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Topics - neonsamurai

1
Main / The MEN Commandments
Sep 18, 2008, 12:55 AM
Not sure if this has been posted before, but there's a new book coming out by a popular UK radio DJ:

THE MEN COMMANDMENTS

The book is just an unapologetic look at being a man, not a list of things to do to be a man. I was given a free 'mini' copy in the station today as part of its promotion. Here's the introduction:

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Three things happened in a week that made me think I needed to write this book. First my newspaper had a headline screaming "The Redundant Male". Next was my wife's sinister cackling while reading her new book, How to Kill Your Husband. The final insult was turning on the TV and seeing that advert for Sheilas' Wheels offering cheaper car insurance for those oh so careful women drivers. Discrimination. And during Heartbeat.

ENOUGH.


Check out the link above to read more and see the man himself in action.
2
Another great article in the Guardian, questioning the feminist dogma, this time attached to DV industry. It's another long article, but is well worth the read.

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A scourge that touches everyone

There should be help and support for all victims of domestic violence, regardless of their gender

    * Ally Fogg
   
    All forms of domestic violence - psychological, economic, emotional and physical - come from the abuser's desire for power and control over other family members or intimate partners.

    Domestic violence is the result of an abuser's desire for power and control.

    Domestic violence is a pattern of controlling and aggressive behaviours from one adult, usually a man, towards another, usually a woman, within the context of an intimate relationship.

Those three bald statements are taken from the top three British links offered by Google UK when you type in the words "domestic violence", namely Women's Aid, Refuge and the BBC respectively.

They reflect the 40-year-old orthodoxy that places domestic violence largely or entirely in the context of patriarchal power and control. Domestic violence is a gender-based phenomenon that serves the purpose of subjugating women and entrenching male privilege. This is an article of faith for many feminists. It is also, to a large extent, false.

If this theory were merely an ideological rallying cry for political activists, or an academic standpoint for polemicists, it might be relatively harmless. When it is influencing the delivery of essential, potentially life-saving, publicly-funded services, not to mention legal systems and law-enforcement practices, it cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged.

There are few debates more tedious or ignoble than the domestic violence numbers game. Ever since women's refuge pioneer Erin Pizzey first demurred from the consensus by suggesting that women could sometimes be not only the victims but also the perpetrators of domestic violence, feminists and their opponents have been engaged in a sporadic game of male v female Top Trumps, with one side trying to outscore the other on frequency, severity and justifiability of offences.

It's a pointless, unwinnable and demeaning exercise for those involved, and utterly degrading to those actually caught in abusive relationships. What I would hope could be agreed by all is that domestic violence is horrific whoever the victim might be, and that as a society we must find approaches that minimise the incidence of offences and maximise the support and security that can be offered to victims. By even arguing about symmetry, we buy into a thoughtless, sexist dichotomy that attributes qualities to people solely by virtue of their sex. Every victim deserves our compassion and our help. Victims and offenders alike should be respected as unique, complex individuals, not representatives of one random half of humanity.

What can and must be addressed, however, is the theory that domestic violence is a monolithic phenomenon, with a single explanation and a straightforward pattern of innocent female victims and evil male offenders. Over the past 15 years, a huge body of academic work, most notably by Michael P Johnson and colleagues, has sought to define and refine a typology of domestic violence. Different theorists have different categories and different labels, of course. In the most frequently quoted models (pdf), there are four distinct types of incidents. Johnson calls them coercive controlling violence, violent resistance, situational couple violence, and separation-instigated violence. Whatever interventions, harm-reduction policies or judicial approaches one may advocate, it should be unarguable that these different types of abusive situations have very different causes and will therefore require very different responses.

Since 1980, research has consistently shown that as few as a quarter of domestic violence cases are straightforward examples of a man violently asserting patriarchal power over a female partner. And yet to this day pretty much all mainstream services hold this as their default assumption. The almost total absence of refuges and support services for abused men has been well documented, but it is also worth noting that if a man seeks help to address his violent behaviour and control his abusive impulses, almost every town and city has a range of self-help groups and treatment programmes available to him. After a fairly exhaustive search and inquiries to leading organisations such as Relate and Respect, I've been unable to identify a single organisation in the UK offering an equivalent service to violent and abusive women. Not one.

Linda G Mills is a lawyer turned professor of social work at New York University, a self-declared feminist and also a survivor of abusive relationships. In her essential new book Violent Partners, she takes issue with the orthodoxy of domestic violence services. Using many heartbreaking case-studies, Mills details a litany of deficient services, ineffective responses and miscarriages of justice - all with roots in the ideological model of patriarchal power.

Much more significantly however, she shines a light on several alternative approaches, founded not on dogma but on a huge body of cross-disciplinary research and practice. Mills sees violent behaviour as being part of a cycle of abuse, learned responses that spiral within relationships but also across generations, for men and women alike. In a radical break from feminist doctrine, she suggests that the most effective ways to address those destructive habits involve blame-free counselling, including self-help groups, couples therapy and healing circles, alongside judicial processes based on restorative justice.

Around 75% of women and 85% of men who suffer in violent relationships do not report the incidents or seek help and support, most commonly because they do not want to risk breaking up their family or seeing their partner jailed. Similarly, many victims refuse to cooperate with investigations and prosecutions. Mills argues convincingly that a less threatening, less divisive, less judgmental approach to this kind of violence could lead to far greater use of support services at a much earlier stage, with far greater effectiveness, thereby avoiding immense human suffering and saving lives.

We shouldn't underestimate the contribution made by feminists to the struggle against domestic violence. Without the arguments and the activism of the women's movement, police might still dismiss serious physical and sexual assaults as "just a domestic". Without their energy and dedication there would be no refuges, no hostels, no support services for anyone. We can gratefully acknowledge all this, but that does not mean that our understanding the issues has to remain frozen sometime around 1975. I have no doubt that feminist activists, with their vast experience and passion for a better world, still have a huge amount to give to domestic violence campaigns and voluntary projects. They would do so more effectively without the burden of false dogma.


And this guy Ally Fogg is a switched-on chap who can back up his article with facts and intelligence, as well as answering his critics with a touch of class:

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PurpleFluff

Oh FFS. Can't be bothered with the usual misogynists.

Ally, I thought you were better than this.

Domestic violence is a gender-based hate crime, simple as that.

No feminists ever said *no* women abuse their partners, or that women are perfect angels and men are all evil or whatever you think.

But the vast majority of domestic abusers are men.

Get some information.

Men lecturing women on what THEY think feminism should be can fuck off. Seriously. Shut up.


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AllyF

@PurpleFluff

Many thanks. I'd been waiting for someone to come along and give a demonstration of brainless dogmatism, assert without any supporting evidence or explanation that domestic violence is a gender-based crime ("because I say so, dammit") utterly fail to address the arguments or show any evidence of having read or understood the article, throw around an accusation of misogyny, and then tell me that because I am a man I have no right to express an opinion on anything relating to feminism.

Well done. I'm only surprised that it took about 150 posts to get here.


Great job! I'll be writing to the Guardian to praise Ally Fog on such a well researched and logical article.
3
Believe it or not, this article was in the Guardian. It's quite a long article, but worth a read, especially as it features Warren Farrell.

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Depressed, repressed, objectified: are men the new women?
They're less fertile, more weight-obsessed and 'non-essential to parenting'. No wonder men are confused about modern masculinity. Elizabeth Day reports

    * Elizabeth Day
    * Sunday August 3 2008
   
If recent research is anything to go by, 21st century man is in a desperate muddle.

In June, men discovered that their libidos are in freefall, prompting a 40 per cent increase in males seeking counselling for impotence problems. Their existential angst worsened in July, when British men discovered that they have the most unequal paternity rights in Europe. According to Nicola Brewer, chief executive of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, fathers in the UK are seen as 'not essential for parenting'. The same month saw the publication of a medical study that proved the quality of men's sperm declines to such an extent after they hit 45 that the chances of a partner's miscarriage are doubled.

It's not only their internal biology; men are also succumbing to the traditionally female preoccupation of looking good on the outside, too. Sales of male beauty products have leapt 30 per cent over the past decade. Almost 20 per cent more men are having plastic surgery than ever before while, last year, researchers from Harvard discovered that a quarter of anorexia and bulimia sufferers is male. During the fashion shows, male models had their own equivalent of the size-zero debate. 'Male models look chicken-chested, hollow-cheeked and undernourished' noted the New York Times.

Every week, it seems as if there are new surveys and studies tripping over themselves to paint the grimmest possible picture of modern masculinity. They tell us that men are more neurotic and less fulfilled than ever before; that they are objectified rather than revered; that they are expected to be more in touch with their emotions and yet are criticised for it. Men appear to be confused about what they are and unsure about who they are meant to be. So with more of them feeling disenfranchised, disillusioned and disempowered, is it feasible to think of men as the new oppressed minority? Might men, in fact, be the new women? And, if so, who is to blame for making them feel marginalised?

In the UK, men account for 75 per cent of all suicides. They are twice as likely to die from the 10 most common cancers that affect both sexes and, typically, develop heart disease 10 years earlier than women. Although there is a national screening programme in place for cervical and breast cancer, there is no equivalent for men, in spite of prostate cancer claiming 6.7 per cent more deaths for men than cervical cancer in women.

While women still earn on average 12 per cent less than men and are severely under-represented in top-level corporate roles, men in full-time
employment work an average of 41.9 hours a week, compared to women's 37.6 hours. According to the American men's-rights author Warren Farrell, there might be a glass ceiling for women, but there is also what he calls 'a glass cellar' for men. 'What I mean by that is men are both at the top of the economy scale and at the bottom. Of the 25 professions ranked the lowest [in the US], 24 of them are 85-100 per cent male. That's things like roofer, welder, garbage collector, sewer maintenance - jobs with very little security, little pay and few people want them.'

Farrell says that women generally prefer a more flexible work-life balance and that implies 40-hour weeks 'at most'. Often, mothers are able to work fewer hours only because they are financially supported by their male partners. This, he claims, is the real definition of power. 'I define power as "control over one's life". A balanced life is far superior to the male definition of power: earning money someone else spends while he dies sooner.'

It would be easy to dismiss these arguments as anti-feminist but there are some commentators who think this could be a fundamental misreading of the movement's original goal: equality for both sexes, rather than the dominance of one at the cost of the other. Rosie Boycott, who co-founded the feminist magazine Spare Rib in 1971, points out that their first editorial insisted liberation should be for men as well as women. 'It is as much of a trap for a man aged 18-65 to feel solely financially responsible for 2.2 children and his wife, to be entitled to two weeks' holiday a year and to work nine to five, as it is for a woman to be responsible for all the childcare and housework,' she says. 'Men don't feel comfortable admitting that they're taking time off work to take their daughter to the dentist. We need a bigger critical mass of people to make that happen.'

