Article here. So much for the "she has no other option" line. Excerpt:

'...Dancers pay the club a fee to use their premises. After that, essentially, they are self-employed and can earn anything from £20 to £400 in a night. Girls say that the financial security counters any feminist argument against stripping. ... Some girls, though not many, are paying their way through university. Others are single mothers, supplementing a wage. Younger girls do it for the extra cash and party lifestyle.

Zoe, 22, has been dancing for five years....“I have never had a job where I've felt so empowered,” she says. “I've just got myself through university, I've got my own car, my own house."

Article here. Excerpt:

'A whole raft of research shows that whereas some of society’s longest life expectancies are found among groups of nuns, the shortest are found among single men. Single men die early: they drink more, smoke more and kill themselves more often, whereas single unmarried women live longer than their married sisters. The maths is simple: marriage is bad for women and good for guys.
...
So what are you gonna do? Not marry just to save some chick’s life? I don’t think so. Marry her and save yourself. It’s every man for himself, and the selfish man has only one choice: if he wants to die happy and old, marry and marry quick. Staying too long in Guyland is for those with a death wish.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'In 2000, it was reported that the FBI's DNA testing over a three year period had exonerated more than 30% of their 4,000-plus sexual assault suspects. Going further back, in the FBI's Behavioural Science Unit's 1983 study of False Allegations, a total of 220 out of 556 rape investigations - 40% - turned out to be false. Over a quarter turned out to be actual hoaxes (remember the infamous Tawana Brawley, who at 15 falsely accused a number of white men of a marathon three-day gang rape, some of them police officers? At least she got successfully sued for defamation, but that was small potatoes for the havoc she wreaked in those men's lives). About 4,000 allegations of rape a year are levelled in Manhattan. About half never happened. Police officials in New Zealand state that 64% of rape reports are false.'

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. This is the ideal time to raise Congressional awareness about the flaws and failures of the Violence Against Women Act.

Among VAWA's many failures are the fact that it:

• Funds "solutions" to the problem that are grounded in ideology rather than objective research. Thus the problem grows worse every year because the "solutions" don't solve the problem.
• Undermines constitutional protections and makes a mockery of due process, resulting in innocent citizens being forced
  from their homes and separated from their children based on accusations without any evidence.
• Redefines everyday words in Humpty Dumpty-esque fashion ("When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less"), so that in addition to physical violence, the term "violence" now includes emotional distress - which is highly subjective, easy to accuse someone of, and impossible to disprove.

This week we're asking you to:

Sorry, Fido, It’s Just a Guy Thing

'IF you ask Adam Fulrath who is the love of his life, he will barely blink an eye before responding: Parappa.

Mr. Fulrath, a 37-year-old design director at Time Out New York, keeps five photographs of Parappa, a shorthaired, bicolored, mixed-breed cat, on his desktop. He knows that it might be considered a little weird that a grown man would be so enamored with his kitty, but Mr. Fulrath, who is into video games and comic books and calls himself a “straight, geeky guy,” doesn’t care.

“She’s my primary relationship,” he said.'

Love it! I have always been a "cat man" and it's no mystery to me.

Researchers at Clark University and Bridgewater State College are conducting a study on men who experience aggression from their girlfriends, wives, or female partners. If you are a man between the ages of 18-59 and have experienced aggression from your partner within the past 12 months, you may be eligible to participate in this study. We invite you to follow this link to the study webpage where you can complete an Internet survey about your experiences. Link: http://www.clarku.edu/faculty/dhines

Article here. Excerpt:

'QANDIL MOUNTAINS, Iraq (CNN) -- The women line the mountainside, locked hand in hand in their green battle fatigues, and begin dancing. It's a victory dance, they say, that is routine after raids across the border on Turkish troops.

"We want a natural life, a society that revolves around women -- one where women and men are equal, a society without pressure, without inequality, where all differences between people are eliminated," says Rengin, the head of a female battalion of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'PHILADELPHIA — The ex-headmistress of Oprah Winfrey's school for girls in South Africa sued the talk show host for defamation, claiming Winfrey falsely suggested she tried to cover up abuse at the school.

