Patschef

lundi, avril 28, 2008

samedi, janvier 12, 2008

http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080112/NEWS01/80112002

Saturday, January 12, 2008
By Steve Lieberman, Khurram Saeed and Laura Incalcaterra
The Journal News

A Rockland County woman was charged Friday after being accused of putting her 7-year-old son in a hot oven as punishment.

Tiffany Fraser, 26, of 1 Tallman Place, Airmont, the mother of twin sons, pleaded not guilty to second-degree assault, a felony, in Village Court. She previously had been charged with a misdemeanor in the case.

The child's day care provider also was charged because, police and state officials said, she learned about the abuse from the boy and mother but never reported it to authorities.

The day care provider, Joelle M. Lherisson, 37, of 10 Country Club Lane, was charged with a misdemeanor count of failure to report child abuse. She has pleaded not guilty. Her license to operate a day care facility at her house has been revoked by the state.

"In this case, we have horrific acts," Ramapo Detective Lt. Brad Weidel said yesterday during a Town Hall news conference attended by the police chief, town supervisor and council members. "This case has been very unnerving for us, especially those of us who have children.

"Our investigation found the mother threatened to put the child in the oven and then did so. We found the day care operator knew and didn't report the incident."

Fraser's twin sons were removed by the Family Court in November and placed with a foster family under the auspices of Rockland Child Protective Services.

Weidel said Fraser's other son was not physically abused, but police were investigating more abuse against the child and Lherisson's day care business.

Fraser, a single mother, is accused of putting her son in the oven in July because he had lost a cell phone, Weidel said.

"He was being punished," Weidel said.

The child's burns - including to his arm, hand, nose and left leg - were noticed by Lherisson, who questioned the boy at the day care facility, police and the state Office of Children and Family Services said.

Lherisson never reported the abuse as required by law for mandated reporters, according to a Nov. 8 letter from the state agency revoking her license to operate a child care facility.

State inspectors visited Lherisson's day care facility Oct. 26 to investigate a hair-pulling incident between a staff member and a child, said Pat Cantiello, a representative of the state Office of Children and Family Services.

During that visit, the inspectors learned about the July incident with Fraser's child, Cantiello said.

"During the the month of July 2007, you observed burns marks and blisters on the inside of the arm of a seven-year-old day care child," the state wrote Lherisson in the Nov. 8 letter.

"You questioned the child and he disclosed that his mother tried to put him in the oven. You contacted the child's mother, who confirmed the incident did occur."

Lherisson, who had a license since Nov. 30, 2005, appealed the revocation of her license on Dec. 20. A hearing officer upheld the state's decision on Dec. 31.

She has 120 days under the law to appeal her revocation. Lherisson could not be reached for comment. Her lawyer, Brian Berkowitz, did not return two telephone calls seeking comment.

While the state learned about the alleged child abuse on Oct. 26, Ramapo police learned about it on Oct. 31. Weidel said the police had been investigating a separate incident of child endangerment at Lherisson's facility, but declined to comment further.

Fraser reported her son missing to the police that Halloween Day, Weidel said. The boy was found at the ShopRite on Route 59, about two-tenths of a mile from his home.

The boy told Ramapo police "that he had run away from home and did not want to return," Weidel said.

"He indicated to them that his mother had put him in an oven and burned him as a punishment," Weidel said. "When you hear something like that from a 7-year-old kid, you wonder if it's accurate. But we investigated."

Fraser appeared in court yesterday, dressed in a white jacket, gray sweat pants and boots. She wore black-rimmed glasses. She has appeared before the judge in this case before on the misdemeanor count of endangering the welfare of a child.

After the arraignment, Fraser's lawyer, Edward Cigna, questioned the filing of an assault charge. Cigna said the Ramapo police had known about the abuse allegations for three months and only charged her with a misdemeanor count of endangering the welfare of a child.

"This has been kicking around for months with the same known facts," Cigna said. "They returned the children to her back then. This has gone overboard."

Weidel said police filed the assault charge based on results from forensic evidence. He also said the child didn't have burn marks when police first saw him on Oct. 31.

Fraser's only comment to Justice Anthony Benedict during her arraignment referred to the media.

"I just don't want nobody coming to my house," she told the judge.

Benedict said he couldn't stop people from knocking on her door. He released her without bail, because she has shown up at all her previous hearings and at Family Court, where custody of her twin boys is at stake.

Rockland District Attorney Thomas Zugibe's office called in a recommended bail of $5,000 on the assault charge, but didn't send a prosecutor to Fraser's arraignment. Zugibe didn't return a telephone call seeking comment.

Fraser waited inside Airmont Village Hall in hopes the news photographers would leave. She eventually ran out the back door.

Tallman Place, where she and her two sons lived, is just off Route 59, a short street near railroad tracks, an industrial park and the New York State Thruway.

Deon Raymond, a homeowner, said he was shocked by the charges against Fraser, whom he knew only in passing.

"She didn't look like someone who would do this type of thing," Raymond said.

Lherisson's home on Country Club Lane is on a quiet cul-de-sac where the houses have broad lawns and wooded backyards. Toys and play equipment sat inside a fenced area in the home's side yard.

Several neighbors declined to comment on Lherisson yesterday.

jeudi, janvier 10, 2008

'Career divorcee' in $100m fight

By Charles Miranda in London

A WOMAN once married to racing magnate Robert Sangster has been called a career divorcee by her fourth husband as she tries to grab a chunk of his $100 million fortune - just 14 months after they wed.

Susan Sangster became Susan Crossley after marrying Australian developer Stuart Crossley in a whirlwind courtship and wedding in Barbados.

They have agreed to divorce - but she is declaring the pre-nuptial agreement they signed is invalid because he failed to tell her about "tens of millions" he had in offshore accounts.

In a groundbreaking ruling yesterday, three British Court of Appeal judges dismissed her appeal over a hearing next month which will evaluate the pre-nup and whether it means her claims against her husband should be thrown out.

Lord Justice Thorpe, giving the ruling of the court, said: "This is a quite exceptional case on its facts. If ever there is to be a paradigm case in which the courts will look to the pre-nuptial agreement as not simply one of the peripheral factors of the case but a factor of magnetic importance, then it seems to me that this is such a case."

Lawyers for Mr Crossley said the appeal judges had ruled it is possible to short-circuit normal procedures when a financial claim in a divorce appears to be hopeless and there is a pre-nuptial contract.

The judges dismissed Mrs Crossley's appeal against a High Court judge's decision that the facts of the case could be heard in a one-day hearing rather than multiple hearings covering 18 months.

Mr Crossley had asked Justice Bennett in the High Court to short-circuit normal procedures because they were only married for 14 months, there were no children, both had independent wealth and had signed an agreement forbidding court action over their finances on divorce.

His lawyers said the final decision after the hearing next February should provide long-awaited clarification on the degree to which pre-nuptial agreements are binding in the courts.

Mr Crossley said after the hearing: "This is a fair decision. I am upset that our marriage failed. Sadly, my wife is a career divorcee."

He met his future wife in the summer of 2005 and was engaged within a few months.

Before their marriage in January 2006, they signed the pre-nuptial contract agreeing they would leave the marriage without making claims against each other.

She filed for divorce in August - although from June 2006 the couple had lived largely separate lives.

When Mrs Crossley applied for the full range of financial claims against her husband, he asked the court to order that the case should be heard in one day.

Justice Bennett agreed, ordering a hearing to consider all the facts of the case and whether Mrs Crossley should be held to the terms of the pre-nuptial contract.

The story of Ms Crossley's string of wealthy men began in her teens when, as an attractive blond model, she married the heir to the Kwik Save store chain in England.

The marriage lasted 18 months. She then met tax exile Peter Lilley, heir to the Lilley and Skinner shoe fortune, and at age 22 they married but divorced a short time later.

She then met multi-millionaire Robert Sangster - 20 years her senior - and three years later became Mrs Sangster. Their marriage ended in 2000.

Her divorce payouts are worth an estimated $50 million.

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,22959113-5001021,00.html

Libellés : career divorcee

jeudi, mars 02, 2006

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Dangerous Professors Threaten Young Minds

Breaking from NewsMax.com

Time magazine once called author David Horowitz "a clear and ruthless thinker. What he says has an indignant sanity about it."

Horowitz lives up to that description in his latest blockbuster book -- "The Professors - The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America." [Editor's Note: Check out our FREE offer for this book -- Click Here Now.]

In it he offers "indignant sanity" as he draws blazing portraits of some of the worst leftist propagandists now infesting America's colleges and universities.

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Those unfamiliar with the extent to which the nation's campuses are being held captive by left-wing radicals will find his revelations shocking. He goes about the task of unmasking the most virulent of academic terrorists who brook no dissent from their student victims.

Horowitz is well suited for the job. He knows the left, its tactics and its goals because he is a child of the extreme left, a background he detailed in his classic books, "Radical Son" and the more recent "Left Illusions."

A lifelong champion of civil rights, he shifted from his parents' vigorous communism - a vigor he shared - to battling his former comrades on the left, paying special attention to their continuing assault on America's institutions of higher education.

In the 1990s Horowitz created the Individual Rights Foundation to combat the epidemic of so-called speech codes being used by colleges to stifle free speech. In 1998 he created the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, his vehicle for fighting the culture wars raging on campuses.

He has visited hundreds of campuses and has been frequently attacked - sometimes physically - by students egged on by bigoted academics who despise any opinions but their own Marxist creed. Now in his mid-60s and recovered from a bout with prostate cancer, he's still at it. Says radio hostess Laura Ingraham: "Beware the unhinged, leftist academic when David Horowitz hits campus."

Florida State Rep. Dennis K. Baxley, chairman of the Education Council of the Florida Legislature, says, "David Horowitz has done more than anyone I know to throw light on the political abuse of our college and university classrooms by activist professors who have been enabled to do so because of the incestuous self-selection process for faculty recruitment and tenure."

In "The Professors" Horowitz traces the advent of leftist domination of the campus to "an academic generation that came of age as the anti-war radicals in the Vietnam era." He notes that many of these activists stayed in school to avoid the military draft and earned Ph.D.s, "taking their political activism with them when they became tenured-track professors in the 1970s."

David Horowitz

Horowitz reveals in detail the extent of professorial radicalism being imposed on students.

He cites federal government statistics showing that the total number of college and university professors is a staggering 617,000. Of that number, he estimates there are between 25,000 and 30,000 radical academics on America's campuses.

The number of students annually passing through their classrooms, he estimates, would be on the order of 3 million potential brainwashees.

Writes Horowitz: "This is a figure that ought to trouble every educator who is concerned about the quality of higher education and every American who cares about the country's future."

Profiled in the book are some of the most radical academics in the United States, representing every form of Marxism, radical Islamicism and sexual deviancy imaginable. He explores a political and cultural loony bin whose inmates are determined to warp the minds of every student they "teach":

At the University of Oregon, professor John Bellamy Foster, editor of the Marxist magazine "Monthly Review," considers the collapse of the Soviet empire to be a setback for human progress.
University of Texas (Arlington) professor Jose Angel Gutierrez says: "We have to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to worst, we have got to kill them."
Columbia University professor Victor Navasky has somehow convinced himself that the traitor Alger Hiss and the Rosenberg spies who betrayed our atomic secrets to the Soviets were as pure as the driven snow.
University of Michigan professor Gayle Rubin, a fan of pedophilia, argues that the government's crackdown on child molesters is a "savage and undeserved witch hunt."
Rutgers University professor Michael Warner advocates public homosexual encounters with strangers.
There are 96 other academics covered in this excursion into the madness of campus extremism. None subscribed to the description of teachers' duties offered by distinguished leftist professor Stanley Fish, who wrote: "Teachers should teach their subjects. They should not teach peace or war or freedom or diversity or uniformity or nationalism or anti-nationalism or any other agenda that might properly be taught by a political leader or talk-show host."

If the examples cited above are not frightening enough, what Horowitz wrote at the conclusion of "The Professors" should scare the wits out of any parent whose child is enrolled in an American college or university: "More than 90 percent of the professors profiled in this text have attained tenure rank, an indication that their academic work is approved by their peers ... within their department and university and nationally."

Their tenure, he notes, makes them eligible to vote on who will be hired in the future in their departments and who will be promoted to tenured rank. He goes on to warn that "the problems revealed in this text - the explicit introduction of political agendas into the classroom, the lack of professionalism in conduct and the decline in professional standards - appear to be increasingly widespread throughout the academic profession and at virtually every type of institution of higher learning."

dimanche, août 21, 2005

The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com

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Forum: Foibles of feminism
Published August 21, 2005

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Driving home from a high school mentoring luncheon held by the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, I contemplated my discussion with the girls at my table.
They were troubled by the information at the weekend conference. It seemed a few considered themselves feminists. Luce Policy Institute President Michelle Easton's speech -- aptly titled "The Failures of Feminism" -- worried them.
Now a junior at Drake University, I couldn't help but think of my own high school days. For all I knew, I was a feminist. Packing up my belongings for that all-important first year of college, I never bothered to categorize myself as a Democrat or a Republican or even a liberal or a conservative. I was 17 and in the middle of that angst/rebellion stage, meaning I no longer went to church with my parents and had purposefully chosen a college 500 miles from home.
Surprisingly, my otherwise mediocre public high school employed a teacher passionate about American history. Come to think of it, the man is the most objective instructor I ever had. My younger sister's revelation the teacher was a Kerry supporter came as quite a blow. Nevertheless, he taught my Advanced Placement U.S. History class and he did so fairly. We spent a good deal of time on the suffragettes at Seneca Falls, and I grew to respect the women who fought for equal rights.
Thus, my view of feminism was neutral, if anything. There was a general appreciation -- "isn't it nice women have the right to work and vote." I didn't see modern feminism directly affecting me. Equal pay for equal work? Sounded logical. I was OK with claims that women should seek fulfillment outside the home.
Naively assuming Women's Studies would be a thorough analysis of the obstacles women had overcome and, perhaps, a comparison of the rights American women have versus the rights of women in other countries, I followed my orientation counselor's advice and enrolled in Women's Studies 101. Call me gullible, but alongside courses titled Marxist Principles of Economics, Intro to Women's Studies looked harmless.
"Harmless" is perhaps the perfect description of how feminist activity seems to those, like my high school lunch companions, who have yet to experience the hateful wrath of the actual movement. This movement is often glamorous and fashionable present but still ever-present in some shape or form on every American college campus.
For three hours a week during my first semester of college, my tuition dollars were spent studying that oppressive beast, the white male. I don't exactly specialize in staying quiet, so for 12 long weeks I was known as the enemy by my Women's Studies professor and classmates.
Soon after leaving home, I had an "Aha" moment. I stopped hating my mother for her selfless devotion to her children and began looking forward to having children of my own. I voiced this desire in class, in response to a question about any justification of heterosexuality, and it was not well received.
If you haven't been in a Women's Studies classroom, just imagine a situation where open-mindedness is touted so long as everyone shares the same liberal ideology. Then multiply it by one woman with a Marxist agenda equally fond of saying "America entered Iraq unpre[expletive deleted]pared" and "King George II," to 30 impressionable and self-conscious peers.
Combine that with assorted readings and film clips shining a positive light on self-centered, lesbian, anti-male existence, and you might see the feminist movement for what it really is: Anything but harmless.
Most despicable in my view is the movement claim to represent all women equally. My professor could not get her mind around anyone disagreeing with her. Her open-mindedness simply did not extend to someone with pro-family convictions.
The Women's Awareness Coalition at my school certainly does raise awareness -- the question is: of what? Trying to explain to a feminist that feminism furthers a leftist agenda, not the rights of all women, is something I think I'll have earned a minor in if I survive the second half of my college career.
After the mentoring lunch, a ninth-grader wrote to me, "I learned that most feminists are very confused." I couldn't have put it better myself.

DANIELLE STURGIS
Miss Sturgis is the recipient of the Phillips Foundation Clare Boothe Luce Journalism Award at the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute. She is a junior at Drake University in Iowa.

lundi, juillet 11, 2005

dimanche, juillet 10, 2005

Patschef

mercredi, juin 29, 2005

Congress Should Kill Discriminatory Domestic Violence Act

"I hope VAWA becomes the Titanic of the legislative approach to social problems. I hope it sinks spectacularly."

June 29, 2005

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by Wendy McElroy
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The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) will expire this September if it is not reauthorized by Congress. Largely viewed as an anti-domestic violence measure, VAWA has become a flashpoint for the men's rights advocates who see it instead as the living symbol of anti-male bias in law.
Although a significant number of domestic violence victims are male, VAWA defines victims as female. As one result, tax-funded domestic violence shelters and services assist women and routinely turn away men, often including older male children.

Estimates vary on the prevalence of male victims. Professor Martin Fiebert of California State University at Long Beach offers a bibliography that "summarizes 170 scholarly investigations, 134 empirical studies and 36 reviews."

It indicates that men and women are victimized at much the same rate. A lower-bound figure is provided by a recent DOJ study: Men constituted 27 percent of the victims of family violence between 1998 and 2002.

Accordingly, men's rights activists not only accuse the VAWA of not merely being unconstitutional for excluding men but also of dismissing the existence of one-quarter to one-half of domestic violence victims.

The criticism should go deeper. In many ways, VAWA typifies the legislative approach to social problems, which arose over the past few decades and peaked during the Clinton years.

The legislative approach follows a pattern: public furor stirs over a social problem; Congress is pressured to "do something"; remedial bureaucracy arises, often with scant planning; the problem remains; more money and bureaucracy is demanded; those who object are called hostile to "victims."

VAWA arose largely from the concern stirred by feminists in the '80s. They quite properly focused on domestic violence as a neglected and misunderstood social problem. But their analysis went to extremes and seemed tailor-made to create public furor.

As an example, consider a widely circulated claim: "a woman is beaten every 15 seconds." The statistic is sometimes attributed to the FBI, other times to a 1983 report by the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics. But neither the FBI nor the DOJ sites seems to include that statement or a similar one.

Men's rights activists contend that the elusive statistic derives from the book "Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family" (1980) by Murray Straus, Richard J. Gelles and Suzanne K. Steinmetz. The book was based on the first National Family Violence Survey (1975), from which the FBI and other federal agencies drew.

The survey does support the claim that a woman is battered every 15 seconds but also indicates men are also victims. By omitting male victims from their efforts, however, domestic violence activists create the impression of a national epidemic that uniquely victimizes women who require unique protection.

In response to public outcry, Congress was pressured to "do something." It passed VAWA 1994, granting $1.6 billion to create a bureaucracy of researchers, advocates, experts, and victim assistants, which some collectively call "the domestic violence industry."

Reauthorized in 2000, VAWA's funding rose to $3.33 billion to be expended over five years. Now, VAWA 2005 seeks more money.

Voices like the National Organization for Women insist that "the problem" remains. To argue for the "growing problem of gender-based violence," however, NOW reaches beyond traditionally defined violence against women and seeks to protect high school girls from abusive dating experiences. NOW states, "Nearly one in three high-school-age women experience some type of abuse -- whether physical, sexual or psychological -- in their dating relationships."

Without expanding the definition in such a manner, it would be difficult to argue for more funding.

Data indicates that traditionally defined violence against women has declined sharply. The rate of family violence reportedly "fell from about 5.4 victims per 1,000 to 2.1 victims per 1,000 people 12 and older," according to DOJ statistics.

VAWA 2005 faces much more opposition than its earlier incarnations. One reason is that men's rights activists have been presenting counter-data and arguments for over 10 years.

Advocates of VAWA 2005 have responded with pre-emptive accusations that paint opponents as anti-victim: for example, "If Congress does not act quickly to reauthorize the legislation, they are putting women's and children's lives at risk."

But most of the anti-VAWA arguments are not anti-victim. Many are anti-bureaucracy and could apply to any of the so-called "industries" created by the legislative approach to social problems. (The Child Protective Services is another example.)

Some anti-bureaucracy objections focus on the billions of dollars transferred into programs, often with little oversight or accountability attached.

Other objections point to those dollars being used for political purposes rather than clear and immediate assistance to victims. The misuse of tax dollars is most often alleged on the grassroots level, where men's rights activists often face VAWA-funded opposition to political measures, especially on father's rights issues.

One incident in New Hampshire illustrates the point. Earlier this year, The Presumption of Shared Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act was defeated by vehement opposition from the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence. The coalition both wrote to and spoke before the Legislature. Accordingly, father's rights advocates in New Hampshire are seeking language in VAWA 2005 to prohibit any VAWA-funded agency from "legislative lobbying, advertising, or otherwise supporting the endorsement of, or opposition to, any state proposed legislation" which is not explicitly related to the prevention of domestic violence.

I think they should seek to kill the act entirely. I believe VAWA is not only ideologically inspired and discriminatory, it is also an example of why bureaucracy-driven solutions to human problems do not work.

I hope VAWA becomes the Titanic of the legislative approach to social problems. I hope it sinks spectacularly.

Wendy McElroy

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mardi, juin 28, 2005

Senator Biden's Biggest Lie

June 28, 2005

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by Carey Roberts
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Ol’ Joe Biden has been waiting 17 long years, hoping the American public would forget.

Back in 1988 Mr. Biden was running against Michael Dukakis for the Democratic presidential nomination. But then it came to light that Mr. Biden was lifting lines from the speeches of Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and others.

Where I come from, folks call that plagiarism. That, along with other previous peccadilloes, drove Biden from the nomination race. [www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/frenzy/biden.htm]

Time erases all bad memories, as they say, and now Mr. Biden is letting on that he wants to join the 2008 presidential race.

But Mr. Biden has another stain on his ethical resume’. This fib is far worse because it has the potential to rend the very foundations of the social order. For the last 15 years, Biden has been saying that women, and only women, can suffer from domestic violence.

Try telling that to the three young children of Clayton Carter, who watched in horror as he was run over by his wife with their Ford SUV. This past week Marquetta Jordan pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in Washington DC.

And consider Herman Winslow, who was shot and killed by Lena Driskell when their yearlong romance came to an end. “I did it and I’d do it again,” Driskell yelled when the police came to her Atlanta home on June 10.

When women kill their husbands and ex-boyfriends, the media never use the term, “domestic violence.” That’s because according to Mr. Biden, only men commit DV.

Clayton Carter and Herman Winslow are just two of the 835,000 men who are assaulted each year by their wives or girlfriends, according to Department of Justice statistics. [www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles/172837.pdf]

Indeed, women are just as likely as men to commit partner aggression, and men suffer 38% of all DV-related injuries, according to the research. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10989615&dopt=Abstract]

But Biden’s silver-tongued oratory and cloak room arm-twisting counted for more than the truth, and in 1994 President Clinton signed the first Violence Against Women Act into law. That compelled the Department of Justice to create a new bureaucracy, the Office on Violence Against Women.

A lie is never static. A lie must always grow in order to stay one step ahead of the skeptics.

So the billion-dollar-a-year VAWA has spawned even more falsehoods. It wasn’t enough to say that women were the exclusive victims of DV. Soon we learned that violence against pregnant women was the leading cause of birth defects, that half of all homeless women are on the streets because of partner violence, and other propaganda-like factoids. [http://www.mincava.umn.edu/documents/factoid/factoid.html]

Recently a hyperventilating Catherine MacKinnon, law professor at the University of Michigan, compared partner aggression to the tragedy of 9/11: “Just like terrorist attacks, acts of violence against women are carefully planned, targeted at civilians, and driven by ideology.”

Eventually a lie becomes so bloated, so distorted, and so grotesque that people begin to have their doubts.

Indiana University law professor Linda Kelly recently exposed the neo-Marxist underpinnings of the DV industry. Kelley explained, “the ‘discovery’ of domestic violence is rooted in the essential feminist tenet that society is controlled by an all-encompassing patriarchal structure.” [www.law.fsu.edu/journals/lawreview/downloads/304/kelly.pdf]

Earlier this year the non-partisan National Academy Science delivered this stinging critique of VAWA-funded programs: “the design of prevention and control strategies…frequently is driven by ideology and stakeholder interests rather than by plausible theories and scientific evidence of cause.” [http://nap.edu/catalog/10849.html]

Fox News columnist Wendy McElroy lambasted VAWA as a “hand-me-down from the Clinton administration based on gender myths, anti-male bias and an infatuation with Big Government.” [http://www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2005/0112.html]

And earlier this month columnist Phyllis Schlafly offered this wish to America’s fathers: “Congress can help us celebrate Father’s Day this year by refusing to reauthorize the costly VAWA boondoggle.” [www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=7713]

For years the Democrats have clung to their receding power base by playing on the fears and vulnerabilities of racial minorities. Now the Dems are misleading women with the same red-meat rhetoric by saying they live under the constant threat of being beaten and bloodied.

Thanks to DV-induced hysteria, laws make it possible to evict husbands from their homes simply on the word of the woman. So it’s no surprise that so many eligible bachelors are refusing to marry. And it’s no coincidence that single women are far more likely than their married counterparts to vote Democratic.

An ever-growing climate of fear, an unaccountable federal bureaucracy, and a fading-away of the institution of marriage -- all that bodes well for Senator Biden’s presidential aspirations.

Carey Roberts

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dimanche, juin 26, 2005

We Must Take a Stand Against Misandry
Let me remind the reader of certain values every
democracy holds. That includes the belief that all
humans are created equal, that collective guilt or
punishment is unfair, and freedom of _expression.
Unfortunately with the rise of misandry – viewing men
as villains, oppressors and potential rapists these
values are on the way of disappearing completely.

Misandry is so prevalent, that in our age of
diversity saying that all men bear collective guilt
for rape is considered progressive. Male bashing
cards are everywhere. TV commercials portray men as
fools. Our media censors male domestic violence
victims in order to portray us as batterers and
abusers. While violence against women on TV is
denounced, revenge fantasies in which hundreds of man
are cut up, castrated and tortured are blockbusters.
Sin City got $33M in sales the first weekend it was
released. Ireen von Wachenfeldt, chairman of ROKS,
The National Organization for Women’s Shelters and
Young Women’s Shelters in Sweden denied us our
humanity by claiming on TV that men are animals.

Many of us consider misandry a harmless game. But
unfortunately hatred in words leads to discrimination
in action. About 100,000 men in US are in jail at any
given time for inability to pay child support. Any
man who slaps a woman would face a choice between a
year in jail or 72 hours of “reeducation”, yet women
slapping men is considered harmless fun by most. Our
media encourages ladies to kick men in private parts,
yet a man who commits such act of sexual assault would
be given a life sentence divided between prison
“treatment” and other supervision. Male victims of
domestic violence get very little help and are
frequently treated as perpetrators. You should read
The Myth of Male Power and Women Cant Hear What Men
Don't Say to find out more about antimale
discrimination in modern world.

Many of us would ask what is the cause of the
prevalent misandry, and what we can do about it. Many
men and women believe that men at least partially
deserve the modern misandry – and that the best way
for us to deal with it is to ignore it. I believe
that approach is 100% wrong. I do not believe anyone
deserves to be blamed for belonging to a birth group
-- everyone is created equal.

The main reason for the rise of misandry is not the
fact that we commit some crimes more then women –
Americans commit much more crime than Japanese, people
with depression commit more crimes then the
non-depressed, etc. Yet in the XXI-st century, me is
the only group singled out for demonization and
scapegoating.

The perception of men as the “fair game” or the
softest target – someone who can be ridiculed,
insulted or demonized for fun. In this day and age of
cruel and violent entertainment industry, even more
people consider it fun to be cruel to someone. Yet
anyone who tries attacking a race or attacking women
via public media would soon find themselves stopped by
virulent counterarguments, protests and possibly
lawsuits. The fact that there is no such resistance
from men makes all forms of male-bashing fun and
profitable.

We may think that the fad of male-bashing and
anti-male discrimination may pass by itself, but
unfortunately, that is not the case. Without a very
vocal protest anti-male hate and discrimination can
only increase. Both male bashing and anti-male
discrimination grew a lot between 1985 and 1995, and
grew more between 1995 and 2005. There is no reason
to think that the growth of these factors will be any
less this or next decade. We may think, that
misandrists will not try to be more cruel then they
are, but history will prove us wrong. If we look at
the history of American slavery we will see how cruel
can people be to those who can not speak up for
themselves. Given that that much cruelty was shown in
the generations much closer to our forefathers and US
Constitution and raised on religious values of
universal love, we can only imagine our generation's
capacity for cruelty.

Hence, our society has to address this problem as
soon as possible. I believe that men and women who
value our rights should be as vocal on the issue as
possible. We should write letters to newspaper
editors, call in to our local radio shows, and those
of us who are students speak up in classes and at
events, and post fliers on public bulletin boards
protesting vilification of men. Given that many men
resent being demonized and many women do not dislike
men, if we have courage to speak up, we will gather
lots of support.

The question arises how do we rebell against the current culture of misandry?
By refusing to participate in our oppression. If we refuse to interact with American & Western Women and go our own way we can reshape our culture to our benefit. Don't Marry American Women, don't date American Woman, boycott the companies that promote the misandry and promote a sane male oriented subculture. If Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, Artists have their own subculture why not Males? Why must we act like a herd and do as we are told? What obligation do we have to support our oppression? It is no longer about equality Feminists want revenge against Men and Boys, they are nearing their goal of the elimination of the family as a structure in our culture.

Let the Skanks whine when we refuse to be part of this debased and sick culture. We are also under no obligation to support Churches who have caved into the FemNags & FemHags. Our debased culture is a result of our Institutions caving into their isane ideaology. If we listen to the current attacks on Men & Masculinity the victory of Islam over our current tolerant culture is assured. Women get your Bhurkas now. You are not worth fighting for.

vendredi, juin 24, 2005

Not the Era of the Deadbeat Dad but the Era of the Hero Father

June 24, 2005

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by Jeffrey Leving and Glenn Sacks

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Fatherhood has changed dramatically in the era of divorce and out of wedlock births, and much attention has been paid to two unfortunate products of this era—the absent father and the deadbeat dad. However, there is another type of father this era has produced, one which has received very little attention—the hero father.

According to the Children's Rights Council, a Washington-based advocacy group, more than five million American children each year have their access to their noncustodial parents interfered with or blocked by custodial parents. Behind that statistic are legions of heroic divorced or separated fathers who fight a long, hard but generally unrecognized battle to remain a meaningful part of the lives of the children who love them and need them.>

Some hero fathers move repeatedly to be near their children. In the controversial case of DeBrenes v. Traub, Eric Traub had already moved to new cities twice in order to be near his daughter when he was forced to conduct a lengthy and expensive legal struggle to prevent her from being moved to Costa Rica. As is typical, the court allowed the move. Traub’s determination paid off, however, as the now teenaged girl became so set against the move that her mother, to her credit, dropped the request.

Most fathers are not so fortunate. In a recent California Supreme Court case, Gary LaMusga, who operates a business in Northern California, fought for eight years to prevent his two young sons from being moved to Ohio, 2,000 miles away. He eventually won, but his victory was a pyrrhic one because his children had already been moved out of state in violation of court orders. In the strange world of modern family law, even with the new decision his children will not be moved back.

While divorced dads are unfairly stigmatized as stingy, some noncustodial fathers raise their children in their homes but still pay child support to the children’s mothers. Many others never ask for child support. In the face of a family court system which usually grants mothers a monopoly of power over children, these fathers must buy or rent their children back. When mothers allow their children to live with their fathers—or send them there because they’ve become unruly or inconvenient—fathers often won’t challenge custodial and financial arrangements because they fear doing so will mean they’ll be pushed out of their children’s lives.

Other fathers endure physical abuse at the hands of their wives but remain in the relationships because they know that divorce will leave their children alone in the custody—usually sole custody—of an abuser. Decades of research show that women are as likely to abuse their male partners as vice versa, and that heterosexual men make up a significant minority of those suffering injuries in domestic assaults. However, gender politics has kept this research from influencing government and law enforcement policies. Many men know that revealing their wives’ violence usually means the wife will claim that she was abused, and the system will side with her. Fathers are commonly arrested, punished or slapped with custody sanctions for their wives’ violence.

In one highly publicized case, Dr. Xavier Caro, a Northridge, California rheumatologist, endured years of physical abuse at the hands of his wife Socorro, who once assaulted him so badly he had to have surgery to regain his sight in one eye. Xavier stayed in the relationship for the sake of his kids but his efforts failed, as Socorro later shot and killed three of their four children.

Some fathers face false charges of domestic violence or sexual abuse, which are commonly used as custody maneuvers in divorce. Those most vulnerable to these charges are dads who are their children’s primary caregivers. Such charges are often made to separate these dads from their children so a new custody precedent can be set with mothers as the primary caregivers.

Falsely accused men often bankrupt themselves fighting to regain access to their children. Meanwhile, many can only see their children in nightmarish visitation centers where fathers are treated like criminals.

Over the past several decades the love and devotion of millions of fathers has been tested in ways few in previous generations experienced. This Father’s Day, let’s honor the hero father.

This column was first published in the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram (6/19/05).
Jeffrey Leving & Glenn Sacks

jeudi, juin 23, 2005

The Semi-Declared War on Men - Bernard Chapin - MensNewsDaily.com�

The Semi-Declared War on Men

June 23, 2005

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by Bernard Chapin
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The battle between the sexes has ceased being a battle and has quickly turned into a rout. With women the recipients of state sponsored advantages such as affirmative action, preferential treatment in the courts, and a public educational system uniquely sensitive to the needs of girls, men are like frogs in an aquarium where water is added incrementally at ever-increasing temperatures. The frogs only realize the danger just as they begin to boil to death. This is exact warning that Dr. Richard Hise gives us in his 2004 book, The War Against Men.

Its full title includes the secondary, Why Women are Winning and What Men Must Do If America is to Survive, and this is the approach the author takes within. He first outlines the problems of today and then gives suggestions as to what we should do about them. Dr. Hise is a professor of marketing at Texas A&M’s Mays Business School. This would not be a natural subject for a business professor to address, yet he wrote the book for highly passionate reasons. Indeed, the author “…cried when I read how our young sons are degraded in school through the feminization efforts espoused by and, unfortunately, implemented by the female dominated educational system.”

This is very much a work of scholarship. Dr. Hise has read just about everything he could get his hands on regarding radical feminism and the decline of men. The farther he got into his research, the more surprised and dismayed he became. He was shocked as to the extent in which contemporary society is biased against men. The clear message here is that war is being waged against us, and if we continue to stand down we will become serfs within our own country.

He leaves no stone, or troglodyte in the case of radical feminists, untipped in the pursuit of the truth. Most of The War on Men highlights the exact nature of our dhimitude in the United States. From the start he stresses that men and women are not the same, yet the desire of our social engineers is to feminize men and masculinize women. They have been most successful thus far. Dr. Hise surveys the available evidence and paints us a Guernica: women are now more sexually aggressive than ever before, in many cases they consciously attempt to look like men, they choose traditionally male professions, and copy male hobbies and interests. The androgenizing of women reduces male sexual desire as we inherently are attracted to the feminine. What is the overall effect of this process? The camaraderie and complementariness of the sexes is eliminated which is a major factor in our society’s decline.

Women are becoming dominant in the work place and within education as the rules of productivity have been altered to ensure their competitive advantage. In higher education, as most of us are already aware, the universities are devoted to fighting the “phallocracy” which means paranoia in regards to men. The author uncovers a horrifying piece of propaganda put out by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst Women’s Studies Director. It demands that Ameican universities make gender “part of all pertinent programs of institutional research,” and that all “curricula would be transformed according to guidance from an autonomous women’s studies site.” The “gender” that would be imposed would be exclusively female in its orientation. If such ideas were ever adopted, then a college education would be next to worthless. Dr. Hise wisely shares with his readers a list of the Top 10 most anti-male universities which is something that every prospective student should consult.

Most frightening of all is what’s happening in the courts where men are forced to pay for children they did not father, and thrown in jail should they not be able to come up with the amount of monthly funds arbitrarily determined by a judge. The case of Dr. Griffin is recounted where he was falsely accused of sodomizing a female patient after he refused to testify on her behalf in a suit she filed against her landlord. The judge barred the doctor from mentioning her past request of him, and also from mentioning her history of instigating frivolous lawsuits. He got 3-and-a-half-years before being acquitted on appeal.

As alluded to earlier, the book is not merely confined to outlining what is wrong with the system. Several recommendations are given for men to follow in the hopes of providing the boys of today with a future. Here are but a few:

1. Men, individually, must be proud of our achievements. We should not allow others to denigrate us.

2. Men must be informed as to what’s going on around us. Work and family cannot prevent us from following political events.

3. Avoid the mainstream media as the information they provide is too biased.

4. Men must take a more active role politically and make sure we vote in every election.

5. Men should fight for the elimination of anti-male legislation like the Violence Against Women Act.

6. We should use the Equal Protection Clause to protest anti-male practices like affirmative action.

Overall, I recommend the book but I must point out to the reader that I have some serious reservations regarding it. While I agree with all of the author’s major themes, there are some details that give one pause. First, Dr. Hise evokes the name of the Lord early and often in his defense of men. This certainly does not offend me, but it does make him a caricature of a religious rightist. The Bible may well be right and true, but it has long ceased to influence political opinion in America (at least for the majority of the population). Second, within some of his passages, Dr. Hise introduces occasional ideas or arguments that are frankly bizarre. I know of no other way of describing a comment like this one about Ritalin, “[t]here are some experts who claim that the drug will turn boys into homosexuals by the time they are 15 years old.” Whoever’s saying that should be called “an idiot” as opposed to an “expert.” Of course taking Ritalin will not result in one becoming a homosexual. Temporarily altering the work of the brain’s neurotransmitters is not going to change one’s sexual identity. An egregious tidbit like that can delegitimate his fine efforts elsewhere. Third, like other writers on this subject, he sometimes seems to confuse “women” with “radical feminists.” This is done inconsistently as in some places the division is clear while in others it is not. Other than these points, it is a book worthy of our time.

Bernard Chapin

mercredi, juin 01, 2005

Socialism....The Price of Idiot Proofing America

June 2, 2005

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by J.B. Williams

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Being a member of congress used to be a part-time job held by our society’s most successful individuals who wanted to preserve the free society they so enjoyed. Now it is a life long career for people who can’t do anything else, the proverbial brass ring, like hitting the lottery. No matter how humble your beginnings, once elected, you are forever rich, forever powerful and forever respected, at least by some.

Overseeing our nation’s security interests, our infrastructure, protecting and defending our Constitution and way of life, these things do not demand the full-time attention of our elected officials, nor would they suck the lifeblood from an enormously successful capitalist society. Idiot proofing America? Now that’s a full-time job and there is no end in sight to the expense of such a proposition.

Not so long ago, the federal budget was less than 3% of GDP. This was when America was building its infrastructure. Now it is above 20% of GDP and growing at a record pace. Add all other taxes to that for a whopping 43% of GDP. We have “public debt” of 65% of GDP and deficits as far as the eye can see. Eventually, we will have no choice but to balance our budget. Guess how? Can anyone tell me what you call a society where the majority (51% or more) of its GDP is controlled by a central government, allegedly for benefit of society at large? Or how we will pay our debts any other way?