But much of this remains a resolutely middle-class problem. At the lowest end of the economic scale, women are still attempting to shrug off the yoke of oppression and inequality. Meanwhile for many men, their loss of status in the home and the workplace is twinned with a loss of confidence in themselves. Neil Oliver, the television historian who has just published Amazing Tales for Making Men out of Boys, says that there is a conspicuous dearth of positive male role models. 'I grew up hearing tales of Ernest Shackleton and watching films like Zulu,' he says. 'The world in which I was a little boy was one of clearly defined roles for men and women and we don't have that any more, so men are struggling to readjust. Manly men have been hunted to near extinction in Britain and the concept of manliness has been outmoded. Yet the urge to be a man is a primal thing and still exists in boys today.'

In the classroom, too, boys are at risk of losing out on male role models. According to government figures for 2006, the ratio of newly qualified female to male teachers under the age of 25 was approaching seven to one. The introduction of coursework and modular exams is believed to play to traditionally female strengths - girls tend to be more methodical while boys tend to follow high-risk strategies such as cramming the night before an exam.

Some critics argue that this creeping 'feminisation' has led to girls outperforming boys on almost every level: they use more words, speak more fluently in longer sentences and with fewer mistakes. By the age of 11, some 76 per cent of boys have attained government-set literacy standards, compared to 85 per cent of girls. At GCSE level, 66.8 per cent of girls achieved A-C grades in 2007, compared to 59.7 per cent of boys (in real terms, this means they trail behind their female counterparts by nine years).

Do these statistics have any bearing on the everyday experiences of ordinary men? 'I don't know if I feel oppressed, but there's a sense in which women can talk about us with impunity,' says a 32-year-old male lawyer from London, who does not wish to give his name in case his female colleagues start pelting him with rotten tomatoes. 'I've been in the office on several occasions where sweeping generalisations have been made about the general crapness of men: "Oh, all men are useless, no wonder he couldn't get the job done in time" - that sort of thing. I don't take it all that seriously - at least, not yet - but I know that I wouldn't get away with saying the same things about women.'

For a long time, it wasn't particularly fashionable to stand up for men. Warren Farrell, the daddy of the so-called 'masculinist' movement, has been making his arguments since the late 1970s and frequently attracts outrage. His books -Why Men Earn More and his latest, Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men? - seek to redress what he sees as an endemic sociocultural bias against his gender.

In almost all respects, he believes that men are now the weaker sex: 'The problem with feminism is that it saw man as the enemy. When only one sex wins, both sexes lose.'

On a superfi cial level, Farrell's insistence that men are scrabbling around in the dark searching for their lost masculinity like a mislaid dumbbell seems ill-conceived and borderline offensive. However, over the last few months, several books have been written reiterating Farrell's belief that men are disgruntled with their lot and must fight back against a Western culture that worships womanhood while demeaning masculinity. Apparently, men are stymied by biology as well - human genetics experts estimate that man will be extinct within 125,000 years owing to their declining sperm count and the mutation of the Y chromosome.

So - although women hold only 17 per cent of parliamentary positions across the globe, despite there being only 10 female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and ignoring the fact that it is still illegal for a woman to drive a car in Saudi Arabia - it seems that, sometimes, it is harder to be a man.

Just ask Guy Garcia, author of the forthcoming The Decline of Men, an upbeat look at how the American male is 'tuning out, giving up and flipping off his future'. There is, says Garcia, 'a social predisposition to treat men as unworthy parents, betrayers and incorrigible philanderers'. Or there's Michael Gilbert, whose 2007 study, The Disposable Male, does pretty much what it says on the tin. 'Motherhood is immutable,' Gilbert writes. 'Paternity is the social construct. Amazingly, we have been doing everything we can to deconstruct it.'

Nor is it just men who have taken up the cudgel. This year saw the publication of Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care by Kathleen Parker, a pithy stateside newspaper columnist who prides herself on her Coulter-esque capacity to say the unsayable. 'I think men are confused because they are receiving conflicting and often confusing messages from women and culture,' she explains. 'We want them to be providers and protectors - except when we don't. We want them to count our contractions and share baby's midnight feedings, but then we want them out of the picture when we tire of them.'

Parker reserves much of her ire for 'the highly lucrative boy-bashing industry' that views sexual discrimination against men as a form of shared hilarity. So while you can buy T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan 'Boys Are Stupid - Throw Rocks At Them', to claim the same about women would be viewed as an incitement to violence. Discrimination against men increasingly seems socially acceptable. 'When Susan Pinker, the highly regarded psychologist and journalist published her recent book, The Sexual Paradox: Troubled Boys, Gifted Girls and the Real Difference Between the Sexes, she received an email from a colleague asking her to give a comment 'on the difference between men and women's brains - or rather, men's lack of brains!'

'It was a joke no one would make about women,' Pinker tells me. 'When you said you were writing a piece on men, I was just floored because my experience has been that no one cares a whit about men. I think there is a double standard. Because women have been discriminated against for so long there is a hyper-sensitivity about making jokes about them that doesn't exist for men. They are assumed to be fair game because they're on top. There's a notion that it's acceptable for women to treat men as dolts. It's a form of female bonding, as if it's known that men are a bit useless.'

Of course, lots of men are relatively happy with the status quo, but does this make it desirable or just? There is still a novelty factor attached to the notion of a full-time father and a mother who goes out to work: in many ways, the man who wishes to be a stay-at-home dad can be likened to the woman who wanted to be a surgeon in the 1950s. They both face a similar barrage of sexist assumptions.

'There is a culture of motherhood, a sanctity about it, that is quite strong in the UK,' argues Duncan Fisher, chief executive of the Fatherhood Institute. 'There's a gratuitous exclusion of men and the impression is given that you're left looking over the mother's shoulder. Midwifery services are described as "one-to-one care". After the birth, each mother is given a free magazine called "Mum Plus One". If a woman goes to a job office, she is asked "Are you a mother? Let's see what kind of job you want to do," whereas no one would ask a man if he was a father.

'The guy is just not factored in. That's OK if you're a well-resourced middle-class man who can assert himself. But that's why so many teenage fathers drift away: there's no expectation that they should be included.'

Yet research shows that children with supportive fathers have lower instances of substance abuse, higher self-esteem and higher educational achievement.

Nor is this cheerful presumption of man's uselessness limited to fatherhood. The Advertising Standards Bureau reports a steady increase each year in the number of complaints about the way men are portrayed on television as 'buffoons' or 'idiots'. A 2007 advertisement for MFI kitchens depicted a woman slapping her husband in a dispute about leaving the toilet seat up. 'If a man belittles a woman, it could become a lawsuit,' says Farrell. 'If women belittle men, it's a Hallmark card.'

Tad Safran, a Los Angeles-based scriptwriter and journalist, discovered this to his cost last year when he wrote a scathing piece in a national newspaper about British women's 'unkempt' appearance. 'The hate mail I got was insane,' he says now. 'I was called "Sexist of the Year". Maybe I deserved it, but certainly that wouldn't have happened to the same extent if it had been written about men.' As if to prove his point, a few months later, another British broadsheet published a feature entitled 'Are Men Boring?' Both articles were based on ludicrous generalisations but no one labelled the female journalist sexist.

Does any of this really matter when men occupy an almost unquestioned position of primacy in nearly all walks of life? Are they getting their boxer shorts in a twist about trivialities? And is it patronising to assume that the nagging disaffection felt by primarily middle-class men in the Western hemisphere is shared by men the world over?

Maybe. But, according to experts like Susan Pinker, there is a necessary truth here too: that perhaps our harmless chatter among female friends
occasionally carries a deeper significance than we might like to think; that for all the sperm banks and Rampant Rabbit vibrators on offer, men still have a role to play that can complement women rather than limiting them. We might, she argues, end up demeaning our own gender: 'It does us a disservice to gloss over the fact that our husbands, sons, brothers or fathers are all unique individuals. I've never believed in this Mars/Venus division: we're all just people.'


4
This is taken from the London Paper and comes from a column written by members of the public. Everyday people get the opportunity to say what they think about anything from politics to shoes. Readers then get to vote on what they think of it (more or bore?) On Wednesday I read this article:

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Women-only carriages for the Tube
by Charlotte Summers. Wednesday, 23 July 2008

It has just happened to me too many times now;  being harassed or even chased by weird or pervy men on the Underground. Only yesterday I was approached by a seemingly friendly guy who ­chatted to me, and yet when I declined to give him my number he followed me on to the Tube and even tried to kiss me! Fair dos for trying your luck at chatting up a girl, but guys, when a lady says "no", she means it. You should just smile politely, say "It was nice to meet you," and then walk away, further up the platform.

My worst experience was when a weird-looking fellow on the Metropolitan line slowly manoeuvred himself until he squashed up to me in my seat (on a fairly empty train). He asked me how many stops it was until a ­particular place, but when he didn't get off there I started to worry.

He proceeded to whisper questions to me whilst ­getting closer. I jumped off the train at ­Liverpool Street and ran for it. He chased me and caught me at the ticket ­machines, where I screamed at him to "f*** off!" and I flew into the arms of my friend, who was ­waiting for me.

Now, I know most of you guys are gentlemen and are only bold enough to smile at a girl from the other end of the carriage, but there are a good few out there who are very creepy. ­Sometimes it seems like it's only a matter of time before something worse happens, and such a ­concern makes me wonder whether carrying a weapon would be useful.

However, there is an obvious solution. Why don't we designate one carriage per Tube as women-only? Whilst I am, of course, a feminist, I don't offer the idea in an ­outlandish "all men are the enemy" sort of way; and ­neither am I suggesting that all women are weak and need ­protecting. I just think it would be a good idea to have a space where women can feel safe on the Tube.

Of course, moving into the carriage would be optional. Any forced separation would be a step too far  -and  might result in the unfortunate end to the delightful lovestruck section of thelondonpaper. However, it is important to note that not all "lovestruck" encounters on the Underground are pleasant.

I hope you can see I am not attacking all men ­everywhere. I am simply proposing that we create a safe place on the Tube for the women who feel they need it.

Charlotte, 20, is a student from north-west London


Yesterday we learned that only 13% of the readers who responded actually liked the article. No wonder feminists are complaining about a 'backlash' when the public stop accepting their attempts at 'equality' and see it for what it really is.
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Main / Equity Laws are Holding Women Back
Jul 13, 2008, 10:36 PM
Similar to the article Thomas posted here, this article from the Times specifically mentions maternity leave and its effects on a woman's career.

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Equality laws 'are now holding women back'

Maternity rights damage chances of promotion
Rosemary Bennett and Murad Ahmed


The radical extension of maternity leave and parents' rights is sabotaging women's careers, according to the head of the new equalities watchdog.

Nicola Brewer said that it was an inconvenient truth that giving women a year off work after the birth of each child - soon to be paid throughout - was making employers think twice before offering a job or promotion.

