Article here. Excerpt:

'SUICIDE rates in the Clarence Valley could rise because of a Federal Government decision not to continue funding a men's suicide prevention group.

Dads in Distress (DIDS) was founded nine years ago by Coffs Harbour man Tony Miller to help guide men through traumatic experiences. In 2001, Grafton became just the second city in NSW to start a DIDS support group.

Local co-ordinators have run DIDS support group meetings in an effort to help Clarence Valley men deal with any type of stressful situation that may lead to suicide or depression.
...
“The thing that amazes me is that the Government has announced a national men's health policy and here's a group that works to prevent male suicide and they're just letting it go,” he said.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'MINEOLA, New York — A former high school teacher in New York has been rearrested a day after being sentenced for having a long-running affair with a 16-year-old student.
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The 25-year-old was first arrested in March. She pleaded guilty to sexual misconduct and was awaiting an August sentencing.

Prosecutors got a tip Kennedy was still meeting with the boy and began watching her. The victim also admitted having sex with Kennedy five times since her guilty plea.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'A group home for teenage boys in Columbiana will appeal the city’s council decision to shut it down, City Clerk Gina Antonili said Monday.

The council voted Feb. 17 not to grant a business license to the Fortress Group Home on Mildred Street. The home opened in late 2007 and houses boys 14 to 19 who are wards of the state.

A public hearing will be held to discuss the home’s future Monday, March 16 at 6 p.m. at City Hall. People for and against the home will be allowed to speak, Mayor Allan Lowe said.

Those against the home say the children there are unruly. Mayor Lowe said he’s received numerous complaints about Fortress. He also said several of the teens there have had run-ins with Columbiana police officers.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'An independent review into allegations of abuse at a school for boys with behavioural problems has found that pupils were restrained on a routine basis.

The local authority-commissioned report found that staff at Gatehouse residential school in Milton Keynes used restraint as a "first resort", instead of attempting to deal with pupil behaviour using alternative methods.

Pupils were also locked in classrooms frequently. One parent complained that a teacher punched their son in the stomach.

Teachers said that both the deputy and head teacher subjected them to intimidation and bullying.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'Last summer, Langley Park School for Girls and the neighbouring Langley Park School for Boys became locked in a dispute over a large-scale development at the boy’s school.

Bromley Council originally agreed to a complete overhaul of the boys’ school’s facilities in June, but the neighbouring girls’ school tried to overturn that decision at the High Court.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Framing safe heterosexual intercourse in the language of “men are dogs—protect yourself!” constructs a hypothetical, collective female vulnerability that deprives women of agency in their sexual encounters. Rather than empowering women, it establishes a paradigm in which women are victims of men’s animalistic urges. In reality, men are not the sole indulgers in promiscuity. This characterization assumes that men are infidels and that women are their perpetual victims, when this is by no means a universal truth. Forced sexual encounters are tragic occurrences that will erode sexual equality as long as they persist, but to establish the lying, cheating beau as the norm in sexual relationships is regressive and destructive. It instills a resignation that a dishonest scoundrel is all a heterosexual woman should hope for, when, in reality, any woman who writes off all men in one fell swoop is probably a bit of a dog herself.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'It was bound to happen. Since the scythe of recession got swinging, newly jobless men have been shuffling around Britain’s town centres on weekday mornings like prematurely retired racing dogs. You can spot them nervously sipping cappuccinos or hanging in morose little groups outside the local hardware shop. Watching them on the treadmills — literally going nowhere — is depressing. They have gone from power lunches to power shakes, from Bloomberg monitors to MTV, from having a ball to being in danger of losing theirs. And that’s only for an hour or two each day at the gym — what are they doing with the rest of their time?'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Ireland could face social unrest and higher crime rates following a massive surge in unemployment among men in their early 20s, a leading economist has warned.
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Men in their early twenties have experienced a threefold increase in unemployment, a more pronounced rise than any other age group, driven by the collapse in the building industry. One in five men in this age bracket were out of work in the three months to November, according to the latest Quarterly National Household Survey.

O’Neill believes society is ignoring the plight of men who opted out of further education in favour of earning huge wages in bricklaying, carpentry and other trades during the boom. Some 82,000 men who were working in construction in January 2007 left school without sitting their Leaving Cert exams.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Speaking of households being turned upside down, you probably saw Sunday's NWjobs article about men being laid off at a far more rapid rate than women. As Patrick May of the San Jose Mercury News reports, in an increasing number of households, women are being thrust into the role of main breadwinner and laid-off men are stepping into the role of househusband or stay-at-home dad.
...
"Since the recession began in December 2007, more than 80 percent of those laid off have been men, thanks to their disproportionate slice of jobs in hard-hit fields such as construction and manufacturing..."