America was once the land of the free and the home of the brave. Why? Because only the brave can ever be truly free. Freedom requires accepting risk. It requires individual choices and sacrifices which result in some level of success or failure. Freedom requires good judgment, or the acceptance of consequences inherent with bad judgment.

The socialist view subscribes to the theory that no matter what individual choices one makes, no matter what initiative one takes, what risk or what sacrifice one accepts, we are all entitled to equal results, or at least the same economic rewards. (Not to be confused with honest individual charity.) In other words, a consequence-free society, where all ideas have equal benefit even though they don’t have equal merit.

Those who have chosen badly have come to expect their government to bail them out via any number of government funded social welfare programs, beginning with the graduated tax scale, itself designed to redistribute wealth right from the onset.

From our tax code to Social Security, from Food Stamps to Medicaid, even speed limits, gun laws, smoking bans and EPA guidelines are all attempts to save foolish Americans from their own ill conceived notions. Almost every law on the books in America today, and certainly every new law passed is an effort to idiot proof some segment of American society.

Why not? There is great political power in the promise to solve every Americans self inflicted disaster. People prone to inflicting such disasters upon themselves will readily relinquish the freedom they used so poorly in exchange for government issued absolution.

Anyone with a calculator knows that Social Security is a raw deal for every American. But some have paid into it (or bought into it) for so long, that to walk away from even a failing system now only proves just how flawed their judgment was in the beginning. Rather than admit the mistake and face the music, they search for a band-aid and kick the can down the road.

But here’s the part nobody talks about at social events or around the kitchen table anymore. The only way to save you from yourself is to remove or restrict your freedom to do harm to yourself. Social Security is a perfect example. Because some did not manage their own financial future, government seized control of part of every paycheck in an effort to manage it for us.

They idiot proofed your economic future, or so they say. But if you can work a calculator, you will find that you could have done better even at simple passbook savings rates. Your freedom to do so was exchanged for a government promise. But who gets the money you paid in?

Social Security amounts to another fleecing of America and every member of congress knows it. They just can’t get elected by admitting it. The graduated tax scale is nothing more than the tyranny of some (the haves) for benefit of the others, (the have nots). On the most basic level, we all know that there is no such thing as free stuff. Everything has a price… and free stuff almost always costs the most.

So in our effort to idiot proof America, we pass laws that remove or restrict individual freedoms for benefit of society as a whole. Some people can drive safely at 150 miles per hour. But since some are not safe at 35 miles per hour, we establish speed laws in an effort to idiot proof our roads.

Some have used their freedom to become independently wealthy in America, while others have used theirs to become bankrupt. In an effort to idiot proof America, we remove or restrict ones right to succeed in an effort to remove another’s right to fail.

Some have used their freedom to become respected productive members of their community, while others have used theirs to become a drug addict, a criminal or a freeloader. Because we want everyone to be treated “equal” in our society, we must take from those who contribute something of value for benefit of those who contribute nothing to society.

And so it goes…the steady march towards an American version of socialism, all in the name of idiot proofing society, saving the American people from themselves, at the expense of everything our forefathers died to provide us.

Freedom only works for those who use it well. All others will gladly exchange their freedoms for the promise of a risk-free consequence-free life. Even if the promise is a lie.

Each day we pass new laws to tell people in the most culturally diverse nation that they need to respect other cultures. We pass laws to define words that have been around for centuries, like marriage. We legislate what you can drive, what you can eat, what you can smoke, even what you can think or say. We do it all to idiot proof America, even though America was never designed for idiots…

It seems to me that we only need one law in America. NO IDIOTS ALLOWED! If people could manage their own finances, we won’t need government to do it. If they already know that the most culturally diverse nation on earth must have respect for other cultures, we won’t need government programs to tell them.

People who can read the definition of marriage won’t need the government to explain what the word means. People who understand the consequences of sleeping with anyone, or anything, anytime and anywhere won’t need government funded abortions or programs to combat STDs.

In short, people who take responsibility for their own lives don’t elect people who seek to control their lives. People capable of making sound decisions don’t want anyone else making their decisions.

As long as we have idiots, politicians will pander to them for power, promising a government bailout to every idiot who can vote. Eventually, idiot proofing America will cost America its rightful place in the world as the free home of the brave.

A central government in control of the majority of a nation’s resources is by definition, a socialist form of government. 51% is a majority, just ask John Kerry. In calendar measurements, we now work until June 1 of each year to pay taxes and we are still running red ink. When we are working until July 1 to pay taxes, we will be at 50%. Think about it…

There isn’t enough money in the world to fully idiot proof any free society. A society without the freedom to do itself harm would just be a society full of idiots who foolishly relinquished their own freedom. America is fast becoming the land of the free-ride and home to the government dependent and there is no end in sight to the public demand for more free stuff from their government.

Idiot proofing America is not possible. Just as gun laws leave guns only in the hands of criminals, idiot proofing laws leave the nation only in the hands of idiots…

Copyright ©2005 JB Williams All rights reserved.

J.B. Williams

mardi, mai 24, 2005

More on Fathers' Rights: The State Matriarchy

May 24, 2005

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by Paul C. Robbins, Ph.D.
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Under the current system of family law, fathers typically lose their children in return for financing the destruction of their own families. When the system fails to work as promised, fathers are blamed and put in jail. But the system is at fault, not fathers. The system makes it far too easy for mom to expel dad, keep the children, and force him to pay for her decisions using the police power of the state.

The theory behind the system holds that the traditional family and marriage can be destroyed with acceptable consequences, as long as mom gets the kids and dad (or the taxpayers) can be forced to pay.

Feminist sociologist Stephanie Coontz presents a version of this theory in a recent Los Angeles Times editorial. According to Coontz, over the past decade "the number of families headed by single mothers rose five times faster than the number of married-couple families"and "the number of couples living together unmarried increased by more than 70 percent" but several negative trends decreased during this same time. She attributes this decrease in part to more dads paying their child support, then argues that "it doesn't help today's diverse families to be told their children are doomed unless they can shoehorn themselves into a traditional marriage."

Maybe not, but would Ms. Coontz make the same arguments if "diverse families" were routinely created by fathers expelling mothers from the family home and then forcing these mothers to pay child support under threat of jail? I doubt it.

And despite the rosy tone of her piece, she concludes that "there is much left to work on" and that "divorced and unwed parents" (read "single mothers") need advice on effective parenting, job training, more education, and high-quality daycare.

In other words, more government programs. This is the hallmark of the system that I call "state matriarchy": the creation of single-mother families followed by calls for more government programs to help those families. We are assured the problem is not single-mother families; the problem is a government that doesn't do enough to help these families.

So why shouldn't government spend massive amounts of money on welfare, daycare, and training programs for single-mother families? And why shouldn't the government expend even more money to round up fathers and put them in jail?

Because to do so requires the government to spend massive amounts on welfare, daycare, and training programs for single-mother families, then expend even more money to round up fathers and put them in jail.

Until recently, few political powers had either the means or the will to do so. Especially since there was a much simpler and less costly alternative: fathers. And especially since there was a very simple way to give children fathers: marriage.

Marriage was an agreement based on an exchange: roughly, his ability to provide for her ability to have children. Marriage was the central agreement in a system of agreements that made families possible. Without this system of agreements, reproduction took place at will, with children likely left in the care of the mother, creating a de facto matriarchy. No man knew who his children were and thus had no reason to undertake their care, making family formation impossible. Marriage was the solution to the problem of de facto matriarchy, the solution adopted independently by every major civilization.

The current system of family law is creating what might be called "state-mandated" or "state-imposed" matriarchy (or simply "state matriarchy" for short). Historically, matriarchies fail, but in a theory a matriarchy can be made to work with sufficient use of government force and money.

In a state matriarchy, the children belong to the mother but the state is responsible for supporting those children, either indirectly, by forcing absent fathers to support those children (child support), or directly, by using tax monies (welfare and other government programs). The ideological foundation for the state matriarchy is modern feminism, which opposes both traditional marriage and to fathers' rights but favors expanded welfare and child support enforcement programs.

In the state matriarchy, marriage is not an agreement based on a mutually beneficial exchange. It is merely a "no-fault" contract that serves as the legal pretext for a divorce in which mom usually gets the kids and dad gets a support order. Marriage and fatherhood thus become unilateral obligations for the man, who can expect little in return.

The state matriarchy presumes a custodial mother financially supports her children–she's innocent until proven guilty. The state matriarchy presumes the absent dad does not financially support his children–he's guilty until proven innocent.

And if for some reason the father cannot be forced to support the children, the state does so using tax revenues, aligning taxpayers against fathers–after all, if he doesn't support the children, the taxpayers must. A divorced or unmarried father thus becomes public enemy number one.

The state matriarchy gives women rights and powers that can be exercised arbitrarily and without accountability: the unilateral right to decide if children are born (abortion), the power to divorce their husbands at will (no-fault divorce), the right to retain the children when they divorce (sole mother custody), the power to force fathers and men to pay for reproductive decisions made unilaterally by women (child support), and the right to lie about the paternity of their children (paternity fraud)..

It also gives women a number of ancillary rights: the right to preferred treatment in academia (Title IX), the right to preferred treatment in employment (affirmative action and sexual harassment laws), the right to remove their husbands at will (restraining orders), the right to have their husbands arrested at will (domestic violence laws), and the right to refuse marital relations within a marriage (marital rape laws).

Men have no legal say over abortion, can file for no-fault divorce but will likely lose their children and property, are less likely to graduate from college, find it difficult to get restraining orders against wives, will likely be arrested themselves if they file a domestic violence complaint, and can be jailed for failing to support another man's children under default judgments and "presumption of paternity" statutes.

The state matriarchy makes marriage and motherhood an easy game for women to win, but makes marriage and fatherhood a game very difficult for men to win. And when men do lose that game, to offer them no way out. Tragically, some men do find a way out: suicide. Sometimes suicide preceded by homicide.

The feminists provided much of the anti-male and anti-marriage ideological impetus for the state matriarchy, but they could not have created it without the help of judges and elected officials. How did they get judges and elected officials to help? By portraying women as poor helpless victims abused and brutalized by ruthless men, like the hapless heroines of old-time melodramas. The politicians and judges fell over themselves running to their rescue.

The dominant cultural narratives of the state matriarchy are two: the noble, virtuous single mom and the "deadbeat dad." In these cultural narratives, single moms are bravely struggling to raise their children, saintly victims of circumstance and scumbag dads who abandoned them. (In fact, most single mothers today are single by choice.) Her counterpart is the "deadbeat dad" who walked out on his family and now refuses to support them. (In fact, most divorced dads are legally expelled from their families against their wills.)

If these narrative don't work, a third one is hauled out: domestic violence. According to this narrative, husbands routinely batter their wives as a way to impose patriarchal dominance.

These narratives are told over and over again by politicians and social commentators and even pro-marriage groups. Any facts that don't fit within these two narratives are denied or ignored. These two polarizing narratives define the social context in which social policy is defined. Fathers can expect few rights within the social policies defined by these two narratives.

Any human rights fathers might have--such as the right to their own children, to their own property, or to their own liberty–get in the way of the state matriarchy's authority to determine the "best interests" of the children and force fathers to pay for its determinations. And certainly, the state matriarchy does not grant men the same reproductive rights as women, for that would really muck up the system.

So what's wrong with state-mandated matriarchy?

The system is unfair to children, depriving them of their rights to a father. Fatherless children suffer numerous disadvantages compared to children with fathers. Even Stephanie Coontz recognizes that being fatherless is a risk factor for teens.

It is inimical to human rights, depriving men of their rights to their children, their own property, and often their liberty. It discourages men from marrying and becoming fathers.

Its power is virtually unchecked. Women are rewarded for using its power. Men can avoid marriage, fatherhood, and sexual relations with women, but few will do so. The state matriarchy counts on women being able to find men to have sex with it. Women usually do.

It cannot deliver on what it promises. In theory, it promises women the social and sexual freedom of being single while retaining both their children and the economic benefits of marriage. After all, if mom has the children, she can demand support from dad in the name of the children.

But that is a promise made by the state to women on behalf of men. The state does not ask men what they promised women; it simply jails men if they fail to deliver on the promises it made to women on their behalf.

Some would reply that single moms don't have it all that great. Look at all the child support that isn't paid, how many divorced moms struggle. Why, being a single mom is practically synonymous with being a victim. But that is simply another argument against the system–it makes victims of single moms because it cannot deliver on what it has promised.

Victim moms, jailed dads, fatherless kids. That is what the state matriarchy delivers.

So what can we do?

While I support a number of changes, including presumptive joint custody, if I were to make one change, it would be the following: return to the practice of treating marriage as an agreement between two parties. That means that the two parties should have the right to define the agreement in advance. It is my view that neither party would enter an agreement that assures they will be treated unfairly in the event of a divorce.

A pre-defined marriage contract would be broad in many aspects, but definite about what happens if one or both parties wants to dissolve the contract. The role of the government would be limited to enforcing the contract as written if either party seeks to end the contract. Either party could request a trial by jury, limiting the power of judges to decide the matter based on unwritten social policies or the judge's opinion of the "best interests" of the children.

Under current no-fault divorce laws, a divorce court does not enforce the original marriage contract. It enforces the only right provided by the contract: the right of one or both parties to break the marriage contract. Divorce judges do not care who kept or did not keep the terms of the marriage contract because the contract had no terms; the only term it defined was the right to divorce. Judges simply decide who gets the spoils of the marriage using their own criteria, in effect defining the terms of the contract ex post facto, after the fact. Both parties should be able to know and define the terms of the marriage contract in advance.

Yes, private marriage contracts take the romance out of falling in love and getting married, but they're better than placing one's life, children, and livelihood in the hands of a biased family court judge. And they would begin to dismantle the state matriarchy, wherein the rule of law is replaced by the rule of a woman's will, backed by the police power of the state.

I have no problem with society expecting fathers to meet their responsibilities to their children. But society in turn must protect fathers' rights to the care and custody of their children. That is a fair an equitable arrangement, not unaccountable judicial power backed up by unaccountable state power in the service of divisive social theories.

A society that fails to protect a father's rights loses the moral authority to demand he comply with his responsibilities.

Paul C. Robbins, Ph.D.

lundi, mars 28, 2005

Sex, Women, and Conservatism

March 28, 2005

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by Dallas Claymore

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“The world has changed.

I feel it in the water.

I feel it in the earth.

I smell it in the air.

Much that once was is now lost.”

Although these lines from Galadriel are in reference to Tolkien’s Middle Earth as opposed to our modern age, they aptly describe the revolution in social relations that has transpired since the 1960s. Former ways of interacting are now obsolete. The old social mores and rules are gone forever. Nowhere can this be seen more vividly than in attachments between the sexes. Until only recently on the historical timeline, interconnections occurred with a clear understanding that men and women are different from one another, and that differences must be tolerated. With the transcendence of radical feminist thought, these same differences, at least when they are displayed by men, are now treated as signs of mental pathology.

Recent evidence substantiates long held beliefs concerning the presence of innate distinctions between the sexes. These disparities are not simply genital deep. Variations in behavior are more hard wired than the majority of the mainstream media ever suspected:

An international team of 250 scientists, conducting research first reported

last Thursday in the British journal Nature, has completed a full map of

the X or "female" chromosome which helps determine sex in human beings.

The researchers found much greater genetic variation between the sexes

than they had expected. All told, as the Los Angeles Times described the

team's conclusions, "men and women may differ by as much as 2 percent

of their entire genetic inheritance, greater than the hereditary gap between

humankind and its closest relative--the chimpanzee." Huntington Willard

of Duke University, one of the key researchers participating in this latest

effort, told the Chicago Tribune that by now "any of us over the age of

two realizes there are plenty of differences between males and females

that are characteristic of the two sexes."

Regardless of what science is able to prove, many of us tainted with post-modern college educations side with the social constructivists regarding sexual variation. It is believed that the reason “male” and “female” are not synonyms is due to society imbuing us with norms of behavior to which we conform. The belief that men and women could be interchangeable, were it not for the stereotyping of the community, is something commonly believed among progressives, but, most alarmingly, supported by large segments of the general population.

Many readers undoubtedly matured in the setting of full equality for men and women, but this has not prevented men from being unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, guided by the standards of chivalry when interacting with women. For those who grew up in the seventies and eighties, it was a time when boys were expected to follow both the mandates of chivalry and equality. The result often was confusion. It is bewildering for a young man to make sense of how one should behave towards women when every public authority proclaims “Men and Women Are Equal” while these same public authorities rig the laws to favor women over men via affirmative action hiring practices, the creation of a sexual harassment industry, and the unjust treatment of husbands and fathers in divorce and custody courts. It is constantly alleged that men are favored in our society yet the government has taken every measure to ensure that the exact opposite is the case. As conservatives, it is hard to know if there is anything about the current juridical practices and statutes that anybody would wish to preserve, but the only thing that’s for certain is that none of these laws and preferences will be changing anytime soon.

In this new millennium, we are immovably wedded to much of the irrationality that has posed as conventional wisdom for the last forty years. As much as we’d like to make fun of the mumbo jumbo that emits from relationship “experts” and talk show hosts on our boob tubes, we still must vicariously deal with all the soot they’ve blown into the public’s lungs every time that we greet an unfamiliar person.

The current situation can be depressing and disheartening, but my message to the reader is strictly one of hope. Certainly the culture has become toxic but that does not preclude us from exploiting it to our own advantage. We can, and must, excel in an arena that is biased against both men and conservatives. Intellectually retaliating against those who attack us is certainly worthwhile, but many men regard it as unmanly to stand up for their rights before women or anybody else who derides us on the basis of gender alone. However, in this book, while I will be refuting many a lie in the pages that follow, the goal is for conservative men to resign themselves to the fact that, while this zeitgeist is not one that we created or necessarily approve of, it is one to which we can adapt. Man can always profit from circumstances to which he did not wish to be placed. Living in the past is counter-productive. We must live and conquer in the present–regardless of how we wish things to be. It is our duty.

In light of this, in the chapters that follow, I will identify and analyze many of the tank traps blocking our advancement and suggest the most efficient and least costly ways of getting around them. I certainly am not King Solomon, but I do regard some of my ideas as being valuable and applicable to others.

There are a million “how to” books out there giving advice concerning women and sex. “Sex, Women, and Conservatism” is not one of those books. What follows is a strategic discussion to be used in any way the reader likes. All I am attempting to do in these pages is toss a ball into the air and send a Methedrine serve across the net. If it comes back at 500 mile per hour and disembowels me, that’s my problem and not yours.

A quotation from a character in The Lord of the Rings was cited above. In keeping with my mentioning of Middle Earth, I would like to identify your narrator as being far more closely related to the character of Bilbo Baggins than Aragorn. There is nothing inherently noble or royal about me. I am simply one who has seen and observed a large sample of behavior and wish to make use of my experiences for the purposes of analysis. I am just an average guy who had the wits to be more observant than my peers. I certainly was never a Don Juan and never will be.

On the subject of Casanovas, I think you will find that most of them are not the type of men who can teach one much of anything. Their skills simply are not transferable. If you asked them what the secrets of their success were, chances are they would not be able to tell you. As for me, the only areas of life in which I outshined others were the result of study and effort. Few achievements came naturally, but this is why I am able to convey worthwhile advice. The fact that I am not gorgeous, rich, or connected in any way to famous people is perhaps the reason why I have something legitimate to say about this topic. The mediocrities of my birth necessitated a need for me to pay attention.

It’s no accident that Bill Belichick and Bill Parcells were not outstanding football players but turned out to be tremendous coaches because natural phenoms rarely have much of an understanding as to how challenging it is for the average person to perform their craft. My friend Duke is an example of this. He’s one of the rare men I’ve known who qualifies as a lady’s man. If you were to ask him how and why he has done what he’s done, he would undoubtedly respond by sheepishly shrugging his shoulders. He honestly doesn’t know why life has been so easy for him. Only when one begins from the bottom or middle can one have any information with which to impart others.

One must face the realization that whenever one attempts to write a book that is intended to speak chiefly to a male audience that it will, in turn, be read quite often by women. Such an eventuality tells us much about why works like this one need to be written in contemporary America as political correctness has made the truth contraband. Yet, even though this will have female readers, the result will not be the same as in the case of a popular “How To” book boasting of it routinely being bought by women for their men as a way for them to better understand their partners. I don’t think any women will be buying this this one for their men anytime soon or perhaps ever. There’s too much ambiguity in what follows for most women to be completely comfortable with it.

Indeed, even though this is about as mild a tone that I am capable of adopting, I have already said some things that will be construed as harsh by many. Why? Simply because chimpanzees and genetic inheritance are not things we’re bred to acknowledge in the post-millennial United States. Yet, regardless of what our anti-intellectual PA systems convey, there is no reason that a subset of men cannot reset the paradigms within ourselves. In the words of Rosie the Riveter: “We can do it.”

Speaking of Rosie, let me emphasize in bold type an important bylaw that we must always remember; Women are not our enemy. Many a modern woman has been just as lied to and as manipulated by the oppression mongers as any man has ever been. Political correctness is absolutely evil and it’s misconceptions poison everybody. The freshman co-ed in the Womyn’s Studies ovular has been just as fooled as the manicured Metrosexual with Prada shoes at an Indigo Girls concert. They’re both unwittingly part of an experimental grouping within a sick study created by our social engineers.

Speaking of women, I should let you know that there is no misogyny in the pages which follow. Yet, many would try to dye me with that tired misogynistic pen due to my central theme which happens to be,

Women do not have the same interests as men. We are

different creatures. We have our own unique desires

which should be pursued whenever possible.

I made mention of this in something I wrote over the summer. A woman responded to me that my stance was selfish. I countered, “Shouldn’t I be selfish about my own interests?” I can’t remember whether she called me a name and then ignored my statement or simply ignored my statement. Either way, it’s a profoundly sad fact about our world that a man is not free to identify his own needs and strive for their realization. Just as nations must safeguard their own interests, we as men must identify ours and attempt to protect them when we can. Should we subjugate our needs to another’s there better be a DGR (damn good reason) for us to do so.

The other day I watched a friend’s dog shred a doll that she had just purchased for him. He meticulously tore the insides from it and then deposited them in various places about her condo. The dog’s actions provide us with a very good analogy for the role of men in society. We so oftentimes are rag dolls to be thrown about and to be turned to fluff. I honestly do not believe that becoming compost it the reason that we were placed on this earth. Our lives were not given to us in order for them to be mindlessly sacrificed. We should be grateful for what we have been given. Taking punches and being discriminated against is not an option. We should not go quietly into that good night. We must defend ourselves. We must stand and fight. If we don’t defend ourselves nobody else will.

One more note should be made on the subject of men. “Men” are not a monolithic entity. I readily admit that all men do not think as I do. There’s no question about it. Some of my brothers waste their entire pay checks and family fortunes on dominatrixes, drugs, toys for their cats, shares in Portuguese gerbil farms, or, most deplorably, the greatest hits of the Bee Gees.

Just last month, I met a guy at the gym who sniffed, after a comment I made about a girl on the Stairmaster, that he “doesn’t look at women in the gym.” I gazed at him with the same bewilderment that I would if I encountered an Ocelot walking down the middle of Madison Street. Why would anyone want to avoid staring at girls in the gym? I could not possibly guess what the answer would be. Yet, the fellow was undeniably a man and he had a completely different perspective that your narrator. That’s perfectly acceptable because I do not profess to speak for all men, but they’ll certainly be more than a couple who have had many of the same experiences as I and can profit from my assessment of the situation.

Lastly, there is the topic of “conservatism” which is part of my title and thank God for that. For one thing, it alerts readers that I may just reference God once in awhile in these pages and will not do so in a mystified or angry manner. For my enemies, this will be a goddessend, as it will allow them to paint me as a religious fanatic which fits in perfectly with their pre-primer understanding of those who are not politically correct.

Yet, it is conservatives alone who can most completely, although admittedly not most effectively, refute cultural Marxism on the whole. Many leftists nowadays think that the other side is evil simply because they’re on the other side which is instructive for us as it decreases the need to appease them. I don’t know why they regard America in 2005 as being a patriarchy rife with discrimination, rape, and Rophynol vending machines, but I do know that their views are false and need to be rebutted. Understanding them is not something that I’ll attempt to do in these pages. The causation for their feelings of anger, depression, and guilt would make for a wonderful book but it cannot be this one.

As conservatives, we hear phrases like “the personal is political” and express amazement that anyone could be that confused about the world. We are able to easily separate what is good for the country from what is good for ourselves. Many on the other side cannot or refuse to do this. They are stuck having to run errands with Marxists and feministas babbling at them from the back seat. Luckily, we are free from such parasitic passengers. When we marvel at the shape of a woman’s derriere we understand that our appreciation is reflective of our own biological programming and not an attempt to entrench a fictional patriarchy. Finding women attractive is not a political statement. It’s a personal statement and, oftentimes, what is attractive to one of us is not attractive to another. We can live with that To us, the purely personal can remain personal. For this reason, this book could be appreciated by many men who are not conservative in the political sense but are old school types who revel in just being the way they are and despise having to pretend to be something they are not. That is why I ask all of you to join me in this impromptu tour of our milieu and insist that the rest of society tolerate our diversity.

Galadriel, from the introduction of Peter Jackson’s film, The Fellowship of the Ring.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/373erfbt.asp?pg=2

I would like to recommend an excellent article to you by Dr. John J. Ray on this subject.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=1226

Dallas Claymore

jeudi, mars 24, 2005

DTH Online - Leader lambasts feminism in talk
Leader lambasts feminism in talk
Conservative takes on women's rights
BY KATIE HOFFMANN
STAFF WRITER
March 10, 2005

The classic women’s rights movement has made great strides, but that change isn’t necessarily for the better, a conservative leader said in a speech at the University on Wednesday evening.

“Feminism is destructive,” said Phyllis Schlafly. “It’s destructive of marriage. It’s destructive of happiness. It’s destructive of your whole life.”

Schlafly catapulted into the national spotlight in 1964 when her conservative book, “A Choice Not an Echo,” sold 3 million copies.

She since has served as a leader of the pro-family movement and testified before more than 50 congressional and state legislative committees on constitutional, national defense and family issues.

Schlafly said feminists blame government for their problems and convince women they are victims of society.

“(Feminists) claim liberation from men but then look to the government as a replacement,” she said.

Schlafly also said feminists believe tax dollars should provide programs such as subsidized day care and maternity leave.

“The American people don’t want to pay for baby-sitters for other people’s children,” she said. “Feminism has changed attitudes of women and some men — but not babies. They don’t want to see other people’s faces at a day care every day.”

Schlafly said that she supports women who go into the work force but that they should not expect help from the government. She said that when her father could not find a job during the Great Depression, her mother had to go to work.

“People have to face life’s challenges,” Schlafly said. “But we didn’t look to the government. We didn’t get any handouts from them.”

She said feminists also have turned to government for increased wages. Feminists have said that a woman makes 76 cents to a man’s dollar, but Schlafly said this statistic is misleading because it does not compare similar jobs.

“We do not want wage controls in this country,” she said. “We had it here once, and the American people did not like it.

“Feminism is not compatible with the notion of equality. What they really want is the jobs they would not get on merit.”

Schlafly went on to criticize feminists’ efforts to increasingly integrate women into the military. She said she believes it would lower physical standards in the military because women are weaker than men.

“When you have coed training, a man cannot be all that he can be,” she said. “He can only be all that a woman can be.”

UNC’s Conservative Women’s Voice, an organization started earlier this year, sponsored the speech.

“In the face of turmoil and opposition, it’s nice to hear and see things come together,” said sophomore Kat Rodgers, president and founder of the group. “It invigorates me. It keeps me trucking and focusing on my core beliefs.”

Contact the University Editor at udesk@unc.edu.

SIS team

samedi, janvier 29, 2005

Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa: Confessions of a Misogynist

January 29, 2005

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Paul C. Robbins, Ph.D.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On his Web site, Hugo Schwyzer, self-proclaimed “pro-feminist male,” writes the following:

"Much of the misogyny of the men's rights movement is directed towards feminists…To be hostile to the movement that seeks to liberate women is enough...to merit the charge of misogyny."

Feminists have made a similar claim for so many years that the intellectual and moral arrogance of that claim today passes unnoticed. But no movement, neither feminism nor the men’s rights movement, is above criticism. Dr. Schwyzer would ask us to believe that he can justly criticize the men’s rights movement, but the men’s rights movement cannot justly criticize back.

As far as I can tell, feminists believe all men are guilty of being men, an original sin no amount of virtue can erase. So I confess—I’m guilty. First, of being a man, second, of not being a feminist. If that makes me a misogynist, so be it.

I’m a man and I make no apologies for being a man.

I am not a feminist because I believe society must balance the inter-related needs, rights, and interests of men, women, and children, while feminists believe the needs, rights, and interests of women always outweigh those of men and children.

So here, Brother Hugo, is my mea culpa—read it and weep.

I respect and acknowledge Condoleeza Rice for being the first black woman to be confirmed as Secretary of State.

Feminists oppose Dr. Rice because she's a political conservative. Barbara Boxer all but called her a liar during her confirmation hearing. So much for the sisterhood.

I deeply admire and respect Mother Teresa, a Catholic nun who felt called to spend her life comforting the dying untouchables in India.

Feminists dislike Mother Teresa because she opposed abortion. Germaine Greer wrote a snippy, catty critique of her life when she died. Feminists admire Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood; Sanger was a racist eugenicist who wanted to sterilize blacks to limit their numbers.

I believe the only difference between The Vagina Monologues and a blue movie is that the blue movie has better monologues.

Feminists believe The Vagina Monologues is the greatest piece of literature since Medea.

I'm not a male feminist. A male feminist believes all men beat their wives—except himself. A male feminist believes all men rape women—except himself. A male feminist believes all men oppress women—except himself. He's half right–he doesn't, but neither do most men.

Female feminists believe all men beat their wives, rape women, and oppress women–except for Bill Clinton.

I believe men have made enormous contributions to civilization and that absent those contributions civilization itself would disappear.

Feminists believe men are good for three things: donating sperm, changing the oil, and paying child support.

I believe women have made enormous contributions to civilization and that absent those contributions civilization itself would disappear.

Feminists believe women would have made enormous contributions to civilization if men had not oppressed them. Since their liberation, feminists have made up for lost time by giving us Women’s Studies.

I’m a misogynist because I believe most women are fair-minded individuals who seek fairness and equality for both men and women.

Feminists seek fairness and equality for women but not for men.

I believe when the Titanic goes down without sufficient lifeboats, women and children should share the lifeboats.

Feminists believe women should share the lifeboats with the children—if there’s room.

I believe children need both mothers and fathers.

Feminists believe children need mothers and child support checks but not fathers.

I believe most men truly love their children and their wives and that most men behave responsibly and lovingly towards their wives and their children.

Feminists think women are good, men are bad. Well, except for the evil Dr. Rice and Mother Teresa, of course.

I believe a father who loses his kids in an unfair and biased custody decision suffers an injustice—and that his pain at losing his children is real.

Feminists believe his pain is real but deserved. If he didn't want to lose his kids in a nasty divorce, he shouldn't have married. You know, kind of like the black slave who objected to being whipped–if he didn't want to be whipped, he shouldn't have run away in the first place.

I believe children deserve both a mother and a father in the event of a divorce.

Feminists believe children deserve only a mother and a child support check in the event of divorce. Whether children ever see their father again should be left up to mom.

I believe no man should be forced to support another man's child.

Feminists believe women have the right to lie to their children about who their
fathers are, lie to fathers about who their children are, and to jail any man
who refuses to support the child the woman said was his–even if the DNA proves
she lied.

I believe both fathers and mothers should have both rights and responsibilities when its comes to their children.

Feminists believe mothers should have rights to children, fathers should have responsibilities.

I believe that marriage benefits men, women, and children and deserves widespread societal support.

Feminists oppose heterosexual marriage but think homosexual marriage is the greatest thing since Roe v Wade.

I believe in the event of divorce, the state has an obligation to treat both the husband and wife fairly and equally and to mitigate the damage to all parties, but especially to the children.

Feminists believe the purpose of divorce is to allow a woman to end a marriage but
keep all its benefits, including the children and her former husband's money.

I believe the destruction of the family is a result of ideas and policies advanced largely by feminists.

Feminists agree—and they’re proud of it. According to Germaine Greer, widespread divorce is feminism's greatest achievement.

I believe most divorces are filed and initiated by wives because they know they'll receive the children, the bulk of the marital property, and a sizable share of their former husband's income.

Feminist believe women file most divorces because the husband deserves it. He’s a man, after all.

I believe divorced fathers are justly angry at a family court system that routinely deprives them of their children, their property, and their rights–and that calling these men "misogynists" will not suffice to silence their anger and their cries for justice.

Feminists call these men "misogynists" to silence them so that women's gravy train will not be derailed.

I believe domestic violence is a human problem, that women are as likely to resort to violence in an intimate relationship as men, a conclusion supported by numerous scientific studies.

Feminists believe that only men resort to violence and a woman who appears to resort violence is actually defending herself. Feminists have no explanation for intimate violence in lesbian relationships, so they don't talk about it.

I believe most child abuse and murder is committed by mothers, not by fathers, a conclusion supported by solid evidence.

Feminists avoid dealing with this issue. When confronted, they say it's because mothers spend more time caring for children than fathers, but feminists do not make the same effort to prevent mothers from abusing their children as they do to prevent men from abusing their wives.

I believe abortion should be limited to certain situations and that 45 million abortions since Roe v Wade is a stain on our collective conscience.

Feminists believe women should have an unlimited right to abortion because an unborn child is mere fetal tissue with no Constitutional rights. Too bad for it.

I believe men and women are born with innate sexual desires.

Feminists believe heterosexual desire is the result of social conditioning but homosexual desire is innate.

I believe empowering women means giving them choices–and expecting them to take responsibility for the consequences of those choices.

Feminists believe that a woman who chooses to teach French in New Guinea should be paid the same as the president of GM.

I believe the pay gap between men and women is caused primarily by choices women make–to work fewer hours, to take time off for raising children, and to work in careers that pay less.

Feminists believe the only cause of the pay gap is that companies want to decrease their profits by paying men more than women.

I believe that when Nancy Hopkins claimed she would either black out or throw up when Larry Summers suggested innate differences might be the cause of women's comparative lack of success in science, she demonstrated she prefers emotional blackmail over science.

Feminists believe the only purpose of science is to support the preconceived conclusions of feminism—and they’ll gladly use a classic feminine ploy straight out of Gone With the Wind to be sure it does.

I believe feminism's constant portrayal of women as victims is demeaning to women.

Feminists portray women as victims to elicit chivalry in men, to avoid responsibility for their behavior, and to portray themselves as always innocent.

I believe what men and women share in common is more important than what divides them.

Feminists believe men and women are just alike, except that women are good and
men are bad.

I believe men and women come from the same source, a source I call God. I believe God loves us all equally, man or woman, black or white, red or brown, and that God’s gift of life is an opportunity, not a guarantee.

Feminists believe the Goddess created a world in which women are always victims
and men are always villains. They have no idea why the Goddess did this to them,
but they're really pissed about it.

I believe women were one of God's better ideas and that women deny their unique gift to the world when they try to be men.

Feminists think men should be like women and women should be like men.

So there, Brother Hugo. I've bared my soul. My conscience is clear, my penitence
complete.

Ave Maria, gratia plena…

I shall go and sin no more.

(PS: My comment about The Vagina Monologues was suggested by George Harrison, the late Beatle, who sardonically remarked: “The only difference between a Spice Girls movie and a blue movie is that the blue movie has better music.” Thanks, George.)

Paul C. Robbins, Ph.D.

vendredi, septembre 24, 2004

Violente et dangereuse la vie avec Maman?

par William LEVY
26 septembre 2002
(traduit par Gérard Pierre LEVESQUE)

C'est une réalité accablante, mais personne n’en parle. Pourquoi pas ?

Lorsque les statistiques sur toutes les victimes de violence familiale sont examinées, il est clair que sont les femmes, surtout les mères, qui perpètrent clairement la plus grande partie des actes de violence dans la famille. Les femmes commettent les deux tiers (2/3) de toute la violence familiale contre les enfants — et la majorité des meurtres d'enfant.

Hélas, les petits amis des femmes, les maris de droit commun, et les beaux-pères des enfants commettent aussi une partie notable de la violence familiale contre les enfants. Il est très important de remarquer que les pères biologiques ne commettent qu’une partie minime de ces crimes.

La violence contre les femmes n’est qu’une une petite partie de toute la violence familiale. Les familles dirigées par deux parents mariés, sauf pour celles dirigées par des veuves âgées, sont clairement le milieu le plus sécuritaire et le moins violent pour les femmes.

En 1996, des 1 262 enfants américains assassinés dans la famille, les femmes ont été responsables de 984 de ces assassinats (78 %). Les hommes ne commirent que 278 assassinats (22 %). Les mères biologiques tuèrent 768 enfants (61 %). Les pères biologiques furent responsables de 30 assassinats (2,4 %). Clairement, ce sont le mères qui sont les grandes criminelles : surtout les mères qui vivent avec un homme qui n'est pas le père de leur enfant.

Au Canada, les statistiques sont présentées de façon à obscurcir l’identification des auteurs de ces crimes. Cependant, ce qui est clair c’est que les crimes violents sont généralement en déclin. Mais les crimes violents contre les enfants, eux sont en croissance. Les assassinats d’enfants de moins de 18 ans sont passés de 17,5% de tous les homicides en 1994, à 21 % en 1998. Plus de la moitié (52%) de ces victimes d’homicides étaient des … garçons.

En 1986, le Dr. Cyril Groenland, de l'université McMaster, a publié une étude sur les parents naturels impliqués, une étude sur l’Ontario, dans des cas d’agression ou de décès d'enfants dus à la négligence criminelle. Il montre que les pères furent impliqués dans 13 décès. Cependant, les mères étaient responsables de 38 décès, soit … trois fois plus de crimes. Conjointement, les deux parents n’étaient coupables que de 12 décès.

L’infanticide est une catégorie de crime dont ne peut être coupable qu’une femme. L’infanticide est généralement puni par une sentence de « deux années moins un jour » de prison. Cependant, lorsque c’est un homme qui tue un jeune enfant, il est condamné pour meurtre.

C'est là le genre de « linge sale » que les grands médias canadiens refusent d’imprimer ou de diffuser.

Pourquoi ?

jeudi, septembre 23, 2004

Consider the following facts and you'll agree:

* Women are now 43% of the paid workforce (Up from 27% in the late 60s).

* 64% of all females are in full-time work.

* 72% of all part-time workers are women.

* 67% of all new jobs are going to women.