The chief executive of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission was speaking to The Times on the eve of a speech in which she will call for a significant rethink of family policy.

Ms Brewer said that generous maternity benefits had entrenched the assumption that only mothers brought up children and failed to hasten a social revolution where both parents were equally responsible for caring for their family.
Related Links

British fathers have the most unequal rights in Europe, entitled to only two weeks of leave compared with 52 for mothers. At the moment, nine months of maternity leave is paid, but this will rise to a year by the end of the current Parliament.

Ms Brewer said that calls to the commission's helpline from women who had lost their jobs after becoming pregnant suggested that they were paying a heavy price for their new rights. She said that her fears deepened earlier this year when the entrepreneur Sir Alan Sugar claimed that many employers binned the CVs of women of childbearing age.

Business leaders have criticised the new maternity laws, saying that they are a headache for employers and that it is difficult to plan the workforce if parents go part-time. But this is the first time that a criticism has come from an organisation that campaigns on behalf of women.

Ms Brewer said she feared that plans to extend the right to request flexible working hours until children were 16 could hamper women's employment prospects further. Of the one million parents who have made use of flexible hours so far, the overwhelming majority are women.

"There has been a sea change on maternity leave and flexible work and we welcome that," she said. "But the effect has been to reinforce some traditional patterns. The Work and Families Act has not freed parents and given them real choice. It is based on assumptions, and some of the terms reinforce the traditional pattern of women as the carers of children."

She added: "We have come a long way but after winning all these gains it is worth asking: are we still on the right track? The thing I worry about is that the current legislation and regulations have had the unintended consequence of making women a less attractive prospect to employers."

Although the latest legislation allows for the last six months of maternity leave to be transferred to the father if the mother goes back to work earlier, but that misses the point, she says. "The way it is framed means it is up to the women to transfer the leave to the man. It is not his right," she said. Ms Brewer said that it was not a case of taking away the new rights from mothers but of extending them to fathers. In her speech today she will ask why men should not be entitled to 12 weeks of leave on 90 per cent of their earnings following the birth of a child - the same as women.

She questioned the way in which the Government and opposition parties always tried to make a business case for each piece of family-friendly legislation. "Of course, there is a business case for these changes and many companies are going further," she said, "but this is a social argument as well as an economic one. There may well be a cost [to business], but as a society we are already thinking in terms of wellbeing as well as take-home pay."

Officials at the commission say that they are studying research from Sweden that has found that fathers who take up to two years off work after the birth of a child are 30 per cent less likely to get divorced. A six-month consultation exercise is to be launched today through the online chat rooms Mumsnet and Dad.info.

Katherine Rake, director of the Fawcett Society, which campaigns for equality between women and men, said that she shared the commission's concerns about the effect of legislation on women's careers. "Under EU law employment rights once given cannot be taken away, so there is no point regretting past decisions," she said. "The Government should both better protect pregnant workers and introduce paid parental leave that supports mums and dads to share care."

The commission has in the past been accused of courting controversy. Trevor Phillips, the chairman, said in April that a lack of control over immigration had led to a "cold war" between rival ethnic communities. He also criticised the Archbishop of Canterbury for saying that Sharia should have a role in the legal system.


6
This is by Dave Hill in the Guardian:

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Gender Stereotypes Hurt Men Too.

I hear "the feminists" are out to get me. They want to frame me for harassment; they want the right to breastfeed in my car; they want to toast my goolies before raging Sapphic fires. Never mind that some of my fellow men would pay good money to have that last thing done to them, there is plainly a monstrous regiment prosecuting a ruthless sex war at we gentlemen's expense, and it is winning. We have been forced on the defensive. The ladies will not be appeased.

I present these random extracts from the The Seething Classes' Book Of Male Resentments to indicate both the strength of resistance to women's uneven but inexorable advance beyond the domestic realm and the sheer silliness of much of it. Yes, I know sins are committed in female liberation's name and all sorts of daft attitudes struck. Women do sometimes abuse power at men's expense and cite powerlessness as justification. I get narked when women assume that I hate shopping and don't know where the oven gloves are kept because I'd gladly squander an afternoon on retail therapy if I had an afternoon to squander, because the sight of my souffles rising would make them go weak at the knees, and because sex war cliches are, in fact, our common enemy

But that's humankind for you. And the point is that the best and wisest feminist ideals - the sort that don't interest the media - have things to offer men too. Women moving onto the ground of politics and the professions, gaining autonomy and attaining enhanced cultural presence as a result has presented challenges for men and masculinity, but also certain opportunities.

Feminism has become a dirty word in the mouths of some its enemies, so let's recall one of its basic ambitions - the release of women from the constraints of gender custom and practice. It insists - or should insist - that the blurring of boundaries between men's domain and women's, between traits we call masculine and those we call feminine, is not a dangerous assault on some sacred natural order but an advance for social justice. It's about fair play, freedom of choice and enhancing human happiness.

Men should embrace these principles too, not only for women's sake but also for their own. All else being equal, to be born male is to inherit legacies of entitlement that continue to outweigh those bestowed on those born female. Yet the state of maleness carries its own burden of expectations and constraints. Contemporary studies of boyhood shed light on what we've always known - what I still remember vividly from my own boyhood - about the disabling and limiting influence of male behaviour conventions, homophobia and general "gender policing" on men in the making and the huge anxieties that inform them.

This is the baggage men drag with them through their lives; the pressure imposed both from without and from within to appear hard and never soft, to make a performance of rejecting anything that smacks of domesticity or femininity, notwithstanding the metrosexual and "new man". Even men who seem to embody and thrive on this stereotype can feel like slaves to it, and are often undone by it.

Sensible, grown up, non-sectarian feminism recognises all of this and seeks ways for men to combat it. This is not a matter of asking men to forgo every traditional bond and pursuit in favour of their "feminine side" but of inviting them to see that such distinctions are limiting and very largely artificial. It's not a matter either of unmanning the alleged essential male, but about men flourishing and developing in all areas of their lives, including as parents and in the home. It's about making modern, dual-earner, heterosexual relationships work better; more democratically. It's about a chap discovering that he too can be a nurse in the nursery, a cook in the kitchen and a lover in the bedroom and also, should he be so inclined, wrestle grizzly bears and grout the bathroom tiles as well - and be happy for women to enjoy such freedoms, too.


Feminism is good for men too, apparently. Obviously not so good that any of the large feminist organisations actually tackle any issues concerning men's rights on their websites (unless it's to take those rights away).

Although I read this article as "honestly, we're not lying anymore, feminism is good for men too. Please stop the backlash! We're not very good at arguing!"
7
Where else would you read this but in the Guardian?

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Feminists must not be deterred by Backlash

Kira Cochrane is absolutely spot on when she identifies the current discourse surrounding women's rights and women's roles to be part of a modern backlash against feminism. Writing in yesterday's G2, Cochrane notes: "arguments we thought were long-won have been re-opened, rights we thought were settled are suddenly under threat." As she goes on to explain, the signs of an all out assault on feminism are everywhere: from media representations of women to the negligible rape conviction rates, there's growing and disturbing evidence that our hard-won progress towards emancipation and equality is nowhere near as secure as many of us had hoped.

It's been 80 years since women secured the vote, and in the intervening years our lives have improved almost beyond recognition; well, that's the theory anyway. But every time we take our eye off the ball, every time we get complacent about our right to be treated as equals in 21st century society, we risk losing whatever gains have been made.

Take the recent debate on abortion for example. As Cochrane points out, the failed attempt to bring the time limit down to 20 weeks was bad enough, and would have had devastating consequences for the small numbers of women who need terminations in those later stages; but what few people realised was that there were even more draconian proposals than this, including one that sought a reduction to as low as 12 weeks. Although we won the arguments this time, as the worryingly close Commons vote showed, the fight is far from over.

Indeed, only last week while some of us were applauding Dr Evan Harris and Chris McCafferty for tabling more liberalising amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology bill, amendments aimed at removing the two doctor rule and at allowing other health professionals to carry out abortions, Nadine Dorries snuck in and renewed her assault on our reproductive rights with yet another time-limit amendment. Whether parliament thinks that the debate over 20 weeks is worth repeating so soon after all the issues have already been aired remains to be seen, but what's in no doubt is that the religious fundamentalists and the pro-life campaigners are not about to give up, and a woman's right to bodily integrity is very far from being hers to take for granted.

Cochrane also mentions the recent report by New Philanthropy Capital, which revealed that the great British public gives more to a Devon-based donkey sanctuary than it does to the three main organisations supporting female victims of violence combined. To be honest, I've resisted writing about this one up until now, because although like a lot of people I have a soft spot when it comes to donkeys or indeed any animal that's been abused or mistreated, to me it just beggars all belief to think that people consider animals more worthy of support than women. When rape crisis centres are closing down at the rate of two per month (and incidentally, where's the emergency funding they were promised nearly four months ago, and the four new rape crisis centres Boris Johnson promised to Londoners during his mayoral campaign?) and when grassroots women's organisations are struggling to stay afloat, this revelation was like a slap in the face for every woman who has been subjected to abuse in this country: and that's a lot of women. The funding crisis in the women's sector is a national disgrace: the story of the donkey sanctuary simply adds insult to injury.

In her book Are Women Human? Catherine MacKinnon asks:

    If women were human, would we be a cash crop shipped from Thailand in containers into New York's brothels? Would we be sexual and reproductive slaves? Would we be bred, worked without pay our whole lives, burned when our dowry money wasn't enough or when men tired of us, starved as widows when our husbands died (if we survived his funeral pyre)?

Perhaps we should now add to that: "and would our lives really be deemed as less importance than the lives of animals?"

But while I agree with Mackinnon's analysis of the status of women today, and with Cochrane's catalogue of the injustices and discriminations we endure, there's a danger in the way modern feminists, me included, present our case. When Cochrane asks, "What's to be done?" one of the first things I would say is that we need to change the nature of the debate. Instead of concentrating on the things done to us, as if we are and always will be passive recipients of male behaviour and patriarchal hegemony, women need to be more outspoken about what it is we need, and what it is we want to see happen in order for true liberation to be achieved. Instead of being on the defensive, waiting for the inevitable assaults on our freedoms, and only getting ourselves organised when we risk losing something, we need to start making demands.

At the moment, we're too easily pleased; as soon as men acquiesce to some small thing we stop thinking about asking for even more, so grateful are we for any small crumb that drops from the table. For example, we won the vote on abortion, but we failed to demand the same rights for the women of Northern Ireland, and when Brown did a deal with the DUP to help secure the vote on 42 day detention, one of the first things he allegedly agreed to was no change on the Northern Ireland abortion law. Yes, we managed to defend what we had, but what we had wasn't good enough in the first place, not when it excluded so many women, so why weren't we demanding better?

