Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Science, Culture, & Humanities => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on March 28, 2007, 09:33:49 AM
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Ex-wife becomes a man; ex-husband seeks end to alimony
CLEARWATER, Florida (AP) -- Lawrence Roach agreed to pay alimony to the woman he divorced, not the man she became after a sex change, his lawyers argued in a Florida court Tuesday in an effort to end the payments.
But the ex-wife's attorneys said the operation does not alter the agreement.
The lawyers and Circuit Judge Jack St. Arnold agreed the case delves into relatively uncharted legal territory. They found only a 2004 Ohio case that addressed whether or not a transsexual could still collect alimony after a sex change.
"There is not a lot out there to help us," St. Arnold said.
Roach and his wife, Julia, divorced in 2004 after 18 years of marriage. The 48-year-old utility worker agreed to pay her $1,250 a month in alimony. Since then, Julia Roach, 55, has had a sex change and legally changed her name to Julio Roberto Silverwolf.
"It's illegal for a man to marry a man, and it should likewise be illegal for a man to pay alimony to a man," said Roach's attorney, John McGuire. "When she changed to a man, I believe she terminated that alimony."
Silverwolf did not appear in court Tuesday and has declined to talk about the divorce. His lawyer, Gregory Nevins, said the language of the divorce decree is clear and firm -- Roach agreed to pay alimony until his ex-wife dies or remarries.
"Those two things haven't happened," said Nevins, a senior staff attorney with the national gay rights group Lambda Legal.
St. Arnold is considering the arguments. But lawyers on both sides agreed Tuesday that Roach will probably have to keep paying alimony to Silverwolf.
The judge poked holes in several of Roach's legal arguments and noted that appeals courts have declined to legally recognize a sex change in Florida when it comes to marriage. The appellate court "is telling us you are what you are when you are born," St. Arnold said.
In the Ohio case, an appeals court ruled in September 2004 that a Montgomery County man must continue to pay $750 a month in alimony to his transsexual ex-wife because her sex change was not reason enough to violate the agreement.
Roach's other attorney, John Smitten, said the case falls into a legal void.
"It's probably something that has to be addressed by the Legislature," Smitten said. "There is one other case in the entire United States. It really needs to be addressed either for or against the concept of eliminating alimony for that reason."
Roach, who has since remarried, said has been unable to convince state and federal lawmakers to tackle the issue. He said he will continue to fight.
"This is definitely wrong. I have a right to move forward with my life. I wish no harm and hardship to that person," Roach said of his ex-wife. "They can be the person they want to be, to find happiness and peace within themselves. I have the right to do the same. But I can't rest because I'm paying a lot of money every month."
The legal fight is the second transsexual rights showdown in Pinellas County in less than a week. On Friday, transsexual activists from around the United States packed a City Commission meeting in neighboring Largo to oppose the firing of City Manager Steve Stanton after he announced he was seeking a sex-change operation.
Despite the support, commissioners voted 5-2 to fire Stanton.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press.
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From an emailing by Glenn Sachs, who writes on these issues. Sometimes I find him a bit of a weenie, but I do share with him the notion that men, manliness and fatherhood are under general attack in our culture.
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June 12, 2007
Protest TIME Magazine's Father's Day Hatchet Job on Dads!
TIME magazine's new Father's Day hatchet job on divorced and separated fathers--"Daddy Dearest: What Science Tells Us About Fatherhood"--questions whether fathers "have done a good enough job to deserve the honor" of having a Father's Day. The contents page reads "Behavior: Why some animal fathers are more nurturing dads than many men are."
In the article, which appears in the June 18 issue of TIME magazine, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and Mary Batten write:
"In the U.S., more than half of divorced fathers lose contact with their kids within a few years. By the end of 10 years, as many as two-thirds of them have drifted out of their children's lives. According to a 1994 study by the Children's Defense Fund, men are more likely to default on a child-support payment (49%) than a used-car payment (3%). Even fathers in intact families spend a lot less time focused on their kids than they think: in the U.S. fathers average less than an hour a day (up from 20 minutes a few decades ago), usually squeezed in after the workday."
The drumbeat continues--dads don't care, dads walk out, dads
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are stingy. All of these canards have been debunked many times, but that doesn't stop the mainstream media's attacks on fathers and fatherhood.
To write a Letter to the Editor of TIME magazine, click here.
Let's look at each of these accusations individually:
Criticism #1) "In the U.S., more than half of divorced fathers lose contact with their kids within a few years. By the end of 10 years, as many as two-thirds of them have drifted out of their children's lives."
In other words, dad's a cad who walks out and doesn't look back. The authors' assertions are contradicted by a large body of research.
We're not given a source for this information, but it is likely the highly-influential and highly-publicized study conducted by Frank Furstenburg, Ph.D. and his associates. Furstenburg used a large, representative national sample in his study, and he found that half of the children in his study had not seen their noncustodial parent--usually dad--during the previous year. Furstenburg labeled these men the "disappearing dad."
Arizona State University researcher Sanford Braver, who conducted the largest federally-funded study of divorced dads ever done, points out that there are many problems with Furstenburg's research:
1) Furstenberg's research is based only on custodial mothers' views--the fathers were never asked. I doubt many fathers would feel their angry ex-wives are a particularly accurate source of information about their bonds with their children.
2) Those who cited Furstenburg's research widely presumed it applied only or primarily to divorced dads, as did the TIME magazine article's authors. However, in his study Furstenburg did not distinguish between divorced dads and never married fathers. When Furstenburg's colleague Judith Seltzer later separated the two groups, she found that divorced fathers were more than twice as likely to have retained contact with their children as never-married dads.
3) The survey, which is used to condemn American fathers in June of 2007, was based largely on divorces which occurred in the late 1960s! A tremendous amount has changed in the area of gender roles in the past 40 years.
Braver's study found that--by either parent's account--90% of fathers had contact with their kids in the past year. Of those who lived within 60 miles of each other, there was virtually universal contact.
Moreover, Braver's research found that to the degree that divorced fathers' contact with their children is infrequent, the cause is very often not the fathers' lack of desire, but instead attempts by mothers to push their ex-husbands out of their children's lives.
According to the Children's Rights Council, a Washington-based advocacy group, more than five million American children each year have their access to their noncustodial parents interfered with or blocked by custodial parents. We get no sense of this enormous social problem from the TIME article.
Criticism #2) "According to a 1994 study by the Children's Defense Fund, men are more likely to default on a child-support payment (49%) than a used-car payment (3%)."
Whereas TIME magazine assumes that dads don't pay because they don't care, Braver found in his research that "unemployment is the single most important factor relating to nonpayment." Braver notes that his findings were "consistent with virtually all past studies on the topic" and that it "belies the image that divorced fathers don't pay because they refuse to though they are truly able to pay."
Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement data shows that two-thirds of those behind on child support nationwide earned poverty-level wages; less than four percent of the national child support debt is owed by those earning $40,000 or more a year. According to an Urban Institute study, even among fathers who experience income drops of 15% or more, less than one in 20 are able to get courts to reduce their child support payments. In the interim, arrearages mount, along with interest (10% or more in many states) and penalties. This greatly contributes to child support noncompliance.
The "child support vs. used car" comparison is spurious. For one, divorced fathers don't just pay child support--they sometimes also pay spousal support, and are frequently saddled with stiff and sometimes catastrophic divorce-related legal fees, often including those of their ex-wives. Also, child support alone often comprises a third or even half of a divorced fathers' take-home pay.
In California, for example, a noncustodial father of two earning a modest $3,800 a month in net income pays $1,300 a month in child support--almost $300,000 over 18 years. For the financial burden to be equivalent, the father would have to buy a hell of a lot of used cars.
One more point--since noncustodial mothers' default rate on child support is higher than that of noncustodial dads, the "child support vs. car payment" statistic which is used to vilify fathers also applies to mothers.
Criticism #3) "Even fathers in intact families spend a lot less time focused on their kids than they think: in the U.S. fathers average less than an hour a day (up from 20 minutes a few decades ago), usually squeezed in after the workday."
We're not given a source for the assertion that "fathers in intact families spend a lot less time focused on their kids than they think," but it may have been taken, to one degree or another, from Susan Faludi's 1991 anti-male bestseller Backlash. In that book she contrasts what men and fathers do around the house with what Faludi says men "think" they do.
And who's to tell them they're wrong, that they don't do much, they only "think" they do?
Their wives, of course.
It never seems to occur to Faludi or Hrdy/Batten that perhaps the fathers' assertions of their roles are accurate, and that it's mothers--who often pride themselves on being #1 with the kids--are disparaging or downplaying fathers' role. It is likely that, to some degree, both fathers and mothers exaggerate their own roles, though we get no sense of that from the TIME magazine article.
The "lazy husband/uncaring father" stereotype is a myth. Census data shows that only 40% of married women with children under 18 work full-time, and over a quarter do not hold a job outside the home. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2004 Time Use Survey, men spend one and a half times as many hours working as women do, and full-time employed men still work significantly more hours than full-time employed women.
When both work outside the home and inside the home are properly considered, it is clear that men do at least as much as women. A 2002 University of Michigan Institute for Social Research survey found that women do 11 more hours of housework a week than men but men work 14 hours a week more than women. According to the BLS, men's total time at leisure, sleeping, doing personal care activities, or socializing is a statistically meaningless 1% higher than women's.
Despite the fact that fathers bear the primary burden of supporting their families, the Families and Work Institute in New York City found that fathers now provide three-fourths as much child care as mothers do. This figure is also 50% higher than 30 years ago.
The "usually squeezed in after the workday" slap is also spurious. Between dads working all day and the kids being in school, it's hard to see when a father would have much time to spend with his kids that isn't "usually squeezed in after the workday." The full TIME Magazine article can be seen here.
Again, to write a Letter to the Editor of TIME magazine, click here.
To discuss this issue on my blog, click here.
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WSJ
Boys to Men
Raising three sons has helped me appreciate the masculine virtues.
BY TONY WOODLIEF
Friday, June 15, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
I think Father's Day ought not to be a celebration of every man who managed to procreate, but instead a time to honor those increasingly rare men who are actually good at fathering. But what makes a good father? This question holds more than philosophical interest for me. Though my father left when I was young, and my stepfather found me uninteresting, I now have three sons of my own (ages 7, 5 and 2). Not knowing any better, they think I have fatherhood figured out. They believe Father's Day is rightly my day.
Judging by the greeting cards, Father's Day is like a Sabbath for many men, a day Dad puts his feet up. I think the Almighty was able to rest one day a week because he had just the two kids, only one of whom was male. I could really use a restful Father's Day, but recently I found my sons huddled over a book on traps, which makes me fear that they're planning for my gift to be something live. Already this spring they've captured a snake, a bullfrog and at least one deadly spider. While other men think about golfing or napping tomorrow, I'm praying I can weather the day without getting bitten.
There's more than a little irony in the fact that I have three sons. I'm not what you'd call a master of the manly arts. I can't start a fire without a match, or track a deer, or ride a horse. I don't know how to fix cars, and my infrequent forays into home repair usually necessitate medical attention. But these are the things little boys want to learn--I remember wanting to learn them myself. Or maybe it's that boys yearn to do things with fathers, and those things usually involve a little danger. A new wildly popular book of essential boy knowledge recognizes this in its title: "The Dangerous Book for Boys." My oldest has dog-eared nearly every page.
I'm allergic to most danger. I get a stomachache at the thought of confrontation. I'm grouchy and self-centered, and have few of the traits that William McKeever, in his curmudgeonly 1913 classic, "Training the Boy," considered essential to manhood: "courageous action in the face of trying circumstances, cordial sympathy and helpfulness in all dealings with others, and a sane disposition toward the Ruler of All Life." I'm hardly qualified to be a role-model for three boys.
Many academics would consider my lack of manliness a good thing. They regard boys as thugs-in-training, caught up in a patriarchal society that demeans women. In the 1990s the American Association of University Women (among others) positioned boys as the enemies of female progress (something Christina Hoff Sommers exposed in her book, "The War Against Boys"). But the latest trend is to depict boys as themselves victims of a testosterone-infected culture. In their book "Raising Cain," for example, the child psychologists Don Kindlon and Michael Thompson warn parents against a "culture of cruelty" among boys. Forget math, science and throwing a ball, they suggest--what your boy most needs to learn is emotional literacy.
But I can't shake the sense that boys are supposed to become manly. Rather than neutering their aggression, confidence and desire for danger, we should channel these instincts into honor, gentlemanliness and courage. Instead of inculcating timidity in our sons, it seems wiser to train them to face down bullies, which by necessity means teaching them how to throw a good uppercut. In his book "Manliness," Harvey Mansfield writes that a person manifesting this quality "not only knows what justice requires, but he acts on his knowledge, making and executing the decision that the rest of us trembled even to define." You can't build a civilization and defend it against barbarians, fascists and playground bullies, in other words, with a nation of Phil Donahues.
Maybe the problem isn't that boys are aggressive, but that we've neglected their moral education. As Teddy Roosevelt wrote to one of his sons: "I would rather have a boy of mine stand high in his studies than high in athletics, but I would a great deal rather have him show true manliness of character than show either intellectual or physical prowess." Manliness, then, is not the ability to survive in the wilderness, or wield a rifle. But having such skills increases the odds that one's manly actions--which Roosevelt and others believed flow from a moral quality--will be successful.
The good father, then, needs to nurture his son's moral and spiritual core, and equip him with the skills he'll need to act on the moral impulse that we call courage. A real man, in other words, is someone who doesn't run from an Osama bin Laden. But he may also need the ability to hit a target from three miles out with a .50 caliber M88 if he wants to finish the job.
Not only do I believe that trying to take the wildness out of boys is a doomed social experiment, but I'm certain that genetic scientists will eventually discover that males carry the Cowboy Gene. That's my name for whatever is responsible for all the wrestling in my house, and the dunking during bath time, and my 5-year-old's insistence on wearing his silver six-shooters to Wal-Mart in order to protect our grocery cart. I only pray that when the Cowboy Gene is discovered, some well-meaning utopian doesn't try to transform it into a Tea Party Gene.
The trick is not to squash the essence of boys, but to channel their natural wildness into manliness. And this is what keeps me awake at night, because it's going to take a miracle for someone like me, who grew up without meaningful male influence, who would be an embarrassment to Teddy Roosevelt, to raise three men. Along with learning what makes a good father, I face an added dilemma: How do I raise my sons to be better than their father?
What I'm discovering is that as I try to guide these ornery, wild-hearted little boys toward manhood, they are helping me become a better man, too. I love my sons without measure, and I want them to have the father I did not. As I stumble and sometimes fail, as I feign an interest in camping and construction and bugs, I become something better than I was.
Father's Day, in our house, won't entail golfing or napping or watching a game. I'll probably have to contend with some trapped and irritated reptile. There's that cannon made of PVC that my oldest boy has been pestering me to help him finish. And the youngest two boys are lately enamored of climbing onto furniture and blindsiding me with flying tackles. Father's Day is going to be exhausting. But it will be good, because in the midst of these trials and joys I find my answer to the essential question on Father's Day. What makes a good father? My sons.
Mr. Woodlief's pamphlet "Raising Wild Boys Into Men: A Modern Dad's Survival Guide" is available from the New Pamphleteer. He also blogs about family and faith at www.tonywoodlief.com.
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Florida man owes $10,000 for child who's not his
FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida (CNN) -- Francisco Rodriguez owes more than $10,000 in back child support payments in a paternity case involving a 15-year-old girl who, according to DNA results and the girl's mother, is not his daughter.
Rodriguez, who is married with two daughters and a son from his wife's previous marriage, is fighting for leniency. "It's not right. I'm not the father, " he said at a recent court hearing.
He says he knew nothing about the other girl until paperwork showed up about four years ago saying he was the father.
He now has DNA results that show the 15-year-old girl wasn't fathered by him. He even has an affidavit from the girl's mother -- a former girlfriend from 1990 -- saying he's "not the father" and asking that Rodriguez no longer be required to pay child support.
Yet the state of Florida is continuing to push him to pay $305 a month to support the girl, as well as the more than $10,000 already owed. He spent a night in jail because of his delinquent payments.
Why is he in such a bind?
He missed the deadline to legally contest paternity. That's because, he says, the paperwork didn't reach him until after the deadline had passed. VideoWatch Rodriguez plead in court for a break »
"It's like you're drowning every day," says Rodriguez, a massage therapist.
Rodriguez's case highlights the legal dilemma states face over how to handle paternity cases. More than a third of children born in the United States are born to unmarried parents, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
But paternity laws vary from state to state, according to the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), a nonprofit organization that works to improve the lives of low-income families.
Some states have detailed laws to challenge paternity within deadlines, while others offer little guidance. In most cases, men have 60 days to challenge paternity, according to CLASP.
After that, it can be "challenged only on the basis of fraud, duress or material mistake of fact," CLASP said last year in an update to a report on paternity law.
"There are no perfect answers," says Susan Paikin of the Center for Support of Families in Delaware. "Deadlines are imposed so that when families are broken -- the legal process is handled quickly."
She says state legislatures and courts struggle with paternity cases, trying to strike the proper balance between children's rights and adults' rights, always keeping in mind any potential harm to the child.
"This is a struggle. It's not something easy for courts or legislatures," she says.
Paikin says it's especially tricky in cases where a father has raised a child thinking it was his, only to learn years later the child had a different father.
"Most men who have a relationship with their child don't think of their child in terms of DNA," she said. "The real issue in most of these cases is anger and money."
Tampa Police officer Michael Anderson understands that sentiment. He paid child support for more than 12 years -- a total outlay he says amounted to more than $80,000. But a DNA test after he and his wife divorced showed the daughter he thought was his was somebody else's.
He then separated himself and his feelings from the child.
"I stopped having a relationship with the girl right from the beginning, when I found out," he said. "It was hard, but I had to do it."
A Tampa court earlier this year disestablished him as father and relieved him of his future child support payments. But by law, he is unable to get back the $80,000 he already paid.
Carnell Smith, who founded a group called U.S. Citizens Against Paternity Fraud, wants mandatory DNA tests when a child is born to avoid legal wrangling and anguish.
"Unfortunately, today it's not a crime for someone to lie about which man is the father," Smith said. "The mother doesn't have to return the money and rarely, if ever, is she prosecuted for perjury, for fraud."
Rodriguez's odyssey began in 1990, when he says at age 16 he had a four- to five-month relationship with a woman CNN is not identifying. He says when the relationship ended, he did not hear from her again until child support papers arrived at his home in 2003.
"My wife and I both had a confused look, and we're wondering, 'Where is the DNA test?' " he says.
But it was long past Florida's deadline to contest paternity. A court had already named him the father three years before when he did not respond to notices to appear, notices he says he never received because he had moved a lot.
He was now on the hook for monthly child support, as well as $10,623 in back child support.
He eventually paid for DNA testing. The test showed he was not the father.
A judge has now ordered a court-sanctioned DNA test for Rodriguez and the 15-year-old girl. Rodriguez has taken that test; the girl and her mother did not show up for their appointment to submit to DNA testing and it's unclear if the girl has complied.
CNN has repeatedly tried to contact the mother, but has been unable to reach her.
Rodriguez and his family continue to wait for answers.
"It's hard when your daughter needs sneakers and you have to pay $305 or your husband goes to jail," said Rodriguez's wife, Michele. "It's just unfair."
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Choosing Foster Parents over Fathers
By Jeffery M. Leving and Glenn Sacks
San Diego Union-Tribune, 7/11/07
In the heartbreaking Melinda Smith case, a father and daughter were needlessly separated by the foster care system for over a decade. Last week, Los Angeles County settled a lawsuit over the case for an undisclosed sum. Yet a recent Urban Institute study found that the Smith case typifies the way the foster care system harms children by disregarding the loving bonds they share with their fathers.
Smith was born to an unwed couple in 1988. Her father, Thomas Marion Smith, a former Marine and a decorated Vietnam War veteran, saw Melinda often and paid child support. When the girl was four, her mother abruptly moved without leaving a forwarding address. Two years later, Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services found that Melinda’s mother was abusing her. Though the social worker for the case noted in the file that Thomas was the father, he was never contacted, and his then 6-year-old daughter was placed in the foster care system.
Thomas--whose fitness as a father was never impugned nor legally questioned--continued to receive and pay his child support bills. Authorities refused to disclose his daughter’s whereabouts, and didn’t even inform him that his daughter had been taken by the County. Smith employed private investigators and attorneys to try to find Melinda and secure visitation rights, but he eventually ran out of money.
Rather than allowing Smith to raise his own daughter, the system shuttled Melinda through seven different foster care placements. An understandably angry child, her outbursts led authorities to house her in a residential treatment center alongside older children convicted of criminal activity—when she was only seven years old.
Melinda says that during this period she was told that her father was a “deadbeat dad” who had abandoned her. When Melinda was 16, she told an investigating social worker that the “most important thing” for her was to find her dad. Moved by her story, the social worker began searching for Melinda’s father--and found him in one day. In 2005, Thomas and Melinda were finally reunited.
Unfortunately, the Smith case is no aberration. When a mother and father are divorced or separated, and a child welfare agency removes the children from the mother’s home for abuse or neglect, an offer of placement to the father, barring unfitness, should be automatic. Yet in the report What About the Dads? Child Welfare Agencies’ Efforts to Identify, Locate, and Involve Nonresident Fathers, the Urban Institute presents a shocking finding: when fathers inform child welfare officials that they would like their children to live with them, the agencies seek to place the children with their fathers only 15% of the time.
Fathers can offer their children a sense of permanence, security and emotional support that a foster family (or a succession of foster care placements) cannot provide. Many foster children are pushed out of their homes and into a tenuous existence when they turn 18 and the foster parents no longer receive state subsidies. Fathers could be a valuable source of long-term resources and sponsorship for these young adults.
Child welfare agencies often operate on the assumption that the fathers of the children they’ve taken away from their mothers are, like the mothers, unfit or uninterested in parenting. Yet many of these men are loving fathers who have been forced out of their children’s lives by mothers who denied visitation, moved away and/or hid the children, or employed spurious abuse charges.
What About the Dads? makes it clear that many child welfare workers treat fathers as an afterthought. The report found that even when a caseworker had been in contact with a child’s father, the caseworker was still five times less likely to know basic information about the father than about the mother. Just as with Thomas Smith, 20% of the fathers whose identity and location were known by the child welfare agencies from the opening of the case were never even contacted.
These policies are harmful and misguided. One shudders to think how many little Melinda Smiths are lost in the foster care system right now—being raised by strangers, and denied their father’s love.
This column first appeared in the San Diego Union-Tribune (7/11/07).
www.GlennSacks.com
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Virginia's New Putative Father Registry Violates Fathers' Right to Raise Their Own Children
By Mike McCormick and Glenn Sacks
Virginia's controversial new Putative Father Registry law asks any man who has had heterosexual non-marital sex in Virginia to register with the State. Supporters say the law will help connect fathers with their children before the children are put up for adoption. Critics see it as another example of the erosion of citizens' privacy. Both sides miss the real point of the Registry--to remove a father's right to prevent his child's mother from giving their child up for adoption without his consent.
Incredibly, under the new law, putative fathers who fail to register waive their right to be notified that their parental rights are being terminated. They also forfeit the right to be notified of the adoption proceedings and to consent to the adoption. Rather than being required to make a legitimate effort to find and notify the father, the state can now simply check the Registry and, if the man has not registered, give his child away.
Such violations of fathers' rights are common. For example, in the widely-reported Huddleston adoption case, Mark Huddleston's baby boy was adopted out when he was three days old, but Huddleston didn't know the baby existed until two months after his birth. As a New Mexico court later found, the private adoption agency did not notify Huddleston of the pending adoption, thus denying him the chance to raise his son.
In an adoption case, the burden of identifying the father should be on the mother. It is the mother, not the father, who is certain to be aware of the child's birth, and it is the mother who knows (or should know) the baby's parentage. However, when states have tried to craft measures requiring a mother who seeks to put her baby up for adoption to find and notify the baby's father, there has been opposition from the National Organization for Women and other women's groups.
Defenders of the Registry justify disregarding fathers with numerous unfair assumptions about men and their intentions. For example, Kerry Dougherty, a prominent Virginia newspaper columnist, asserts:
"I think we're being too kind to these men. Guys who don't stick around long enough to find out whether they've caused a pregnancy have terminated their paternal rights. If they know a baby's on the way and then disappear, they aren't fathers...the General Assembly ought to look for ways to strip these irresponsible Romeos of their rights, not invite them to record their random copulations."
One wonders if Dougherty knows anyone who has dated within the last 40 years. It is absurd to think that in modern relationships, when there's an out-of-wedlock birth it must be because the father ran off. In reality, most unwed biological fathers do care about their children, but often do not know of their existence or are unsure that the children really are biologically theirs. There have been countless adoption cases where these fathers have struggled desperately for the right to raise their own children. One also wonders why a woman who wants to avoid the responsibility of raising a child (and of paying child support) is viewed sympathetically, while a man in exactly the same position is a villain.
There are numerous other problems with the Registry. A registrant must provide his social security number, driver's license number, home address, and employer, as well as details about the sexual affair and his sexual partner. This sensitive, personal information will be available to the baby's mother, the lawyers involved in the adoption, court employees, and anyone able to hack in to the computer system.
The law should instead require that an honest, exhaustive search for the father be conducted before an adoption can proceed. This search should include use of the Federal Parent Locator Service, which contains a vast array of information, including the National Directory of New Hires. The FPLS is used to enforce child support, find children involved in parental kidnappings, and to enforce child custody and visitation. State systems are tied into the FPLS, and they are often remarkably effective at finding parents.
Fathers have the right to raise their own children. Virginia's Registry is a shameful attempt to circumvent that right.
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Why Feminism Is AWOL on Islam
Kay S. Hymowitz
U.S. feminists should be protesting the brutal oppression of Middle Eastern women. But doing so would reveal how little they have to complain about at home.
Argue all you want with many feminist policies, but few quarrel with feminism?s core moral insight, which changed the lives (and minds) of women forever: that women are due the same rights and dignity as men. So, as news of the appalling miseries of women in the Islamic world has piled up, where are the feminists? Where?s the outrage? For a brief moment after September 11, when pictures of those blue alien-creaturely shapes in Afghanistan filled the papers, it seemed as if feminists were going to have their moment. And in fact the Feminist Majority, to its credit, had been publicizing since the mid-90s how Afghan girls were barred from school, how women were stoned for adultery or beaten for showing an ankle or wearing high-heeled shoes, how they were prohibited from leaving the house unless accompanied by a male relative, how they were denied medical help because the only doctors around were male.
But the rest is feminist silence. You haven?t heard a peep from feminists as it has grown clear that the Taliban were exceptional not in their extreme views about women but in their success at embodying those views in law and practice. In the United Arab Emirates, husbands have the right to beat their wives in order to discipline them??provided that the beating is not so severe as to damage her bones or deform her body,? in the words of the Gulf News. In Saudi Arabia, women cannot vote, drive, or show their faces or talk with male non-relatives in public. (Evidently they can?t talk to men over the airwaves either; when Prince Abdullah went to President Bush?s ranch in Crawford last April, he insisted that no female air-traffic controllers handle his flight.) Yes, Saudi girls can go to school, and many even attend the university; but at the university, women must sit in segregated rooms and watch their professors on closed-circuit televisions. If they have a question, they push a button on their desk, which turns on a light at the professor?s lectern, from which he can answer the female without being in her dangerous presence. And in Saudi Arabia, education can be harmful to female health. Last spring in Mecca, members of the mutaween, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue, pushed fleeing students back into their burning school because they were not properly covered in abaya. Fifteen girls died.
You didn?t hear much from feminists when in the northern Nigerian province of Katsina a Muslim court sentenced a woman to death by stoning for having a child outside of marriage. The case might not have earned much attention?stonings are common in parts of the Muslim world?except that the young woman, who had been married off at 14 to a husband who ultimately divorced her when she lost her virginal allure, was still nursing a baby at the time of sentencing. During her trial she had no lawyer, although the court did see fit to delay her execution until she weans her infant.
You didn?t hear much from feminists as it emerged that honor killings by relatives, often either ignored or only lightly punished by authorities, are also commonplace in the Muslim world. In September, Reuters reported the story of an Iranian man, ?defending my honor, family, and dignity,? who cut off his seven-year-old daughter?s head after suspecting she had been raped by her uncle. The postmortem showed the girl to be a virgin. In another family mix-up, a Yemeni man shot his daughter to death on her wedding night when her husband claimed she was not a virgin. After a medical exam revealed that the husband was mistaken, officials concluded he was simply trying to protect himself from embarrassment about his own impotence. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, every day two women are slain by male relatives seeking to avenge the family honor.
The savagery of some of these murders is worth a moment?s pause. In 2000, two Punjabi sisters, 20 and 21 years old, had their throats slit by their brother and cousin because the girls were seen talking to two boys to whom they were not related. In one especially notorious case, an Egyptian woman named Nora Marzouk Ahmed fell in love and eloped. When she went to make amends with her father, he cut off her head and paraded it down the street. Several years back, according to the Washington Post, the husband of Zahida Perveen, a 32-year-old pregnant Pakistani, gouged out her eyes and sliced off her earlobe and nose because he suspected her of having an affair.
In a related example widely covered last summer, a teenage girl in the Punjab was sentenced by a tribal council to rape by a gang that included one of the councilmen. After the hour-and-a-half ordeal, the girl was forced to walk home naked in front of scores of onlookers. She had been punished because her 11-year-old brother had compromised another girl by being been seen alone with her. But that charge turned out to be a ruse: it seems that three men of a neighboring tribe had sodomized the boy and accused him of illicit relations?an accusation leading to his sister?s barbaric punishment?as a way of covering up their crime.
Nor is such brutality limited to backward, out-of-the-way villages. Muddassir Rizvi, a Pakistani journalist, says that, though always common in rural areas, in recent years honor killings have become more prevalent in cities ?among educated and liberal families.? In relatively modern Jordan, honor killings were all but exempt from punishment until the penal code was modified last year; unfortunately, a young Palestinian living in Jordan, who had recently stabbed his 19-year-old sister 40 times ?to cleanse the family honor,? and another man from near Amman, who ran over his 23-year-old sister with his truck because of her ?immoral behavior,? had not yet changed their ways. British psychiatrist Anthony Daniels reports that British Muslim men frequently spirit their young daughters back to their native Pakistan and force the girls to marry. Such fathers have been known to kill daughters who resist. In Sweden, in one highly publicized case, Fadima Sahindal, an assimilated 26-year-old of Kurdish origin, was murdered by her father after she began living with her Swedish boyfriend. ?The whore is dead,? the family announced.
As you look at this inventory of brutality, the question bears repeating: Where are the demonstrations, the articles, the petitions, the resolutions, the vindications of the rights of Islamic women by American feminists? The weird fact is that, even after the excesses of the Taliban did more to forge an American consensus about women?s rights than 30 years of speeches by Gloria Steinem, feminists refused to touch this subject. They have averted their eyes from the harsh, blatant oppression of millions of women, even while they have continued to stare into the Western patriarchal abyss, indignant over female executives who cannot join an exclusive golf club and college women who do not have their own lacrosse teams.
But look more deeply into the matter, and you realize that the sound of feminist silence about the savage fundamentalist Muslim oppression of women has its own perverse logic. The silence is a direct outgrowth of the way feminist theory has developed in recent years. Now mired in self-righteous sentimentalism, multicultural nonjudgmentalism, and internationalist utopianism, feminism has lost the language to make the universalist moral claims of equal dignity and individual freedom that once rendered it so compelling. No wonder that most Americans, trying to deal with the realities of a post-9/11 world, are paying feminists no mind.
To understand the current sisterly silence about the sort of tyranny that the women?s movement came into existence to attack, it is helpful to think of feminisms plural rather than singular. Though not entirely discrete philosophies, each of three different feminisms has its own distinct reasons for causing activists to ?lose their voice? in the face of women?s oppression.
The first variety?radical feminism (or gender feminism, in Christina Hoff Sommers?s term)?starts with the insight that men are, not to put too fine a point upon it, brutes. Radical feminists do not simply subscribe to the reasonable-enough notion that men are naturally more prone to aggression than women. They believe that maleness is a kind of original sin. Masculinity explains child abuse, marital strife, high defense spending, every war from Troy to Afghanistan, as well as Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet. As Gloria Steinem informed the audience at a Florida fundraiser last March: ?The cult of masculinity is the basis for every violent, fascist regime.?
Gender feminists are little interested in fine distinctions between radical Muslim men who slam commercial airliners into office buildings and soldiers who want to stop radical Muslim men from slamming commercial airliners into office buildings. They are both examples of generic male violence?and specifically, male violence against women. ?Terrorism is on a continuum that starts with violence within the family, battery against women, violence against women in the society, all the way up to organized militaries that are supported by taxpayer money,? according to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who teaches ?The Sexuality of Terrorism? at California State University in Hayward. Violence is so intertwined with male sexuality that, she tells us, military pilots watch porn movies before they go out on sorties. The war in Afghanistan could not possibly offer a chance to liberate women from their oppressors, since it would simply expose women to yet another set of oppressors, in the gender feminists? view. As Sharon Lerner asserted bizarrely in the Village Voice, feminists? ?discomfort? with the Afghanistan bombing was ?deepened by the knowledge that more women than men die as a result of most wars.?
If guys are brutes, girls are their opposite: peace-loving, tolerant, conciliatory, and reasonable??Antiwar and Pro-Feminist,? as the popular peace-rally sign goes. Feminists long ago banished tough-as-nails women like Margaret Thatcher and Jeanne Kirkpatrick (and these days, one would guess, even the fetching Condoleezza Rice) to the ranks of the imperfectly female. Real women, they believe, would never justify war. ?Most women, Western and Muslim, are opposed to war regardless of its reasons and objectives,? wrote the Jordanian feminist Fadia Faqir on OpenDemocracy.net. ?They are concerned with emancipation, freedom (personal and civic), human rights, power sharing, integrity, dignity, equality, autonomy, power-sharing [sic], liberation, and pluralism.?
Sara Ruddick, author of Maternal Thinking, is perhaps one of the most influential spokeswomen for the position that women are instinctually peaceful. According to Ruddick (who clearly didn?t have Joan Crawford in mind), that?s because a good deal of mothering is naturally governed by the Gandhian principles of nonviolence such as ?renunciation,? ?resistance to injustice,? and ?reconciliation.? The novelist Barbara Kingsolver was one of the first to demonstrate the subtleties of such universal maternal thinking after the United States invaded Afghanistan. ?I feel like I?m standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming ?He started it!? and throwing rocks,? she wrote in the Los Angeles Times. ?I keep looking for somebody?s mother to come on the scene saying, ?Boys! Boys!? ?
Gender feminism?s tendency to reduce foreign affairs to a Lifetime Channel movie may make it seem too silly to bear mentioning, but its kitschy naivet? hasn?t stopped it from being widespread among elites. You see it in widely read writers like Kingsolver, Maureen Dowd, and Alice Walker. It turns up in our most elite institutions. Swanee Hunt, head of the Women in Public Policy Program at Harvard?s Kennedy School of Government wrote, with Cristina Posa in Foreign Policy: ?The key reason behind women?s marginalization may be that everyone recognizes just how good women are at forging peace.? Even female elected officials are on board. ?The women of all these countries should go on strike, they should all sit down and refuse to do anything until their men agree to talk peace,? urged Ohio representative Marcy Kaptur to the Arab News last spring, echoing an idea that Aristophanes, a dead white male, proposed as a joke 2,400 years ago. And President Clinton is an advocate of maternal thinking, too. ?If we?d had women at Camp David,? he said in July 2000, ?we?d have an agreement.?
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Major foundations too seem to take gender feminism seriously enough to promote it as an answer to world problems. Last December, the Ford Foundation and the Soros Open Society Foundation helped fund the Afghan Women?s Summit in Brussels to develop ideas for a new government in Afghanistan. As Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler described it on her website, the summit was made up of ?meetings and meals, canvassing, workshops, tears, and dancing.? ?Defense was mentioned nowhere in the document,? Ensler wrote proudly of the summit?s concluding proclamation?despite the continuing threat in Afghanistan of warlords, bandits, and lingering al-Qaida operatives. ?uilding weapons or instruments of retaliation was not called for in any category,? Ensler cooed. ?Instead [the women] wanted education, health care, and the protection of refugees, culture, and human rights.?
Too busy celebrating their own virtue and contemplating their own victimhood, gender feminists cannot address the suffering of their Muslim sisters realistically, as light years worse than their own petulant grievances. They are too intent on hating war to ask if unleashing its horrors might be worth it to overturn a brutal tyranny that, among its manifold inhumanities, treats women like animals. After all, hating war and machismo is evidence of the moral superiority that comes with being born female.
Yet the gender feminist idea of superior feminine virtue is becoming an increasingly tough sell for anyone actually keeping up with world events. Kipling once wrote of the fierceness of Afghan women: ?When you?re wounded and left on the Afghan plains/And the women come out to cut up your remains/Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains.? Now it?s clearer than ever that the dream of worldwide sisterhood is no more realistic than worldwide brotherhood; culture trumps gender any day. Mothers all over the Muslim world are naming their babies Usama or praising Allah for their sons? efforts to kill crusading infidels. Last February, 28-year-old Wafa Idris became the first female Palestinian suicide bomber to strike in Israel, killing an elderly man and wounding scores of women and children. And in April, Israeli soldiers discovered under the maternity clothes of 26-year-old Shifa Adnan Kodsi a bomb rather than a baby. Maternal thinking, indeed.
The second variety of feminism, seemingly more sophisticated and especially prevalent on college campuses, is multiculturalism and its twin, postcolonialism. The postcolonial feminist has even more reason to shy away from the predicament of women under radical Islam than her maternally thinking sister. She believes that the Western world is so sullied by its legacy of imperialism that no Westerner, man or woman, can utter a word of judgment against former colonial peoples. Worse, she is not so sure that radical Islam isn?t an authentic, indigenous?and therefore appropriate?expression of Arab and Middle Eastern identity.
The postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the intellectual godfathers of multiculturalism and postcolonialism, first set the tone in 1978 when an Italian newspaper sent him to Teheran to cover the Iranian revolution. As his biographer James Miller tells it, Foucault looked in the face of Islamic fundamentalism and saw . . . an awe-inspiring revolt against ?global hegemony.? He was mesmerized by this new form of ?political spirituality? that, in a phrase whose dark prescience he could not have grasped, portended the ?transfiguration of the world.? Even after the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and reintroduced polygamy and divorce on the husband?s demand with automatic custody to fathers, reduced the official female age of marriage from 18 to 13, fired all female judges, and ordered compulsory veiling, whose transgression was to be punished by public flogging, Foucault saw no reason to temper his enthusiasm. What was a small matter like women?s basic rights, when a struggle against ?the planetary system? was at hand?
Postcolonialists, then, have their own binary system, somewhat at odds with gender feminism?not to mention with women?s rights. It is not men who are the sinners; it is the West. It is not women who are victimized innocents; it is the people who suffered under Western colonialism, or the descendants of those people, to be more exact. Caught between the rock of patriarchy and the hard place of imperialism, the postcolonial feminist scholar gingerly tiptoes her way around the subject of Islamic fundamentalism and does the only thing she can do: she focuses her ire on Western men.
To this end, the postcolonialist eagerly dips into the inkwell of gender feminism. She ties colonialist exploitation and domination to maleness; she might refer to Israel?s ?masculinist military culture??Israel being white and Western?though she would never dream of pointing out the ?masculinist military culture? of the jihadi. And she expends a good deal of energy condemning Western men for wanting to improve the lives of Eastern women. At the turn of the twentieth century Lord Cromer, the British vice consul of Egypt and a pet target of postcolonial feminists, argued that the ?degradation? of women under Islam had a harmful effect on society. Rubbish, according to the postcolonialist feminist. His words are simply part of ?the Western narrative of the quintessential otherness and inferiority of Islam,? as Harvard professor Leila Ahmed puts it in Women and Gender in Islam. The same goes for American concern about Afghan women; it is merely a ?device for ranking the ?other? men as inferior or as ?uncivilized,? ? according to Nira Yuval-Davis, professor of gender and ethnic studies at the University of Greenwich, England. These are all examples of what renowned Columbia professor Gayatri Spivak called ?white men saving brown women from brown men.?
Spivak?s phrase, a great favorite on campus, points to the postcolonial notion that brown men, having been victimized by the West, can never be oppressors in their own right. If they give the appearance of treating women badly, the oppression they have suffered at the hands of Western colonial masters is to blame. In fact, the worse they treat women, the more they are expressing their own justifiable outrage. ?When men are traumatized [by colonial rule], they tend to traumatize their own women,? Miriam Cooke, a Duke professor and head of the Association for Middle East Women?s Studies, told me. And today, Cooke asserts, brown men are subjected to a new form of imperialism. ?Now there is a return of colonialism that we saw in the nineteenth century in the context of globalization,? she says. ?What is driving Islamist men is globalization.?
It would be difficult to exaggerate the through-the-looking-glass quality of postcolonialist theory when it comes to the subject of women. Female suicide bombers are a good thing, because they are strong women demonstrating ?agency? against colonial powers. Polygamy too must be shown due consideration. ?Polygamy can be liberating and empowering,? Cooke answered sunnily when I asked her about it. ?Our norm is the Western, heterosexual, single couple. If we can imagine different forms that would allow us to be something other than a heterosexual couple, we might imagine polygamy working,? she explained murkily. Some women, she continued, are relieved when their husbands take a new wife: they won?t have to service him so often. Or they might find they now have the freedom to take a lover. But, I ask, wouldn?t that be dangerous in places where adulteresses can be stoned to death? At any rate, how common is that? ?I don?t know,? Cooke answers, ?I?m interested in discourse.? The irony couldn?t be darker: the very people protesting the imperialist exploitation of the ?Other? endorse that Other?s repressive customs as a means of promoting their own uniquely Western agenda?subverting the heterosexual patriarchy.
The final category in the feminist taxonomy, which might be called the world-government utopian strain, is in many respects closest to classical liberal feminism. Dedicated to full female dignity and equality, it generally eschews both the biological determinism of the gender feminist and the cultural relativism of the multiculti postcolonialist. Stanford political science professor Susan Moller Okin, an influential, subtle, and intelligent spokeswoman for this approach, created a stir among feminists in 1997 when she forthrightly attacked multiculturalists for valuing ?group rights for minority cultures? over the well-being of individual women. Okin admirably minced no words attacking arranged marriage, female circumcision, and polygamy, which she believed women experienced as a ?barely tolerable institution.? Some women, she went so far as to declare, ?might be better off if the culture into which they were born were either to become extinct . . . or preferably, to be encouraged to alter itself so as to reinforce the equality of women.?
But though Okin is less shy than other feminists about discussing the plight of women under Islamic fundamentalism, the typical U.N. utopian has her own reasons for keeping quiet as that plight fills Western headlines. For one thing, the utopian is also a bean-counting absolutist, seeking a pure, numerical equality between men and women in all departments of life. She greets Western, and particularly American, claims to have achieved freedom for women with skepticism. The motto of the 2002 International Women?s Day??Afghanistan Is Everywhere??was in part a reproach to the West about its superior airs. Women in Afghanistan might have to wear burqas, but don?t women in the West parade around in bikinis? ?It?s equally disrespectful and abusive to have women prancing around a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking the streets shrouded in burqas in order to survive,? columnist Jill Nelson wrote on the MSNBC website about the murderously fanatical riots that attended the Miss World pageant in Nigeria.
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As Nelson?s statement hints, the utopian is less interested in freeing women to make their own choices than in engineering and imposing her own elite vision of a perfect society. Indeed, she is under no illusions that, left to their own democratic devices, women would freely choose the utopia she has in mind. She would not be surprised by recent Pakistani elections, where a number of the women who won parliamentary seats were Islamist. But it doesn?t really matter what women want. The universalist has a comprehensive vision of ?women?s human rights,? meaning not simply women?s civil and political rights but ?economic rights? and ?socioeconomic justice.? Cynical about free markets and globalization, the U.N. utopian is also unimpressed by the liberal democratic nation-state ?as an emancipatory institution,? in the dismissive words of J. Ann Tickner, director for international studies at the University of Southern California. Such nation-states are ?unresponsive to the needs of [their] most vulnerable members? and seeped in ?nationalist ideologies? as well as in patriarchal assumptions about autonomy. In fact, like the (usually) unacknowledged socialist that she is, the U.N. utopian eagerly awaits the withering of the nation-state, a political arrangement that she sees as tied to imperialism, war, and masculinity. During war, in particular, nations ?depend on ideas about masculinized dignity and feminized sacrifice to sustain the sense of autonomous nationhood,? writes Cynthia Enloe, professor of government at Clark University.
Having rejected the patriarchal liberal nation-state, with all the democratic machinery of self-government that goes along with it, the utopian concludes that there is only one way to achieve her goals: to impose them through international government. Utopian feminists fill the halls of the United Nations, where they examine everything through the lens of the ?gender perspective? in study after unreadable study. (My personal favorites: ?Gender Perspectives on Landmines? and ?Gender Perspectives on Weapons of Mass Destruction,? whose conclusion is that landmines and WMDs are bad for women.)
The 1979 U.N. Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), perhaps the first and most important document of feminist utopianism, gives the best sense of the sweeping nature of the movement?s ambitions. CEDAW demands many measures that anyone committed to democratic liberal values would applaud, including women?s right to vote and protection against honor killings and forced marriage. Would that the document stopped there. Instead it sets out to impose a utopian order that would erase all distinctions between men and women, a kind of revolution of the sexes from above, requiring nations to ?take all appropriate measures to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women? and to eliminate ?stereotyped roles? to accomplish this legislative abolition of biology. The document calls for paid maternity leave, nonsexist school curricula, and government-supported child care. The treaty?s 23-member enforcement committee hectors nations that do not adequately grasp that, as Enloe puts it, ?the personal is international.? The committee has cited Belarus for celebrating Mother?s Day, China for failing to legalize prostitution, and Libya for not interpreting the Qur?an in accordance with ?committee guidelines.?
Confusing ?women?s participation? with self-determination, and numerical equivalence with equality, CEDAW utopians try to orchestrate their perfect society through quotas and affirmative-action plans. Their bean-counting mentality cares about whether women participate equally, without asking what it is that they are participating in or whether their participation is anything more than ceremonial. Thus at the recent Women?s Summit in Jordan, Rima Khalaf suggested that governments be required to use quotas in elections ?to leapfrog women to power.? Khalaf, like so many illiberal feminist utopians, has no hesitation in forcing society to be free. As is often the case when elites decide they have discovered the route to human perfection, the utopian urge is not simply antidemocratic but verges on the totalitarian.
That this combination of sentimental victimhood, postcolonial relativism, and utopian overreaching has caused feminism to suffer so profound a loss of moral and political imagination that it cannot speak against the brutalization of Islamic women is an incalculable loss to women and to men. The great contribution of Western feminism was to expand the definition of human dignity and freedom. It insisted that all human beings were worthy of liberty. Feminists now have the opportunity to make that claim on behalf of women who in their oppression have not so much as imagined that its promise could include them, too. At its best, feminism has stood for a rich idea of personal choice in shaping a meaningful life, one that respects not only the woman who wants to crash through glass ceilings but also the one who wants to stay home with her children and bake cookies or to wear a veil and fast on Ramadan. Why shouldn?t feminists want to shout out their own profound discovery for the world to hear?
Perhaps, finally, because to do so would be to acknowledge the freedom they themselves enjoy, thanks to Western ideals and institutions. Not only would such an admission force them to give up their own simmering resentments; it would be bad for business.
The truth is that the free institutions?an independent judiciary, a free press, open elections?that protect the rights of women are the same ones that protect the rights of men. The separation of church and state that would allow women to escape the burqa would also free men from having their hands amputated for theft. The education system that would teach girls to read would also empower millions of illiterate boys. The capitalist economies that bring clean water, cheap clothes, and washing machines that change the lives of women are the same ones that lead to healthier, freer men. In other words, to address the problems of Muslim women honestly, feminists would have to recognize that free men and women need the same things?and that those are things that they themselves already have. And recognizing that would mean an end to feminism as we know it.
There are signs that, outside the academy, middlebrow literary circles, and the United Nations, feminism has indeed met its Waterloo. Most Americans seem to realize that September 11 turned self-indulgent sentimental illusions, including those about the sexes, into an unaffordable luxury. Consider, for instance, women?s attitudes toward war, a topic on which politicians have learned to take for granted a gender gap. But according to the Pew Research Center, in January 2002, 57 percent of women versus 46 percent of men cited national security as the country?s top priority. There has been a ?seismic gender shift on matters of war,? according to pollster Kellyanne Conway. In 1991, 45 percent of U.S. women supported the use of ground troops in the Gulf War, a substantially smaller number than the 67 percent of men. But as of November, a CNN survey found women were more likely than men to support the use of ground troops against Iraq, 58 percent to 56 percent. The numbers for younger women were especially dramatic. Sixty-five percent of women between 18 and 49 support ground troops, as opposed to 48 percent of women 50 and over. Women are also changing their attitudes toward military spending: before September 11, only 24 percent of women supported increased funds; after the attacks, that number climbed to 47 percent. An evolutionary psychologist might speculate that, if females tend to be less aggressively territorial than males, there?s little to compare to the ferocity of the lioness when she believes her young are threatened.
Even among some who consider themselves feminists, there is some grudging recognition that Western, and specifically American, men are sometimes a force for the good. The Feminist Majority is sending around urgent messages asking for President Bush to increase American security forces in Afghanistan. The influential left-wing British columnist Polly Toynbee, who just 18 months ago coined the phrase ?America the Horrible,? went to Afghanistan to figure out whether the war ?was worth it.? Her answer was not what she might have expected. Though she found nine out of ten women still wearing burqas, partly out of fear of lingering fundamentalist hostility, she was convinced their lives had greatly improved. Women say they can go out alone now.
As we sink more deeply into what is likely to be a protracted struggle with radical Islam, American feminists have a moral responsibility to give up their resentments and speak up for women who actually need their support. Feminists have the moral authority to say that their call for the rights of women is a universal demand?that the rights of women are the Rights of Man.
Feminism Behind the Veil
Feminists in the West may fiddle while Muslim women are burning, but in the Muslim world itself there is a burgeoning movement to address the miserable predicament of the second sex?without simply adopting a philosophy whose higher cultural products include Sex and the City, Rosie O?Donnell, and the power-suited female executive.
The most impressive signs of an indigenous female revolt against the fundamentalist order are in Iran. Over the past ten years or so, Iran has seen the publication of a slew of serious journals dedicated to the social and political predicament of Islamic women, the most well known being the Teheran-based Zonan and Zan, published by Faezah Hashemi, a well-known member of parliament and the daughter of former president Rafsanjani. Believing that Western feminism has promoted hostility between the sexes, confused sex roles, and the sexual objectification of women, a number of writers have proposed an Islamic-style feminism that would stress ?gender complementarity? rather than equality and that would pay full respect to housewifery and motherhood while also giving women access to education and jobs.
Attacking from the religious front, a number of ?Islamic feminists? are challenging the reigning fundamentalist reading of the Qur?an. These scholars insist that the founding principles of Islam, which they believe were long ago corrupted by pre-Islamic Arab, Persian, and North African customs, are if anything more egalitarian than those of Western religions; the Qur?an explicitly describes women as the moral and spiritual equals of men and allows them to inherit and pass down property. The power of misogynistic mullahs has grown in recent decades, feminists continue, because Muslim men have felt threatened by modernity?s challenge to traditional arrangements between the sexes.
What makes Islamic feminism really worth watching is that it has the potential to play a profoundly important role in the future of the Islamic world?and not just because it could improve the lot of women. By insisting that it is true to Islam?in fact, truer than the creed espoused by the entrenched religious elite?Islamic feminism can affirm the dignity of Islam while at the same time bringing it more in line with modernity. In doing this, feminists can help lay the philosophical groundwork for democracy. In the West, feminism lagged behind religious reformation and political democratization by centuries; in the East, feminism could help lead the charge.
At the same time, though, the issue of women?s rights highlights two reasons for caution about the Islamic future. For one thing, no matter how much feminists might wish otherwise, polygamy and male domination of the family are not merely a fact of local traditions; they are written into the Qur?an itself. This in and of itself would not prove to be such an impediment?the Old Testament is filled with laws antithetical to women?s equality?except for the second problem: more than other religions, Islam is unfriendly to the notion of the separation of church and state. If history is any guide, there?s the rub. The ultimate guarantor of the rights of all citizens, whether Islamic or not, can only be a fully secular state.
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West: The Fatherless Civilization
By Fjordman
The decade from the first half of the 1960s to the first half of the 1970s was clearly a major watershed in Western history, with the start of non-Western mass immigration in the USA, the birth of Eurabia in Western Europe and the rise of Multiculturalism and radical Feminism. American columnist Diana West recently released her book The Death of the Grown-up, where she traces the decline of Western civilization to the permanent youth rebellions of the past two generations. The paradox is that the people who viciously attacked their own civilization had enjoyed uninterrupted economic growth for decades, yet embraced Marxist-inspired ideologies and decided to undermine the very society which had allowed them to live privileged lives. Maybe this isn't as strange as it seems. Karl Marx himself was aided by the wealth of Friedrich Engels, the son of a successful industrialist.
This was also the age of decolonization in Western Europe and desegregation in the USA, which created an atmosphere where Western civilization was seen as evil. Whatever the cause, we have since been stuck in a pattern of eternal opposition to our own civilization. Some of these problems may well have older roots, but they became institutionalized to an unprecedented degree during the 1960s.
According to Diana West, the organizing thesis of her book "is that the unprecedented transfer of cultural authority from adults to adolescents over the past half century or so has dire implications for the survival of the Western world." Having redirected our natural development away from adulthood and maturity in order to strike the pop-influenced pose of eternally cool youth – ever-open, non-judgmental, self-absorbed, searching for (or just plain lacking) identity – we have fostered a society marked by these same traits. In short: Westerners live in a state of perpetual adolescence, but also with a corresponding perpetual identity crisis. West thinks maturity went out of style in the rebellious 1960s, "the biggest temper tantrum in the history of the world," which flouted authority figures of any kind.
She also believes that although the most radical break with the past took place during the 60s and 70s, the roots of Western youth culture are to be found in the 1950s with the birth of rock and roll music, Elvis Presley and actors such as James Dean. Pop group The Beatles embodied this in the early 60s, but changed radically in favor of drugs and the rejection of established wisdom as they approached 1970, a shift which was reflected in the entire culture.
Personally, one of my favorite movies from the 1980s was Back to the Future. In one of the scenes, actor Michael J. Fox travels in time from 1985 to 1955. Before he leaves 1985, he hears the slogan "Re-elect Mayor....Progress is his middle name." The same slogan is repeated in 1955, only with a different name. Politics is politics in any age. Writers Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale have stated that they chose the year 1955 as the setting of the movie because this was the age of the birth of teen culture: This was when the teenager started to rule, and he has ruled ever since.
As West says, many things changed in the economic boom in the decades following the Second World War: "When you talk about the postwar period, the vast new affluence is a big factor in reorienting the culture to adolescent desire. You see a shift in cultural authority going to the young. Instead of kids who might take a job to be able to help with household expenses, all of a sudden that pocket money was going into the manufacture of a massive new culture. That conferred such importance to a period of adolescence that had never been there before." After generations of this celebration of youth, the adults have no confidence left: "Kids are planning expensive trips, going out unchaperoned, they are drinking, debauching, absolutely running amok, yet the parents say, 'I can't do anything about it.' Parents have abdicated responsibilities to give in to adolescent desire."
She believes that "Where womanhood stands today is deeply affected by the death of grown-up. I would say the sexualized female is part of the phenomenon I'm talking about, so I don't think they're immune to the death of the grown-up. Women are still emulating young fashion. Where sex is more available, there are no longer the same incentives building toward married life, which once was a big motivation toward the maturing process."
Is she right? Have we become a civilization of Peter Pans refusing to grow up? Have we been cut off from the past by disparaging everything old as outmoded? I know blogger Conservative Swede, who likes Friedrich Nietzsche, thinks we suffer from "slave morality," but I sometimes wonder whether we suffer from child morality rather than slave morality. However, there are other forces at work here as well.
The welfare state encourages an infantilization of society where people return to childhood by being provided for by others. This creates not just a culture obsessed with youth but with adolescent irresponsibility. Many people live in a constant state of rebellion against not just their parents but their nation, their culture and their civilization.
Writer Theodore Dalrymple thinks one reason for the epidemic of self-destructiveness in Western societies is the avoidance of boredom: "For people who have no transcendent purpose to their lives and cannot invent one through contributing to a cultural tradition (for example), in other words who have no religious belief and no intellectual interests to stimulate them, self-destruction and the creation of crises in their life is one way of warding off meaninglessness."
According to him, what we are seeing now is "a society in which people demand to behave more or less as they wish, that is to say whimsically, in accordance with their kaleidoscopically changing desires, at the same time as being protected from the natural consequences of their own behaviour by agencies of the state. The result is a combination of Sodom and Gomorrah and a vast and impersonal bureaucracy of welfare."
The welfare state deprives you of the possibility of deriving self-respect from your work. This can hurt a person's self-respect, but more so for men than for women because masculine identity is closely tied to providing for others. Stripped of this, male self-respect declines and society with it. Dalrymple also worries about the end of fatherhood, and believes that the worst child abusers are governments promoting the very circumstances in which child abuse and neglect are most likely to take place: "He who promotes single parenthood is indifferent to the fate of children." Fatherhood scarcely exists, except in the merest biological sense:
"I worked in a hospital in which had it not been for the children of Indian immigrants, the illegitimacy rate of children born there would have approached one hundred per cent. It became an almost indelicate question to ask of a young person who his or her father was; to me, it was still an astounding thing to be asked, 'Do you mean my father now, at the moment?' as if it could change at any time and had in fact changed several times before."
This is because "women are to have children merely because they want them, as is their government-given right, irrespective of their ability to bring them up, or who has to pay for them, or the consequences to the children themselves. Men are to be permanently infantilised, their income being in essence pocket money for them to spend on their enjoyments, having no serious responsibilities at all (beyond paying tax). Henceforth, the state will be father to the child, and the father will be child of the state."
As Swedish writer Per Bylund explains: "Most of us were not raised by our parents at all. We were raised by the authorities in state daycare centers from the time of infancy; then pushed on to public schools, public high schools, and public universities; and later to employment in the public sector and more education via the powerful labor unions and their educational associations. The state is ever-present and is to many the only means of survival – and its welfare benefits the only possible way to gain independence."
Though Sweden is arguably an extreme case, author Melanie Phillips notices the same trends in Britain, too: "Our culture is now deep into uncharted territory. Generations of family disintegration in turn are unravelling the fundamentals of civilised human behaviour. Committed fathers are crucial to their children's emotional development. As a result of the incalculable irresponsibility of our elites, however, fathers have been seen for the past three decades as expendable and disposable. Lone parenthood stopped being a source of shame and turned instead into a woman's inalienable right. The state has provided more and more inducements to women – through child benefit, council flats and other welfare provision – to have children without committed fathers. This has produced generations of women-only households, where emotionally needy girls so often become hopelessly inadequate mothers who abuse and neglect their own children – who, in turn, perpetuate the destructive pattern. This is culturally nothing less than suicidal."
I sometimes wonder whether the modern West, and Western Europe in particular, should be dubbed the Fatherless Civilization. Fathers have been turned into a caricature and there is a striking demonization of traditional male values. Any person attempting to enforce rules and authority, a traditional male preserve, is seen as a Fascist and ridiculed, starting with God the Father. We end up with a society of vague fathers who can be replaced at the whim of the mothers at any given moment. Even the mothers have largely abdicated, leaving the upbringing of children to schools, kindergartens and television. In fashion and lifestyle, mothers imitate their daughters, not vice versa.
The elaborate welfare state model in Western Europe is frequently labelled "the nanny state," but perhaps it could also be named "the husband state." Why? Well, in a traditional society, the role of men was to physically protect and financially provide for their women. In our modern society, part of this task has been "outsourced" to the state, which helps explain why women in general give disproportionate support to high taxation and pro-welfare state parties. According to anthropologist Lionel Tiger, the ancient unit of a mother, a child and a father has morphed from monogamy into "bureaugamy," a mother, a child and a bureaucrat. The state has become a substitute husband. In fact, it doesn't replace just the husband, it replaces the entire nuclear and extended family, raises the children and cares for the elderly.
Øystein Djupedal, Minister of Education and Research from the Socialist Left Party and responsible for Norwegian education from kindergartens via high schools to PhD level, has stated: "I think that it's simply a mistaken view of child-rearing to believe that parents are the best to raise children. 'Children need a village,' said Hillary Clinton. But we don't have that. The village of our time is the kindergarten." He later retracted this statement, saying that parents have the main responsibility for raising children, but that "kindergartens are a fantastic device for children, and it is good for children to spend time in kindergarten before [they] start school."
The problem is that some of his colleagues use the kindergarten as the blueprint for society as a whole, even for adults. In the fall of 2007, Norway's center-left government issued a warning to 140 companies that still hadn't fulfilled the state-mandated quota of 40 percent women on their boards of directors. Equality minister Karita Bekkemellem stated that companies failing to meet the quota will face involuntary dissolution, despite the fact that many are within traditionally male-oriented branches like the offshore oil industry, shipping and finance. She called the law "historic and radical" and said it will be enforced.
Bekkemellem is thus punishing the naughty children who refuse to do as Mother State tells them to, even if these children happen to be private corporations. The state replaces the father in the sense that it provides for you financially, but it acts more like a mother in removing risks and turning society into a cozy, regulated kindergarten with ice cream and speech codes.
Blog reader Tim W. thinks women tend to be more selfish than men vis-a-vis the opposite sex: "Men show concern for women and children while women.... well, they show concern for themselves and children. I'm not saying that individual women don't show concern for husbands or brothers, but as a group (or voting bloc) they have no particular interest in men's well-being. Women's problems are always a major concern but men's problems aren't. Every political candidate is expected to address women's concerns, but a candidate even acknowledging that men might have concerns worth addressing would be ostracized." What if men lived an average of five years and eight months longer than women? Well, if that were the case, we'd never hear the end of it: "Feminists and women candidates would walk around wearing buttons with 'five years, eight months' written on them to constantly remind themselves and the world about this horrendous inequity. That this would happen, and surely it would, says something about the differing natures of male and female voters."
Bernard Chapin interviewed Dr. John Lott at Frontpage Magazine. According to Lott, "I think that women are generally more risk averse then men are and they see government as one way of providing insurance against life's vagaries. I also think that divorced women with kids particularly turn towards government for protection. Simply giving women the right to vote explained at least a third of the growth in government for about 45 years."
He thinks this "explains a lot of the government's growth in the US but also the rest of the world over the last century. When states gave women the right to vote, government spending and tax revenue, even after adjusting for inflation and population, went from not growing at all to more than doubling in ten years. As women gradually made up a greater and greater share of the electorate, the size of government kept on increasing. This continued for 45 years as a lot of older women who hadn't been used to voting when suffrage first passed were gradually replaced by younger women. After you get to the 1960s, the continued growth in government is driven by higher divorce rates. Divorce causes women with children to turn much more to government programs." The liberalization of abortion also led to more single parent families.
Diana West thinks what we saw in the counterculture of the 1960s was a leveling of all sorts of hierarchies, both of learning and of authority. From that emerged the leveling of culture and by extension Multiculturalism. She also links this trend to the nanny state:
"In considering the strong links between an increasingly paternalistic nanny state and the death of the grown-up, I found that Tocqueville (of course) had long ago made the connections. He tried to imagine under what conditions despotism could come to the United States. He came up with a vision of the nation characterized, on the one hand, by an 'innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, constantly circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls,' and, on the other, by the 'immense protective power' of the state. 'Banal pleasures' and 'immense state power' might have sounded downright science-fictional in the middle of the 19th century; by the start of the 21st century, it begins to sound all too familiar. Indeed, speaking of the all-powerful state, he wrote: 'It would resemble parental authority if, fatherlike, it tried to prepare its charges for a man's life, but, on the contrary, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood.' Perhaps the extent to which we, liberals and conservatives alike, have acquiesced to our state's parental authority shows how far along we, as a culture, have reached Tocqueville's state of 'perpetual childhood.'"
This problem is even worse in Western Europe, a region with more elaborate welfare states than the USA and which has lived under the American military umbrella for generations, thus further enhancing the tendency for adolescent behavior.
The question, which was indirectly raised by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s in his book Democracy in America, is this: If democracy of universal suffrage means that everybody's opinion is as good as everybody else's, will this sooner or later turn into a society where everybody's choices are also as good as everybody else's, which leads to cultural relativism? Tocqueville wrote at a time when only men had the vote. Will universal suffrage also lead to a situation where women vote themselves into possession of men's finances while reducing their authority and creating powerful state regulation of everything?
I don't know the answer to that. What I do know is that the current situation isn't sustainable. The absence of fatherhood has created a society full of social pathologies, and the lack of male self-confidence has made us easy prey for our enemies. If the West is to survive, we need to reassert a healthy dose of male authority. In order to do so we need to roll back the welfare state. Perhaps we need to roll back some of the excesses of Western Feminism, too.
Fjordman is a noted Norwegian blogger who has written for many conservative web sites. He used to have his own Fjordman Blog in the past, but it is no longer active.
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New Jersey Court Ruling--She Killed His Son, but
He Must Pay Her Alimony
November 27, 2007
She Killed His Son but He Must Pay Her Alimony
Examples of decent, loving dads being manhandled by the anti-father family law system are legion, but this one has to make the Top 10. A recent New Jersey appeals court reaffirmed a decision mandating that a man must pay alimony to his ex-wife--who killed their son. From Legal tussle: Should killer get alimony? (Bergen Record, 11/22/07):
"A state appeals court on Wednesday refused to automatically bar alimony from spouses who kill a child...The decision was issued in the case of Linda Calbi, who is serving a three-year prison term after pleading guilty to beating her son, Matt, on Aug. 17, 2003, during a violent argument at their home. He died hours later from internal bleeding and cardiac arrest...
"Linda Calbi was originally charged with murder, but the charges were later downgraded to aggravated assault, based on expert reports that medical error contributed significantly to the boy's death. She was sentenced last year to three years in prison and won't be eligible for parole until November 2008.
"The Calbis were divorced in 2001 after 15 years of marriage. A few months after Matt's death, Chris Calbi fell behind on his alimony payments and filed papers in court seeking a reduction or termination of his payment obligations.
"'She took the life of her oldest son, scarred her younger son for the rest of his life, and tore the fabric of my soul from me,' Chris Calbi wrote in papers filed in Superior Court in Hackensack. 'To reward this evil and violent woman by allowing her ... to derive a financial benefit from the family she destroyed ... can only be described as a perversion of our justice system.'"
Chris Calbi had been paying Linda $3,183 a month until her incarceration, and may be saddled with that amount when Linda is paroled. Chris is pictured with his deceased son Matthew and his surviving son Dean above. A few comments:
1) Chris Calbi claimed that Linda abused and assaulted him during their marriage, at times employing a kitchen knife and a hammer. The death of the son is discussed in Typical teen meets a tragic end (Bergen Record, 8/20/03), and Linda Calbi sounds like a real sweetheart:
"As [Christopher Calbi's] company - Robert Christopher Sales - grew, [Christopher] was increasingly away in Europe on business, Linda Calbi said in divorce papers. Though they shared fine dinners, and Christopher Calbi showered his wife with gifts, a physical and emotional distance developed between Matthew's parents, her papers say.
"Linda Calbi said in the papers that she felt like 'a highly paid slave.'
"Christopher Calbi countered that his wife subjected him to 'profanity-laced tirades and ridicule.'"
2) From the same article:
"The couple split in 1999 and - after 15 years of marriage - divorced in July 2001.
"Meanwhile, Matthew was having problems at school, said a woman who worked in the River Vale school system.
"When Matthew was in the special education program at Holdrum Middle School, he regularly came to class with bruises, said the woman, who declined to be identified. The teen always had an excuse for the marks - he was playing with his younger brother, or he fell, the woman said.
"But in April 2002, the woman noticed a strange bruise on Matthew's wrist, one she thought looked like a defensive wound. She asked Matt to explain, but he couldn't, she said, so she called DYFS to report the mark.
"As part of the special education program, Linda Calbi met routinely with educators to review her son's performance.
"But when Calbi showed up, she often smelled of booze, the woman said. 'You could light the air on fire, she smelled so badly,' the woman said.
"Linda could not understand why her son wasn't more successful in school.
"'She was very forceful when she spoke. Nothing was ever her fault, and of course she was at her wit's end,' the woman said."
3) The father now has to raise the surviving son, Dean, age 12, on his own. Is Linda being asked to pay child support? Isn't Chris' ability to provide for Dean negatively impacted by having to pay alimony to the noncustodial parent?
4) Chris also needs to save his money--Linda may be out of prison in less than a year and will be fighting for visitation rights to Dean. In July, 2006, a judge ordered a supervised visitation between Dean and his mother, contingent on the boy's acceptance.
5) Linda apparently received a lesser charge and sentence for her crime because supposedly there was medical bungling by the hospital after she assaulted her son which contributed to Matthew's death. How much of her light sentence is due to the alleged medical bungling and how much is just the standard female sentencing discount is unclear.
6) It's amazing some of the things that an attorney will say. Linda's attorney, Ian Hirsch, said:
"'Mr. Calbi is using his son's death to take away any obligations he has,' Hirsch said. 'I think he's trying to take advantage of a tragedy and turn it around to his economic benefit.'"
Yup--dad not wanting to pay money to the woman who killed his son is "taking advantage of a tragedy and turning it around to his economic benefit." Bad dad--how could he be so rotten?
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What Do Men Want?
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
ShareThis
It is said that the one question about men and women that even the great Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, could not answer was: What do women want?
Whether or not Freud actually said that is irrelevant. The very popularity of the anecdote testifies to one incontrovertible fact: A lot of men don't know the answer. It is probably fair to say that a lot of women also don't know the answer. If they did, all they would have to do is tell men. That would solve the riddle -- and make most men and women very happy. So, to the extent that this is a great riddle, it is so because most members of both sexes seem not to know the answer.
Adding support to the widespread belief that what women want is close to unknowable is the underlying presumption that just about everybody knows what men want.
The number of truly funny Internet jokes that describe what women want as complex and what men want as simple is a testament to how widespread these assumptions about the two sexes are. Three examples illustrate this:
The first example is the one that begins: "How To Impress a Woman."
Listed beneath that heading is this: "Compliment her, respect her, honor her, cuddle her, kiss her, caress her, love her, stroke her, tease her, comfort her, protect her, hug her, hold her, spend money on her, wine and dine her, buy things for her, listen to her, care for her, stand by her, support her, hold her, go to the ends of the Earth for her."
That long list is followed by: "How To Impress a Man."
And listed beneath is this: "Show up naked. Bring food."
The second Internet example:
"Q: What is the difference between men and women?
A: A woman wants one man to satisfy her every need. A man wants every woman to satisfy his one need."
And a third Internet example shows a box divided into two parts.
Under the part labeled "Women" are 40 dials and knobs.
Under the part labeled "Men" is one switch, marked "On-Off."
As with most generalizations, there is much truth to these.
Nevertheless, I take issue with both presumptions -- that what women want is a riddle that would stump the Sphinx and that what men want is so easy it could be written on the back of a postage stamp. In fact, I believe that both are relatively simple to answer (though neither is simple to achieve).
What does a man most want?
Answer: He most wants to be admired by the woman he loves.
One proof is that the most devastating thing a woman can do to her man is to hold him in contempt. That is so devastating to a marriage that, over time, it is often more toxic than an affair. I am fairly certain that more marriages survive an affair, as difficult as that is, than contempt. Of course, this goes in both directions, but when a woman shows contempt toward her man, his very manhood is called into question.
My father and mother were married 69 years. As my brother and I have heard countless times, "She put me on a pedestal" was the quality my father most often cited in describing what a wonderful wife my mother was. She admired him, and to him, that was everything. On the other hand, in describing her love for my father over all those years, my mother never once said, "He put me on a pedestal" (despite the fact that he constantly praised her). Rather, she always spoke of what a "great man" he was, how "brilliant," etc. Of course, this is just one example, but I think it applies to the majority of men and women.
The obvious upshot of this thesis is that in order to gain a woman's love, a man must make -- and keep -- himself admirable.
Boys know this instinctively. Studies that have observed boys and young men reveal how much harder they work at anything -- sports comes immediately to mind -- when they know girls are watching them.
That is why many single men in our society (often erroneously but understandably) place so much emphasis on what car they drive: They want to impress women. Yet, men couldn't care less what car a woman drives. In fact, for most men, a woman arriving on a first date in a relatively inexpensive car renders her more desirable than if she showed up in an expensive luxury car -- unless the man is looking to be supported by a woman. But few women are attracted to a man they know in advance they will have to support.
So, although the Internet jokes are right about men wanting sex, it isn't sex men most want from their woman. They want to be admired -- and sex is one manifestation of a woman's admiration for her man. When a man is regularly denied sex, in his eyes that means that his wife does not hold him in high esteem. Worse, he actually feels humiliated as a man. That, not the sex per se, is why regular denial devastates a man.
So, then, if what a man most wants is to be admired by his woman, what is it that a woman most wants?
That is the subject of the next column.
But here's a hint. If we begin with the assumption that men and women are made to bond with one another, what she most wants must be in some way related to what he most wants.
As we shall see, it is.
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Forget "boy" or "girl". It is friends or I guess person. I don't know if this should be under the gay heading, parenting heading gender heading or under a heading of "crazy':
***No "boys" or "girls" at gender-neutral preschool in Sweden
At Egalia preschool in Stockholm, children are not called "him" and "her," or "boy" and "girl," in an attempt to fight gender stereotypes.
News DeskJune 26, 2011 12:04
Swedish children from a kindergarden wear their obligatory traffic safety vests as they play in a Stockholm park. At the "Egalia" preschool in Sweden, staff refer to the children as "friends" instead of "boys" and "girls," in an attempt to breakdown gender stereotypes for boys and girls. (SVEN NACKSTRAND/AFP/Getty Images)A preschool in Sweden wants to eliminate gender bias by referring to children as “friends,” instead of girls and boys, and avoiding gender-specific pronouns such as “him” or “her.”
At the taxpayer-funded “Egalia” preschool in Stockholm, which opened last year for children ages 1-6, boys and girls play together with a toy kitchen, which is located next to the Lego bricks, the Associated Press reports.
They read books featuring gay and lesbian couples, single parents and adopted children, instead of fairy tales such as “Cinderella” or “Snow White,” which are rife with gender stereotypes.
School staff try to avoid masculine and feminine references in their speech, for example by not using the Swedish pronouns “han” or “hon” for him or her, and instead using the genderless word “hen,” which doesn’t formally exist in the Swedish language.
"Society expects girls to be girlie, nice and pretty and boys to be manly, rough and outgoing," teacher Jenny Johnsson told the AP. "Egalia gives them a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be."
A 2010 report by the World Economic Forum on the global gender gap found that Sweden and three other Nordic countries lead the world when it comes to gender equality. Sweden is also considered a pioneer in legalizing gay and lesbian partnerships.
A Canadian couple recently drew international attention for their decision to try and raise a genderless baby by not telling anyone whether their child is a boy or girl.
When Storm was born, the couple from Toronto told friends and family that they had decided not to share the baby’s sex.
“When the baby comes out, even the people who love you the most and know you so intimately, the first question they ask is, ‘Is it a girl or a boy?’” mother Kathy Witterick explained to the Toronto Star. “If you really want to get to know someone, you don’t ask what’s between their legs.”
Storm’s brothers Jazz, 5, and Kio, 2, choose their own clothes and hairstyles. Jazz prefers to wear his hair long and in three braids, and his favorite color is pink.****
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Forget "boy" or "girl". It is friends or I guess person. I don't know if this should be under the gay heading, parenting heading gender heading or under a heading of "crazy':
***No "boys" or "girls" at gender-neutral preschool in Sweden
At Egalia preschool in Stockholm, children are not called "him" and "her," or "boy" and "girl," in an attempt to fight gender stereotypes.