* There is virtually no equal opportunity for men when it comes to the government's largesse. In Australia, some two and a half billion (not million) is spent on `women's ' policy initiatives by federal, state and local governments. Men? Hardly a brass razoo! Yet men contribute 70% of income tax! State and Federal governments in Australia spend over 1.25 billion on childcare alone.

* Stay at home mums penalised. The Federal Government pays working women almost double what it pays stay-at-home mums. Thus women are encouraged to enter the workforce at a time of high unemployment and to dump their children in child minding.

* Men are now only 44% of all undergraduates (Down from 70% in the early 70s).

* In the decade 1970 to 1980, the number of females in the workforce increased by 58% - men by just 20%

* Most women are employed in the expanding areas of employment such as the service industries. Men are in the shrinking areas such as engineering, etc.

* 68% of the registered unemployed are men, 32% are women. (Three plus decades ago women formed the majority of the unemployed).

* World-wide unemployment rates for men are rising much faster than the female rate.

* Men are often given a raw deal in the Family Court when they divorce (especially in terms of custody, access and property division).

* Most government and semi-government departments and statutory bodies tend to favour women over men in hiring and promotion due to affirmative action legislation. This includes education, armed forces, police and fire fighting services.

* Boys make up the bulk of remedial students at school.

* Men, on average, die 7 years earlier than women.

* Most of the homeless are men

* Young men commit suicide at over 4 times the female rate.

* Men are discriminated against in the workplace and in education by affirmative action for women.

* Men are given more serve jail terms for similar crimes than women.
* Men still do most of the dirty and dangerous jobs, and still would be expected to go off to war should the situation demand it.

* Men are often wrongly accused of sexual harassment/crimes.

Women are new elite

The Federal Equal Employment Opportunities Act (formerly Affirmative Action Act) requires all employers with over 100 employees to set up equal opportunities for women; with the CEO to be responsible for EEO. Each company must report to EEOA each two years. There are some 10,585 companies in Australia who have over 100 employees.

In addition there are over 6,900 government schools in Australia each with a dedicated EEO Officer seeking to advance girls and women's education. No wonder boys and men are being left behind in the workplace and education.

By our reckoning, there must be some 17,000 Equal Opportunities Officers (conservative estimate) across this nation all rooting for women. Our figures exclude private schools (over 2,000), the Union Movement - which is crammed full of femocrats - small businesses under 100 employees, political parties, and community groups and Churches.

Then we have the Office of the Status of Women with around 50 staff. (There is no equivalent for men). In addition they allocate over $1 million dollars annually to "women's" groups.

Special spending on women runs into the millions. Examples:

(1) the Women in Business Trust get $500,000 from the federal budget to assist women establish their own business - nothing for men.

(2) `Women's Safety Survey' was allocated $1.3 million - nothing for men.

(3) The Federal Government also gives hefty handouts for things for women's only events like the International Women's Conference' held in Adelaide in 1996.

(4) Special employment and health programs for women. The government even funded a program for wives of unemployed men to help them find a job!

(5) All State Governments have their special programs for women, especially in education, employment and health. Example: In 1997/98 financial year the Victorian Kennett Coalition Government spent $50 million implementing its `women's agenda' (health and employment issues mainly).

(6) Australian Bureau of Statistics publish each year their `Australian Women's Year Book'. This is in addition to gender information in `Year Book Australia, Australian Social Trends'.

The cost of administering the plethora of `women's policies' at federal, state, and local levels, must be costing taxpayers a fortune. There has been many a forest cleared to print the copious amounts of `women's reports' published over the past three decades.

Let me give but a very small sample;

* Women- Shaping and Sharing the Future - The New National Agenda for Women 1993-2000 (162 pages, Office of the Status of Women, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 1993),

* Equity before the Law, Discussion Paper 54, Australian Law Reform Commission 1993, over 360 pages in 2 volumes),

* Half Way to Equal, (365 pages), House of Representatives Standing Committee on legal and Constitutional Affairs, 1992,

* Affirmative Action for Women, (Dept of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 1984 (2 volumes),

* 2 Year Action Plan for Women 1998-2000 (Victorian Government),

* Women's Employment Strategy 1991-94 (Public Service Board of Victoria, Career Planning for Women in the Victorian Ministry of Education (Ministerial Advisory Committee on Women and girls Ministry of Education, Victoria, 1990),

* Come on Girls, (Advisory Committee on the Post-Secondary Education of Women and Girls, SA 1985),

* Equal Employment Opportunity Action Plan 1986/87 (Rural Water Commission of Victoria),

* Managers Managing Equally, (SA Office of the Commissioner for Equal Opportunity),

* Rural Women's Network Report (Vic Government 1998), etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc...

On top of this there are all those telephone listings. In checking the White Pages under Office of Women's Policy (Queensland), there were two extensive listings including toll free numbers (Australia Wide).

The bottom line

Women get squillions spend on them and men hardly a brass razoo. The need to spend money on men's issues is slowly dawning however. For example, the government is at last, going to spend a couple of million dollars on promoting men's prostate health.
But the reality is there is virtually no equal opportunity for men when it comes to the government's largesse.
____________________________________________________________

"It is not often that a dominant class legislates its own downfall with quite as much thoroughness as the parliaments of the western world, filled as they are with men passing equal opportunities legislation in favour of women, have done". (David Thomas, "Not Guilty- In defence of the Modern Man", Weiden & Nicolson, London, 1993, page 63.)

lundi, septembre 20, 2004

AN OPEN LETTER TO GENDER FEMINISTS

1. Stop polarizing the sexes!
by Jerry A. Boggs
Author of Male Matters
GENDER RELATIONS could not be more strained.
“On some days,” writes Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in Feminism Is Not The Story Of My Life, “it is hard not to believe that our society has collapsed into an all-out war between the sexes.”
Cathy Young laments in Ceasefire! Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality, “...[F]or every sign of a return to sanity, there are several signs that the culture of gender polarization is alive.”
In Fire With Fire, Naomi Wolf says, “We are not simply experiencing a ‘war against women’ in which women are unthreatening victims. Rather, we are in the midst of a civil war over gender, in which there is not one side waging battle but two, unevenly matched though they may be. It is also a war against men.”
Here is the short reason for this great gender divide: Like an ill-trained doctor, you misdiagnosed the sexes’ condition from the get-go and now you prescribe the wrong remedy, one that has set many men and women seething at each other over a wide range of issues, from jobs and health funding, to violence in the home and sexual harassment in the workplace.
As all know, you diagnosed the sexes’ condition along this line: Men possess a cornucopia of power and privilege, and women possess nothing save the misfortune of being crushed underfoot by a patriarchal boot. Your remedy, then, was to confer to women, at men’s expense where necessary, more rights, privileges, power, self-esteem, money – anything that would make life as good for them as you envision it being for men.
Because of your persistence and no small dollop of chivalry, this “remedy” was eventually seized upon and promoted by virtually every institution as if gospel. This happened, as did the gender alienation, because in your diagnosis of the state of gender, you and the largely unquestioning news media gave not even the briefest glance to the male side of the issues. You failed to look beyond your oversimplified “Men run things, so they have the power.”
So, for example, when you deemed women oppressed because “they were stuck at home with the children,” you failed to acknowledge the male side: men were stuck at work away from the children, and that it can be just as oppressive to be stuck with the boss, over whom one has no control, as it can be to be stuck with the children, over whom one generally has control. Men often endured pressure-cooker jobs solely to fulfill their role of earning enough income so their stay-at-home wife could stay home.
Your diagnosis of gender stumbled early on when you compared the sexes’ wages. Some of you admitted it was logical that men earned more as providers, but then most of you illogically declared it discriminatory that women earned less. Your word for it was that women were “corralled” into lower-paid jobs.
You refused to admit the obvious: men were corralled away from low-paid jobs by their provider role and by society’s – including women’s – expectation of greater male success. Burdened with supporting two or more people, men were denied access to lower-paying jobs that might have interested them more or offered them the flexibility they needed to become more involved with their children. And you refused to understand something any 14-year-old knows: most women either have been married and had most or all their expenses paid by a husband, or have been single and expecting their expenses to be paid by a husband. As a supported group that needs less income than men because their expenses are paid (or are expected to be paid), women have been able to “underbid” men for the lower-paid jobs. The “corralling” of women into lower-paid occupations stems from supported women’s ability to accept the pay of jobs which men have been priced out of by their greater financial obligation as sole or primary provider and the greater expectation of male success. Many supported and expecting-to-be-supported women are like live-at-home teens. These teens can accept a job that barely pays pocket change, while their parents cannot, since they must support both themselves and the teens.
The “corralling” of the sexes into different jobs began in earnest around 1908. That’s when states were pressured, largely by women, to pass hours-limitation laws. These laws barred employers from requiring women to work more than ten hours a day. The laws, clearly discriminatory against men, forced employers to hire only men in jobs subject to last-minute changes in work-hours. These laws to protect women fueled the division of labor by sex and the gender wage gap.
But never mind all this. Never mind logic and common sense and the fact that it is incontrovertible that providers, who have mostly been men, will perforce earn more than those who are provided for, who have mostly been women (and children). To advance your oppression theory, you simply ignored this reality and demanded acceptance of your idea that the sexes’ wage gap is a product solely of discrimination against women for the benefit of men.
With this demand, you influenced employers and institutions everywhere to brush aside equal opportunity – the sensible, fair approach to gender equity in employment – and to establish in male professions equal outcomes, which by definition require discrimination against men where imbalances exist.
But to you, being unfair to men was necessary and just. Men had the power, you claimed, primarily by earning the lion’s share of money at women’s expense, and thus they deserved a good hobbling.
It still has not dawned on you that there is no power in earning money. There can be satisfaction, even exhilaration (the “thrill of the hunt and conquest”) in earning money, but in time, for most of us this satisfaction tends to wither as the monotony of work bears down. For the vast majority of workers, earning money brings only responsibility and stress. The power in money is in spending it. (Ask political action committees, or mobsters who bribe officials. Or suppose you earned $1 million a year but couldn’t spend it? Would you feel powerful? “Money talks” points to the power derived from spending money, not from earning it.) And according to American Demographic, women control consumer spending by a wide margin in nearly every consumer category. The greatest power in spending money, I suggest, lies in the right to spend money toiled for by others.
Women. And they read newspapers.
Newspaper advertising puts messages in front of an audience
that controls most of the nation’s retail spending.
–Editor & Publisher, front page, Sep. 21, 1996
When the man became wealthy from the job he had worked hard at for two decades, he was 45 years old and his wife was 40. He died at age 73, men’s average longevity. She died at age 79, women’s average longevity. She enjoyed the wealth he alone created eleven years longer than he did. Yet we say only he had power.
You stumbled again in your analysis of gender when you said the male-provider/female-providee arrangement was created and controlled by the man to benefit him. You chose to see it this way although you know in your heart that if at any time in our history a fellow had told a woman on their first date, “When I get married, I plan to stay at home with the children while my wife works and acquires power,” there likely would not have been a second date, but there would have been hysterical laughter.
You erred, too, in thinking men want only one thing. No, not sex. Work. One of your deepest biases is to believe that men would not dream of giving up a fraction of their “privilege-and-power-filled” romp at work and staying at home with their children. In truth, most men fear societal scorn and female rejection too much to deviate from their primary provider-role script. So until very recently they have not felt permitted even to think about staying at home with the children. You haven’t bothered to ask them if they think about it, either. If you were to ask, you’d find what, according to a June 16, 2002, report in Australia’s Sunday Times, was found by an Australian Institute of Family Studies report titled Talking to Fathers: a “strong motivation among the fathers interviewed to be involved in their children’s lives – an involvement that many of them found difficult with their present workloads and work conditions and/or cultures…”
The news media have fed us a relentless parade of politicians, CEOs, and other male bigwigs – Donald Trump, Ted Turner, et al – whose wealth or power you can almost smell. The high visibility of such men enabled you to plant your feminist fallacy: all powerful people are men, therefore all men are powerful people. The powerful man became Everyman.
What you and the news media failed to mention was that these “powerful” men represented only a tiny fraction of working men, and that most of them each week logged in 60-plus hours at the office and still more at home tethered to briefcase, phone, and computer. No doubt as a result of this slavery, according to a survey by Burson-Marsteller, the New York-based global communications consultancy, a whopping 73 percent of 369 CEOs answered yes to the question, “Do you think about quitting your job?” More than 80 percent said they are kept awake at night by company demons, including worries about the competition and how to increase business and make shareholders happy.
But more to the gender point, you omitted the fact that virtually every one of these men had or would have a wife who did not have to work at all and could usually do as she pleased, especially after the nanny and the domestic workers arrived to do her work for her, including much of her “social director” work.
The successful man’s wife now has it even better. “Has there ever been a better time to be a woman?” asked Forbes in its August 11, 1997, issue. “Want to work 70 hours a week and compete with the boys on Wall Street? Or do you prefer to stay at home and do a good job raising your children? As a woman you can now have it either way.” Thanks to husbands.
The successful man’s wife has a third option: doing some combination of part-time work and mothering. Compare her three options, says Warren Farrell, author of Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say, to men’s three “options”: 1. work full time; 2. work full time; 3. work full time with overtime.
When using the gender wage gap to symbolize women’s oppression, you neglected to point out that a woman generally has had as good a chance to find a well-paid husband as a man has had to find a well-paid job. Conversely, a man has had as poor a chance to find a well-paid wife – who would give him the options traditionally accorded only to wives – as a woman has had to find a well-paid job. What has limited one sex has tended to limit the other.
You have told us countless times that husbands have had equal access to the home-cooked meals and other domestic advantages wrought by wives, without equal production in the home. But when will you admit that wives have had equal access to the income and other economic advantages wrought by husbands, without equal production in the workplace?
For a jolting illustration of the latter, consider the marriage of software tycoon William Gates. To build his mind-blowing wealth, Mr. Gates doubtless labored hard for most of his adult life. Yet when he married, his bride and former subordinate Melinda, barring some prenuptial agreement stating otherwise, gained legal access to everything he has, including, with or without a prenuptial, his extravagant standard of living – in one day. He became a billionaire over decades; she became one overnight. Who has power? And who has more privilege, the CEO with his one option and over-60-hour workweek, or his wife with her three options and control over most of their spending? Might this at least partly explain why women as a group outlive men by six years?
Society cannot deny husbands the options given wives, then with diversity-like programs penalize men for the gender wage gap created by giving wives options. Would we deny women an option and then punish them for not having it?
Just as females were punished for trying to succeed, men are still punished for failing.
(Incidentally, did not Gates’ premarital pursuit of Melinda violate the law pertaining to the “hostile work environment,” the definition of which includes bosses requesting dates from subordinates? What would have been Melinda’s response had Gates been not her billionaire employer but her so-so well-off immediate boss? A request for a date by Ultra Rich Gates, who is Everywoman’s Mr. Right, is the kind of “harassment” few of his female employees would have griped about. Such reminds us of who in practice ends up being penalized most by sexual harassment laws: men who are not successful enough if they are not handsome enough.)
You and the mainstream media, which largely serve as your protectors and agents, have long given a forum to women’s complaint that men treat women as sex objects, that men eye women as if they were only so much racked meat. But how often have you listened to men’s complaint that women treat men as success objects and regard them as if they were a mere wallet? On the singles’ scene, a woman’s seemingly innocent “What do you do?” equates perfectly to a man’s eyeing her up and down. (Never mind that she eyes him up and down, too, to check out his physical appeal as she checks out his economic appeal, in essence expecting twice as much of him as he expects of her, the double expectation being the real double standard.) Many women still seek out such courses as “How To Marry Wealth.” There is no demand for courses called “How To Get a Man Who Wants To Stay At Home With the Children So You Can Pursue a Career.” And many young women are still told, “You can fall in love with a rich man as easily as with a poor man.” They are encouraged to focus on a man’s check size even as they are taught to label sexist his focus on her chest size.
So naturally, because of your and the media’s one-sidedness on such issues, we hear much about a “Beauty Myth,” which blames men for women’s preoccupation with beauty, and we hear little about an “achiever myth,” men’s preoccupation with success. When we do hear about the latter, we hear that it, too, is blamed on men, on the male ego.
You would never bring yourself to question whether the sexes’ respective preoccupations might be linked to the sexes’ unequal sharing of the initiative-taking that launches and advances male-female relationships.
Ask yourself – and stay with me on this – why women wear makeup and men do not. Your answer is that men’s demand for beauty compels women to wear it, and even tough women who iron-fistedly rule cut-throat companies are powerless to resist the demand. There is, of course, a better answer.
The female traditionally has not had the role of taking romantic initiatives. Instead, she sees her role as trying to induce the man to take them. How does she go about doing this? How does a woman at a dance, say, try to induce men to approach her rather than some other woman? She does it mainly by trying to be as attractive as possible in the hope of being the first to catch and hold a man’s eye. One of her chief means to this is makeup. (She may periodically appraise her makeup before a mirror, performing a “rehearsal” to see if she is at her best at inducing. Just as men rehearse their “lines” to do better at seducing, women “rehearse their looks” to do better at inducing.) Makeup, along with other beauty enhancers, is intended to improve a woman’s looks and help her compete with other women in her role of inducing men to take initiatives.
When the makeup works and an encounter leads to dating, the woman feels pressured to continue wearing makeup whenever in the man’s presence. After all, in her mind, that is how she “sold” herself – with a made-up face – and that is how he “bought” her. To stop wearing makeup and obsessing over her looks is to risk causing him to stop taking initiatives. How much she obsesses depends on such factors as how secure she feels in his presence.
The male’s initiator role pressures the man differently. From the moment he initiates a conversation with a woman, and until a solid relationship develops, his perhaps unconscious but abiding concern is: Will she reject my next initiative? This is especially true if he is insecure and feels he may not be “good enough” for her. So he may resort to using male “makeup” – a facade to cover up what he thinks she might consider weaknesses, with a confident swagger and with talk, subtle or otherwise, about how splendid he is. He may exaggerate everything about himself, particularly his financial success or potential for it: “Well, I may not earn much right now, but my boss says big bucks’re in my future.”
Such statements about succeeding, which are an integral part of men’s “makeup,” may sometimes be outright lies to fool her by showing more ambition or ability than possessed. But does not a woman lie and fool him, too, with the makeup and the WondraBra (or the X-Bra, with a cord to “Adjust to Stun”) that she wears to project more beauty than possessed? Once he promises, or merely implies, that he’ll be successful, he cannot easily relinquish his preoccupation with that goal. After all, in his mind, being a success is how he “sold” himself to her and it’s how she “bought” him. To give up this preoccupation is to risk being dumped for “false advertising.”
As a result of the female-inducer and male-seducer roles and the unequal sharing of the initiative-taking, the male is preoccupied with achievement, the female with beauty.
The sexes’ unequal initiative-taking is a driving force behind another wedge between men and women – sexual harassment in the workplace.
Quid pro quo sexual harassment, as when a male supervisor in effect tells a female subordinate, “Give me sex or I’ll give you the boot,” is one thing; so is it when he promises, “Give me sex and I’ll give you that promotion you want,” thereby discriminating against all the other women and the men who were eligible for the promotion.
But it is quite another thing when a woman can sue her employer because she was “offended” by such as the following: a male co-worker, whose first request for a date the woman rejected, thought she may have had a change of heart when he spotted her reading a women’s magazine article, “The Workplace is a Great Place to Find Romance,” and she reflexively gave him a polite smile, and so he, thinking she might be “inducing” him again, asked her out again (and he not only got rejected again – the pain of this rejection perhaps hurting more than the first – but was accused of “harassing” her and was fired under his employer’s zero-tolerance policy).
“All the new sexual harassment litigation,” says Christina Hoff Sommers, “has turned the workplace into something very unpleasant and very grim.” So grim are some workplaces that the male employees and the female employees no longer look to each other for romance and companionship, but give each other a wide berth, the women fearing “sexual predators” and the men fearing “financial predators,” women eyeing sexual harassment’s pot of gold for being “offended.”
Asked if he now makes the first move, comedian Drew Carey said, “No. I worry some woman might say, ‘Drew Carey tried to do something with me and it was unwanted.’ I don’t want to get in the paper for that. It used to easier for me...before I was well known. But now it worries me.” So much for male power.
How might some men feel about the firestorm of sexual harassment?
Suppose men said to women, “We men have decided that it is women’s role, and women’s role only, to raise the children. We men will take no part in this role whatsoever.” Suppose men added, “We will never acknowledge when you do well in your role of taking care of the children. Our only feedback to you will be to criticize you when we think you care for the children improperly or make them angry. We will then call you ‘abusers.’”
Women, knowing full well that most of the children would be raised properly, would feel this is sexism compounded with cruelty. They would see all women becoming stereotyped as potential abusers.
Imagine, then, how men must feel when realizing this: you, the media, and the courts have fixated only on sexual harassment outside the context of all male-female flirting and courting interactions in the workplace, and so have in effect said to men: “It is your role, and your role alone, to initiate romantic relationships even though women may want them more than you do. It is your role to take the roughly 150 initiatives – and the attendant 150 risks of rejection – which Warren Farrell says must be taken to advance a relationship from first eye contact to first sexual contact. We do not want women to take any part whatsoever in male-female interactions except to say yes or no to your initiatives. And we will not commend you when you perform this role properly and each day countless good relationships result. Our only feedback to you will be to vilify you when we think you ‘do it wrong.’ We will then call you ‘harassers.’” (For more on how women unwittingly fuel sexual harassment, see my Detroit News op-ed, “Women’s roles key to ending harassment.”)
Such extremist views, allowed to help formulate sexual harassment law, prompted Newsweek staff writer Ellis Cose to write in his book, A Man’s World, “Inevitably, the heightened sensitivity to sexual harassment has left some men feeling persecuted...” If in fact extremist sexual harassment laws are nudging us toward gender persecution, are they not also nudging us toward becoming a little bit like Hitler’s Nazis, whose extremist racial views led to legalizing racial persecution?
You truly went off the rail in your diagnosis of gender affairs when you leaped to a quick conclusion on domestic violence, creating a gender divider if ever there was one. You bought hugely into ideology such as that evinced by the sexist, viciously dichotomizing slam-dunker uttered by Kay Leigh Hagan writing about husbands in Ms Magazine: “If he can hurt you, he will.”
By focusing exclusively on husbands’ violence, you and most of the media lured us into picturing every husband as a potentially brutish wolf and every wife as an innocent lamb who is led blindly by marriage to the slaughter-house and who herself is incapable of harm except in wholly justifiable self-defense.
In your world, women never initiate unprovoked violence against their husbands. “According to contemporary studies,” says one of your more prominent members, Phyllis Chesler, “90 percent of all violent crimes are still committed by men. ... When those women who commit 10 percent of all violent crimes do kill, nearly half kill male intimates who have abused them or their children, and they invariably do so in self-defense.” You cling to this notion despite contrary facts which the popular press makes little of to chivalrously perpetuate women’s image of innocence.
Those contrary facts are:
· Women are more likely to commit major physical abuse of their children than are men: 56.8 percent to 43.2 percent.
· Women are more likely to kill their children than are men: 55 percent to 45 percent.
· Women commit almost all of the murders of newborns. In Dade County, Fla., between 1956 and 1986, according to the June 1990 Journal of Interpersonal Violence 5:2, mothers accounted for 86 percent of newborn deaths.
The view that women can assault children is finally becoming acceptable. Thanks to hidden cameras, mothers and female baby sitters increasingly are caught attacking small children. “Prime Time Live,” for example, on November 19, 1997, treated us to the nightmarish scene of mothers clamping their hand over the nose and mouth of their desperately struggling infants. In Great Britain, researchers using covert video cameras in just two hospitals filmed 33 parents suspected of child abuse, almost all of them mothers, in the act of deliberately smothering their babies.
“Yet even though these children are all alleged to have died at the hands of a parent, no one is using the term ‘domestic violence’ to talk about their demise.:”
• July 18, 2001, “Domestic violence isn’t a gender issue,” Donna Laframboise, National Post

You insist that violence against women is not taken seriously. Yet it is taken far more seriously than violence by women. Such monstrous mothers as those caught on video are often dismissed as victims of one of several syndromes attributed to women who abuse. One of the syndromes is postpartum depression, said to be brought on by hormonal changes. (I can imagine your reaction to the father who, after murdering his newborn, claimed to be afflicted by a testosterone surge.) Another is Munchausen by Proxy syndrome, a disorder in which a parent – almost always a mother – may cause illness or injury in a child to draw attention to herself in the role of sympathetic caregiver. (Again, I can imagine your reaction to the father harming his child to draw attention to himself.) Introducing these syndromes permits you and the news media to shift the talk away from mothers’ violence against children to the mothers as tragic figures who deserve not jail time but therapy and sympathy.
Had the war criminals we rightly hunt and prosecute been women we’d have crafted a neat little syndrome by now so we could explain away their evil deeds. -Christine Dirks, London Free Press
It is understandable why in your one-sided opines on domestic violence you would never bring up women’s killing of newborns and infants. “Across the country,” writes crime journalist Patricia Pearson in When She Was Bad – Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence, “according to the National Center on Health Statistics, the killing of infants climbed 55 percent between 1985 and 1988, until it was several times the rate at which adult women were murdered.” [Emphasis mine.] Were you to air this little tidbit, it would explode your fanatically guarded Innocent Woman hypothesis and put an entirely new face on domestic violence.
So what conclusion must we draw from the facts on women’s rather extensive, unprovoked violence against children? Just this, which is painfully obvious to anyone unhindered by feministthink: If women can batter or kill their own innocent children without provocation, they can, despite your fierce protestations to the contrary, batter or kill their husbands without provocation.
The plausibility of this rises dramatically once we consider the vision of husbands that you and the media have exhausted themselves to construct. In this vision, every husband salivates at the idea of regularly sending his wife out on a stretcher bruised and broken, just to show her, among other oppressive aims, who’s the boss. With husband-as-brute drummed daily into women’s brains, why should not some wives, in the heat of an escalating quarrel with hubby, forget trying to calm the waters in the traditional feminine manner and strike out preemptively with the justification: “I’d better nail him first because he’s sure going to nail me!”?
Wives are in fact the spousal killers 41 percent of the time, according to the September 1995 Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, “Spouse Murder Defendants in Large Urban Counties.” Yet that might not tell the full extent of it. As Warren Farrell says, “a woman is more likely to poison a man than shoot him, and poisoning is often recorded as a heart attack or accident.” She is more likely than a husband to employ contract killing, which is also less detectable because it is premeditated and often hired out to a professional. Often this professional vanishes, and no evidence can be found to link the wife. If evidence is found, says Farrell, the Justice Department records the murder as a “‘multiple offender killing’ – it never gets recorded as a woman killing a man.”
“More American women are assaulted by other women than by husbands or ex-husbands.”
 Cathy Young,Ceasefire!

As for spouse abuse, sociologists Murray Straus and Jan Stets analyzed the 1985 National Family Violence Survey, the largest survey on domestic violence, and wrote, “Of the... respondents who experienced one or more assaults, both parties engaged in violence in 49 percent of the cases, violence by men occurred in 23 percent of the cases, and violence by women occurred in 28 percent of the cases. No significant differences were found by gender of respondent . . . [W]omen not only engage in physical violence as often as men, but they also initiate violence about as often as men.”
Women are more seriously hurt than men in domestic violence, but Murray Straus and Richard Gelles reported in the 1980s that less than one percent of women involved in domestic violence required medical care.
Straus found that in later years men’s violence against women, even as reported by women, fell 43 percent between 1985 and 1992. In the same period, female assaults against men rose by about 28 percent. Straus says “part of the reason may be that there has been no effort to condemn assault by wives parallel to the effort to condemn assaults by husbands.”
That’s putting it mildly. If it were simply that wife assault was not condemned, its rate would have remained roughly constant, rather than rise a remarkable 28 percent. As said, violence against husbands has been encouraged – if not quietly mandated – by your hate literature. It is encouraged also by feminist-influenced laws. Some states pardon husband killers who apply for clemency because of physical abuse, which often cannot be disproved. California, according to Patricia Pearson, “has added new provisions to its prisoner clemency policy, allowing women to apply for release for killing their mates due to ‘emotional’ abuse. [Stress mine.] Since nobody can sensibly argue that women are not capable of extremely artful and wounding verbal attacks (studies find high degrees of female verbal hostility in violent marriages), the whole question of ‘harm’ gets turned on its head.” Not to mention that California’s emotional-abuse escape practically begs women predisposed to violence to take the law into their own hands and murder their husbands.
There also has been little or no effort to condemn women’s non-domestic violence against men. At a 1995 Wimbledon tennis match, the wife of a player who had been ruled against by the referee rose from her stadium seat, proceeded to the referee’s chair, and slapped the male referee in the face. She then walked haughtily out of the arena with her husband.
Reverse the sexes: the husband of a female player strides over and slaps the female referee in the face. He turns to leave... What happens next? You know exactly what would happen if any man were loony enough to pull such a stunt: Enraged spectators – doubtless all men – would swarm down onto the court and slam this misogynist ape to the ground. Several would probably pummel him with their fists. The cops would be summoned, and the man handcuffed and dragged off to be booked for assault. The next day’s caption for thousands of editors and columnists around the world: “Another example of male violence against women.”
“This tradition—of men killing a man who insults a woman—is still with us in places like Sicily....” –Warren Farrell
Why can’t you imagine this reversal actually happening? Because you know society does not condone violence against women. The “most oppressive members of the patriarchy,” men like religious fundamentalist Pat Roberts, wanted Texas to spare the life of Karla Tucker, the woman who in 1997 was executed for burying a pick-ax in a woman’s chest. But since society does not tolerate violence against women, she was executed precisely because she killed a woman. In her rampage she also killed a man, a former boyfriend. Had she killed only him, she no doubt would still be alive. No woman has been executed in the United States for killing only a man since 1954.
If such “oppressive” patriarchs as Pat Roberts wanted to protect the grotesquely violent Karla Tucker, how much does the average guy want to protect women in general? Enough to risk discrimination lawsuits. Warren Farrell illustrates: “A 17-year-old Michigan high school student attempted to choke a male teacher. Afterward, teachers got no additional protection. Two months later, a 14-year-old attempted to choke a female teacher – in the same school. [Emphasis mine.] The school immediately withdrew all female teachers from the school, reducing the staff from twenty-one to nine [and risking lawsuits by the withdrawn women]. Now here is the rub. The male teachers were still expected to remain but now they had to handle classes that were more than twice the size. The larger the class size, the greater the chance of violence. Protecting every woman put every man in jeopardy—without the men’s consent.” [Italics and bold type Farrell’s.] You say the violence against which sex is not taken seriously?
If we shouldn’t take women’s violence seriously, why should we take women’s opinions seriously? An act of violence is, after all, an opinion acted out.
Why were you not upset when you heard the real story of the Wimbledon tennis player’s wife slapping the male referee? Why was no one else? Because you and society, while abhorring violence against women, tend to tolerate – if not encourage – female violence against men. Of Betty Broderick, who shot her ex-husband and his new wife to death, Patricia Pearson says, “Broderick’s behavior is hers alone, but her account of it, and the way that account was received, reflects a widely accepted idea in this era about permissible female aggression.” (Stress mine.)
I’ve never heard of a man who, upon spotting a man beating up a woman, dashed over to help the man. Yet if we are to believe your canard about misogynist violence and male conspiracies, that is exactly what we should expect to happen. Yet because many do believe that canard, the following really did happen: “I overheard two men talking about seeing a 28-year- old woman assaulting a 67-year-old man. At the point they stumbled onto the attack, the man was on his back and the woman was choking him. The two men did nothing to stop the attack, they didn’t call the police, they just watched for a minute and then left. When I questioned their behavior one said, ‘If I had pulled that woman off the man I would have gone to jail for attacking her - plain and simple.’” -Andrew Bokelman, NCFM.org
With domestic violence shaping up as an equal-opportunity recruiter, why do the newsmedia continue to deny male victims of domestic violence at least a token recognition? (A rare exception is ABC’s September 1997 “20/20” story, “Battered By Their Wives: Men Who Are Abused – More Common Than You Think.” Hopefully, for the sake of gender harmony, this signals a new direction in reporting on domestic violence.) Female victims get more recognition than warranted even in non-domestic violence. “I was in Vietnam,” said Bill Geist, CBS reporter and author of The Big Five-0, “and didn’t see any women over there, and we have a monument for them.” In reports on the soldiers killed in all our nation’s wars, the phrase “the men who died” is being replaced by the politically correct “the men and women who died.” Yet the Gulf War took 368 male lives versus only 15 female lives. The Vietnam War killed 57,000 men and only eight women. The Civil War snuffed out 600,000 men – and boys – and only about sixty females. Yet on May 22, 1998, during an ABC News pre-Memorial Day story on the Civil War, Peter Jennings intoned somberly, “More than 600,000 men and women died before the war was over.” Do the benighted think that as many as 300,000 women were killed? No one called Jennings down for this. But what if the topic had been sexual assault and he had said, “Each year 200,000 women and men are raped”? Even though he would have more closely stated the truth, his feminist staffers would have forced him to apologize before day’s end. The entire world would have been made aware of his “gross misstatement.”
The purpose of defining war-killed troops as “the men and women” is to rewrite history. It’s to diminish men’s risk and sacrifice and to suggest that women are equally burdened with the responsibility of protecting the nation, and that female soldiers are equally victimized by war’s violence. (Might we one day, in the apex of political correctness, hear only “the women” killed in war? After all, I never thought I would hear Jennings’ incredible statement. And despite the abundance of easily accessible facts on the Web, we already say just “the women” regarding domestic violence.) In domestic violence reports, “the women and men” is avoided because of chivalry and antimale sexism and, I suspect, because feminist employees of the media stiff-arm the networks into airing a feminist slant on all news about gender, and too many male journalists are intimidated into silence by you and political correctness.
“Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today’s warfare, victims. Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children.”
-Hillary Clinton, in her speech to the First Ladies’ Conference on Domestic Violence in San Salvador in 1998
Of course, non-domestic violence, too, looks different when the statistics are not cooked or interpreted by you.
The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), revised in 1992 under pressure from you to produce more accurate reporting of crimes against women, showed that in 1995, 26 percent of all crimes were violent acts. Of this 26 percent, 16 percent were simple assaults, 16 percent aggravated assaults, three percent robberies, and less than one-tenth of a percent were rapes. The revised NCVS revealed what it had previously revealed: men are victimized by assault more than women, even when rape is counted. Men “were more likely than women to experience violent crimes committed by both acquaintances and strangers. In fact, men were about twice as likely as women to experience acts of violence by strangers.” In 1995, the Bureau of Justice Statistics showed U.S. violent crime rates per 1000 persons as follows:
As for homicide, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 1994, 23 percent of the victims were female, 77 percent male.
Despite statistics showing males more at risk than females, you concluded that since most murders of women are committed by men, this proves men hate women. But if we are to rely solely on homicide statistics to determine who hates whom, it appears that since men kill far more men than they kill women, men must hate the male sex more than the female. And since male suicides (43.8 per 100,000 males just between ages 15 and 24) outnumber female homicides (17 per 100,000, all ages), one must conclude there are more men who hate themselves than men who hate women. And while we are at it, statistics show, as stated, that women kill their own children more often than men do – so should men wail incessantly about women hating children?
You say male gun owners are among the most misogynist. If so, why are those paper silhouettes on the firing range always male? You also say boys are trained to harm females. Why, then, are the people destroyed in their violent video games almost always male? In the popular “Tomb Raider,” female protagonist Lara Croft kills uncountable men and, I am told, only the occasional female. If anything, boys learn that females can kill males, but not the other way around.
If we are to use murder statistics to tell us who hates whom, we must use rescue statistics to tell us who cares for whom. The Carnegie Hero Fund Commission shows that far more men pull women from the jaws of death than women pull men. Using your logic, men could say women care only about themselves.
But forget what all the foregoing statistics tell us about violence. In a chivalrous and unconstitutional bow to women, and with a slap in the face of men, especially black men, Congress passed a Violence Against Women Act to combat violence against the group less at risk of violence. This act seeks to place all violence seen as directed primarily at women into a special category, particularly violence in relationships. Adequate laws already exist to punish violence against members of either sex, but in the “gender war,” Congress wants to show whose side it is on: the side with the power to humiliate and bring Congress to its knees, almost literally.
So now, in the aftermath of your “remedy” for gender inequality, we are beleaguered with polarizing spin-offs. Many women despise all men solely because you have convinced them that all men despise women. Many other women, if not hating men, keep them at arm’s length, leery of the male’s highly propagandized penchant for pitbullness.
And new negative gender stereotypes have formed. In the late nineteenth century an American husband could have his wife committed to an insane asylum entirely on the basis of his word. He could get away with this because women were stereotyped as being fragile and prone to hysteria. “A century later,” says Patricia Pearson in When She Was Bad, “a confluence of social forces has created a parallel opportunity, but with the sexes reversed: Men can be committed to prison on the strength of stereotypes about them.”
Perhaps worse, the female who commits a crime, including battering or killing her own child, is now often seen as having no control over her actions and as having been pushed over the edge by patriarchal oppression; the devilish male sex made her do it. Yet when she commits a good act, it is attributed to the nurturing, saintly feminine – or to feminist influences. The man who commits an offense is regarded as acting solely within his own control. He is seen as making a choice with no influence save his own evil desire to oppress, especially if the offense is against a woman. His “rare” good behavior is often suspect. Ergo the emerging stereotype, “Men are evil, women are good.” One can hear in this the echoes of a similar ideology of a different place and time: Nazi Germany in the ‘30s and ‘40s.
You insist men want to oppress women. But what men really want is to love them. “In fact,” says Nancy Friday, who in Men In Love reveals herself to be one of the few feminists to hear men out rather than presume their motives, “my research tells me men’s love of women is greater than their love of self.” The ship Titanic, where men sacrificed their lives to save women at a time when society perhaps stood at the pinnacle of patriarchy, is but one illustration of men’s greater love of women.
Does this, along with the statistics on saving lives, describe a group that wants to oppress women? Compare this treatment of women to that of blacks, a group that indeed knows oppression. To my knowledge, in the 300 years of blacks’ disenfranchisement, not a solitary researcher has reported that (white) men’s love of blacks was often greater than their love of self. And for sure no crew member overseeing the life boats of a sinking ship ever commanded, his pistol at the ready, “Blacks and children first!”
A note on power and the Titanic: There can be no greater power than to live a long life, then to be rescued at the expense of others, including children, as happened to the old women helped into the lifeboats of the Titanic.
Some say the Maritime law should read “the women and the children first,” because women have less upper-body strength, reducing survivability. But the same point about strength can be made regarding women versus children. Why not the children first, then the women? I estimate that the Titanic lost four or five children for every three women placed in the lifeboats. Children should not be sacrificed to save adult females.
Moreover, the men who you claim oppress women most – men such as fundamentalist Christian Pat Roberts (perhaps none of whose extremely conservative ideas I embrace, having a Saganesque view of a Creator) – cry out against sending female soldiers into battle. Such protests indicate unequivocally that men want not to oppress women but to protect them. If men wanted to oppress women, what better way to do so than to treat them like men: send them into battle to be killed or maimed, or execute them, or shove them away from a sinking ship’s lifeboats with a snarling, “Men and children first!”? Such men as Pat Roberts should trouble you less than men like me, for I demand for the sexes equal treatment, which you abhor because of your desire for preferential treatment of women.
Nor do men “conspire” with employers to bar women from “male” jobs. Some men feel threatened when a woman enters “male” turf, but not in the evil, conspiratorial sense presumed by you. The “threat” springs from the diminished self-worth a man may feel because, as put by anthropologist Helen Fisher, women the world over prefer the man who has greater resources, power, and status than they. The man without these can feel as invisible to women as the homely woman can to men.
The threat can come from a man’s thinking, “If women can succeed at work as well as I can, thus proving they are as competent at making money, why would a woman need me?” This reflects how deeply men internalize their success-object status. It reflects how much they attach their self-worth to economic achievement as a means of attracting and holding women. Feeling threatened is fearing rejection.
“If women can do everything as well or better than men, what could it possibly mean to be a man?” –Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young speculating on men’s fear of women in Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture
You ignore the fact that women feel similarly threatened by men on “female” turf. “If the baby responds to the father as lovingly and automatically as to her,” says Nancy Friday in The Power of Beauty, “then who is she, given the definition of womanliness in almost all cultures as ‘care-taker’?” In the world of work, men have been socialized to perceive males as superior, and in the world of children, women have been socialized to perceive females as superior. Anyone can feel threatened if his or her expected superior competence is threatened.
Even as you mythologize about men conspiring to deny women equality in the world of work, you conspire to deny men equality in the world of children. In California, for example, you argued against the presumption of joint child custody in divorce cases. Custody, you insisted, should be awarded to the parent who spent the greater time raising the children. How does this differ from saying management jobs should go to the sex with the greater experience raising family income – men? A custody law based on your argument would discriminatorily stack the deck against men, insuring that mothers virtually always get custody.
“We women are as much involved in discriminating against men at home as caretakers, as they are in wanting to keep us from taking their jobs.” –Nancy Friday
Your fantasized “male conspiracies” have been employers’ efforts to hire the most productive, most malleable worker. This generally has been men due to their provider role. The role has taught men to think, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going” – they produce even more. For women, when the going gets tough, many more of them than men can quit and be supported by a spouse. Or many more of them than men can risk suing to force a tough workplace to adapt to them, whereas most men have always tended to believe they must adapt to the workplace.
Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, most male employers, even conservative ones, today view equal opportunity positively. Equal opportunity means more job seekers. More jobseekers means more competition for jobs and thus greater willingness to accept lower pay. This greater willingness helps employers’ bottom line and survivability for all.
Why did I expend enormous time and energy to write this admitted polemic? I did so because I:
· Realized that long ago society began interpreting gender equality as ignoring men’s issues and giving women what radical feminism wants for them, which is mostly a full-optioned world free of risk and adversity, wrought by gender-specific laws that penalize men where necessary.
· Heard that to curb sexual harassment, a branch of the military considered prohibiting its servicemen from looking at servicewomen no longer than four seconds (and one construction company adopted a policy specifying that workers could look at a woman passing by, but only for six seconds; see “A new sexual harassment dynamic” ), and recognized that this is similar to some countries’ rule requiring commoners in the presence of royalty to glance down to acknowledge an inferior status.
· Realized that with the media’s help, you have taught the government and the rest of society to care with great compassion about the gender wage gap but to ignore the occupational gender death gap. Over 93 percent of workplace deaths occur to men – to our fathers, our brothers, our sons. And women, as said, control consumer spending by a wide margin in nearly every consumer category and control 89 percent of the nation’s wealth. Still, women’s wages mean more to you than men’s lives.
· Saw the movie “Titanic” and understood that when the male passengers were held back from the life boats, they were denied the right to be equal to women in the most fundamentally important way, when rights really mattered.
· Realized that the Maritime law “women and children first” symbolizes the suppressed truth that men ultimately are considered unequal to women, that they are bribed by promises of “glory” and “power” into accepting a protector role that requires a view of themselves as secondary to women.
· Recognized that we are transforming from a society of unconsciously socialized sexism against both sexes, to one of deliberate sexism against men.
The more you and the media ignore men’s issues, the more you will insure an outcome like that predicted by Charles Reich nearly 30 years ago. In The Greening of America, Reich said, “When the white man discovers his servitude, we will see a real explosion in America. Black rage, black pride, black militancy, give us some idea what it will be like. But with whites, the self-deception has been greater, and perhaps that will make the truth all the more infuriating.” Reich was talking about a rebellion against the “meritocracy,” which he faulted for making men without a top-echelon job feel unworthy. Because he did not see the effect on men of gender roles, he had no idea that it was men’s provider role and success-object status that made men vulnerable to the meritocracy’s depredations in the first place. And he could not have realized that on top of this “meritocracy,” the ‘90s man would have to deal with a culture strong-armed into an anti-male animus by you.
“[T]he world view of our society has become increasingly both gynocentric (focused on the needs and problems of women) and misandric (focused on the evils and inadequacies of men).” –Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young, Spreading Misandry
If you continue your war on men and plunge us into a Gender Dark Ages, we doubtless will see Reich’s predicted explosion occur in men (especially liberal men, who perhaps are the most deceived) possibly within the next five to ten years. But the explosion will not consist entirely of white men, as Reich thought. It might consist mostly of black men. As race issues diminish in significance for black men, gender issues become more problematic. This is particularly true, as Cathy Young’s Ceasefire! alarmingly details, concerning the rapid erosion of men’s rights and due process when men are charged, increasingly falsely, with domestic violence, rape, stalking, sexual harassment, and violation of restraining orders, which are often obtained with breath-taking ease. This broad erosion of men’s rights represents part of a sexism that returns black men to the second-class status they were escaping with the war on racism.
In general, black men bristle at government’s tripping-all-over-itself eagerness to become, in the words of Warren Farrell, women’s substitute husband. They see government’s limited resources increasingly diverted to protect and extend the lives of women, mostly white women, who have always been the safest, healthiest, and longest-living group in the nation, outliving black men by fourteen years.
At the turn of the century, men and women had roughly the same life expectancy: 45 years for men, 46 years for women. But by 1950, women were outliving men by five years. Today women live about 7½ years longer than men. If the trend continues, by 2020 women will be outliving men by a dozen years, demographers say.