Similarly, so difficult has it been in the past week to persuade men that the proposals in the new equalities bill are not going to discriminate against them, we've ignored the fact that the bill in its present form is a watered down version of what was originally intended. So while structural discrimination in the public sector is soon to be a thing of the past, for women working in the private sector nothing is going to change. If we win the bill, we'll no doubt breathe a sigh of relief that at least something has been achieved, but the proposals don't go far enough, and instead of relief we should be angry that we've once again been forced to compromise. Feminism is and always has been about securing equal rights for all women, not just for the lucky few, and those of us working to secure equality for women would do well to remember that.

I'm in no doubt that there is a backlash against feminism, and I expect some uncomfortable times ahead, but my message to all feminists would be: don't let that put you off. We're nowhere near achieving what we need to achieve, but as long as we don't give up, we can rest assured that at least if we don't get there our daughters and granddaughters and the next generation of feminists surely will.


The fact that people are starting to wise up to feminists and actually (shock horror) questioning what they say is apparently a 'Backlash', which is indicative of misogyny.  At least that's the story in the Guardian. I think it's because feminists have lied so much that people are actually starting to smell a rat. Even in the letters page at the Guardian people are actually questioning feminists claims of 'equality' whilst it's blatantly obvious that they care nothing for mens rights.

Also check out the comments for this article, they're ripping the 'backlash' article to pieces.
8
Hopefully someone here can help. I'm searching for an article I remember reading a few years ago about gender conflict within the media.

Basically there was a report based around US comedy and drama shows concerning who wins arguments or is considered 'right' when dealing with the shows protagonists. If my memory serves me correctly women were normally always 'right' on any issue.

Does anyone know where I might be able to find this article?

Thanks

Neon
9
Main / "Mothers make better single parents"
May 21, 2008, 12:15 AM
Unbelievably this article is in the Times. Matthew Collins shares his experience of being a single dad, and it doesn't sound too good. I suppose that kids need a mum as much as they need a dad, but apparently women should be the primary caregivers.

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Dads can find their inner mum
Following the debate this week in Parliament about a child's need for a father, a single dad says that it is possible for men to fill both roles - so long as he has strong female friends

Matthew Collins

According to a close single mother friend of mine, "All men are emotionally retarded to some degree and therefore much less well equipped than women to bring up children alone." As a single dad, I don't completely disagree. Despite a trend to argue otherwise, most childcare experts agree that children ideally need a mother and a father to bring them up. But if parents split, should the mother automatically be given custody? Increasingly vocal fathers' groups - and Bob Geldof - think not. But having been bringing up my kids alone for seven years, I have become very aware of men's limitations when it comes to trying to be a father and a mother.

"Look at your house," says my friend. "It's like a cave - devoid of soft furnishings and often messy as well. You've never realised that children need a gentle, nurturing environment in which to grow up and flourish." I realise now - rather late in the day. My way of keeping domestic work to a minimum has been to strip the house of clutter. It is therefore bare. And I don't do nearly as much housework as I should.

I fall short elsewhere too. Most mums of my acquaintance have a strict evening routine - supper, homework, bath, bed. My routine goes haywire frequently. I like my boys to eat proper food, so sometimes I spend too long cooking something wonderful, which means it can be frighteningly close to midnight before we've even had supper. And too often I've insisted on an evening walk or bike ride - which has meant no time for homework. We've then skipped the bath, or even a wash (and sometimes, I'm ashamed to say, teeth-brushing), and I've bundled them up to bed far too late, minutes after vigorous exercise - and expected them to nod off immediately. "Can you read us a story?" "No! Go to sleep!" That's not very nurturing, is it?

I haven't always had reservoirs of emotional sensitivity. And nor has my own sweet father. He was born in 1922, one of six kids who lost their mum when he was 7. He fought hardship and then a war, and nobody took much time when he was a child to connect with his emotions. He's been a great dad but obviously not the world's most touchy-feely father. When I started going bald at 19 he told me about a balding lad in the war: "The chap went to the medic... And do you know the MO said? 'I've got men around me getting blown to bits and you come to me about your hair! Get out of my bloody sight!'"

I'm slightly more sensitive but still fall short. Too often when the boys have fallen over and grazed their knees, I've simply told them to get up. I've occasionally kissed them in a rather gauche way but often in the early days I didn't even have plasters in the house. Mother friends of mine would make a massive fuss of their poor wounded soldier and offer them a choice of cheery coloured plasters.

When I've been a knackered single dad - especially when knackered thanks to the kids - I've had even less sympathy. For example, I might have spent three hours cooking what I thought was a fantastic meal. I've served it with pride, only for the kids to say it's horrid. I've told them to eat it; emotions have got heated; my food has been spilt; and they have had the cheek to start shedding tears... I've then erupted like Vesuvius. "Why don't you just give them a hug?" said a friend.

"Give them a hug? What, for being vile?" It can be hard when kids wind you up - and then expect sympathy. But, of course, I know the theory that sensible parents stand back - and don't start getting all emotional with their kids when they start getting emotional.

So, although it is not most men's strong point, emotional intelligence can be learnt and developed. There is, therefore, hope for us Neanderthals. I have come on in leaps and bounds since becoming a single father. My emotional intelligence doesn't surface all the time but I no longer join in the arguing and fighting the moment my two kids start arguing and fighting. And I try to look for reasons when they are upset - even when they are vile to me.

I've also learnt about fresh duvet covers. I find housework extremely stressful - it sends my heart rate soaring and makes me breathless. I once read that stress reduces testosterone levels and increases oestrogen production so maybe this is nature's way of telling me that housework is really not a man thing. I also read once that John Humphrys likes ironing. Apparently he finds it relaxing. But if John was stuck in the house all day instead of haranguing politicians, he wouldn't find it so soothing. And does John like changing duvet covers?

This is the mother of stressful household activities but a mum friend has taught me how this horrendous task can be done slightly more simply - you hang the duvet cover over the stairs and fill it from the top of the banister. I now do this (almost) weekly and my little gents sleep much better.

But despite our handicaps, men do have assets when it comes to parenting.

Our DIY skills are overrated (most women can put up far better shelves than I can) but our physical strength is a strength. And when you've got boys that is a great asset. I would possibly be a more limited single father if my teenage children were girls. But they're hulking lads who love testing out their ever-increasing strength on me. I might be hoovering when a boy suddenly jumps on me and throws me to the floor.

I floor him. We have a wrestle. I prove I'm still the house dominant male. And then return to my hoovering.

Another strength of mine is male recklessness. Since they were toddlers my kids and I have had adventures that other people have said were foolhardly. When my first son was born, my mother told me: "Whatever you do, Matthew, enjoy your children." And I've tried to follow her advice.

I've driven across America and Canada with the kids. We've busked in Florida, camped around Europe. And we've enjoyed numerous activities together - anything from football to fishing. We talk all the time as well. I don't know how useful my advice would be for girls but my kids are blokes and we talk candidly about everything. However, I have also learnt that paternal advice is more useful when reinforced by other men - a friend, a teacher, one of my brothers. So if it is something I'm really concerned about, I ask other men to make the point too.

I'm still pretty poor at multitasking. If I'm doing something and someone phones, I give them 100 per cent attention (unlike mothers I know who balance the phone between their chin and shoulder and carry on helping with homework). But I've become better at running the home - and working from it - even during long school holidays.

"You're a much better dad than I could ever be," my single-mother friend told me. "And you're probably a better dad than most dads ever are. But you're still not a great mum. And kids need a mum first and foremost." Maybe she's right. But men can find and develop the mother in them - especially when they have inspiring mother friends.

Matthew Collins will perform his one-man show, How to make tax-free cash from your kids and shop for free at Waitrose, at the Buxton Fringe, Derbyshire, in July


You can leave comments at the Times website. So far it seems that a couple of men have said (and quite rightly) "speak for yourself!"

10
An Absolute classic from The Onion:

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Nation's Slicked-Back-Hair Men Rally Against Negative Hollywood Portrayal
May 12, 2008 | Issue 44•20

      LOS ANGELES--Thousands of members of the slicked-back-hair community gathered in Hollywood Monday to protest the film industry's longtime trend of depicting men with slicked-back hair as untrustworthy, unlikeable antagonists.

"There have been 4,192 films in the past 10 years in which male characters with sleek or slicked-back hairstyles have been portrayed in a negative light," said Ray Swartz, chairman of the National Organization of Men with Slicked-Back Hair. "Even though men with this hairstyle comprise just 3 percent of the U.S. populace, they make up nearly 80 percent of all film and TV villains, bad guys, and just plain assholes. As a result, thousands of men who enjoy wetting their hair and then combing it straight back face a silent but pervasive form of discrimination every single day."

"I'm just a man with slicked-back hair," Swartz added. "Does that make me a sleazeball?"

According to statistics released by the organization, five out of every six characters with slicked-back hair are cast as the primary antagonist. Of this group, 29 percent are depicted as greedy and manipulative Wall Street sharks, 22 percent as cold, emotionless murderers, 19 percent as evil coaches or mentors, 12 percent as corrupt mafiosi, 8 percent as undead creatures who feast on human blood, and the remaining 10 percent fall into the general category of jerks/pricks/John Travolta.

More alarming, Swartz said, is that certain subsets of slicked-back-hair Americans endure even worse prejudices. He cited men with slicked-back hair who also talk with cigarettes dangling out of their mouths, wear blue button-down shirts with white collars, or place toothpicks behind their right ears as the most victimized.


"Just because I have heavily gelled, jet-black, slicked-back hair does not mean I can't lead a normal, productive life," Kettering, OH native Martin Sutulovich said. "I'm not consumed by an insatiable thirst for power, I know nothing about the high-pressure world of real-estate speculation, and I have a wife and kids whom I love very much. The last thing I want to do is murder them, cut them up into tiny pieces, bag them up, and put them out with the trash, but when strangers look at me, that's all they think."

A recent study conducted by Swartz's group indicates that Americans who slick back their hair usually experience typical development, have life spans equal to those without slicked-back hair, and are no more likely to stoically torture people with medical instruments than the average dry-haired citizen.

"You always see crooked lawyers and politicians with slicked-back hair in the movies, but when was the last time you saw a computer programmer with slicked-back hair, a farmer who built a magical baseball field in a cornfield with slicked-back hair, or a man who defused a bomb at the last possible second to save thousands of innocent lives with slicked-back hair?" Swartz said. "Never."

"The closest thing we've ever gotten to a hero is Steven Seagal or that Spanish neighbor guy on Sanford And Son," he added. "And Seagal's hair is pulled back into a ponytail, so he doesn't even really count."

Swartz also pointed out that even females who appear in films with slicked-back hair often end up transforming into aliens who have sex with people and then kill them.