And while it's typical for more men to lose their jobs during a recession than women, May's article points out that this is the highest unemployment gender gap the country has seen during the past 25 years.'

Article here. Excerpt:

"The advert features a couple who are straight out of a 1970’s sitcom - she’s a sour-faced battle-axe in training and he’s a simpering emasculated idiot. Their relationship is so loving that they can barely bring themselves to look at each other. So instead they take part in a bizarre silent and deeply menacing gurning competition.

There she stands - hands on hip, desperately trying to suck her lips clean off her face - as a statuesque representation of womankind’s disgust at the inadequacies of men. Whilst he fidgets uneasily on his stool, presumably because he’s so idiotic he’s put his underpants on the wrong way."

I just saw this ad on TV and HAD to post about it. It's unbelievable.

Article here. Excerpt:

"The portrayal of teenage boys as "yobs" in the media has made the boys wary of other teenagers, according to new research.

Figures show more than half of the stories about teenage boys in national and regional newspapers in the past year (4,374 out of 8,629) were about crime. The word most commonly used to describe them was "yobs" (591 times), followed by "thugs" (254 times), "sick" (119 times) and "feral" (96 times).

Other terms often used included "hoodie", "louts", "heartless", "evil" "frightening", "scum", "monsters", "inhuman" and "threatening".
...

"We found some news coverage where teen boys were described in glowing terms – 'model student', 'angel', 'altar boy' or 'every mother's perfect son'," the research concluded, "but sadly these were reserved for teenage boys who met a violent and untimely death."

Article here. Excerpt:

'I've heard horrific stories of men being denied access to their children after a divorce, of boys getting harsh punishments that are not applied by schools or the legal system to girls, and I've seen scholarship and fellowship programs for women and minorities where guys, especially white guys, can't get in.

We don't fight discrimination with discrimination -- and while I am not for "councils" of this kind to begin with, I'm disgusted that the president thinks it's a good thing to come out with a council for women and girls when there are vast problems men and boys are dealing with.
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Then again, if you really want to change things, to really improve life for a great number of people (especially children), how about coming up with a Council Against Single Motherhood, including rich, largely white women, who are selfish, me-first/children's needs second "single mothers by choice"?'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Ninety-five percent of crimes are committed by men, that’s a fact every man has to confront — that violence is mainly male, but at the same time, 95 percent of men aren’t violent. So, yes, men commit violence, but it’s a small percent, your son has to know both those things,” Thompson said to me.

And while men and boys get more air time in movies and on TV — 70 percent more than girls — they also are frequently cast as the instigator or troublemaker.

Couple that with the lack of nurturing adult males depicted in TV and movies and you begin to wonder what that impact has on these boys who will one day be fathers themselves.

“There’s a serious dearth of both sympathetic and competent fathers in TV and movies, the best we can do is ‘Two and a Half Men,’ and these are well-meaning bumbler dads,” Thompson notes.
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Female teachers need to avoid approaching boys with a “reformist” mindset, he said, which is woven into our culture of parenting boys.'

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Article here. Excerpt:

'By coincidence, on the same day this week’s shootings occurred, President Obama signed an executive order creating the White House Council on Women and Girls to ensure they are “treated fairly all matters of public policy.” There are still many reasons why special care should be taken to ensure that women aren’t discriminated against in the workplace, that domestic violence is treated as a serious problem and that girls get the same educational opportunies as boys.

'But this is not our only gender-specific problem. Sometime this year, for the first time in history, the number of American women drawing a paycheck will exceed that of men. This doesn’t mean that women suddenly are doing a lot better. It means that men are being disproportionally affected by the economic downturn and are doing a lot worse.

Whether the current economy bothered McClendon at all is uncertain; he seems to have quit a couple of jobs by choice. Like most of his brethren, however, there’s a familiar dead-end quality to the outlines of his story.

Story here. Excerpt:

'St. Thomas School in Waterdown wants to get its boys excited about reading. By doing so, school and Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Board officials hope they can boost the primary boys’ literacy scores and assist in closing the 20 per cent reading gap identified between genders.

But while the test scores ranked above the board and provincial averages, broken down, the results indicate a reading gap between the school’s boys and girls. “All my girls are at an A level in reading and most of my boys are at a B level,” explained principal Michael Goffredo. “They are doing well, but there is a gap, a 20 per cent gap.”
...

“We decided that we have to change the way we teach,” said Goffredo. Implementing two strategies in each Junior Kindergarten to Grade 3 classroom, teachers have restructured their lessons to target boys and further engage them.