Black men have noticed that government money is pouring into breast cancer research (though most of the women felled by breast cancer are age 70 or older; by this age, the average black man has been dead for five years!). From 1990 through 1997, the National Cancer Institute directed $1.8 billion toward breast-cancer research. During the same period, it sent only $376 million to prostate-cancer research projects. Even the Department of Defense, oddly enough, has jumped onto the women’s health bandwagon. Its cancer research expenditures for 1993-96 were $455 million (95.8%) for breast cancer and $20 million (4.2%) for prostate cancer. Widening the gender health-care gap still more, former President Clinton called for insurance coverage of mammograms but not of tests for prostate cancer. All this despite Time’s April 1, 1996, article by Leon Jaroff, which said: “The American Cancer Society estimates that in 1996, 317,000 Americans will be told they have prostate cancer, more than the 184,000 new cases of breast cancer...expected this year.” What would be the rate of prostate cancer if men lived as long as women?
“The information highway is bumper to bumper with men fuming over the disproportionate attention given to women’s health issues at the expense of men’s.” –columnist Kathleen Parker

Black men know, too, that there is an Office of Research On Women’s Health, but no Office of Research On Men’s Health. How might men of all races feel about this? Ask women how they would feel if men, who already out earn women, had an Office of Research On Men’s Economic Advancement, but no similar office existed for women.
Many black men note with bitter irony that their biggest health issue is also an economic issue. The average black man lives only 65 years. Only when he is on his death bed is he finally eligible for full Social Security benefits. Thus black men, at a proportionately much higher rate than that of any other group, may pay into Social Security for over 40 years for nothing! Well, it’s almost for nothing: the average black man’s dying off before he collects a dime of the thousands taken from him helps fund Social Security for white women, the wealthiest, healthiest, longest-living group.
I am a former world peace research writer who sent to 200 individuals and peace groups my pamphlet exploring the underpinnings of the ill will that develops between nations. As such, I am troubled to see that with a strategy reminiscent of that used by Hitler’s Nazi propagandists (who cast Germans as good, Jews as evil), you are attempting to alienate women from men.
But what troubles me more is the mainstream news media. They know the importance of balanced views, and they know that such views as mine are quickly obtainable on the Web. But political correctness and a stone-cold indifference to men relieve them of the need to provide a balance regarding gender issues. Television in particular resists airing balanced gender views, usually accommodating only feminists. If marriage counselors listened only to, say, husbands, would the counselors be deemed fair? Could we trust that marital problems would get solved?
So you likely will continue to wound the truth and wreak your damage, before you are stopped. But you will be stopped. Men and women like myself will not stand idly by while you wreck and botch, driving the wedge deeper between the sexes. We have formed a men’s movement, however much you and the media deride it. This movement consists not of vengeful patriarchs trying to turn back the clock, but of fair-minded men and women who want to put the quest for gender equality back on a non-sexist track.
We have begun a campaign of protest, boycott – anything within legal boundaries – and will not cease until we have shoved a crowbar between the spokes of your “feminism” and stopped the gender alienation set aflame by your calumnies against men. We will free society of the intentional anti-male sexism that you have substituted for the unintentional, socialized sexism against both sexes. We intend to hand over a non-sexist, gender-harmonious nation to our children. That is the very least we can do for them.
Women are never stronger than when
they arm themselves with their weaknesses.
-Marie Anne du Deffand, letter to Voltaire.
She must have understood chivalry and male guilt.

About Jerry A. Boggs:
I have written about gender issues for about 20 years. My work has been published in the Humanist, The Detroit News, and various newsletters. I am the Michigan Representative of the National Coalition of Free Men. Reach NCFM at 516-482-6378; e-mail ncfm@ncfm .com. Web-visit at www.ncfm.org.
SOME OF MY SOURCES:
2. A Man’s World: How Real Is Male Privilege – And How High Is Its Price? Ellis Cose
3. Ceasefire – Why Women and Men Must Join Forces in the Battle for True Equality, © 1999, Cathy Young
4. Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and The Future of Feminism, © 1998, Daphne Patai
5. Father and Child Reunion, © 2001, Warren Farrell
6. Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture, Ó 2001, Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young
7. When She Was Bad – Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence, © 1997, Patricia Pearson
8. The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Sons, Christina Hoff Sommers
9. Men’s News Daily (http://mndnet.com)
10. Women’s Freedom Network newsletter (www.womensfreedom.org)

In The Name Of The Fathers

Across Europe, desperate dads are taking dramatic action — on public landmarks and in the courts — to win the right to see their own children
BY JAMES GEARY AND APARISIM GHOSH

The balcony of Buckingham Palace is normally reserved for photo ops of Queen Elizabeth and the royal family. But last week, it was a man dressed in a Batman suit who was waving regally to the crowds. Perched on a ledge next to Britain's most famous balcony, Jason Hatch, a 32-year-old painter and decorator from Cheltenham, unfurled a banner — superdads of Fathers 4 Justice fighting for your right to see your kids — and settled in for a six-hour-long photo op of his own. His protest was designed to draw attention to the plight of fathers who are shut out of their children's lives by their former or estranged wives — and by a legal system they say discriminates against men in custody and visitation cases. "It is abuse to deny a child the love of a father," Hatch told Time after his caped crusade had ended. "That's what we're fighting to stop, and we're going to keep on doing stunts like this and embarrassing [the government] until things change."

Hatch is an imperfect messenger for a very real problem. He has been married and divorced twice. He and his first ex-wife lost contact (their son lives with her), and he has fought a bitter, protracted battle for the right to see the children from his second marriage. That crusade drove him to the ledge outside Buckingham Palace — and led his current girlfriend, with whom he has a seven-month-old daughter, to leave him because, she says, his activism took too much time away from her and the baby.

Hatch and his second wife were divorced in 2001. She declines to speak to the press, citing ongoing court proceedings. He says she prevented him from seeing the children for at least a year and did not respond to his calls. After being taken to court for threatening his wife — he admits to harassing her — another 18 months passed before he was allowed supervised visits with his kids. He says his ex found excuses to cancel the meetings. Even though she now lives nearby, he says he has only seen his kids a few times in the past three years.

In desperation, he turned to Families Need Fathers, an organization that offers support and counseling, but soon became frustrated with what he saw as the group's inaction. He joined the more radical Fathers 4 Justice (F4J) about a year ago, signing up as a grade 5 member: someone willing to engage in direct action and risk arrest for the cause. That's how he ended up on the Buckingham Palace ledge, a stunt that led to a security shakeup and got F4J global press coverage, though many media outlets ignored Batman's message and focused on the potential threat to the Queen. "If you want to go to a pub and watch a load of grown men cry, then go to [Families Need Fathers]," Hatch says. "If you want to get off your arse and get this law changed, go to F4J."

Dads across Europe are taking Hatch's advice, banding together in activist groups and lobbying for legal and social change. They're keeping the fight for dad's rights in the public eye with a mix of humor and guerrilla tactics. In Britain, daredevil dads have donned superhero costumes to occupy the roof of the Royal Courts of Justice and the top of the London Eye ferris wheel. Their most brazen stunt came in May, when two F4J members hurled purple flour bombs at Prime Minister Tony Blair from the visitors' gallery in the House of Commons. In October 2002 in Madrid, two members of SOS Papa, a divorced-dads protest group, doused themselves with gasoline and set themselves alight outside the Cortes, the Spanish parliament building. (The men were wearing fireproof suits, so they weren't injured.) At the Colosseum in Rome last Saturday, a group called Papà Separati (Separated Fathers) held a small demonstration; some members turned up in Batman costumes in salute to Hatch. The French chapter of SOS Papa is more restrained, avoiding direct action but organizing marches every Father's Day.

The impact of these protests is mixed. "There is wide public sympathy for the plight of fathers who are maliciously denied access to their children," columnist Deborah Orr wrote in Britain's The Independent in May. "But there is also an uncomfortable recognition that if a former couple are so unable to decide between themselves what is best for their children, then the courts have little prospect of doing it for them." But custody statistics suggest that the disgruntled dads have a legitimate gripe. In most European countries, the law is supposed to be gender neutral and custody can be awarded to either parent, depending on the best interests of the children. But in the overwhelming majority of cases, the mother gets custody — and activists claim that discriminates against fathers. Even in Germany, where joint custody is the legal norm, 85% of children of divorced or separated parents live with the mother. In France, the percentage is the same. In Italy, mothers get custody in 90% of cases; in Britain, the figure is 93%. Many divorcing fathers don't seek custody. But activists say the state should not presume that. And if a mother decides to relocate with the children, they say, the father has no recourse.

As a result, thousands of divorced or separated fathers are denied access to their children by the courts or an embittered ex-wife. In Britain, government statistics show, 713 fathers were refused contact with their kids by the courts in 2001, and 518 in 2002. But those extreme cases — many involving fathers who were barred from seeing their children for good reason — aren't the measure of this problem. Divorced dads say custody rules granting them only a handful of visits per month don't let them develop meaningful relationships with their children. And many accuse their ex-wives of flouting visitation agreements — but how many such cases there are is unknowable, not least because the courts tend not to enforce the agreements. "There has been a trend over the past two or three decades in favor of women's rights in relation to their children," says Catherine Hakim, a sociologist who specializes in family and women's issues at the London School of Economics, "so it's actually become necessary to reassert fathers' rights."

Rock musician and social activist Bob Geldof is trying to do so. In the 1990s, Geldof and his ex-wife, Paula Yates, fought a bitter battle over access to their three daughters. The dispute was settled in 1998 when he gained custody; Yates died of a heroin overdose in 2000. In a Father's Day television interview in 2002, Geldof spoke out against laws that favored mothers in custody matters and expressed the agony felt by many fathers. The response was overwhelming: a flood of letters from anguished fathers, more mail than his advocacy on behalf of Africa had ever unleashed. "I just wanted to be with my kids 50% of the time," he told TIME. "If a man and a woman live together and it fails, that's tragic. But if you have children, whole universes close to you" if you're prevented from seeing them.

Geldof, who's making a TV documentary on the issue for Britain's Channel 4, blames the courts. "Our system is adversarial," he says, "designed to spiral into acrimony, rage, bitterness and hatred. The law says it's gender neutral, but 93% of children go to the women — how is that neutral? It amounts to state-sanctioned kidnapping, the willful breakup of families."

"We're in a period of social change and the law has not kept pace," Geldof continues. "This mirrors some of the battles women have had to fight, like when it was said women couldn't make business decisions. Now we value emotional intelligence so highly, and assume men don't have any."

Recent research supports keeping fathers involved in their children's lives after a divorce or separation. According to Michael Lamb, a professor of psychology at Cambridge University who has spent over two decades studying this issue, children who live in single-parent families are nearly twice as likely as those in two-parent families to perform poorly in school, become delinquent or have difficulty maintaining relationships. "If you were able to look at a normal population, 15-18% would be maladjusted," Lamb says. "When you talk about kids in single-parent families, 30% are maladjusted."

Although child-development experts disagree about how much time children should spend with their noncustodial parent, Lamb says there's a consensus that every- other-weekend visits, comprising about 15% of nonschool hours, are inadequate. Some experts suggest at least one-third of nonschool time should be the norm. "Where the system has failed kids is in not recognizing that they need the other parent as well," Lamb says. "You don't have to have a 50-50 split to be an involved father, but you do want more than twice-a-month visitation."

Ralph Traviato is a Roman corporate communications specialist whose separation last February ruptured his relationship with his two children. "I was used to coming home and having my kids jump all over me," he says, with a nostalgic smile. "Then suddenly they're not there anymore. It's devastating." Traviato, 47, sees his kids every other weekend, but that's not enough for a man who describes himself as a hands-on parent. He knows about fathers who lose touch with their kids after a divorce, and is determined that won't happen to him. But he worries about how the separation will affect the children's perception of him. "I can tell you about my emotional needs, but what about theirs?" he says.

Traviato isn't an activist and has no hope that the laws can be changed. But Italian groups like Papà Separati are lobbying for new legislation, titled Law 66, to give children the right to maintain a balanced relationship with both parents. The present law, reasoning that children of divorce need continuity and structure, says it is in their best interests to live with one parent. The new law would provide for joint physical custody.

Even in countries that encourage joint custody, fathers say the courts are biased. Christian Bade, a Berlin surveyor, says his ex-wife used a one-sided legal system to drag him through the courts for three emotionally wrenching years. (Like the wives of other men in this story, Bade's wife didn't respond to requests for comment.) "It's so unnerving. Your whole life is destroyed," says Bade, 44. "You lose friends because your whole life revolves around this matter. I lost interest in everything else. I lost my job and didn't have the energy to find a new one." Bade now sees his son each weekend, and an additional three-and-a-half hours every second week. He has to keep precise time. Once when he returned the boy an hour late, he says, his wife went to court, claiming a violation of their right of access order; he may have to pay a €1,000 fine.

Journalist Matthias Matussek describes himself as an accidental "missionary of the men's movement." He was cast in the role after he wrote a 1997 cover story in the German weekly Der Spiegel that railed against the "feminist power of mothers" who used children as "trump cards in the gender war." Matussek looked into "the abyss of a possible custody battle" after his marriage hit hard times — it is now running smoothly again, he says — and he learned how "rightless dads are in case of conflict." "In movies, books for women and cartoons, men are today only depicted as ridiculous creatures and no longer as role models — it's time for that to change," says Matussek, who went on to write The Fatherless Society, a much debated 1998 book that says fathers are emasculated in child custody and visitation battles because judges and youth welfare offices are naturally sympathetic to the moms. As a consequence, he says "mothers can prevent their former husbands from seeing their offspring for years on end — to the detriment of the children." The feminist magazine Emma griped that the book was misogynistic and nominated Matussek the pasha (chauvinist) of the month. With so much arguing going on, it's no wonder that governments and politicians are finally beginning to pay attention. At a British Conservative Party conference on family issues last month, leader Michael Howard vowed to reform family laws to give divorced and separated fathers more rights. "There should be a strong legal presumption in favor of both parents having equal rights in the upbringing of their children," he said. "There are many fathers in Britain today who do want to play their part, yet can't get access to their children." But in the view of Constitutional Affairs Secretary Charles Falconer, "There cannot and will not be an automatic presumption of 50-50 contact. Children cannot be divided like the furniture or the CD collection."

While Britain is now considering reforms to the family justice system, other European countries have gone much further. German custody legislation was amended in 1998 to give the children of separated couples the right to be in touch with both parents as well as their siblings and grandparents. And in Cochem-Zell, an association of towns and villages in western Germany, the Youth Welfare Office came up with a model that sees to it that divorces end in consensual shared custody. The initiative, called the Cochem Way, was devised by social workers and backed by lawyers and judges. It requires both parents to agree on how to divide responsibility for the kids so that one can't deny the other access. "The parents find themselves in a network of lawyers, judges, social workers, all of whom tell them the same thing: You are both responsible for your child," says social worker Manfred Lengowski, co-author of the Cochem Way. "Faced with this network, the parents don't have a choice." Parents who unreasonably resist a settlement are required to see court-appointed counselors, and legal proceedings are frozen until both sides have agreed to shared custody. "We simply do not let parents escape their responsibilities," says Lengowski. When the authorities suspect there is a danger of violence or abuse, contact between parent and child — if it is granted at all — only occurs under supervision and if it is deemed to be in the interest of the child.

Elvira Steffes, 35, spent two-and-a-half years denying the father of her twins access to them (he disputed that he was the biological father). After his paternity was proven, they were both nudged along the Cochem Way, attending counseling sessions until she agreed to allow him access. "If it had not been for the Cochem Way, I would never have let the father be in touch with the children," Steffes says. Now, he sees the kids once or twice a month. "I know I have done my children a lot of good by agreeing to this process," says Steffes. "They know where they come from and where they belong."

In France, divorced dads have had some success changing the law, but complain that the realities haven't changed. In 2002, the efforts of the national SOS Papa chapter led to an amendment to the civil code that encouraged alternating residency. The code now states that all children have the right to be raised by both a mother and a father under a principle of "co-parenting." But an October 2003 study by the Ministry of Justice showed that in 75% of custody disputes, judges deny alternating residency. That's why Jean-Louis Touchot, president of the French SOS Papa, still has a sign reading objective: alternating residency on the wall of his modest Paris office. A thickset man with the smooth demeanor of a veteran campaigner, Touchot is visibly saddened by his limited progress. The fight to change the civil code has consumed all of his spare time and most of his energies since his 1994 separation from his wife severely reduced his access to their daughter. "We helped change the letter of the law," he says, "but in practice things haven't changed too much." Even if the National Assembly amends the code again, it will come too late for Touchot. His daughter is 18, and with only limited access to her father for the past 10 years, she's grown distant from him. "She can live wherever she wants," he says, quietly. "Mostly, she lives with her mom."

That's a fate Xavier Savidan is determined to avoid. Since his divorce in 2002, the Parisian dentist can only see his kids every other Wednesday and alternating weekends, so he has to work hard to build a relationship with his two children. He is in a bright mood on a recent Wednesday as he watches them play in the leafy backyard of his home. They amuse themselves on a swing set, stopping only to run over to him, dangle from his legs and giggle. But Savidan, 40, worries that as the kids grow older, these occasional visits, which already seem like far too little time, will be insufficient. So he plans to petition again next year for joint custody. He knows his ex-wife will oppose it, and fears the fight may get ugly. During the divorce, she accused him of alcoholism and violence against her, charges the judge threw out. His great fear is that his ex-wife, who has Spanish roots, will move to Spain someday. If that happens, he says, "I'm prepared to uproot myself, sell my house and the practice and go there to be near the kids." Should the law prevent a woman from shutting out her spouse — or even living where she wants to live? Or should it preserve her freedom at the expense of her ex-husband's relationship with his children? In the torturous world of divorce, custody and visitation, Solomon and Superman might both throw up their hands.

Our Girls
By Christopher Orlet
Published 9/20/2004 12:06:25 AM

No sooner had sociologists discovered what they dubbed female alternative aggression --the unpleasant, but one would think obvious fact that pubertal girls snub, exclude and spread vicious rumors about one other -- than these findings were made inconsequential by another shocker: that when it comes to plain, old-fashioned physical brutality, girls are quickly catching up (and in some instances have caught up) with boys.

In her 2002 best-seller Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, author Rachel Simmons was taken aback to find that our little princesses were not all sugar and spice, and could in fact behave with such malice as to make Pfc. Lynndie England cringe. But while Ms. Simmons was enthusiastically blaming girls' "alternative aggression" on a Western patriarchic system that discourages the gentler sex from loudly or physically expressing (or even acknowledging) its anger and petty jealousies, rates of female violence were skyrocketing. Had she known, Ms. Simmons doubtless would have cheered the fact that girls were finally openly and honestly expressing their feelings, just like the boys, ala fisticuffs. Throughout her book, Ms. Simmons and the little vixens she interviewed lamented that -- unlike their male counterparts -- society would not allow them to blow off their anger quickly with a few blows to the snout and a jab to the solar plexus.

Proponents of open and honest aggression might also celebrate news that the FBI's Crime Index for violent crimes shows that the arrest rate for American girls soared 103 percent between 1981 and 1997. During that same period the arrest rate for boys rose a mere 27 percent. Reporter Marisa Trevino found that during the last decade the rate of girls under 18-years-old arrested for aggravated assault rose by 7 percent. Among boys such arrests fell 29 percent. The most dismaying finding, Trevino suggests, was a 46 percent rise of females who were a party to forcible rape. Among males, the figure fell by 28 percent.

More recently, Richard Heikes, a principal for a Texas alternative education center, told Women's E-News, that he began noticing this shift in gender dynamics in middle school two years ago. "Right now, in my (alternative) middle school we are 50-50, males and females. It used to be 70-30 or 80-20. The girls are offending just as badly as the boys."

Another study from the November 1999 Psychology Today involving 460 female murderers and all but ignored by the alternative aggression researchers, showed that women are growing more stereotypically male in their reasons for murdering, and concludes that for the first time in recorded history girls are altering their pattern of aggression from the traditional female form of hidden aggression to the ass-whupping male variety, the inevitable result being that more and more of America's sweethearts are beginning to resemble Jerry Springer's butt-kicking trailer brides.

FEMINISTS ARE UNDERSTANDABLY reluctant to acknowledge that study after study have shown that women are not only as potentially violent as men, but they are potentially more violent, partly because they expect not to be punished for their actions. Psychology Today reported that two National Family Violence Surveys, conducted in 1975 and 1985 with a total of 8,145 married and cohabiting couples, concluded that 12.4 percent of women have assaulted their spouses, compared to 12.2 percent of men. In severe assaults, the numbers were 4.6 percent for women and 5 percent for men. Across the pond the numbers are similar. A 1999 British Home Office study found 4.2 percent of both men and women had been assaulted by a partner the previous year. True, assaults by women often result in less serious injury, but apparently not for lack of trying.

Meanwhile Irene Frieze, professor of psychology and women's studies at the University of Pittsburgh, undertook yet another study to disprove the absurd notion that girls were more violent than men in dating situations. Frieze, according to Psychology Today, was dumbfounded to learn that of the college students she surveyed, 58 percent of women had assaulted their dates, compared to 55 percent of men. And yet despite such findings it is male students alone that are forced to attend date rape seminars and sensitivity training sessions, while across campus at the Tri Delta House the sorority sisters smugly plot their next act of alternative aggression.

Surprisingly, outside of radical feminist circles society and the patriarchic culture are not being blamed for the skyrocketing increase in female violence. More often than not scholars are fingering the influence of feminism and something called the "liberation hypothesis," which briefly states that fifty years ago if a young woman wanted to be bad she had relatively few opportunities to do so. Equal rights have given women more economic opportunities, but also more opportunities to be bad, or, as in the case of Lynddie England, very bad.

With the disturbing case of Private England doubtless still fresh his mind, Shepherd Smith, president of the Institute for Youth Development, recently told Fox News that feminism is a significant factor in girls becoming more violent. "You see females modeling more male behavior, whether it's women in the military, or construction, hunting -- traditional male activities -- I think that some of the spillover is that male aggression is picked up [by girls] more than has been ever witnessed before."

When Unlucky Lynndie goes away to Leavenworth for torturing nude Iraqis she will have plenty of degenerate same sex company now that females are making up a greater and greater portion of the criminal justice population. Our generation has witnessed the percentage of girls in juvenile jails soar from 5 percent to 20, and it is still rising. In 10 or 20 years there will be as many females as males in prison, Coramae Ritchey Mann, Ph.D., professor emerita of criminal justice at Indiana University told Psychology Today.

One thing hasn't changed. Most youth violence still occurs among poor working class and blue-collar kids, the large majority of these coming from broken homes with all the attendant drug, alcohol and sex abuse. The Lynddie England types. In contrast, upper class girls will continue to successfully hide their alternative aggression from clueless parents and teachers. But it will be the lower class girls who will continue to get the most "benefit" from open and honest displays of aggression, largely in the form of permanent records and time served.

A high-ranking British woman doctor, Professor Carol Black, president of the Royal College of Physicians, has warned that the British medical profession is shedding the prestige in which it was once held. She ascribes the diminution of respect to the high percentage of women who have entered the profession over the past 20 years.

Indeed, she is right to be concerned. Consider teaching. Fifty years ago, when most teachers were male, teaching was accorded the status of "profession." Now, with the great majority of teachers in Britain and Europe being women, teaching has seen its prestige plummet to the point where it is regarded as just another unionized job with pay and holiday issues.

Again, since British women flooded into the legal profession, especially as solicitors (essentially, non-trial lawyers) the law too has seen its score marked "diminuendo".

The Anglican Church has allowed itself to become sidelined to the point of irrelevance -- although to be fair, this is partly due to its adopting a loony left stance on most critical issues of the day. Nevertheless, the decision to admit women as vicars has diminished the Church's spiritual authority and shepherded it into an "issues oriented" profession rather than that of a provider of spiritual comfort and moral certainties.

People perceive women as anchored to issues as opposed to concepts. I recall seeing an interview with one woman who voiced dissatisfaction with her Anglican vicar, who was a woman. The woman complained, "I was spiritually troubled. I was trying to find my faith again, and the vicar kept drawing the conversation back to the lack of adequate childcare facilities in the parish."

Politics, too, once surely the most ruthless profession of them all, has seen the regard in which it was previously held, albeit always with a healthy skepticism in the Anglosphere, diminish since large numbers of British and European women chose politics as a career. Think Swedish female politicians, and now think how seriously you take Swedish politics.

The high regard in which the police were formerly held in Britain has taken a tumble since they first started recruiting women 40 or so years ago. Women were seen as better communicators than men, more able to tweezle the truth out of child molesters, wife beaters and people sheltering criminals, as though that were the sum total of police work. It wasn't long before battle-hardened male officers were being chided for being too tough, too abrupt, too insensitive. So began the disastrous road to an "understanding" police force in Britain, which, married to a new "profession" variously called social services and counseling, turned into a vast army of social workers rather than apprehenders of malfeasants.

So, jobs that have always had a high female presence -- real estate, sales, journalism, advertising, literary and performer agencies -- racket along as ever with nary a change in public perceptions. (Be it noted that although these are all jobs that require mental agility and an ability to capture a fleeting mood, they do not require years of rigorous study and grinding apprenticeship.) The professions whose corpus is still largely male -- architecture, nuclear physics, orchestra conducting, rocket science (indeed, all science) maintain their status and mystique.

It is solely those formerly male preserves which have had large infusions of women that are seeing their prestige become unmoored. As women have agitated for special dispensations, they have chipped away at the mystique in which their professions were previously mantled.

Dr. Black told London's Observer newspaper that female-dominated professions such as teaching no longer see themselves as "powerful" and pointed to the danger of feminizing medicine because they have been persuaded to make special dispensations for women and mothers.

I think that Dr. Black hit the nail on the head when she added that "women were unlikely to take top jobs, such as the dean of a medical school, because of the difficulties combining them with family life." She added that many women avoided more "demanding" areas such as cardiology. "What worries me is who is going to be the professor of cardiology in the future? Where are we going to find the leaders of British medicine in 20 years' time?"

Well may she ask, because as long as women insist on maintaining a dual role and manipulating their chosen professions to suit their family life, men will be less attracted to the field and the women who are in it will not make the sacrifices that males routinely make to establish a name for themselves and uphold the standards of their profession. In the British and European health systems, there are few top women consultants in any field except pediatrics. They don't seem to have the stamina or the mental rigor to become surgeons. Or perhaps they don't have the will. A 12-hour operation would interfere with their home life.

And women are increasingly trivializing the rigors of the professions by manipulating them to suit their family life by agitating for shorter working hours so they can be at home when the children come back from school, maternity breaks without loss of position on the rung, and extra time off for school events, and so on. The British Parliament, under touchy-feely Tony Blair, recently introduced shorter working hours in Parliament specifically so female legislators could be at home for supper with their children. No one asked why these Labour politicians went into politics knowing how unsuitable the hours are for family life. Under Labour, Parliament had to be massaged to suit young mothers. This is no way to run a country.

There was even loony lefty talk at one point -- endorsed by Blair -- that Members of Parliament who were nursing mothers should be allowed to breastfeed their babies in the debating chamber. The Conservatives saw this notion off pretty quickly. The mind boggles.

So the sense of entitlement is another factor. The ancient professions should be manipulated so women can have their "fair share", despite not taking them seriously enough to make the very real sacrifices that men make as a matter of course. Is this feminism or is it socialism?

Dr. Black is correct when she notes that many women do not enter the really difficult realms of their profession because they are reluctant to commit the time required. In Britain and Europe there may be one or two neurosurgeons, or there may be none. Although they cling around the lower rungs of the ladder, few women in the British legal profession have thrown themselves into the cut and thrust of being barristers, which requires long hours that devastate family life and the ability and the will to master several briefs at the same time.

The Labour party hypes Blair's wife Cherie as a "hot shot" barrister, but she's not. She's strictly paint by numbers. She handles publicly-funded "human rights" cases and is a comparatively low earner. What she earns comes not from individuals who have retained her for her abilities, but from the public purse. In other words, she takes the easy work. The high achievers in the legal world in Britain are still fiercely clever, fiercely ambitious, ruthless males. With the exception of Helen Kennedy, I cannot think of a single outstanding woman barrister in Britain.

So women don't put their profession first. They grab all the soft options and, indeed, create new ones. And, with the endless stream of employment legislation, who will dare say them nay?

Men are increasingly becoming disenchanted with professions that heretofore required steely determination and sacrifice to get to the top. The gates have been thrown open and without the competitive factor, many men don't know how to cope, or simply lose interest. They don't like not being set against the ruthless cut and thrust of other males and they are deserting professions that have become feminized. What's the point of having all that testosterone if a colleague is going to accuse you of being "too aggressive" and go and have a little weep in the ladies restroom?

It is male aggression that built civilizations and furthered the sciences, not women sitting around forming cooperatives and sharing childcare.

The women who rise to the top of demanding professions, rather than drifting comfortably along the slipstream at the bottom, do so in spite of their sex, and because they possess some of the male characteristics that infuse a discussion with certainty and confidence.

Margaret Thatcher, although many men found her very attractive as a woman, has a mind with qualities commonly thought of as masculine. In debate, she gave no quarter and asked none. It is interesting that she holds a degree not just in law, but in chemistry as well. There are other ambitious and brilliant women in Britain who possess clarity of thought and vision, who have made sacrifices to achieve their positions and are well rewarded. But by and large, they are not in the professions. Or if they are lawyers, they aren't practicing but deploy the skills they developed in law elsewhere.

In socialist Britain and socialist Europe today, there is a conscious demasculization under way. All those wars: bad. All those hours spent away from the family dinner table building fortunes or careers: bad. All that deferring to rank: bad. Ruthlessness: bad. Inclusion, cooperation, "understanding": good. Good for what? Who knows?

None of this is new. It isn't often addressed because in countries infected with radical socialism, it is simply too incendiary.

What Women Want

Men want to compete. Women want to cooperate. Or so runs contemporary received wisdom. This may not be true. It might be that, once the feminists announced that the professions weren't "caring" enough, the type of woman given to weaving mental macramé was drawn to demand her rights and shove her way in. Certainly the early, and rare, female doctors and lawyers in the early part of the last century were as focused and determined as any man.

In my opinion, this deconsecrating of the professions is a socialist, rather than a feminist, construct. The feminists were handy fodder. There is a disconcerting leveling down in Britain and much of Europe today. Excellence is derided for "excluding" those who are not excellent. If further proof were needed that this is an exercise in class warfare, as medical science, in the fields of both knowledge and new treatment, expands at a formidable rate, Labour is currently hacking away at the profession by reducing the length and thoroughness of British medical education to make it "more inclusive".

A reasonable question might be, will the profession continue to prosper although males desert it?

Another reasonable question might be, why is it American women have entered the professions at the same rate, and are not only doing well in many fields and excelling in some, but doing so by accepting the same sacrifices that men make and playing by the same rules?

The fact is, whether it is a deliberate leveling down policy or simply a social evolution, once women predominate in a profession, that profession loses its attraction for clever men. Will we see the social status of medicine in Europe sink to the same level as that of teachers?

Well, it did in the USSR.

Copyright © 2004 Tech Central Station - www.techcentralstation.com

dimanche, septembre 12, 2004

A Way to Walk a Mile in a Noncustodial Parent's Moccasins

Les Paas non payeurs?...a lire d'urgence....

samedi, septembre 11, 2004

It is great that at least one of us now has the opportunity to get past the
gatekeepers. It sounds almost too good to be true.

n another note, according CBC it is not only one but two committees that are
being proposed. (Source: CBC webpage last Updated Thu, 09 Sep 2004 21:52:17
EDT Opposition to alter parliamentary rules: “Establishing TWO [my emphasis]
new committees on women's issues, and access to information and ethics
matters, as well as dividing the current committee on aboriginal affairs and
natural resources into two bodies.”)

This defies all intelligence and logic as the Parliament is firmly in the
hands of Status of Women Canada and there simply is no further need for more
such committees. Not one piece of legislation is passed without first
consulting the over 1,500 women’s organizations in the country.

Stephen Harper has shown his true colours which are no different from Paul
Martin or Jack Layton. His condemnation of his own party members who dared to
express what their constituents told them, rather than what the members said,
may simply have been the stumbling block.