News DeskJune 26, 2011 12:04
Swedish children from a kindergarden wear their obligatory traffic safety vests as they play in a Stockholm park. At the "Egalia" preschool in Sweden, staff refer to the children as "friends" instead of "boys" and "girls," in an attempt to breakdown gender stereotypes for boys and girls. (SVEN NACKSTRAND/AFP/Getty Images)A preschool in Sweden wants to eliminate gender bias by referring to children as “friends,” instead of girls and boys, and avoiding gender-specific pronouns such as “him” or “her.”
At the taxpayer-funded “Egalia” preschool in Stockholm, which opened last year for children ages 1-6, boys and girls play together with a toy kitchen, which is located next to the Lego bricks, the Associated Press reports.
They read books featuring gay and lesbian couples, single parents and adopted children, instead of fairy tales such as “Cinderella” or “Snow White,” which are rife with gender stereotypes.
School staff try to avoid masculine and feminine references in their speech, for example by not using the Swedish pronouns “han” or “hon” for him or her, and instead using the genderless word “hen,” which doesn’t formally exist in the Swedish language.
"Society expects girls to be girlie, nice and pretty and boys to be manly, rough and outgoing," teacher Jenny Johnsson told the AP. "Egalia gives them a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be."
A 2010 report by the World Economic Forum on the global gender gap found that Sweden and three other Nordic countries lead the world when it comes to gender equality. Sweden is also considered a pioneer in legalizing gay and lesbian partnerships.
A Canadian couple recently drew international attention for their decision to try and raise a genderless baby by not telling anyone whether their child is a boy or girl.
When Storm was born, the couple from Toronto told friends and family that they had decided not to share the baby’s sex.
“When the baby comes out, even the people who love you the most and know you so intimately, the first question they ask is, ‘Is it a girl or a boy?’” mother Kathy Witterick explained to the Toronto Star. “If you really want to get to know someone, you don’t ask what’s between their legs.”
Storm’s brothers Jazz, 5, and Kio, 2, choose their own clothes and hairstyles. Jazz prefers to wear his hair long and in three braids, and his favorite color is pink.****
The muslim immigrants will help them determine their genders. The primary victims of sexual violence will be female, the primary victims of physical violence will be male.
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http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2011/06/12/
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http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2011/11/27/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+daybydaycartoon%2FkUnt+%28Day+by+Day+Cartoon+by+Chris+Muir%29#006334
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http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/17/us/vermont-rape-survey/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
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http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/17/us/vermont-rape-survey/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
So, rather than seek to enlighten ignorants that rape is a horrific thing, they silence speech they don't like? How leftist.
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http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/17/us/vermont-rape-survey/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
So, rather than seek to enlighten ignorants that rape is a horrific thing, they silence speech they don't like? How leftist.
I'd also add that "gender feminists" such as Andrea Dworkin in calling everything rape end up trivializing it, feeding into stupid frat boy trivialization of it.
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By JAMES TARANTO
Over the past few weeks, this column has on more than one occasion expressed agreement with Rick Santorum's view that advances in birth control have had deleterious social consequences, most notably in contributing to the breakdown of the family. To our surprise, a not-insignificant number of our readers have pushed back against this idea, which some find counterintuitive and others downright unthinkable. So we'd like to go through the argument step by step.
The Food and Drug Administration approved the pill for contraceptive use in 1960. Over the next half-century, the marriage rate declined and the illegitimacy rate skyrocketed, Charles Murray notes in a recent Wall Street Journal essay adapted from his new book:
In 1960, extremely high proportions of whites in both Belmont [Murray's metaphor for the upper middle class] and Fishtown [the working class] were married—94% in Belmont and 84% in Fishtown. In the 1970s, those percentages declined about equally in both places. Then came the great divergence. In Belmont, marriage stabilized during the mid-1980s, standing at 83% in 2010. In Fishtown, however, marriage continued to slide; as of 2010, a minority (just 48%) were married. The gap in marriage between Belmont and Fishtown grew to 35 percentage points, from just 10. . . .
In 1960, just 2% of all white births were nonmarital. When we first started recording the education level of mothers in 1970, 6% of births to white women with no more than a high-school education—women, that is, with a Fishtown education--were out of wedlock. By 2008, 44% were nonmarital. Among the college-educated women of Belmont, less than 6% of all births were out of wedlock as of 2008, up from 1% in 1970.
The same trends have been noted among blacks, although they started earlier and are more severe. Of course it would be a fallacy (post hoc ergo propter hoc, for those keeping score at home) to declare Santorum's argument proven on the basis of these facts. But they do demonstrate that the argument is not inconsistent with the facts.
The usual criticism we've heard is that it is absurd to suggest a causal link between birth-control advances and illegitimacy because, after all, birth control prevents pregnancy, and giving birth out of wedlock entails pregnancy. By that logic, though, illegitimacy rates should have remained low, or even declined further, after the inception of the pill. The Santorum argument may be counterintuitive, but the counterargument flies in the face of the facts.
But Santorum's argument is not really all that counterintuitive. It posits that the availability of birth control changed the culture in ways that encouraged illegitimacy. There is scholarly support for this hypothesis, in the form of a 1996 study in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, which served as the basis for a brief written by George Akerlof and Janet Yellen and published by the centrist-liberal Brookings Institution:
Before 1970, the stigma of unwed motherhood was so great that few women were willing to bear children outside of marriage. The only circumstance that would cause women to engage in sexual activity was a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy. Men were willing to make (and keep) that promise for they knew that in leaving one woman they would be unlikely to find another who would not make the same demand. Even women who would be willing to bear children out-of-wedlock could demand a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy.
The increased availability of contraception and abortion made shotgun weddings a thing of the past. Women who were willing to get an abortion or who reliably used contraception no longer found it necessary to condition sexual relations on a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy. But women who wanted children, who did not want an abortion for moral or religious reasons, or who were unreliable in their use of contraception found themselves pressured to participate in premarital sexual relations without being able to exact a promise of marriage in case of pregnancy. These women feared, correctly, that if they refused sexual relations, they would risk losing their partners. Sexual activity without commitment was increasingly expected in premarital relationships.
Advances in reproductive technology eroded the custom of shotgun marriage in another way. Before the sexual revolution, women had less freedom, but men were expected to assume responsibility for their welfare. Today women are more free to choose, but men have afforded themselves the comparable option. "If she is not willing to have an abortion or use contraception," the man can reason, "why should I sacrifice myself to get married?" By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother, the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father.
Santorum has come under particular attack for saying that contraception is "harmful to women." It may reasonably be said that this is an overgeneralization: There are many women for whom birth control has not been harmful--those who don't want children, who prioritize career over family, or who have been able to find husbands in the post-sexual-revolution mate market. Still, Akerlof and Yellen make a compelling case that birth control has been harmful to many other women, and it is not implausible to think, as Santorum does, that it has been harmful to women on balance.
By and large, it is the women of Murray's "Belmont" who have been the beneficiaries of feminism and the sexual revolution, and those of "Fishtown" who have suffered the ill effects. The former (along with men who are inclined to be deferential when it comes to "women's issues") are predominant in the elite media. But they are unrepresentative of the general population, which may explain why, as the Washington Post reported last week, Santorum seems to be doing fine with female voters notwithstanding the fierce opposition of the female elite.
Whether he wins or loses the nomination and the presidency, Santorum is doing a service to American intellectual culture by giving voice to ideas the feminist elite would like to decree unthinkable. For another example of such an idea, get a load of this, from Emily Yoffe's "Dear Prudence" advice column in Slate:
Q: I attend a small university studying engineering. I hold traditional values and I would like to get married to a woman willing to stay home and raise our children. I am lucky enough to not have any student loans and will be able to support a wife and children on my salary. Preferably, I would like to marry a woman who has a college degree and is smart because we would match intellectually and she would provide the best environment for my children. Women I meet on campus frequently call me sexist. I never thought of myself as sexist because I have no problem whatsoever with women who work in general and I respect my fellow female students and professors. Just because I don't want my wife to work does not mean I think women in general shouldn't work. Am I sexist? Is there any way I can meet a woman who shares my values, or was I born 40 years too late?
A: You sound like the male equivalent of the bride in the letter above who much preferred planning her wedding without the bother of a real person to marry. Of course we all have ideas of what our ideal life would be, then life happens and we have to--even want to--adjust to reality. Yes, there are women, even well-educated ones, who would prefer to stay home with their children. But dictating these terms before you've even gotten far enough to go steady makes you sound rigid, dictatorial, and yes, sexist. Instead of announcing your life plan for the so-far nonexistent woman you plan to marry, you should just date interesting, intelligent women and find out what they want out of life. But if you're determined to only spend time with women who meet your qualifications, go to a rally for Rick Santorum. He shares your views of women's roles, and during his Q&A ask if he can fix you up.
Yoffe is not usually that snide and judgmental. In an earlier column, she responded in blasé fashion to a (fictional, we hope to God) letter from a man who claimed to be carrying on a homosexual affair with his own fraternal twin brother: "When people ask when you're each going to go out there and find a nice young man, tell them that while it may seem unorthodox, you both have realized that living together is what works for you," she advised.
Don't even think of living like this.
.But when a decent young man professes a desire to marry an old-fashioned girl and take financial responsibility for his family, Yoffe treats him as a deviant. She denounces him as "sexist" even though he is careful to affirm that women have every right to work outside the home if they choose to do so. He mentions nothing about politics, yet she feels compelled to bring Santorum, the feminists' Emmanuel Goldstein, into the mix.
Yoffe's hostility to this young man tells us more about elite culture than it does about her personally. (We've met her, and she's perfectly pleasant.) By his account, his female classmates have been indoctrinated with the same rigid ideas about "sexism" that Yoffe expresses in her response.
But we wonder if female opinion on campus is really quite as uniform as his experience would suggest. Our guess is that there are young women who don't believe the feminist dogma but expect that if they gave voice to their doubts, they'd receive a hostile response, and thus lack the confidence to speak out.
Rick Santorum doesn't have that problem, and that is why he is driving elite feminists crazy.
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Preferably, I would like to marry a woman who has a college degree and is smart because we would match intellectually and she would provide the best environment for my children.
Just because I don't want my wife to work does not mean I think women in general shouldn't work. Am I sexist?
YES
The WSJ's rebuttal said, "She denounces him as "sexist" even though he is careful to affirm that women have every right to work outside the home if they choose to do so."
Actually, not true. The engineering student in question clearly said that he did not want his wife, a woman whom he wanted to match intellectually, to work outside the home.
Sorry, that's Sexist. She is his equal intellectually, but she is suppose to stay home, make breakfast and dinner for him, clean his house, clean his laundry and have his martini ready?
Sexist.
But, if he had said he wanted to marry a beautiful woman, one who is his intellectual equal, a woman who she herself expressed that she did not want to work; well that's fine.
I know a few girls like that here in LA, quite cute, but some call them gold diggers or worse.
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IMHO I find him not sexist, but I do find you arrogant :-D
It is profoundly arrogant of you to say that he should not have an opinion on what kind of an arrangement he wants in his marriage.
Bonus points in arrogance for saying a woman who makes a home and raises children is a gold digger.
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Maybe you don't find him sexist, but I'ld venture to guess that 4 out of 5 women would call him sexist, if not even a higher percentage. Nothing arrogant about it.
The only arrogance is the engineering student demanding a woman of equal intelligence, but insisting that she stay home, whether she wants to or not, to clean the house, make him breakfast and dinner, wash the dishes, fetch his drink, etc. and raise his family.
It reminds me of a Muslim Marriage that conforms to Sharia Law.
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Ah, but there is no compulsion in what he seeks. A woman seeking otherwise will not accept his offer.
"But, if he had said he wanted to marry a beautiful woman, one who is his intellectual equal, a woman who she herself expressed that she did not want to work; well that's fine."
So a woman can want this, but he cannot seek such a woman? :roll:
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So a woman can want this, but he cannot seek such a woman?
A woman can want this for herself, but she is not imposing or limiting her spouse.
Following your logic, so if a woman in amenable to a marriage under Sharia Law in America that is just fine. Why then do we criticize it on this forum?
Sorry, he's Sexist. Pure and simple. It reminds me of many year ago when my parents went to a Halloween party. My father dressed up as a cave man
and my mother a cave woman. He had a big club and my mother was to obey and follow him. It was cute for Halloween, my mother agreed to the outfit,
but even 40 years ago they knew it was a joke.
My mother graduated from the University of Wisconsin. She was an RN and worked much of her life. She would have been a doctor like her father, but the
medical field was still quite sexist back then.
That engineering student belongs in the cave man age or at minimum, he should convert to Islam and follow Sharia Law
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"A woman can want this for herself, but she is not imposing or limiting her spouse."
Well, she will be looking for, and limiting herself to a man who is ready, willing, and able to support her and the children. How is that any different from what he is doing?
Furthermore I continue your attitude towards those who live this way arrogant. (The problem with Sharia is its coercion and its mission of Theocracy.)
"He had a big club and my mother was to obey and follow him". Ummm , , , lets check the record here. Did the man in question here say anything about this? Hmmmm, , , , nope.
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Sorry, its Sexist; the only arrogant one is the engineering student. I repeat 4 out of 5 women will call him sexist; probably a much higher percentage. We've moved passed this archaic attitude towards women. In contrast, this man in question wants to return to the cave man days. Or Sharia Law. I don't know a single college educated (equal to an engineering degree) woman who would agree with this student.
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God forbid we return to the old ways where children grew up in two parent homes and the worst problems in schools were talking in class and students running in the halls.
Thank god the left has rescued us from those horrors.
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JDN:
"I don't know a single college educated , , , woman who would agree with this student."
That you don't is probably true :lol:
Still the cognitive dissonance to your reasoning remains. A woman is free to want this, but he is not free to want it?
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Sure "he is free to want it". And I'm free to want to have an open sexual marriage. But most people would call me a Pig.
He's just a Sexist. :-D
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The original point of feminism, before a lot of it went down the femi-nazi road, is that women should be free to choose without social or legal approbation.
You POV seeks to disrespect and degrade a choice that millions of parents make (the husband father, with his work is part of making it possible) a choice that, as GM notes, has a pretty solid record overall.
In this, you are arrogant.
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"Your POV seeks to disrespect and degrade a choice that millions of parents make..."
I could not help but notice and be offended reading a view that washing his dishes and fetching his drink is put on the same plane as raising his family. I visualize a fat slob on the couch belching after his 3rd beer and demanding another from the woman/wife who chose this man as the love of her life now trapped doing all the work with no options as if that is an issue or reality in true stay-at-home-by-choice relationships. As a single parent I cannot tell you the value of having one person available to observe and communicate everything that is happening with the children and having the other free to hunt and gather or whatever it is we do today to responsibly pay for the enormous costs that make up living even frugally in today's society. One side or the other of that simply does not get done without an amazing partnership.
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The original point of feminism, before a lot of it went down the femi-nazi road, is that women should be free to choose without social or legal approbation.
You POV seeks to disrespect and degrade a choice that millions of parents make (the husband father, with his work is part of making it possible) a choice that, as GM notes, has a pretty solid record overall.
In this, you are arrogant.
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights for women. In addition, feminism seeks to establish equal opportunities for women in education and employment.
Images of the traditional family still dominate our televisions and magazines, but they do not represent how most Americans live. In 2002, only 7 percent of all U.S. households consisted of married couples with children in which only the husband worked. The percentage is probably much lower now in 2012.
However, if the engineering student had like Doug stated, wanted a marriage where one person watches the children and the other gathers, I may or may not agree, but it would not be sexist. Instead, the engineering student said, although he wants to marry someone of equal intelligence, he expects her to stay home everyday and take care of the daily chores while he goes out and gathers. Sort of like my cave man analogy earlier. Sorry that's sexist.
If he is worried about the family, and the wife has a better job offer, why doesn't he then stay home and take care of the family? Why should she have to give up her career for the family?
That's arrogance.
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And this now becomes tedious.
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I agree, it is a little tedious, this longing for the good old days when women supposedly "knew their place"; as if they had a choice. It's like watching old movies... Or the Flintstones.
But I have a question, for discussion sake, let's say we agree with Doug's point, i.e. it's better to have one parent at home raising the family and one parent "gathering".
Why can't the woman work and the man stay home? I have friends who are married and who are both attorneys. Both very bright, both with excellent large firms downtown.
He's already in his early 30's. She's late 20's. It looks like she is on the fast track to partnership, it's doubtful if her husband will make it. She plans to have children in 2-3 years; hopefully she will
also be a partner then. Following Doug's logic, after she gives birth, assuming one parent should be home, why doesn't the husband stay home and raise the children while his wife supports the family.
She is the better "gatherer". Do you accept that as reasonable?
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Sure, if that is what works for them; though I suspect for most women, and men, this would run against some rather deep wiring for reasons similar to those that most women don't prefer men who are smaller, shorter, and physically weaker. Also, nursing the baby would be rather problematic; indeed my understanding is that hormonal changes that accompany the pregnancy and birth process may change the woman's world view and the premises of this theoretical couple's assumptions.
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Sure, if that is what works for them; though I suspect for most women, and men, this would run against some rather deep wiring for reasons similar to those that most women don't prefer men who are smaller, shorter, and physically weaker. Also, nursing the baby would be rather problematic; indeed my understanding is that hormonal changes that accompany the pregnancy and birth process may change the woman's world view and the premises of this theoretical couple's assumptions.
"smaller, shorter, and physically weaker" is different than intellectual and wage earning ability. Now a days, being the "gatherer" is all about wage earning ability; no one really cares, unless you are truly exceptional, that you are physically stronger, you can lift more weight, or fight better; it doesn't help pay the rent. I know quite a few couples where the wife is earning more than the man. They seem equally as happy as families where the man is the primary wage earner.
As for nursing, most firms and large corporations have maternity leave and many have extended paternity leave. And of course in this example, the father will to home to attend to the baby.
I'm not sure how pregnancy changes a woman's world view as it relates to this discussion or even this couple's assumption; that being to maximize income and still have one parent home with their child. In fact in this example, it may enhance the woman's viewpoint; knowing that she can pursue her career/passion and have her husband home taking care of their child.
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**I bet the genetically unfit are predisposed to ignoring evolutionary biology.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110518171343.htm
"If you're a chimpanzee- or gorilla-type ancestor that is moving on the ground, walking bipedally has a cost," he says. "It's energetically more expensive, it's harder to speed up and slow down, and there are costs in terms of agility. In every way, going from four legs to two is a disadvantage for locomotion. So the selective advantage for becoming bipedal, whatever it was, must have been important."
Nearly all mammals, including chimps and gorillas, move on all fours when they run or cover long distances on the ground. On the other hand, all sorts of four-legged animals stand up and use their front legs to fight. They include anteaters, lions, wolves, bears, wolverines, horses, rabbits and many rodents and primates.
Carrier believes that the usefulness of quadruped forelegs as weapons is a side effect of how forelegs are used for walking and running. When an animal is running with its body positioned horizontally, the forelegs strike down at the ground. By lifting the body to a vertical posture, animals can direct that same force toward an opponent.
In addition, quadrupeds are stronger pulling back with their forelimbs than pushing forward. That translates to a powerful downward blow when they rear up on their hind legs. These advantages, which grow directly out of four-legged movement, can be used most effectively by an animal that can stand easily on two legs.
Carrier predicted that animals would hit harder with their forelegs when their bodies were held upright than when they were horizontal, and that they would hit harder downward than upward. Although it would be ideal to test these hypotheses with four-legged animals, humans should still possess the advantages that led our ancestors to stand upright, and they are more practical test subjects.
The results were exactly what Carrier expected. Men's side strikes were 64 percent harder, their forward strikes were 48 percent harder, their downward strikes were 44 percent harder, and their upward strikes were 48 percent harder when they were standing than when they were on their hands and knees. From both postures, subjects delivered 3.3 times as much force when they hit downward rather than upward.
Do Women Want Men Who Can Fight?
While Carrier's study primarily deals with the evolution of upright posture, it also may have implications for how women choose mates. Multiple studies have shown that women find tall men more attractive. Greater height is also associated with health, social dominance, symmetrical faces and intelligence in men and women. These correlations have led some scientists to suggest that women prefer tall men because height indicates "good genes" that can be passed on to offspring. Carrier believes there is more to it.
"If that were the whole story, I would expect the same to be true for men -- that men would be attracted to tall women. But it turns out they're not. Men are attracted to women of average height or even shorter," he says.
The alternative explanation is that tall males among our ancestors were better able to defend their resources, partners and offspring. If males can hit down harder than they can hit up, a tall male has the advantage in a fight because he can punch down to hit his opponent's most vulnerable targets.
Carrier certainly isn't saying women like physically abusive men or those who get into fights with each other. He is saying that women like tall men because tallness is a product if the evolutionary advantage held by our ancestors who began standing upright to fight.
"From the perspective of sexual selection theory, women are attracted to powerful males, not because powerful males can beat them up, but because powerful males can protect them and their children from other males," Carrier says.
"In a world of automatic weapons and guided missiles, male physical strength has little relevance to most conflicts between males," he adds. "But guns have been common weapons for less than 15 human generations. So maybe we shouldn't be surprised that modern females are still attracted to physical traits that predict how their mates would fare in a fight."
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Raising the children is not a 'daily chore', it is an honor and a privilege and a gift beyond anything that you know.
Yes, men can raise children. I did it. But besides being plumbed differently, women are actually wired differently - in general. The freedom to have careers should not pull with it a stigma for choosing not to. Some women want to be homemakers and raise children. That does not mean zero other work ever outside the home in a dynamic economy, which is why your 7% stat is highly misleading. Taking months or years out of the continuity in your career has an enormous and measurable negative impact on future income - for any gender.
"why doesn't the husband stay home and raise the children while his wife supports the family."
Unless you are that husband or that wife, what on earth business of ours/yours is it to second guess what they do, and what happened to a right of privacy?
Two parents both work today for one reason more than any other: the public sector is directly consuming nearly half the resources in the economy and it is more than half if you count the private sector time directly spent on government regulation compliance activities.
Equal is a synonym for same. The genders are not the same. Ending discrimination (that happened how long ago?) is not the same as making gender differences go away.
The Equal Rights Amendment failed to be ratified. Why?
"Following Doug's logic ..." Of all your strong points, that has never been one of them. :wink:
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Unless you are that husband or that wife, what on earth business of ours/yours is it to second guess what they do, and what happened to a right of privacy?
If I recollect, the male engineering student in question wrote in to the magazine asking for advice. :-o
Equal is a synonym for same. The genders are not the same. Ending discrimination (that happened how long ago?) is not the same as making gender differences go away.
When I think of "equal"; I think of equal opportunity. Unfortunately, gender discrimination is still prevalent. Sexism is still prevalent. To answer your ? discrimination happened a long time ago and is STILL happening today. It hasn't ended.
That said, most of the high income attractive single women I know have a problem dating. It's not that they set their standards so high, it's that the guys are intimidated. I tell my female friends it's a male problem, it's their insecurity, that you should not worry. But they are forced to downplay their success and stroke the male's ego on a date. It seems rather comical albeit necessary.
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....because masculinity has been defined as being in control.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/03/04/the-stubborn-gender-gap.html
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In the one breath gender discrimination is still rampant and in the next breath all these 'attractive' single women are burdened with the fact that success in their careers is intimidating men. Which is it?
Not to judge specific people whom I don't know but by 'attractive' I think you mean visually appealing. If they are high CEO's, boss of many men, maybe they are not the type men are 'attracted to' for forming family partnerships with. As you intimate, they made other choices. These women commonly insist on finding a man equal to them in career, not a man with time on his hands and willing to be supported and home with the children. The men equal to them in their careers tend to be married. I'm sure they will tell you that, or you can have these successful, attractive single women give me a call to discuss this fuirther.
Written before but I am not very sympathetic to the plight of discrimination of the majority having grown up in a family of high achieving women, and having worked in companies large, medium and small where results always mattered more than gender - or anything else. The on-to-college rate for girls at my daughter's large public high school is very nearly 100%. Women make up 57% of college students. http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2005-10-19-male-college-cover_x.htm http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-01-26-genderequity26_ST_N.htm Pretty soon we will have to be offering preferences to men if the alleged discrimination has any scientific basis to it.
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In the one breath gender discrimination is still rampant and in the next breath all these 'attractive' single women are burdened with the fact that success in their careers is intimidating men. Which is it?
Actually both.
Not to judge specific people whom I don't know but by 'attractive' I think you mean visually appealing. If they are high CEO's, boss of many men, maybe they are not the type men are 'attracted to' for forming family partnerships with. As you intimate, they made other choices. These women commonly insist on finding a man equal to them in career, not a man with time on his hands and willing to be supported and home with the children. The men equal to them in their careers tend to be married. I'm sure they will tell you that, or you can have these successful, attractive single women give me a call to discuss this fuirther.
Yes, I mean visually appealing. But they not high CEO's rather they are young, late 20's early 30's who are either associates at large law firms, senior managers at large accounting firms, recent Medical School Graduates, or MBA financial types at banks etc. All making easy six figures, some over $300K. I will have them give you a call but long distance romances never seem to work IMHO. :-) However, in nearly every case they are not looking necessarily for a career peer, but rather just an intelligent nice guy. My neighbor found that; she is late 30's, on the fast track at a big bank, and married to a nice guy. No MBA for him, but he did graduate from college and also works at a bank, but at a much lower job with little future in comparison.
Written before but I am not very sympathetic to the plight of discrimination of the majority having grown up in a family of high achieving women, and having worked in companies large, medium and small where results always mattered more than gender - or anything else. The on-to-college rate for girls at my daughter's large public high school is very nearly 100%. Women make up 57% of college students. http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2005-10-19-male-college-cover_x.htm http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-01-26-genderequity26_ST_N.htm Pretty soon we will have to be offering preferences to men if the alleged discrimination has any scientific basis to it.
Kudos to you family, and I agree that the on-to-college rate for girls is equal or higher than for guys. The same can probably be said about the hire rate at law firms, accounting firms, financial firms, etc. BUT, did you read the article I posted? The issue is not entry level, the issue is promotion and the glass ceiling. Wage scales differ. Promotions differ. Who makes partner more often? Who gets invited to join the private clubs. Etc. The guy; more often than not... THAT is where discrimination still exists.
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a) Once you filter for age (i.e. the top tiers obviously are older and pre-date many changes in the current environment) the data flattens out quite a bit
b) Disparity does not prove discrimination. Read that again: Disparity does not prove discrimination.
c) When I went to Columbia, I met plenty of "successful"/about-to-be-successful women-- but found none of them attractive, even the pretty ones , , , with the exception of one who was a rock and roll lawyer who once played a bimbo in a Fred Williamson movie :wink:
Tangent: One suspects that Marcia Clark, one of the two DAs in the OJ Simpson case, got the gig because she was a woman , , , and that did not work out too well. Ditto Chris Darden, the other DA whom one suspects got the gig because he was black. Together they form Exhibit A in the case against affirmative action.
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a) This is 2012; the data has not flattened out yet. The problem still exists; see the article I posted or just ask any woman.
b) "Disparity does not prove discrimination". Perhaps, but the burden is now on you to prove otherwise...
I'm still waiting for your explanation on another thread as to why you think discrimination is ok.
c) Who is "attractive"; thank goodness we all have different opinions. I was referring the the general consensus, just pretty, visual as Doug put it, but I agree a lot more goes into the equation.....
As for your tangent, who knows? It was a very big case; Prosecutor Marcia Clark, a 40-year-old Deputy District Attorney, was designated as the lead prosecutor, which was her twenty-first murder trial during her 13 years with the D.A.'s office. Darden, who also has experience in murder trials assisted. I think they chose the best they had for the situation; obviously in hindsight.....
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"a) This is 2012; the data has not flattened out yet. The problem still exists; see the article I posted or just ask any woman." When filtered for age, they have.
b) ""Disparity does not prove discrimination". Perhaps, but the burden is now on you to prove otherwise..." No, it isn't. There is an alternate explanation. It is this: Men and women are different. Just ask any man or any woman. :evil:
"I'm still waiting for your explanation on another thread as to why you think discrimination is ok. This is a deep subject that would require quite a bit of time which I don't have right now. In the meantime, please discriminate between bigotry and the discernment of differences. Please discriminate between wondering if the government has a role and if so, what that role is and thinking that bigotry is OK.
"As for your tangent, who knows? It was a very big case; Prosecutor Marcia Clark, a 40-year-old Deputy District Attorney, was designated as the lead prosecutor, which was her twenty-first murder trial during her 13 years with the D.A.'s office. Darden, who also has experience in murder trials assisted. I think they chose the best they had for the situation; obviously in hindsight....."
IMHO opinion they were chosen because she is a woman, like the victim, and he is black, like the accused. IMHO they were in way over their heads and did a very poor job.
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"a) This is 2012; the data has not flattened out yet. The problem still exists; see the article I posted or just ask any woman." When filtered for age, they have.
Actually, I don't think they have even if you do an age equal comparison.
b) ""Disparity does not prove discrimination". Perhaps, but the burden is now on you to prove otherwise..." No, it isn't. There is an alternate explanation. It is this: Men and women are different. Just ask any man or any woman. :evil:
Hogwash. Men and women may be plumbed different, but in 95% (excluding physically demanding jobs) there is no logical reason for gender disparity other than discrimination.
"I'm still waiting for your explanation on another thread as to why you think discrimination is ok. This is a deep subject that would require quite a bit of time which I don't have right now. In the meantime, please discriminate between bigotry and the discernment of differences. Please discriminate between wondering if the government has a role and if so, what that role is and thinking that bigotry is OK.
Before i expand on bigotry and the discernment of differences and what is the role of government, I'll wait for for you to find time to explain your controversial albeit clear statement,
"Yes, I am saying that people should be allowed to discriminate." :-o :-o :-o
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""a) This is 2012; the data has not flattened out yet. The problem still exists; see the article I posted or just ask any woman." When filtered for age, they have.
"Actually, I don't think they have even if you do an age equal comparison.""
I regret I don't have the citations handy, but I will state with 100% certainly that the data of the sort cited in the piece you posted when filtered for age shows that the disparities diminish considerably. By "flattened" I did not mean to communicate complete parity, rather a movement towards parity. I remain of the opinion that when men and women take each other as individuals in the decisions that they make, that there will be considerable disparity between what men and women choose and what men and women achieve.
"Before i expand on bigotry and the discernment of differences and what is the role of government, I'll wait for for you to find time to explain your controversial albeit clear statement,"
Sorry if I wasn't clear. I am not asking for you to write anything in this regard, rather I am asking you to keep these distinctions in mind as you react to what I, or anyone else, may write.
"Men and women may be plumbed different, but in 95% (excluding physically demanding jobs) there is no logical reason for gender disparity other than discrimination."
Our perceptions of reality overlap very little here.
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Obama is trying desperately to win over the women who I suspect didn't like him so much in 08 not because they loved McCain but because they love Hillary. Hillary is a giant hit among woman. She would win them over in a huge landslide in 2016:
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/hillary-clinton-ive-made-women-cornerstone-american-foreign-policy
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Women's History Month
How did March come to be Women's History Month?
By Jone Johnson Lewis,
In 1911 in Europe, March 8 was first celebrated as International Women's Day. In many European nations, as well as in the United States, women's rights was a political hot topic. Woman suffrage — winning the vote — was a priority of many women's organizations. Women (and men) wrote books on the contributions of women to history.
But with the economic depression of the 1930s which hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and then World War II, women's rights went out of fashion. In the 1950s and 1960s, after Betty Friedan pointed to the "problem that has no name" — the boredom and isolation of the middle-class housewife who often gave up intellectual and professional aspirations — the women's movement began to revive. With "women's liberation" in the 1960s, interest in women's issues and women's history blossomed.
By the 1970s, there was a growing sense by many women that "history" as taught in school — and especially in grade school and high school — was incomplete with attending to "her story" as well. In the United States, calls for inclusion of black Americans and Native Americans helped some women realize that women were invisible in most history courses.
And so in the 1970s many universities began to include the fields of women's history and the broader field of women's studies.
In 1978 in California, the Education Task Force of the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women began a "Women's History Week" celebration. The week was chosen to coincide with International Women's Day, March 8.
The response was positive. Schools began to host their own Women's History Week programs. The next year, leaders from the California group shared their project at a Women's History Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. Other participants not only determined to begin their own local Women's History Week projects, but agreed to support an effort to have Congress declare a national Women's History Week.
Three years later, the United States Congress passed a resolution establishing National Women's History Week. Co-sponsors of the resolution, demonstrating bipartisan support, were Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, and Representative Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat from Maryland.
This recognition encouraged even wider participation in Women's History Week. Schools focused for that week on special projects and exhibitions honoring women in history. Organizations sponsored talks on women's history. The National Women's History Project began distributing materials specifically designed to support Women's History Week, as well as materials to enhance the teaching of history through the year, to include notable women and women's experience.
In 1987, at the request of the National Women's History Project, Congress expanded the week to a month, and the U.S. Congress has issued a resolution every year since then, with wide support, for Women's History Month. The U.S. President has issued each year a proclamation of Women's History Month.
To further extend the inclusion of women's history in the history curriculum (and in everyday consciousness of history), the President's Commission on the Celebration of Women in History in America met through the 1990s. One result has been the effort towards establishing a National Museum of Women's History for the Washington, DC, area, where it would join other museums such as the American History Museum.
The purpose of Women's History Month is to increase consciousness and knowledge of women's history: to take one month of the year to remember the contributions of notable and ordinary women, in hopes that the day will soon come when it's impossible to teach or learn history without remembering these contributions.
As the Women's History Guide at About, I focus on women's history 365 days a year. To honor this special month, I encourage you to explore this site, learning more about one important aspect of the history of all people. Women's history isn't just for women, although many women find that studying women's history helps them realize that women's place is everywhere.
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Much love to the BLP community!
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http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/rtd-opinion/2012/mar/09/tdopin01-save-the-males-ar-1751559/
Should colleges and universities adopt affirmative action for men? By their own standards, the answer appears to be yes. Economist Mark Perry calls attention to a recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It shows that for every hundred men who have a bachelor's degree by age 24, a whopping 148 women of the same age do.
In every other academic realm, the existence of a statistical disparity — such as the fact that fewer men than women pursue advanced degrees in certain science and technology fields — is taken as definitive proof of gender discrimination.
For instance, in 2010 the American Association of University Women lamented the "striking disparity between the numbers of men and women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics," and concluded that "we must take a hard look at the stereotypes and biases that still pervade our culture. Encouraging more girls and women to enter these vital fields will require careful attention to the environment in our classrooms and workplaces and throughout our culture."
We look forward to a robust debate on how institutions of higher learning can correct the discriminatory circumstances that are leading them to graduate nearly three women for every two men.
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" Don't forget bi-racial, lefthanded, paraplegic history month!
« Reply #50 on: Today at 01:37:53 PM »"
Good news GM!,
The latter, at least, has been remembered:
http://www.loc.gov/disabilityawareness/
Oh how I celebrate!
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Qhm7-LEBznk#![/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Qhm7-LEBznk#!
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Memo to Ann Romney: Motherhood is hard work, but it’s not a career, argues Leslie Bennetts.
When Rosen said that Ann Romney had “never worked,” it was perfectly obvious that she was referring to the classic definition of work as something one does for pay: “the labor, task or duty that affords one his accustomed means of livelihood,” as Webster’s dictionary puts it. All mothers know that motherhood involves a lot of hard work, but let’s stop pretending that that’s the same as working for a living. It isn’t. When you’re a stay-at-home mom, somebody else is bringing home the paycheck.
Equally misleading was Mrs. Romney’s retort that her “career” was being a mother. Again, Webster’s defines “career” as “a field for or pursuit of a consecutive progressive achievement, especially in public, professional or business life,” and also as “a profession for which one undergoes special training and which is undertaken as a permanent calling.” Motherhood is many things, but as a matter of pure semantics, it’s not a career. It’s also not a “permanent calling,” since kids grow up.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/13/the-myth-of-the-stay-at-home-mommy-job.html
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To have slandered a woman publicly who raised 5 boys born over an 11 year period, 30 years from pregnant to getting them to 18, survived breast cancer and lives with MS that she "NEVER WORKED A DAY IN HER LIFE", that is okay?? Not to mention that campaigning IS a job, the highest job Obama ever had before he was President. Speaking at events like CPAC, lobbying the legislature on MS awareness, work on behalf of at-risk youth, Board Member of the New England Chapter of the MS Society, board member of the Massachusetts Children's Trust Fund, director of Best Friends, an organization that addresses the special needs of adolescent, inner-city girls by providing educational and community service opportunities, she worked as a volunteer instructor at the Mother Caroline Academy, a multicultural middle school serving young girls from inner city Boston and served on the board for Families First, served on the Women's Cancer Advisory Board of Massachusetts General Hospital, board member of United Way - none of that is work. What a bunch of bullsh*t.
35 trips to the White House, this wasn't an accident; the whole thing down to the phony apology and scapegoat is puppetmastered.
"Career" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a person's "course or progress through life". "It can also pertain to an occupation".
Yes to the condescending and disingenuous among us, that was a CAREER choice that she made.
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She wasn't a "working mother" like Michelle, who had the classic Chicago Graft "no show" job.
In 2005, when Obama began serving in the U.S. Senate (and his daughters turned 4 and 7), he and his wife were earning a combined annual income of $479,062. Barack Obama was paid a salary of $162,100 by the U.S. taxpayers, and Michelle Obama was paid $316,962 to handle community affairs for the University of Chicago Medical Center.
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To have slandered a woman publicly who raised 5 boys born over an 11 year period, 30 years from pregnant to getting them to 18, survived breast cancer and lives with MS that she "NEVER WORKED A DAY IN HER LIFE", that is okay?? Not to mention that campaigning IS a job, the highest job Obama ever had before he was President. Speaking at events like CPAC, lobbying the legislature on MS awareness, work on behalf of at-risk youth, Board Member of the New England Chapter of the MS Society, board member of the Massachusetts Children's Trust Fund, director of Best Friends, an organization that addresses the special needs of adolescent, inner-city girls by providing educational and community service opportunities, she worked as a volunteer instructor at the Mother Caroline Academy, a multicultural middle school serving young girls from inner city Boston and served on the board for Families First, served on the Women's Cancer Advisory Board of Massachusetts General Hospital, board member of United Way - none of that is work. What a bunch of bullsh*t.
