheep’s clothing.In the last several months, Harvey Weinstein, Joss Whedon, Louis C.K., Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose have all fallen into this camp. In the case of writer Michael Hafford, who has been accused of physically assaulting four women, he went as far as authoring a column for Vice’s women-focused site, Broadly, in 2015 titled “Male Feminist Here,” parodying the deceitfulness of this very group of men... From an evolutionary perspective, the approach has been described by the late evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith as the “sneaky fuckers” strategy, referring to the way in which subordinate males manage to accomplish mating with females—which they otherwise might not get to do—by taking advantage of instances in which dominant (and more appealing) males are preoccupied, fighting off intruders.This has been observed across multiple species in the animal kingdom and in humans, it takes the form of feminist men. These men know by rote all of the right things to say in order to gain a woman’s trust. They pride themselves on being sensitive, socially conscious “allies,” calling out “male privilege” and “problematic behavior” by the “patriarchy.” They will subvert any hint of their masculinity. This brilliant comic, which compares male feminists with predators in the wild that successfully camouflage themselves from their prey, accurately sums up their duplicitous nature... Women deserve equality and to be treated no differently from men, and there are plenty of decent men out there who agree with me. The difference is these men don’t feel the need to run around waving a giant banner notifying everyone of this (or wearing a pink pussy hat, the national emblem of the Woman’s March on Washington in January). To have healthy and successful relationships, the solution isn’t mindlessly telling women what they want to hear, nor setting impossible expectations on men based on a biased worldview. For those who have bought into the unfortunate narrative that women are an oppressed class in need of special treatment in order to level the playing field, I will say that helping and supporting women because they are women is patronizing. These is nothing a male feminist loves more than educating women on how oppressed we really are."

Reclaiming my fear: I will no longer stay silent about Michael Kimmel - "What follows is a detailed and intimate account of my six or so years working for and in the presence of Michael Kimmel — noted Sociologist and famous “male feminist” — who was recently named as a sexual harasser. While all accounts of sexual harassment, sexual assault, violence, and exploitation are horrific, what makes this case particularly toxic is that Michael has spent the better part of the last three decades becoming famous for telling other men how to be better, including contributing to field-specific knowledge on intimate partner violence and community-wide conversations on #MeToo outside of and even in the workplace."

A cleansing fire: Moral outrage alleviates guilt and buffers threats to one’s moral identity - "Why do people express moral outrage? While this sentiment often stems from a perceived violation of some moral principle, we test the counter-intuitive possibility that moral outrage at third-party transgressions is sometimes a means of reducing guilt over one’s own moral failings and restoring a moral identity. We tested this guilt-driven account of outrage in five studies examining outrage at corporate labor exploitation and environmental destruction. Study 1 showed that personal guilt uniquely predicted moral outrage at corporate harm-doing and support for retributive punishment. Ingroup (vs. outgroup) wrongdoing elicited outrage at corporations through increased guilt, while the opportunity to express outrage reduced guilt (Study 2) and restored perceived personal morality (Study 3). Study 4 tested whether effects were due merely to downward social comparison and Study 5 showed that guilt-driven outrage was attenuated by an affirmation of moral identity in an unrelated context."
In other words, virtue signalling is a reflection of your own immorality. Or, the lady doth protest too much, methinks

William Shatner says MeToo has become hysterical and like the French Revolution - "The Captain Kirk actor also hit back at his critics who slammed him for defending the Christmas song 'Baby It's Cold Outside' on Twitter last week, after a radio station in his native Canada took it off the air.In an exclusive interview with DailyMailTV, Shatner – who is promoting his own Christmas album Shatner Claus - doubled down, saying the man in the song is 'just offering an invitation and presenting an argument for not leaving.''You're not saying I'm closing the door and you can't leave. It's not force, it's verbal persuasion, which works in the act,' Shatner said... The sci-fi actor also said he has had to rethink his compliments to women after recently taking a three-hour training course on sexual harassment in the workplace as part of his role in the United States Equestrian Federation (USEF).'It's all about sensitizing you to what is harassment. You might say, as I have on numerous occasions, ''looking good'', ''wow, what a great dress'', ''great legs'', ''I love your hair''. Nothing grabby, touchy-feely, nothing sexual,' he said.'Just innocuous compliments that one might say to anybody, with no intent of lasciviousness.'Shatner said he has even become wary when posing for pictures with Star Trek fans.'People say ''can I put my arm around you?'' I say ''Yes of course.'''But I don't. I've changed my behavior to quite a degree… because it's a revolution.'"