"I have naturally oily hair. If I leave it dry, it ends up messy by the end of the day, so I slick it back," Doug Roessner of Brockton, MA said. "I sell insurance for a living, so how am I supposed to get my clients to trust me when they all think I'm some money-hungry scumbag? And every time I tell my bosses that I'll 'take care of' a problem, they immediately assume I mean murdering someone. It's pathetic."

"My son hasn't been the same around me since he watched D2: The Mighty Ducks last month," said slicked-back-hair man Mick Romanini, referencing the film in which coach Gordon Bombay slicks back his hair when consumed by fame, then wears it dry again upon realizing the error of his ways. "Is this what we want to teach our children about slicked-back hair?"

Added Romanini, "He should be able to do whatever he wants with his hair when he gets older and not worry that people are going to assume he's the kind of guy who would plot his best friend's death and then seduce the widow to get his hands on the insurance money."

In interviews, studio executives have countered the protests by citing a number of realistic and sympathetic characters with slicked-back hair, including James Bond, Superman, and Data from Star Trek.

But Swartz rejects such claims. After closer examination, he said, Bond's hair is slicked "more to the side than back," Data is not a human being, and Superman has a distinct curl of hair that falls on his forehead, which his group considers a different hairstyle altogether.

Hollywood is facing similar protests from groups such as the National Association of Maniacal Laughers, the American Mustache-Twirlers Coalition, and the Alliance of Gentlemen with Scars and Eye Patches.


The Onion delivers the goods yet again! The funniest thing is that when I think about it, it's true! However, there was one notably good guy with slicked back hair; none other than Tim Thomerson as 'Jack Deth' in the film Trancers, which was a brilliant little movie.
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Main / Women Living Alone Hits Women Hardest
May 12, 2008, 01:59 AM
From the Guardian:

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Who can afford to stay single now?

As the credit crunch pushes up prices, the lifestyle of singletons, especially women who chose to live alone, is under threat, writes Huma Qureshi

Jane Austen heroes and heroines, prepare to move aside. A single man in possession of a good fortune might have been 'in want of a wife' 200 years ago, but that no longer holds true.

According to figures from the Office for National Statistics, the number of people - especially women - living alone has doubled since the 1970s. Many singletons celebrate their independent status - the term 'freemale' has been coined to describe single, successful career women who don't need to rely on a man, financially or otherwise - but with everything from fuel to food getting more and more expensive, just how sustainable is life alone?

'There's just no monetary benefit to being single,' says Tracey-Ann Christian, 33, who lives in Chislehurst, Kent. 'Other than the council tax reduction [a 25 per cent reduction for people living alone], you get no discounts or benefits at all and what little money you do have is taken away from you in bills.'

Recent figures from comparison site Uswitch.com show the cost of living is up by 9 per cent from last year, and not being able to share that cost is a particular gripe among singletons.

'When you're on your own, you do sometimes think that if you had a boyfriend, and he moved in, you could share everything: the bills, the television licence ... ' says Annette Meesschaert, a 26-year-old solicitor who lives in Surrey, and pays £700- 900 a month on rent and bills. 'I used to lodge with someone, and wasn't used to paying bills by myself. I did try to calculate how much it would come to, but there are things such as home insurance that you forget about and don't account for but still have to pay. Even if it is only £18 a month, it's yet another cost.'

Tracey-Ann, who works as a PA, bought a house with her ex-partner, but when they split last year, she remortgaged the property in her own name and now pays twice as much (£1,000 instead of the £500 she contributed before) on the mortgage. 'It would still cost me £700 to rent somewhere, so I decided to stay on the property ladder. But the bills worry me more than the mortgage - they aren't always constant, and they never go down, only up,' she says. 'I really struggled at the beginning financially: I did find myself in debt and my overdraft kept going up and up. But when you don't have anyone to bail you out - no boyfriend who earns more than you and offers to help you out - then you have to monitor your money constantly.

'I'm always keeping a tab on how much I'm spending and I'll usually have £500 left at the end of the month to spend on socialising, clothes and so on, but I don't save much at all. I might be able to save some, but when you're single, you don't want to spend a whole week in on your own.'

When it comes to car insurance, singles usually have to pay more than their coupled-up counterparts. According to insurance comparison site Tesco compare.com, a single 35-year-old woman driving a Ford Puma would pay £232.55 to insure a car in her name only, but would pay £173.75 if she added on her 36-year-old partner as a named driver, saving nearly £60. Her partner, meanwhile, would save around £70 by adding her as a named driver on to his insurance policy for his car.

'If you add a spouse to your policy, then the chances are that your premium will come down because of the shared risk,' explains Niki Bolton from insurer eSure. 'We call it the "family factor". A man that adds his wife to his policy is considered more settled, possibly drives with children in the car and so on - so these factors may bring their car insurance down.'

Single travellers are often charged a single supplement fee for a hotel room, paying the same price that two people would pay to share. Tracey-Ann is going abroad for two weddings, and has to pay single supplements for her accommodation for both events. 'I know I could stay in a cheaper hotel, but when all the other guests are staying together at the nicer hotel, you don't want to be the only one that isn't there,' she says. 'It's a double-edged sword: spend more to be on your own, or spend less - to still be on your own.'

Buying groceries is another sore point, especially with the cost of food up by 11 per cent since last year. So many singles are worried about this that online discussion forums are springing up to address the issue of buying and cooking meals for one. Most forum users say they either end up spending too much money on food, they don't eat, or don't bother buying 'proper' food at all and live off ready meals and endless bowls of cereal instead.

Single mother-of-two Sarah Compton, who lives in east Sussex, says she's aghast at how much her weekly shop is costing now.

'I used to overshop and buy whatever I wanted to, but I've noticed recently that everything is so much more expensive,' she says. 'I now stop and ask myself if we really need things before buying them and I've started to cut out so many of the luxury items that I like - posh chocolates and exotic things. But even then, you can't buy anything for under a pound any more and I'm still spending around £80 to £100 on food.

'I used to go to Sainsbury's, then switched to Tesco and didn't notice a huge difference in prices, so now I'm going to start going to Lidl for basics. In my ideal world, I'd order my groceries from Waitrose, but that would probably cost me as much as my mortgage."


Girls, it ain't easy being independent.
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Main / Glass Ceiling? It's all in the mind...
May 08, 2008, 02:27 PM
An article from the Times

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The glass ceiling in women's heads

Women in their thirties often face the next move up the career ladder with dread

Camilla Cavendish

In my dwindling band of friends who are still combining work and motherhood, there is a common fear. It is fear of promotion. Few say it, few even acknowledge it to themselves. These women are in their thirties, educated, in good jobs. But the next move up the career ladder - or at least the conventional career ladder - seems to produce in them a secret dread.

I realised this recently when one friend, who has been wanting more responsibility for ages, ducked a planned meeting with her boss. "I think I'm OK where I am," she said. "Why risk climbing up another notch?" Only a few days later yet another friend turned down a job offer that most of the men she consulted said she'd be crazy to reject. This has become a familiar pattern. We mothers hold a steady course, fearing that any deviation will send our households veering out of control. While most of the men we know have their feet clamped hard on the career accelerator, their eyes in almost permanent rotation between the conquests ahead and the rear-view mirror.

"If you were to predict the future on the basis of school achievement," says Susan Pinker, in her new book The Sexual Paradox, "the world would be a matriarchy." Women are powering ahead of men in education. As graduates, many are earning more than their male peers. But by their mid-thirties they stick in the middle ranks or drop out altogether, while men who may have much more erratic educational histories are excelling. This trend is most pronounced among the most gifted women, many of whom have bosses or husbands who urge them to aim high. And it is not just a motherhood issue: educated women without children are also not choosing the same paths, in the same numbers, as educated men. As Pinker puts it: "Even with all the barriers stripped away, they don't behave like male clones."

Why? Pinker believes that the answers are mainly biological. It is not lack of ability or opportunity that prevents so many women from reaching boardrooms and the upper echelons of science, she says, (although she does not claim that discrimination has been abolished). It is because women are wired in the womb to want different things. Baby boys are more exposed to testosterone, which drives them to be daring and aggressive. Baby girls are doused in oestrogen, which helps them to empathise. This makes women by nature resistant to investing all their energies, single-mindedly, in one thing. It makes them less extreme. Women tend to seek "inherent meaning" in their jobs, whereas men tend to seek domination.

Parents like me, who have failed to tempt their children away from gender-stereotyped toys, may nod at this. Some people will see it as an outrageous attack on equality - as I would have done in my feminist twenties. But it is really an argument for a better understanding of why some women dislike roles that are defined by male ambitions. Pinker asks why we think of the male as the standard model and the female as a version with a few optional features. All the high-powered women she interviews are happier for having left their top jobs. In different ways they explain that society impelled them towards the male model, but that it didn't quite fit.

The book is a powerful portrayal of men, too. Pinker realised that in 20 years of clinical practice most of the troubled children she had seen were boys. She discovered that some of the most fragile boys, with obsessive interests or an extreme appetite for risk, had become surprisingly successful in later life. Some of the men who have driven the world forward have (like my distant relative Henry Cavendish, in whose scientific discoveries I have always taken a nonsensical pride) been loners almost incapable of communicating - not attributes to which most women aspire.

This book in fact gives powerful support to Larry Summers' remarks that produced rage on the Harvard campus two years ago. He was the first President of Harvard to suffer a no-confidence vote, for having the temerity to suggest that there are fewer female geniuses than men and fewer women prepared to devote crazy hours to a single topic.

The book raises intriguing questions. If Pinker is right, then women who have the luxury of making career choices may actually increase, not decrease, the sexual division of labour. That is certainly what happened in kibbutzes that were studied over four generations, where all choices were freely available to men and women but where, in each generation, men chose to do progressively less childcare and women less construction work.

What does that mean for our current notions of equality? If women choose not to be corporate CEOs, does it matter? How can we find ways to better value what they do decide to do? If women really are more wired for empathy, this also raises questions about what policies are really "family-friendly". Pinker cites potentially devastating evidence, from one Ivy League university, that male professors use parental leave to do research, while female professors use it to care for children.

He returns with a book, and she with a backlog. So greater equality in family policy could paradoxically discriminate against women.

To me, this book comes as a relief. I have never felt that diatribes about discrimination chimed with my personal experience, although it does with some of my friends. I have never bought the idea that women aren't competitive: we are. But I see so many able women who are fed up with the idea that the only real progress has to be perpetual upward motion. There's a time for that, but it should be in our own time.
13
Interesting article in the Times written by Alice Walkers daughter Rebecca:

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In the mid-1980s, The New York Times ran a profile of the American writer and activist Alice Walker. Her novel, The Color Purple, had won the Pulitzer prize and was being turned into a film by Steven Spielberg.

The article was illustrated by a photograph of Walker sitting on her teenaged daughter's knee. It was meant to be a "fun" picture; but, in retrospect, according to Rebecca Walker, the photographer unwittingly portrayed the true nature of her relationship with her mother.