Yes to the condescending and disingenuous among us, that was a CAREER choice that she made.
I never slandered her; she sounds like a wonderful woman, but she never "worked" a day in her life. I was reading the Sports page this morning. A good article on Ramon Sessions (thank you Minnesota). http://www.latimes.com/sports/basketball/nba/lakers/la-sp-lakers-ramon-sessions-20120415,0,1711842,full.story
What popped out was the comment about his mother, Ann, who worked at a coffee shop in a hotel for 20 years in Myrtle Beach, S.C. "She was always getting up at five in the morning, supporting me and my sister," Now THAT is what I call work. Not volunteering for the girl scouts, coaching your son's little league team, etc. "Work" means making money because you need the money to survive. It's doing something you don't necessarily want to do, but have to do to put food on the table and pay bills.
To quote Fitzgerald, "The rich are different than you and I."
The Romneys lived in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., an exclusive suburb outside Detroit, but George Romney, chairman of American Motors Corp., prided himself on not spoiling his children... The children had chores, though they also had a maid, a cook, and a laundress." Ann Romney had a similar upbringing.
In contrast (not claiming I grew up poor) I always had a summer and part time job since I was 10 years old. My father worked full time AND my mother worked full time (RN). Somehow she raised two boys, cooked the meals, cleaned the house, and worked 40 hours a week for money. That's "WORK". She never called it "work" having to make dinner for the family (no servants in our house), but she did call it "work" being an RN although she loved her job. However it wasn't a "choice"; she did it because my family needed the money.
I volunteer in a Neighborhood Watch Program. I volunteer at my church. That's volunteer work; I want to do that. My WORK is my 9-5 job to try and make money. I've never said, "I have to go to WORK" when I was driving to my church to help serve food to the poor downtown.
In contrast, Mrs. Romney, who from all I can tell is a very fine woman, intelligent, kind, and a good mother, grew up very rich, married a rich guy in College, and has never WORKED a day in her life. Lucky woman. Nothing wrong with that. I too might like a life of doing whatever I wanted to do, whenever I wanted to do it.
Again, it reminds me of Sessions mom. After he signed his pro contract, "He picked up the phone and called his mother, Ann, who worked at a coffee shop in a hotel for 20 years in Myrtle Beach, S.C. Sessions said. "I said, 'Mom, you don't have to work anymore.' It was the best phone call I ever made. I bought her a house in South Carolina and she's just hanging out watching every game."
She no longer has to WORK anymore....
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In 2005, when Obama began serving in the U.S. Senate (and his daughters turned 4 and 7), he and his wife were earning a combined annual income of $479,062. Barack Obama was paid a salary of $162,100 by the U.S. taxpayers, and Michelle Obama was paid $316,962 to handle community affairs for the University of Chicago Medical Center.
Michelle Obama graduated from Princeton undergraduate and then Harvard Law School. I have friends here in LA who work for large law firms as associates. They are only 30 years old, some even younger and many make $300K plus. Michelle Obama's salary for her job (work) is in line with her education...
What is your point? That is what the market, the job market (work) will pay for superb education.
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In 2005, when Obama began serving in the U.S. Senate (and his daughters turned 4 and 7), he and his wife were earning a combined annual income of $479,062. Barack Obama was paid a salary of $162,100 by the U.S. taxpayers, and Michelle Obama was paid $316,962 to handle community affairs for the University of Chicago Medical Center.
Michelle Obama graduated from Princeton undergraduate and then Harvard Law School. I have friends here in LA who work for large law firms as associates. They are only 30 years old, some even younger and many make $300K plus. Michelle Obama's salary for her job (work) is in line with her education...
What is your point? That is what the market, the job market (work) will pay for superb education.
Funny enough, they created this job for Michelle and Buraq started pushing earmarks to her employer. When she left, they dissolved the position. Must have been a crucial position and not some sort of Chicago corruption like their real estate deal with Tony Rezko.
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That's not the way I understand the facts. She was more than qualified.
"For one, the column suggests that Barack Obama’s election to the U.S. Senate in 2004 had a role in his wife’s promotion and pay increase in 2005. We can’t say what the hospital’s motivation was for promoting her. But Michael Riordan, who served as the medical center’s president at the time, told the Chicago Tribune that it had nothing to do with her husband. "She was hired before Barack was Barack,” Riordan told the newspaper. "She is worth her weight in gold, and she is just terrific." The Tribune reported that Riordan "had planned early on for the position [of executive director of community affairs] to evolve into a vice president’s post as a way of showing the organization’s commitment to community outreach." Riordan said: "I knew where I wanted to go with this position. … I wanted to identify someone to grow into it." And Easton said at the time that her increased salary was in line with those of other vice presidents at the medical center, who were earning between $291,000 and $362,000, according to the newspaper."
http://www.factcheck.org/2009/05/michelle-obamas-salary/
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Graft.
For one, the column suggests that Barack Obama’s election to the U.S. Senate in 2004 had a role in his wife’s promotion and pay increase in 2005. We can’t say what the hospital’s motivation was for promoting her. But Michael Riordan, who served as the medical center’s president at the time, told the Chicago Tribune that it had nothing to do with her husband. "She was hired before Barack was Barack,” Riordan told the newspaper. "She is worth her weight in gold, and she is just terrific." The Tribune reported that Riordan "had planned early on for the position [of executive director of community affairs] to evolve into a vice president’s post as a way of showing the organization’s commitment to community outreach." Riordan said: "I knew where I wanted to go with this position. … I wanted to identify someone to grow into it." And Easton said at the time that her increased salary was in line with those of other vice presidents at the medical center, who were earning between $291,000 and $362,000, according to the newspaper.
Second, the column implies that her "networking" was what caused her then-senator husband to request a "$1 million earmark for the UC Medical Center" back in 2006. But that’s unsubstantiated also. He did request the funds for the "construction of a new hospital pavilion" at the University of Chicago, but both Obama and hospital officials denied that the request was influenced by his wife’s position. And during the campaign, Obama’s aides were quick to point out that the request was one of many projects that the former senator made in 2005 and 2006 that were killed by Congress.
Lastly, the column questioned the hospital’s decision not to fill the position vacated by the first lady, asking: "How can that be, if the work she did was vital enough to be worth $317,000?" It’s true that after her departure, the hospital did not fill the position of vice president for community and external affairs. But the column doesn’t mention that she had reduced her work schedule to part time well before she left and wasn’t making that much money when she officially resigned. Easton told us that "the responsibilities related to that position have been absorbed by those in other roles." Dr. James Madara, CEO of the Medical Center, announced that the Office of Community and External Affairs would be "reorganized" under Dr. Eric Whitaker, executive vice president for strategic affiliations, according to a hospital press release.
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If money was her sole motivation (it wasn't) she should have/would have stayed with the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin LLP, an excellent firm with offices world wide. I know
some people who work in the LA Office of Sidley Austin; they are paid very very well. Associates make over $300K. Many/Most partners make over $1,000,000 per year.
Sorry, you accusation of "graft" is all conjecture.
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So I guess she couldn't hack it there. Another "diversity dud" like her husband. Good thing he is able to soak the taxpayers to support her luxury lifestyle.
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Actually, I think she just preferred public service. She left Sidley to go to become the assistant commissioner of planning and development in Chicago. I have a friend who recently left an excellent law firm here in LA; she was making $300K+ but decided to go to work in the DA's Office. She loves her new job, but she is making about one third of what she was making. She was on partner track; she just didn't like working for a large law firm.
As for "diversity dud" well, "her husband" was a Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, a U.S. Senator, and is now President of the United States. Hardly what one would call a "dud".
Taking this thread back to it's title, i.e. "Men & Women" rather than the issue of "corruption" and "graft"; in both/all instances these women were "working"; i.e. going to a job to make money. No one is claiming to "work" because they went to the PTA meetings.
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Actually, I think she just preferred public service.
Hysterical.
Professor at the University of Chicago Law School
No he wasn't. Another make work graft job where he accomplished nothing.
a U.S. Senator
One term, with nothing but Moochelle's graft job to show for it.
is now President of the United States
EPIC FAIL. Worse than Jimmah Carter.
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"Professor at the University of Chicago Law School"
http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2012/04/which-is-it-mr-president-professor-or-senior-lecturer.html
Which is it Mr. President, 'Professor' or Senior Lecturer'?
By Nancy Thorner -
Hearing the main stream media repeatedly portray President Obama as a former Constitutional Law professor, Obama's recent kerfuffle on April 2nd with his veiled threat remarks directed to Supreme Court brought forth the skeptic in me.
If President Obama is really a Constitutional Law professor, how then could Obama not know there was ample precedent for the Supreme Court to overturn a law, even if, as Obama claimed, it was were passed by a strong majority of the democratically-elected Congress?
Overturning unconstitutional laws has been a part of the Supreme Count ruling for more than two centuries. Furthermore, the health care law wasn't passed by a strong majority. It barely passed the Senate, and in the House 34 Democrats voted with all Republicans House members in opposition. http://www.factcheck.org/2012/04/obama-eats-his-words/
In speaking with a friend who was a Chemistry Professor at Loyola University in Chicago and also served as Department Chairman for six year, she explained that at the most you are an Adjunct professor if teaching only one course or so, meaning you have a part-time teaching position and are retained only as long as the professor receives good student reviews. My professor friend went on to explain that adjunct professors are a blessing for many institutions that cannot afford full time faculty, they make much less, and have no benefits.
Resorting to fact check I came up with a document entitled: "Obama a Constitutional Law Professor?" http://www.factcheck.org/2008/03/obama-a-constitutional-law-professor/
Question: Was Barack Obama really a constitutional law professor?
Answer: His formal title was "senior lecturer," but the University of Chicago Law says he "served as a professor" and was "regarded as" a professor.
A University of Chicago Law School media site informed me that in 2008, in response to media inquiries, a carefully worded statement was released regarding Obama's status as a "Senior Lecturer." The statement related that Obama was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004 during which time he taught three courses per year. As a Senior Lecturer Obama was considered to be a member of the University of Chicago Law School faculty who ARE regarded as professors. In other words, Obama served as a "professor in name only" in his part-time position at the University of Chicago Law School, without any of the qualifications implied by a professorship appointment. http://www.law.uchicago.edu/meida
But the story doesn't end here.
In a blog post by at DougRoss@Journal on March 1, 2010, "To be (a lawyer) or not to be... ", comments are offered from one who corroborates that Obama's "teaching career" at The University of Chicago, was to put it kindly, a sham. This evaluation came about after talks the individual had with the highest tenured faculty members at Chicago Law about Obama, who was Barry at the time. Among them were:
* Obama applied for a position as an adjunct and wasn't even considered.
* A few weeks later the law school got a phone call from the Board of Trustees telling them to find him an office, put him on the payroll, and give him a class to teach.
* The Board told Obama that he didn't have to be a member of the faculty, but they needed to give him a temporary position.
* Obama was described by other professors as being lazy, unqualified, never attending any of the faculty meeting. It was clear that the position was nothing more than a political stepping stool.
* Some doubted whether Obama was legitimately an editor on the Harvard Law Review, because, if so, he would be the first and only editor of an Ivy League law review to never be published while in school.
The same blogger then asked reader to consider:
1. Having surrendered his license back in 2008, Obama is no longer a lawyer (allegations that the surrendering occurred to escape charges that Obama "fibbed" on his bar application.).
2. According to a Chicago Sun-Time article: "Obama did not 'hold the title' of a University of Chicago law school professor."
3. According to Marsha Ferziger Nagorsky, an Assistant Dean for Communications and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago School of Law, "He did not hold the title of professor of law."
4. As a former Constitutional senior lecturer, how could Obama cite the U.S. Constitution during a State of the Union Address with a quote that was from the Declaration of Independence?:
"We find unity in our incredible diversity, drawing on the promise enshrined in our Constitution: the notion that we are all created equal…." The notion that we are all created equal" is not "enshrined in our Constitution" it’s from the Declaration of Independence.
This mistaken attribution is an understandable faux pas for the average person, but Obama is supposed to be a Harvard-trained constitutional lawyer. http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2010/03/to-be-lawyer-or-not-to-be.html
Why does the media continue to refer to Barack Obama as a former law professor at the University of Chicago. Professor does roll of the tongue better as when saying "special lecturer" or "professor"?
Might it also be a continuing effort by the media to portray Obama as a highly intelligent man or intellect following that idiot of a president that proceeded him, George W. Bush?
As for the University, possibly it likes to play up Obama's connection. It's just another university trying to convert names into money?
But what about Bill Ayers and his rehabilitation from fugitive terrorist to a retired Distinguished Professor at the University of Chicago whose connections with Obama are unmistakable?
All signs point to his rich father, Thomas Ayers, who was CEO of Commonwealth Edison and a major power player in the Chicago establishment.
This is just another example of "The Chicago Way", that now also exists in Washington, D.C. enthroned in the White House.
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GM; he was a Professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He choose not to pursue tenure track but he was nonetheless a Professor; even the University calls him a Professor.
As a Senator, while you may not agree with his accomplishments, others do.
and now he is President of the United States.
Again, while you may/don't agree with his accomplishments/viewpoint, calling him a diversity "dud" when in fact he was a Professor at Chicago, he was elected to the U.S. Senate AND was elected to be President of the United States hardly is a resume that I would call a "dud". Actually, it is rather impressive. Who among us has a resume by the age of 50 even close?
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GM; I think we are getting off track here. Debates about Obama's qualifications, issues of supposed graft, etc. don't belong on Men & Women. The issue on this thread, among others is working women, etc.
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GM; he was a Professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
Having trouble reading? Even Buraq can read a teleprompter, it's his strongest area in fact.
1. Having surrendered his license back in 2008, Obama is no longer a lawyer (allegations that the surrendering occurred to escape charges that Obama "fibbed" on his bar application.).
2. According to a Chicago Sun-Time article: "Obama did not 'hold the title' of a University of Chicago law school professor."
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GM; I think we are getting off track here. Debates about Obama's qualifications, issues of supposed graft, etc. don't belong on Men & Women. The issue on this thread, among others is working women, etc.
Moochelle's "diversity" graft jobs doesn't mean she knows what it's like to be a working mother.
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GM; I think we are getting off track here. Debates about Obama's qualifications, issues of supposed graft, etc. don't belong on Men & Women. The issue on this thread, among others is working women, etc.
Moochelle's "diversity" graft jobs doesn't mean she knows what it's like to be a working mother.
Good, we are back on track now. :-)
She went to work. She got a paycheck. By definition, she is a "working mother". Whether a woman is a high priced Harvard educated lawyer or a bus driver, raising a family AND going to a job is a lot harder than clipping coupons or attending the PTA meeting. It's work....
Unlike Ann Romney born with a silver spoon (no criticism intended; lucky her), Michelle Obama didn't have a choice; Michelle Obama's dad worked for the water plant and her mom was a secretary. They rented an apartment. No rich family money there... Just day by day hard work. Michelle rose from nothing, she was a gifted student from an early age, then she went to Princeton then Harvard Law School. To an associate position at Sidley Austin (probably 60-80 hours a week) probably earning in today's dollars nearly $300K. She continued to go to work and draw a paycheck AND raise a family. To mumble or complain how she got the job is irrelevant. People often get jobs because they know people. The fact remains, she worked... AND raised a family.
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Lt. Worf, like her husband have nothing but chips on their shoulders, probably in part due to their understanding of how they lacked talent and ability but coasted along on affirmative action hiring and Chicago Graft jobs.
Or, can you point out a brilliant scholary or legal paper published by either one of them? Maybe you can show me Buraq's school records.
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GM; I can't point out any of my earlier referenced friend's (2nd in her class at Berkeley Law; not Harvard, but not bad either) brilliant scholarly or legal paper published by her either, but I do know she worked nearly 80 hours a week as an associate in a big firm downtown earning a little over $300K last year before she was 30 years old. I never saw her school records either, but trust me, she is a smart girl.
She WORKED hard at the law firm. She is working hard now in the DA's Office. She is engaged. Probably she will have children soon. And, I bet she will continue to WORK full time in the DA's Office AND raise a family. Probably, she will also somehow find time to volunteer for various charities. I doubt if she would call that part of her life "work".
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Please forgive me for momentarily steering things back off course, but FWIW, and I do have a bit of background in this area, I vote a clear win for GM on the matter of whether Baraq should properly be said to have been a Professor.
Also, I give the edge to the notion that Michele's gig was a politically motivated gift.
Concerning "work", while I get JDN's point, I think the intention of those who take the position is usually to disparage women who choose to put as much time and effort as they can into raising their children. Time is finite, and if you are, for example, working as an attorney, your children are going to get A LOT LESS of your time and effort.
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"I think the intention of those who take the position is usually to disparage women who choose to put as much time and effort as they can into raising their children. Time is finite, and if you are, for example, working as an attorney, your children are going to get A LOT LESS of your time and effort."
One point to that would be that it is a private, family decision, outrageous to be disparaged publicly for it implying she is unworthy of having an opinion to express on civic matters.
The attack on stay at home moms I believe is borne out of the guilt the others often feel for subcontracting and outsourcing the experience of raising of your children.
Among my own experiences with the soccer moms and girl scout moms I found that the stay at home ones tended to be equally educated and informed and usually more so than the career moms. In Ann Romney's case she has a Harvard degree at least by extension. In most neighborhoods that is impressive alone besides serving on all the boards posted previously. In fact and in law these women and a couple of stay at home dads are in equal partnership with the careers and accomplishments of the spouse. These successful men (or women) did not marry the maid or the babysitter; they mostly married their equal. If Ann Romney's economic thoughts were naive or stupid wouldn't you think you could attack them on the merit instead of on the person.
FYI to anyone who hasn't tried it, taking off 2 or 3 decades to raise children may be the most rewarding experience possible, but when you are done companies don't just put you back to either the level where you would risen or even to where you left off. That is the difficult transition the women's activists, if they cared, should be addressing. MHO.
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Please forgive me for momentarily steering things back off course, but FWIW, and I do have a bit of background in this area, I vote a clear win for GM on the matter of whether Baraq should properly be said to have been a Professor.
While you are entitled to your opinion, may I point out that his employer, the University of Chicago disagrees with you. "Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track." When GM quotes a biased unqualified blogger, who quotes other bloggers, it isn't particularly relevant versus the source itself.
http://www.law.uchicago.edu/mediaauthorties
Also, I give the edge to the notion that Michele's gig was a politically motivated gift.
That wasn't the discussion; it may have well been a gift although the hospital says differently and she was eminently qualified; many of us I dare to say have gotten jobs and/or assignments due to personal contacts. The issue was the question of "work". Yes, she did "work".
Concerning "work", while I get JDN's point, I think the intention of those who take the position is usually to disparage women who choose to put as much time and effort as they can into raising their children. Time is finite, and if you are, for example, working as an attorney, your children are going to get A LOT LESS of your time and effort.
I'm glad you get my point. I have no intention of disparaging women; I like women. :-D But staying home has nothing to do with "work". Further, "time and effort" raising children by itself does not make a better child. If that alone were true all the stay at home welfare moms would be producing great children rather than gang bangers. As for it being "borne out of the guilt the others often feel for subcontracting and outsourcing the experience of raising of your children." that simply isn't true either. Actually, study after study shows "not only do working moms not harm their children. The evidence suggests that they're actually better off when both parents work!" And in most families, both parents do work.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/owning-pink/201111/do-working-moms-raise-healthier-kids
"FYI to anyone who hasn't tried it, taking off 2 or 3 decades to raise children may be the most rewarding experience possible". It may well be very rewarding and fun, so is lowering my golf handicap, but after the first year it's not necessarily rewarding to the child anymore than if you went to work 9-5. And please don't call it "work". Going to baseball games, girl scout meetings, or PTA meetings, just sitting and talking with your child is not "work". It is a joy and pleasure; at least that's what my parents told me. I think anyone here would be happy to have been raised by Sheryl Sandberg, COO and 2nd in charge of Facebook and mother. She is a "working mom." Further, would I want her opinion on world matters? On business matters? Etc.? Absolutely! But do I want these opinions from "stay at home moms"? Probably not.... And, while Mrs. Romney may be a very fine lovely women, her "working" opinion doesn't count for much. Plus her children are long gone; she's still a "stay at home something". Again, nothing wrong with that, I wouldn't mind coming from a family that are multimillionaires and marrying a multi multimillionaire either and staying home to work on my golf game or do whatever I wanted, but I would never say I was "working".
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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/23/why_do_they_hate_us
But let's put aside what the United States does or doesn't do to women. Name me an Arab country, and I'll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt -- including my mother and all but one of her six sisters -- have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating "virginity tests" merely for speaking out, it's no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband "with good intentions" no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness. And what, pray tell, are "good intentions"? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is "not severe" or "directed at the face." What all this means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Middle East, it's not better than you think. It's much, much worse. Even after these "revolutions," all is more or less considered well with the world as long as women are covered up, anchored to the home, denied the simple mobility of getting into their own cars, forced to get permission from men to travel, and unable to marry without a male guardian's blessing -- or divorce either.
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BD your post reminds me of this:
« on: January 23, 2003, 01:28:05 AM »
Why Feminism Is AWOL on Islam
Kay S. Hymowitz
U.S. feminists should be protesting the brutal oppression of Middle Eastern women. But doing so would reveal how little they have to complain about at home.
Argue all you want with many feminist policies, but few quarrel with feminism?s core moral insight, which changed the lives (and minds) of women forever: that women are due the same rights and dignity as men. So, as news of the appalling miseries of women in the Islamic world has piled up, where are the feminists? Where?s the outrage? For a brief moment after September 11, when pictures of those blue alien-creaturely shapes in Afghanistan filled the papers, it seemed as if feminists were going to have their moment. And in fact the Feminist Majority, to its credit, had been publicizing since the mid-90s how Afghan girls were barred from school, how women were stoned for adultery or beaten for showing an ankle or wearing high-heeled shoes, how they were prohibited from leaving the house unless accompanied by a male relative, how they were denied medical help because the only doctors around were male.
But the rest is feminist silence. You haven?t heard a peep from feminists as it has grown clear that the Taliban were exceptional not in their extreme views about women but in their success at embodying those views in law and practice. In the United Arab Emirates, husbands have the right to beat their wives in order to discipline them??provided that the beating is not so severe as to damage her bones or deform her body,? in the words of the Gulf News. In Saudi Arabia, women cannot vote, drive, or show their faces or talk with male non-relatives in public. (Evidently they can?t talk to men over the airwaves either; when Prince Abdullah went to President Bush?s ranch in Crawford last April, he insisted that no female air-traffic controllers handle his flight.) Yes, Saudi girls can go to school, and many even attend the university; but at the university, women must sit in segregated rooms and watch their professors on closed-circuit televisions. If they have a question, they push a button on their desk, which turns on a light at the professor?s lectern, from which he can answer the female without being in her dangerous presence. And in Saudi Arabia, education can be harmful to female health. Last spring in Mecca, members of the mutaween, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue, pushed fleeing students back into their burning school because they were not properly covered in abaya. Fifteen girls died.
You didn?t hear much from feminists when in the northern Nigerian province of Katsina a Muslim court sentenced a woman to death by stoning for having a child outside of marriage. The case might not have earned much attention?stonings are common in parts of the Muslim world?except that the young woman, who had been married off at 14 to a husband who ultimately divorced her when she lost her virginal allure, was still nursing a baby at the time of sentencing. During her trial she had no lawyer, although the court did see fit to delay her execution until she weans her infant.
You didn?t hear much from feminists as it emerged that honor killings by relatives, often either ignored or only lightly punished by authorities, are also commonplace in the Muslim world. In September, Reuters reported the story of an Iranian man, ?defending my honor, family, and dignity,? who cut off his seven-year-old daughter?s head after suspecting she had been raped by her uncle. The postmortem showed the girl to be a virgin. In another family mix-up, a Yemeni man shot his daughter to death on her wedding night when her husband claimed she was not a virgin. After a medical exam revealed that the husband was mistaken, officials concluded he was simply trying to protect himself from embarrassment about his own impotence. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, every day two women are slain by male relatives seeking to avenge the family honor.
The savagery of some of these murders is worth a moment?s pause. In 2000, two Punjabi sisters, 20 and 21 years old, had their throats slit by their brother and cousin because the girls were seen talking to two boys to whom they were not related. In one especially notorious case, an Egyptian woman named Nora Marzouk Ahmed fell in love and eloped. When she went to make amends with her father, he cut off her head and paraded it down the street. Several years back, according to the Washington Post, the husband of Zahida Perveen, a 32-year-old pregnant Pakistani, gouged out her eyes and sliced off her earlobe and nose because he suspected her of having an affair.
In a related example widely covered last summer, a teenage girl in the Punjab was sentenced by a tribal council to rape by a gang that included one of the councilmen. After the hour-and-a-half ordeal, the girl was forced to walk home naked in front of scores of onlookers. She had been punished because her 11-year-old brother had compromised another girl by being been seen alone with her. But that charge turned out to be a ruse: it seems that three men of a neighboring tribe had sodomized the boy and accused him of illicit relations?an accusation leading to his sister?s barbaric punishment?as a way of covering up their crime.
Nor is such brutality limited to backward, out-of-the-way villages. Muddassir Rizvi, a Pakistani journalist, says that, though always common in rural areas, in recent years honor killings have become more prevalent in cities ?among educated and liberal families.? In relatively modern Jordan, honor killings were all but exempt from punishment until the penal code was modified last year; unfortunately, a young Palestinian living in Jordan, who had recently stabbed his 19-year-old sister 40 times ?to cleanse the family honor,? and another man from near Amman, who ran over his 23-year-old sister with his truck because of her ?immoral behavior,? had not yet changed their ways. British psychiatrist Anthony Daniels reports that British Muslim men frequently spirit their young daughters back to their native Pakistan and force the girls to marry. Such fathers have been known to kill daughters who resist. In Sweden, in one highly publicized case, Fadima Sahindal, an assimilated 26-year-old of Kurdish origin, was murdered by her father after she began living with her Swedish boyfriend. ?The whore is dead,? the family announced.
As you look at this inventory of brutality, the question bears repeating: Where are the demonstrations, the articles, the petitions, the resolutions, the vindications of the rights of Islamic women by American feminists? The weird fact is that, even after the excesses of the Taliban did more to forge an American consensus about women?s rights than 30 years of speeches by Gloria Steinem, feminists refused to touch this subject. They have averted their eyes from the harsh, blatant oppression of millions of women, even while they have continued to stare into the Western patriarchal abyss, indignant over female executives who cannot join an exclusive golf club and college women who do not have their own lacrosse teams.
But look more deeply into the matter, and you realize that the sound of feminist silence about the savage fundamentalist Muslim oppression of women has its own perverse logic. The silence is a direct outgrowth of the way feminist theory has developed in recent years. Now mired in self-righteous sentimentalism, multicultural nonjudgmentalism, and internationalist utopianism, feminism has lost the language to make the universalist moral claims of equal dignity and individual freedom that once rendered it so compelling. No wonder that most Americans, trying to deal with the realities of a post-9/11 world, are paying feminists no mind.
To understand the current sisterly silence about the sort of tyranny that the women?s movement came into existence to attack, it is helpful to think of feminisms plural rather than singular. Though not entirely discrete philosophies, each of three different feminisms has its own distinct reasons for causing activists to ?lose their voice? in the face of women?s oppression.
The first variety?radical feminism (or gender feminism, in Christina Hoff Sommers?s term)?starts with the insight that men are, not to put too fine a point upon it, brutes. Radical feminists do not simply subscribe to the reasonable-enough notion that men are naturally more prone to aggression than women. They believe that maleness is a kind of original sin. Masculinity explains child abuse, marital strife, high defense spending, every war from Troy to Afghanistan, as well as Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet. As Gloria Steinem informed the audience at a Florida fundraiser last March: ?The cult of masculinity is the basis for every violent, fascist regime.?
Gender feminists are little interested in fine distinctions between radical Muslim men who slam commercial airliners into office buildings and soldiers who want to stop radical Muslim men from slamming commercial airliners into office buildings. They are both examples of generic male violence?and specifically, male violence against women. ?Terrorism is on a continuum that starts with violence within the family, battery against women, violence against women in the society, all the way up to organized militaries that are supported by taxpayer money,? according to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who teaches ?The Sexuality of Terrorism? at California State University in Hayward. Violence is so intertwined with male sexuality that, she tells us, military pilots watch porn movies before they go out on sorties. The war in Afghanistan could not possibly offer a chance to liberate women from their oppressors, since it would simply expose women to yet another set of oppressors, in the gender feminists? view. As Sharon Lerner asserted bizarrely in the Village Voice, feminists? ?discomfort? with the Afghanistan bombing was ?deepened by the knowledge that more women than men die as a result of most wars.?
If guys are brutes, girls are their opposite: peace-loving, tolerant, conciliatory, and reasonable??Antiwar and Pro-Feminist,? as the popular peace-rally sign goes. Feminists long ago banished tough-as-nails women like Margaret Thatcher and Jeanne Kirkpatrick (and these days, one would guess, even the fetching Condoleezza Rice) to the ranks of the imperfectly female. Real women, they believe, would never justify war. ?Most women, Western and Muslim, are opposed to war regardless of its reasons and objectives,? wrote the Jordanian feminist Fadia Faqir on OpenDemocracy.net. ?They are concerned with emancipation, freedom (personal and civic), human rights, power sharing, integrity, dignity, equality, autonomy, power-sharing [sic], liberation, and pluralism.?
Sara Ruddick, author of Maternal Thinking, is perhaps one of the most influential spokeswomen for the position that women are instinctually peaceful. According to Ruddick (who clearly didn?t have Joan Crawford in mind), that?s because a good deal of mothering is naturally governed by the Gandhian principles of nonviolence such as ?renunciation,? ?resistance to injustice,? and ?reconciliation.? The novelist Barbara Kingsolver was one of the first to demonstrate the subtleties of such universal maternal thinking after the United States invaded Afghanistan. ?I feel like I?m standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming ?He started it!? and throwing rocks,? she wrote in the Los Angeles Times. ?I keep looking for somebody?s mother to come on the scene saying, ?Boys! Boys!? ?
Gender feminism?s tendency to reduce foreign affairs to a Lifetime Channel movie may make it seem too silly to bear mentioning, but its kitschy naivet? hasn?t stopped it from being widespread among elites. You see it in widely read writers like Kingsolver, Maureen Dowd, and Alice Walker. It turns up in our most elite institutions. Swanee Hunt, head of the Women in Public Policy Program at Harvard?s Kennedy School of Government wrote, with Cristina Posa in Foreign Policy: ?The key reason behind women?s marginalization may be that everyone recognizes just how good women are at forging peace.? Even female elected officials are on board. ?The women of all these countries should go on strike, they should all sit down and refuse to do anything until their men agree to talk peace,? urged Ohio representative Marcy Kaptur to the Arab News last spring, echoing an idea that Aristophanes, a dead white male, proposed as a joke 2,400 years ago. And President Clinton is an advocate of maternal thinking, too. ?If we?d had women at Camp David,? he said in July 2000, ?we?d have an agreement.?
Major foundations too seem to take gender feminism seriously enough to promote it as an answer to world problems. Last December, the Ford Foundation and the Soros Open Society Foundation helped fund the Afghan Women?s Summit in Brussels to develop ideas for a new government in Afghanistan. As Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler described it on her website, the summit was made up of ?meetings and meals, canvassing, workshops, tears, and dancing.? ?Defense was mentioned nowhere in the document,? Ensler wrote proudly of the summit?s concluding proclamation?despite the continuing threat in Afghanistan of warlords, bandits, and lingering al-Qaida operatives. ?uilding weapons or instruments of retaliation was not called for in any category,? Ensler cooed. ?Instead [the women] wanted education, health care, and the protection of refugees, culture, and human rights.?
Too busy celebrating their own virtue and contemplating their own victimhood, gender feminists cannot address the suffering of their Muslim sisters realistically, as light years worse than their own petulant grievances. They are too intent on hating war to ask if unleashing its horrors might be worth it to overturn a brutal tyranny that, among its manifold inhumanities, treats women like animals. After all, hating war and machismo is evidence of the moral superiority that comes with being born female.
Yet the gender feminist idea of superior feminine virtue is becoming an increasingly tough sell for anyone actually keeping up with world events. Kipling once wrote of the fierceness of Afghan women: ?When you?re wounded and left on the Afghan plains/And the women come out to cut up your remains/Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains.? Now it?s clearer than ever that the dream of worldwide sisterhood is no more realistic than worldwide brotherhood; culture trumps gender any day. Mothers all over the Muslim world are naming their babies Usama or praising Allah for their sons? efforts to kill crusading infidels. Last February, 28-year-old Wafa Idris became the first female Palestinian suicide bomber to strike in Israel, killing an elderly man and wounding scores of women and children. And in April, Israeli soldiers discovered under the maternity clothes of 26-year-old Shifa Adnan Kodsi a bomb rather than a baby. Maternal thinking, indeed.
The second variety of feminism, seemingly more sophisticated and especially prevalent on college campuses, is multiculturalism and its twin, postcolonialism. The postcolonial feminist has even more reason to shy away from the predicament of women under radical Islam than her maternally thinking sister. She believes that the Western world is so sullied by its legacy of imperialism that no Westerner, man or woman, can utter a word of judgment against former colonial peoples. Worse, she is not so sure that radical Islam isn?t an authentic, indigenous?and therefore appropriate?expression of Arab and Middle Eastern identity.
The postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the intellectual godfathers of multiculturalism and postcolonialism, first set the tone in 1978 when an Italian newspaper sent him to Teheran to cover the Iranian revolution. As his biographer James Miller tells it, Foucault looked in the face of Islamic fundamentalism and saw . . . an awe-inspiring revolt against ?global hegemony.? He was mesmerized by this new form of ?political spirituality? that, in a phrase whose dark prescience he could not have grasped, portended the ?transfiguration of the world.? Even after the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and reintroduced polygamy and divorce on the husband?s demand with automatic custody to fathers, reduced the official female age of marriage from 18 to 13, fired all female judges, and ordered compulsory veiling, whose transgression was to be punished by public flogging, Foucault saw no reason to temper his enthusiasm. What was a small matter like women?s basic rights, when a struggle against ?the planetary system? was at hand?
Postcolonialists, then, have their own binary system, somewhat at odds with gender feminism?not to mention with women?s rights. It is not men who are the sinners; it is the West. It is not women who are victimized innocents; it is the people who suffered under Western colonialism, or the descendants of those people, to be more exact. Caught between the rock of patriarchy and the hard place of imperialism, the postcolonial feminist scholar gingerly tiptoes her way around the subject of Islamic fundamentalism and does the only thing she can do: she focuses her ire on Western men.
To this end, the postcolonialist eagerly dips into the inkwell of gender feminism. She ties colonialist exploitation and domination to maleness; she might refer to Israel?s ?masculinist military culture??Israel being white and Western?though she would never dream of pointing out the ?masculinist military culture? of the jihadi. And she expends a good deal of energy condemning Western men for wanting to improve the lives of Eastern women. At the turn of the twentieth century Lord Cromer, the British vice consul of Egypt and a pet target of postcolonial feminists, argued that the ?degradation? of women under Islam had a harmful effect on society. Rubbish, according to the postcolonialist feminist. His words are simply part of ?the Western narrative of the quintessential otherness and inferiority of Islam,? as Harvard professor Leila Ahmed puts it in Women and Gender in Islam. The same goes for American concern about Afghan women; it is merely a ?device for ranking the ?other? men as inferior or as ?uncivilized,? ? according to Nira Yuval-Davis, professor of gender and ethnic studies at the University of Greenwich, England. These are all examples of what renowned Columbia professor Gayatri Spivak called ?white men saving brown women from brown men.?
Spivak?s phrase, a great favorite on campus, points to the postcolonial notion that brown men, having been victimized by the West, can never be oppressors in their own right. If they give the appearance of treating women badly, the oppression they have suffered at the hands of Western colonial masters is to blame. In fact, the worse they treat women, the more they are expressing their own justifiable outrage. ?When men are traumatized [by colonial rule], they tend to traumatize their own women,? Miriam Cooke, a Duke professor and head of the Association for Middle East Women?s Studies, told me. And today, Cooke asserts, brown men are subjected to a new form of imperialism. ?Now there is a return of colonialism that we saw in the nineteenth century in the context of globalization,? she says. ?What is driving Islamist men is globalization.?
It would be difficult to exaggerate the through-the-looking-glass quality of postcolonialist theory when it comes to the subject of women. Female suicide bombers are a good thing, because they are strong women demonstrating ?agency? against colonial powers. Polygamy too must be shown due consideration. ?Polygamy can be liberating and empowering,? Cooke answered sunnily when I asked her about it. ?Our norm is the Western, heterosexual, single couple. If we can imagine different forms that would allow us to be something other than a heterosexual couple, we might imagine polygamy working,? she explained murkily. Some women, she continued, are relieved when their husbands take a new wife: they won?t have to service him so often. Or they might find they now have the freedom to take a lover. But, I ask, wouldn?t that be dangerous in places where adulteresses can be stoned to death? At any rate, how common is that? ?I don?t know,? Cooke answers, ?I?m interested in discourse.? The irony couldn?t be darker: the very people protesting the imperialist exploitation of the ?Other? endorse that Other?s repressive customs as a means of promoting their own uniquely Western agenda?subverting the heterosexual patriarchy.
The final category in the feminist taxonomy, which might be called the world-government utopian strain, is in many respects closest to classical liberal feminism. Dedicated to full female dignity and equality, it generally eschews both the biological determinism of the gender feminist and the cultural relativism of the multiculti postcolonialist. Stanford political science professor Susan Moller Okin, an influential, subtle, and intelligent spokeswoman for this approach, created a stir among feminists in 1997 when she forthrightly attacked multiculturalists for valuing ?group rights for minority cultures? over the well-being of individual women. Okin admirably minced no words attacking arranged marriage, female circumcision, and polygamy, which she believed women experienced as a ?barely tolerable institution.? Some women, she went so far as to declare, ?might be better off if the culture into which they were born were either to become extinct . . . or preferably, to be encouraged to alter itself so as to reinforce the equality of women.?