According to Status of Women Canada (SWC), the feminist "national machinery"
is firmly in place:
[open quotes]
"The Director of the Gender-based Analysis Directorate chairs an
Interdepartmental Committee on Gender-Based Analysis, a focal point
for coordination, facilitation and support of gender-based analysis
activities across federal government departments and agencies. Comprised of
gender specialist representatives from a variety of federal departments,
including Justice Canada, Health Canada, Citizenship and Immigration Canada,
Human Resources Development Canada, Indian Affairs and Northern Development
Canada, Canadian Heritage and the Canadian International Development Agency,
the committee is active in identifying and sharing gender-based analysis
information and resources, including best practices on implementing gender-
based analysis and gender-based analysis training tools.

Furthermore, a pilot project was negotiated with Citizenship and Immigration
Canada (CIC) and a Memorandum of Understanding (M.O.U.) outlining the roles
and responsibilities as well as the project details was signed by senior
officials.

SWC's gender-based analysis implementation strategy consists of six elements:

1. Training: GBA implies that gender equality is no longer solely the
responsibility of SWC but is shared with other departments and
stakeholders/partners. New learning tools need to be developed to build the
GBA capacity in departments. SWC has developed a training package and
training-related material and is actively working, with the Public Service
Commission and the Canadian Centre for Management Development on the delivery
of gender-based analysis training. In addition, a "training the trainer"
workshop was designed and delivered in February 2000 to five gender-based
analysis departmental teams.

Mechanisms for Gender Equality in Other Ministries and Agencies of Government

Although SWC has a leadership role, every government ministry is responsible
for implementing the government's commitment to gender-based policy analysis
within their mandates. Several ministries established an office or unit on
women's issues before 1995, and the 1995 commitment to gender-based analysis
has encouraged others to take a similar step. Examples include:

Health Canada's Women's Health Bureau, which is responsible for
implementation of gender-based analysis in all of Health Canada's work. The
work of the Bureau is guided by the Women's Health Strategy (1999) which
requires that the substantive work of the department undergo a systematic
gender-based analysis.

The Women's Health Strategy includes 64 departmental commitments and has four
main objectives

The Department of Justice established the Office of the Senior Advisor on
Gender Equality in 1996. The Office consists of a Senior Advisor plus two
gender equality analysts.

The Office of the Senior Advisor on Aboriginal Women's Issues and Gender
Equality was established by Indian Affairs and Northern Development Canada in
1998

The International Women's Equality Section of the Department of Foreign
Affairs and International Trade functions as the focal point on issues of
gender equality and women's human rights within the department. It also
serves to integrate these issues into foreign policy development, Canada's
input into world conferences and the work of multilateral organizations.

The Gender Equality Division of the Canadian International Development Agency
is the agency's focal point for gender equality. Its activities include
developing mechanisms to mainstream gender perspectives into the Agency's
management, planning and performance assessment systems"
[end quotes] cfc.gc.ca/pubs/0662667352/200112_0662667352_3_e.html>

In a box further down in the same report SWC tells that Justice Canada
has "established a network of over 55 gender equality specialists to act as
resource persons for their colleagues on the application of a gender-equality
analysis in their area of responsibility; and prepared "Diversity and
Justice: Gender Perspectives", a manual of "critical questions to be asked at
each step of policy development, litigation, prosecutions, legal advice and
legislative and regulatory drafting processes to ensure that gender is taken
into account, inequality is identified and remedies are developed."

The Justice Canada manual no longer is available on the Internet, presumably
because it was real dynamite. See also how SWC controls research and
statistics: "Various key contributors at the federal level in this area are
instrumental in ensuring the systematic collection and compilation of gender
disaggregated data (Statistics Canada) and promoting and supporting
independent, curiosity-driven research on gender issues (Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada) ...

The National Judicial Institute that is responsible for the training of
judges bases its data on feminist literature rather than on facts that they
themselves establish day in and day out. Rather than delivering orders based
on the merits of the individual case that they are judging they deliver their
judgement according to something that is called "social justice".

In short everything in the country, from initial research to legislation and
the delivery of justice is firmly in the hands of SWC.

When you write to your MP or MPP one or another of the workers who operate
the machinery will receive your letter. What are the chances that the
intended recipient will ever see the letter? One Parliamentary assistant to
Martin Cauchon once forwarded one of my letters to him, and sent a copy to
me, with a note: "You better answer this yourself". Months later I receive
the typical form letter from one of his gatekeepers.

The same applies to the media. I once received a reply from a Ottawa Citizen
editor who wrote: "I have no room for THAT" when I commented about judicial
bias. In spite of my name he addressed me as "Mr.". Lew Rockwell later
published my article.

It should be clear to all of us by now that if we want to get anywhere with
our struggle we will first have to tackle the systemic bias. No matter how
sad and tragic individual stories are they will be dismissed by those who
have the power to do so.

For more details on any of the above see www.nojustice.info

Eeva

samedi, septembre 04, 2004

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER............angryharry

Quote: Until men's rights groups, father's groups and anti-feminist groups realise they are on the same side and start co-operating together, we will remain as quiet, singular voices in the wilderness. United we can break through the censorship, group-think and twisted ideology, reach out to others and build something worthwhile. Our biggest enemy is feminism, our second biggest enemy is men's ego and competitive nature.
To put your ego in front of co-operation is to damage the movement.......................................Alan Carr - Webmaster/Chairman of the IMN

Quote:"As we unite, so we will win"............Mike LaSalle Editor of Mensnewsdaily.com, IMN Executive

Quote: "It's much more manly to ask for help than to hurt or be hurt"

..............Earl Silverman Candian President of the IMN, founder of Family of Men.

CARELESSNESS IN DRESSING IS MORAL SUICIDE...............JAMES BOND

Feminism is the product of female selfishness, compounded by male chivalry.
- Peter Zohrab -
The Law is not an Ass -- the Law is a Sexist Bitch !
Peter Zohrab
Human gullibility is a vast resource, which the Feminist Media tap into constantly.
-- Peter Zohrab
Feminism: The State Ideology whereby women have rights, men have responsibilities, and children have their lives ruined
-- Peter Zohrab
Feminism: the most organised form of nagging
Peter Zohrab
Well-known Saying: WOMEN CAN DO ANYTHING (and get away with it !)
Peter Zohrab
men of the world unite against feminism! ................. ANTIFEMINIST

Such women dream of being raped ,but no one wants them .They like standing next to strong male bodies.......MP Vladimir Zhirinovsky on feminist MP Yevegenia Ttishkovskaya funny thats what the anti feminist thinks of manhating feminists!

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IS ACTUALLY POLITICAL CORRUPTION..........ANTIFEMINIST

No more male chivalry, no more pampering get ready for masculism..........ANTIFEMINIST

All men are brothers, like the seas throughout the world ; so why do wind and waves clash so fiercely everywhere? ..................EMPEROR HIROHITO i say why not become a large wave(all men together) and wash away the venom called feminism

FEMINISM IS A VALIANT FIGHT, A FIGHT AGAINST NATURE , REALITY AND COMMON SENSE.........ANTIFEMINIST

THE TRAGEDY OF WAR IS THAT IT USES MANS BEST TO DO MANS WORST...HENRY FOSDICK

FEMINISM IS ABOUT SACRIFICE, SACRIFICING MEN........ANTIFEMINIST

MALE CHIVALRY IS MALE SLAVERY...............................ANTIFEMINIST

vendredi, septembre 03, 2004

THE PLANNED DESTRUCTION OF THE FAMILY

by ERIN PIZZEY

Just recently a 'battered woman,' for that is how she saw herself, came to me for help. Her lover, who lived apart from her and her children, had beaten her up badly and she was forced to go to the hospital. He then took her back to her own house and stayed with her in order to look after her while her wounds healed.

'You are not a battered woman,' I said with a sigh. I define a battered woman as a woman who is a genuine victim of her partner's violence. 'You are a violence-prone woman, a victim of your own need for violence.' I sighed because those two sentences uttered twenty-five years ago in my early work at Chiswick caused me to be hated and despised. I became the nation's conscience. I dared to say publicly that women can be as violent as men and that women were a great deal more psychologically violent than men. In this woman's case we have a great deal of work to do and he needs to find himself a good therapist.

In 1971, inspired by the promise of women journalists and other media-manipulators, I decided to join the newly founded Women's Movement. 'Sisterhood is powerful' they chanted. 'Sisters unite, no more competing, women helping women.' It all sounded too good to be true. My first meeting filled me with doubts. It was held in a very middle-class home in Chiswick and I gazed at the Mao posters on the wall of the drawing-room. When asked why I was there by the hostess, I replied that my husband was a television reporter and was very rarely home and I felt lonely and isolated with my two children. 'Your problem is not your isolation but your husband. He oppresses you and he is a capitalist.' I pointed out that she too had a mortgage so she therefore was a capitalist, and far from oppressing me my husband was baby-sitting so that I could attend this meeting. Her husband was out at a Union meeting organizing the Brentford Biscuit factory with the help of his degree in Political Science, to prepare for the forthcoming revolution.

What the woman didn't know, was that I was the daughter of a diplomat. I was born in China, and traveled the world with my father. I also-worked in the Foreign Office and was well aware of the atrocities both in Russia and in China. Then over cups of tea, we were assured that women were a minority group. I pointed out that women made up fifty-two per cent of the world's population. I was given Mao's little red book and SHREW magazine. I took it home and was horrified at the hatred it spewed against men.

I decided that this organization needed looking at. With both children in school and time on my hands I went to work for The Women's Liberation Workshop in Shaftsbury Avenue. I witnessed the women working there tearing open letters and pocketing the three pounds ten shillings that desperate women were sending in to join the movement. I tried to answer as many of the letters as I could. Some of that money went into buying explosives.

Terrorists in the Women's Movement blew up the BBC van outside the Miss World Contest and the top off the Post office tower. I called in the police. All this rubbish and rhetoric was to culminate in the up-rising of the 'working classes' and the death of Capitalism and the destruction of all men. Needless to say there were virtually no working class women in this movement. Most of the revolution was fought around middle class dinner tables in grisly Islington.

By now I was very firmly 'the enemy.' Men, at this point, took the whole movement as a joke but it was no joke, as many homeless men deprived of their children will tell you. Savaged by feminist lawyers and therapists, men have routinely been deprived of their homes, their children and their incomes.

I knew that I wanted to fulfill my original dream. Women working with women in co-operation with men. The idea that we should work with men was anathema to these women. The Women's Movement was dominated by the Radical Separatist Movement. They not only hated men but heterosexual women as well. I saw through their very hidden agenda. I stood on platforms saying that if I had to pay three pounds ten shillings, meet in cells and call my friends comrade, then they were asking me to join the Communist Party, which was fine, but don't lie. Don't collect money under false pretenses. I had plenty of good Communist friends, I wanted a movement that truly represented women. Not tired hacked-to-death male politics.

The early collective meetings and conferences involved hundreds of women, mostly middle-class women bored with their life-styles and they were terrifying. Anyone brought up in a girls' boarding school as I was, knows how violent and manipulative women can be. The bullying in the collectives was unabated. No lipstick, no high heels, no deodorant, I broke all the rules. 'Why do you wear men's suits and ties,' I asked. 'if you so hate men?' Silly question I suppose. 'We are wearing the symbol of our oppression,' was the humorless reply.

By now I realized through reading the Women's Movement literature that those thousands of women working in all caring fields, the journalists, the television makers, were determined to destroy family life in England. [See Communist Manifesto ‹WHS] 'Make the personal political,' was one of their many banners. So thousands of violent and very disturbed women attacked normal happily married women and our traditional way of life. Secret meetings were held (everything was done in secret) and I received a letter '.....and the collective decided that until the whole matter is sorted out, and you have given a statement of this position to a woman-lawyer, or someone in the N.C.C.L., you should no longer work in the office or attend meetings of any of the collectives.'

Profoundly depressed by my experiences in the movement, I went off to do what I always believed would liberate women. A place to gather and to work together in co-operation with men.

Soon beaten and battered women with their children were coming to me for help. There was no literature on battered women, so I wrote 'Scream Quietly Or The Neighbors Will Hear.' I was immediately in trouble because the book was not 'politically correct,' it discussed family violence and I refused to let the Managing Director politicize my book. By now I was giving the figure of 62 women out of the first hundred women who came to the refuge were as violent or more violent than the men they left. Also many were prostitutes taking refuge from their violent pimps. This infuriated the Women's Movement. I knew that as soon as I attracted publicity and funding, the Women's Movement which by now attracted neither, would be beating on my door. When I called a small conference to help other groups get started, several hundred women with feminists and radical separatist feminists invaded my conference. They started their usual bogus rubbish trying to appeal to my mothers, making much use of the phrase 'working classes.' My mothers were not impressed. One of my closest friends at Chiswick said 'there isn't a working class woman amongst you.' Another slightly bolder yelled 'go home and get your dildoes.' We left them to battle it out by themselves. They then formed The National Women's Aid Federation.

This delighted my many enemies at The Home Office and The Department Of Social Security. My chief enemy at my first meeting was a member of the sisterhood. 'How will you pay for your refuge?' she sniffed. 'I shall pray,' I said. I did all the time and it was our prayers that sustained Chiswick for all those years. The Federation used all their contacts in the media (many of them were journalists) to rubbish me and my work. By now I was writing at home at night. They came to interview me about my books but the books were never discussed, only how fat I was or how belligerent I was.

I recently asked The Home Office for their latest report and I was not surprised to see that my name and 'Scream Quietly,' the first book in the world on wife battering was missing. I knew from other writers that editors in the publishing world of London were themselves radical feminists and it was their habit to dictate their themes to desperate writers, who were then coerced into writing the editor's book, knowing that should they disobey, they would not be published. My brother Danny always wrote what he was told to write. He complained down the telephone to me and finally, just before he died, he said bitterly 'I have no contracts and no film deals in sight.' He rewrote the four hundred page synopsis for his book four times to suit his agent and his publishers.

Throughout all the fighting I kept preaching that family life was and always will be the foundation of any civilization. Destroy the family and you destroy the country. I warned that of the violent women with their children coming to me, virtually none used contraception. My mothers had an average of 5.1 children, meanwhile non-violent families had a 2.5 average. I wrote reports, I drafted memos, all to no avail. Nobody wanted to hear what I had to say. In the back of 'Scream Quietly' I listed all the agencies that had failed my families. I wrote that I was not seeing social workers, I was seeing political activists with social work degrees. The same went for teachers, and probation officers, editors of books and magazines. Like a giant cancer this movement dug its crabs legs into anywhere they could wield their power.

Many women, assisted by weak men, sought to destroy me and my work and I knew that finally having fought court cases that involved disobeying judge's orders to save children's lives, I knew I would be ousted from my own refuge. A few men bravely tried to make their voices heard, realizing the dangers. They too were excoriated by both men and women. Businessmen in the media, managing directors of publishing houses, never understood that their editors were lying to them. Playing the numbers game. 'Who do you think you are?' screamed one feminist editor. 'I must be somebody,' I replied. 'After all I'm in Debrett's and Who's Who. You're nobody in publishing.' Another said...'Why can't you write the sort of books you know I like, Erin...... books about women loving women?' 'I can't,' I replied. 'I'm a heterosexual writer and all my books celebrate family life.'

Because men looked upon the refuge movement as a 'woman's issue', newspapers sent women journalists to attack me. I addressed a conference of radical feminists and asked them why, when I respected their right to practice their politics and define their own sexuality they denied me my rights to my heterosexuality, my right to live and work to preserve family life and to enjoy being at home with my family. That I think being a mother and a grandmother has given me more joy than any other achievement. I was screamed down and met with utter hostility.

When I published 'Prone to Violence', a book about my work with violent women and the children in the refuge, I was picketed by hundreds of banner-waving women. 'All men are bastards!' read some of the banners. 'All men are rapists!' shrieked another. 'If those banners said Jews or black people, you would have arrested those women,' I told the policeman who had come to say that I had to have a police escort all around England for the book tour.

In due course, I lost the refuge but a carefully orchestrated campaigning the press never allowed the people of England to know that I was pushed into exile. The newspapers made much of my defection and I was helpless. My crime was to fight for family life and values. A few months ago The Sunday Times sent a reporter to find out why I was waitressing in a bar in exchange for food. 'There seems to have been a conspiracy,' the reporter wrote. I knew that remainder notices would soon be forthcoming and now my back list is remaindered. Thank goodness my books are selling all over the world including sales to Russia. I own nothing but my four dogs and my cat and I work internationally for peace in the family.

______________________
[Note: 'Prone to Violence' (1982 Hamblyn Paperbacks, Middlesex, England) is not a book that's easy to find in the book trade (only three copies of it were listed in the catalogues of Canadian university libraries in 1998). However, it is now available as an Internet edition. It was thoroughly boycotted world-wide by the feminists when it was originally published.
The radical feminists (a.k.a. redfems) went so far as to remove the copies of the books that had already been shipped out and were available from the shelves of the book stores. The publisher went into receivership over that.
However, the book is now back in print in an edition produced by Commoners' Publishing Inc.. ‹WHS]

lundi, août 30, 2004

Demonic Men, Angelic Women IV

August 31, 2004

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Richard L. Davis

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Common sense ain’t common. - Will Rogers

It Takes Two To Tango

There are many national organizations and programs that want men to redefine themselves. And perhaps many men should. One of the earliest organizations is the White Ribbon Campaign. You can find an extensive list of other 35 other organizations here. Their central premise is that men are bad and need to change.

Another organization the, Family Violence Prevention Fund, has an extensive program, “Coaching Boys into Men”. It asks men to take the initiative and talk with boys about violence against women. It is almost, if not totally, impossible to find any programs that will address female violence against men or girls against boys.

The fundamental feminists [people who believe that women’s rights are more important than victim’s or civil rights] have now moved from men are bad to boys are bad. Few if any people it seems want to talk to girls or women about their behavior?

I have recently discovered an organization that documents the real problem that the above organizations are either unable or unwilling to understand. The goal of all these programs is to change the behavior of boys, however, this one is little different than most. Information about it appeared in the August 29, 2004 Parade article, “He Turns Boys Into Men”.

The founder of the program is coach Joe Ehrmann, a former National Football player. He has discovered, without recognizing it, what all these other programs have missed. Ehrmann believes the “three lies of false masculinity” are athletic ability, sexual conquest and economic success are not the best measurements of manhood. And he may very well be correct.

There is little doubt that the majority of the other programs would agree with him. Ehrmann believes that “We [men] compare, we [men] compete. That’s all we ever do. It leaves most men feeling isolated and alone. And it destroys any concept of community.” And again, Ehrmann may very well be right.

Men turn to crime far more than women and they are arrested far more often than women. Approximately 95% of our prisoners are males. With one exception every offender executed during the last several decades has been male. Men are twice as likely as women to suffer serious assault and three times more likely to be a victim of a homicide. Men are four times more likely to commit suicide. Men suffer far more stress related heart attacks and die 10 percent earlier than women.

However, similar to the vast majority of programs for men and boys, the why men and boys behave the way they do is missing from the Ehrmann program. And in fact the demonic men angelic female belief has become the norm for almost all programs, public and private, concerning dating or intimate partner violence.

What is missing from all these programs is that there is little to no doubt that athletic ability, sexual conquest and economic success is the ways femalesmeasure masculinity in men. Athletic ability, sexual conquest and economic success is what females in contemporary society have come to expect from men. If there is guilt here, let it start here.

To Be A Better Man

There is little to nothing that I disagree with concerning what Coach Ehrmann program and what he believes is the challenge for men. All I disagree with is why Ehrmann believes men think that way and women do not. At the end of the football season each senior reads what he would like his obituary to be. Linebacker David Caperna read:

David was a man who fought for justice and accepted the consequences of his actions. He was not a man who would allow poverty, abuse, racism or any sort of oppression to take place in his presence. David carried with him the knowledge and pride of being a man built for others.

There is little to nothing that David speaks of that I would disagree with. However, when David speaks of oppression I am reminded of fundamental feminists who myopically and steadfastly believe that domestic violence is caused by the oppression of women by men. This leads me to these final thoughts.

Cause and Effect

In contemporary society everything bad is laid at the feet of men. The article notes that men must recognize the “three lies of false masculinity.” Athletic ability, sexual conquest and economic success are not the best measurements of manhood.

Recognizing that I am generalizing, I submit that many men buy into the athletic ability, sexual conquest and economic success because that is specifically what most women want and expect of men. And most men, particularly young men, do what they think women want because they want women.

The vast majority of women want men who are “hunks.” If you do not think this true, before you begin to argue your point all I ask is that you look at the magazines that line the checkout rows in super markets. The term “checkout” takes on another meaning there.

These magazines are all about the ways women can get and hold on to a “man.” And the majority of women want to “get” and “hold onto” men with athletic bodies. They do desire nor want nerds or skinny little men with glasses.

However, if the skinny little man with glasses has lots and lots of money or political power he can become an acceptable substitute for the athlete. And if you do not think women have as much of an obsession with sexual prowess I suggest you simply read some of the articles in those magazines.

These “false lies of masculinity” expectations women have and demand of men is what causes many men to define themselves in the manner Coach Ehrmann believes is unacceptable. And perhaps we should agree with the Coach. We should all find these “false lies of masculinity” to be unacceptable.

Men, especially young men, are very well aware of these three lies of “false masculinity” as these behaviors are consistently and constantly held up by women in our contemporary culture as the measurements of being a real man. Arnold of California agrees that women don’t want “girly” men, they want manly men.

The desire and expectations of many women is the cause and the behavior of many men is the effect. It is the behavior of women, that causes this behavior in some men. Coach Ehrmann needs to change his program to include women. His program needs to be a partnership, male and female, where each shares responsibility for their behavior.

As good as his football program is, they have been undefeated three of the last six years, to really be successful at behavioral change it has to become a program where males and females accept responsibility for their individual actions and behavior. It takes two to tango. It is extremely problematic to expect men to think “What can I do for you?” while women continue to define their thoughts and actions based on the three lies of false masculinity that Coach Ehrmann so abhors.

Richard L. Davis

National Post - Editorial

August 30, 2004

"Spousal abuse is a two-way street"

Irwin Cotler, the Justice Minister, has announced that the federal government will soon unveil new legislation aimed at reducing spousal abuse. It is welcome news. But in implementing the initiative, we hope Mr. Cotler takes a broader view of the problem than his pronouncements thus far would indicate.

It is a "top priority for his department," the Justice Minister says, to "protect [against] violence against women." He also calls domestic violence a violation of women's human rights.

But, stereotypes notwithstanding, domestic violence is not just about men attacking their wives and partners. Though Justice bureaucrats, the administrators of shelters and others in the abuse industry may argue otherwise, abuse can go both ways.

This is not to say women attacking men represents a problem on the same magnitude as men attacking women. Men are generally larger, stronger and more aggressive than women -- and so are far more likely to hurt their victim when they perpetrate domestic violence. Indeed, studies show male abusers are responsible for two to five times as many injuries requiring medical treatment or time off work (though it is also true that men may, in many situations, be less likely to report battery by a female). But these same studies show that up to the point of injury, men and women are equally likely to initiate abuse. Assault is assault, whether it results in injury or not.

Regrettably, violence begets violence. So even if an episode begins with female-on-male aggression, the man may be the one who ends it with a strong blow to his wife or girlfriend. Any legislation that does not recognize this dynamic by targeting aggressive male and female behaviour equally will fail to get at the root of the problem.

Unfortunately, it has become a mantra of progressive liberal culture that, where domestic violence is concerned, women are always the victims, men the villains. The Justice Department is well steeped in this mantra, as reflected by Mr. Cotler's claim that spousal abuse is a human rights violation against women -- rather than what it truly is: a criminal act perpetrated by individuals.

This blind spot is hardly isolated. Over a wide swath of family law matters, the Justice Department's legal and policy draftsmen have demonstrated a strong bias against men. They have succeeded, for instance, in enforcing feminist sensitivity training for all federal judges and in transferring tax liability for child support from the mothers who receive it to the fathers who have to pay it.

In addition, bureaucrats in Mr. Cotler's department refused to consider codifying shared parenting in custody law, and routinely view the failure of fathers to pay child support as a greater offence than the refusal of mothers to permit fathers visits with estranged children.

Mr. Cotler has not yet announced the details of his anti-spousal abuse package -- and he may yet surprise us. With this in mind, we would urge him to reconsider Justice Department dogma in this area. Spousal abuse is a serious social problem. The government must craft a strategy that helps all its victims, not just those who happen to be women.

© National Post 2004

The ONLY SOLUTION is EQUAL rights of parenting, and the equal rights of
each child to access both parents

30 August 2004.

THIS PARTICULAR ARTICLE WILL SHOCK MANY

PERHAPS BY RE-EDUCATION OF THE REAL FACTS, MANY WILL START SINGING A FAR
DIFFERENT TUNE
IN FUTURE.

STEREOTYPING ‘MEN’ AS SOLE ABUSERS MUST CEASE NOW

‘THE MEDIA’--- SHOULD NOTE WELL

Yours,

Steve Flynn Christchurch 30
August 2004.

All lists.

The Sexual Abuse by Women of Children and
Teenagers

Summary of UK TV programme - Panorama - BBC1 - 10 pm
Monday 6th October 1997

The sexual abuse of children by women was once thought to be so rare it
could be ignored.

In this programme the victims tell
a different story.

Summary

This was a vivid and horrific programme in which the victims of sexual
abuse by women told disturbing stories of emotional and physical
damage:

Rape and attempted murder of a 12 year old boy by a 19 year old
girl
Rape and abuse of a 12 year old boy over a two year period by a 28
year old mother of four
Rape and abuse of boys by their mother
Rape and abuse of girls by their mother
Women taking a lead role in pornographic violence and abuse
Children abused by nuns
Children abused at playgroup
Boy abused by lesbians

It was acknowledged that the scale and nature of these attacks had been
severely underestimated and there were examples of women
using excessive force with implements such as chair legs and cutlery.

A surprising 86% of survivors of sexual abuse were not believed when
they said the abuser was a woman.

Many myths were exposed, such as the one that women only sexually abused
when coerced by men - they in fact played the lead part.
Also the myth that women are incapable of cruelty - what was shown was
beyond belief.

But despite the seriousness of these offences, women generally escaped
custodial sentences.

Statistics

The programme claimed that:

Women commit 25% of all child sexual abuse
250,000 children in UK have been sexually abused by women

People find it difficult to believe

The issue strikes at the core of what women perceive themselves to be:

The whole view of women is of nurturers, carers, protectors -
people who do anything to look after children
The crime seems so unnatural it offends against all instincts, so
society is reluctant to even associate women with sexual abuse
It's easier to think that it's men - men the enemy, somehow - but
it can't be women - it's one thing women can't do

Society excuses female abusers

What tends to happen is that the female sexual abuser is excused in some
way.

"She must have been misguided” or it was a "chronicled affair". We
wouldn't have said that about a man. And what happens is that
the sentences are more lenient.
The judges might even think "Well a woman really couldn't have done
this - it must have been a mistake".
And they usually get probation or they walk free. A man doing that
would be locked up.
Their testimony shatters the myth that women only sexually abuse if
coerced by men.

Women are seen as victims

Women are seen as victims rather than enemies or perpetrators of any
abuse.

Women in our society have been portrayed as victims, but somewhere
within their victimisation they have learned that to abuse
children gave them a sense of power, control, agency, and therefore
they use the abuse of children to gain those things.

Disbelief the biggest trauma

The biggest trauma for some victims is disbelief. A survey of 127
survivors by the children's charity Kidscape showed 86% were not
believed at first when they named a woman as their abuser.
The fact that we are not expecting women in our society to do this
- not expecting that women our society do this actually has
profound effects on the victims, often making the experience go on
much longer than it would have done in other cases, but also
making them feel more stigmatised, more different, more betrayed,
more powerless.

More traumatic to be sexually abused by a woman

It was more traumatic to be sexually abused by a woman - children
feel more betrayed, they feel very angry, they feel the woman
should have cared for them, should have loved them instead of
abusing them.

Violent and sadistic attacks

The violence that often accompanies the abuse is unexpected of a
woman.
Victims often report excessive force equivalent to if not greater
than that of a man.
Women are supposed to be the gentler sex, women are supposed to be
incapable of cruelty in a sense
Many of the abusers have been very sadistic - cruelty that is
almost unimaginable.
Half the women in a recent survey of 50 convicted female sexual
abusers said they derived sadistic pleasure from inflicting pain on
victims.

Across the board

The research showed neither class nor age were barriers to their
behaviour. We can't make assumptions about the type of woman who will
sexually abuse a child - sexual abuse is committed by:

Women of any age from young teenagers to grandmothers
Women from any class - from women who barely had a house to live in
during their life to women with very large houses.
Women from any level of education - women who can barely read and
write to women who've got degrees.

Female abusers acquire positions of trust

Some children aren't just at risk from the people they live with;
they are vulnerable targets when they leave their homes.
Out in the community female sexual abusers can manoeuvre with even
more ease than men into positions of trust with authority
over lost of children.

Eternal victims

Some of those abused become eternal victims and never recover from
that.
Other children will mask their confusions and go into adulthood and
never really be able to sustain relationships, or have very
distorted relationships because of their enormous confusions.
And there are other children who will go on to hurt not only other
children in their own childhood but in adulthood.

The need for more work

There's very very little being done to look at the issue of female
sexual abuse. We have no programmes in this country that are
aimed at working with female sexual offenders specifically. Quite a
lot of professionals are picking up women offenders now. What
they're not doing is having the resources to help them deal with
these women offenders. It's because so many professionals are
now getting to pick up women offenders that we are now getting to
realise some of the extent of the problem throughout the country.
Few abusers ever volunteer their guilt, and behind closed doors it
is difficult to prove. A woman's traditional role in the home as a
mother often puts her above suspicion, and medical evidence is hard
to obtain. But as more and more of women's victims come
forward and speak out they may just force us to face up to the
ultimate taboo.

The Sexual Abuse by Women of Children and
Teenagers

UK TV Programme - Panorama - BBC1 - 10 pm Monday
6th October 1997

Warning: This programme contains explicit descriptions of attacks and
the emotional and physical damage they have caused, which
some viewers may find distressing.
Narrator:
The sexual abuse of children by women was once thought to be so
rare it could be ignored. Today the victims tell a different
story.
Woman:
You knew when my mum was being really nice, you knew something
was going to happen - you were going to get raped.
Man:
Imagine your worst nightmare come true. It probably doesn't
even come close to it.
Narrator:
Tonight Panorama reveals how the scale and nature of this
sexual taboo has been severely underestimated.
Boy:
We used to play football together, go for walks, we were just
friends.

Cheryl

Narrator:
Cheryl's friend was just a 12 year old
schoolboy. She was 19. Walking with him one evening she
committed such a serious act of sexual
indecency she went to prison for it.
Cheryl:
So I says to him, I says, we'll walk the
field way. So we started walking the field way and I sat
down; he sat down. I pushed him back,
pulled his trousers down, pulled mine down, then I had
sexual intercourse with him ... until
someone was walking past with a dog.
Interviewer:
And how long did this assault go on for?
Cheryl:
About 15 minutes
Interviewer:
Why did you do it in the first place?
Cheryl:
'Cause I were feeling aroused. He was
crying, shouting for his mum, he wanted to go home.
Interviewer:
And what did you think when you saw him
crying?
Cheryl:
At that time I couldn't think straight, so
I just carried on.
Narrator:
After she had raped the child, Cheryl
realised that as a woman who had abused, she had broken
one of society's most serious taboos. She
marched him to a railway bridge, believing there was
only one option left to her.
Cheryl:
Then I looked round to see if anything
were coming.. such as transport, and there was nothing
and I just pushed him over. I were
thinking what have I done wrong?
Interviewer:
Why did you push him?
Cheryl:
Trying to frighten him - scare him so he
wouldn't tell what happened.
Interviewer:
You could have killed him. Did you know
that when you pushed him?
Cheryl:
Yes
Narrator:
The boy survived his fall from the bridge.
Cheryl was sentenced to 18 months for indecent assault
and grievous bodily harm.
Narrator:
Sexual abuse by anyone is appalling,
but when the perpetrator is a woman the crime seems
so unnatural it offends against all
instincts. It's thought that 10% of the population are abused
as children; it is hard to accept that
some of their tormentors are women
Jacqui Saradjiam:
(clinical psychologist)
I think people find it so difficult to
see that women sexually abuse children because the whole
view of women is of nurturers, carers,
protectors - people who do anything to look after
children - and they see the women as
victims rather than enemies or perpetrators of any
abuse.
Michelle Elliott :
(Director - children's charity
Kidscape)
I think the issue strikes at the core
of what we perceive ourselves as women to be. I think
that it's easier to think that it's men
- men the enemy, somehow - but it can't be women - it's
one thing women can't do. Women can be
equal, we can be free, we can be in charge of
companies, but we can't sexually abuse
children - That's a load of rubbish.

Tina

Narrator:
Reaction to 28 year old Tina Purser's relationship with
another 12 year old boy demonstrates society's reluctance to even
associate women with sexual abuse. Purser, a trained nurse
and mother of four secretly abused the 12 year old for two
years.
Interviewer:
When did she make her first sexual approach? How did she do
it?
Mother:
Apparently not long after he was 12. Her own children she'd
sent round to the local park to play. Our son was in the house
and she was just doing her housework and apparently while she
was cleaning the bathroom she just turned around to our
son and said how would you like this and actually abused him
- she masturbated him on that first occasion, with him
apparently leaning against the door. Afterwards he just
cleaned himself up and she said "You'd better pop off and play with
the children now and I'll finish the housework and see you
later."
Interviewer:
Do you think she targeted him?
Mother:
Definitely. She went for that blonde gorgeous little boy. She
used her son to get him. She used her son to get him over to
play. She used her son to do the things that our son liked
doing. If our son liked certain videos, she'd get her son to like
them too.
Interviewer:
On any level do you understand what she was getting out of a
relationship with a 12 year old boy?
Mother:
None whatsoever. If he'd have been a Chippendale, yes, but a
12 year old boy, no. I can only presume that she was getting
from it sex, and didn't have the problems of a grown up man
and demands of a grown up man and a full blown relationship.
This was just easy sex.
Narrator:
It took secret tape recordings by a private detective to
convince the authorities that Tina Purser was abusing the boy, albeit
he appeared to consent. The family were distressed the media
reported the relationship as an affair.
Interviewer:
Would you say what they were having was an affair?
Mother:
No. She raped him. She raped him hundreds of times and robbed
him of six years of his childhood. I had a gorgeous little
boy and now I've got a very aggressive moody teenager.
Narrator:
Tina Purser was found guilty of two indecent assault charges,
but the sentence was just two years probation and the judge
said he didn't see Purser as a future risk to children.

Society excuses female abusers

Michelle Elliott:
What tends to happen is that the female sexual abuser is
excused in a way. "She must have been misguided", or it
was a "chronicled affair". For example an affair with a 34
year old woman and a ten year old boy. I mean we wouldn't
have said that about a man. And what happens is that the
sentences are more lenient. The judges might even think
"Well a woman really couldn't have done this - it must
have been a mistake". And they usually get probation or they
walk free. A man doing that would be locked up.
Narrator:
That's because men have long been seen as both capable of
sexual abusing children and as being the main
perpetrators. That still holds true; they are, but there
is increasing evidence that far more women sexually abuse
children than previously thought.
Michelle Elliott:
In the past the statistics have indicated that perhaps
2-5% of abusers are female. I think, based on the people who've
contacted me, that that is probably much higher, maybe as
high as 25%.

Chris

Narrator:
Chris Roberts, seen here in the 1980's in a foster home, was
removed from his own home because of physical abuse by
his father. What the authorities didn't even consider at the
time was that his mother might be sexually abusing him.
Chris:
There's no way you can describe how unpleasant it was. You
couldn't put it into words. Imagine your worst nightmare
come true; it probably doesn't even come close to it. The
earliest memory would be when I was probably about two and a
half or three years old. Beatings, physical and sexual abuse,
mental abuse, from both my mother and father. My mother
would keep us away from playschool and my other two brothers
from school and use us for her sexual perversions whilst
our father was at work. When I was three I remember I was put
into a children's home.
Narrator:
But Chris's abuse was not to end there. On the weekly visits
they were allowed to the home, his parents continued the
abuse.
Chris:
The supervision order wasn't enforced. We'd be taken into a
play room and our father would ram a chair up against the door
and the abuse would carry on - on the property of the
children's home.
Interviewer:
What sort of abuses happened in the home?
Chris:
At this point in time my mother had lost a set of twins ...
can I stop for a minute please? [breaks down].
Narrator:
Chris was told he was to blame for the twins death. His
feelings of guilt helped ensure he would submit to yet more abuse.
Chris:
There were many forms of abuse - physically, mentally and
sexually. I had a mixture of mentally and sexually would be
putting pornographic magazines into the children's home where
we'd be made to sit and look at the magazines whilst
performing sexual acts with our mother, and our father
joining in as well.
Narrator:
Approximately one in every hundred girls in the population
and one in every hundred boys in the population are sexually
abused in their childhood by a woman. And that's a vast
number of victims that we are avoiding if we are not looking at the
issue of women as sexual abusers.
Victims trapped in the custody of their mothers as children,
often only speak out after they've escaped. When they do,
much of their testimony shatters the myth that women only
sexually abuse if coerced by men.

Lucy

Narrator:
Lucy Jenner had a single mother. Lucy took the place of a
husband in the bed she had to share every night.
Lucy:
She would lock the door and after a certain time she would snap
on the lights. Sometimes I tried to pretend to be asleep and
it wouldn't happen, but it didn't make any difference. My
mother would be behind me and I would be facing the wall. My mother
would be around me and she pulled up a chair and she would say
that she loved me and various other things and she would
penetrate me vaginally and rectally with whatever she had.
Narrator:
There was lasting damage, causing pain and bleeding even today
a legacy of the abuse she'd endured.
Lucy:
I think mainly it was the abuse that affected my bowel. I have
a rectal prolapse which was a direct result of being penetrated
with objects whatever when I was a child and was sexually
abused by my mother.

Disbelief the biggest trauma

Narrator:
The biggest trauma for some victims though is
disbelief. A survey of 127 survivors by the children's charity
Kidscape showed 86% were not believed at first when
they named a woman as their abuser.
Jacqui Saradjiam:
The fact that we are not expecting women in our
society to do this - not expecting that women our society do this
actually has profound effects on the victims, often
making the experience go on much longer than it would have
done in other cases, but also making them feel more
stigmatised, more different, more betrayed, more powerless.