Alice Walker was, and remains, an icon of the American civil rights movement. "People adore her. I can't tell you how many people have said to me, 'Your mother saved my life' and 'I have an altar to your mother in my bedroom'. They feel a connection to her and revere her greatly," says Rebecca.

Walker's success as a campaigner was to her detriment as a mother. Like Dickens's Mrs Jellyby, who neglects her home and her children as she directs her energy towards the poor of Africa, so America's icon often went to feminist meetings and rallies and left Rebecca to fend for herself. Her daughter experimented with drugs and became pregnant at 14.

"My mother\did a lot of leaving to go to her writing retreat, which was over 100 miles away -- so she'd go there and leave me a little bit of money, leave me in the care of a neighbour," recalls Rebecca, now 38.

"When I was pregnant at 14, I think it was because I was so lonely that I was reaching out through my sexuality. My mother's a crusader for daughters around the world, but couldn't see that her own daughter was having a difficult time. It was me having to psycho-emotionally tiptoe around her, rather than her taking care of me."

Walker is furious with Rebecca for making such sentiments public, and mother and daughter are estranged with little hope of reconciliation. Rebecca has a three-year-old son, Tenzin, whom her mother has never seen. Their last meaningful exchange, during Rebecca's pregnancy, ended in Walker sending a terse e-mail in which she resigned from "the job" of being her mother, and told her that in any case their relationship had been "inconsequential" for years.

The depth of her anger was such that she refused to budge even when Rebecca had a difficult birth and Tenzin's life hung in the balance in a special-care baby unit. "My father called her to tell her what was happening. He couldn't imagine that she wouldn't run right over . . . In some ways, I wanted her to -- but in other ways, I didn't. I knew she wouldn't be able to be there for me in the way I wanted. It would be problematic."

Walker, the eighth child of poor sharecroppers, grew up in Georgia during segregation. Her extraordinary intellect and determination won her a scholarship to study in New York; and after university she returned to the South and became involved in voter-registration drives and setting up children's education programmes in Mississippi.

There she met Mel Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. In the midst of the feverish, sometimes murderous, racial politics of the time, they became the first legally married inter-racial couple in Mississippi, defying both their families' disapproval and death threats from the Ku Klux Klan.

The marriage did not last but it produced Rebecca: a living, breathing, mixed-race embodiment of the new America that they were trying to forge. The problem was that, during her childhood, Rebecca felt precisely that -- a political symbol rather than a cherished daughter.

Being progressives, Walker and Leventhal decided on shared parenting but came up with the agreement that Rebecca would alternately live two years with each of them. From the age of eight, she lived in utterly different worlds: with her father and stepmother in New York's conventional, rich, Jewish, Upper East Side; and with her mother among bohemian, black, mostly poverty stricken activists and feminists in California.

She felt she did not fit into either world. In New York, she was the only black face in the neighbourhood. Yet she felt she was far too steeped in "white privilege" for her mother's friends' taste. And, if she tried to talk to her parents about any of this, she was ignored.

"My father had come out of world war two and the Holocaust, my mother from the segregated South. Their attitude was, 'The Gestapo isn't after you, you're not getting beaten up by mobs just for sitting at the lunch counter -- what's your problem?' " she says.

Walker had also joined the early feminist movement -- Gloria Steinem is Rebecca's godmother -- and it was her politics, more than anything, that shaped mother-daughter relations. The so-called "first wave" feminists believed that housework was another form of slavery and that women did not have an innate need to nurture but had been conditioned into their subordinate role as wives and mothers through centuries of patriarchy.

"My mother is very ideologically based, and her ideology is much more important in many ways than her personal relationships," says Rebecca.


When Rebecca became pregnant at 14, Walker wasn't shocked: she calmly picked up the phone and arranged an abortion. "Her feminist thing was about empowering me to have an active sexuality and to be in control of my body, and that trumped any sense of boundaries," Rebecca says.

Certainly, Walker believed that what she was doing was right. Leaving her teenaged daughter to "do her own thing" was a way of fostering Rebecca's independence and avoiding inadvertently passing down patriarchal values.

"Her circle were questioning power relationships and whether a mother had any more knowledge than a child. Some friends of hers were living on communes. I know those kids and they're totally screwed up.

"Some were sexually abused, all kinds of bad stuff happened, but even those who survived intact don't want to create communes for their children. They didn't want to be raised by 10 different parents -- again, it was this ideological thing trumping the maternal instinct."


Towards the end of senior school, an ecstatic Rebecca showed Walker her offer letter from Yale. Instead of celebrating her daughter's success in landing a place at one of the world's top universities, Walker asked her coolly why she wanted to go to a bastion of male privilege.

Rebecca went to Yale anyway, and started thinking about feminism for herself. Her first book examined what feminism meant to young women and what role it played in the modern world. "When I began to challenge status quo feminism, my mother started to feel very injured," she says. "To have a daughter who was questioning feminism -- it was seen as a threat. Imagine Margaret Thatcher having a hippie child who wanted to live in India and become a Hare Krishna. It was that kind of schism.

"I keep telling people feminism is an experiment. And just like in science, you have to assess the outcome of the experiment and adjust according to your results, but my mother and her friends, they see it as truth; they don't see it as an experiment.

"So that creates quite a problem. You've got young women saying, 'That didn't really work for me' and the older ones saying, 'Tough, because that's how it should be'."


The debate goes on: Rebecca, who lives in Hawaii with Tenzin and Glen, his Buddhist-teacher father, recently wrote about why she was supporting Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton -- and immediately came under fire.

"The response from older feminists was that I, and other young women, were naive in thinking Obama could ever truly represent us, and we should be supporting the female candidate. The belief is that women become more radical as they get older, that we're naive and we'll 'get it' later on."

Predictably, Walker was upset at Rebecca's next publication, Black, White and Jewish -- a memoir about growing up in her fractured family. "My father was quite shocked at first, but he got behind me 100%. However, my mother felt very injured," says Rebecca. "I'm not blameless. I can be very direct and strong in my opinions and I wasn't as sensitive to other people's feelings as I could have been.

"My mother is a celebrity, and celebrities need to constantly police their reputation. If you put a chink in their public persona, it can be very dangerous and threatening to them."

The final showdown happened while Rebecca was pregnant, and is chronicled in her new book, Baby Love -- a diary of her pregnancy in which she explores modern women's dilemmas about relationships and motherhood.

Having been raised to believe that "it's not nature, it's nurture", she was not prepared for the strength of her feelings for her baby. "I adore him," she says. "He's really into running and jumping and he's very attached to me. It's all, 'Mommy, Mommy, Mommy', and it's very difficult to leave him."

People she meets constantly express surprise at what's happened -- surely having a child should have brought her closer to her mother, rather than splitting them asunder? She agrees.

"People don't really understand how strong ideology can be," she says. "I think sometimes of that group and that feminism as being close to a cult. I feel I had to de-programme myself in order to have independent thought. It's been an ongoing struggle. When you have a cult, you have a cult leader who demands a certain conformity . . . And when you have a celebrity who has cultural-icon status, economic power beyond what you can imagine, you can't resist that person -- if you want to stay in their realm. Because once you start challenging them, they kick you out."


Some of the things she mentions are a good indication of why feminism went so awry. Feminism was and still is an experiment, but the fact that it's got so much power is quite scary. "We're right because we feel it's right" isn't a valid basis for it. That's probably why it's so screwed up now.

Kind of a sad article though.
14
An American columnist in the Times decided to tell British women what he thought of their appearance and opened the flood-gates to all manner of opinions and insults. Here's the article:

American Beauty?

Here's an excerpt:

Quote
In the iconic chick-flick Bridget Jones's Diary, the title character is a sad, lonely, overweight, posh-sounding chain-smoker in her thirties with a drinking problem and no dating prospects. She then, one day, goes to the gym for an hour or two, spends £200 at Topshop, reads a self-help book and, lo and behold, she finds herself in the delightful position of having to decide between Hugh Grant and Colin Firth.

Women of Britain: Bridget Jones's Diary is not a documentary. It's a work of fiction, a fairytale. The fact is that control-top granny pants are simply not a substitute for regular exercise, thoughtful grooming and a healthy diet. Certainly not if you're single and interested in men.

Although I am American, England has been my home since I was three years old. I now split my time between Los Angeles and London and regularly visit New York. There are many, many differences between the British and the Americans, but none more glaring than UK women's approach to their own upkeep.

I am a massive fan of British women. UK girls, in my opinion, are the greatest natural beauties in the world . . . when they're 17 or 18 years old. The girls I was surrounded by when I was a teenager were sublime roses with lustrous hair, flawless skin, bright eyes and lithe, athletic bodies. They dressed as if there would be a prize at the end of the night for the girl wearing the least. I then went away to Philadelphia for university. Four years later, I came back and wondered: "What the hell happened to all the beautiful girls I knew?" My first assumption was that one half of them had eaten the other half and washed them down with a crate of lager. These girls looked phenomenal when looking good took no effort. But when British women get to the age where they have to make an effort, they appear unable, or uninterested, in rising to the challenge.


Very provocative, this article unleashed a mass of comments on the Times website, so much so that Tad was forced to write a second article. However, he didn't do a Sommers and go back on what he said. Oh no he did not:


Oh please, you lard-butt British frumps have got off too lightly


Here's how the article began:

Quote
I love English women. The great love of my life was English. I always thought I would end up with an English girl. But I'm never getting laid in Britain ever again.

I ensured this by writing an article last week in The Times, comparing British and American women and asking why British women don't spend the time, money and effort on their upkeep that American women do. What started out as a light-hearted, anecdotal account of my impressions of dating women on both sides of the Atlantic has exploded into a national furore.

Granted, my comments were provocative. I described an English girl I was once set up with as "something that would surely have been happier hunting truffles in the forests of central France". I also said this woman had been described to me as "having the body of a 20-year-old" to which I responded, "maybe she did ... dismembered in her freezer at home. She certainly didn't have it on her skeleton".

I didn't expect to make friends when I wrote that you "don't exactly need callipers to figure out in which country the women look after themselves more". But the response has been insane. A large number of comments on The Times's website might be 20 or 30: my article drew 550. The Sun ran a spread on my story and The Guardian anointed me Sexist of the Year.

I was utterly unprepared for the avalanche, but I stick to my guns: when British women reach the age where looking good is no longer effortless, they seem unwilling or unable to rise to the challenge. And judging by the vitriol of the response, I realise I've not only touched a nerve, I've reached into the underbelly of a deep, dark insecurity. Nobody gets that defensive about something they don't care about.


Tad's article even prompted one dealing with the best responses, which can be found here:

American versus British beauty: who wins?

Interesting responses to a clearly deliberately provocative article, particularly Tad's second article.
15
Main / So who do feminists employ?
Nov 13, 2007, 03:25 AM
I found this rather interesting article in the Times.