But though Okin is less shy than other feminists about discussing the plight of women under Islamic fundamentalism, the typical U.N. utopian has her own reasons for keeping quiet as that plight fills Western headlines. For one thing, the utopian is also a bean-counting absolutist, seeking a pure, numerical equality between men and women in all departments of life. She greets Western, and particularly American, claims to have achieved freedom for women with skepticism. The motto of the 2002 International Women?s Day??Afghanistan Is Everywhere??was in part a reproach to the West about its superior airs. Women in Afghanistan might have to wear burqas, but don?t women in the West parade around in bikinis? ?It?s equally disrespectful and abusive to have women prancing around a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking the streets shrouded in burqas in order to survive,? columnist Jill Nelson wrote on the MSNBC website about the murderously fanatical riots that attended the Miss World pageant in Nigeria.
As Nelson?s statement hints, the utopian is less interested in freeing women to make their own choices than in engineering and imposing her own elite vision of a perfect society. Indeed, she is under no illusions that, left to their own democratic devices, women would freely choose the utopia she has in mind. She would not be surprised by recent Pakistani elections, where a number of the women who won parliamentary seats were Islamist. But it doesn?t really matter what women want. The universalist has a comprehensive vision of ?women?s human rights,? meaning not simply women?s civil and political rights but ?economic rights? and ?socioeconomic justice.? Cynical about free markets and globalization, the U.N. utopian is also unimpressed by the liberal democratic nation-state ?as an emancipatory institution,? in the dismissive words of J. Ann Tickner, director for international studies at the University of Southern California. Such nation-states are ?unresponsive to the needs of [their] most vulnerable members? and seeped in ?nationalist ideologies? as well as in patriarchal assumptions about autonomy. In fact, like the (usually) unacknowledged socialist that she is, the U.N. utopian eagerly awaits the withering of the nation-state, a political arrangement that she sees as tied to imperialism, war, and masculinity. During war, in particular, nations ?depend on ideas about masculinized dignity and feminized sacrifice to sustain the sense of autonomous nationhood,? writes Cynthia Enloe, professor of government at Clark University.
Having rejected the patriarchal liberal nation-state, with all the democratic machinery of self-government that goes along with it, the utopian concludes that there is only one way to achieve her goals: to impose them through international government. Utopian feminists fill the halls of the United Nations, where they examine everything through the lens of the ?gender perspective? in study after unreadable study. (My personal favorites: ?Gender Perspectives on Landmines? and ?Gender Perspectives on Weapons of Mass Destruction,? whose conclusion is that landmines and WMDs are bad for women.)
The 1979 U.N. Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), perhaps the first and most important document of feminist utopianism, gives the best sense of the sweeping nature of the movement?s ambitions. CEDAW demands many measures that anyone committed to democratic liberal values would applaud, including women?s right to vote and protection against honor killings and forced marriage. Would that the document stopped there. Instead it sets out to impose a utopian order that would erase all distinctions between men and women, a kind of revolution of the sexes from above, requiring nations to ?take all appropriate measures to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women? and to eliminate ?stereotyped roles? to accomplish this legislative abolition of biology. The document calls for paid maternity leave, nonsexist school curricula, and government-supported child care. The treaty?s 23-member enforcement committee hectors nations that do not adequately grasp that, as Enloe puts it, ?the personal is international.? The committee has cited Belarus for celebrating Mother?s Day, China for failing to legalize prostitution, and Libya for not interpreting the Qur?an in accordance with ?committee guidelines.?
Confusing ?women?s participation? with self-determination, and numerical equivalence with equality, CEDAW utopians try to orchestrate their perfect society through quotas and affirmative-action plans. Their bean-counting mentality cares about whether women participate equally, without asking what it is that they are participating in or whether their participation is anything more than ceremonial. Thus at the recent Women?s Summit in Jordan, Rima Khalaf suggested that governments be required to use quotas in elections ?to leapfrog women to power.? Khalaf, like so many illiberal feminist utopians, has no hesitation in forcing society to be free. As is often the case when elites decide they have discovered the route to human perfection, the utopian urge is not simply antidemocratic but verges on the totalitarian.
That this combination of sentimental victimhood, postcolonial relativism, and utopian overreaching has caused feminism to suffer so profound a loss of moral and political imagination that it cannot speak against the brutalization of Islamic women is an incalculable loss to women and to men. The great contribution of Western feminism was to expand the definition of human dignity and freedom. It insisted that all human beings were worthy of liberty. Feminists now have the opportunity to make that claim on behalf of women who in their oppression have not so much as imagined that its promise could include them, too. At its best, feminism has stood for a rich idea of personal choice in shaping a meaningful life, one that respects not only the woman who wants to crash through glass ceilings but also the one who wants to stay home with her children and bake cookies or to wear a veil and fast on Ramadan. Why shouldn?t feminists want to shout out their own profound discovery for the world to hear?
Perhaps, finally, because to do so would be to acknowledge the freedom they themselves enjoy, thanks to Western ideals and institutions. Not only would such an admission force them to give up their own simmering resentments; it would be bad for business.
The truth is that the free institutions?an independent judiciary, a free press, open elections?that protect the rights of women are the same ones that protect the rights of men. The separation of church and state that would allow women to escape the burqa would also free men from having their hands amputated for theft. The education system that would teach girls to read would also empower millions of illiterate boys. The capitalist economies that bring clean water, cheap clothes, and washing machines that change the lives of women are the same ones that lead to healthier, freer men. In other words, to address the problems of Muslim women honestly, feminists would have to recognize that free men and women need the same things?and that those are things that they themselves already have. And recognizing that would mean an end to feminism as we know it.
There are signs that, outside the academy, middlebrow literary circles, and the United Nations, feminism has indeed met its Waterloo. Most Americans seem to realize that September 11 turned self-indulgent sentimental illusions, including those about the sexes, into an unaffordable luxury. Consider, for instance, women?s attitudes toward war, a topic on which politicians have learned to take for granted a gender gap. But according to the Pew Research Center, in January 2002, 57 percent of women versus 46 percent of men cited national security as the country?s top priority. There has been a ?seismic gender shift on matters of war,? according to pollster Kellyanne Conway. In 1991, 45 percent of U.S. women supported the use of ground troops in the Gulf War, a substantially smaller number than the 67 percent of men. But as of November, a CNN survey found women were more likely than men to support the use of ground troops against Iraq, 58 percent to 56 percent. The numbers for younger women were especially dramatic. Sixty-five percent of women between 18 and 49 support ground troops, as opposed to 48 percent of women 50 and over. Women are also changing their attitudes toward military spending: before September 11, only 24 percent of women supported increased funds; after the attacks, that number climbed to 47 percent. An evolutionary psychologist might speculate that, if females tend to be less aggressively territorial than males, there?s little to compare to the ferocity of the lioness when she believes her young are threatened.
Even among some who consider themselves feminists, there is some grudging recognition that Western, and specifically American, men are sometimes a force for the good. The Feminist Majority is sending around urgent messages asking for President Bush to increase American security forces in Afghanistan. The influential left-wing British columnist Polly Toynbee, who just 18 months ago coined the phrase ?America the Horrible,? went to Afghanistan to figure out whether the war ?was worth it.? Her answer was not what she might have expected. Though she found nine out of ten women still wearing burqas, partly out of fear of lingering fundamentalist hostility, she was convinced their lives had greatly improved. Women say they can go out alone now.
As we sink more deeply into what is likely to be a protracted struggle with radical Islam, American feminists have a moral responsibility to give up their resentments and speak up for women who actually need their support. Feminists have the moral authority to say that their call for the rights of women is a universal demand?that the rights of women are the Rights of Man.
Feminism Behind the Veil
Feminists in the West may fiddle while Muslim women are burning, but in the Muslim world itself there is a burgeoning movement to address the miserable predicament of the second sex?without simply adopting a philosophy whose higher cultural products include Sex and the City, Rosie O?Donnell, and the power-suited female executive.
The most impressive signs of an indigenous female revolt against the fundamentalist order are in Iran. Over the past ten years or so, Iran has seen the publication of a slew of serious journals dedicated to the social and political predicament of Islamic women, the most well known being the Teheran-based Zonan and Zan, published by Faezah Hashemi, a well-known member of parliament and the daughter of former president Rafsanjani. Believing that Western feminism has promoted hostility between the sexes, confused sex roles, and the sexual objectification of women, a number of writers have proposed an Islamic-style feminism that would stress ?gender complementarity? rather than equality and that would pay full respect to housewifery and motherhood while also giving women access to education and jobs.
Attacking from the religious front, a number of ?Islamic feminists? are challenging the reigning fundamentalist reading of the Qur?an. These scholars insist that the founding principles of Islam, which they believe were long ago corrupted by pre-Islamic Arab, Persian, and North African customs, are if anything more egalitarian than those of Western religions; the Qur?an explicitly describes women as the moral and spiritual equals of men and allows them to inherit and pass down property. The power of misogynistic mullahs has grown in recent decades, feminists continue, because Muslim men have felt threatened by modernity?s challenge to traditional arrangements between the sexes.
What makes Islamic feminism really worth watching is that it has the potential to play a profoundly important role in the future of the Islamic world?and not just because it could improve the lot of women. By insisting that it is true to Islam?in fact, truer than the creed espoused by the entrenched religious elite?Islamic feminism can affirm the dignity of Islam while at the same time bringing it more in line with modernity. In doing this, feminists can help lay the philosophical groundwork for democracy. In the West, feminism lagged behind religious reformation and political democratization by centuries; in the East, feminism could help lead the charge.
At the same time, though, the issue of women?s rights highlights two reasons for caution about the Islamic future. For one thing, no matter how much feminists might wish otherwise, polygamy and male domination of the family are not merely a fact of local traditions; they are written into the Qur?an itself. This in and of itself would not prove to be such an impediment?the Old Testament is filled with laws antithetical to women?s equality?except for the second problem: more than other religions, Islam is unfriendly to the notion of the separation of church and state. If history is any guide, there?s the rub. The ultimate guarantor of the rights of all citizens, whether Islamic or not, can only be a fully secular state.
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So the person who claims not be sexist and really likes women thinks that stay at home mothers should just shut up about money and world matters; leave the "big" thinking to men or women who got paid for work (because they are more valuable than mere housewives). Ironically, the men who defended the guy who wanted an at home wife are the ones who actually value the work of the women and don't intimate that they are second class citizens because motherhood doesn't receive a paycheck.
BTW, parenthood is rewarding because of the challenges. Parenting > golfing. One is sacrifice, the other is indulgence.
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http://www.cracked.com/blog/3-mistakes-women-make-when-dealing-with-men/
This is hilarious, thought provoking and hard hitting. It is also NOT SAFE FOR WORK.
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http://www.psypost.org/2012/05/people-see-sexy-pictures-of-women-as-objects-not-people-11643
"Perfume ads, beer billboards, movie posters: everywhere you look, women’s sexualized bodies are on display. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that both men and women see images of sexy women’s bodies as objects, while they see sexy-looking men as people.
Sexual objectification has been well studied, but most of the research is about looking at the effects of this objectification. “What’s unclear is, we don’t actually know whether people at a basic level recognize sexualized females or sexualized males as objects,” says Philippe Bernard of Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. Bernard cowrote the new paper with Sarah Gervais, Jill Allen, Sophie Campomizzi, and Olivier Klein."
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C.S. Lewis, "We scoff at Chivalry and are shocked to find scoundrels in our midst."
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http://townhall.com/columnists/monacharen/2012/07/27/can_we_still_call_men_heroes
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http://higherunlearning.com/2012/02/26/chrisbrownandthesoundsofyoungmeninfreefall/
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And then are things the ACLU which I disagree with, as does the author of this piece:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-met-kass-0920-20120920,0,7364093.column
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A dangerous dish on the cultural menu
Monica Gabriel and Kara Eschbach | 21 September 2012
In case you haven't noticed, 2012 has been declared The Year of the Women in the United States. Everyone wants to talk about women: Democrats at their National Convention; shocked multitudes following Rep. Todd Akin’s outrageous statements about women and rape; leading columnists debating options for a pregnant Marissa Meyer after her being named CEO of Yahoo!, it seems that every time we open a newspaper, turn on the TV, or surf the internet, there is a feverish conversation around who women are and what is and is not good for us.
So it is hardly surprising that when Hanna Rosin, author of the controversial 2010 Atlantic article “The End of Men” (which has spawned a book, just published, of the same name), released one of the book's juicier chapters in the latest Atlantic, it ignited the conversation anew. Her piece, entitled “Boys on the Side”, proves to be just as provocative as the title suggests.
In it, Rosin takes a contrarian view of the hookup culture flourishing on at least some college campuses, contesting the typical women-as-victim narrative. If your idea of hookups assumes there will be a broken-hearted girl crying into her pillow because “she thought it was love,” you would be quite mistaken. Not only are college women not upset by the new world of casual sexual relationships, says Rosin, but they have actually become the leaders in initiating and perpetuating the system.
More than just acknowledging that casual sex is the new norm, Rosin posits that this development is actually the necessary ingredient for further female progress. Just as birth control affords women sex without the babies, the appeal of the college hook-up culture is sex without the love that can lead to burdensome monogamy and steal our professional dreams.
Rosin bases these conclusions on interviews and research conducted with college women who, at the time, were immersed in this culture themselves. Can we really conclude from these anecdotes that hooking up is good for young women, and therefore something to be applauded?
As late 20-somethings looking back on a decade of witnessing the no-strings-attached trend first hand, we can’t help but be skeptical. Yes, it may look on the surface that the world is our oyster: we are pursuing prestigious, well-paying careers, living in vibrant cities and traveling the world. Perhaps if we only worshiped at the altar of the shattered glass ceiling, this would be enough. But the reality is that most of us don’t, and our definition of the good life has as much to do with love and intimate relationships as with career aspirations.
By denying this, Rosin’s analysis misses out on the huge downside presented by the hookup culture, namely, that when we habitually separate sex from intimacy, it hurts our chances of being able to form the kinds of committed relationships that would one day lead us towards the very thing we have been avoiding but claim to desire: marriage.
In one of the surveys she cites, 90 percent of respondents said they wanted to get married. One comment she quotes stands out as particularly encapsulating the attitude of young adults towards marriage: “I want to get secure in a city and in a job.... As long as I’m married by 30, I’m good.” But the reality, according to a 2010 Pew Research Center survey, is that only 44 percent of adults aged 25-34 have achieved that goal.
If “hookups haven't wrecked the capacity for intimacy” as Rosin claims, and if the only lasting effects are Facebook photos and alcohol-hazed memories, why are our prospects for attaining committed intimacy plummeting?
Some may say our expectations changed as we matured and that we decided we would prefer to delay or forgo marriage. But in the aforementioned Pew report, 61 percent of those who aren’t married say they want to be, so that doesn’t fully explain what’s going on.
What seems far more likely is that separating sex from love can be habit-forming. Sensory experiences can actually change the physical and organizational structure of our brain, meaning―as Dr. Freda Bush and Dr. Joseph S. McKissic reveal in their book Hooked―that years of equating sexual pleasure with emotional detachment and objectification could have long-term effects on one’s sensory memory and ability to maintain healthy, committed relationships in the future.
The other stumbling block seems to be in the deliberately self-seeking and habitually utilitarian lifestyle that gives rise to casual and detached sex―as one survey respondent in a study by NYU sociologist Paula England put it, just being “100% selfish.”
Martin Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness and founding director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues have found that fostering internal character strengths are the key to happiness and life satisfaction. Their studies have indicated that the most important character traits are what they call “heart strengths” -- gratitude, hope, zest, and the ability to love and be loved -- and that these are enhanced with practice.
So, when you practice being altruistic by reaching outside of yourself to serve another, you in fact become an altruistic person. On the other hand, it would follow that after practicing being a selfish person for 10 years, it should be no surprise that you reach the end of your twenties and find that selfishness is a bad habit that stands in the way of long-term happiness.
None of this is to say that women should not pursue careers or that they need to “find a husband” early in life. But it is dangerous to believe that there aren’t long-term consequences to teaching ourselves to value our careers first and to use people for momentary sexual gratification without any promise of long-term commitment.
How hollow is the victory of economic progress if our deepest emotional desires are thrown to the wayside?
Rather than taking Rosin’s assessment at face value, young women today would do better to take charge of reshaping the terms of women’s empowerment. Career and healthy romantic relationships are not mutually exclusive; it may be difficult to have both, but if we truly value this as an important part of our happiness, we should want to foster a culture that supports working just as hard at healthy, committed relationships as it does at working on our PhDs.
While we might laugh and shake our heads at the embarrassing Facebook photos of our college days, and we’d be the first to admit they don’t define us, we also have to be honest: they represent hurdles to our relational futures that we wish we didn’t have to clear.
Kara Eschbach is the co-founder and editor in chief of Verily Magazine. Monica Gabriel is a columnist for Verily, and currently works in advertising at TIME Magazine.
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http://www.mercatornet.com/Newsletterv0810/view_txt/the_end_of_men_and_women
The end of men - and women
Carolyn Moynihan | 24 September 2012
It would be easy to misunderstand the meaning of Hanna Rosin’s now celebrated theme “the end of men”. The title of the American writer’s 2010 Atlantic magazine article, and now of a full-blownbook, signifies not the total redundancy of men as sub-species of the human race (although a biology professor recently suggested we were near that point) but the end of masculinity as we have known it. What is in sight is the end of men as providers and protectors, as leaders and authorities -- roles based on their physical strength and capacity for fatherhood.
As I have noted before, this also means that what Rosin calls “the rise of women” (the subtitle of her book) is actually “the end of women” in the sense that femininity has no meaning once masculinity disappears.
Her prediction is based on long-term changes in the workforce which have now given women an edge over men in some respects, and resulting domestic changes. She assumes that this is a good thing, that we have arrived at a kind of evolutionary point from which women can lead men towards a new balance of power -- if only men will learn from women how to adapt to the new economic and social climate.
Is she right? It depends on what you mean by adaptation. Few lament the passing of the strict role segregation of the “patriarchal” era, or higher education for more women and their increasing role in professional life and public leadership. But the attempt to push this trend towards a strict equality that refuses to give any significance to sexual differences is a denial of reality that will have serious consequences for the family and the whole of society.
One can reject such assumptions, however, and still benefit from Rosin’s presentation of statistical trends and their impact on particular lives, since they are potentially revolutionary and we do have to contend with them.
The “mancession” and the house-husband
Men -- working class men anyway -- have been hard hit by the changing economy. The decline of manufacturing and the rise of the service and “knowledge” industries have made male strength and the skills based on it increasingly redundant and left large numbers of men unemployed. This process has been accelerated by recent recessions to the point where people talk of a “mancession”. Around one in five of men of prime working age today are not working.
Rosin observes that men who have lost their old jobs find it hard to accept the jobs that are available -- typically “women’s work” such as sales, teaching, accounting, nursing and child care. It is easy to appreciate that a man accustomed to using heavy machinery in a textile mill is not thrilled at the prospect of sitting in front of a computer in a call centre or looking after toddlers in daycare -- let alone collecting the meagre pay packet for such work.
Women, by contrast, have seized the opportunities of the new economy, and by early 2010 had become a small majority of the US workforce. While men start again at the bottom of the ladder in some new activity, women are climbing into managerial positions. They study part-time at community college and get new qualifications. At universities they outnumber men and outstrip them in completing degrees. Young women overall earn more money than young men, says Rosin.
Why? Because women are “plastic” and willingly adapt themselves to the new conditions, and because the new jobs happen to value skills that come naturally to them: things like sitting still and concentrating, listening to people and communicating openly. Men need to learn from women’s flexibility and skills, Rosin suggests.
Becoming a house-husband while your wife spends all day (and perhaps half the night) at the office is one way to learn. Rosin paints a picture of wives becoming breadwinners and husbands looking after the kids and doing the housework and shopping -- while, perhaps, doing some freelance work or trying to start a new business. Just the way mothers at home have tended to do. College girls in Kansas tell Rosin they expect to be the breadwinners. One talks about men as “the new ball and chain”.
Rosin lays out this whole scenario from her vantage point as a married woman with a husband, who could well be one of the new-style plastic men (David Plotz is the editor of the Washington Post’s online magazine Slate and Rosin runs the site’s XX blog), and three children. The new work and domestic dispensation has worked for them, presumably.
Further down the social scale, however, the imbalance between men and women in education, skills and employability is wreaking havoc on the family. Women with jobs and prospects don’t want to marry down; they would rather, it seems, join the swelling ranks of single mothers. Nearly 60 percent of births to women with high school degrees or less now occur outside marriage, and while some of these women may be cohabiting with the father of their children, such relationships are notoriously unstable. Marriage is becoming a luxury of the educated elite.
It’s the family, not the economy, stupid
So much for trends. But what are we to make of them?
One can accept that working class men should be more adaptable. They should contribute more to childcare and domestic work -- as many already do. They should be happy to see women succeed in the workforce and, if they are unemployed with a family, they should be grateful that at least one parent is bringing in a wage. All this can be taken for granted.
What should not be taken for granted is that society is evolving to a point where gender based roles don’t count at all. What we should not accept is Rosin’s cheerful assumption that masculinity itself is doomed -- and with it, necessarily, femininity.
The distinctive masculine and feminine roles of the past have a sound basis: male and female biology and its orientation towards procreation and the family. And it is the needs of the family - in particular what is best for children -- that should shape the economy, not the other way round.
Since one of the parents must invest more heavily in nurturing young children, why not the mother, who has been favoured for it by nature? Why not let men play second fiddle at home and invest more heavily in providing for the family’s material needs? Why not look to the father as the protector, since his physical strength fits him for the role?
This is not to deny that women can combine motherhood and careers, or that at times mothers will have to be breadwinners and fathers play the domestic role, but all this can happen without the need to discard the norm of sexual complementarity altogether. Studies consistently show that mothers of young children typically prefer part-time work to full-time.
The pill, sexual culture, and the end of the human race
There is no evolutionary inevitability about current trends, as Rosin seems to suggest.
The current feminised form of the workforce is not the outcome of some inherent law of production and distribution. It is, to a large degree, an artefact of the contraceptive revolution and the abrupt end that brought to a more natural level of fertility and the domestic culture that went with it. As Rosin herself notes, women came flooding into the workforce in the 1970s, after the pill and legalised abortion became available.
Feminist ideology also played its part in this revolution with its insistence on equality -- a term that meant, in practice, sameness. And so we arrived at the notions of gender equity and the interchangeability of women and men in both the public and domestic spheres. Some of the consequences of this should alarm us.
In a revealing chapter of her book, published separately in the Atlantic under the heading “Boys on the Side”, Rosin describes the sexual customs of some (presumably typical) college women. Practically every serious-minded person who has commented on the trend of “hooking up” -- that is, casual sex on the agreed basis that there is no emotional investment or commitment at all -- regards it as harmful to young women. But Rosin reports that today’s ambitious college girls are appropriating the hook-up culture as a way to stay focused on their career track while getting their rightful share of sexual pleasure. (See “A dangerous dish” for further comment.)
From the point of view of human dignity, of course, this points to the “fall of women” rather than their “rise” and yet, disturbingly, Rosin completely approves of it. “To put it crudely,” she says, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hook-up culture.”
It’s Rosin’s views on sex, ultimately, that undermine her judgement concerning the future of either men or women, but we are obliged to her for showing so clearly on what morally precarious foundations the rise of women now rests.
What is clear is that the end of men (masculinity) would also mean the end of women (femininity) and the reduction of both sexes to a state of plasticity that makes them perfect ciphers for “the economy” (the political and financial establishment). That way lies the end of the human race itself.
Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.
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This Just In: Boys Like Sports Obvious? Not if you're a blank-slatist..
By JAMES TARANTO
"Males Play Sports Much More Than Females," reads the headline on a press release from Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Mich. Dog bites man, right? No. "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle," George Orwell observed. In today's academic world, the insight that the sexes are different is as revolutionary as Winston Smith's insight that two plus two make four was in Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four."
The GVSU press release announces a new study, published in the online journal PLOS ONE:
The new research, led by Robert Deaner, associate professor of psychology, shows that, on average, American men actually play sports about three times as often as American women.
"The existence of such a sex difference might seem obvious. However, many scholars, advocacy groups and the United States courts believe the sex difference in sports interest is non-existent, small or rapidly disappearing," said Deaner. "This view is based on the fact that women comprise 42 percent of high school sports participants and 43 percent of intercollegiate sports participants."
The study looked at sports participation in noneducational and intramural settings and found that male rates were vastly higher. Women's propensity to exercise approaches or exceeds men's, but men are much likelier to engage in competitive physical activity.
Deaner acknowledges the politically incorrect nature of his findings:
Deaner said the results challenge a "blank slate" view of human sex differences, whereby men and women only differ because of the social environments that shaped them throughout their lives. An evolutionary perspective, by contrast, holds that even when men and women and boys and girls receive similar encouragement and opportunities, major sex differences in some kinds of motivation will reliably emerge.
"Sports are one such area because they function as arenas of physical competition, and men have, on average, experienced greater physical competition throughout human evolutionary history," Deaner said. "This is one reason why men are physically larger and stronger than women. In addition to these physical differences, boys and men are predisposed to be more interested in sports than girls and women. This interest drives them to refine the physical and social skills that were important components of men's physical competition during our evolutionary history."
So why are the female participation rates in high school and intercollegiate sports so much closer to the male ones? Because the federal government, in the name of "equal opportunity," has made a priority of increasing female participation at those institutions under 1972 legislation commonly known as Title IX.
In practice Title IX has led to the imposition of quotas, as institutions abolish male sports teams to compensate for the lack of female interest. Still, that 43% figure the press release cites isn't as close to parity as it sounds. Since 57% of college undergraduates are female, male students are 1.76 times as likely as female ones to play intercollegiate sports. To put it another way, all else being equal, men would account for nearly 64% of intercollegiate athletes if they made up half the student body.
Feminist blank-slatism amounts to little more than a wholesale rejection of Darwin's theory of sexual selection, or at least to an adamant denial that the theory applies to man. It's curious that the left spends so much effort mocking religious conservatives as "antiscience" for doubting or rejecting evolution. Although this attitude may be misguided, it has far less real-world impact than blank-slatism.
Probably without meaning to, Deaner illustrates another theme this column has struck in recent months--that of totalitarian feminism. "We certainly don't dispute the need for Title IX or its tremendous benefits," he ritualistically declares at the end of the press release. You must love Big Brother.
Oops, make that Big Sibling.
Over at the American Enterprise Institute website, Charles Murray calls our attention to an example of academic blank-slatism that is either hilarious or horrific, depending on your mood. It's an abstract of a paper from Psychology of Women Quarterly, on "benevolent sexism," which Murray defines as "gentlemanly behavior." Get a load of this:
Previous research suggests that benevolent sexism is an ideology that perpetuates gender inequality. But despite its negative consequences, benevolent sexism is a prevalent ideology that some even find attractive. . . . A structural equation model revealed that benevolent sexism was positively associated with diffuse system justification within a sample of 274 college women and 111 college men. Additionally, benevolent sexism was indirectly associated with life satisfaction for both women and men through diffuse system justification. In contrast, hostile sexism was not related to diffuse system justification or life satisfaction. The results imply that although benevolent sexism perpetuates inequality at the structural level, it might offer some benefits at the personal level. Thus, our findings reinforce the dangerous nature of benevolent sexism and emphasize the need for interventions to reduce its prevalence.
That last sentence is a doozy. Benevolent sexism is "dangerous," the authors are claiming, because it makes people happy.
Murray asks: "When social scientists discover something that increases life satisfaction for both sexes, shouldn't they at least consider the possibility that they have come across something that is positive? Healthy? Something that might even conceivably be grounded in the nature of Homo sapiens?"
The innocent tone of these questions is affected. Having been cast in the role of Emmanuel Goldstein after his classic 1994 book, "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life," Murray understands the nature of blank-slatism better than most. In fact, the central thesis of that book is a fundamental assault on blank-slatism.
Most of the attacks on Murray and co-author Richard Herrnstein involved the neuralgic question of racial differences in intelligence. But that was an ancillary topic, the third of the book's four sections. The main argument was that American society has become more stratified as its institutions, especially educational ones, have gotten more efficient at sorting people by intelligence and produced what Murray and Herrnstein call a "cognitive elite."
That process of sorting is known as "meritocracy," a word that implies intelligence is morally praiseworthy, a virtue. That proposition is easier to justify if you are a blank-slatist. By contrast if, as Murray and Herrnstein argue, intelligence is largely a matter of genetics, then the cognitive elite's credentials are a measure of luck more than merit. It may be that intellectuals, and especially those in academic institutions, so fiercely defend blank-slatism because their own sense of self-worth depends on it.
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http://www.westernjournalism.com/between-feminism-and-gun-control-women-are-screwed/
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http://www.michaelyon-online.com/seven-myths-about-women-in-combat.htm
Myth #1 – “It’s about women in combat.”
No, it’s not. Women are already in combat, and are serving well and professionally. The issue should be more clearly entitled, “Women in the infantry.” And this is a decidedly different proposition.
Myth #2 – “Combat has changed” (often accompanied by “There are no front lines anymore”).
This convenient misconception requires several counters. First, any serious study of military history will reveal numerous historical examples about how successive generations (over millennia) believed that warfare had changed forever, only to find that technology may change platforms, but not its harsh essence. To hope that conflicts over the last 20 years are models of a new, antiseptic form of warfare is delusional.
The second point is that the enemy gets a vote – time, place, and style. For example, war on the Korean Peninsula would be a brutal, costly, no-holds-barred nightmare of mayhem in close combat with casualties in a week that could surpass the annual total of recent conflict.
The final point on this myth reinforces the Korea example and it bears examination — Fallujah, Iraq in 2004, where warfare was reduced to a horrific, costly, and exhausting scrap in a destroyed city between two foes that fought to the death.
The standard for ground combat unit composition should be whether social experimentation would have amplified our opportunity for success in that crucible, or diminished it. We gamble with our future security when we set standards for warfare based on the best case, instead of the harshest one.
Myth #3 – “If they pass the physical standards, why not?”
Physical standards are important, but not nearly all of the story. Napoleon – “The moral (spirit) is to the physical as three is to one.”
Unit cohesion is the essence of combat power, and while it may be convenient to dismiss human nature for political expediency, the facts are that sexual dynamics will exist and can affect morale. That may be manageable in other environments, but not in close combat.
Any study of sexual harassment statistics in this age cohort – in the military, academia, or the civilian workplace — are evidence enough that despite best efforts to by sincere leaders to control the issue, human instincts remain strong. Perceptions of favoritism or harassment will be corrosive, and cohesion will be the victim.
Myth #4 – “Standards won’t be lowered.”
This is the cruelest myth of all. The statements of the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are telling.
They essentially declare “guilty until proven innocent” on anyone attempting to maintain the standards which produced the finest fighting force in the world. There are already accommodations (note that unit cohesion won’t be a metric), there will be many more, and we will pay a bloody price for it someday.
Pity the truthful leader who attempts to hold to standards based on realistic combat factors, and tells truth to power. Most won’t, and the others won’t survive.
Myth #5 – “Opening the infantry will provide a better pathway to senior rank for the talented women.”
Not so. What will happen is that we will take very talented females with unlimited potential and change their peer norm when we inject them into the infantry.
Those who might meet the infantry physical standard will find that their peers are expected, as leaders, to far exceed it (and most of their subordinates will, as well).
So instead of advancing to a level appropriate to their potential, they may well be left out.
Myth #6 – “It’s a civil rights issue, much like the integration of the armed forces and allowing gays to serve openly.”
Those who parrot this either hope to scare honest and frank discussion, or confuse national security with utopian ideas.
In the process, they demean initiatives that were to provide equally skilled individuals the opportunity to contribute equally. In each of the other issues, lowered standards were not the consequence.
Myth #7 – “It’s just fair.”
Allow me two points.
First, this is ground warfare we’re discussing, so realism is important.
“Fair” is not part of the direct ground combat lexicon.
Direct ground combat, such as experienced in the frozen tundra of Korea, the rubble of Stalingrad, or the endless 30-day jungle patrols against a grim foe in Viet Nam, is the harshest meritocracy — with the greatest consequences — there is.
And psychology in warfare is germane – the force that is respected (and, yes, feared) has a distinct advantage.
Will women in our infantry enhance a psychological advantage, or hinder it?
Second, if it’s about fairness, why do women get a choice of whether to serve in the infantry (when men do not), and why aren’t they required to register for the draft (as men are)?
It may be that we live in a society in which honest discussion of this issue, relying on facts instead of volume, is not possible. If so, our national security will fall victim to hope instead of reality. And myths be damned.
Gregory S. Newbold served 32 years as a Marine infantryman, commanding units from platoon to the 1st Marine Division. His final assignment before retiring in 2002 was as director of operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff.
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http://www.dailymotion.com/playlist/x1xv47_BrainwashingInNorway_hjernevask-english/1#video=xp0tg8
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324021104578549891063938034.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
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http://live.wsj.com/video/opinion-a-war-on-men/2CDEC491-967B-4695-924E-53C9C68EDB8C.html?mod=opinion_video_newsreel#!2CDEC491-967B-4695-924E-53C9C68EDB8C
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1021293/How-mothers-fanatical-feminist-views-tore-apart-daughter-The-Color-Purple-author.html
How my mother's fanatical views tore us apart
By Rebecca Walker
Last updated at 1:18 PM on 23rd May 2008
She's revered as a trail-blazing feminist and author Alice Walker touched the lives of a generation of women. A champion of women's rights, she has always argued that motherhood is a form of servitude. But one woman didn't buy in to Alice's beliefs - her daughter, Rebecca, 38.
Here the writer describes what it was like to grow up as the daughter of a cultural icon, and why she feels so blessed to be the sort of woman 64-year-old Alice despises - a mother.
The other day I was vacuuming when my son came bounding into the room. 'Mummy, Mummy, let me help,' he cried. His little hands were grabbing me around the knees and his huge brown eyes were looking up at me. I was overwhelmed by a huge surge of happiness.
Rebecca Walker
Maternal rift: Rebecca Walker, whose mother was the feminist author of The Color Purple - who thought motherhood a form of servitude, is now proud to be a mother herself
I love the way his head nestles in the crook of my neck. I love the way his face falls into a mask of eager concentration when I help him learn the alphabet. But most of all, I simply love hearing his little voice calling: 'Mummy, Mummy.'
It reminds me of just how blessed I am. The truth is that I very nearly missed out on becoming a mother - thanks to being brought up by a rabid feminist who thought motherhood was about the worst thing that could happen to a woman. You see, my mum taught me that children enslave women. I grew up believing that children are millstones around your neck, and the idea that motherhood can make you blissfully happy is a complete fairytale.
In fact, having a child has been the most rewarding experience of my life. Far from 'enslaving' me, three-and-a-half-year-old Tenzin has opened my world. My only regret is that I discovered the joys of motherhood so late - I have been trying for a second child for two years, but so far with no luck.
I was raised to believe that women need men like a fish needs a bicycle. But I strongly feel children need two parents and the thought of raising Tenzin without my partner, Glen, 52, would be terrifying.
As the child of divorced parents, I know only too well the painful consequences of being brought up in those circumstances. Feminism has much to answer for denigrating men and encouraging women to seek independence whatever the cost to their families.
My mother's feminist principles coloured every aspect of my life. As a little girl, I wasn't even allowed to play with dolls or stuffed toys in case they brought out a maternal instinct. It was drummed into me that being a mother, raising children and running a home were a form of slavery. Having a career, travelling the world and being independent were what really mattered according to her.
I love my mother very much, but I haven't seen her or spoken to her since I became pregnant. She has never seen my son - her only grandchild. My crime? Daring to question her ideology.
Well, so be it. My mother may be revered by women around the world - goodness knows, many even have shrines to her. But I honestly believe it's time to puncture the myth and to reveal what life was really like to grow up as a child of the feminist revolution.
My parents met and fell in love in Mississippi during the civil rights movement. Dad [Mel Leventhal], was the brilliant lawyer son of a Jewish family who had fled the Holocaust. Mum was the impoverished eighth child of sharecroppers from Georgia. When they married in 1967, inter-racial weddings were still illegal in some states.
My early childhood was very happy although my parents were terribly busy, encouraging me to grow up fast. I was only one when I was sent off to nursery school. I'm told they even made me walk down the street to the school.
Alice Walker
Alice Walker believed so strongly that children enslaved their mothers she disowned her own daughter
When I was eight, my parents divorced. From then on I was shuttled between two worlds - my father's very conservative, traditional, wealthy, white suburban community in New York, and my mother's avant garde multi-racial community in California. I spent two years with each parent - a bizarre way of doing things.
Ironically, my mother regards herself as a hugely maternal woman. Believing that women are suppressed, she has campaigned for their rights around the world and set up organisations to aid women abandoned in Africa - offering herself up as a mother figure.
But, while she has taken care of daughters all over the world and is hugely revered for her public work and service, my childhood tells a very different story. I came very low down in her priorities - after work, political integrity, self-fulfilment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel.
My mother would always do what she wanted - for example taking off to Greece for two months in the summer, leaving me with relatives when I was a teenager. Is that independent, or just plain selfish?
I was 16 when I found a now-famous poem she wrote comparing me to various calamities that struck and impeded the lives of other women writers. Virginia Woolf was mentally ill and the Brontes died prematurely. My mother had me - a 'delightful distraction', but a calamity nevertheless. I found that a huge shock and very upsetting.
According to the strident feminist ideology of the Seventies, women were sisters first, and my mother chose to see me as a sister rather than a daughter. From the age of 13, I spent days at a time alone while my mother retreated to her writing studio - some 100 miles away. I was left with money to buy my own meals and lived on a diet of fast food.
Sisters together
A neighbour, not much older than me, was deputised to look after me. I never complained. I saw it as my job to protect my mother and never distract her from her writing. It never crossed my mind to say that I needed some time and attention from her.
When I was beaten up at school - accused of being a snob because I had lighter skin than my black classmates - I always told my mother that everything was fine, that I had won the fight. I didn't want to worry her.