Sandra & Lesley

Narrator:
For 20 years no one saw what Sandra and Lesley Wilson
endured. their mother started to abuse them aged 5 and six,
and continued even after they were married. When they
threatened to go to the police she threatened to abuse their
children. Sandra and Lesley's mother was accompanied by
their father in the abuse, but it was she who took the lead.
Sister:
Mother always used to come in the bedroom and drag us out
of bed. She never had any clothes on. You knew what
was going to happen. I was made to do things. I was
frightened. I was crying. I was told to shut up and I just had to get
used to it.
Sister:
You'd know when my mum was being really nice - you knew
something was going to happen - you were going to get
raped. It felt like it was every night - 2 or three times
a week they both raped me.
Interviewer:
Who started these sessions? Who was the dominant partner?
Sister:
My mother. My mother always came to get me.
Sister:
My dad was at work. I was cleaning the bath out and
everything. All of a sudden my mum come in the bathroom and
she pushed me flying, she grabbed my hair and dragged me
into the bedroom and she made me do things you know
to her satisfaction.
Sister:
I couldn't understand how your own mother... You've got no
one else to turn to. If it's your dad doing it at least you've
got some chance - your mother to try and talk to if she's
a good mum. But when you've got your mother doing it as
well what chance have you got? No one's going to believe
you. There was no escape.
Narrator:
Sandra and Lesley's father John Wildman was eventually
sent to prison for 22 years. Maureen Wildman died shortly
after being charged. It's her abuse the girls say hurt
them most.
Michelle Elliott:
Those survivors who tell me they have been sexually abused
by both a woman and a man always tell me that it was
more traumatic to be sexually abused by a woman - they
feel more betrayed, they feel very angry, they feel the woman
should have cared for them, should have loved them instead
of abusing them. For some reason they expected it almost
of the man, but never of the woman.

Louise

Narrator:
The violence that often accompanies the abuse is also
unexpected of a woman. Victims often report excessive force
equivalent to if not greater than that of a man. This was
the experience in a Newcastle taxi a year ago of a 15
year old girl. Her 33 year old aunt held her down and
forced her to submit to oral sex by the driver as
payment in kind. Angered by that and other sexual attacks
by her aunt Paula Belisle, the victim has
decided to speak out publicly about the abuse.
Louise:
I was sitting watching the telly and I thought she was
going into the toilet because she went out in the passage, She
came back in and she had this chair leg cause it was on
top of the electrical rad and then she just come over on the
settee and put her hand over me mouth and pulling me pants
down had her legs over my legs and she's got like big fat
legs, you know what I mean, well really really tight on my
legs and I couldn't move. She had a hand on me shoulder
and a hand on me mouth and everything - just one hand
though, and she was shoving the chair leg up us really really
hard and I couldn't hardly scream because she had her hand
over me mouth. It was very painful, it was like I was
having a bairn [baby]. And I was just crying - I was
really upset I didn't want me own aunty to do it to us. I thought men
were animals, but women are just as bad - especially my
own aunty doing that. I hate her. If I had the chance I'd kill
her. I can't stand her.
Narrator:
Paula Belisle is now on probation. Louise says she has
since threatened to kill her for going to the police.
Michelle Elliott:
Women are supposed to be the gentler sex, women are
supposed to be incapable of cruelty in a sense, and I would
like as a woman to believe that. Unfortunately my
experience with the survivors tells me that many of their abusers
have been very sadistic to them. Cruelty that is almost
unimaginable

South Wales

Narrator:
In the early hours of one morning in South Wales
last year the authorities drew up in a quiet street to a
neat looking terrace house, looking to arrest a
male abuser. Nothing prepared them for what they found.
Child Protection Officers were to stumble on a
den of professional paedophiles, but a den in which the
mother was the prime abuser.
Margaret Harris:
(South Wales Probation)
It had all the appearances of a normal sort of
terrace house from the outside, in a very ordinary community
- a very proud community. And as you went in the
front door it changed dramatically. The house was full of
rubble and rubbish from floor to ceiling. The
walls had been taken away right through to the point that you
could see bare wires hanging down as though the
house was still under construction. It gave the
appearance of a house that was just designed
really to completely disorientate the children. In the room
where the family actually lived - that was where
they videoing the children - they used two different
cameras. The room where the computer was kept was
full of rubbish and yet in this corner in a particular
corner which had been sectioned off from the rest
of the room was the most sophisticated equipment that
you could imagine. There was a kitchen area where
in the larder there were videos - pornographic videos.
Hardly any food, just videos upon videos upon
videos. We also then found under the floorboards
home-made videos of the abuse of the children.
They did what would almost be construed as a
professional video, which we assumed would be for
selling.
Narrator:
The husband had filmed the videos, but his wife
did the abusing. She took a lead role, sometimes reading
from scripts, acting out scenes. Most of them
involved her daughter videoed between the ages of eight and
thirteen.
Margaret Harris:
The older child was naked. Mother was naked. They
strung up the older child and tied her, gagged her and
string her up from a hook in the ceiling and beat
her something like 100 times in about four minutes. They
then laid her on the bed and further abused her.
All the time mother was doing this, father was videoing the
actual abuse. At the end of it all, at one point
when the child was lying on the bed almost unconscious,
mother and father sat on the edge of the bed and
had a cup of tea together. I think that portrays very
graphically the awful nature of this. To give it
the name sexual abuse belies what actually happened in that
house. It was torture. It was the most abhorrent
torture I have ever seen.
Narrator:
The mother used the Internet to feed her
fantasies. Links to the North of England and the United States
were stark evidence of leading female involvement
in the sort of network of abusers
normally associated with men. The father was
taken away and jailed for life. The mother
got a lesser 15 year sentence. Without the
exceptional video evidence the authorities say
because she was a woman she may not have been
implicated at all.
Margaret Harris:
Often when children are trying to tell us what's
happening to them, we are dependent on their stories and I
do wonder with this child, if we hadn't found the
videos, and this child had simply told us what had
happened it would have been beyond belief, and I
do worry that no on would in fact have believed her. And I
wonder therefore how many other children has this
happened to, where they've either been too afraid to tell
or if they have tried to tell they felt they
weren't being believed and have held back. Because what we know
we know from the videos. The children still
haven't talked in full about the horrors that they encountered.
Narrator:
Half the women in a recent survey of 50 convicted
female sexual abusers said they derived sadistic
pleasure from inflicting pain on victims. The
research showed neither class nor age were barriers to their
behaviour.
Jacqui Saradjiam:
In my research I've come across women of any age
from young teenagers to grandmothers, from any
class - from women who barely had a house to live
in during their life to women with very large houses.
And from any level of education - women who can
barely read and write to women who've got degrees. We
can't make assumptions about the type of woman
who will sexually abuse a child.

Children's home

Narrator:
More than 40 people are now alleging abuse including sexual
abuse at this former children's home in Aberdeen. The
orphanage was run by the Poor Sisters of Nazareth. The
complaints the police are now investigating were
until recently dismissed as impossible. They range over a
period of 30 years in which individual nuns are
alleged to have abused.
Boy:
I was about 7 or 8 at the time and she was in charge of our
group, and just one day out of the blue she came along and asked
me would I like to learn the time. And I just said yes, I'd
like to learn the time. She told me that her watch was inside her
breasts underneath her cassock which they used to wear. So I
put my hand in - obviously I was fondling her breasts to look
for the watch and I found it and while I was doing that-
pulling the watch out - she would put her hand next to my penis and
she would just gently squeeze it and that would get me excited.
I could tell she was getting excited cause her face was pure
red and her speech was pretty excited speech.
Narrator:
This sort of incident happened on several occasions but the boy
felt powerless.
Boy:
I knew it was wrong to do it, but I just did it because I had
to do it or I got punished.

Female abusers acquire positions of trust

Narrator:
Some children aren't just at risk from the people they live
with; they are vulnerable targets when they leave their homes. Out in
the community female sexual abusers can manoeuvre with even
more ease than men into positions of trust with authority over
lost of children.

Dawn Read and Christopher Lilley

Narrator:
Dawn Read and Christopher Lilley worked together as qualified
teachers at a nursery in Newcastle. About 120 two to
four year olds passed through their classes. Their mothers
suspected nothing.
Mother:
I really liked her. She just came across really as a nice
person, always laughing, smiling and wanting to talk to you, and
just made us feel at ease.
Narrator:
It took two years for trusting parents to find out that their
children were being repeatedly sexually abused at the nursery.
Lilley and Read were never tried in court, making the parents
determined to stand up in public and draw attention to the
abuse.
Mother:
My daughter was sitting at the lunch table and said she
didn't want her lunch, so Dawn got a knife and fork and took my
daughter to the toilet which was in the classroom and sat her
on the floor and inserted the knife and fork into her vagina.
Chris was there and they were both laughing.
Narrator:
What did your daughter tell you about that, about how she
felt?
Mother:
Well she said it hurt and there was blood and that they had
to get a towel when she got washed, and the towel had blood
on. But they seem to have done it a few times.
Narrator:
This child was one of more than 20 others who went on to tell
their mothers what Dawn Read had done to them. At first
they couldn't grasp what they were hearing.
Mother:
I'm angry with her. I can't understand where she was coming
from when she was doing this to the children. I can't believe,
as a mother I trusted her and I can't believe that a woman
would let people trust her and then go out and misuse that trust.
Narrator:
Dawn Read and Christopher Lilley persistently misused parents
trust at the nursery and at other addresses in
Newcastle.
Interviewer:
What were they asking you to do?
Girl:
Pull my pants down. If I had a dress, lift my dress up.
Interviewer:
Did anyone take any photographs of you?
Girl:
Yeah, there was a camera man there.
Interviewer:
Tell me about that
Girl:
He was just like taking pictures when they were being nasty
to her and everything. I was like crying and just a lot of upset
like. Screaming and saying I wanted to go back to the nursery
and me mam and everything. And they wouldn't take any
notice and they'd be laughing at me.
Interviewer:
When you had to join in with them, what did you have to do?
Girl:
I can remember when Chris put his privates into mine.
Interviewer:
And what was Dawn doing while Chris was doing this?
Girl:
Looking at the other children, being rude to the other
children.
Interviewer:
She was being rude to the other children? What was she doing
to the other children?
Girl:
Making them lift their dresses and take their clothes off
Mother:
Medically there was tearing of the tissues, bleeding trauma,
extensive damage to the hymen. She has since underwent
STD tests for sexually transmitted diseases. She has also had
an HIV test.
Narrator:
Dawn Reed and Christopher Lilley were never brought to
justice because the judge thought the child witnesses too young
to be heard in court. There was an outcry on behalf of the
children. The parents formed a protest group to support each
other and publicise fully Reed and Lilley's abuse. Some
children are still showing signs of trauma.
Mother:
She was always trying to make play with herself and I used to
think that's just what children do. I did ask the health visitor
a couple of times and she said "She's just exploring her own
body and a lot of children do this". But as she started to get
older it didn't just settle with her. I've had a lot of
counselling about it because I've got a fear of her growing up to being
an
abuser herself. What the therapist said was that a child who
comes from a loving home who is being abused doesn't
necessarily go on to be an abuser. But that's not to say it
can't happen.

Therapy for abused children

Narrator:
The Sexual Abuse Child Consultancy Service is one of the few
organisations attempting to break this cycle. In specially
designed rooms long term play therapy helps children explore
feelings and relationships. Half the children who pass through
here have been abused by a woman - like this 10 year old boy.
Therapist:
His abusers were involved in a lesbian relationship and he was
also abused by men too, so actually he's quite a confused
little boy, which is shown very often in his play where he
doesn't really know whether he's a woman or whether he's a man.

[shots of boy who has made a montage of a pretty girl with
lots of diamonds and an engagement ring]
Therapist:
He was out of control. Sometimes he'd be physically violent
and sometimes that would develop then into spitting, sometimes
weeing in a playroom, sometimes weeing over the therapist. He
was also highly eroticised, both with adults and with the
other children, which meant that there would be a lot of
sexual wriggling - he would get his penis out and wave it around - that
kind of sexualised stuff, and trying to do very sexy kisses
with the other children and with staff.

[shots of boy hugging with baby doll, saying he had a baby in
the night, and then kissing it on the mouth]
Therapist:
He understands about nice kissing and safe kissing, but when
he was holding the baby clearly the kissing started to get very
unsafe. He had looked to me to make sure that I had understood
that the kissing was unsafe. So an issue for him is unsafe
kissing with babies - which of course was his experience.
Therapist:
Some of them become eternal victims and never recover from
that. Other children like this little boy will mask their
confusions and go into adulthood and never really be able to
sustain relationships or have very distorted relationships
because of their enormous confusions. And there are other
children who will go on to hurt not only other children in their own
childhood but in adulthood.

250,000 children abused by women

Narrator:
It's thought more than 250,000 people in this country have been
abused as children by women. While not everyone who has
been harmed goes on to abuse, it is thought about 5% do. So
what is it that makes them do it and others not?
Jacqui:
Women in our society have been portrayed as victims. And yes
I'm not disputing that nearly all women who sexually abuse
children were in my research were themselves very victimised,
but somewhere within their victimisation they learned that to
abuse children gave them a sense of power, control, agency,
that they'd not had any other in their life. And therefore they
used the abuse of children to gain those things.

Zoe

Narrator:
The natural compulsion of a mother to love and protect her
child can be destroyed by years of abuse. One such woman
who went on to abuse claims she saw her baby as a mere
object.
Zoe:
I was about 22, I'd just divorced my husband. My sons - one
was two and the other was a babe in arms - and the eldest
son, I changed his nappy and masturbated him - once. I felt
sick at what I was doing. I felt angry at what I was doing. I
didn't do it for pleasure, it was more for anger for what
their dad had done to me. It was a day when I had just finished
decorating the bedroom with my eldest brother. He had
sexually abused me and I was so angry at what he had done that
the anger came out by masturbating my son.
Interviewer:
What effect has what you did consequently had on your sons?
Zoe:
Both my sons are sexual abusers. My eldest son is in prison
now for what he's done.
Interviewer:
What has he done?
Zoe:
Sexually abused a nine year old boy.
Interviewer:
Do you feel responsible for the way he's turned out?
Zoe:
Badly
Interviewer:
Why's that?
Zoe:
Because if I hadn't done what I'd done to him he wouldn't be
like he is now.
Narrator:
Zoe was jailed for four years on three counts of indecent
assault. While she was in prison she was
ostracised but not treated. Now she's back in the community
and still considered a risk to children.

Concluding comments

Jacqui:
There's very very little being done to look at the issue of
female sexual abuse. We have no programmes in this country that
are aimed at working with female sexual offenders specifically.
Quite a lot of professionals are picking up women offenders
now. What they're not doing is having the resources to help
them deal with these women offenders. It's because so many
professionals are now getting to pick up women offenders that
we are now getting to realise some of the extent of the problem
throughout the country.
Narrator:
Few abusers ever volunteer their guilt, and behind closed doors
it is difficult to prove. A woman's traditional role in the home as
a mother often puts her above suspicion, and medical evidence
is hard to obtain. But as more and more of women's victims
come forward and speak out they may just force us to face up to
the ultimate taboo.

THE MYTHS EXPOSED YET AGAIN

vendredi, août 27, 2004

Angry Harry
22/08/04

The NSPCC Needs To Be Stopped
Well. Well. Well.

Did I get an earful from TWO people who were unhappy about my complaints about the way in which the NSPCC demonises adults, parents, and especially men, in order to suck up emotionally-inspired donations.

Yes. A whole TWO!

Basically, their argument (and I use the word 'argument' in the loosest of senses) was that the NSPCC is trying to help children, so why be so hostile toward it?

And that was the sum total of their 'argument'.

Well. The answer is very simple.

The fact that someone might be trying to help someone else does **not** mean that they are not also causing great harm to others while doing so.

Indeed, perhaps some group of men could start a charity to protect children from divorce, and then spend millions of pounds annually demonising women who sought a divorce. Women seeking divorce could be portrayed as violent, manipulative, sexually-abusive, adulterous, selfish, child-hating, scheming, and goodness knows what else, in order to punch the message home.

And then when the various wimmin's groups started complaining, the men's charity could simply turn around and say, "Well, we are only trying to save children from divorce. This is a good thing, isn't it?"

It is nonsense to argue that because someone is doing some good it must follow that they are not also doing bad elsewhere.

In fact, we know that divorce has a far worse effect on children (both individually and in terms of sheer scale) than does, say, the antics of young people groping each other - which is what the vast majority of 'sex-abuse' actually is, judging by a close look at the statistics.

And, as such, the NSPCC would protect far more children from 'abuse' by promoting marriage rather than by trying to inflame suspicion and hatred through its various child abuse campaigns.

However, because it is not fashionable to promote marriage, and because it would also upset the feminists - who believe that marriage oppresses women - the NSPCC would not dare do such a thing.

But because it is both fashionable and acceptable, especially to feminists, to heap suspicion and hatred on to men in order to rake in donations, the NSPCC blithely does exactly this.

And to argue that the NSPCC is trying only to do some good does not address any of the serious issues that I have raised in the past about its activities.

In my view, the evidence strongly suggests that the NSPCC is doing, and has done, a great deal of damage to people, both socially and emotionally, and it has also seriously harmed the whole of the society in which they live.

And it has done this largely by demonising men.

I imagine that the occasional Jew here and there in the Germany of the late 1930s committed some form of heinous crime. And I am pretty sure that those who hated Jews made sure that headlines such as this were blazoned on the front pages.

"Jew commits heinous crime."

But we all know what were the real motives behind such headlines.

And they had nothing to do with stopping crime.

And I am also reminded, for example, of the claim (made about 15 years ago) that up to 25% of fathers were sexually abusing their daughters.

(And then the figure later rose to 1 in 3 - thanks to some 'research' in the USA.)

And I also remember some woman from the NSPCC claiming that fathers who tickled their children were often simply using tickling as an excuse to grope them sexually.

I also remember the NSPCC promoting the recovered memory nonsense which allowed people (women mostly) to claim - after months of 'therapy' - that they suddenly remembered being sexually abused as children 20, 30 or 40 years beforehand.

And they would be believed!

Thousands of fathers and mothers ended up being accused of sexually abusing their children, and in many cases the claims involved the most fantastic and unbelievable of stories.

Many were prosecuted and nearly all were subjected to months and years of fanatical inquisitorial investigations by deluded social workers, police officers, lawyers and judges.

For example, among other things, the founder of the British False Memory Society was accused by his daughter (then about 30 years of age) of willfully breaking her legs during some sadistic sexual orgy when she was a young child.

And even though the X-Ray evidence showed that her legs had never been broken, and a whole swathe of other evidence showed that her claims were ridiculous, he was still persecuted for some years by many workers involved with child protection.

These hateful witch-hunts by fantasists in the child abuse industry were directed not only at parents, but also against professionals who worked with children.

In America, for example, almost the entire staff at a nursery care centre was accused by children as young as five years old of the most appalling acts of sexual abuse following months of 'therapy'. Indeed, the owner of the nursery, Bob Kelly, was given twelve consecutive life sentences for sexually abusing children in, among other things, a spacecraft, and in shark-infested waters; sharks which some of the children claimed he would catch and then place in the nursery's swimming pool. (See Innocence Lost.)

This nightmare was inflicted on western populations for over a decade - from the mid 80s to the mid 90s. And it was becoming impossible for any man to spend any time being anywhere near children.

After all, 20, 30, or 40 years later, any children (including one's own children) could easily end up visiting one of the many 'recovered memory' therapists who would then convince them that they had been sexually abused somewhere in the very distant past.

Who knew what could happen if, as adults, their children visited a therapist for some psychological advice to do with, say, dieting, or whatever?

Indeed, one widely publicised claim by a feminist 'child expert' in the USA was that 100,000 women died from anorexia each year. And that anorexia was caused by child sex-abuse.

It turned out - much later - that about 100 women died from anorexia each year, and that child sex-abuse had nothing to do with it.

But can you just imagine what the parents - especially the fathers - of anorexic daughters must have gone through as this baloney was splashed across the media and injected into the minds of the population?

Just imagine it!

Even their own daughters would have been unsure as to what might have happened to them all those years ago.

And, of course, even the wives of these men began to view them with suspicion. After all, if their daughters were anorexic, someone must have sexually abused them.

Please try to imagine how much and how far widespread was the damage that was caused to tens of thousands of families across the western world by this hateful nonsense about anorexia.

But this type of chicanery was not only being applied in the case of anorexia!

There were numerous other ailments that were being said to be the result of child-sexual abuse; e.g. not being able to concentrate at school, appearing to be uncommunicative, constipation, an interest in the opposite sex, depression etc etc - the list is long.

And in the climate of the hysteria that prevailed - and that was continually being stirred up by the abuse industry - millions of men started to be regarded with suspicion.

And if, for example, their own children had one of the many ailments that were alleged to have been caused by child sex-abuse, the fingers started wagging and pointing at them.

And in the UK, the NSPCC was doing its own bit to pile on the suspicion.

As such, the NSPCC was playing a major role in destroying the social fabric of the whole nation.

It was supporting the view that a significant percentage of fathers were sexually abusing their children - in some of the most appalling ways imaginable - and it was endorsing the view that therapists who were sexual fantasists were dragging up real memories of abuse in their bogus therapy sessions.

And all fathers were placed under suspicion as a result of these persistent claims.

All of them.

And such was the level of the hysteria that fathers were not only being suspected by everyone in the country, they were even being suspected by their very own wives and children; who could never quite see them again in the same trusting light - because they were continually being urged to have doubts about them.

And a large percentage of fathers even dared not risk bathing their own children nor dare spend too much time with them in the bedroom while saying goodnight.

And men who are old enough might remember what a nightmare it was to be living in that decade.

The result was that men fled the teaching profession. The youth clubs could not find men to engage with them; thus leaving young boys stranded on the streets with nothing to do. Fathers were throwing in the towel. And men started to abandon children in droves.

The NSPCC also endorsed the view that Satanic ritual abuse was taking place across the nation. Groups of families were raided early in the morning, with children hauled into social service care homes to be interrogated by sex-crazed therapists who badgered them over hours, days and months in order to compel them to admit to having been subjected to Satanic abuse of some form.

Needless to say, they were kept away from their parents during this time.

During this decade alone, the NSPCC helped to damage the relationships of just about everybody in the country - with those between men and children being damaged most of all.

And even though the abuse hysteria has now subsided considerably - though it still remains at high levels - many of its effects are still with us today, and we all bear the scars in one form or another.

Indeed, it was this hysteria (hotly inflamed also by the feminists with regard to the sexual abuse of women and domestic violence) that led to the huge corruption of the western legal systems of justice wherein men began to be punished, persecuted and/or prosecuted even on the basis of the most impossible and unlikely of accusations.

And men have been thrown out of their jobs and fathers kicked out of their homes simply on the basis of accusations - false or otherwise.

The notion that, "Accusations must always be believed," became what is now the rule.

And so it was that trial proceedings in the courtrooms became completely corrupted and stacked against men who were accused of 'abuse'.

And this corruption continues to increase to this day.

And the NSPCC has, throughout, had very much to do with all this; both directly and indirectly.

The NSPCC also seemed to suggest that having men working with young children was a problem, as indicated in the following recent piece by Julian Grenier ...

You might think that organisations concerned with children's welfare would promote a discussion about how children are best cared for in nurseries. Instead, the NSPCC chose to flag up hysterical fears about men working in childcare, holding a conference in 1994 which concluded that the question of whether men should work in daycare at all was 'a difficult issue'

... and this sort of thing also infused the country with the notion that men should never be trusted to be alone with children without close scrutiny.

It really was becoming virtually impossible for men to have any close contact with children - including their own - not only because there was continued suspicion being cast upon all men by the antics of the NSPCC (and others) but also because the consequences of any accusations alone were just too horrendous - and very long term in their effects.

And part of the legacy still very much in evidence today is that men and fathers are not to be trusted. They are deemed likely to be abusive towards their partners and their children (no matter what the evidence) and, as such, when any accusations against them are made - no matter how unfounded - they are very often persecuted, punished and/or prosecuted.

I have also pointed out in my various articles how genuine victims of abuse have also been harmed horrendously by the NSPCC; e.g. see NSPCC- Children's Charities Sued for Millions?

And, almost unbelievably, this also applies to children in care homes.

As just one example, this is the description given by a particularly articulate young man in his early twenties describing (on BBC's Question Time) what it was like during the 80s and 90s being brought up in a care home run by social workers.

He had been in care from the age of 5 to 18. And thanks to the fear that the staff had of being falsely accused of abuse at some later stage (e.g. some bogus recovered memory) he was never cuddled, never kissed and never touched by the staff.

In other words, the most damaged and vulnerable children have had to be brought up in cold emotionally-isolated conditions where they are treated as if they had some terrible contagious disease.

And it is worth thinking very deeply about the last sentence.

Really think about it.

"We were just numbers. They didn't care for us at all," were some of the words that I remember him saying.

And so you can also thank the child-abuse hysteria emanating from people like those at the NSPCC for the emotionless, loveless gulag that tens of thousands of our most deprived children have had to endure throughout their childhood.

Can you even begin to appreciate what kind of damage this will have done to them?

Can you even begin to appreciate the implications for society as these emotionally-deprived, emotionally-detached and, hence, emotionally-disturbed children became young adults?

And in more recent times - largely, I presume, because the public is beginning to see through its various shenanigans when it comes to sexual abuse - the NSPCC has focused on the issue of smacking in order to extend its tentacles and increase its money supply.

Once again, therefore, we see the NSPCC trying to damage families by demonising decent parents; this time for trying to discipline their own children. And once again we are fed with 'research' findings on this issue that are mostly worse than worthless; e.g. see Smack those Bottoms?

And who is this, do you think? ...

He complained of "witch hunts" and whispering campaigns. The police, he said in a letter to Scottish Secretary Michael Forsyth in 1993, are "obsessed with child abuse in carrying out their failed pervert hunt using unfair tactics." The most recent letter was to the Queen, mailed five days before the massacre. "As well as my personal distress and loss of public standing," he wrote, "this situation has also resulted in loss of business and ability to earn a living. Indeed, I cannot even walk the streets for fear of embarrassing ridicule."

Yes. That's right.

Thomas Hamilton.

The man who went crazy and shot and killed sixteen children in Dunblane.

Yep: It can even be said that the NSPCC had a hand in this too.

But, of course, this connection was never mentioned in the press.

You see. The journalists - especially in the tabloids - knew how complicit they had been in fostering the abuse hysteria through their newspapers.

So they focused almost exclusively on the issue of banning certain guns in order to divert the public's attention from the possible truth surrounding the cause of Hamilton's murderous fury.

Guns are the problem, they said.

And this suited even the government - which saw an opportunity to grab a bit more power unto itself by banning certain guns.

But the evidence suggests that Thomas Hamilton - very strange man that he was - 'so proud of his boys' - paedophile or not - lost his cool, and decided, presumably, to hurt the type of people whom he thought had caused him so much misery by spreading, what he considered to be, malicious rumours about him for so long.

Parents.

He killed their children.

It was the most hurtful way in which he could punish them.

And nearly the whole world mourned.

That's how bad it was.

And, needless to say, all the 'abuse' pundits even managed to turn this tragedy into yet another man-hating money-spinner. "Thomas Hamilton, the evil child abuser."

That man was a positive goldmine for many people.

There is a fortune to be had from demonising men.

But you can bet your last dollar that it was not just Thomas Hamilton who became far more aggressive and murderous as a result of the hysteria being generated. Genuine victims of past sexual abuse would have been intimidated and threatened with far greater force by those who had abused them; so that they did not dare spill the beans in the current climate.

And so it seems to me that there is not a single person who has not been damaged by the NSPCC. And the list of tragedies that people have had to endure as a consequence of its activities must be endless.

Indeed, the list will continue growing well into the foreseeable future.

I should also point out that I have also come across social workers and workers in other children's charities who feel more or less the same way.

Indeed, many men who work with children get particularly uptight at the way in which the NSPCC portrays them.

Unsurprisingly.

And it is really important for men to understand that organisations such as the NSPCC thrive by generating suspicion and hatred.

Mostly towards men.

After all, for example, the NSPCC could produce a series of advertisements to point out that paedophiles - male and female - probably seek jobs that involve children.

Why does the NSPCC not do this?

Perhaps its advertisements could show lesbian and gay teachers taking gym lessons and eyeing up the young pupils.

Why does the NSPCC not do this?

Perhaps it could produce advertisements to show male doctors, dentists, pediatricians, midwives, nurses and nursery school teachers having an extra grope.

Why does the NSPCC not do this?

Well. It does not do this sort of thing because the groups being targeted would object very strongly to being demonised in this way.

But 'men' can be demonised as much as you like.

There is virtually no limit with regard to how much men may be demonised.

And there are at least five reasons for this.

1. There is no powerful lobby group to protect men.

2. Men have been trained in recent times not to see themselves as 'men'.

They see themselves as black, or gay, or as teachers, police officers, or whatever. But they do not see themselves as 'men'.

As an example of this, try telling a male police officer that all male police officers are brainless idiots, and I can almost guarantee you that he won't look too pleased.

But tell him that all men are brainless idiots - which amounts to the same thing - and he will probably laugh.

You see. He sees himself as a police officer, not as a 'man'.

(But if you try telling a woman police officer that all women are brainless idiots, you will almost certainly find a difference in her response to such a claim.)

3. Men have also been taught to hate men and to be forever suspicious of them as a result of the malicious propaganda in which they have been bathed.

Indeed, men now hate men so much that they will even laugh openly at Bobbit jokes.

But you will not find them laughing at jokes about women being similarly mutilated.

This fact ALONE is sufficient proof of how successful have been the campaigns designed to indoctrinate people into hating and despising men.

4. Stirring up hatred towards men is totally consistent with feminists and feminist ideology; both of which also thrive on male hatred. The more male hatred, the better.

5. Millions of other people benefit hugely by demonising men and by creating hysteria over their misdeeds or their alleged misdeeds - especially if they involve sex.

As such, there are many people who are delighted to see the pots of man-hatred being stirred over matters to do with 'abuse'.

Fundamentally, the NSPCC's advertisements and publicity campaigns are designed to make money. And in order to do this, they have to portray people as being 'very bad', and as causing huge damage.

And men are the easy targets.

If the NSPCC made a series of adverts that kept portraying women in a negative light, it would not be long before there was some kind of uproar in the media and in government.

And one of the reasons for this is that women do see themselves as women.

For example, just imagine what an uproar would take place if the NSPCC produced a series of adverts pointing out that having a single mother as a parent disadvantages children in numerous ways - and that it also makes the children far more vulnerable to 'abuse' from many quarters.

Not only would women be making a huge fuss about this, but the feminists would be up in arms.

But why does the NSPCC not go ahead and do this anyway, if it is so concerned about children?

Well, of course, the answer is that there are billions of pounds to be made every year by organisations that demonise men - and very few people seem likely to object to this demonisation - whereas the same would not apply in the case of demonising women.

And the NSPCC wants a piece of the action.

Fundamentally, the NSPCC is an organism that thrives on breaking up people's relationships, and in order to do this it demonises and casts hatred and suspicion on those involved in close relationships - with men being the primary target.

And, at the moment, it is also trying to demonise all parents, and to pull the children away from them; e.g. via the smacking issue.

And here is Frank Furedi describing other tactics now being used by the NSPCC to drive a further wedge between parents and their children ...

Today, it launches new 'research' in order to promote its 'Someone To Turn To' campaign. Ostensibly, the aim of this campaign is to get children to talk to people about their anxieties. However, its real objective is to target children and to get them to communicate their family problems and parental misdeeds to disinterested lobby groups like the NSPCC.

And, further, Frank Furedi points out that ...

What is also new is the mendacious project of turning childhood anxiety into a justification for the predatory activity of a publicity-hungry media machine.

Even worse is the message transmitted by this campaign - that the NSPCC understands children far better than their mums and dads do. Aside from promoting itself, the campaign seeks to popularise the idea that families need the NSPCC to coordinate their children's communication with the world of adults.

Well, of course, as must be obvious, the more that all our children are gradually enticed further away from their parents, and, hence, further away from their control and scrutiny, the more vulnerable are they to those who want them for other purposes.

In general, therefore, I think that there is a very strong case for saying that the NSPCC has damaged people emotionally, psychologically, socially, morally, legally, economically and even physiologically.

But I will leave it to the reader to make the connections.

After all, they are fairly obvious.

But it is men who have been damaged the most.

Furthermore, men and fathers should keep asking themselves why it seems so difficult for men to be treated properly, and why it seems impossible to get the authorities to listen to them. Why, for example, do they have so many problems with CAFCASS or the CSA? And part of the answer is that, fundamentally, no-one likes them and/or cares for them very much.

But, of course, this works both ways.

For example, it seems to me that many fathers and men's activists who are concerned about their own issues do not actually care for men who are suffering from other circumstances - which is why, presumably, some men's groups are quite happy to cosy up to the NSPCC, despite the appalling damage that it has done to so many men.

And this is further evidence that they have been hypnotised successfully to disregard the suffering of other men.

So it is, perhaps, somewhat hypocritical, as well as naive, for them to expect those who work for CAFCASS or the CSA (or whatever) to be concerned for the pains and problems that they, themselves, are having to endure, and are currently complaining about.

Why should anybody care about their problems?

And, quite frankly, until the leaders of the various men's groups remove their blinkers and look at the bigger picture, they will achieve nothing.

They are wasting their time, and everybody else's.

And while some more perceptive men's activists can, indeed, see the bombs dropping from the sky on men from all over the place, they still mostly do not really understand why this is happening. Yes. It's the feminists, the government, the women's groups, the BBC, the chat shows, the women's magazines, CAFCASS, the CSA, the NSPCC etc etc etc. But what they really need to understand is that the basic force behind their appalling attitudes towards men is energised and maintained by well-orchestrated well-funded campaigns designed to stir up a hatred of men.

And the NSPCC has been engaged in many such campaigns.

It is by generating a hatred of men that these people make much of their living, and it is the hatred of men that they have generated that allows them to get away with it; because no-one any longer cares much about men.

Indeed, readers ought also to be aware that the NSPCC has also been involved in persuading successfully TV producers (e.g. of soap operas) to refrain from broadcasting any storylines which suggest that accusations of child abuse might be false.

And so, even when it comes to fiction, the NSPCC has gone out of its way to make sure that the public remains hypnotised with the view that all men who are accused of abuse must be 'guilty'.

Men who have been falsely accused must not be allowed to exist even in fiction!

And this is why, for example, men now virtually have to prove their innocence whenever they are accused of 'abuse' against women or children; and why they remain horribly tainted and horribly treated even when no real evidence stands against them.

They are guilty!

And with the NSPCC continuing to rely for its funding on the masterful creations of various people working for the likes of Saatch and Saatchi - the most expert and most professional emotional manipulators in the world - such as those highly emotional advertisements depicting various ordinary-looking men as paedophiles or as child-batterers, the situation seems unlikely to improve - to put it mildly.

And yet there are many children's charities, thousands of social workers, and hordes of others working in other professions that help abused children without needing to deluge the entire nation with suspicion and hatred.

The NSPCC, however, thrives on such things.

Furthermore, the NSPCC's annual spending (about £40 million) on children in need is tiny compared to the total amount spent on this matter through other avenues. As such, its tactics for obtaining its funding are even less justifiable.

And it has to be stopped.

Full stop.

Finally, as I write this, members of Fathers4Justice are preparing to launch further campaigns in support of fathers who are being prevented from having decent contact with their children.

But the truth of the matter is that, at some level, all fathers - yes, ALL fathers - are being prevented from having decent contact with their children, thanks to the way in which they are continually being demonised and treated - either as 'fathers' or as 'men'.

Whether they realise it or not, all fathers are having their children deeply poisoned against them.

And many fathers have even given up completely, preferring to walk away in order to save themselves and everyone else the pain and the aggravation of themselves having to struggle continually - and often failing in the face of the massive malicious onslaught - to prove their worth.

No Man Is Safe There is a growing fear among men that their actions towards young children may be misconstrued. Fathers are frightened to touch let alone bathe their daughters, and grandfathers are afraid to display affection towards their grandchildren. Chris Thompson - 1998

mardi, août 24, 2004

Ask a buddy at work. Ask your neighbor. Even a relative will probably have heard of one. And the stories are always the same: she took his house, his car, and his kids. She made more money than him and he still had to pay alimony. She accused him of physical abuse and the courts didn't even ask for evidence.
It seems that no matter who you talk to these days, someone knows of a man who came out of a divorce robbed and humiliated. And there is no end to how harrowing such stories get.

In America, men are forced to pay around 40% of their income to ex-wives, regardless of wrongdoing on the woman's parts (often called "no-fault" alimony). She could commit adultery and beat her husband or kids, and none of it will influence the court's decision.

More shockingly still, a woman can simply accuse her husband of sexual or physical abuse (or simply express a fear of it) and instantly win a restraining order forcing him away from his home and children, without so much as a hearing. In fact, most divorce lawyers will advise a woman to do this, and those who do not can be sued for legal malpractice.

And once she has the kids, the family court will be loath to enforce visitation rights for the father. All the mother has to do is ask.

the war on men

With divorce on the rise -- today, more than 50% of all marriages in the U.S. result in divorce -- men's rights are being increasingly overlooked to the benefit of women. Consider this: statistically, the first person to file for divorce usually wins. While 70% of all divorces are initiated by women, 85 to 90% of custody awards go to the women. The numbers alone reveal the ugly truth when it comes to men: marriage has become a gamble in which the odds are heavily against us.

Family courts have become synonymous with tragedy and injustice. Once made to protect women from deadbeat dads, these courts are making a mockery of fairness by being instruments of disgrace for men and families.

But this waking nightmare is simply part of a much larger current. Even the most inattentive of men will notice that the media is saturated with negative images of themselves.

Pervasive in television and movies, the only acceptable representation of man is that of the irresponsible, beer-drinking dimwit. We are living in the anti-male age, where men are the new scapegoats for all of society's evils. It was only a matter of time before this trend reached the courtrooms.

It's all because of those radical feminists...
There is little doubt over who is responsible for this. Radical feminists, the same ones who dominate the media and schools with the message that men are by nature violent and abusive, have gained control of key parts of the law and legislature. They have managed to convince lawmakers that men are dangerous and have no place in a child's life, and therefore should be controlled accordingly. And the result can be seen in the following rulings:

Courts consistently refuse to lower child support fees when the father's income drops. Known as the "Bradley Amendment," this law forbids any reduction in child support arrears, even if the father is disabled.

If a man remarries, his new wife's income can be used as proof that the man can pay alimony. If the ex-wife (and mother) remarries, however, not a cent of her new husband's earnings goes to child support. The court's rationale? They are not his children, thus not his responsibility.

Current data indicates that women are becoming the biggest perpetrators of domestic abuse. Furthermore, many women brainwash children into saying their fathers were abusers. Courts will nonetheless believe a woman over a man, just because she is the mother.

In California, if the higher-earning spouse, who is typically the man, is hurt during marriage and gets a monetary settlement, the court can award some of it to the wife even if he suffered all the pain and permanent loss of earning capacity.

The earning spouse will be ordered to pay the attorney's fees of the dependent spouse, which is usually between $5,000 and $20,000 US, even if the latter initiated it.
the delicate sex?