Quote
Flexi-workers are a twist we can ill afford

Minette Marrin

'You cannot imagine how much women like me hate women like you." This salvo was aimed at me at a drinks party 20 years ago by a successful publisher and well-known childless 1970s feminist, on noticing that I was pregnant.

"You think that just because you have lovely babies or terrible teenagers you have a God-given right to leave the office any time you like, to go to their nativity plays or their parents' days, while the rest of us do your work for you and keep your lovely job warm for you, without any thanks, until you see fit to come back from your blissful maternity leave or your half-term holidays." That was her drift.

I didn't bother to tell her that I did not belong to the army of exploitative mummies she so loathed. I worked freelance and part-time from home and still do, precisely because of these problems. I was impressed by the force of her argument. She had worked hard all her life to make small enterprises succeed and, among the many risks involved, she particularly resented the risks of hiring women who turned out to be a liability and a source of disruption and resentment among her colleagues.

Nothing has changed since then. Working flexibly is good for families and good for mothers, but it is not good for employers. With the best of goodwill on all sides, flexitime will always cause problems. Some employers may be large enough to bear the inevitable costs and inconveniences. The public services will be protected from such commercial realities by the state and the taxpayer. But that does not change the unpleasant fact that flexible working imposes costs and inefficiencies on almost all employers and the economy as a whole.

Despite this obvious fact, more and more women now see flexible working as a human right. Men are beginning to do so, too. Politicians agree: both Gordon Brown and David Cameron are anxious to oblige. Downing Street announced last week an inquiry into extending the right to flexible working (currently restricted to parents of children under six) to parents of children under nine, 12 or even 17. About 6.25m parents have the right to request conditions such as flexitime or working at home; if all parents of schoolchildren were included, 4.5m more would have this right. This would include the right to time off to help teenagers with their exams.

Last month I found myself at a similar drinks party to the one 20 years ago, talking to another successful woman publisher and a woman lawyer, both of feminist views. The lawyer admitted sadly that in her small organisation she could scarcely afford to employ women, no matter how good, no matter how much better than the male applicants; if they disappeared for many months' maternity leave with the right to return, it was almost impossible to replace them temporarily with a woman or man of the same calibre; why would any such high-flyer accept a temporary job for only a year or so without any security?

What would happen, meanwhile, to the discriminating clients and their complex affairs who had temporarily been abandoned? Would they want her back, pending the birth of her next baby? And this, the lawyer said, was quite aside from the direct financial costs of subsiding the mother's pregnancy and flexitime.

The publisher agreed. If a good literary agent disappeared for a year's maternity leave, she said, her firm didn't bother dealing with the replacement. It took time and there were so many good agents around; her company would publish books from the other agents. So the literary agency of the woman on leave and the writers she looks after would lose out for at least a year.

The same problems emerge everywhere. In my own experience, women social workers and women doctors who work flexibly become much less satisfactory to me as a customer; they must be even more unsatisfactory to their employers. For instance, one excellent social worker I contact sometimes about one of her vulnerable clients works only on Thursdays and Fridays. If this client of hers suddenly has a big problem between Monday and Thursday morning, she won't be available. Someone else may be, but it won't be someone who knows and understands all the personal details. The costs of handovers between flexi-workers in complicated jobs like these must be astronomical, too.

I found the same with an all-women GP practice of excellent doctors. We gave up going because there was so much handover, so many temporary doctors and so little continuity - all because of maternity leave and flexible working. Our GP now is a man who works full time, as do his colleagues.

Some time ago I sat on a working group for the Royal College of Physicians, looking into the choices and opportunities for women hospital doctors. There was almost universal agreement that what women doctors wanted was the chance of flexible working and that many men doctors would like it, too. I sympathise; flexibility is what I've always needed as well. But one or two expert witnesses sounded cautionary notes.

What happens, one asked, in a small hospital where there were, say, three consultants in a speciality - two mothers and one man? Surely there would be great pressure on the man to accept more than his share of the family-unfriendly shifts. Two other witnesses, one a woman, suggested something more depressing. You could not get to the top of your profession, they argued, without making great sacrifices, including the sacrifice of time. Achievement in medicine - as in anything else - involves weighting the work-life balance heavily in favour of work. Flexitime is at odds with great achievement.

Anecdotes such as these are no substitute for argument, of course. But I mention them because they illustrate something which so many women (and men) seem determined to ignore. However good it sounds in theory, in the nasty detail of practice, flexible working all too often imposes a burden on businesses, on standards, on services, on clients and on the economy.

To impose flexible working on employers as a woman's right and increasingly as a man's right, too, is yet another step along the road of economic decline. In this light, resentment of flexi-workers doesn't seem to me to be unreasonable.
16
This is from the BBC.

Quote
TV told father of son's drowning   

The estranged father of a 10-year-old boy says he did not learn of his death by drowning until four months later.
John Prestwich said he discovered that Jordon Lyon had died from a TV report on the inquest into his death in Wigan, Greater Manchester
.


The case caused controversy after it emerged that two police community support officers (PCSOs) had declined to jump into a pond to save him.

Jordon jumped into the pond in an effort to rescue his step-sister as they played together in May. Fishermen managed to save his step-sister from the water.

Mr Prestwich said he had separated from Jordon's mother, Tracy Ganderton, eight years ago, but initially had regular access to Jordon and their other son, Brandon.

He said he was serving in the Army at the time, and had returned home on leave one weekend to find that his ex-wife and children had moved house, leaving no new address.

Mr Prestwich said he had tried to trace them through the Child Support Agency (CSA) but was told details could not be given out due to the Data Protection Act.

It was not until he saw the news in September that he realised Jordon had died, he said.

"It was like someone had hold of my throat and I couldn't get any words out, I just collapsed on the floor," he said.

"In my eyes, if I was in contact, I might not have been there on that specific day but I know that I would have been able to go to the hospital and actually see him.

"I know that he was looking for me, so just me turning up at the hospital, saying I was there, could have been enough to bring him round.

"The fact that I have had to turn up in September, four months after he died... I just wish that I had been contacted.

"I know I am on the system, the electoral register. I am available to be found if someone looks, and I've done that on purpose, so that if Jordon and Brandon did decide to look for me, they could find me.

"Nobody should be watching the news one day and find out that their son's died - nobody."

Jordon's death sparked a row over the role of the two PCSOs who were at the scene but did not enter the water as they were not trained to deal with the incident.

Jordon was eventually pulled from the pond, but despite attempts to resuscitate him was later pronounced dead in hospital.

A verdict of accidental death was recorded at the inquest into his death.

Police have defended the actions of the PCSOs, saying that they could not see where Jordon was in the lake.

Ass Chf Con Dave Thompson said Greater Manchester Police would not encourage any officer to jump into the water because of the dangers.

He paid tribute to the PCSOs for "acting correctly".

"The two PCSOs involved did not stand by and watch Jordon die," he said.

"They acted correctly and I fully support the actions they took.

"The initial call to police gave the wrong location. This was no-one's fault, as the lake is known by several different names locally and there are other similar lakes nearby." 


If he hadn't watched TV he might not have even known his son was dead.
17
Main / Why is the divorce rate declining?
Oct 15, 2007, 06:23 AM
This question was pondered and then answered in the Guardian:

Quote
Why are divorce rates falling?

Emine Saner
Monday October 15, 2007
The Guardian


According to the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics, there were 132,562 divorces last year, down 7% on 2005 and the lowest number for 30 years. But before you get a rosy glow, the figures don't tell the whole story - they are just for England and Wales (in Scotland and Northern Ireland, divorce levels rose). It is also because fewer people are getting married (in 2005, the number of marriages was at its lowest level since records began in 1862).

Some think high-profile large divorce settlements have put people off tying the knot. "People are terrified about what happens when the marriage breaks down," says Vanessa Lloyd Platt, a divorce lawyer. "Men, in particular [they still tend to be the wealth holders], are increasingly panicked about the way in which settlements have been going. As a consequence, people are cohabiting. What will be interesting is if the laws regarding cohabitation are changed - I think people will start getting married again and the divorce levels will rise."
Cohabiting couples are more likely to break up than married couples. Lloyd Platt says we are in the grip of a "relationship crisis". She says men, increasingly, are unable to deal with women who are more independent and less likely to put up with unreasonable behaviour.

Denise Knowles, from the relationship counselling service Relate, is more optimistic. "People are marrying later, so that could mean that they are more sure about what they want and more settled in themselves. Then there are more people accessing services such as Relate, which shows that when people are hitting difficulties, they are prepared to do something about it. They are looking at shared history and realising that just because there are a few problems, their marriage doesn't have to be dead in the water."


So men aren't marrying because:

a) They don't want to lose half of everything they own.

b) They can't deal with independent women who don't cut them any slack.

Those two reasons seem to be part and parcel of the same point. Women are more likely to file for divorce and then take half your stuff. So these days men are more likely to be divorced by their partner and have more to lose.
18
Main / Rape - Why aren't we outraged by it?
Oct 05, 2007, 05:10 AM
Quote
'Why aren't we more outraged?'

Professor Joanna Bourke couldn't stop anger creeping into her new book, a modern history of rape. The problem has got worse, not better, she tells Eithne Farry - and it's time we started recognising just how abhorrent it is

Friday October 5, 2007
The Guardian

In the UK today, only 5.6% of reported rapes end in a conviction, and in some areas - Warwickshire, Avon and Somerset, Gloucestershire and Essex - that falls to 3%. "I think there should be a 'Women: where not to go' tourist map," says historian Joanna Bourke, only half joking. It was these statistics that enraged Bourke, and transformed the writing of her latest book, Rape, A History from 1860 to the Present. "I was forced, in a sense, to put myself in this book, because researching it made me realise that it's not out there, it's here. It's happened to my friends, it happens to one in five women, and the conviction rate is shocking."

Whereas previous studies of rape have focused on the victims, Bourke's approach has always been to take a cold, measured look at those who carry out acts of violence, in work including An Intimate History of Killing and Fear: A Cultural History. "All my previous books were about perpetrators, so it seemed natural to continue to focus on them. That's the way you understand something, then you can defuse it, by demystifying it." The previous books were shrewdly detached, but there is an undercurrent of anger this time round. The book explores how the cultural perception of rape has changed, quoting from prison journals, medical textbooks and trial reports. Essentially, Bourke demands: "Who are these violent people, and what can we do about them?"
There is, of course, no conclusive answer. She discusses the crime and wonders about the punishment. Imprisonment? Castration? She painstakingly describes the rape myths that have allowed perpetrators to "get away with it", such as the 19th-century theory that you can't rape a woman who resists ("It is impossible to sheath a sword into a vibrating scabbard," as one 19th-century judicial textbook declared). And Bourke doesn't shy away from discussing female rapists. "That was really hard, on a personal and ideological level. I always thought they were imitating men ... but they weren't simply adopting a masculine form of aggression; female perpetrators perpetrate in a female way. If you ask the question, 'Were you sexually assaulted or raped as a child?', all of a sudden mothers, babysitters, teachers become the perpetrators. I found that very distressing and unexpected, and it's true that a tiny, tiny 1% of convicted rapists are women."