But the truth was I was very lonely and, with my mother's knowledge, started having sex at 13. I guess it was a relief for my mother as it meant I was less demanding. And she felt that being sexually active was empowering for me because it meant I was in control of my body.
Now I simply cannot understand how she could have been so permissive. I barely want my son to leave the house on a play-date, let alone start sleeping around while barely out of junior school.
A good mother is attentive, sets boundaries and makes the world safe for her child. But my mother did none of those things.
Although I was on the Pill - something I had arranged at 13, visiting the doctor with my best friend - I fell pregnant at 14. I organised an abortion myself. Now I shudder at the memory. I was only a little girl. I don't remember my mother being shocked or upset. She tried to be supportive, accompanying me with her boyfriend.
Although I believe that an abortion was the right decision for me then, the aftermath haunted me for decades. It ate away at my self-confidence and, until I had Tenzin, I was terrified that I'd never be able to have a baby because of what I had done to the child I had destroyed. For feminists to say that abortion carries no consequences is simply wrong.
As a child, I was terribly confused, because while I was being fed a strong feminist message, I actually yearned for a traditional mother. My father's second wife, Judy, was a loving, maternal homemaker with five children she doted on.
There was always food in the fridge and she did all the things my mother didn't, such as attending their school events, taking endless photos and telling her children at every opportunity how wonderful they were.
The Color Purple
Alice Walker's iconic book was made in to a film in 1985, and starred Whoopi Goldberg and Margaret Avery (pictured)
My mother was the polar opposite. She never came to a single school event, she didn't buy me any clothes, she didn't even help me buy my first bra - a friend was paid to go shopping with me. If I needed help with homework I asked my boyfriend's mother.
Moving between the two homes was terrible. At my father's home I felt much more taken care of. But, if I told my mother that I'd had a good time with Judy, she'd look bereft - making me feel I was choosing this white, privileged woman above her. I was made to feel that I had to choose one set of ideals above the other.
When I hit my 20s and first felt a longing to be a mother, I was totally confused. I could feel my biological clock ticking, but I felt if I listened to it, I would be betraying my mother and all she had taught me.
I tried to push it to the back of my mind, but over the next ten years the longing became more intense, and when I met Glen, a teacher, at a seminar five years ago, I knew I had found the man I wanted to have a baby with. Gentle, kind and hugely supportive, he is, as I knew he would be, the most wonderful father.
Although I knew what my mother felt about babies, I still hoped that when I told her I was pregnant, she would be excited for me.
'Mum, I'm pregnant'
Instead, when I called her one morning in the spring of 2004, while I was at one of her homes housesitting, and told her my news and that I'd never been happier, she went very quiet. All she could say was that she was shocked. Then she asked if I could check on her garden. I put the phone down and sobbed - she had deliberately withheld her approval with the intention of hurting me. What loving mother would do that?
Worse was to follow. My mother took umbrage at an interview in which I'd mentioned that my parents didn't protect or look out for me. She sent me an e-mail, threatening to undermine my reputation as a writer. I couldn't believe she could be so hurtful - particularly when I was pregnant.
Devastated, I asked her to apologise and acknowledge how much she'd hurt me over the years with neglect, withholding affection and resenting me for things I had no control over - the fact that I am mixed-race, that I have a wealthy, white, professional father and that I was born at all.
But she wouldn't back down. Instead, she wrote me a letter saying that our relationship had been inconsequential for years and that she was no longer interested in being my mother. She even signed the letter with her first name, rather than 'Mom'.
That was a month before Tenzin's birth in December 2004, and I have had no contact with my mother since. She didn't even get in touch when he was rushed into the special care baby unit after he was born suffering breathing difficulties.
And I have since heard that my mother has cut me out of her will in favour of one of my cousins. I feel terribly sad - my mother is missing such a great opportunity to be close to her family. But I'm also relieved. Unlike most mothers, mine has never taken any pride in my achievements. She has always had a strange competitiveness that led her to undermine me at almost every turn.
When I got into Yale - a huge achievement - she asked why on earth I wanted to be educated at such a male bastion. Whenever I published anything, she wanted to write her version - trying to eclipse mine. When I wrote my memoir, Black, White And Jewish, my mother insisted on publishing her version. She finds it impossible to step out of the limelight, which is extremely ironic in light of her view that all women are sisters and should support one another.
It's been almost four years since I have had any contact with my mother, but it's for the best - not only for my self-protection but for my son's well-being. I've done all I can to be a loyal, loving daughter, but I can no longer have this poisonous relationship destroy my life.
I know many women are shocked by my views. They expect the daughter of Alice Walker to deliver a very different message. Yes, feminism has undoubtedly given women opportunities. It's helped open the doors for us at schools, universities and in the workplace. But what about the problems it's caused for my contemporaries?
What about the children?
The ease with which people can get divorced these days doesn't take into account the toll on children. That's all part of the unfinished business of feminism.
Then there is the issue of not having children. Even now, I meet women in their 30s who are ambivalent about having a family. They say things like: 'I'd like a child. If it happens, it happens.' I tell them: 'Go home and get on with it because your window of opportunity is very small.' As I know only too well.
Then I meet women in their 40s who are devastated because they spent two decades working on a PhD or becoming a partner in a law firm, and they missed out on having a family. Thanks to the feminist movement, they discounted their biological clocks. They've missed the opportunity and they're bereft.
Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating.
But far from taking responsibility for any of this, the leaders of the women's movement close ranks against anyone who dares to question them - as I have learned to my cost. I don't want to hurt my mother, but I cannot stay silent. I believe feminism is an experiment, and all experiments need to be assessed on their results. Then, when you see huge mistakes have been paid, you need to make alterations.
I hope that my mother and I will be reconciled one day. Tenzin deserves to have a grandmother. But I am just so relieved that my viewpoint is no longer so utterly coloured by my mother's.
I am my own woman and I have discovered what really matters - a happy family.
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Feminism through the life cycle
Nicole M. King | 5 July 2013
In the Introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan wrote, “It’s frightening when you’re starting on a new road that no one has been on before. You don’t know how far it’s going to take you until you look back and realize how far, how very far you’ve gone.”
Indeed. Forty years after that statement and 50 years after the publication of The Feminine Mystique, the road that Friedan embarked upon has led women to places they have never been before—entering the workforce and academia in ever-higher numbers, yes, but also historically low fertility rates, no-fault divorce, and abortion on demand. The emotional consequences for women have not been rosy. Stevenson and Wolfers report that, in spite of the fact that all objective measures of women’s happiness have risen, both women’s subjective well-being and their well-being relative to men have fallen since the 1970s. For the first time in the last 35 years, men report higher levels of happiness than do women.
Friedan’s diagnosis of “the problem that has no name”—women’s sense of purposelessness—was justified, but her prescriptions have been disastrous. The road that Betty Friedan and second-wave feminists paved has led women to lives new and unfamiliar, but not to a solution to the problem. In following the impact of feminism through three broad categories of the life cycle—education, child-bearing years, and the empty nest—we see that the promises of feminism have fallen flat, as women have bought into a feminist mystique that has left them more alone and conflicted in their pursuit of fulfillment than ever before.
Education
Friedan oft laments what she calls the “sex-directed education” of women. Women, she discovered when interviewing college girls to write her book, embark upon higher education primarily to meet a man and cannot be bothered with academic pursuits. Friedan professes herself to be horrified. When she was in college, she writes, women used to linger outside the classrooms for hours, debating war, marriage, sex, art. Women of 1963 were too occupied painting their nails and keeping dates to bother with the end of Western Civilization.
Friedan argues that women have reached this stage because they have been long trained that their primary purpose is sexual. High-school and college curricula have become increasingly “functionalist,” oriented toward a woman’s sexual function of bearing children.
Friedan’s answer is an education that prepares women for a meaningful career outside the home. Women should go to college not for some vague liberal arts degree, but for a degree that sets them on a specific career path. For this to happen, she says, they must learn to explore their sexuality outside of marriage. And although she does not say it, the implicit lesson is that girls must learn that denying their fertility is a necessary step to success.
Women have learned their lesson only too well. We face now a new “sex-directed education,” one that explicitly tells young girls that they are sexual beings expected to engage in intercourse before marriage and also expected to protect themselves from the hazards of an unwanted pregnancy. This new sex-directed education is enforced by a variety of the nation’s most reputable bodies. The American Academy of Pediatrics recently issued a statement recommending that doctors prescribe emergency contraceptives like Plan B in girls’ early teens, before they actually become sexually active. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics both recommend that children (boys and girls) receive the HPV vaccine as young as 11 or 12.
The educators are doing their job well, as is seen in current levels of contraception use. The National Center for Health Statistics reports that 61.8 percent of women ages 15-44 use some form of contraception, and 98 percent of women who have ever had intercourse have used contraception. Of these, the more educated the woman, the more likely she was to “protect” herself, with daughters of college graduates the most likely to use contraception at first incidence of intercourse (83.9 percent). Yet in spite of all of this contraception, a staggering 41 percent of births in 2011 were to unwed mothers. Women have more chemical and mechanical means than ever before to keep themselves from bearing children, and yet, almost half of babies are born outside of wedlock. The implication is clear: Sex and marriage no longer go together, and so, babies and marriage no longer go together, in spite of the fact that research overwhelmingly shows marriage to be the best environment for raising children.
In promoting no-strings-attached sex, this new sex-directed education has both prevented marriages from occurring and damaged the marriages that do occur. A recent study has shown that women who have sex before marriage increase their chances of divorce, and those who have sex before the age of 18 double their odds of a split. Women are being educated to be sexually active before marriage, told that the best way to ensure a career is to postpone marriage and children. To do so, they subject their bodies to one of a number of chemical or surgical procedures, while engaging in behavior that endangers their future marriages.
The functionalists may no longer write the curriculum, but we still have a “sex-directed education,” one that is far more damaging than any functionalist text ever was.
Child-bearing years
Once they reach adulthood, Friedan argues, women of 1963 took pride in checking the box for “occupation: housewife” on the US census. A cult of femininity and motherhood had developed whose design was to keep women in the home. At the same time that women chose “occupation: housewife” as their calling, however, that occupation was becoming less and less fulfilling. Friedan accurately notes the rise of the consumerist household: “Why is it never said that the really crucial function, the really important role that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house. In all the talk of femininity and woman’s role, one forgets that the real business of America is business.”
The home was no longer a place where a woman felt useful. The state had taken over the education and care of her children for the majority of most days. Her husband spent all his waking hours in an office or shop miles away. The home did not produce anything. Friedan’s solution to the increasing irrelevance of the American home was for women to leave it, just like men did. Seek meaning in a useful vocation, she advised. Hire help to care for the children and do the cleaning.
Women have taken her advice, leaving home and children to the care of others in ever-increasing numbers while searching for more fulfilling lives elsewhere. But those careers, it turns out, are not as meaningful as they had hoped, and most women still cannot squelch that maternal instinct that drives them to want to bear and care for children more than anything else in the world. Kay Hymowitz argues in “The Plight of the Alpha Female” that “women are less inclined than men to think that power and status are worth the sacrifice of a close relationship with their children.” Women, she says, generally prefer being with their children to spending their days in boardrooms and conference calls.
Hymowitz reports on a longitudinal study of Booth School of Business graduates at the University of Chicago. The study found that although these new graduates began their careers in equal numbers and earned roughly equal salaries, half of the women had quit in ten years. Ninety percent of the men remained in the workforce. These women, among the best and brightest in the business world and probably well able to afford childcare, chose to leave profitable careers to stay home.
Hymowitz also points to some interesting statistics that indicate that women still tend to plan their most intense career-pursuing years around the possibility of having a child. A recent survey of students conducted by University of Wisconsin psychologists showed that most female students were already thinking about ways to cut back their work hours once they became mothers. Similarly, a recent survey of 1,000 mothers conducted by Forbes revealed that while only 10 percent of stay-at-home mothers wished they still worked, about half of working mothers wished they could stay at home. Study upon study has indicated that most women want to have children, and most women who want to have children want to stay home with them or at the very most work part-time.
This reality is emphasized by the very few number of what Hymowitz calls female “alphas”—those at the very top of any given career path. Of Fortune 500 company CEOs, only four percent are women, and Hymowitz argues that this represents women’s choice to avoid such careers more than anything else. The same goes for politics—men are still the overwhelming majority in both the Senate and the House.
While the data indicate that women still want to have children and want to stay home with them, however, the stark reality is that fewer women are having fewer children. The mean age of first birth in the US is a bit over 25 years, according to the US Census Bureau, while the preliminary data for 2011 indicates that birth rates for women ages 30-34 are actually higher than birth rates for women ages 20-24. The overall US birthrate, however, is at an all-time low of 63.2 per 1,000 women, ages 15-44—a total fertility rate of 1.9. Women are either foregoing children or pushing back childbearing until late ages.
What the data do not show is how many of those women, ages 15-44, would have liked to have children after delaying childbirth into their 30s. Recent mathematical models have estimated that by 30 years of age, 95 percent of women have only 12 percent of their eggs remaining. As later childbirth has become more popular, so have reproductive technologies such as IVF, technologies whose health impact upon both child and mother are still relatively unknown. Ironically—and sadly—women discover that the high-powered career is not that important to them, while perhaps simultaneously discovering that their fertility is not as buoyant as they had hoped.
The other group in the category of career-minded women are those who manage to have children, but also believe they can “have it all”—in the words of Anne-Marie Slaugher’s recent piece in the Atlantic that reignited debate over the compatibility of family life and a high-powered career.
More women are acknowledging that “having it all” is a delusion, because the lingering reality is that most women still feel a sense of guilt about leaving children for long hours, guilt that men simply do not feel at the same levels. Those women who choose to try to juggle a 60-hour work week with soccer practice, school, and music lessons find themselves torn between two worlds, facing inner conflict that leaves them unsatisfied with their roles. Predictably, those women who do attain the “alpha” jobs are more likely than women in the general population to be childless.
The Empty Nest
In interviewing her subjects, Friedan found that many housewives lived in fear of what would happen when the babies were gone. One purportedly told her that she envied her neighbor, an interior designer: “She knows what she wants to do. I don’t know. I never have. When I’m pregnant and the babies are little, I’msomebody, finally, a mother. But then, they get older. I can’t just keep on having babies.”
The contemporary American woman faces perhaps an even starker reality. In 1963, the average woman still had babies. Lots of babies. When she was older, she may still have at least one or two of those children living nearby, and probably a few grandchildren as well. Now, however, with the age of first child rising and the overall birth rate declining, women are increasingly alone in a vulnerable stage of life. With five children, one or two might have stayed close to home. With two, the chances of having a child living nearby dwindle. The children a woman does have are likely postponing their own family as well, denying Mom and Dad both the health and emotional benefits of caretaking.
In addition to being childless, the baby-boomer female is increasingly likely to be divorced. Susan Brown and I-Fen Lin have shown that while the divorce rate for the population at large has remained essentially the same over the past 20 years, divorces have doubled among adults aged 50 and older—so-called “grey divorces.” Most of these divorces stem from remarriages that have fallen apart, as remarriages are much more likely than first marriages to dissolve. What the rise in divorce among this generation means is that all the health, emotional, and economic impacts of a divorce hit women in a stage of life of great transition, when overall health is more likely to be declining. For women in particular, who are much less likely than men to have had a career and consequent savings, the economic impact may be severe.
At the very time of life when a woman should be able to rest and enjoy the fruits and fulfillment of a life well-lived, then, while still being of some use to her family, she finds herself increasingly isolated. If she is like most women, she has not allowed herself to develop a career to the same level as do men, because she wanted to be around for her children when they were growing. The result is that she has not given herself wholeheartedly either to career or to childrearing. Now, in the so-called Golden Years, she has little purpose in life, no comfort in either work or family.
After Friedan
The problems that Betty Friedan outlined were real. Industrialization and the consumerism of the 1950s meant that the American household was reduced to little more than a comfortable hotel, where people slept and perhaps ate a meal or two while conducting their real work elsewhere. Little surprise that women felt stifled and unfulfilled by the role of glorified purchaser. And for Friedan, self-fulfillment was paramount. Women could not be “fulfilled,” she believed, unless they held meaningful paid employment. The home was no longer enough to provide fulfillment. But what do these women who have followed Friedan’s advice—divorced, childless, grandchildless—have to show for their “self-fulfillment”?
The modern American woman who has tried to follow Friedan’s command to pursue a career and raise a family on the side finds herself in constant conflict with her own nature. For inside most if not all women lies a powerful desire to have some children and take care of them. In trying to straddle the worlds of career and homemaker, today’s woman finds stressed, tired, and, according to most studies, wanting to return home to be with the children. In her later years, she is more likely to be alone and separated from her children and husband.
We are no better off today than we were in 1963, and in many ways, we are worse. What, then, is the solution? How are women to be “fulfilled” by the role of wife and mother? The problem lies not in some kind of gender disparity, as Friedan thought, but rather in what Wendell Berry calls in The Unsettling of Americathe “sexual division of labor.”
Labor has always been gendered, Berry argues. Women have tended to focus on the domestic, while men have tended to do the work outside the home. But only with industrialization has the sexual division of labor been so pronounced. Men have left the home to work for money, an abstraction, while women have stayed at home doing work that was menial and automated. “Home became,” says Berry, “a place for the husband to go when he was not working or amusing himself. It was the place where the wife was held in servitude.”
The only way for both sexes to be fulfilled in their work is for work to become human again, for the home to reclaim its authority in American society, and for Americans—men and women—to resume the roles that are rightfully theirs. For that transition to happen, men and women both must make choices that go against the grain. Growing a household garden, homeschooling the children, a small home business, a home office—all these would help.
There are signs that we may be moving in the right direction—David Houle’s The Shift Age argues that Americans are changing the way that they work, foregoing a structured office environment and hierarchical system in which they do not see the end results of their labor for more project-based work that is also more likely to be amenable to flexible hours and home life.
Let us hope that the trend continues. Until the home becomes productive again, we will continue to see the problem that has no name, because women will still lead lives that deny their fundamental human nature and gifts.
Nicole M. King is the Managing Editor of The Family in America. This article was originally published in The Family in America, a MercatorNet partner site, and is republished with permission.
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The other problem that has no name
Ryan C. MacPherson | 5 July 2013
In 1963, Betty Friedan named the problem. The opening chapter of her Feminine Mystique is aptly titled, “The Problem That Has No Name.” There Friedan verbalized what countless housewives thought and felt but did not know how to say: the American dream was a disappointment for women. Marriage, children, a house in the suburbs full of modern conveniences—all these trappings of success failed to satisfy the deeply human yearnings of women. The trappings were, she argued, traps; the middle-class home, a “concentration camp” where women were held captive by a culture that expected them to find fulfillment in their families while secluding themselves from the ambitions of the university and the workplace.
With the problem thus named (and the Nazi metaphor apologetically retracted), Friedan volunteered a solution. If the “feminine mystique” reduced a woman’s identity to the categories of wife and mother, then the first step toward liberation would be to envision a woman’s life course as independent from both her husband and her children. Marriage and childbearing would have to be construed as choices, not obligations, and other choices would have to be permitted the spotlight at center stage.
By Friedan’s account, one choice was paramount: a woman must have a career of her own. To serve this end, women must also have suitable educational opportunities. Friedan called for a feminist “GI Bill” that would bring wives and mothers into university classrooms. Both as to education and employment, Friedan’s goal was for society to treat women more like it had been treating men.
But to pose the problem and solution in this manner left other problems unnamed, unanalyzed, and unresolved. Beneath the feminine mystique, and foundational to Friedan’s portrayal of and plans for women, lay three other cultural assumptions, which may be termed the career mystique, the masculine mystique, and the education mystique. Fifty years after The Feminine Mystique, all three of these problems, plus the one Friedan named, continue to vex women—and also men and children.
The Career Mystique
A record percentage (38.3 percent) of American women had paid employment in 1963—surpassing the wartime peak (35.0 percent) occasioned by “Rosie the Riveter” in 1944. The problem Freidan perceived was that postwar women did not, because they could not, work the right kinds of jobs at the right times in their lives. Legal strictures and cultural expectations, argued Friedan, denied women the opportunities to choose careers that truly suited their abilities and aspirations. One of her unspoken assumptions was that men have both chosen and enjoyed their careers with hardly any legal or cultural impediments—an assumption that would be difficult to substantiate throughout most of human history, even in Friedan’s 20th Century America.
Another of Friedan’s core assumptions, known as the “career mystique,” holds that adult life cannot be fulfilling apart from continuous, paid employment away from home in a field that one selects and enjoys. Friedan was emphatic that employment before the childbearing years does not suffice; nor does re-employment after the children are grown. A career follows a “continuous thread” of employment throughout the course of a “life plan that can encompass marriage and motherhood,” if and when a woman chooses. “The women I found who had made and kept alive such long-term [employment] commitments,” explained Friedan, “did not suffer the problem that has no name.”
Friedan further asserted that a career must center around “some meaningful pursuit (which necessarily means competition, for there is competition in every serious pursuit in our society).” The measure of a career, therefore, is not simply that a woman chooses it but also that her society values it. In the capitalist market, paid employment designates work that is worthy of the career mystique. The contributions that wives and mothers make to their homes and communities do not fit that bill.
Friedan blamed women’s magazines for selling women short by glorifying housewifery and discouraging paid employment beyond the home. Surveying periodicals in the New York Public Library, she “found a change in the image of the American woman, and in the boundaries of the woman’s world.” In the 1930s, magazine articles featured “career women—happily, proudly, adventurously, attractively career women—who loved and were loved by men.” By the 1950s, “the happy housewife heroine” had taken over: “The new mystique makes the housewife-mothers, who never had a chance to be anything else, the model for all women.”
Subsequent analysis, however, has not supported Friedan’s conclusions. Joanne Meyerowitz’s study of eight major magazines—ranging from the “highbrow” Harper’s to the “middlebrow” Reader’s Digest and including also Ladies’ Home Journal and Ebony—has revealed that articles spanning 1946-1958 typically presented a “joint endorsement of domestic and non-domestic roles,” celebrating “the woman who successfully combines motherhood and career.” Contrary to Friedan, Meyerowitz discovered that maternal roles received higher emphasis during the Depression years than in the postwar era, with careers outside the home commonly being exemplified for women during both periods. In other words, the success of The Feminine Mystique may be explained in part by its ability to ride the reinforcing wave of a “career mystique” already present in mid-century popular literature.
Long hours of hard work for paid employment away from one’s family somehow were—and today still are—expected to deliver the American dream, whether that dream be a house full of children in the suburbs or, as Friedan emphasized, the self-actualization of one’s individual identity. As a program of deferred gratification, the career mystique also guarantees a lifetime of income security, stretching into retirement, in exchange for the decades of labor during one’s prime. But this mystique seldom has delivered its promises. The success rate was highest among postwar middle-class professionals and unionized production workers, who unwittingly provided Friedan’s female readers some contemporary male models to emulate.
Friedan, however, was only setting women up for failure by replacing the feminine mystique with the career mystique, since the latter cannot exist apart from the former. As Phyllis Moen’s subsequent analysis has revealed, the outcomes once enjoyed by middle-class men never could be expanded across the population because “the feminine mystique provided the platform undergirding the career mystique. It is no accident that those most successful in climbing career ladders in business and in government have been men with either homemaking wives or else wives who put their own careers on the back burner.” Postwar careers—as codified by Social Security, healthcare, and retirement plan regulations—essentially required a 4o-hour (or longer) work week to be consistently maintained for four consecutive decades of one’s life. Because this schedule left precious little wiggle room for family caregiving by the working spouse, career success required a division of labor between the breadwinner and the homemaker. The career mystique and the feminine mystique were, therefore, not alternatives as Friedan suggested, but rather two sides of the same coin.
Nevertheless, many women—and a growing number of men—attempted during the late 20th Century to maximize their potentials simultaneously as a spouse, a parent, and an employee, only to discover that real wages were declining, as was the quality of their family relationships. Moreover, the declining earning power of men eroded their identities as family providers while women expanded into the role of co-breadwinner. But men also lacked something that the career mystique never had been able to provide them; in fact, their careers had long ago taken from them an important component of masculinity.
The Masculine Mystique
Three decades after Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, men’s-rights advocate Andrew Kimbrell published The Masculine Mystique: The Politics of Masculinity (1995). He begins by outlining a “hidden crisis” concerning “the grim condition of the American male.” Society brands men as self-interested, efficient, power-seeking, promiscuous, competitive, insensitive, and manipulative. This masculine mystique refuses to acknowledge traditional masculine traits, such as “generativity, stewardship, generosity, teaching, husbandry, [and] honor.” Lacking affirmation and guidance, men are failing. The gender-gap in life expectancies widened notably in the 1970s and 1980s (despite Friedan’s prediction that women’s employment would relieve men of the breadwinner burden and boost their longevity). Men’s lives are more vulnerable than women’s to heart, lung, and liver disease; to violent crime, including murder; to workplace injuries; to undiagnosed depression; and, to suicide.
But staying alive is just half the challenge, notes Kimbrell. Girls outperform boys in school, while boys are disproportionately medicated for hyperactivity, attention-deficit disorder, or other symptoms of maladaptation to classroom environments. Fewer men enroll in college than women; of those who enroll, women have a higher graduation rate. Women also outpace men in master’s programs, by an 18 percent spread. Meanwhile, men’s real wages are declining, while women’s wages are rising. About two-thirds of homeless people are male adults, as are 94 percent of the nation’s incarcerated criminals. “Millions of fathers,” laments Kimbrell, “have lost meaningful contact with their children as family courts discriminate against men in child custody decisions.”
Of course, most men are neither homeless nor imprisoned, and a slight majority of married men never get divorced. But even among those faring well, Kimbrell detects that “men are increasingly torn between the necessities of their job and their desire to have time for their families.” Yes—men, too, suffer from a problem that has no name.
Friedan had promised women that they could have it all—a career if only society would let them and a family if they wanted—but men are discovering this dream to be just as ephemeral for them as it has been for women. Why so out of reach? Perhaps because it is just as unnatural for men to pursue a career apart from their families as it is for women.
The separation of men, and men’s work, from the family may well be the most significant personal and social disruption men have ever had to face. For generations industrial society has been conducting an unparalleled anthropological experiment: What is the effect of virtual father absence on the family, children, and the redefinition of men’s role in society? … Boys have had to attempt to develop a masculine identity in the absence of a continuous and ongoing personal relationship with their fathers, uncles, or other male elders. . . . Thus boys’ major sources of instruction about the masculine derives from cultural images of masculinity promulgated by the masculine mystique.
Culturally pervasive images of manhood reduce half the human species to, at best, “productive, emotionless, competitive machines” or, at worst, promiscuous animals. Either way, precious few men model the virtues of “generative, caring fathers” to their own children, much less to the broader society.
Kimbrell’s analysis closely tracked that of Alexander Mitscherlich’s Society without the Father, which first had been published in 1963, the same year as The Feminine Mystique. Unfortunately for American women and men of Friedan’s generation, Mitscherlich wrote in German, not English, and his entire book laboriously navigated through psychoanalytic theories of mind and culture, whereas Friedan was apt enough to write a lucid opening chapter and save the erudition for the middle of her volume.
Originally entitled Auf dem Weg zur vaterlosen Gesellschaft (literally, On the Way toward a Fatherless Community), the 1991 English printing of Mitscherlich’s opus expressed in its translated title the fulfillment of the transition envisioned a generation earlier: Society without the Father.
By the 1990s, American (to say nothing of German) society had become fatherless in two significant respects. First, as Mitscherlich had warned in 1963, the “working, teaching father” had gone extinct, replaced by a father who still works, but now out of his children’s sight, and therefore he cannot teach because he is not present to model for them how work is done. Children of the industrial era have been raised typically by “invisible fathers,” by which Mitscherlich meant “the disappearance of the father image so closely associated with the roots of our civilization, and of the paternal instructive function. The imago of the working father is disappearing and becoming unknown.”
Mitscherlich made clear that he did not here mean only the occasional physical loss of a father due to divorce or death, but also the near universal social displacement of the psychological father who nurtures his sons in the discipline of meaningful labor. Mitscherlich ascribed the cause of this displacement chiefly to industrialization:
The progressive fragmentation of labour, combined with mass production and complicated administration, the separation of home from place of work, the transition from independent producer to paid employee who uses consumer goods, has led to a progressive loss of substance of the father’s authority and a diminution of his power in the family and over the family.
It is worth noting that “authority” and “power” in this context refer primarily to the father’s influence in shaping children’s identities during their formative years through shared productive activity, not to autocratic leadership as such. In fact, Mitscherlich, who suffered political persecution for his opposition to the Nazi movement, recognized in the family-present father a needed bulwark against totalitarianism in the state.
Mitscherlich next posited “fatherlessness of the second degree”: the disappearance of tangible, personal relationships from authority structures beyond the family. Children raised in the absence of a teaching father become absorbed into a mass “sibling society” in which an anonymous bureaucracy, not an authoritative individual, governs. The absence of identifiable leadership fosters a conformity that cannot easily be challenged, because one is not sure who is responsible for directing its course. Not only was Mitscherlich’s work insightful, it also was predictive. America has become that second-order fatherless society of neutered siblings seeking their individual shares of an egalitarian utopia.
By the century’s end, a generation of men who had never observed their fathers working—but at best had only seen them go away to work—had themselves become fathers of sons about to enter the uncharted territory of Guyland. Sociologist Michael Kimmel explains that Guyland is “a kind of suspended animation between boyhood and manhood,” broader and deeper and more perplexing to its inhabitants than the “adolescence” introduced a century earlier by psychologist G. Stanley Hall:
Guyland is the world in which young men live … unhassled by the demands of parents, girlfriends, jobs, kids, and other nuisances of adult life. In this topsy-turvy, Peter-Pan mindset, young men shirk the responsibilities of adulthood and remain fixated on the trappings of boyhood, while the boys they still are struggle heroically to prove that they are real men despite all evidence to the contrary.
Although Kimmel does not quite acknowledge this, Guyland is the millennial generation’s “sibling society,” a subculture of conformity in which young people try to become individuals but lack an appropriate model for male maturity. Kimmel denies that Guyland is “a case of prolonged adolescence,” and yet surely the aimless drift of today’s video-game playing college sophomores was unknown to pre-industrial societies in which boys became men by working with fathers and uncles who mentored them.
The Education Mystique
Like Friedan, Mitscherlich emphasized the importance of education, but beyond that facile comparison they shared little agreement. Friedan envisioned intensive “intellectual ‘shock therapy’” programs to prepare housewives to compete successfully against men in the job market. Bowing before the altar of the college diploma, she professed, “education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique.” Mitscherlich, by contrast, offered a child-centered view of education: “Society must educate itself to subordinating all competing interests to the education of the child.” He saw this task as “essential for the survival of the specifically human way of life in the fatherless mass society.” Nor was Mitscherlich’s “education” a utilitarian device for delivering information or skills to future employees; it was a formative enterprise, a lifestyle for shaping a child’s character by developing relationships of trust within the family and, by extension, the community.
Friedan brought to attention some things that needed to be re-thought. She opened some pathways for women’s education and employment that never should have been blocked in the first place. But, unfortunately, she structured the discussion in such a way that promising alternatives were overlooked during the generation that came of age reading her book. Wives and mothers left their homes for careers, rather than working with their husbands to bring productive labor back into the home; women thought it would be easier to put childbearing on hold while the career never paused, only to discover too late that fertility is easier to shut off than to turn back on; children, instead of spending plenty of time with mom and not enough with dad, soon found themselves spending hardly any time with either parent while being whisked from daycare to school to after-school care to sports practice to a future for which no one had ever modeled for them the commitment, cooperation, or constructive power of familial interdependence.
Beyond The Feminine Mystique
Fifty years after The Feminine Mystique, America needs not better career opportunities or expanded education for women, but a revival of domesticity among women, men, and their children. Public policies that encourage homeschooling, home entrepreneurship, family flextime in the workplace, and a shorter work week may prove more helpful than those that focus on gender equality in the labor market. To require employers to treat all workers identically simply reinforces the career mystique’s distorted view that a worker is a worker and nothing else. It was this ideology that displaced husbands from their wives, fathers from their children; lamentably, women in their quest for equality have embraced the same dream, realizing too late the social fragmentation it causes.
Insofar as Betty Friedan drew attention to the work-family tension felt by many women, she provided a valuable service, but unfortunately her critique of the feminine mystique played too easily into the hands of the career mystique.
As Stephanie Coontz has noted, “The career mystique is not the inevitable or the only way to organize work and family. Through most of history, workers didn’t balance work and family. They combined the two, integrating responsibilities rather than juggling them.” Mitscherlich reminds us that what was once true of work, also was true of education: character formation passed from parent to child through shared, meaningful activities. A revival of the “working, teaching parent” can rescue both masculinity and femininity from the modern mystiques of impoverished definitions that limit human flourishing.
Ryan C. MacPherson is Senior Editor of The Family in America. He teaches American history at Bethany Lutheran College in Mankato, Minnesota. This essay has been republished from The Family in America, a MercatorNet partner site, with permission.
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It's starting.....
****Washington state gets rid of sexist language
Claudine Zap July 3, 2013
Achieving gender-neutral language is no small task, says a Washington state lawmaker from Seattle. (Thinkstock …
In Washington state, the word "freshman" is out. And "first-year student" is in. In total, 40,000 words have been changed as part of an effort to rid state statutes of gender-biased language.
The bill, signed into law earlier in the year by Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee, went into effect this week.
And it was no small task. "This was a much larger effort than I had envisioned. Mankind means man and woman," Democratic state Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles of Seattle told Reuters.
"Fisherman" is now a "fisher." "Penmanship" is called "handwriting." And "manhole cover" is, well, still "manhole cover." Some words don’t have an easy replacement.
Others do: "His" is now “his and hers.” "Clergyman" is now "clergy." "Journeyman plumber" is now “journey-level plumber,” according to the Daily Mail.
According to Reuters, Washington is the fourth state to officially remove gender-biased language from the law. Others are Florida, North Carolina and Illinois. Nine other states are considering similar gender-neutral laws.
"Words matter," Liz Watson, a National Women's Law Center senior adviser, told Reuters. "This is important in changing hearts and minds."
France recently officially banned the term "mademoiselle" from official documents. The Gallic term means "miss," and French officials contended it forced women to acknowledge their marital status.
The French also bid adieu to "maiden name," which they dismissed as "archaic." They should know: Paris only recently got rid of a law that banned women from wearing pants.****
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/14/average-penis-size-american-men_n_3591649.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular
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I came across this article this morning:
http://ideas.time.com/2013/08/19/school-has-become-too-hostile-to-boys/ (http://ideas.time.com/2013/08/19/school-has-become-too-hostile-to-boys/)
Christina Hoff Sommers is an academic and advocate of boys. Her first book "Who Stole Feminism" is an objective analysis of the source materials used in certain arguments. She is not deprecating to women and believes that a failure to raise boys is actually a society and a women's issue.
I raised two boys and a step son who was slightly autistic and pegged with being ADHD. Education for boys has always drawn my interest.
Sommers is basicallly saying that they way schools are today punishes boys for their basic nature. She cites instances of boys who are very young being expelled for playing cops and robbers.
My own experience with schools as a teacher and as a parent are that school policy is usually based on minimizing problems and keeping things on an even keel. Very little actual policy goes into what might be best for kids though I know that there are a decent number of teachers who see such things and want to address them.
Its good to have an alternative plan.
I thought I would throw it out there....what would a school look like if it were designed to meet the needs of boys?
I spent a year homeschooling my two sons. In that year we focused on the practical skills...reading, writing, math. That took about 2 to 4 hours per day. Then we had adventures. We explored the woods, we went on canoe trips, we did martial arts, learned about firearms, archery, we climbed an old growth douglas fir tree to the very top using rock climbing gear and had lunch while we watched the forest. The boys built things out of wood. One project was to build a bridge that I could walk across using some logs and rope. We raised rabbits and they got to see what sex was all about by breeding them. This was by the way, hilarious. In that year, one of my boys discovered that he liked math. He advanced 2 years in math that year. My other sons discovered that he liked writing and art. He now works for an animated movie company as an animator/illustrator.
Part of the secret to education is identifying the gifts that kids have and simply saying "You are good at that" and then helping them to discover what they can do with who and what they are. The longer I taught, the more I realized that beyond the three Rs, the actual subject matter taught is almost superfluous when compared to the importance of getting kids to value their gifts and show them how to trust their own instincts about how and what they ought to be focusing on.
One idea in education is to mitigate weaknesses instead of building strengths. Practically speaking, when a kid is not so good in math, public schools have a system that acknowledges that to some extent and then tries to fix the problem. So a kid who may indeed have gifts may fly under the radar after being labeled with a problem. Very rarely does a parent teacher conference convene to discuss the discovery of a kids abilities in order to create a plan to allow the kid to engage in his passion.
This is true for boys and girls.
When it comes to boys, innate gifts are varied and diverse. In some respects I think that men have to go through a process similar to women where they question every role or preconceived notion of what they think they are in favor of discovering who they actually are. This was a large part of the original positive notion behind feminism. Throw off the roles and be who you are.
If men did that, they would discover a greater diversity in themselves, greater freedom to be. They would also be able to honor innate male characteristics...protector, provider alongside other skills and talents that are unique to the individual. I do not think that this happens now to any great extent. The approach in schools in particular are to mostly lump boys into a large preconception of what they are and unfortunately that is often filled with negative slants.
I know from my homeschooling experiment that boys need a huge amount of time to run their bags off. My sons barely stopped to breath all afternoon and during our adventures. If I gave them that, then they could strongly focus on the skill development that I felt was important as well. Though in my sons cases even within the basic skills they differed in their desire to focus and this did not hurt either one of them in the end. They each had their passions and we ran with those.
If you have strengths and weaknesses and you have X much time and energy to devote which will result in an increase in 10% in either the strength or the weakness, which would you focus on? If you focus on a weakness perhaps that weakness is at 70%. Then an addition 10% of effort will result in 80% and quite possibly a kid whose eyes are rolling into the back of their head with boredom. If you focus on their strengths, then an additional 10% of effort will raise a kid from 90 to 99.99999%. You get the idea. When schools focus on mitigating weaknesses, they are normalizing but that normalization is not necessarily what is best for the kid.