Conventional wisdom tells us that women are, by nature, nurturers. For that reason they should naturally have custody of a child. Far be it for anyone to question a mother's love, but turning a blind eye to the role that a father plays in a child's life is downright insensitive. A good father keeps a family together, provides strength, and shows unconditional support.

These are not the musings of romantics. U.S. data shows that fatherless children are five times more likely to commit suicide, nine times more likely to drop out of school, 10 times more likely to abuse drugs, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. Also, 71% of teenage pregnancies happen to girls who reside in fatherless homes.

Now get this: 60% of all child abuse is committed by women with sole custody.

with liberty & justice for some

So why are fathers increasingly discouraged -- nay, maligned -- from being fathers? When a pendulum stops swinging one way, it must necessarily come to the other extreme. This is a fact too oft forgotten by the frontline fighters of feminism. So influential are pressure groups run by seriously vindictive women, that preference in courts are given to women -- no matter what.

Family judges today automatically believe the woman over the man out of fear for being politically incorrect. They know that if they examine the facts and find that the man is more capable of raising a child, the shrill alarms of sexism will ring loud and clear.

keep it in the middle

It is time to admit that the pendulum of political correctness has swung too far. In an effort to force equality into society, all the power fell into the hands of feminists who seem too happy to ape the worst traits of their former oppressors. But pointing fingers is what got us into this mess in the first place. It won't help anyone, and it will only prod us to the other extreme. Of greater consequence is that marriage vows are now seven-year contracts that end in tears and anger. It might be wise to examine where we went wrong.

And should we try to change the pendulum's course, let's hope we learn to keep it happily in the middle.

http://www.askmen.com/

lundi, août 23, 2004

Est-ce que l'homme est désavantagé dans la société Québécoise?

Toute une question!
Surtout dans le contexte actuel de la société Québécoise où il est de rigueur d'affirmer que les hommes gagnent plus d'argent que les femmes et que celles-ci subissent davantage d'inégalités. Alors, même si les conclusions de ce travail apporteront DES PREUVES INCONTESTABLES, les lecteurs ne pourront s'empêcher de rire car ils sont tellement conditionnés à ne pas écouter le désarroi des hommes qu'ils rejetterons TOUS les faits du revers de main. Ils sont PROGRAMMÉS pour n'écouter que les souffrances des femmes. Ils peuvent être TRÈS intelligents, mais nous savons, grâce à la psychologie, qu'un conditionnement social bien fait rendra les intellectuels et encore plus les gens ordinaires, incapables de réfléchir de façon OBJECTIVE aux questions qui ont été affectées par ce même conditionnement. Dommage car les inégalités croissantes que vivent les hommes, et ce à tous les stades de leurs vie, va nuire considérablement à L'ENSEMBLE de la société Québécoise.

La situation a été étudié en utilisant 2 grilles d'analyses:

1) En fonction des inégalités globales vécues par de plus en plus d'hommes.
2) En ciblant les injustices et embûches expérimentées par les hommes à chacune des étapes de leur vie. Ces étapes sont numérotées de 1 a 12

#1 La naissance:
Heureusement, la misandrie de la société Québécoise n'a pas encore poussé les gens à faire avorter les petits garçons, comme le pratique ouvertement la Chine misogyne à l'égard des petites filles. Ici, nous sentons un préjugé favorable aux petites filles. Elles sont plus disciplinées, plus studieuses, et plus tard les parents qui auront eu une fille s'enorgueilliront de ses réussites car les filles réussissent beaucoup mieux que les garçons, et ce à tous les niveaux. C'est ce que nous verrons plus loin. Il y a aussi énormément de non-dit et il faut être très franc envers soi-même pour admettre que nous ayons un préjugé favorable aux filles. Je suis moi-même père, et je dois avouer être content que mon enfant soit une fille qui n'aura pas à subir les discriminations vécues par les hommes en raison de leur attribut masculin!

#2 L'enfance et l'adolescence
C'est là que se joue l'avenir des garçons. Les enfants qui prennent du Ritalin sont des garçons 9 fois sur 10. NOUS DEVONS ADAPTER L'ÉCOLE qui n'est pas conçue pour la biologie plus démonstrative des garçons. Ces derniers se retrouvent aussi 3 à 4 fois plus nombreux dans des domaines sans avenir. Le décrochage scolaire affecte les garçons 2 x plus que les filles. Certains disent que l'écart entre le taux de décrochage des filles et des gars n'est que de 6-7%. Mais, si le taux de décrochage est de 7% pour les filles et de 14% pour les gars, on peut aussi affirmer que les gars ont un taux de décrochage 100% plus élevé que les filles. Les 2 façons de voir sont véridiques.

Les classes d'adaptations comptent généralement 3 X plus de garcons que de filles. Les garcons sont aussi 3 a 4 X plus nombreux a se retrouver dans des domaines ou il y a peu ou pas d'avenir.

Les hommes se suicident 4 à 5 x plus que les femmes.
Source : "Cahier technique de la Semaine provinciale de prévention du suicide, Édition 1999", une production de l'AQS, sous la direction de Lucie Charbonneau. Cette surmortalité masculine par suicide caractérise le Québec lorsqu'on le compare aux pays scandinaves et aux pays européens, qui présentent également des taux élevés de suicide. Sur l'ensemble des décès par suicide chez les hommes, la majorité survient chez des hommes âgés de moins de 55 ans, soit près de 8 décès sur 10. Enfin, les taux de mortalité les plus élevés sont observés chez les hommes âgés de 20 à 44 ans:

SUICIDES PAR GROUPES D'AGE (1997):

_________________________________________________________________________________

VOICI COMMENT LES JEUNES GARCONS VIVENT DES DISCIMINATIONS À L'ECOLE :

82,5% des élèves rejetés à la maternelle et au début du primaire par les enseignantes sont des garçons. Le rapport de recherche réparti sur 20 écoles, compile qualitativement les attitudes et les réponses des enseignantes et en vient à deux conclusions indéniables:
1- Les attitudes des enseignantes sont significativement plus favorables à l'égard des élèves filles qu'à l'égard des élèves garçons;
2- Plus de filles que de garçons sont considérées attachantes par les enseignantes alors que davantage de garçons que de filles sont considérés rejetés.
(Résumé d'une partie de la recherche): Revue des sciences de l'éducation, Vol. XXVI, n.1, p.35 à 54, Attitude des enseignantes de maternelle selon le sexe des élèves. Par Louise Paradis, Ph. D. et Pierre Potvin, Ph. D de l'Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. Année 2000. Page 48 tableau 3.

Recherche intégrale: Disponible au C.R.I.R.E.S. à l'Université Laval, Québec, sous le titre Facteurs de réussite dès le début de l'éducation préscolaire et du primaire (Vol. 5, no 3, 2000). En conclusion et recommandations:
· Recommandation 5: '' L'attitude de l'enseignante envers le garçon. Dans l'ensemble et de façon constante, il existe une différence significative entre l'attitude des enseignantes envers les garçons et les filles. Cette attitude est toujours plus positive à l'égard des filles et l'écart est important. De plus, nous retrouvons de façon constante une proportion plus grande de filles considérées comme de type attachant comparativement aux garçons et, inversement, la proportion des garçons considérés comme de type rejeté est significativement et constamment plus grande que celle des filles. Compte tenu de ces diverses constatations, nous recommandons:
· d'offrir aux enseignants la possibilité de se questionner sur leur relation et leur attitude envers les garçons à l'école, de remettre en question la conception du rôle de l'élève et de l'école qui, dans l'ensemble, semble mieux convenir aux filles qu'aux garçons.'' Page 104

Autres rapports de recherche:
· Salomon et Féat (1991) L'enseignant face aux rôles sexuels des filles et des garçons.: 84% des enseignants voient des différences d'attitude entre les sexes et ils utilisent des qualificatifs différents pour caractériser chaque groupe. Les épithètes qui concernent les garçons sont nettement plus défavorables que celles choisies pour les filles
· Ferguson, Lloyd et Horwood (1991) Teacher evaluations of the performance of boys and girls.: Les résultats montrent que les enseignants tendent systématiquement à évaluer plus favorablement la performance des filles que celle des garçons.
· Potvin et Rousseau (1993) Attitudes des enseignants envers les élèves en difficultés scolaires, Québec: Ont étudié les attitudes d'enseignants du primaire et du secondaire envers les élèves en difficulté. Les résultats révèlent que les enseignants présentent de façon significative des attitudes plus positives envers les filles qu'envers les garçons.
· Botkin et Twardosz (1988) Early Chilhood Research Quartely: Ont observé, durant 37 semaines échelonnées sur deux ans, 47 enseignantes dans six maternelles. Ils ont enregistré les comportements d'ordre affectif de ces enseignantes et vers qui elles les dirigeaient. Les comportements observés incluent le sourire, des mots d'affections, des contacts physiques d'affections et des contacts physiques passifs d'affections. Les résultats révèlent que les enseignantes expriment plus d'affections aux filles qu'aux garçons.
· Brais (1991) Retard scolaire au primaire et risque d'abandon scolaire au secondaire. Ministère de l'Éducation du Québec. Met en évidence que le phénomène de l'abandon scolaire semble prendre racine dans l'expérience de l'élève dès le primaire.

Certains de ces problèmes affectent aussi les filles, mais comme nous venons de le voir, c'est de façon beaucoup moins sévère.

#3 Début de l'age adulte:
L'EDUCATION POST-SECONDAIRE:

Tout ceux qui travaillent dans le domaine de l'éducation connaissent le programme Chapeau les filles et le programme Exel science, 2 programmes qui permettent aux jeunes filles d'avoir une aide globale et financière pour percer dans des domaines où l'homme est encore majoritaire. Pourtant, les facultés universitaires du Québec sont très nettement composées de jeunes filles. Si la tendance se maintien, certaines facultés de médecine et de droit verront la disparition prochaine des hommes. Ces facultés sont déjà à 70-80% composées de femmes. MAIS LA SOCIÉTÉ CONTINUE d'aider les filles qui partent déjà avantagées dès la plus tendre enfance. Plus grave encore, on ne fait TOUJOURS RIEN pour aider les garçons à s'orienter dans des domaines à prédominances féminines.

Je suis moi-même étudiant à l'UQAM et malgré que je connaisse les chiffres, je suis toujours étonné de l'absence des hommes. Veut-on la disparition complète des hommes? Pourquoi n'est-il pas possible d'aider les femmes sans nuire aux garçons ou plutôt pourquoi ne pas aider autant les garçons et les filles pour construire une société VRAIMENT égalitaire? Voilà 3 questions qui méritent chacune une analyse sérieuse, mais je vais m'en tenir à la question principale de mon travail qui est de démontrer les discriminations que vivent les hommes à tous les stades de leur vie.

Proportion des femmes dans différents domaines d'études universitaire en 2002

Art: 64%
Administration/gestion: 51%
Science de l'éducation: 80%
Droit: 61%
Lettres: 72%
Sciences sociales: 64%
Sciences appliquées: 27%
Sciences pures: 51%
Sciences de la santé: 75%

Source: Régie régionale de la santé et des services sociaux de la Montérégie

TAUX D'OBTENTION DES DIPLOMES:

Taux d'obtention de diplômes selon le sexe pour les années 1998-2000 au Québec, Source des données: Portrait social du Québec Données et analyses Édition 2001, ISBN : 2-551-21424-6. Chap. 7, page 184 tableau 7.4 et page 190 tableau 7.8.:

au secondaire adolescents: 76,8% --- adolescentes: 90,4%
au collégial jeunes hommes: 29,7% -- jeunes femmes: 49.4%
au baccalauréat hommes: 21,7% --- femmes: 33.0%

En bref le 1/4 des garçons n'obtiendront pas leur diplôme secondaire, comparativement à 1/10 pour les filles

Depuis les 20 dernières années au Québec, de façon constante, à tous les âges et avec un écart important, sans exception, les garçons sont exclus du système pour une raison ou une autre, dans une proportion significativement plus importante que les filles. Les conséquences du décrochage dans la vie d'un jeune sont d'un dommage indescriptible à court, moyen et long termes ... délinquant, rejeté socialement, il handicape sa réussite sociale à plusieurs niveaux, ses rêves, ses aspirations ... et encore bien plus.

Source des données: Portrait social du Québec Données et analyses Édition 2001, ISBN : 2-551-21424-6. Chap. 7, page 186 Tableau 7.6

Les problèmes de réussite et de persévérance des garçons prennent de l'importance au fur et à mesure qu'ils progressent dans le système éducationnel québécois. Le ministère de l'Éducation a établi qu'en 2000, le taux d'obtention du diplôme au collégial (DEC ou autre) chez les femmes était plus d'une fois et demie plus élevé que chez les hommes (47,9 % contre 28,9%). Cet écart entre les deux sexes est allé grandissant depuis l'année 1975-76, passant de 2,7 points à près de 20
#4 L'âge adulte:
Le SUICIDE continue d'affecter les hommes 4 ou 5 x plus que les femmes, mais les femmes continuent de faire 4 fois plus de tentatives.

Le marché du travail :

* Loi 143
(avril 2001)......concernant les quotas à emploi dans les organismes parapublics et péripublics ...une mesure qui devait être temporaire... Cette loi instaure une obligation légale pour les organismes parapublics d'engager en priorité les femmes dans les secteurs où elles sont déjà
très largement en majorité. Interdiction légale de discriminer positivement les hommes à
l'embauche dans les secteurs où ils sont très largement en minorité.

Au départ, toutes les mesures discriminatoires ( art. 92 de la Charte et loi 143 )
devaient être temporaire, une fois les objectifs atteint:
Source: www.mrci.gouv.qc.ca/civiques/fr/280_2.asp

Voici un document qui explique le fonctionnement de la loi 143;
www.mensongefeministe.ca/loi143.html

LES MESURES DISCRIMINATOIRES SONT TOUJOURS EN PLACE. Pourtant, la fonction
publique du Québec, les organismes publics, organismes parapublics et péripublics sont maintenant majoritairement féminins. (+ ou moins 55% de femmes en 2004 et en progression d'environ 1 % par année )

Concernant le programme CHAPEAU les FILLES: Soit qu'on implante CHAPEAU les GARS
dans les domaines traditionnellement féminins ou soit qu'on mette fin à ce programme discriminatoire envers les hommes..
[ Loi 143 voté par le PQ en avril 2001 ]
__________________________________________________________________________________
*Loi sur l'équité salariale (loi 35)
(21 novembre 1997). Au départ, l'article 19 de la charte, en vigueur depuis 1982, établit
l'assise juridique de l'équité salariale. Cet article devait sa raison d'être pour corriger les injustices que subissaient les femmes. Mais la loi 35, qui touche autant les secteurs public et privé, part du principe que les femmes gagnent globalement 60 à 70% du salaire des hommes, tout en "oubliant" de mentionner que les femmes travaillent globalement de 60 à 70% du temps des hommes. OUI, je suis d'accord pour défendre le principe de: TRAVAIL ÉGAL, SALAIRE ÉGAL. NON, je ne suis pas d'accord d'utiliser de fausses statistiques pour promouvoir des injustices et des exagérations. En 2003, selon les dernières statistiques, pour chaque HEURE TRAVAILLÉE, les femmes gagnent AUTANT que les hommes.
Source : www.mensongefeministe.ca/salaire.html

Si les femmes gagnent moins que les hommes, c'est tout simplement parce qu'elles travaillent
moins et que globalement, elles passent plus de temps à la maison. Peut-être faudrait-il
augmenter les allocations versées à la personne qui reste à la maison. Voilà je crois, une
façon HONNÊTE et constructive d'aborder l'inégalité de REVENU (et non salariale) dont se plaignent les femmes. Encore un exemple de deux poids, deux mesures? Pourquoi ne pas corriger TOUTES les inégalités?

Pour l'instant, le lobby féministe et surtout les syndicats se BASENT SUR LA FAUSSE STATISTIQUE QUI DIT QUE LES FEMMES GAGNENT 60% A 70% DU SALAIRE DES
HOMMES POUR LE MEME TRAVAIL. Si vous avez lu le document ci-dessus
( www.mensongefeministe.ca/salaire.html ), vous avez pu constater que pour CHAQUE HEURE TRAVAILLÉE, LES FEMMES GAGNENT AUTANT SINON PLUS QUE LES HOMMES !!!!
Ces 2 lobbys MANIPULENT les politiciens et l'opinion public pour siphonner toujours plus
d'argent aux gouvernements !
[ Loi 35, voté par le PQ en 1997 ]

_____________________________________________________________________________________

CELIBATAIRE?, MARIÉ?, CONJOINT DE FAIT? SEPARÉ? Avec ou
sans enfant? Je vais analyser chacune de ces situations et leur impact sur les hommes.

Ici, nous verrons que le célibataire SANS enfant et habitant seul et l'homme marié
sont nettement avantagés par rapport à l'homme divorcé ou séparé
(s'il n'était pas marié) avec ou sans enfant.

En 1975, LA DECLARATION DU FEMINISME a ouvert la guerre au mariage en affirmant que
cette institution était issue du patriarcat et était destinée à contrôler la femme ! Nous allons voir que pour l'homme; le fait de se marier et d'avoir des enfants constituent un grand risque pour son bonheur, sa réussite sociale et sa santé mentale. ! Le mariage et surtout la rupture du mariage sont devenus un véritable piège à con pour les hommes. Là-dessus, les féministes ont gagnées! Elles ont rendu le mariage et le divorce si dommageable pour l'homme qu'il faut être soit fou ou vouer une foi aveugle à l'égard de la femme pour s'y aventurer !

#5 HOMME MARIÉ et DIVORCÉ AVEC ENFANT (cela affecte environ 50% des hommes mariés avec enfant)
Après une séparation, les hommes avec enfants N'AURONT PAS DROIT D'AVOIR contact avec leurs enfants de façon ÉGALITAIRE avec la mère. Plus de 70% des femmes ont la garde EXCLUSIVE de leurs enfants.

· La garde légale des enfants octroyée au père dans les décisions des tribunaux, a diminué de 3,3% au Canada entre 1978 et 1990, au profit de la garde partagée. .
· La garde légale des enfants octroyée au père dans les décisions des tribunaux, est demeurée stable à ~15% au Québec entre 1986 et 1996, au profit de la garde partagée.

Dans ce lot, de 50 à 70% (selon les études) des pères auraient voulus avoir une garde partagée, mais n'auront droit qu'à une fin de semaine sur 2, en sus de quelques jours durant les congés annuels. Ceci constitue, à mes yeux et à ceux de la majorité des Québécois, l'injustice la plus flagrante commise à l'égard des hommes dans cette société. Si le temps de garde n'était pas rattaché au montant de la pension concomitante, peut-on imaginer que la garde partagée serait la norme?

96% des payeurs de pension alimentaire sont des hommes au Québec
Source: Gouvernement du Québec, Ministère du Revenu, Loi d'accès à l'information, nu: 01-360047, année 2001. Pages 2 et 3

50% du 4% des femmes qui doivent payer des pensions alimentaires, "s'arrangent" (par le biais de la cour) pour échapper à leurs obligations !

Mais 96% des hommes (qui doivent payer une pension par ordonnance de la cour) sont soumis au régime de perception automatique et la cour ne permet pas aux hommes d'échapper à cette obligation... ( jurisprudence disponible )

Si la pension était calculée en fonction des besoins DE BASE REELS des enfants et non sur le revenu des parents (ou sur le temps de garde), peut-on imaginer que la garde partagée serait la norme?

96% de 1 milliard ( 962 200 000 $) de dollars en 5 ans ( connus dans le système ), a été payé par les hommes pour les femmes et leurs enfants au Québec seulement (entre le 1 décembre 1995 et 31 mars 2000). Source: Gouvernement du Québec, programme de perception des pensions alimentaires 2000. Page: faits saillants.

VOICI COMMNENT FONCTIONNE LA LOI SUR LES PENSIONS ALIMENTAIRES et aussi la loi sur la perception automatique

* Loi sur la fixation des pensions alimentaires pour enfants
( et loi sur les droits de garde et de visite au fédéral) ...(1997).C'est la plus flagrante aberration du monde...Cette loi est tellement anti-enfant et anti-homme......70% des enfants vont n'avoir qu'une mère APRÈS une rupture ! Même si 50 à 70% (selon les études) des pères demandent et/ou désirs une garde partagée ... les pères acceptent souvent une entente à l'amiable (80% des cas) qui laissent les enfants + souvent qu'autrement avec la mère, car ils savent qu'ils n'obtiendront pas plus que ce que leurs ex-conjointes daigneront leur laisser ! Seuls les avocats ou autres intervenants honnêtes vous le diront!... Encore là, cette loi visait à corriger des torts passés, mais a créé les pires iniquités....CONTRE LES HOMMES....Les enfants ne sont pas la propriété de la mère...tout comme le marché du travail n'appartenait pas aux hommes !!!! TOUTES les études sérieuses démontrent que les enfants (en majorité) désirent leurs 2 parents et TOUTES les études sérieuses démontrent que les enfants ont besoin des 2 parents, et ce pour des raisons différentes... Ici je ne parle pas d'$$$ mais bien pour leur développement !

Cette loi prévoit également une indexation annuelle des montants prévus dans la table de fixation des pensions, mais sans mentionner l'indexation de la déduction de base fixé arbitrairement à 9,000$ en 1997. Encore ici, ce sont les pères qui sont pénalisés par cet "oubli", eux qui représentent 96% des payeurs de pensions alimentaires. Cette déduction de base devrait être fixée à tout le moins au niveau du seuil de la pauvreté (entre 12,000$ et 15,000$ pour une personne vivant seule) et être indexée annuellement au même taux que la pension alimentaire.

Si le salaire du payeur de pension augmente d'une année à l'autre, la pension est ajustée automatiquement. Mais si le salaire du payeur diminue, il doit se payer un avocat pour faire rajuster le montant de la pension.
Enfin, la personne payant la pension qui retourne vivre en couple verra le revenu de sa(son) conjoint(e) pris en compte pour établir le montant de la pension alimentaire. Mais le revenu du nouveau conjoint de la personne qui reçoit la pension est "ignoré" dans le calcul.

Modification à la loi novembre 2003:

( Le projet de loi 21 par M. Marc Bellemare, ministre de la justice du parti Libéral);
Les juges devront désormais tenir compte des enfants nés d'une seconde union lorsque viendra le temps d'établir le montant de la pension alimentaire. Le régime actuel est, depuis longtemps, dénoncé pour son iniquité envers les hommes car les montants de pension sont calculés en tenant compte seulement des enfants issus de la première union du père. De plus, le montant d'exemption de base sera relevé à 10,000$ (sans indexation annuelle) et les pensions ne seront + automatiquement indexées. C'est une bonne nouvelle mais c'est loin, même très loin de la coupe aux lèvres.. Suite aux pressions du puissant lobby des avocats (i.e. le barreau), toute référence à un service administratif de révision des pensions alimentaires a été éliminé du projet de loi 21. Les payeurs devront continuer à payer des montants d'honoraire faramineux à un membre du barreau pour mettre fin à une pension alimentaire concernant un enfant majeur, financièrement autonome. Le projet de loi non déposé au printemps dernier (2003) par le ministre Bégin (PQ) prévoyait une telle mesure.
[ La loi est en vigueur depuis le 1 mai 1997, Responsable de cette loi: Louise Harel, ministre de la Sécurité du revenu et ministre responsable de la Condition féminine au sein du PQ]

...et la loi sur la perception automatique des pensions:

* Loi sur la perception automatique des pensions alimentaires appliqué par le ministère du revenu du Québec
(1 déc 1995) : Très inéquitable envers la MAJORITÉ des papas qui payent leur pension de façon régulière. Il faudrait modifier cette loi pour exempter TOUS les papas de cette mesure draconienne et irrespectueuse. Les mesures de perception automatique seraient appliquées SEULEMENT pour les parents fautifs. (Comme dans tous les autres pays Occidentaux)
[ Loi 60, en vigueur depuis le 1 déc. 1995, Responsable de cette loi: Jeanne L. Blackburn , ministre de la Sécurité du revenu et ministre responsable de la Condition féminine au sein du PQ ]

Voici un cas réel concernant l'avantage des femmes sur les hommes suite à une séparation. CE CAS N'EST PAS L'EXEPTION MAIS LA NORME AU QUEBEC :
Nombre de suicide par année
(hommes en bleu foncé et femmes en jaune):
_______________________________________________________________________

Meutres entre conjoints aux USA ( Il n'existe pas de données spécifiques pour le Québec, mais il n'est pas faux d'affirmer que la situation est comparable à celle qui prévaut aux USA)

Source : U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics (B.J.S.). Meurtres entre conjoints; résultats des différentes sentences données, hommes versus femmes, dans les 75 plus importants comtés des États-Unis. Source des données: Spouses Murder Defendants in Large Urban Counties (B.J.S.), September 1995, nu. NCJ-153256. Enquête du gouvernement fédéral, données compilées par Patrick L. Langan, Ph. D., et John M. Dawson.

540 cas de meurtres entre conjoints,
318 hommes accusés (59%) et 222 femmes accusées (41%):

Ceux et celles déclarés coupables de crimes:
· Hommes: Moyenne de 16,5 années de prison --- Femmes: Moyenne de 6 années de prison. Page 18, tableau 32.
· Hommes: 43% condamnés à plus de 20 ans --- Femmes: 15% condamnées à plus de 20 ans. Page 18.
· Hommes: 69% utilisent une arme à feu ou un couteau pour tuer --- Femmes: 95% utilise une arme à feu ou un couteau pour tuer. Page 2, tableau 3.
· Hommes: 5% ont eu une sentence de probation --- Femmes: 12% ont eu une sentence de probation. Page 16, tableau 27.
· Hommes: 81% sentencés de prison --- Femmes: 57% sentencées de prison. Page 16, tableau 27.
· Hommes: 2% acquittés --- Femmes: 14% acquittées. Page 15, tableau 22.

Une autre compilation de données concernant les meurtres entre conjoints a été faite entre 1948 et 1952 et réalisée par Marvin Wolfgang. Elle démontre que 34% des femmes étaient acquittées comparativement à 4% pour les hommes. Page 23.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

UN PORTRAIT GLOBAL FAIT PAR UNE FEMINISTE non hostile aux hommes et CONNUE, DENISE BOMBARDIER:

"Les statistiques sont alarmantes. Les hommes de demain seront sous-scolarisés, plus pauvres et donc plus démunis socialement que les femmes. Le phénomène s'observe partout au Canada mais c'est encore une fois au Québec que l'inversion de la situation est la plus spectaculaire. On savait déjà que les filles réussissent mieux en classe, qu'elles décrochent moins que les garçons, qu'elles sont désormais très majoritaires dans certaines professions libérales, la médecine au premier chef, voilà que les chiffres indiquent qu'il s'agit d'une tendance lourde et que l'écart entre les hommes et les femmes va s'accentuer au profit des seules femmes."

Source:Denise Bombardier, Le sexe fort en perte d'avenir,
Le Devoir, Édition du samedi 7 et du dimanche 8 septembre 2002.
http://www.ledevoir.com/2002/09/07/8680.html http://www.autonhommie.org/lautonhomme/novembre/sexefort.htm

CONCLUSION

APRÈS CELA ON SE DEMANDE POURQUOI LE TAUX DE NATALITÉ BAISSE DE FAÇON AUSSI DRASTIQUE AU QUÉBEC.

APRES CELA ON SE DEMANDE POURQUOI TANT D'HOMMES SE SUICIDENT AU QUEBEC...

Aucun autre endroit au monde n'exerce autant de discrimination CONTRE les hommes qu'au Québec. Cette discrimination sexiste n'est pas la seule RAISON de la dénatalité, mais il s'agit certainement d'une des principales cause de la situation. Cette discrimination explique pourquoi les hommes ne veulent plus faire d'enfants. Lorsqu'on ajoute l'égoïsme et le matérialisme ambiant, on a un portrait COMPLET des raisons de la dénatalité. C'est à ce moment-ci qu'on entend les féministes (hommes et femmes) ricaner le plus fort. Les féministes sont persuadées que les femmes d'ici vivent la même situation d'opprimée face à l'homme oppresseur, dynamique retrouvée dans les sociétés tiers-Mondiste. Je fais remarquer aux féministes, tel que je le disais au début de mon texte, que même si j'apporterais des faits INDÉNIABLES prouvant la discrimination dont souffrent les hommes du Québec, leur conditionnement idéologique les empêche d'admettre l'évidence et les faits OBJECTIFS !!

Si vous voulez vous déconditionner, c'est assez facile. Vous n'avez qu'à penser avec votre cœur! REGARDER LES FAITS! Cesser de focaliser sur les discriminations que vivaient les Québécoises dans le passé! OUI, les femmes d'ici ont subi des discriminations plus que les autres femmes. Nous n'avons qu'à penser à la fameuse OBLIGATION DE NE PAS EMPÊCHER LA FAMILLE qu'imposait l'Église catholique. Nul part ailleurs les femmes ne furent transformées en " machine à bébés " contre leur gré. Même l'africaine moderne n'accouche pas d'autant d'enfants que le faisait la Québécoise. Aucune menace d'excommunication ne pèse sur l'africaine si elle n'enfante pas! De plus, comme la plupart des femmes du Tiers-monde, les Québécoises avaient peu d'accès aux études supérieures, ou au marché du travail. Elles étaient infantilisées par des lois qui faisaient d'elles soient des possessions du père, du mari ou de l'Église ! .

Mais tout ceci fait partie du lointain passé.

La situation de la femme québécoise moderne fait l'envie du monde entier. ET C'EST BIEN AINSI !

Les hommes doivent donc ARRETER DE SE CULPABILISER pour les actions reprochées aux hommes du passé !!!

Vous n'avez peut-être pas été affecté par les différentes situations et lois discriminatoires...

Vous êtes privilégiés!

Mais vos grand-pères, votre père, vos frères, vos fils, vos amis n'auront peut-être pas la même chance. C'est pour ça qu'il est URGENT D'AGIR

Regardons la situation en face. Certes, il reste quelques améliorations qui peuvent être apportées à la situation des Québécoises. Mais ceci sera TOUJOURS vrai! Lorsque les femmes décident d'arrêter de travailler pour avoir un enfant ou pour s'occuper d'un parent malade, elles sont nettement désavantagées par rapport aux hommes. Mais, ce sera TOUJOURS les femmes qui enfanteront; c'est l'évidence même. Les femmes sont encore, en général, celles qui s'occupent du bébé une fois qu'il est né. Ce sont encore elles qui s'occupent le plus souvent d'un parent malade ou en perte d'autonomie

C'est pour cette raison qu'une ALLOCATION substantielle (comme en France) pour la personne qui reste à la maison devrait être créé pour compenser les efforts supplémentaires fournis plus souvent qu'autrement par une femme.

Néanmoins, et en dépit de ce que vous venez de lire sur certains besoins des femmes, c'est désormais l'homme qui subit le plus de discriminations et qui a le plus besoin d'appui! La seule chose qui vous empêche de vous rendre à l'évidence de ce FAIT est votre conditionnement idéologique!

Les hommes doivent cesser d'avoir peur de dénoncer les multiples injustices qu'ils subissent ! Les femmes ne doivent plus demeurer silencieuses face à de telles discriminations sexistes! Une souffrance ou une discrimination n'est pas plus pénible lorsque vécue par une femme. Nous, les hommes, sommes encore trop souvent bloqués par notre réflexe de stoïcisme mâle : ne pas exprimer et encore moins crier notre désarroi.

La plupart des hommes ont adhéré d'emblée au principe d'égalité prônée par les pionnières du féminisme. Ils les ont accompagnées dans leurs revendications, n'hésitant pas à descendre dans la rue à leur côté et se remettre en question jusque dans les plus intimes replis de leurs êtres. Est-ce trop demander aux femmes libérées un retour d'ascenseur?

Hélas, le statu quo, l'immobilisme actuel implique nécessairement la domination du sexe féminin sur le masculin... et un mouvement de ressac, minant jusqu'aux acquis les plus légitimes du mouvement féministe.

Recommandations:
1)Que l'état Québécois reconnaisse officiellement l'immense progrès de la condtion des femmes du Québec.
2)Que l'état Québécois reconnaisse que les hommes ont aussi besoin d'aide et qu'ils vivent de plus en plus de discriminations ET QU'IL AGISSE EN CONSÉQUENCE, mais sans toucher aux acquis légitmes des femmes.
3)Que l'état Quebecois encourage les classes non-mixtes
4)Que l'état Quebecois fasse une etude sur le lien qu'il pourrait avoir entre les ruptures conjugales et les suicides de pères/hommes
5)Que l'état Quebecois encourage les hommes ---par discrimination positive--- à devenir enseignant et à occuper d'autres domaines à prédominance féminine
6)Que l'état Québécois reconnaisse que les lois sur l'acces à l'egalité ( lois qui devaient être temporaire) ont donné les resultats escomptés (+ de 55% de femmes dans la fonction publique et para-publique en 2004... et en progression d'un % par année) et qu'il est temps de penser aussi aux hommes
7)Que l'état Québécois change ses façon de calculer les salaires des hommes et des femmes en INCLUANT le temps travaillé et en incluant les autres revenus non-comptabilisés
8)Que l'état Québécois fasse une étude exhausitive et non-biaisée sur les discriminations qui affectent les garçons/hommes/pères. ET QU'IL AGISSE EN CONSÉQUENCE.
9)Que l'état Québécois reconnaisse l'importance de la présomption de la garde partagée et qu'il fasse pression sur le fédéral pour qu'il adopte une loi allant dans ce sens !
10)Que l'état Québécois fasse une etude exhaustive et non-biaisée sur les trop nombreux cas de fausse allégation de violence conjugale/ abus sexuel
11)Que l'état Québécois adopte une nouvelle politique en matière de violence conjugale et d'abus sexuel. Pas pour aider les hommes coupables à échapper à une punition....mais bien pour PUNIR les fausses allégations TOUT en continuant de protéger les femmes et hommes réellement vicitmes. Cette politique doit aussi reconnaitre que les hommes aussi sont de plus en plus victime de violence conjugale.
12)Que la politique officielle de l'etat Québécois sur les abus sexuels inclus AUSSI les hommes... surtout les jeunes hommes

Finalement la recommandation la plus urgente et la plus importante:

Que l'état Québécois mette sur pied un Secrétariat à la condition masculine pour chapeauter toutes ces études et actions !

Le Québec est très avant-gardiste sur le plan social, tout comme la Suède... mais contrairement à ce pays, le Québec a vraiment négligé la condition masculine.

Le Québec a un Conseil permenent de la jeunesse ( http://www.cpj.gouv.qc.ca/ )
Le Québec a un Conseil des ainés ( http://www.conseil-des-aines.qc.ca/ )
Le Québec a un Office de la protection du consommateur
( http://www.opc.gouv.qc.ca/navig/default.asp )
Le Québec a un Conseil du Statut de la femme ( )
Le Québec a un Secrétariat à la condition féminine ( )
Le Québec a un Secrétariat aux aînés

Ce texte a été écrit par un membre des égalitaristes:
Site: www.egalitariste.org
Courriel: info@egalitariste.org

No Man Is An Island: How I Came To Be Involved In The Men's Movement

August 21, 2004

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by David E. Reiser, MD.

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“No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

--John Donne, 1572-1631

In July, 2000, a bailiff in a Colorado courtroom ordered me to rise. My lawyer was beside me and just before we stood up he had whispered in my ear, “Now, I’m warning you! Just shut up! Don’t you dare say a single word!”

“Is this the defendant?” the judge asked my lawyer.

My lawyer said, “Yes, Your Honor. This is Dr. Reiser.”

I was not a defendant. I had been charged with no wrongdoing. But at a time like this, that didn’t seem to matter. The judge cleared his throat and began to read the terms and conditions of the court’s will. I was to obey all stipulations of a permanent restraining order. It prohibited me from having any further contact with my son.

I listened in silence, my wrists handcuffed in front of me. I wore the crumpled blue cotton scrubs issued by the Denver City Jail the night before. My eyes were swollen and red from crying, and the left side of my face was abraded, caked with grime after lying all night on the concrete floor of my cell. Although my vision was blurry, I could see my son sitting two rows back. His expression was wooden; his eyes were blank. He wouldn’t look me in the eye.

“When I specify that you are to have no contact with your son,” the judge said, “I mean no contact of any kind. You are not to see him. You are not to call him. You cannot write to him—not so much as a birthday card. If you attempt to do this, I will see you back in my Court. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

He turned to my lawyer. “Make sure than he does understand, Counselor.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

Memory can be quirky at times of great intensity, such as when your life is falling apart. In crisis, it may fail to register certain details altogether. Others it burns into the circuitry with too much intensity. There doesn’t appear to be any logic to this—it’s more like a power outage. If you view it on a PET Scan, you feel as though you’re flying over some vast city late at night, just as the power grid starts to go. Some sectors disappear into the darkness. Next to them, others are blazing islands of light.

In the courtroom that morning there was a clock. It hung on a bare section of wall above and directly behind the judge, large in size and exceedingly plain—a clock of the standard institutional variety that every child remembers from elementary school. It had a black plastic rim, white face, unadorned black Arabic numerals, and a red sweep-hand.

In memory, there is always that clock, only it has grown much larger with time. Between each numeral there are four cross-hatches, each denoting one second. Thus I can tell you that the hearing began at 10:37. 15 AM and was adjourned at 10:48.45 AM.

In memory, the sweep-hand ratcheted ahead to the next notch in ultra-slow motion. The judge scowled down at me, peering over his bifocals with disdain. He held a sheet of paper and read from it, glancing up frequently to interject a comment, or simply for emphasis. Behind him was the clock. It was huge—four feet at least in diameter. And the sweep-hand was a sword blade. It was red because it had been dipped in blood.

I couldn’t hear the judge’s words. They came out silently, one-by-one, like small rodents emerging from a cave —blind and ugly, creeping out only after dark. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I could see what he was saying—his reddened face and the way his lips curled around the words he formed told the story. He was saying: “Blah-blah-blah-blah…You disgusting subhuman piece of shit… Blah-blah-blah-blah…..Wife beater! Stalker! Scum! Scuzzball! Lowlife!...Blah-blah-blah-blah…If I could, I’d hang you myself… Blah-blah-blah-blah…”

I kept my gaze directly on the sweep-hand of the clock as it ticked off the seconds. It advanced slowly, lurching ahead suddenly to the next notch and then pausing there. It would be still for quite a while. Then it would suddenly twitch and lunge ahead to the next notch. When it arrived, it made a sound, a sound that was in every way what you would expect a sweep-hand to sound like, except that its volume was turned up too high. It was as loud as a Tibetan Gong. TICK…TOCK…TICK…TOCK…

What can I say about all of this? I had done nothing wrong, but I had lost my son. I didn’t believe it could really be happening. Even as I write this now, four years later, I realize that I still haven’t fully conceded it in the innermost core of my being.