The silence surrounding grooming gangs | Coffee House - "Who is allowed to be part of the #MeToo movement? I ask because on Friday five men were found guilty of horrific sexual crimes against eight girls and yet the case hasn’t trended on Twitter. There have been no hashtags. The girls’ suffering hasn’t been widely talked about. There have been very few declarations of solidarity from feminists. There’s pretty much been silence.It isn’t hard to see why. The problem for the mostly middle-class, well-connected feminists who make up the #MeToo movement is that this case involved both the wrong kind of victim and the wrong kind of perpetrator. The victims were working-class girls, under the age of 16, some of them quite troubled — a far cry from the actresses, businesswomen and lobby journalists whose experiences of harassment have dominated the #MeToo narrative so far.And the perpetrators were Muslim men. They were Muslim men who the judge described as ‘cunning and determined’ sexual predators. And surely no one wants to risk stirring up Islamophobic sentiment by drawing attention to a Muslim gang engaged in incredibly abusive behaviour?... Strikingly, the judge didn’t only condemn the men – he also criticised the authorities in Rotherham. He said they had at best been ‘totally ineffectual’ and at worst ‘wholly indifferent’ to the abuse of girls by Muslim gangs. He said he was ‘quite satisfied’ that the ‘relevant authorities’ in Rotherham knew girls were being targeted for sexual exploitation. And their failure to do anything about it is a ‘lamentable state of affairs’... Look what happened to the Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, when she wrote about the problem of largely Pakistani gangs abusing white girls. She was demonised by Corbynistas. She was forced out of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. The message was clear: talk about this issue and you will be punished... What strange times we live in. A politician placing his hand on a middle-class journalist’s knee can dominate the news for weeks, while a gang of predatory men abducting and raping working-class girls gets a tiny write-up on page ten of your newspaper. This says something so disturbing to the victims in Rotherham and elsewhere: ‘You don’t matter. Preventing difficult discussion about cultural tensions in 21st-century Britain is far more important than your experiences of abuse.’"

The Return to Archaic Forms of Power—An Interview with Marianne Stidsen - "when I call #MeToo a ”revolution,” I mean it in all seriousness. I explore three instances in my book, where men have been judged by the media before having their cases tried by the legal system. The burden of proof has been reversed. And a violation of civil rights – such as the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial – is an attack on democracy itself, and ultimately undermines the legacy of the Enlightenment. We’re throwing two hundred years of struggle for human rights overboard... some fifty anonymous female students published an open letter to the country’s university rectors, claiming that sexual harassment and violence was ubiquitous at Danish campuses. Of course the letter didn’t mention any specific instances of such harassment or violence.The principal of The University of Copenhagen responded by setting up a committee to devise new guidelines to address sexual misconduct. Based on these guidelines, a senior lecturer in the humanities was reprimanded and stripped of his responsibilities – even though he had been formally acquitted of all accusations directed against him... The school principal was immediately fired.It turned out that this decision was in part prompted by an open letter, signed by 55 Danish authors, calling on the board to investigate rumors that had flourished about the school for several years. This might sound like a noble cause, but as I show in my book, some of the signatories had wanted to have the principal removed for years for reasons that didn’t have anything to do with misconduct: The same people had opposed his appointment three years earlier, based simply on his gender. This is something I knew because I was a member of the board that hired him, and therefore closely followed the reactions. Shortly after he was employed we were criticized by a number of women – some of whom had been candidates for the same job – who saw the appointment of a man as proof of patriarchal structures in the literary world. But it wasn’t until #MeToo swept through Denmark that these women were able to have him fired... When the lawyers went through the case, it turned out that many of the claims of misconduct came from people who had not been victims themselves but who had heard about others who had been mistreated. Some accusations really concerned minor issues: For example, one employee at the school had supposedly called a female student ”an old hag” – 20 years ago. Another former student reported that he, also many years ago, had written a piece that was severely criticized – which is something that one should expect at a writers’ school.In the end, not a single case led to a police report. But by the time the law firm filed its investigation it was too late. The principal had already been fired... even as a woman, I can fully understand if anyone prefers not to work closely with women as long as this #MeToo madness is going on. If I risked being judged on the basis of loose rumors, I’d be equally cautious. It’s a return to archaic forms of power: moralistic, opaque, unpredictable. And incredibly easy to abuse."

In the era of #MeToo, let us revisit Ted Kennedy's legacy - "one of the most grievous miscarriages of justice, one of the grossest abuses of wealth and political power, and one of the most ill-deserved second acts in modern American history: July 18, 1969, the night a probably-drunk Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge at Chappaquiddick and left a young, adoring campaign aide named Mary Jo Kopechne to die in about three feet of water, her horrific death a slow agony — one that took hours — as she doubtless waited for her hero, the young and virile Ted, to run for help.Instead, he stumbled back to his hotel room, called down to the front desk to complain about noisy guests, and went to sleep. Chappaquiddick: Never forget."