When they literally, as a result of policy turn away from certain kinds of passions and interests and behaviors that make many boys thrive they prevent boys from finding their passions. This part of the problem is not unique to boys but there is much more interest in helping girls to "be all that they can be" right now than to do the same for boys.
Cheers,
Karsk
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What is timely about this if anyone noticed my mentioning on another thread the recent lunch I had with four female relatives who opined (and whined) about it being a man's world used as their central example the allegation that women cannot get jobs being waitresses in high end fancy restaurants. The restaurant we were in was higher end and yes the servers were all waiters. A few days later I went with family to another high end restaurant (the second times in months) and true to their allegation all the servers were men. (though not mentioned many were possibly gay which is politically correct?). I am not sure why this is. I once thought that it was because traditionally men were the "bread" winners and it was felt like they had families to support. Certainly that may have been the excuse in ages past but today many women are the breadwinners. And why should that be the arbiter of who gets a serving job? :-o
*****Women Waiting Tables Provide Most of Female Gains in U.S.
By Ian Katz & Alex Tanzi - Sep 19, 2013 12:01 AM ET .
It’s almost 6 p.m. on a Friday and the tables near the bar at The Hamilton in downtown Washington are getting crowded. That means waitress Victoria Honard is busy.
Honard, 22, who graduated from Syracuse University in May, works about 25 hours a week at the restaurant while looking for a job related to public policy. She moved to Washington four days after graduation with the hope of finding a position at a think tank or policy-related organization, she said, and has applied to about 20 prospective employers.
Women Waiting Tables Provide Most of Female Gains in U.S.
A waitress serves customers at the Bouchon Bakery at The Shops at Columbus Circle mall in New York. Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg
Income Inequality Is Worldwide Issue, Swonk Says
Aug. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial Inc., and Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, talk about the U.S. labor market, wage growth and income inequality. They speak with Trish Regan on Bloomberg Television's "Street Smart." (Source: Bloomberg)
“The response has been minimal,” said Honard, whose degree focused on education, health and human services. “There are two ways of looking at it. I could be extremely frustrated and be bitter, or I can make the most of it, and I’m trying to take the latter approach.”
Unemployment data appear to reflect big advances for women. The jobless rate in August for females 20 years and older was 6.3 percent, the lowest since December 2008, compared with 7.1 percent for men. As recently as January, the rate was 7.3 percent for both genders, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The downside is that the gains have been largely in lower-paying industries such as waitresses, in-home health care, food preparation and housekeeping. About 60 percent of the increase in employment for women from 2009 to 2012 was in jobs that pay less than $10.10 an hour, compared with 20 percent for men, according to a study by the National Women’s Law Center using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Soft Spot
The numbers expose a soft spot in an economic recovery that has reduced the overall unemployment rate to 7.3 percent from 10 percent in October 2009. Quality of jobs is an increasing concern for U.S. policy makers and economists since it affects the level of incomes and wage disparities.
Of the 125,000 jobs women gained last month, 54,000 were in retail, leisure and hospitality, and just 24,000 in professional and business services. Many of those are part-time, 34 hours or less a week.
Food services and drinking places have added 354,000 jobs this year alone. “The place jobs have grown the most has been in these parts of the economy that women have traditionally filled more easily,” said Diane Swonk, who studies labor trends as chief economist for Mesirow Financial Inc. in Chicago.
Women have taken restaurant and retail jobs instead of teaching and other public-sector career positions that have disappeared, said Joan Entmacher, vice president for family economic security at the Washington-based law center. Females lost 444,000 public-sector jobs in the four years starting in June 2009, when the recession ended, compared with 290,000 for men.
Without Degrees
“They are taking jobs as baristas in Starbucks and other jobs that used to go to people without college degrees,” Entmacher said. “It’s an anecdote but it’s also a fact.”
Women who worked full-time in 2012 received $37,791 in median income, 77 percent of what men earned, the U.S. Census Bureau said in a report Sept. 17. That percentage has changed little since 2007. The number of men working full-time rose by 1 million from 2011 to 2012, while the change for women wasn’t statistically significant, according to the bureau’s data.
“The very definition of what it means to be middle class is being undercut by trends in our economy that must be addressed,” Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew said in a Sept. 17 speech in Washington. “These trends -- like the increase in income inequality and the decline in upward mobility -- did not happen overnight.”
Dropping Out
While students and recent graduates are taking low-wage jobs to get started, other women are turning them down. About 2 million married women have dropped out of the work force since 2008.
“If they’re in a two-income house they’re more willing to drop out and take care of the children because it costs too much for day care,” Swonk said.
Quality of jobs is tied directly to economic growth, she said.
“Growth is a magician when it comes to employment because it pulls people out of the woodwork that might not have worked otherwise and gives them an opportunity,” Swonk said. “We’re not going to have robust growth for a while.”
Education may eventually shift the trend in favor of women, who accounted for a record 52 percent of college graduates in 2012. They passed men in 2005 and have gradually increased the lead every year since.
Part-time Dentist
After finishing a one-year residency in New York, Monica Delwadia, a 29-year-old dentist, started working three days a week at a clinic in Leesburg, Virginia. She was married in July and moved in with her husband in Germantown, Maryland. Since Delwadia is licensed to work as dentist in Virginia and not in Maryland, she commutes 50 minutes to make the 33-mile drive each way to Leesburg.
“It seems to me there might be a little bit of an economy effect,” said Delwadia, who attended Emory University in Atlanta and went to the University of Tennessee’s College of Dentistry in Memphis. In better times, patients are more willing to pay for preventive and cosmetic work, she said.
“Now it’s more like, ‘This one tooth is bothering me. Let’s just take care of this, and I’ll call you if I want to do the rest of the work,’” she said.
Delwadia likes the clinic and said she hopes to pick up more hours. She said she also may eventually look for a second job at another dental office.
Bracing Themselves
Some students not yet in the workforce are bracing themselves for settling for jobs outside their area of study.
Alexandra Allmand, 22, said it might be difficult to find a position in human resources or recruiting when she graduates from George Washington University in December.
Allmand, who studies psychology, is a hostess at District Commons, a restaurant near the university’s campus in Washington. She said she will look for internships in addition to jobs “because I can’t be picky.”
For many workers in their 20s, “it’s catch-as-catch-can,” said Stephen Bronars, senior economist at Welch Consulting in Washington, who specializes in employment and labor issues. “The economy hasn’t really picked up enough to get all of them into full-time work.”
At the Hamilton, two blocks from the White House, Honard often waits on lawmakers and government officials, giving her a glimpse of people she would like to work with someday. This summer she served a member of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet, to whom she recommended a glass of New Zealand sauvignon blanc.
Waiting Tables
Though she doesn’t want to stick with it long-term, waiting tables comes easily to Honard. As soon as she turned 18, the minimum age for working where alcohol is served, she started as a waitress at Calamari’s Squid Row, the restaurant her parents own in Erie, Pennsylvania, where she grew up.
She decided to move to Washington because it’s an obvious destination for those working in public policy and she enjoyed the city during an internship with a charter school organization two summers ago.
Honard said she frequently searches Syracuse’s alumni program to scout for job openings and uses a network the university has on LinkedIn Corp. (LNKD)’s website.
“It’s a gradual process, and I try to be systematic about it,” she said. “I’m just lucky I have something to support myself in the meantime.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Ian Katz in Washington at ikatz2@bloomberg.net; Alexandre Tanzi in Washington at atanzi@bloomberg.net*****
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHcwoCy_ZHA#t=290
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Differences in How Men and Women Think Are Hard-Wired
Recent Studies Raise the Possibility That Male Brains Are Wired for Focus, Female Brains for Multitasking
By Robert Lee Hotz
Dec. 9, 2013 7:04 p.m. ET
Researchers are finding brains of women and men display distinctive differences that are shaped by the interplay of heredity, experience, and biochemistry. Science writer Robert Lee Hotz explains on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty Images.
So many things come down to connections—especially the ones in your brain.
Women and men display distinctive differences in how nerve fibers connect various regions of their brains, according to a half-dozen recent studies that highlight gender variation in the brain's wiring diagram. There are trillions of these critical connections, and they are shaped by the interplay of heredity, experience and biochemistry.
No one knows how gender variations in brain wiring might translate into thought and behavior—whether they might influence the way men and women generally perceive reality, process information, form judgments and behave socially—but they are sparking controversy.
"It certainly is incendiary," said Paul Thompson, a professor of neurology and director of the University of Southern California's Imaging Genetics Center. He is directing an effort to assemble a database of 26,000 brain scans from 20 countries to cross-check neuroimaging findings. "People who look at findings about sex differences are excited or enraged," he said.
Researchers are looking at the variations to explain the different ways men and women respond to health issues ranging from autism, which is more common among men, and multiple sclerosis, which is more common among women, to strokes, aging and depression. "We have to find the differences first before we can try to understand them," said Neda Jahanshad, a neurologist at USC who led the research while at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Dr. Jahanshad and her UCLA collaborators conducted a 2011 brain-imaging study of healthy twins, including 147 women and 87 men, to trace connections in the brain. She discovered "significant" sex differences in areas of the brain's frontal lobe, which is associated with self-control, speech and decision-making.
In the most comprehensive study so far, scientists led by biomedical analyst Ragini Verma at the University of Pennsylvania found the myriad connections between important parts of the brain developed differently in girls and boys as they grow, resulting in different patterns of brain connections among young women and young men.
The team imaged the brains of 949 healthy young people, 521 females and 428 males, ranging in age from 8 to 22. Like Dr. Jahanshad's team, Dr. Verma employed a technique called Diffusion Tensor Imaging to trace how water molecules align along the brain's white-matter nerve fibers, which form the physical scaffolding of thought. The study was reported earlier this month in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Enlarge Image
Pairs of scan images show gender differences in brain wiring in childhood (1), adolescence (2) and young adulthood (3). Male brains are on left, female on right. University of Pennsylvania, Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences.
The neural patterns emerged only when combining results from hundreds of people, experts said. In any one person, gender patterns may be subsumed by the individual variations in brain shape and structure that help make every person unique.
Dr. Verma's maps of neural circuitry document the brain at moments when it is in a fury of creation. Starting in infancy, the brain normally produces neurons at a rate of half a million a minute, and reaches out to make connections two million times a second. By age 5, brain size on average has grown to about 90% of adult size. By age 20, the average brain is packed with about 109,000 miles of white matter tissue fibers, according to a 2003 Danish study reported in the Journal of Comparative Neurology.
Spurred by the effects of diet, experience and biochemistry, neurons and synapses are ruthlessly pruned, starting in childhood. The winnowing continues in fits and starts throughout adolescence, then picks up again in middle age. "In childhood, we did not see much difference" between male and female, Dr. Verma said. "Most of the changes we see start happening in adolescence. That is when most of the male-female differences come about."
Broadly speaking, women in their 20s had more connections between the two brain hemispheres while men of the same age had more connective fibers within each hemisphere. "Women are mostly better connected left-to-right and right-to-left across the two brain hemispheres," Dr. Verma said. "Men are better connected within each hemisphere and from back-to-front."
That suggests women might be better wired for multitasking and analytical thought, which require coordination of activity in both hemispheres. Men, in turn, may be better wired for more-focused tasks that require attention to one thing a time. But the researchers cautioned such conclusions are speculative.
Experts also cautioned that subtle gender differences in connections can be thrown off by normal disparities in brain size between men and women and in the density of brain tissue. Other factors, such as whether one is left- or right-handed, also affect brain structure.
Also affecting results are differences in how computer calculations are carried out from one lab to the next. "With neuroimaging, there are so many ways to process the data that when you do process things differently and get the same result, it is fantastic," Dr. Jahanshad said.
Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com
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http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2013/12/28/
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http://modernwomandigest.com/disturbing-new-feminist-trend-free-bleeding/
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Christina Hoff Sommers writing online for Time magazine, March 11:
In 2009, David Geary, a University of Missouri psychologist, published the second edition of Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences. This thorough, fair-minded, and comprehensive survey of the literature includes more than 50 pages of footnotes citing studies by neuroscientists, endocrinologists, geneticists, anthropologists, and psychologists showing a strong biological basis for many gender differences. And, as Geary recently told me, "One of the largest and most persistent differences between the sexes is children's play preferences." The female preference for nurturing play and the male propensity for rough-and-tumble hold cross-culturally and even cross-species. Researchers have found, for example, that female vervet monkeys play with dolls much more than their brothers, who prefer balls and toy cars. Nor can human reality be tossed aside. In all known societies, women tend to be the nurturers and men the warriors. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker points to the absurdity of ascribing these universal differences to socialization: "It would be an amazing coincidence that in every society the coin flip that assigns each sex to one set of roles would land the same way."
Of course, we can soften and shape these roles, and that has been, in every epoch, the work of civilization. But civilization won't work against the grain of human nature, and our futile attempts to make it do so can only damage the children that are the subjects of the experiment.
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http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/11/the-bad-news-is-that-gentlemanly-behavior-makes-people-happy/
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http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/a_funny_thing_happened_on_the_way_to_gender_equality_in_norway
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I am glad the myth of the claim that some ridiculous numbers of women being sexually assaulted is starting to drip out. I have interviewed hundreds of female patients and while I agree rape of violent assault is not rare it is no where near the absurd numbers being thrown about by crazy fanatical liberals such as one out of two or three or four. These are numbers that include those who had a 24 year old reach for a breast in the movie theater being considered an assault or rape. Or worse even uncomfortable looks or even feeling uncomfortable around a man.
These numbers are so exaggerated. I ask women all the time these questions and the vast majority will reply no they were not sexually physically or emotionally abused.
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This could go under the humor thread I guess. Girls and steroids [don't mix]:
http://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/nfl/female-arm-wrestler-goes-nuts/vi-AA8bD2m
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A dissection of quantitative skills as they apply to differences in gender pay equity.
http://www.randalolson.com/2015/08/16/u-s-college-majors-median-yearly-earnings-vs-gender-ratio/
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A nice piece of work!
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The ‘Wage Gap’ Myth That Won’t Die
You have to ignore many variables to think women are paid less than men. California is happy to try.
ENLARGE
Photo: Getty Images
By Sarah Ketterer
Sept. 30, 2015 7:06 p.m. ET
364 COMMENTS
When it comes to economically foolish laws, California is second to none. A good example is the California Fair Pay Act, which Gov. Jerry Brown is expected to sign in coming days.
This bill, which the California senate unanimously passed in August, is a state version of the Paycheck Fairness Act that the U.S. Congress rejected in 2014. Like its national counterpart, it is an aggressive attempt to eradicate a wage gap between men and women that is allegedly due to discrimination in the workplace. But this wage gap is illusory, and the legislation will have unintended consequences, including for women.
The Fair Pay Act will prohibit employers from paying men and women different wages for “substantially similar work.” At first glance, this prohibition might appear reasonable: Government data for 2014 show that women in California earn, on average, 84 cents for every dollar earned by men. (Nationally, women earn about 79 cents for every dollar earned by men.)
But a closer look reveals a different picture. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) notes that its analysis of wages by gender does “not control for many factors that can be significant in explaining earnings differences.”
What factors? Start with hours worked. Full-time employment is technically defined as more than 35 hours. This raises an obvious problem: A simple side-by-side comparison of all men and all women includes people who work 35 hours a week, and others who work 45. Men are significantly more likely than women to work longer hours, according to the BLS. And if we compare only people who work 40 hours a week, BLS data show that women then earn on average 90 cents for every dollar earned by men.
Career choice is another factor. Research in 2013 by Anthony Carnevale, a Georgetown University economist, shows that women flock to college majors that lead to lower-paying careers. Of the 10 lowest-paying majors—such as “drama and theater arts” and “counseling psychology”—only one, “theology and religious vocations,” is majority male.
Conversely, of the 10 highest-paying majors—including “mathematics and computer science” and “petroleum engineering”—only one, “pharmacy sciences and administration,” is majority female. Eight of the remaining nine are more than 70% male.
Other factors that account for earnings differences include marriage and children, both of which cause many women to leave the workforce for years. June O’Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, concluded in a 2005 study that “there is no gender gap in wages among men and women with similar family roles.” Time magazine reported in 2010 that in 98% of America’s largest 150 cities, including my hometown of Los Angeles, single women under 30 actually earned, on average, 8% more than their male counterparts.
Ms. O’Neill and her husband concluded in their 2012 book, “The Declining Importance of Race and Gender in the Labor Market,” that once all these factors are taken into account, very little of the pay differential between men and women is due to actual discrimination, which is “unlikely to account for a differential of more than 5 percent but may not be present at all.”
What California’s Fair Pay Act will do, however, is make the state, already notorious for regulation and red tape, a more difficult place to do business. Companies must now ensure that every penny of wage differential between the men and women they employ is attributable to bona-fide differences in education, training, experience, quantity or quality of work, and so on. Referring to the countless factors at play, Harvard economist Claudia Goldin has said “it’s not checkable.” Yet even attempting to do so will only add to companies’ already substantial regulatory-compliance budgets.
Some of these factors—quality of work, for instance—are inevitably subjective, yet trial lawyers will swoop in to turn every conceivable pay difference into a lawsuit. Employers who cannot “prove” objectively that one employee’s work was better than another’s may face costly penalties. Many will surely pay to settle these lawsuits instead of taking them to court.
All of this money would be better spent by businesses to hire more workers or raise wages, including for countless women. Ms. Goldin has even suggested that women’s employment could decline.
Such are the unintended consequences that may accompany this feel-good but ultimately foolish law. As Gov. Brown prepares to sign the California Fair Pay Act, he should ask himself a simple question: Does he really want to put women at an actual disadvantage while attempting to eliminate an imagined one?
Ms. Ketterer is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Causeway Capital Management.
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http://takimag.com/article/smashing_through_the_glass_coffin_jim_goad/print#ixzz3x8fENGbj
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This is not rare. Indeed, it somewhat common after abuse. The abuser will, when in view of health personnel, go out of his way to seem like the doting husband. Not only to fool the health care workers but to be present to intimidate the wife from talking:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/woman-wakes-from-coma-and-accuses-bedside-084842810.html
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This is not rare. Indeed, it somewhat common after abuse. The abuser will, when in view of health personnel, go out of his way to seem like the doting husband. Not only to fool the health care workers but to be present to intimidate the wife from talking:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/woman-wakes-from-coma-and-accuses-bedside-084842810.html
All about control. However, the first time a spouse suffers abuse, they are a victim, after that, they are a volunteer.
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https://howtotalkaboutarthistory.wordpress.com/2015/08/30/why-do-all-old-statues-have-such-small-penises/
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This very angry woman gets big space time on Huffington Post. I wonder if she is "for her":
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kasey-rosehodge/dear-creepy-heterosexual-men-guarding-our-bathrooms_b_10105512.html?1464092300
I would like to add that this is strong evidence this person is the kind of person who is really behind the scenes driving this stuff. It is the angry feminists who are pushing for the eradication of the concept of "gender". It ain't about transexuals or BR rules etc.
This is radical feminism trying to transform everything about gender identity.
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This very angry woman gets big space time on Huffington Post. I wonder if she is "for her":
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kasey-rosehodge/dear-creepy-heterosexual-men-guarding-our-bathrooms_b_10105512.html?1464092300
I would like to add that this is strong evidence this person is the kind of person who is really behind the scenes driving this stuff. It is the angry feminists who are pushing for the eradication of the concept of "gender". It ain't about transexuals or BR rules etc.
This is radical feminism trying to transform everything about gender identity.
This is about Marxism trying to destroy a culture so it can be remade.
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Megyn Kelly was also a victim of Roger Ailes. Well judging from her prime time show and salary we should all feel bad for her:
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/roger-ailes-fox-news-gabe-sherman/2016/08/31/id/746116/
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20 million?
Her greatest business move yet. No doubt well planned and coordinated.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/carlson-settles-lawsuit-against-ailes-135545170.html?ref=gs
The best boss a woman can have is one that makes sexual advances on her. This is the blueprint for success. Just hit record on your I phone.
I wonder if he just asked her for a date? Though she is married......
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https://www.yahoo.com/tv/geraldo-rivera-filled-regret-defending-042717183.html
I agree with Geraldo here but this? This? The sexual harassment will be the best thing that has ever happened to them:
"among them former The Five co-host Andrea Tantaros, who has filed a nearly $50 million sexual harassment lawsuit."
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440199/sexual-assault-v-j-day-1945
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“I bet you look good in a bikini,” and other assorted offensive comments are worth millions according to Tantaros. If this were all the case Greta VanSustren should sue Fox/Alieles for not coming on to her. What because she doesn't look good in a bikini she can't sue now? Is not that some form of discrimination? Ailes could have saved a lot of money simply googling her picture in a bikini.
https://www.google.com/search?q=tantaros&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiqn_v68bLPAhWJeD4KHZqcCrwQiR4IhgE&biw=1440&bih=803#imgrc=Ne_dVbyF7Me5-M%3A
Andrea Tantaros sues Fox NewsHENRY LAMB
SEPTEMBER 28, 2016 | 07:06AM PT
The attorney for former Fox News Channel personality Andrea Tantaros said Wednesday the host had turned down a settlement offer in the “seven figures” and would continue to press her case alleging harassment by senior executives at the 21st Century Fox-owned cable-news outlet.
The legal development threatens to fan the flames of a controversy that the network and its parent hope to extinguish: Roger Ailes, the leader of the network and architect of its popular and influential programming, was ousted in July in the wake of a lawsuit filed by former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson alleging sexual harassment by the executive. He has denied the charges, but multiple female Ailes employees both current and former stepped forward alleging similar charges of unwelcome and sexually charged behavior by Ailes.
“As has been widely reported, Fox News previously offered Ms. Tantaros seven figures to renounce her harassment claims against Ailes (and others) in exchange for her eternal silence,” said Judd Burstein, a lawyer representing Tantaros in the matter, in a statement. ” She summarily refused their offer, and believes that any settlement must provide for the cleaning up of Fox News, a task that has regrettably fallen squarely on her shoulders.”
“We stand by our earlier motion to compel arbitration,” Fox News said in a statement.
Tantaros in August filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court of the State of New York alleging senior executives at the network retaliated against her after she complained about being inappropriate remarks made to her by Ailes, the former chairman and chief executive of the network. In the document, the former co-host of Fox News shows like “The Five” and “Outnumbered”alleged Ailes made demeaning remarks to her, such as “I bet you look good in a bikini,” and also asked inappropriate questions about her romantic life as well as the lives of other Fox News staffers. When Tarantos and her representatives complained to senior Fox News executives, the suit alleges, the anchor was first moved to the daytime program “Outnumbered’ from “The Five,” and was told to cease her complaints because it was likely she would not prevail. The suit seeks as much as $23 million, as well as $26 million in punitive damages and reimbursement of attorney fees.
The attorney released a deposition from Dr. Michele Burdy, a clinical psychologist who once treated Tantaros, and who related a number of instances from her sessions with the news personality in which she detailed some of the allegations she made in her suit.
21st Century Fox reached a settlement said to be valued at around $20 million with Carlson earlier this month.
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https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/09/modern-feminism-lies-bullies-and-whiners-oh-my
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/19/arts/design/those-lips-those-eyes-that-stubble-the-transformative-power-of-men-in-makeup.html?_r=2
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/19/arts/design/those-lips-those-eyes-that-stubble-the-transformative-power-of-men-in-makeup.html?_r=2
Life in the Obama era.
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Oh this is just so romantic:
http://nypost.com/2016/10/22/eleanor-roosevelts-mistress-died-heartbroken-and-alone/
I guess we can read a similar story some years from now about Hill and her lover(s). :roll:
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I would also add that women veiw men by their sex appeal. Who gets all the girls in school? The jocks. What is that all about if not the same kind of attraction that men have for women?
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442993/men-see-women-sex-objects-its-not-misogynist-its-reality
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"The march — organizers are careful to call it a “rally” and not a “protest” — was originally cooked up to coincide with the inauguration of Donald Trump. Alas, thanks to obsessive left-wing identity politics, it has morphed into yet another exhausting episode of “Which college-educated woman who resides in the richest country on earth and who was also just profiled in a glowing Vogue puff piece is the most oppressed person in the room?”
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443741/womens-march-feminists-oppose-donald-trump-struggle-agree-how
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wanna share a couple of articles with amazing photos by National Geographic as usual. interesting insight
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/01/how-rites-of-passage-shape-masculinity-gender/
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/proof/2016/12/hog-hunting-masculinity-boyhood-photography/
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Andy:
Two excellent finds!
Please post here:
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=2101.50
Thank you,
the Thread Nazi :-D
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When scientifically and accurately controlling for extraneous factors there is NO wage gap. The will not stop the SJW (of course) from their politiking. We here screeching from the LEFT who the RiIGHT ignores science. Well here they ignore science:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446397/equal-pay-day-bogus-math
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When scientifically and accurately controlling for extraneous factors there is NO wage gap. The will not stop the SJW (of course) from their politiking. We here screeching from the LEFT who the RiIGHT ignores science. Well here they ignore science:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446397/equal-pay-day-bogus-math
I've written a thesis on this. Nearly every single talking point the feminists have that has any weight to it, is from a third world country, and in first world countries, I've proven two things:
1.) That feminists still lie and that men are actually far worse off.
2.) That the governments know, through their own statistics, problems the PLAGUE men, and they do nothing, because of the revenue involved.
That's the truth of it.
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Women in their 20s earn more than men of same age, study finds (2015)
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-earn-more-men-same-age-study-finds
Workplace Salaries: At Last, Women on Top (2010)
http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.html
As DDF says, feminists still lie about it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/06/07/first-lady-michelle-obama-teams-up-with-oprah-to-host-united-state-of-women-summit-at-white-house/?utm_term=.bdb31976b034
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Women in their 20s earn more than men of same age, study finds (2015)
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-earn-more-men-same-age-study-finds
Workplace Salaries: At Last, Women on Top (2010)
http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.html
As DDF says, feminists still lie about it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/06/07/first-lady-michelle-obama-teams-up-with-oprah-to-host-united-state-of-women-summit-at-white-house/?utm_term=.bdb31976b034
And as par for the course, in every article that you posted, each disparity in gender, is never an issue and minimized, when it is in favour of the female - “The slight salary imbalance in favour of women early on in their careers is particularly interesting, and makes that drop-off point in women’s careers and salaries all the more stark.” - Ann Pickering, HR director at telecoms company O2 .... men have to wait a decade to make more.
“Sadly, the opposite is true: once you get to a certain level, it’s a full-time role, which excludes many women from roles they would be perfectly capable of doing.” Sam Smethers, chief executive of the Fawcett Society ... why don't men get those jobs while working part time?
Smethers described the decline in income as a worrying trend. “Women have been suffering [from the economic downturn] more than men because they had even less job security,” she said. “They were more at risk and thus worse hit when the recession struck.”
Because they have men and welfare to take care of them?
"147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group. [...] The change in the status quo has been marked enough that several erstwhile women's advocates have started to voice concerns about how to get more men to go to college. Is there an equivalent to Title IX for men?"
There's not. They know it. There is nothing any of them will really do about it, because they are not about to relinquish power.
Fun fact: The State of New Hampshire had a Government Commission on the Status of Men. It ws the only government agency or commission dedicated to problems of the male gender by definition, that I have ever encountered in any of my studies. Women have literally thousands of them, and in every country in the world.
It was discontinued due to budget concerns.
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http://dailysignal.com/2017/05/17/feminism-drives-people-deny-basic-facts
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http://nypost.com/2017/05/30/huma-abedin-has-invited-anthony-weiner-back-home/
This is the first step back towards rehabilitation - not about his private life but his public one. Expect him to run for an office again.
These kinds of Dems will never go away till they die . Like the Clintons. Like Baraq. They are life long emotionally needing to force themselves on everyone else.
I would be happy to be wrong but I doubt it.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNoUEB6mgK8
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T3qoBjzRMs
Not on Netflix. The left is trying to suppress the film. It's well worth watching.
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http://www.fayobserver.com/news/20170622/nc-law-woman-cant-back-out-of-sex-once-underway
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http://yournewswire.com/women-dna-man-sex/
Looking for confirmation here , , ,
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http://yournewswire.com/women-dna-man-sex/
Looking for confirmation here , , ,
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0045592
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You are awesome!
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Lets see. This married women and mother of two was "coerced" into having "affair" with Charles Payne, and continued having sex with him for 3 yrs, all the while thinking she would get a job at Fox for doing so.
When that does not happen, and after reading about the windfalls so many women are getting suing Fox, she turns around decides to sue Fox for "sexual harassment" and expects big buckeroos
What a freakin scam!!!
unless the info we read is wrong. :|
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http://mma-core.com/v/10141273
http://www.fitnessandpower.com/fitness-stories/videos/she-took-incredible-doses-of-male-hormones-heres-what-she-looks-like-today
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I don't know if the claims against Moore are true but if he just waited till the girls were 18 yo he could have been lionized with others who were predators like Hefner, Clinton, and JFK:
http://www.newsweek.com/kim-kardashian-and-paris-hilton-lead-celebrity-tributes-playboy-founder-hugh-673047
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I don't know if the claims against Moore are true but if he just waited till the girls were 18 yo he could have been lionized with others who were predators like Hefner, Clinton, and JFK:
http://www.newsweek.com/kim-kardashian-and-paris-hilton-lead-celebrity-tributes-playboy-founder-hugh-673047
If Moore was an avid supporter of abortion, none of this would be an issue.
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When does this become slander?
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/sexual-misconduct-hollywood-summed-one-shocking-infographic-220323215.html
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Slander is oral, Libel is printed. :-D
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http://video.foxnews.com/v/5747284741001/?playlist_id=5198073478001#sp=show-clips
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExhlNHRnh0s
==================================================
18 hrs ·
You hear a lot in America about the "war on women," but it's men in America who are failing. We have some shocking statistics:
The signs are everywhere. If you’re a middle aged man, you probably know a peer who has killed himself in recent years. At least one. If you’re a parent, you may have noticed that your daughter’s friends seem a little more on the ball than your son’s. They get better grades. They smoke less weed. They go to more prestigious colleges. If you’re an employer, you may have noticed that your female employees show up on time, whereas the young men often don’t. And of course if you live in this country, you’ve just seen a horrifying series of mass shootings, far more than we’ve ever had. Women didn’t do that. In every case, the shooter was a man.
Something ominous is happening to men in America. Everyone who pays attention knows that. What’s odd is how rarely you hear it publicly acknowledged. Our leaders pledge to create more opportunities for women and girls, whom they imply are failing. Men don’t need help. They’re the patriarchy. They’re fine. More than fine.
But are they fine? Here are the numbers:
Start with the most basic, life and death. The average American man will die five years before the average American woman. One of the reasons for this is addiction. Men are more than twice as likely as women to become alcoholics. They’re also twice as likely to die of a drug OD. In New Hampshire, one of the states hit hardest by the opioid crisis, 73 percent of overdose deaths were men.
But the saddest reason for shortened life spans is suicide. Seventy-seven percent of all suicides are committed by men. The overall rate is increasing at a dramatic pace. Between 1997 and 2014, there was a 43 percent rise in suicide deaths among middle aged American men. The rates are highest among American Indian and white men, who kill themselves at about ten times the rate of Hispanic and black women.
You often hear of America’s incarceration crisis. That’s almost exclusively a male problem too. Over 90 percent of inmates are male.
These problems are complex, and they start young. Relative to girls, boys are failing in school. More girls than boys graduate high school. Considerably more go to and graduate from college. Boys account for the overwhelming majority of school discipline cases. One study found that fully one in five high school boys had been diagnosed with hyperactivity disorder, compared with just one in 11 girls. Many were medicated for it. The long term health effects of those medications aren’t fully understood, but they appear to include depression in later life.
Women decisively outnumber men in graduate school. They earn the majority of doctoral degrees. They are now the majority of new enrollees in both law and medical schools.
For men, the consequences of failing in school are profound. Between 1979-2010, working age men with only high school degrees saw their real hourly wages drop about 20 percent. Over the same period, high school educated women saw their wages rise. The decline of the industrial economy disproportionately hurt men.
There are now seven million working age American men who are no longer in the labor force. They’ve dropped out. Nearly half of them take pain medication on any given day. That’s the highest rate in the world.
Far fewer young men get married than did just a few decades ago, and fewer stay married. About one in five American children live with only their mothers. That’s double the rate in 1970. Millions more boys are growing up without fathers. Young adult men are now more likely to live with a parent than with a spouse or partner. That is not the case for young women. Single women buy their own homes at more than twice the rate of single men. More women than men now have drivers licenses.
Whenever gender differences come up in public debate, the so-called wage gap dominates the conversation. A woman makes 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That’s the statistic you’ll hear. It’s repeated everywhere. But that number compares all American men to all American women across all professions. No legitimate social scientist would consider that a valid measure. The number is both meaningless and intentionally misleading. It’s a talking point.
Once you compare men and women with similar experience working the same hours in similar jobs for the same period of time — and that’s the only way you can measure it — the gap all but disappears. In fact it may invert. One study using census data found that single women in their 20s living in metropolitan areas now earn eight percent more on average than their male counterparts. By the way, the majority of managers are now women. Women on average are scoring higher on IQ tests than men are.
Men are even falling behind physically. A recent study found that almost half of young men failed the Army's entry-level physical fitness test during basic training. Fully seventy percent of American men are overweight or obese, as compared to 59 percent of American women.
Perhaps most terrifyingly, men seem to be becoming less male. Sperm counts across the west have plummeted, down almost 60 percent since the early 1970s. Scientists don’t know why. Testosterone levels in men have also fallen precipitously. One study found that the average levels of male testosterone dropped by one percent every year after 1987. This is unrelated to age. The average 40-year-old-man in 2017 would have testosterone levels 30 percent lower than the average 40-year-old man in 1987.
There is no upside to this. Lower testosterone levels in men are associated with depression, lethargy, weight gain and decreased cognitive ability. Nothing like this has ever happened. You’d think we’d want to know what exactly is going on and how to fix it. But the media ignore the story. It’s considered a fringe topic.
Nor is it a priority in the scientific research establishment. We checked and couldn’t find a single NIH-funded study on why testosterone levels are falling. We did find a study on, quote, “Pubic Hair Grooming Prevalence and Motivation Among Women in the United States.”
Those are the numbers. They paint a very clear picture: American men are failing, in body, mind and spirit. This is a crisis. Yet our leaders pretend it’s not happening. They tell us the opposite is true: Women are victims, men are oppressors. To question that assumption is to risk punishment. Even as women far outpace men in higher education, virtually every college campus supports a women’s studies department, whose core goal is to attack male power. Our politicians and business leaders internalize and amplify that message. Men are privileged. Women are oppressed. Hire and promote and reward accordingly.
That would be fine if it were true. But it’s not true. At best, it’s an outdated view of an America that no longer exists. At worst, it’s a pernicious lie.
Either way, ignoring the decline of men doesn’t help anyone. Men and women need each other. One cannot exist without the other. That’s elemental biology, but it’s also the reality each of us has lived, with our parents and siblings and friends. When men fail, all of us suffer. How did this happen? How can we fix it? We hope this series answers those questions. #Tucker Fox News
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https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/43y99g/men-legally-allowed-to-finish-sex-even-if-woman-revokes-consent-nc-law-states?utm_campaign=sharebutton
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/08/male-physical-decline-masculinity-threatened/
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https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/06/women-see-more-workplace-rudeness-from-other-women-than-from-men.html?__source=sharebar|facebook&par=sharebar
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" https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/06/women-see-more-workplace-rudeness-from-other-women-than-from-men.html?__source=sharebar|facebook&par=sharebar"
it was noticed by many nurses that female doctors were often much harder on the female nurses then male doctors .
one theory was the women doctors felt they had to prove themselves more but I don't know it that was it or not.
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http://quillette.com/2018/04/12/training-masculinity-children/
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https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/5-things-most-men-have-to-learn-the-hard-way-in-life/?utm_source=PJMCoffeeBreak&utm_medium=email&utm_term=May2018
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU7AewaHr0Q
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqLtEBVkZpA
also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzhnPJxh5VA
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Yeah right. Who would go there to listen to somebody answer questions like "how would you change the world for the better?' Or for some other lib type politically correct question looking for the best polliticaly correct answer:
http://time.com/5303443/miss-america-swimsuit-competition-history/
Truth be told I haven't watched in long time.
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who just happens to looks like Alicia Silverstone:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5840895/High-school-teacher-26-accused-having-sex-student.html
If only I was so lucky at 16..........
She shouldn't expect a 16 yo to keep his mouth shut about this ...... :wink:
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https://www.popsci.com/pregnancy-re-wires-brains-moms-to-be?CMPID=ene070118
Difficult question: What implications for a society where many women do not become mothers?
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https://www.popsci.com/pregnancy-re-wires-brains-moms-to-be?CMPID=ene070118
Difficult question: What implications for a society where many women do not become mothers?
Look at europe today. Plunging birthrates and a lot of lefty catladies destroying their nations from within. See German Hillary as a perfect example.
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https://www.popsci.com/pregnancy-re-wires-brains-moms-to-be?CMPID=ene070118
Difficult question: What implications for a society where many women do not become mothers?
Look at europe today. Plunging birthrates and a lot of lefty catladies destroying their nations from within. See German Hillary as a perfect example.
https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/dying-europes-leaders-have-no-children/news-story/9e0106b5ea1a6d05e39a57caf883db5d
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/style/mens-rights-movement.html
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/style/mens-rights-movement.html
Damn right!
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https://quillette.com/2018/07/09/on-toxic-femininity/?fbclid=IwAR2FrxAztGHwRw6rRUgrSazO_qpMzJGNKBk8D7oCoU8W6nVw-l_ZMjDKgZs
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second post
https://www.foxsports.com.au/afl/hannah-mouncey-granted-permission-by-afl-to-play-in-vflw-for-2018-season/news-story/c2d664424ac1f9b078ed7412d3bc2094?fbclid=IwAR2JEsqVaKekVwt7hAdcRLUrSyxOfPk1qlqyynp3xBRBa5EiqpYbwoLLA6I
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR5EY6UpMlA
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William wrote: "“They find that male train and bus drivers worked about 83 percent more overtime than their female colleagues and were twice as likely to accept an overtime shift—which pays time-and-a-half—on short notice and that around twice as many women as men never took overtime. The male workers took 48 percent fewer unpaid hours off under the Family Medical Leave Act each year. Female workers were more likely to take less desirable routes if it meant working fewer nights, weekends, and holidays. Parenthood turns out to be an important factor. Fathers were more likely than childless men to want the extra cash from overtime, and mothers were more likely to want time off than childless women. “The gap of $0.89 in our setting,” the authors concluded, “can be explained entirely by the fact that, while having the same choice sets in the workplace, women and men make different choices.”