Bourke leans forward in her book-lined room in London's Birkbeck college. "Whatever period you look at, the rapist tries to adapt the social mores of the day to explain away their abusive behaviour. So the 19th-century rapist left money behind - these were poor guys, not wealthy - and he would say, 'I press this coin against your breast because you're not worthy of me putting it on the mantelpiece.' Why does he say that? Well, working-class men put their wages on the mantelpiece, so he's treating his victim like a whore. But after the 1970s the rapist tries to make it into a dating encounter - he'll leave the woman at a bus stop, give her the cab fare, ring her afterwards."

She leans back. "That's why history is so great - you see how things change over time." In light of our abysmal rape conviction rate, the threatened closure of rape crisis centres and underfunded support groups, her attitude seems surprisingly upbeat. "I'm a naturally happy person and some of my friends say I think too optimistically, but there have been times when there hasn't been a major problem with rape. In the 'long 19th century' (1840s to 1914), Britain had very low levels of stranger rape. Rape rates really started increasing during war periods (1914-18, 1939-45), and then rose dramatically from the early 1960s onwards ... If it changed before, it can change again. I am hopeful."

In the 1970s, the women's movement worked hard to try to promote change. Books such as Susan Brownmiller's polemic Against Our Wills (which argued that rape perpetuated male power by keeping all women in a state of fear) helped prompt legal reform, mass protests and more support for rape victims. But earlier this summer, the Purple Resistance, an organisation formed to raise public awareness of rape, was hard pressed to find 20 like-minded women to march across London. "Feminism has become a bad word for a lot of young women," says Bourke. They don't realise, she suggests, how much and how quickly women's lives have changed over the past few decades, and "they don't realise how bad things still are. I've done a lot of work on young women's attitude to sex, and there seems to be an acceptance that boys' sexual aggression is somehow normal, genetic. The boys think that too; they've normalised it."

Bourke, who describes herself as a "socialist feminist", is clear that legal reform is needed, but also believes "that men should step up to the plate. Women are told how to fight back, to get good locks for our doors, to be sensible. It has become our responsibility to make sure 'they' don't do something to 'us'. And when you know that a lot of rapes are committed by husbands, boyfriends and acquaintances - well, it's outrageous. I can't work out why people aren't more outraged. But this epidemic of sexual violence doesn't do men any favours either. Not normalising it, not naturalising it, making it seem abhorrent - that's one of the ways forward."

Bourke is reluctant to explain why she writes about the darker sides of life. "When I can afford the analyst's fees, I'll let you know," she says, laughing. But she admits it may have something to do with her childhood in Haiti. Her parents were medical missionaries who worked in hospitals in Zambia and Haiti and, as Bourke explains, "Haiti, during the reign of Papa Doc Duvalier and the Tonton Macoute, was exceptionally tough." Although she was exposed to violence, she never felt afraid. "I was part of a loving, tight-knit family, and even though I saw terrible things, I also saw how my Haitian friends had a creative engagement with violence and poverty. Maybe that's why I'm interested in understanding violence - because I've seen it first hand."

She pauses for a second, then adds gleefully: "If I'm honest, there's also that competitive thing, a desire to take on a traditionally male subject. When I started writing military history, it was said to my face, many times: 'How can you write about combat when you've never seen combat?' Well, most male academics who write about combat have never got anywhere near the field either. I wasn't going to let them say, 'How can a nice girl like you write on such terrible subjects?'"

For her next book, she is thinking of writing something on male erotics. "There's a lot written about negative male sexuality, so it would be interesting to look at what good male sex would be, from both the male and female perspectives."

Bourke's unflinching curiosity, combined with her insistence that the lessons of the past can transform the future, allows her to imagine a time "in which sexual violence has been placed outside the threshold of the human". It's a visionary outlook, a world where good sex replaces bad. Bearing those abysmal statistics in mind, we have a long way to go.

· Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present by Joanna Bourke is published by Virago at £25. To order a copy for £23 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 070 836 0875.


It's been a while since I've posted something from the Guardian, mainly because I've been finding less and less to raise my blood pressure over the past 6 or so years. A few years back I'd be angry at virtually every post, but I've noticed recently that the usual feminist drivel has seemed to dry up. Sure it's still women-centric stuff, but the usual misleading stuff was toned down or just not there. Until I read this article that is.

Here's my favourite quote:

Quote
"that men should step up to the plate. Women are told how to fight back, to get good locks for our doors, to be sensible. It has become our responsibility to make sure 'they' don't do something to 'us'. And when you know that a lot of rapes are committed by husbands, boyfriends and acquaintances - well, it's outrageous. I can't work out why people aren't more outraged. But this epidemic of sexual violence doesn't do men any favours either. Not normalising it, not naturalising it, making it seem abhorrent - that's one of the ways forward."


Basically men are responsible for rape, so all men should be doing something about it. What we should be doing she doesn't say, but she just wants to make it clear that men are rapists. It's old school feminism at its worst.

19
Main / Why are men in adverts such morons?
Aug 15, 2007, 12:47 AM
Here's an interesting opinion piece in the Times. There's a lot to read so I've highligted the bits I found particularly interesting:

Quote
Don't be a basket case

Shopping as a leisure activity? No thanks, says the author of This Age We're Living In. Avoid shops and you'll avoid stress, while saving time, money and the planet


David Wilson

Enough is enough. It's time for change. It's time to reassert the wisdom of the male instinct about a central area of our national life. It's time for everyone to admit that shopping is rubbish.

Most men have always known instinctively that shopping is not fun. By now, surely, no one in their right mind should even hope that it can be fun. Yet it remains a national leisure pursuit, emptying our bank accounts and filling our homes and our lives with pointless tat.

The British are champion shoppers, the biggest users of credit cards in Europe, with the greatest amount of personal debt. The Earth is being plundered to fulfil British consumer demand, as jumbo jets and giant freighters carry stuff to us from across the world. Yet, repeatedly, the British are scoring badly in international surveys about quality of life and happiness.

So, you see, men were right all along. Shopping does not make you happy. Faced with the suggestion of a major shopping trip for almost any reason, the typical male has a simple response: "Why do we need a new one? The old one is perfectly fine."

Advertisers know that men are the enemy. That's why so many TV adverts now portray men as morons. It's not just that most consumer activity is female-led. The advertisers know that most consumer resistance is male-led, so they try to undermine us before we can speak.


The standard psychological explanation for the differences between male and female shopping attitudes has long been that men are innate, solitary hunters who like to make a quick killing, while women are sociable gatherers who are happy to wander around in groups for hours.

This is all nonsense. Ask a bloke to take part in a trip to a faraway department store or shopping mall, and he will come up with plenty of sociable alternatives. Let's just stay home together instead. Let's go to the pub. How about a coffee on the high street? Do you fancy a drive in the countryside? Any man who pretends to be happy about a day in a shopping mall - like a man who agrees to go on a date to an art gallery - is simply hoping it may lead to sex. Sadly, surveys have shown that many women prefer shopping to sex. Their day has already climaxed before they get home (art galleries remain a much more hopeful bet; that's why serial adulterers prefer them).

The male shopper is often a little confused, but this can work in his favour. It's mid-August and he's about to go on holiday, so he wanders into a clothes shop to buy summer gear and finds to his happy amazement that the summer stuff is in a sale, all prices reduced. This is because the shops and the more competitive women shoppers always think one season ahead and space is being cleared for autumn. Some women are already shopping for Christmas.

When I decided to write a novel about a confused everyman trying to find a meaning to life in the modern world it seemed only right to make him a grumpy lifestyle journalist. This is because "lifestyle" - the idea that all our human longings can be satisfied by buying something in a shop - has become one of the great modern delusions, driving up our envy and our expectations to levels that can never be satisfied.

From all this, there are several evident truths: any time spent watching a TV shopping channel can be a sign of depression or inadequacy; Ikea is a brilliant practical joke to make the middle classes serve as warehousemen; there is no point worrying about having the very latest electronic gadget, as it will be out of date within a month; it's madness for parents to work ever longer hours to buy stuff for their children when the stuff is simply a guilt payment for the longer hours.

The consumer society has become an Orwellian nightmare. Adverts are the propaganda, sudden changes in fashion are the ever-changing allegiances, debt is the enslavement, freedom of choice is the big lie. And, as in 1984, we are always watched: away from roads, most CCTV cameras are in shopping centres.

Blokes hope to be the masters of their pleasures, not the slaves. I'm happy to potter about my local high street: it's part of my community. Supermarkets, bookshops, music stores are all fine, and I'll go to a department store if it's an absolute necessity. But shopping as a big day out, as a leisure activity? No thanks. Life has its own joys and challenges without the big stores telling us what we should want.

Avoid the stress. Save your money. Save your time. Save the planet. Stay in the neighbourhood or get out into the countryside. You don't need a loyalty card there.


20
Main / Italy's first all female beach
Jun 26, 2007, 02:51 AM
Where else would you read an article like this but in the Guardian:

Quote
Sun, sea, and no need to hide the cellulite

Tom Kington in Rome
Monday June 25, 2007

Italian women are flocking to the country's first all-female beach: a short stretch of sand designed to let bathers relax away from prying eyes and football talk.
Bathers arriving at Beach no 134 on the 50-mile stretch of beach clubs linking Rimini to Riccione on the Adriatic coast are greeted with a large sign featuring a cross over an image of a man.

"Here I can allow myself to be less than perfect," said Cinzia Donati, 43, of Milan.

"Men prefer to talk about four-four-two formations," added architect Alice Ghresta, 24. "I come here to relax, and all that is lacking is a eunuch at the door."
Deep-fried squid and chips, mainstays of Italian beach club menus, have been replaced at no 134 by tuna and avocado tart, as well as prawns tossed with tomato, black olives and capers. No disco music blares across the sand.

"We hope women will not feel required to dress in this year's bikini, wear make-up or always cover up that bit of cellulite with a slip," said beach manager Francesca Ravaglia. "It is a place for Italian women to feel some solidarity."

A beach without leering men is the season's biggest novelty in a resort where hundreds of beaches dream up new specialities every year to compete for 40 million paying punters. Dog-walking stretches of sand jostle with surfing hang-outs and beaches for book readers only, equipped with lending libraries. After aerobics in the shallows, this year's get fit fad involves marching up and down in the breakers with ski poles in hand.

Ms Ravaglia's father, Fausto, owner of the beach, said that one man would be allowed in. "The lifeguard must be a man. Clearly, to save a woman you need a man. It's a question of muscles."


Oh dear god...