This brand of 'hipster feminism' helps no one - least of all the abused - "For someone who is frequently touted as the voice of modern womanhood, Lena Dunham certainly does talk a lot of rubbish. In case you don’t already know her oeuvre, Dunham is the creator, writer and star of Girls, the edgy HBO sitcom that was rapidly dubbed the voice of a new generation when it was first aired in 2012.Over the last five years, she has done her best to eclipse that notable achievement by making a number of astoundingly muddle-headed public pronouncements. In the past, Dunham has compared Bill Cosby’s sexual assault allegations to the Holocaust and blithely stated that she hasn’t had an abortion “but I wish I had”... We’ve all seen what happens when investigations are rushed. When the Jimmy Savile scandal erupted, there was a tsunami of allegations concerning historic child sex abuse. In our well-meaning attempts to address past trauma, we jumped headlong into trying to fix it - with mixed results.The singer Cliff Richard was recently given a payout from South Yorkshire Police after suing them for disclosing private information to the BBC naming him as a suspected child abuser in August 2014. No charges were ever brought.The widow of the former home secretary Leon Brittan and a former army chief have received compensation from Scotland Yard over the heavily criticised Operation Midland, a doomed investigation into salacious allegations of child sexual abuse and murder made by a single accuser."
So much for it being a myth that there're people who are pro-abortion

#Metoo has become a vicious hate mob - this will not end well for women - "“Common courtesy”, “decency” and “natural justice”. According to his family, this was all Carl Sargeant expected. He got none of those things. Instead, when allegations of “unwanted attention” and “inappropriate touching or groping” surfaced, the 48 year-old Welsh Labour minister was immediately sacked.Despite pushing for more details on the nature of the claims and warning the party that his mental health was at stake, Sargeant still hadn’t been told exactly what he was accused of four days later, when the father-of-two took his own life. “Why would you kill yourself if you hadn’t done anything?” raged the Twitter mob within hours of his death. “#metoo”... it was the court of #metoo – a court where the judge and jury are one and the same, and increasingly hysterical – that tried and convicted Sargeant without even hearing the charges. And today they are doing the same with the latest men accused of everything from knee-skimming to rape, whether they’re Hollywood actors like Jeremy Piven and Ed Westwick, whose new Agatha Christie drama was removed from the BBC’s Christmas schedule yesterday, MPs like Kelvin Hopkins (suspended) or hoteliers like Chateau Marmont’s André Balazs.... “A witch hunt” is how veteran Tory MP Sir Roger Gale described the current state of the Westminster sex pest scandal yesterday. And in the “wilting flowers” side-swipe he took at the female journalists he holds partly responsible for the mess (“nobody makes a journalist go and have lunch with an MP and drink”), one can hear a bitterness that we women should get used to – because it’s seeping through into every aspect of our lives and relationships now. “I’m never sharing a taxi with a woman again,” “Why would you employ women in this climate?” and “I’ve stopped making jokes with the women at work” are just three of the comments men have made to me in the past week.But all of these are dwarfed by the words of a teenager who said to me simply and only semi-apologetically: “I’m beginning to really dislike women.”"

Men are playing with fire by having drunken sex - "what has changed? Why are so many more young women making so many more complaints against young men, from backgrounds and at universities where arrest was unheard of a few years ago? Is there more rape and sexual assault, or just a greater willingness to report those crimes? Or is there something subtler at play? Are young women redefining for themselves where the boundaries of consent lie and what they are prepared to accept?... The law is clear — even if both parties are equally and very drunk, and got that way together without coercion, and then have sex, the man is a rapist and the woman is his victim. The woman’s drunkenness obliterates any question of consent and the man cannot rely upon his own state to support his defence; the more drunk he is, the worse the law makes it for him... I have seen families torn apart, university careers ended and enduring psychological harm on both sides... But what should we say to our sons and daughters as they head off to university exuding hope, nervous excitement and a desperate desire for the new? Drink less? Good luck there. Don’t have sex after you have had a drink? Again, that advice will be ignored by many, as it always was. And yet, the moment two young people, attracted to each other, drunk on life and cider, walk into a bedroom alone together, they may be seconds away from catastrophe. She may be an hour away from a trip to the Rape Crisis Centre and he may be enjoying his last night free of the label ‘Rapist’."
British law has institutional sexism since if a drunk man and a drunk woman have sex, the man is guilty. Feminists are right... just not in the way that they think
Feminists will call this "victim blaming". But the victim may not be who they claim it is

TSKS on Twitter - "Making a girl believe that you like her just so you can have sex with her should be classified as sexual assault. But no one is ready to have that conversation yet"
"Women that use men for money should get done for fraud then...... but no ones ready for that conversation"
"Yeah we get it every bad thing that happens to a woman is rape"
"Pretending you like a guy for a free meal should be classified as theft but nobody is ready for that conversation yet."