READ MORE IN LINK: https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Ffee.org%2Farticles%2Fharvard-study-gender-pay-gap-explained-entirely-by-work-choices-of-men-and-women&h=AT2amhxxFgQaFoMVTjYb-S3xGXJHIZVsvWrdqU7lY5SBx7k5UTErS3otOJrtEfHk2CiR48JDK9E9wOsbgxH7KTWTo_2JW-qfdKkXA03cFlJzID6wz-nklJ8xfp7QkxMAAJsf8xstT-tIYeX746M"
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The income gap is zero when you compare people with equal circumstances.
Women have a huge advantage going forward if you believe college is where learning occurs.
College class of 2017 is 58.5% women, 41.5% men, (0% other).
http://www.aei.org/publication/prediction-no-2017-graduation-speaker-will-mention-this-the-growing-gender-college-degree-gap-favoring-women/
Look at STEM degrees and those percentages more than flip. Who is steering the best and brightest women into social justice gender equity degrees instead of tech and curing brain cancer?
Inner City Education: Poor Girls Are Leaving Their Brothers Behind
As a college education becomes increasingly important in today’s economy, it’s girls, not boys, who are succeeding in school.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/11/gender-education-gap/546677/
But within STEM you have Alexandria Ocasio who has a $280,000 degree from Boston University, tended bar in 2017 and doesn't know diddly about economics. What she does know isn't so. Apparently they don't get to capitalism in the first four years of economics. Why don't they just call it a B.S. in indoctrination?
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" The income gap is zero when you compare people with equal circumstances."
For some time now I kept hearing that women make less the male doctors.
I am thinking how is that even possible when income is based on insurance medicare rates etc
An article some months came back from a gender warrior about how academic women are being paid maybe 5 to 10 % less then male counterparts in , get this, -
ACADEMIA!!
IF true, then how ironic the academics who are the propagandists for social justice are the very group that may be paying those with vaginas less then those with penises.
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Did Chivalry Go Down With the Titanic?
Social evolutions of the past century have dashed apart old sex roles and notions of self-sacrifice.
263 Comments
By Lance Morrow
In Andrew Roberts’s fine new biography of Winston Churchill, I found a letter the great man wrote to his wife, Clementine, just after the Titanic sank in 1912.
Churchill remarked that the behavior of the male passengers “reflects nothing but honour upon our civilization.”
He wrote: “I cannot help feeling proud of our race and its traditions as proved by this event. Boatloads of women and children tossing on the sea safe and sound—and the rest—silence. Honour to their memory. . . . How differently imperial Rome or Ancient Greece would have settled the problem. The swells, the potentates would have gone off with their concubines and pet slaves and soldier guards . . . whoever could bribe the crew would have had the preference and the rest could go to hell. But such ethics could neither build Titanics with science nor lose them with honour.”
The passage is majestic, Churchillian and, on close inspection, not quite accurate in its understanding of what happened that night. Some male passengers behaved badly, and it might have been only the ship’s officers directing the loading of the boats who kept the male passengers back until the women and children were seated. The captain froze in dismay but had the good grace to go down with the ship; the chairman of the White Star Line, J. Bruce Ismay, got onto one of the lifeboats and survived, somewhat to his shame.
Still, bearing Churchill’s chivalric version in mind, it’s hard to resist wondering how men and women in 2018 would behave if their ship were to strike an iceberg. Women and children first? Stiff upper lip as the cold North Atlantic closes over gentlemen in dinner jackets? “Nearer, My God, to Thee”?
Churchill’s Kiplingesque reference to “our race and its traditions” would seem offensive now. Would the social evolutions of the past century, including recent politics of gender, have any bearing on the behavior of men and women and on the life-or-death choices they made on the deck of a sinking ship? Or is human behavior in these matters—courage or cowardice, selfishness or sacrifice—an unchangeable basic over the centuries, unaffected by politics or ideology?
Would men today feel the same imperative of self-sacrifice as they did in 1912? Would female passengers be inclined to reject such male selflessness as sexist? Or is ideology moot once you hit an iceberg? Would today’s women—to prove they can die as selflessly as men—offer their places in the lifeboats to men? Would such a gesture parse ideologically?
Or, in the absence of the old gentility—under which men were expected to hold the door for women, to rise when they entered the room, and to give up their seats in lifeboats—would the simpler principle of dog-eat-dog assert itself? Would men and women fight tooth and nail on an equal basis over the chance to go on living? Is it possible that the doctrine of equality has, among other things, relieved the male of his duty to behave like a gentleman and left him free to be a cad?
At the time the Titanic went down, William Howard Taft was president—a good and sweet-natured man who weighed more than 300 pounds, enough to sink a ship by himself: a white elephant of the old decencies. Taft undoubtedly would have seen to the safety of women and children and then retired to share the fate of John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim and other gentlemen who went down that night. Taft’s predecessor, Teddy Roosevelt, would have been gaudily masculine in his martyrdom. Taft’s successor, Woodrow Wilson, would have slid beneath the waters—a saint of gothic countenance. Those three presidents had been raised in the ideals of bourgeois knightliness. The man’s duty was to give his life, if necessary. The woman’s duty was to live, for the sake of the children.
When I read Churchill’s comment on the behavior of the men on the Titanic, I could not help thinking of Donald Trump. The Titanic was launched on a wave of Trumpian hyperbole in 1912 as the greatest, most luxurious, most beautiful liner ever built—and the safest. It sounded like a Trump project. Mr. Trump could have imagined himself at the helm of the great ship setting forth—“glorying in his glory,” in Homer’s phrase.
But what next? What if his great project were hull-gashed and sinking? How would Mr. Trump behave? (How would you? How would I?)
Noblesse oblige is not an entirely obsolete moral style, but it has been to a degree discredited as elitist preening and even as a form of oppression. It was a borrowed British reflex anyway, never an absolutely American one, except as preached by Groton’s headmaster, Endicott Peabody, to boys like Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Of Mr. Trump, who can say? He has become a litmus and a Rorschach test. His enemies are certain he would push women and children aside and claim the biggest lifeboat for himself. Drowning, after all, is for losers.
But that’s the predictable answer. Mr. Trump’s reflexes are unusual. In a previous life, he was Stanley Kowalski. He comes from a different part of the American forest—from somewhere beyond the mountains, so to speak, a region of American defiance more authentic and primitive and disreputable than the instincts of the bien-pensant.
He has a talent—a compulsion—to surprise. His election was a wildly unexpected American evolution and his political apotheosis has bent American presidential history toward magic realism—a game in which he makes his own rules and plays the Tasmanian devil. It is at least possible that, in an ultimate gesture of effrontery, he would choose to go down with the ship. Even in death, the pleasures of confounding one’s enemies may be delicious—metaphysical.
Mr. Morrow, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a former essayist for Time.
Appeared in the December 15, 2018, print edition.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D6iu-1B-BI
"None of you have to go, but we are the only help they have."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cajun-navy-volunteers-help-evacuate-north-carolina-nursing-home-residents/
How many of the above are Republican, NRA members and members of a Christian denomination? Probably about 100% I'd guess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KrQsVKcjC0
Did Chivalry Go Down With the Titanic?
Social evolutions of the past century have dashed apart old sex roles and notions of self-sacrifice.
263 Comments
By Lance Morrow
In Andrew Roberts’s fine new biography of Winston Churchill, I found a letter the great man wrote to his wife, Clementine, just after the Titanic sank in 1912.
Churchill remarked that the behavior of the male passengers “reflects nothing but honour upon our civilization.”
He wrote: “I cannot help feeling proud of our race and its traditions as proved by this event. Boatloads of women and children tossing on the sea safe and sound—and the rest—silence. Honour to their memory. . . . How differently imperial Rome or Ancient Greece would have settled the problem. The swells, the potentates would have gone off with their concubines and pet slaves and soldier guards . . . whoever could bribe the crew would have had the preference and the rest could go to hell. But such ethics could neither build Titanics with science nor lose them with honour.”
The passage is majestic, Churchillian and, on close inspection, not quite accurate in its understanding of what happened that night. Some male passengers behaved badly, and it might have been only the ship’s officers directing the loading of the boats who kept the male passengers back until the women and children were seated. The captain froze in dismay but had the good grace to go down with the ship; the chairman of the White Star Line, J. Bruce Ismay, got onto one of the lifeboats and survived, somewhat to his shame.
Still, bearing Churchill’s chivalric version in mind, it’s hard to resist wondering how men and women in 2018 would behave if their ship were to strike an iceberg. Women and children first? Stiff upper lip as the cold North Atlantic closes over gentlemen in dinner jackets? “Nearer, My God, to Thee”?
Churchill’s Kiplingesque reference to “our race and its traditions” would seem offensive now. Would the social evolutions of the past century, including recent politics of gender, have any bearing on the behavior of men and women and on the life-or-death choices they made on the deck of a sinking ship? Or is human behavior in these matters—courage or cowardice, selfishness or sacrifice—an unchangeable basic over the centuries, unaffected by politics or ideology?
Would men today feel the same imperative of self-sacrifice as they did in 1912? Would female passengers be inclined to reject such male selflessness as sexist? Or is ideology moot once you hit an iceberg? Would today’s women—to prove they can die as selflessly as men—offer their places in the lifeboats to men? Would such a gesture parse ideologically?
Or, in the absence of the old gentility—under which men were expected to hold the door for women, to rise when they entered the room, and to give up their seats in lifeboats—would the simpler principle of dog-eat-dog assert itself? Would men and women fight tooth and nail on an equal basis over the chance to go on living? Is it possible that the doctrine of equality has, among other things, relieved the male of his duty to behave like a gentleman and left him free to be a cad?
At the time the Titanic went down, William Howard Taft was president—a good and sweet-natured man who weighed more than 300 pounds, enough to sink a ship by himself: a white elephant of the old decencies. Taft undoubtedly would have seen to the safety of women and children and then retired to share the fate of John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim and other gentlemen who went down that night. Taft’s predecessor, Teddy Roosevelt, would have been gaudily masculine in his martyrdom. Taft’s successor, Woodrow Wilson, would have slid beneath the waters—a saint of gothic countenance. Those three presidents had been raised in the ideals of bourgeois knightliness. The man’s duty was to give his life, if necessary. The woman’s duty was to live, for the sake of the children.
When I read Churchill’s comment on the behavior of the men on the Titanic, I could not help thinking of Donald Trump. The Titanic was launched on a wave of Trumpian hyperbole in 1912 as the greatest, most luxurious, most beautiful liner ever built—and the safest. It sounded like a Trump project. Mr. Trump could have imagined himself at the helm of the great ship setting forth—“glorying in his glory,” in Homer’s phrase.
But what next? What if his great project were hull-gashed and sinking? How would Mr. Trump behave? (How would you? How would I?)
Noblesse oblige is not an entirely obsolete moral style, but it has been to a degree discredited as elitist preening and even as a form of oppression. It was a borrowed British reflex anyway, never an absolutely American one, except as preached by Groton’s headmaster, Endicott Peabody, to boys like Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Of Mr. Trump, who can say? He has become a litmus and a Rorschach test. His enemies are certain he would push women and children aside and claim the biggest lifeboat for himself. Drowning, after all, is for losers.
But that’s the predictable answer. Mr. Trump’s reflexes are unusual. In a previous life, he was Stanley Kowalski. He comes from a different part of the American forest—from somewhere beyond the mountains, so to speak, a region of American defiance more authentic and primitive and disreputable than the instincts of the bien-pensant.
He has a talent—a compulsion—to surprise. His election was a wildly unexpected American evolution and his political apotheosis has bent American presidential history toward magic realism—a game in which he makes his own rules and plays the Tasmanian devil. It is at least possible that, in an ultimate gesture of effrontery, he would choose to go down with the ship. Even in death, the pleasures of confounding one’s enemies may be delicious—metaphysical.
Mr. Morrow, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a former essayist for Time.
Appeared in the December 15, 2018, print edition.
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Heroes they are most certainly, but I'm not sure that the comparison to the Titanic and the question asked by the piece is answered.
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Heroes they are most certainly, but I'm not sure that the comparison to the Titanic and the question asked by the piece is answered.
"Would female passengers be inclined to reject such male selflessness as sexist?" No. Feminism is about protecting and enhancing female privilege while also gaining male privilege without the attendant sacrifice required.
(https://i.imgur.com/ZtL0t6g.jpg?1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSKerypwUDM
No feminists are demanding women register for the draft and face combat postings. They just want women who choose to go to the military have all the career perks without actually having to meet the same standards.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/traditional-masculinity-backlash-against-new-apa-guidelines/
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http://solarey.net/differences-men-women-brain/?fbclid=IwAR3fRJKvvBcdzSJqxq2hV65A_JvZ1xq80s6a8Da9tG3GkLlxV3M7wT3KlLk
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rksKvZoUCPQ&fbclid=IwAR2sdcsWuZ64mcA_whVTenUSih5wGLbE5Y0FKqYchcLZxvPSrv6PhyQxd2I
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https://quillette.com/2019/02/04/psychologists-respond-to-the-apas-guidance-for-treating-men-and-boys/
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https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sax-sex/201903/new-study-blows-old-ideas-about-girls-and-boys?fbclid=IwAR3oPLjLunQyLXdjVCKNY_BCJsg-N_2LNU-Pp82AGJRx4seIX4qCrTWDbvs
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https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/03/31/my-daughter-went-transgender-i-was-powerless-to-stop-doctors-from-harming-her/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Top5&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTkRKaU4yWmxPREExTkRrMSIsInQiOiJ2cHRwZ2FJMG5SbFVscytUZEVCSjEwNGlPamZGNmg2c0FQYWFpbklMZ0RRTnJpR3ZsNGxHNmxQcDhvR1NqNFlKTnFjaGdhNkRDSkU3Y3Z0YnR2V0xXcm15Zko0aDhyM29ybU9sbER6QjdKejNISDloc0E5bHRsaGw3MWlWbGNRWm56R3NhQU9sT2hrNm1iT0tkM0xpMDMxUEZURVwveW5YbVZmMVhGd2JXcDdRPSJ9
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is to do away with male and female sports
and just have co ed sports in every thing
No matter how I think about this I come back to the same conclusion : this is about as dumb as anything else from the LEFT:
https://pjmedia.com/trending/trans-woman-sets-world-records-olympian-decries-pointless-unfair-playing-field/
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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/shawn-mendes-camila-cabello-kiss_n_5d7a0bbfe4b0a938a42e57f3
you need to watch Greta Garbo and Clark Gable movies if you want to do it right !
Glad Huff post has one article not about Trump.
I give them an A for effort
keep practicing !
the movie offers will roll in ...........
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https://www.thecollegefix.com/male-to-female-professor-wins-womens-cycling-championship-again-taunts-female-critics/
is to do away with male and female sports
and just have co ed sports in every thing
No matter how I think about this I come back to the same conclusion : this is about as dumb as anything else from the LEFT:
https://pjmedia.com/trending/trans-woman-sets-world-records-olympian-decries-pointless-unfair-playing-field/
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The *philosophy* professor has a PhD in making arguments but should be using real logic not twisted arguments that use belittling those who disagree ( "bigots"), saying because some play along with the ruse that others should (my doctor calls me a girl as i want), false tenets (stereotype is men are *always* stronger than women - who ever said that ?), and outright calling another person A(Koch) a "trash human being" for apparently his own way of thinking .
In short I don't know how this confused person ever got a PhD in philosophy making illogical and confused arguments that don't work
PS: and no , *science* has not settled this .....
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" While in D.C., Parker got another text from Minton on the night of Nov. 4, telling her that she would meet a guy named “Howie”
https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/whatever-happened-to-the-other-wall-street-millionaire-1832771530
The Howie I knew WAS a really nice guy . never heard him say a bad word about anyone. Indeed he was a gentleman.
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https://www.breitbart.com/sports/2020/01/19/watch-gop-rep-greg-steube-not-one-democrat-voted-to-protect-womens-sports/
Bruce could have been the first both mens and womens decath winner.
Of all the stupid stuff...........
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https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2020/04/27/chris-matthews-admits-to-inappropriate-workplace-behavior-at-msnbc/
ok to say you are smart
hard worker
dedicated
etc
but "you look good" - is now a crime in the harassment category
I mean I would never have to said to someone - hey you gotta nice ass but
even telling them they look nice I don't recall but that said this is so overblown
IMHO
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http://endocrinedisruption.org/
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/where-are-all-the-men-this-vintage-manual-on-manners-from-the-1880s-can-make-a-gentleman-out-of-you_4186143.html?utm_source=newsnoe&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-01-03-3&utm_medium=email&est=37fgIUlypwyw1mcyzuO9SNhbX%2BGvKh1uoERal7QSFyKx%2BsAGJRJ4z3kE0I14qQkz0xDr
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Men should be free to hit on women!!
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/09/catherine-deneuve-men-should-be-free-hit-on-women-harvey-weinstein-scandal
:-D 8-) :-)
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https://nypost.com/2022/06/30/heiress-charged-for-sex-with-14-year-old-4-times-in-one-day/
I know not kosher, but could anyone believe the kid was harmed?
Not clear she was his teacher
or forced into it........
in summer of '42 it was Hermie's best summer in his life.......
I read the book in the just before the movie came out. I was ... 14 yo
Statutory rape never occurred to me....
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You go boy!
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https://nypost.com/2022/06/30/heiress-charged-for-sex-with-14-year-old-4-times-in-one-day/
I know not kosher, but could anyone believe the kid was harmed?
Not clear she was his teacher
or forced into it........
in summer of '42 it was Hermie's best summer in his life.......
I read the book in the just before the movie came out. I was ... 14 yo
Statutory rape never occurred to me....
Yeah, there are several ways to look at this. I know that at 14 I would have been overjoyed at such circumstances, however we have legal boundaries for good reasons.
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TRADITIONAL VALUES
Gender Roles of Husband and Wife in the Home Based on 1880s Gentleman’s Etiquette Manual
BY EPOCH INSPIRED STAFF TIMEJULY 4, 2022 PRINT
The husband, in fact, should act toward his wife as becomes a perfect gentleman, regarding her as the “best lady in the land,” to whom, above all other earthly beings, he owes paramount allegiance.
Epoch Times Photo
HOME is the woman’s kingdom, and there she reigns supreme. To embellish that home, to make happy the lives of her husband and the dear ones committed to her trust, is the honored task which it is the wife’s province to perform. All praise be to her who so rules and governs in that kingdom, that those reared beneath her roof “shall rise up and call her blessed.”
A HOME.
After marriage one of the first requirements for happiness is a home. This can seldom be found in a boarding house or at a hotel, and not always beneath the parental roof of either husband or wife. It will oftenest be found in a house or even a cottage apart from the immediate association of relatives or friends, acquaintances or strangers, and here husband and wife may begin in reality, that new life of which they have had fond dreams; and upon their own actions must depend their future welfare.
HOME COMPANIONSHIP.
Husband and wife should remember, when starting out upon their newly wedded life, that they are to be life companions, that the affection they have possessed and expressed as lovers must ripen into a life-long devotion to one another’s welfare and happiness, that the closest friendship must be begotten from their early love, and that each must live and work for the other. They must seek to be congenial companions to each other, so that every hour they pass together will be mutually enjoyable. They should aim to have the same tastes so that what one enjoys will be alike enjoyable to the other, and what is distasteful to one shall be no less so to the other. Each should yield in matters where it is right to yield, and be firm only where duty is concerned. With a firm trust in one another they should ever abide, that each may say to the world, “I possess one on whose character and heart I can lean as upon a rock.”
CONDUCT OF HUSBAND AND WIFE.
Let neither ever deceive the other, or do anything to shake the other’s confidence, for once deceived, the heart can never wholly trust again. Fault-finding should only be done by gentle and mild criticism, and then with loving words and pleasant looks. Make allowances for one another’s weaknesses, and at the same time endeavor to mutually repress them. For the sake of mutual improvement the husband and wife should receive and give corrections to one another in a spirit of kindness, and in doing so they will prepare themselves for the work God gives the parents of training lives for usefulness here and hereafter. Their motto should be “faithful unto death in all things,” and they must exercise forbearance with each other’s peculiarities.
Let both preserve a strict guard over their tongues, that neither may utter anything rude, contemptuous or severe, and guard their tempers, that neither may ever grow passionate or become sullen or morose in one another’s presence. They should not expect too much from each other; if either offends, it is the part of the other to forgive, remembering that no one is free from faults, and that we are all constantly erring.
If, perchance, after they have entered upon the stern realities of life, they find, that they have made a mistake, that they are not well mated, then they must accept the inevitable and endure to the end, “for better or for worse;” for only in this way can they find consolation for having found out, when too late, that they were unfitted for a life-long companionship. A journalist has said: “No lessons learned by experience, however sharply taught and sadly earned, can enlighten the numbed senses which love has sent to sleep by its magic fascination; and things as plain as the sun in heaven to others are dark as night, unfathomable as the sea, to those who let themselves love before they prove.”
DUTIES OF THE WIFE TO HER HUSBAND.
The wife should remember that upon her, to the greatest extent, devolves the duty of making home happy. She should do nothing to make her husband feel uncomfortable, either mentally or physically, but on the other hand she should strive to the utmost of her ability to do whatever is best calculated to please him, continually showing him that her love, plighted upon the altar, remains steadfast, and that no vicissitudes of fortune can change or diminish it.
She should never indulge in fits of temper, hysterics, or other habits of ill-breeding, which, though easy to conquer at first, grow and strengthen with indulgence, if she would retain her husband as her lover and her dearest and nearest friend. She should be equally as neat and tidy respecting her dress and personal appearance at home as when she appears in society, and her manners towards her husband should be as kind and pleasing when alone with him as when in company. She should bear in mind that to retain the good opinion of her husband is worth far more than to gain the good opinion of hundreds of the devotees of society, and that as she possesses the love and confidence of her husband, so will she receive the respect and esteem of all his friends.
She should be careful not to confide to another any small misunderstandings or petty quarrels between herself and husband, should any occur. This is the surest method of widening any breach of harmony that may occur between husband and wife, for the more such misunderstandings are talked about, and the more advice she receives from her confidants, there is less probability that harmonious relations will be speedily resumed.
THE WIFE A HELPMATE.
A wife should act openly and honorably in regard to money matters, keeping an exact account of her expenditures, and carefully guarding against any extravagances; and while her husband is industriously at work, she should seek to encourage him, by her own frugality, to be economical, thrifty, enterprising and prosperous in his business, that he may be better enabled, as years go by and family cares press more heavily on each, to afford all the comforts and perhaps some of the luxuries of a happy home. No condition is hopeless when the wife possesses firmness, decision and economy, and no outward prosperity can counteract indolence, folly and extravagance at home. She should consult the disposition and tastes of her husband, and endeavor to lead him to high and noble thoughts, lofty aims, and temporal comfort; be ever ready to welcome him home, and in his companionship draw his thoughts from business and lead him to the enjoyment of home comforts and happiness. The influence of a good wife over her husband may be very great, if she exerts it in the right direction. She should, above all things, study to learn the disposition of her husband, and if, perchance, she finds herself united to a man of quick and violent temper, the utmost discretion, as well as perfect equanimity on her own part is required, for she should have such perfect control over herself as to calm his perturbed spirits.
A HUSBAND’S DUTIES.
It must not be supposed that it devolves upon the wife alone to make married life and home happy. She must be seconded in her noble efforts by him who took her from her own parental fireside and kind friends, to be his companion through life’s pilgrimage. He has placed her in a new home, provided with such comforts as his means permit, and the whole current of both their lives have been changed. His constant duty to his wife is to be ever kind and attentive, to love her as he loves himself, even sacrificing his own personal comfort for her happiness. From his affection for her, there should grow out a friendship and fellowship, such as is possessed for no other person. His evenings and spare moments should be devoted to her, and these should be used for their intellectual, moral and social advancement.
The cares and anxieties of business should not exclude the attentions due to wife and family, while he should carefully keep her informed of the condition of his business affairs. Many a wife is capable of giving her husband important advice about various details of his business, and if she knows the condition of his pecuniary affairs, she will be able to govern her expenditures accordingly.
It is the husband’s duty to join with his wife in all her endeavors to instruct her children, to defer all matters pertaining to their discipline to her, aiding her in this respect as she requires it. In household matters the wife rules predominant, and he should never interfere with her authority and government in this sphere. It is his duty and should be his pleasure to accompany her to church, to social gatherings, to lectures and such places of entertainment as they both mutually enjoy and appreciate. In fact he ought not to attend a social gathering unless accompanied by his wife, nor go to an evening entertainment without her. If it is not a fit place for his wife to attend, neither is it fit for him.
While he should give his wife his perfect confidence in her faithfulness, trusting implicitly to her honor at all times and in all places, he should, on his part, remain faithful and constant to her, and give her no cause of complaint. He should pass by unnoticed any disagreeable peculiarities and mistakes, taking care at the proper time, and without giving offense, to remind her of them, with the idea of having her correct them. He should never seek to break her of any disagreeable habits or peculiarities she may possess, by ridiculing them. He should encourage her in all her schemes for promoting the welfare of her household, or in laudable endeavors to promote the happiness of others, by engaging in such works of benevolence and charity as the duties of her home will allow her to perform.
The husband, in fact, should act toward his wife as becomes a perfect gentleman, regarding her as the “best lady in the land,” to whom, above all other earthly beings, he owes paramount allegiance. If he so endeavors to act, his good sense and judgment will dictate to him the many little courtesies which are due her, and which every good wife cannot fail to appreciate. The observance of the rules of politeness are nowhere more desirable than in the domestic circle, between husband and wife, parents and children.
Epoch Times Photo
The above is an excerpt from “Our Deportment,” a code of manners for refined society by John H. Young A.M., published in 1881. We offer it in hopes of promoting gentlemanly conduct among men—young and older—in today’s often unbalanced world.
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/apr/27/what-woman-kansas-legislature-has-answer-womens-bi/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=0IqM2HUJ7uL6m%2BHv7%2BRM%2Fj%2FC8NDrj8WaqA2NnJ4pUPf4kkWgk2PJTxk2qotiH7ST&bt_ts=1682619368024
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not clear if as simple as movie makes it out
but fun to watch the clean innocent appeal of it
compared to today :
https://www.google.com/search?q=jean+the+matchmaker+&rlz=1C5GCEM_enUS1001US1001&ei=jNh0ZOiiBL-f5NoPkKWPiAg&ved=0ahUKEwjomP3p_pr_AhW_D1kFHZDSA4EQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=jean+the+matchmaker+&gs_lcp=Cgxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAQAzIGCAAQFhAeMggIABCKBRCGAzIICAAQigUQhgMyCAgAEIoFEIYDMggIABCKBRCGAzoVCAAQAxCPARDqAhC0AhCMAxDlAhgBOhUILhADEI8BEOoCELQCEIwDEOUCGAE6DQgAEIoFEJECEEYQ-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&sclient=gws-wiz-serp#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:3887ce20,vid:ZDRhPc6bjtA
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https://www.louderwithcrowder.com/womens-soccer-wrecked
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US WOMEN'S SOCCER TEAM GETS WRECKED BY AN OLDER MALE TEAM OF RETIREES
could this be why more people watch men's sports and are thus paid more than women athletes?
:wink: :roll:
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/10-tips-for-looking-after-your-husband-at-home-from-a-1950s-book-6-could-be-controversial_5176282.html?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2023-06-10&src_cmp=gv-2023-06-10&utm_medium=email
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Common Herbicide Could Be Causing Sexual Dysphoria: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Herbicide atrazine linked to feminization of frogs: 10 percent of males became fully viable females
Christy Prais
Jun 16 2023
Commonly used herbicide atrazine has been linked to demasculinization and forced feminization in frogs, raising concerns about exposure in humans. (ShutterStock)
In a recent interview with Jordan B. Peterson, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he thinks many of the causes of sexual dysphoria, particularly with boys, are coming from chemical exposure. In particular, he mentioned the widely used herbicide atrazine.
In the June 5 interview, Peterson and Kennedy discussed a wide range of topics including Kennedy’s presidential bid. When the conversation turned to environmental issues, Kennedy noted that the “huge levels of depression” seen in today’s kids, as well as “a lot of the sexual dysphoria that we’re seeing” may be the result of toxic chemicals.
“These kids are swimming through a soup of toxic chemicals today, and many of those are endocrine disruptors,” Kennedy stressed.
Kennedy said that one of the big issues is atrazine, which he says can be found “throughout our water supply.” He went on to reference a study in which male frogs were exposed to atrazine in a tank, leading to their chemical castration and forced feminization.
Even more concerning, he noted that the study found 10 percent of the male frogs turned into “fully viable females, able to produce viable eggs.”
“If it’s doing that to frogs, there’s a lot of other evidence that it’s doing it to human beings as well,” Kennedy stressed.
The Science
The study Kennedy referred to was led by Tyrone B. Hayes, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. It was published in March 2010 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study noted that atrazine is one of the most commonly used pesticides in the world, as well as the most commonly detected pesticide contaminant. It taints ground, surface, and drinking water and can travel via rainfall over 620 miles from its application site.
The authors stressed that the herbicide is a potent endocrine disruptor, even at low levels. Previous studies showed adverse effects including hermaphroditism, reduced testicular volume, and lowered testosterone. The herbicide is also associated with both the demasculinization and feminization of male amphibians.
The study examined the long-term effects of atrazine on reproductive function in a genetically male population of African clawed frogs.
The male frogs were exposed to 2.5 parts per billion (ppb) of atrazine starting when they were tadpoles and continuing for up to three years after they metamorphosed into adults.
Ninety percent of the atrazine-exposed males appeared male, but suffered from depressed testosterone, decreased breeding gland size, decreased sperm production, feminized laryngeal (vocal) development, suppressed mating behavior, reduced spermatogenesis, and decreased fertility.
Functionally Female Frogs
Significantly, after exposure to atrazine, ten percent of the genetic males developed into fully functional females with ovaries, producing viable eggs.
Two of the male-turned-female frogs were mated with control males and produced offspring. Further testing confirmed that these atrazine-exposed male frogs, although now functionally female (have undergone complete feminization) were in fact still chromosomal males.
In a 2018 keynote presentation, Hayes explained that exposure to atrazine induces the activation of an enzyme called aromatase. Aromatase converts androgens, which are involved in male sexual development, to different forms of the female hormone estrogen. In the atrazine-exposed frogs, aromatase converted testosterone into estrogen, leading to the feminization of male frogs.
According to Hayes, mammals—including humans—will not have the same extreme egg-producing reaction as reptiles and amphibians when exposed to atrazine. However, he noted that aromatase induced by atrazine exposure promotes breast cancer and prostate cancer.
Big Pharma, Big Herbicides
In fact, aromatase is so important as a cause of breast cancer that one of the leading treatments for breast cancer is a non-steroidal aromatase inhibitor called Letrozole, Hayes said.
The developer of Letrozole is pharmaceutical giant Novartis AG.
Interestingly, in a 2003 toxicological profile, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) lists Novartis Crop Protection, Inc. as one of six companies registered to produce products (pdf) containing atrazine.
Novartis Crop Protection was an affiliate of Novartis AG. In 2000, Novartis spun off its Crop Protection and Seeds sectors, merging them with AstraZeneca Agrochemicals to form Syngenta. Today, Syngenta is the chief manufacturer of atrazine, according to the Center for Food Safety. Syngenta was acquired by ChemChina in 2017.
Another study Hayes mentioned in his presentation was published in Environmental Health Perspectives in 1997. It found that Kentucky women who were exposed to well water with medium to high levels of atrazine had a statistically significant increase in breast cancer risk, compared to women who did not drink the contaminated well water.
The study notes that “The results suggest a relationship between exposure to triazine herbicides and increased breast cancer risk, but conclusions concerning causality cannot be drawn, due to the limitations inherent in ecologic study design.”
Per the EPA website, atrazine is chemically related to two other herbicides, simazine and propazine, which together are called triazines.
Hayes emphasized that his study was not a singular study, but rather a comprehensive body of research.
In fact, 22 independent research studies, conducted in 12 different countries have examined the effects of atrazine exposure on various species such as fish, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, and birds.
These studies consistently reported similar findings, including the absence of sperm production, demasculinization, and feminization as a result of atrazine exposure, he said.
The 22 scientists worked together and consolidated their data, publishing it in a paper titled “Demasculinization and Feminization of Male Gonads by Atrazine: Consistent Effects Across Vertebrate Classes” in October 2011 in The Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
Known Harms Reported by US Agencies
In 2003, seven years before the study by Hayes, a detailed toxicological profile of atrazine (pdf) was issued by the ATSDR. The agency is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The report cited studies indicating that atrazine affects health in several ways: “One of the primary ways that atrazine can affect your health is by altering the way that the reproductive system works,” it stated.
“Atrazine has been shown to cause changes in blood hormone levels in animals that affected the ability to reproduce,” the report continued. “Some of the specific effects observed in animals are not likely to occur in animals because of biological differences between humans and these types of animals. However, atrazine may affect the reproductive system in humans by a different mechanism.”
“Atrazine also caused liver, kidney, and heart damage in animals; it is possible that atrazine could cause these effects in humans,” the report warned, although it admitted that this possibility had not been studied.
72 Million Pounds a Year
The report noted the widespread use of atrazine in the United States, although it is a restricted-use herbicide, meaning that it is not available to the general public.
An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) memorandum on the use of atrazine, published in July 2022, noted that the herbicide is registered for use in agricultural crops, including field corn, sweet corn, sorghum, sugarcane, macadamia nuts, and guava. It is also registered for non-agricultural uses such as in nursery or ornamental plantings, turf, and rights-of-way (excluding roadsides). The memo noted that field corn, sweet corn, sorghum, and sugarcane are the most important agricultural use sites for the chemical.
Between 2013 and 2017, an annual average of 72 million pounds of atrazine was used in agriculture.
The ATSDR report noted that atrazine has the potential to be carried through the air or be washed away from the soil by rain, ultimately finding its way into nearby streams, lakes, and other waterways. Moreover, it can penetrate deeper layers of soil and contaminate groundwater. Additionally, plants growing in these areas can absorb atrazine.
Once atrazine enters streams, waterways, or groundwater, it tends to persist for extended periods due to its slow breakdown in water.
According to a June 2023 Market Watch report, the global atrazine market size was estimated to be worth $1916.9 million in 2022. It is forecast to grow to $2342.7 million by 2028.
EPA’s 2021 Biological Evaluation
In November 2021, the EPA issued the finalized version of its Biological Evaluation (BE) of the herbicides atrazine, glyphosate, and simazine, examining the potential risks to endangered and threatened species from these herbicides.
The assessment was conducted as part of a legal agreement between the Center for Biological Diversity and the EPA.
The BE found that all three herbicides are “likely to adversely affect” species listed under the Endangered Species Act, or their designated habitats.
The EPA announced in 2021 that atrazine and simazine are prohibited in Hawaii, Alaska, and the U.S. territories.
Additionally, atrazine will no longer be used “on roadsides, Conservation Reserve Program land, conifers, including Christmas tree plantings, timber and forestry areas, and miscanthus and other perennial bioenergy crops,” according to the EPA release.
A Syngenta representative responded to The Epoch Times regarding questions on the safety of artrazine. The response said the herbicide was primarily used to control weeds in corn, sorghum, and sugar cane crops.
“Herbicides are crucial tools for helping farmers manage weeds and significantly increase crop yields while decreasing the amount of tillage, which prevents soil erosion and greenhouse gas emissions, and improves water and wildlife habitat,” it continued.
“Atrazine has been extensively studied over the past 50 years. Nearly 7,000 studies have concluded it is safe for humans and the environment and it has been approved by international organizations and governments around the world.”
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https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1670887247066042368
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https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1670887247066042368
https://twitter.com/DonovanTurney/status/1666042448156536835
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AMEN!!!
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https://twitter.com/ElijahSchaffer/status/1630509057328168960?cxt=HHwWgIDS0anW3aAtAAAA
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some on LEFT making this into a gender thing:
from Huffington compost :
White has characterized her salary fight as a “statement” for all women, a source told TMZ.
She’s got a point. The gender pay disparity has barely budged over the last 20 years, with women earning an average of 18% less than men in 2022, according to Pew Research.*
* https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vanna-white-raise-wheel-of-fortune_n_649d7696e4b030efa11e9daf
Every woman should be outraged at her compensation compared to Sajak:
https://parade.com/celebrities/vanna-white-net-worth
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https://nypost.com/2023/10/04/media-lynch-mob-was-way-off-in-ex-mlb-star-trevor-bauers-rape-case/
FWIW I did search on CNN and Trevor Bauer
what comes up is that he was accused suspended and his named tarnished
what did not come up was a retraction by CNN or any note of the later evidence that 100% clears his name.
ESPN and Sports Illustrated comes up with something like accusser and Trevor "settle dispute ."
She should be in jail for false accusations.
Compare to what happened to Mike Lindell.
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https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-millionaire-slut-apologists/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Email%20Warm%20Up&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=280964999&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_74ed75ayuc8Kv4fCZHz8ehnbTbPLMQ7WHJGfUrg31eAxN7xa0KXlUrKMWPMITm20Rz0mkVvRPQfencYGakzJae0kcdg&utm_content=280964999&utm_source=hs_email
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https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/08/30/women-are-disproportionately-hurting-our-country/?fbclid=IwAR1VSsucik6a4GM-QBh9UAEGr7S2vbDmB3FOrG1vIz8WuIi0zLPw6xZcoZ8
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Good luck getting this message out to the people who really need to hear it.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KatMQ8PGui0&t=234s
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https://www.oann.com/newsroom/stanford-study-shows-that-men-and-womens-brains-do-operate-differently/