I lost my son. I lost him for absolutely no reason other than the fact that my ex-wife was determined to seek vengeance during a divorce and, shockingly, was assisted by an extensive cadre of people eager to assist her in wreaking as much damage as possible—the courts themselves. I believed in America and I believed in its system of laws. Then this happened. So—what can I say?

Should I strive for eloquence, picking my words with extreme care, seeking to draw certain emotions from you? What emotions? To what end? Or should I just say that I was inwardly destroyed, knowing that such a phrase is just meaningless words, but also knowing that nothing I say can ever explain what it is like to go through this. It is shattering.

It’s simplest in the end just to say that I lost my son and that losing him has left a void in me. Remembering him now brings a feeling of hollowness in me, and yet strangely it is a hollowness that is full of him. After four years, I don’t think about him less, which is what most people believe should be my goal. I think about him all the time.

Every holiday I think back to times I spent with him. I’ll start to smile at a memory when suddenly a fist clutches me from within. It feels like a cold hand that is only half-alive, existing inside of me for one reason only—to remind me of the truth. Whenever I recall loving times, the hand reaches up and starts to squeeze. Every day I remember him. And every day the fist clenches its fingers tighter.

I can tell you this: If grief were really about gradually withdrawing love from someone until none remains, and then watching with growing indifference as the person’s image fades away—then I would want no part of grief. No pain is so great that I would be willing to forget the love I have for my son.

It’s curious. For all of my own anguish that morning, no one else in the courtroom seemed to feel much of anything. I exclude my son from this assessment. He had to cram his pain so far down that he became almost robotic. My ex-wife chattered away breezily with three “Victim’s Assistance Advocates” who had accompanied her to court. As nearly as I could determine, the judge seemed completely unaffected. I suppose that’s because for him the matter was so routine. He’d done it hundreds of times. My lawyer also seemed indifferent. I suppose that he had known the outcome all along, had known that the judge’s ruling was a foregone conclusion. I suppose that for him this was all in a day’s work.

At one point I recall scanning the spectators in the gallery. Every one of them had that stupid blank expression that people get when they’ve been watching hours of TV. Collectively they reminded me of cloth dolls, the ones that have buttons sewn in for eyes and a nose, the kind in which the buttons quickly come off. I beheld three rows of washed out terrycloth sacks. Their eyes had all been chewed away. Their mouths were comprised of a single puckered purse-stitch. They looked as though they were all saying, “Oh! What a surprise!” Or, perhaps they might have been blowing on soup that was still too hot to swallow.

Am I the only one who is disturbed by this? Shouldn’t more people react when a man’s son is taken from him for absolutely no reason? Does everyone honestly believe that a tragedy similar to this one could never happen to him? John Donne wrote his Seventeenth Meditation four hundred years ago. It’s always a favorite of junior high school civics teachers who are trying to instill proper values in their students. But when I look at the world around me I see little evidence for brotherhood. I see people huddled in the shadows, keeping to themselves. They’re saying, “I don’t want to get involved”… “It’s not my problem.”…”I can’t handle this.”…

And it’s too bad because the bell really does toll for all of us. When I was writing this column, I came across an article in Men’s News Daily by Jim Manion. In it he raised the very real possibility that Al Q’uaeda already has nuclear devices hidden in the United States. If the worst comes true, what are the rest of us going to do when CNN reports that Detroit and Buffalo are gone?

I lost my son. Let’s just leave it at that…

This is the place in such a narrative where I am expected to tell you that living through the trauma was sheer hell, but somehow I managed to succeed and get on with my life. OK—Somehow I endured. Let’s fast forward.

After a year I was still spiraling deeper into depression. I was that astronaut in 2001 that HAL sent hurtling out into the universe by cutting his oxygen line. That guy went ass over tea-kettle straight into the void, and Kubrick kept the camera trained on his eyes the entire time. He was conscious all right. He knew what was happening.

So did I. I knew that I had to do something, too. I was dying inside and no one else could or would help me. What I did was to become active in the Men’s Movement. What I did not do is just as important. I did not go back into psychoanalysis. I figured that seven years ought to have been enough. It’s important for me to say that because I’m a psychiatrist. We all tend at times of duress to fall back on what is familiar and I might logically have been expected to seek psychotherapy.

I knew enough about psychotherapy, however, to know that it would not work. In saying this, I wish to make it clear that I am not being cynical. I am not opposed to therapy—not at all. But when a problem originates in a societal injustice, treating it with a form of therapy that focuses on one’s inner psychic world is the opposite of what is needed.

My son and I had been subjected to an act of unpardonable cruelty. If anything was pathological, it was the system that had done this. I joined the Men’s Movement, educated myself about the issues, and commenced to strive along with many others to fight back.

In my previous column, I described a phone call that I received from an old friend. After we had caught one another up on recent events in our lives, he had grown awkward and uncharacteristically tongue-tied. Finally, he blurted out what was on his mind. He told me he hoped, now that I was moving ahead once again in my life, that I had come to my senses and disavowed “all of that crap with the Men’s Movement.”

When someone feels this adamantly about something, I am inclined to wonder whether my experience might be stirring up conflicts in him, perhaps unconsciously. I suspected this in my friend and although I was annoyed I wasn’t surprised. I’ve heard similar sentiments any number of times and have come to believe that this reaction is very common.

I think that my friend’s attitude came from denial and that underneath it he felt very threatened. I also think that my friend’s denial is widespread. As a society, we are all, in my view, minimizing and denying the significance of divorce.

There is an epidemic right now. In fact, there’s a pandemic. The problem has spread across the globe. With one in two marriages ending in divorce, something is obviously gravely wrong. It’s absolutely astonishing, therefore, that no one is saying this straight out, screaming it, bellowing it at the top of his lungs— “THIS IS A TOTAL CATASTROPHIE!” I can only explain that as being due to our mass denial.

We minimize divorce’s significance all the time: Nightly TV talk show hosts engage in clever repartee about it. We all nod and agree that it “happens to just about everybody” Meg Ryan fakes an orgasm in one of the funnier scenes captured in a movie. And I would say, “Kudos,” except that the subject of divorce isn’t all that funny. Its shadow falls over the landscape of everything that we do, all that we are. It falls across our schools (where we see the children who inevitably suffer the most); it falls across our churches (where most moral leaders seem to be more baffled than helpful); and it falls across our mental health centers and counseling suites. Organized psychiatry and psychology have done their usual abysmal job of seeing the problem for what it is. These institutions partake in a level of denial that is at least as great as the rest of society. Perhaps they’ll come up with a new position on the matter in a few years after taking a vote.

It also falls across this country’s lawyers, only they don’t seem to notice. They’re too busy driving their BMW’s through the rush-hour congestion to the Deposit window at the bank.

No one seems to be cutting through the bullshit and declaring a state of emergency, so the shadow keeps growing. No one is confronting the truth except for the Men’s Movement.

Here we come to a vexing situation, a bona fide puzzlement. Perhaps you have noticed, as I have, that most people in this society are completely oblivious to the struggles of the Men’s Movement. Most men and women who have not been recent victims of a divorce seem to be absurdly insouciant about the whole matter. Such noblisse oblige certainly cannot be justified on the basis that divorce won’t happen to them. It’s closer to fifty-fifty that it will.

I have yet to view a single substantive television documentary on the Men’s Movement. Where are Sixty Minutes, Front Line, CNN, and PBS? It has to be denial. We live in a society where political action groups mobilize around almost anything, but it’s very strange indeed to consider that more citizens are apparently worried about irradiated produce in supermarkets than they are about the way we are nuking the psychological futures of half our children. It has to be denial.

It has to be denial and I am convinced that our culture’s astonishing indifference to this Movement, which is the only one that is confronting reality at this time, stems from massive levels of denial. We are dealing with a classical case of “stoning the messenger” here. I fear the consequences of it.

I’m going to discuss the implications of this further in Part III of this series, “The Uses of Shame,” in which I will address the unconscious conflicts, impulses, and fears that abound in divorce. Unconscious conflicts comprise, in fact, an enormous ocean which surrounds the small island of our (apparent) reason when we deal with this subject. If you stop and consider the matter for a moment, I think you’ll agree that the path of any serious conjecture leads directly here.

What is really amazing is that these matters are never mentioned. But then, that’s the way people have always been about these matters. If sexuality was our culture’s ultimate taboo in Victorian times, it seems to me that the demise of marriage and the nuclear family is what we dare not speak of now.

Before I proceed to the subject of all that we deny, repress, and disavow, however, I believe that it is important to clear away some underbrush that’s grown in right where we are standing, and in plain view. Since a surprising number of people haven’t got a clue about what this Movement stands for, perhaps it’s time to review some of the basics.

jeudi, août 19, 2004

France: The EU's Emerging Islamist Center
August 19, 2004

by Tom Marzullo

The Europeans are about to reap one of the long-term benefits of their guest worker programs and the bombs at the Barcelona train station are just a taste of what is yet to come courtesy of France.
France you see, has long welcomed the Islamists first under the guise of Algerians and others then the Iranian mullahs that, at the end of the 1970s sent the Shah packing. The Ayatollah was welcomed for a variety of reasons including making nice with Saddam (think trade), but perhaps the most telling is because it would eventually cause discomfort to the Americans who are never to be forgiven for liberating France from the Germans. And so it came to pass that the Ayatollah did just that and the wine flowed in Paris salons.
But that wonderful discomfiting of the Americans was not quite the freebie the nervous, smarmy effete from the Sorbonne had hoped for, as soon the usefulness of the French may be sorely tested and I am not just talking about turning even more of a blind eye to the burgeoning anti-Semitism again stalking Europe. This is because the French ruling class simply ask themselves what are a few hundred, even thousand, persecuted salir petits juifs to La Belle France anyway?
With the advent of Iranian efforts to secure hegemony over the Middle East, old Europe is going to be forced into choosing whether to take the side of the coming Islamist Empire or remain in the camp of the Americans, more or less. Given that the Islamists in France (and the former Western Germany) are aided in large part by inevitability of demographic change based on their birth rates , what passes for France will soon enough have to stop playing at its mostly-off-again role as friend of the United States to publicly become its true self.
Like France, China has also been hard at work establishing itself as a bona-fide Islamist supporter, since it is their technology that enables the Iranian nuclear threat to the region. China can see the writing on the wall regarding the need to secure a dependable source of oil, since their needs can reasonably be expected to grow at a rate much greater than the rest of the world for at least a decade to come as it moves from a organically-powered internally sufficient production society to a exporting/consumer model in the western mode. Without oil, their industrial-powered economic growth and increasing standard of living must grind to a halt, so they have pragmatically moved to protect that. France also realizes which side their bread is buttered on and acts accordingly.
With the advent of a preemptive strike by the Israelis, the long-predicted showdown between Israel and Iran over the latters nuclear weapons program, the political lines will be drawn in earnest with France caught between a rock and hard place. If France does not come down on or very near the side of Iran and/or the Islamists (with the de rigor volume of disingenuous denials, assurances and other diplomatic newspeak ) then it is reasonable to anticipate that their Muslim population will begin to act out more than they do already that is.
The desecrations of World War Two military and Jewish cemeteries are old news, as are the ever increasing attacks on Jews in public places. But not so distant that Israel, ever mindful of Germany in the 1930s, would not publicly caution Jews to leave France . The Israelis understand the true value of President Chiracs assurances and condemnation of their warning they can read the statistics on demographics as well as anybody else and they too know that if the Jews leave France (Mon Dieu!) the only ones left to bear the fury of the Islamists will be Frenchmen. The Israelis also remember the tender mercies of the Milice (The WWII-era Vichy French Fascist military/police collaborators who killed and deported Jews amongst their other routine outrages) and know that reconstituting them is but a pen stroke away with the French Muslims there as well, just waiting to swell their ranks.
You might also consider that the French government is in no way uninformed as to the widespread nature of the Islamist movement amongst it citizenry, as France can rightfully boast of operating one of the worlds most pervasive and intrusive internal intelligence networks to spy on its own people . So, the issue at hand is not one of a lack of French awareness.
Given population shifts in France, French foreign policy that has been increasingly and openly hostile to the US and its allies, the firm organizational roots the Islamists have carefully grown in France over the past four decades, the European Union needs to keep more than just a weather eye on them as the French already have very capable nuclear weapons, the delivery systems and a disgusting history of insidious collaboration.
But then again, Europes dainty little citizens might have chosen to do their menial jobs themselves and saved themselves, and the world, this sorry turn of affairs. Merde
Tom Marzullo

Tom Marzullo is a columnist/physicist/educator who is a former US Army Special Forces combat soldier and US Navy Submariner with special operations experience in both services. He was the leader of the Internet-based effort by Special Forces veterans that debunked the false CNN/TIME magazine nerve gas story, 'Tailwind' and has provided testimony before the US Senate on military and intelligence matters. He resides in Colorado.

vendredi, août 13, 2004

Beer Goggles
Joe stopped at his favorite watering hole after a hard day's work to relax. He noticed a man next to him ordering a shot and a beer. The man drank the shot, chased it with beer and then looked into his shirt pocket.

This continued several times before Joe's curiosity got the best of him. He leaned over to the guy and said, "Excuse me, I couldn't help but notice your little ritual. Why in the world do you look into your shirt pocket every time you drink your shot and beer?"

The man replied, "There's a picture of my wife in there, and when she starts lookin' good, I'm headin' home!"

A man was driving home from work one evening when he suddenly realized
Christmas was tomorrow and he had not yet purchased his daughter a gift.
So, the man rushed off to the nearest toy store and asked the sales clerk,
"How much is that Barbie in the window?"

The sales clerk replied in a condescending tone, "Which Barbie? We have
Barbie Goes to the Gym for $19.95
Barbie Goes to the Ball for $19.95
Barbie Goes Shopping for $19.95
Barbie Goes to the Beach for $19.95
Barbie Goes Nightclubbing for $19.95 and Divorced Barbie for $265.00."

The overwhelmed man asked, "Why is the Divorced Barbie $265.00 and all the
others are only $19.95?"

"That's obvious!" said the sales clerk. "Divorce Barbie comes with Ken's
house, Ken's car, Ken's boat, and Ken's furniture."

jeudi, août 12, 2004

Men remain stuck in cages of their own creation
NS Essay
Richard Reeves
Monday 16th August 2004

Women's changing lives have been examined closely by academics, the media,
and even the Pope. But, argues Richard Reeves, it is how men cope with these
changes that will shape the future
Men, eh? One minute they are throwing flour-filled condoms at the Prime
Minister; the next, they are being appointed equal opportunities
commissioners. One day they are ascendant, dominating the commanding heights
of society; on the next, they are redundant, with withering skills and
withered chromosomes. They spend time with their children - but then more
time helping to fuel a boom in lap-dancing clubs.

It is time to ask Freud's question again but, this time, of the less fair
sex: "What does a man want?" The ambiguities, uncertainties and
contradictions of the modern man occur because men are in a critical time of
transition, one similar in depth and significance to the changes wrought and
experienced by women in the latter half of the 20th century. The direction
of society now rests, more than anything, on how men respond to the threats
and opportunities presented by the changes in women's lives.

Women are now reasonably clear about what they want. They want to lead lives
of their own choosing, rather than according to gendered assumptions. Women
want choice, autonomy, intimacy and equality in their personal
relationships. They want, essentially, one of the main rallying cries of the
women's movement writ large: the right to choose: to wear lipstick or not,
work or not, marry or not, drink or not. This is what the writer Natasha
Walter has dubbed "the new feminism".

Yet what about the lads? In theory, their choices are even greater: however,
to many, it doesn't feel like that. In the face of women's rising affluence,
confidence and eloquence, men can seem uncertain and threatened. At the
extreme, men's very survival seems in doubt, with regular headlines about
spermless birth and evidence that women live better without men.

In a chilling analysis, the geneticist Bryan Sykes argues that the Y
chromosome is being progressively destroyed and that, within a few thousand
generations, men will disappear altogether. "The human Y chromosome is
crumbling before our very eyes," he warns in his book Adam's Curse. "The
decay of the Y chromosome is . . . happening right now inside every testis
in the land. Look at the nearest man, or think of your own testicles if you
have them, and imagine the genetic damage going on in your trousers right
now." It's enough to put a chap off his pint.

Not that men are going down without a fight: indeed, almost all violent
crime and warfare is male-initiated. The principal characteristic of the
speeding driver, or bearer of an antisocial behaviour order, or murderer,
alcoholic and rapist, is that he is a he. And yet it is also true that men
spend three times as many hours caring for their children as their fathers
did, and that they match women in the grooming stakes.

Most important of all, the future of gender equality lies in the hands of
men. Women have changed their lives almost beyond their grandmothers'
recognition: the question is whether men will change, too. Women have
fuelled the engine of social progress for the past half-century. Now it is
the turn of men.

Men, however, are an under-studied and underpoliticised sex. We have
ministers for women, professors and university departments of women's
studies, pages of newspapers devoted to women, not to mention papal
encyclicals - but, on men, mostly a resounding silence. The reason usually
given is that all study - of politics, history, philosophy or art - is of
men. This misses the point. A study of political history may be populated by
men, but that is not the same as a study of them as men. Female politicians
are wearily used to explaining how their gender has influenced their
politics. For men, the question simply never arises. This is why the
departure of Alan Milburn, the former health secretary, caused confusion.
The first British politician who, when he said he was leaving to "spend more
time with his family", actually did plan to spend more time with his family,
Milburn disturbed the equilibrium of a political world built on the model of
a man with a wife raising the children.

The Jurassic nature of Westminster life may explain why our political
classes are responding so slowly to the new gender politics. The Tories have
made an implausible grab for the "fathers' rights" agenda, and some (mostly
female) Labour ministers are aware of the significance of changes in men's
lives. By and large, however, the emerging, messy politics of masculinity is
not to be found in SW1. This is a great pity, because the principal domains
in which conventional masculine models are starting to be challenged have
profound social and economic implications: for the way we work, and the way
we raise our children.

The labour market is built on the assumption that the paid worker has a wife
who will carry out domestic and child-rearing work - on a "buy one, get one
free" model. This is why trade unions used to fight for a "family wage", a
pay packet big enough to house, clothe and feed not only worker, but also
wife and family.

"[T]here used to be millions of invisible employees," writes the US
economist Shirley Burggraf. "Employers who once got two (an employee with a
back-up spouse at home) are now most often getting just one." The entry of
women into the labour force broke this mould. There are 13 million British
women in paid work, compared with 16 million men. Fifty-nine per cent of
married or cohabiting women with pre-school-age children are in a job.

So men no longer have wives who keep the home fires burning; they, too, are
in the labour market. Yet organisational culture and job design remain stuck
in the past; not least because most organisations are run by middle-aged
men, whose lives did follow the conventional pattern.

Men are increasingly complaining about their "work-life balance". This is
hardly surprising, given that the amount of time fathers spend with their
children has tripled in the past few decades even as working hours have
remained stable or - for many men - have increased. The government has
introduced a statutory right to a fortnight of paternity leave, but
ministers know that so long as it is only "paid" at statutory rates of
maternity pay - £100 a week - very few fathers will be able to afford to
take it. A test of Labour's willingness to support men will be whether it
raises paternity-leave pay to the 90 per cent of salary currently paid
during the first six weeks of maternity leave.

What men most need, however, is flexibility in working hours - compressed
weeks, variable start times and the opportunity to work from home. These can
come about only if men push for them. As Michael Kimmel, a writer on gender,
puts it: "We're trying to do what women want of us, what children want of
us, but we're not willing to transform the workplace."

Given that men have much of the power in the labour market, it is easy to be
scornful of their stated desires. If they don't like the way the
organisations which they run are built, what is stopping them from changing
them? There are two answers. The first is that, despite the increase in
women's employment and the narrowing of the pay gap, men remain the
principal breadwinner in three-quarters of even those families where the
mother is in full-time employment. Clearly, the male breadwinner is a long
way from passing into mythology.

The second obstacle to workplace reform is the close relationship between
paid work, occupational status and male identity. It is not just that most
breadwinners are men, it is that, to be a man, you have to be a breadwinner..
Again, it is difficult for some to muster sympathy. If the world teaches
boys that they must become successful at work, whose fault is that?

"For men to say they feel boxed in is regarded not as laudable political
protest but as childish and indecent whining. How dare the kings complain
about their castles?" writes Susan Faludi in Stiffed: the betrayal of the
modern man. But men, Faludi notes, are just as much prey to cultural forces
as women: "Women see men as guarding the fort so they don't see how the
culture of the fort shapes men. Men don't see how they are influenced by the
culture either: in fact, they prefer not to. If they did, they would have to
give up their illusion of control."

None the less, the baton of driving change in the workplace has now passed
to men. Unless men embrace new ways of working, existing inequalities will
remain as women continue to "juggle" children with work. Younger women, with
less feminist fire in their bellies than their elders, may look at the
lifestyle required of working mothers and decide not to bother, joining the
ranks of PhDs raising babies at home.

The twin assumptions that breadwinning is for men and child-rearing is for
women are deeply entrenched in our culture, and there should be no illusions
that the nirvana of Michael Young's "symmetrical family" can be reached
overnight.

Allison Pearson's successful novel I Don't Know How She Does It, which tells
the tale of a high-flying woman working in the City and her struggle to keep
her marriage and relationships with her children alive, is based on the
profoundly conservative assumption that the choice of Kate, the heroine, is
between working and caring for her children. At the end of the story, she
gladdens the heart of family-values campaigners everywhere by giving up her
job and moving out of London. The dangerous idea that her husband, whose
earnings as an architect barely cover the cost of the nanny, might give up
his job appears nowhere in the tale.

The care of children is the second area in which a new politics of
masculinity is being played out. Most obviously, Fathers 4 Justice has
grabbed the headlines with a variety of stunts designed to highlight the
plight of fathers denied access to their children after divorce or
separation. And there are certainly injustices; in the UK, the approach of
the state to separated fathers in recent decades has been based around the
pursuit of cash, largely through the Child Support Agency, with little
attention paid to the division of care. The recent reform of family law to
give dads more weight in custody decisions is therefore long overdue.

There is an argument for asking British courts to assume the granting of
equal custody, as in Australia and some other countries. However, there is a
danger here of describing the world as we would wish it to be, rather than
as it actually is. The interests of children are best served by the greatest
weight being attached to the person who has undertaken the bulk of their
care, which in most cases will be their mother. The courts should begin
treating men as equal carers when they are, in fact, equal carers.

There is little mileage in hoping for a decline in British divorce rates.
The miracle of our age is not that some couples decide they cannot spend the
rest of their long lives together, but that some do. The late historian
Lawrence Stone estimated that the median duration of marriage today is
exactly the same as it was a hundred years ago, when mortality was very much
higher: "Divorce, in short, now acts as a functional substitute for death."

Yet care of children in "intact" families is a political hot potato, too. A
battle is raging on the editorial floor of the Guardian and spilling out
into the homes of thousands of progressive women. Madeleine Bunting wrote a
long article arguing that nursery provision was not good for very young
children, and that women and feminists needed to face up to the consequences
of signing up to a male work ethic. Polly Toynbee replied angrily that such
arguments were anti-feminist. A number of women have piled in on either
side, with the political types mostly backing Toynbee and researchers mostly
backing Bunting.

A couple of points are worth noting about this debate, which might otherwise
be seen as a mere storm in a liberal feminist teacup. The first is that it
demonstrates how explosive the politics of childcare can be. The second is
the complete absence of men from the debate, whether as protagonists or
subjects.

Given the heat of the argument, the absence of men offering opinions is
perhaps not surprising. But here goes: the social, psychological and
biochemical evidence suggesting that paid childcare for young children is
detrimental, and especially so to those under the age of one, has come to
acquire compelling weight. This may be inconvenient, but inconvenience is
not sufficient reason to dismiss the possibility that our social and
economic arrangements are damaging our children. To paraphrase Keynes, when
the facts change, we should change our minds.

In any case, men cannot in good faith argue for more rights as fathers and
then stand aside from a debate about how children should be best raised. One
of the reasons the Bunting-Toynbee spat is so heated is that the options
presented are so narrow: either women have to stay in the labour market in
order to secure material and status equality with men, at some risk to their
children, or they have to stay at home in order to secure the well-being of
the next generation, but at the price of equality.

Yet there is another - perhaps even a third - way. If the debate were
couched in terms of parents, rather than just mothers, caring for their
children, then it would be perfectly possible to achieve both equality at
work and quality childcare at home.

The government is currently considering paying for the second six months of
maternity leave. How much better if this six months were converted to
parental leave, available to dads as well as mums? Imagine a world in which
women spent the first six months at home after childbirth, and then returned
to work while their partners stayed with baby for the next six months.
Result: a full year of devoted, quality parental care and complete equality
in the workplace.

Once again, we should not imagine for a moment that such a utopia is
imminent. But we should be clear that unless Labour at least makes such a
set of choices possible by altering its policy on the balance between
maternity and parental leave, the government will have lost all rights to
talk about gender equality.

Women have fought for and secured a wider range of choices about the way
they lead their lives. Men, meanwhile, remain stuck in cages of their own
creation. This makes the necessary transformation more complex, and in some
ways more painful. None the less, the social changes of the 21st century
must be led by men, otherwise both men and women will lose out. As the New
York writer Floyd Dell wrote in a prescient essay in 1917: "Half a life -
cooking, clothes and children: half a life - business, politics and
baseball. It doesn't make much difference which is the poorer half. Any
half, when it comes to life, is very near to none at all."

This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in current
and cultural affairs subscribe to the New Statesman print edition.

mercredi, août 11, 2004

I am woman, hear me whine
Maggie Gallagher (archive)

August 10, 2004 | Print | Send

For all the professional progress women have made, "I am woman, hear me whine" could be the mantra of the postmodern educated woman when it comes to relationships, especially marriage.

"Somehow we've even developed the notion that a woman who seeks to meet her husband's needs is subservient (but a husband who fails to meet his wife's needs is a pig)," points out Dr. Laura Schlessinger in her new book, "Woman Power." Its theme is that women have enormous power over men, especially the power to make your average, decent family guy feel miserably inadequate as a man.

I think Dr. Laura is onto something. Don't get me wrong: I know that more men today are more horribly irresponsible toward women and children than ever before. At the same time, never before have the good guys received so little appreciation from women, or affirmation from the larger culture, for their masculine contributions.

Perhaps there is a relationship between these two facts?

In my neighborhood, you see lots of good guys working crushing hours to pay for the nice homes with the good schools, ferrying their kids on the weekend from their multitudinous, highly scheduled, developmentally appropriate activities -- and stopping by to drop off dry-cleaning or pick up take-out along the way.

None of which (in my experience) stops us wives from complaining about their emotional inadequacies, or the difficulties in keeping the little hubby "on task." Career wives or homemaking wives, it seems to make little difference.

Some women routinely treat husbands in ways that, if husbands responded in kind would bring the universal condemnation of all womankind on their heads. You doubt? Pick up a copy of another new book, "The Bastard on the Couch," subtitled "27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood and Freedom," by Daniel Jones.

One artist-husband with a high-powered wife notes: "Every day, Gina prepares this list for me, with all the household tasks and details that I am responsible for completing before she arrives home from work that evening." Picking up his son at school, he observes the mothers. "I somehow doubt that any of them are carrying with them a list of chores from their husbands, detailing the various tasks they must perform that day. I would think that any of these women would laugh at her husband if he tried to give her such a list." (Laugh? Only if he's lucky.)

No doubt Gina would rightly say in her defense that the women do most of the things on her list without being asked. But that only highlights the essential dynamic here: As androgyny becomes the theoretical ideal, and sex differences are treated as nonexistent or suspect, women tend to make "parenting" synonymous with "mothering." And most men really just aren't as good as their wives at being mothers.

As one father tried to explain about his "parenting" experience: "Oh, look, the littler person is crying -- which of the five major reasons could it be? Let me go down the list, after I find the list. Where is the list? Meanwhile my wife will have solved the problem. She doesn't have to consult the list; she is the list."

What this gender confusion turns into "in our home," writes another family guy, "is a big Mexican standoff, with the Loved One saying, I'm making more money than my mother ever did! And The Jerk saying, I'm doing way more housework than my father ever did!"

Men marry because a wife and family give meaning and purpose to their lives. What they want, says Dr. Laura, is simple "appreciation, approval and affection from their women."

The problem is not that working wives want more help with household chores, or that all women want husbands deeply involved in family life. The problem comes when a culture of grievance (and the illusions of power it gives) replaces the cultivation of gratitude. Most especially, when appreciation, approval and affection get translated as "subservience" rather than love.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/maggiegallagher/mg20040810.shtml

vendredi, août 06, 2004

THE SAVAGE NATION
Muslims Take Over Canada, Impose Islamic Law

August 4, 2004

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Michael Savage

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Item: Muslims adopt Shariah legal code in Canada

The legal code of the Koran will override Canadian Law. Muslims claim they are different and demand that their Religious Law take precedence over Canadian Jurisprudence.

According to these retrograde humans, who have snuck in and who have been welcomed by extreme Liberalism, praying for the day that a braless society will become a lawless society; from burning their bras to burning the law books, Feminism has now been turned upside down by a male dominated religion so backwards that it is perfectly acceptable that a son receive twice the inheritance of a daughter and that a man have the automatic right to divorce, while a woman does not.

Will Canada next allow the stoning of adulterous women or the cutting off the hand of a thief? Both punishments are allowable in some Muslim Societies.

Although this Muslim Law contradicts Canada's Bill of Rights which guarantees the quality of both men and women, insane Liberals have dreamed of this day. The late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, a mentally deranged Liberal, dreamed of a Canada in which different customs and identities would live side by side and in harmony. Like all Liberals he detested Nationalism and wanted to see the end of a dominate Canadian Identity. The end of an official culture. The end of a melting pot. Liberals in Toronto today are calling this new shock to Canada, "In the spirit of multiculturalism."

At last, Feminism and Liberalism will come to be defeated by their own insane tolerance.

Michael Savage

samedi, juillet 17, 2004

Cant Find A Good Man? Blame Feminism!
July 17, 2004

by Resa LaRu Kirkland

Does any decent American man want a modern American woman?
Signs are thereno, they dont, or given our behavior, they shouldnt. And we only have women to blame. Yeah, I said itwomen.
Now Ive suspected this for a long time. After all, the damage done to society by the rants of feminismor as I call it, Pussy Politicsis far-reaching and deeply embedded into our education system, insuring that the next generation is as bludgeoned with the lie as their parents were.
My foray into this lie began years ago, when as a little girl I began hearing the rumblings of the classic crap line, Anything men can do women can do too. Women started en masse applying to become policemen, firemen, etc. But no matter how much they whined, the laws of physics stubbornly refused to adapt. Women just dont have the physical strength to carry a grown human being out of harms way, to run as fast, to control a bucking firearm with the power and innate ability of a man. Oh sure, there are exceptions, but our society is designed to cater to the rule while making allowances for the occasional exception. This is how we not only survive, but thrive. When we go the other waymaking laws that favor the exception rather than the rulesociety collapses in on itself, as weve been witness to in the past 40 years of Minority Rule.
Logic would dictate that the femmies take the hint, but logic has never been in bed with these dames. So the Bitch Brigade decided that since they couldnt control the laws of nature, then by God, they would force the laws of man to ignore the painfully obvious and manipulate society into doing things their way. Hence the birth of Pussy Politics.
One of the worst fallouts of thisthe first of many Ill be covering in later partsis the growing epidemic of false allegations of rape. It is a frightening trend in our society, and one that can be laid directly at the feet of femmies. When confronted with this, the femmies do everything they can to distract and evade the topic, and then even rationalize it. Apparently, men are so evil that even a false allegation is a small thing; it makes up for the times they got away with it, and for all the years of oppression! It evens the playing field, so its OK.
And theyve gotten away with it, too, because Pussy Politics long ago so bludgeoned and castrated men with the Guilt Stick that they dont dare protest. After all, in todays society, it is worse to be called racist or sexist than murdereror in the femmies case, liar. Theyve also gotten away with it because of the emotionthe ultimate femmie weaponthat rape conjures in both women and men. Disarm the brain with an overwhelming emotional response so you can shove your crap in there.
And shove the Bitch Brigade does.
In the first four months of the year, I read of at least three cases of false rape claims, and thats just me, in my little neck of the woods. They are coming faster, more frequently than in the past, and by younger and younger females. This is an ominous sign of a plague 40 years in the making.
Why this latest epidemic? The daughters and granddaughters of the First Femmies have been taught three hard and fast truths when it comes to rape: 1) All men are potential rapists, 2) Crying rape gets you out of trouble and off the hook (sympathy and attention), and 3) It gets men into trouble and backs up truth number 1.
Now part of this is because all societies have traditionally been harder on women for sexual indiscretions than they have been on men. This much is true. This fact has caused many women to feel guilty the next day, and turn a consensual sexual tryst into a violent act of force and torture. But femmies have taken this small truth and turned it into a lie so huge, so out of control, that girls are now crying it to get out of trouble and are finding that equality now means charging them with fraud, and its about the hell time.
First was the case of a 15 year old girl, who came to Pocatello to compete in the Simplot Games and spent her time looking for other sport, only to get caught and fall back on her femmie teachings and cry rape. Then came the case of the BYU co-ed, embarrassed about an orgy at a private and strict Christian university. Instead of being a person of honor and admitting her mistake and taking the consequences, her femmie-forced instinct was to blame the boys. Oddly enough, not one of them had a problem admitting to the sexual indiscretion, even though it violated the universitys Honor Code, and meant they may no longer be BYU football players. They behaved like menshe behaved like a femmie. It was absolutely classicnot to be confused with classysomething you could never accuse a femmie of being.
Then there was the case of the Idaho woman who just wanted to get her boyfriend back home for a quicky marriage, and manipulated the Red Crosss policy of helping military men get home for family emergencies. She filed a fake rape report with the local police, then called the Red Cross to get her fiancé home so they could hurry and get married. She was caught, but I guarantee that she wont pay nearly as much as the innocent people with legitimate emergencies will in the future. More than her new husband were screwed as a result of her selfishness.
A quick search found a woman in southern Utah not hesitating to point an accusingand falsefinger at a man, a 12-year-old here in Pocatello who made the claim to get out of trouble for staying out all night (the police log case has since been pulled from the archivesI wonder why), and my own 10-year-old sons experience with a neighbor girl. V, as Ill call her, was jumping on the trampoline at her cousins house with my son, who is friends with the cousin. He tripped and landed on her, and she cried out, Rape! Youre raping meIm going to tell!
You tell mewhere would a girl barely 10-years-old get the idea to cry such a word when a boy bumps into her? I had one VERY upset son to deal with later; he now refuses to even go to his friends house when V is there. And of course, an infamous case: Lt. Elizabeth Warnick and Tailhook, a lie to save her from having to face the truth in front of her fiancé.
(From interview with Cdr. Robert B.Rae U.S.N. Defense attorney, Heterodoxy 4/94)
Q. So Elizabeth Warnick admitted on the witness stand that she had in fact perjured herself. That she had not been gang raped. That she had been having sex with .... and had lied because she was engaged and she wanted to protect her engagement?
A. That's Absolutely true, and was. It is one of the most ironic parts of Tailhook too, because Admiral Kelso knew about a very important clause in the Navy's Sexual Harassment instructions that says if someone falsely accuses someone else of a sexual crime or sexual harassment, those people will be brought to justice. She never was, of course.
Justice for women, jail time for the innocent. It is becoming business as usual, and damned if the femmie/hippy/commie-controlled press isnt ignoring it. It seems that no price is too high for societyand particularly, MENto pay for the wrath of the Bitch Brigade. And it is so deeply ingrained now in men that they dont dare say the truth, for fear of that career-crushing word in our Politically Castrated societysexist. Rape is no longer a word to fear; for women it has become a political windfall.
The problem for femmies is, that word has no effect whatsoever on me. See, I put the itch in bitch when it comes to what femmies have done to this country of ours. Being a broad, I know their emotional tricks, but unlike chicks, I am a slave to logic and reason; their tears and anger in the face of said logic doesnt wash with me. Watching their heads explode because they dont have a valid leg to stand on is my favorite pastime. I am their worst nightmare, and I want their Evil Empire destroyed. In other words: Ms. Steinem, Give Back Our Balls!
Youre going down, femmies, and down hard. Ill see to that; for the two future men Im raising. MoreMUCH moreto come

Resa LaRu Kirkland

Resa LaRu Kirkland is an avid military historian, with her main focus the Korean War and its forgotten warriors. She has been given many names by her beloved Korean War Vets, her favorites being "The Pitbull," "Rambo Brockovich," "Hellraiser," "Tiger" and "D-Day." Resas first book-FORGOTTEN WARRIOR: RICARDOS STORY-is due to be released on Veterans Day, 2003. To pre-order now, please get in touch with her via email. The book will be hard back, $29.95 plus $6.95 shipping and handling, and each book will be autographed. Those who pre-order before November will also receive an autographed poster of Americas War Chick. Pictures and a synopsis of the book can be viewed at her website. Visit her website at: Forgotten Warrior Project

jeudi, juin 17, 2004

lundi, juin 07, 2004

Diary Of A Glad Newlywed

Dear Diary:

Monday: Now home from honeymoon and settled in our new home. It's fun
to cook for Bob. Today I made angel food cake. The recipe said,
"Beat 12 eggs separately". The neighbors were nice enough to loan me
some extra bowls.

Tuesday: Bob wanted fruit salad for supper. The recipe said, "Serve
without dressing." So I didn't dress. What a surprise when Bob
brought a friend home for supper.

Wednesday: A good day for rice. Recipe said, "Wash thoroughly before
steaming the rice." It seemed kinda of silly but I took a bath. I
can't say it improved the rice any.

Thursday: Today Bob asked for salad again. I tried a new recipe. It
said, "Prepare ingredients, then toss on a bed of lettuce one hour
before serving." Which is what led up to Bob asking me why there was
lettuce in our bed that night.

Friday: I found an easy recipe for cookies. It said, "Put all
ingredients in bowl and beat it." There must have been something
wrong with this recipe. When I got back, everything was the same as
when I left.

Saturday: Bob did the shopping today and brought home a chicken. He
asked me to dress it for Sunday. (oh boy) For some reason Bob keeps
counting to ten.

Sunday: Bob's folks came to dinner. I wanted to serve roast. All I
could find was hamburger. Suddenly I had a flash of genius. I put
the hamburger in the oven and set the controls for roast. It still
came out hamburger, much to my disappointment.

Good night, Dear Diary. This has been a very exciting week. I am
eager for tomorrow to come so I can try out a new recipe on Bob. If
we could just get a bigger oven, I would like to surprise him with
"Chocolate Moose."

samedi, juin 05, 2004

Masculinisme

samedi, mai 29, 2004

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