In widely reported remarks last year, Winfrey suggested that Nomvuyo Mzamane, 39, of Philadelphia, knew about alleged abuse by a dorm matron and tried to cover it up, Mzamane says in the lawsuit.
...
Former dorm matron Tiny Virginia Makopo, 28, is charged with abusing six students at the $40 million school for poor girls that Winfrey built. Makopo allegedly tried to kiss and fondle the victims and is also accused of kicking and hitting some of them.'

Review here. Excerpt:

'Baldwin wants us to believe that P.A.S. is a legitimate syndrome, yet he goes to curious lengths to show us that it may not be a sound diagnosis. He then wraps up by interviewing a Harvard law professor, a “rising star” and a woman who argues that feminism is in part to blame for the broken family law system. The transcript format he uses here is ponderous, self-serious and rigid. You can almost hear him as Jack Donaghy interviewing the hot little number from Harvard.

For all its faults, its creakinesses and almost codger-like crankiness, its occasionally sludgy prose, this book has a point. Divorce is hell. Lawyers are vultures. Children get lost. Baldwin bravely set out to illuminate and change the way divorce is conducted in this country; he also, wittingly or not, offers a candid, unhappy portrait of a marriage gone desperately sour.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'BENTONVILLE, Ark. — A 75-year-old woman told police she was "at her wits' end" when she shot her husband to death as he was sleeping.

Myrtle Marie Walter was being held Monday without bond in the Benton County jail on a capital murder charge in the slaying of Paul Walter, 74, at their home in Rogers.

She told police she and her husband had been drinking Friday night and she had four or five beers. She said her husband wanted to have sex but she did not want to, and she could no longer tolerate the mental abuse, according to court records.

She retrieved a loaded gun, returned to the bedroom and shot her husband once, then fired two more times when she saw him move, court documents say. Rogers police arrested her Saturday and recovered a .357-caliber revolver that was on the bed.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'HONG KONG — An American woman lost an appeal Monday of her conviction in a Hong Kong court for the beating death of her husband in a sensational case widely known as the "milkshake murder" trial.
...
The 44-year-old housewife from Minnesota was convicted in 2005 of giving her husband a milkshake laced with sedatives in 2003 and then fatally bashing the wealthy banker on the head with a metal ornament.

Kissel said she was defending herself from an abusive husband and appealed the conviction and her life sentence in prison. But prosecutors argued Kissel was a cold-blooded wife who planned the attack in the couple's luxury apartment.'

Excellent YouTube video of Stephen Baskerville, PhD, author of "Taken Into Custody", on the 2008 Presidential election and VAWA. Note what is said about Biden! MANN readers, please send the YouTube link through your networks ASAP.

Video link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JsB0f32NaM

Also, if you have a "Current" account be sure to vote his video up so that it will be shown on Current TV.

Thank you for your activism!

Story here. Not such a bad idea-- but will the curriculum include the whole truth about intimate partner violence? Excerpt:

'One other state, Texas, mandates unspecified awareness education on dating violence for students and parents, while several other states encourage it. But the Rhode Island measure goes further by requiring the topic be incorporated annually into the curriculum for students in seventh through 12th grade.
...
School districts are expected to start implementing the law this school year. By December, officials hope to have established a policy for responding to incidents of dating violence.

The law is gaining traction around the country, with members of the National Association of Attorneys General unanimously adopting a resolution encouraging the education in their states. Nebraska's top prosecutor said he intends to submit legislation modeled after Rhode Island's law, and apparel maker Liz Claiborne Inc. has helped promote it around the country.'

Story here. Excerpt:

"HOUSTON -- Attorneys for a woman convicted of stabbing her husband nearly 200 times got an extra day Friday to prove their claims that she suffered from battered woman syndrome....

Susan Wright and her attorney are asking for a new trial and a new sentencing because her first trial attorneys were allegedly deficient by not calling key witnesses during her murder trial more than four years ago. Wright is trying to shorten her 25-year prison sentence. She claims the killing was in self-defense after being abused by her husband, Jeffrey, for many years."

One might ask the obvious question. If Wright was battered for years, why did she not flee to refuge in any of the hundreds of women's shelters available to her, instead of killing her husband?

Article here. Excerpt:

"Child protection experts reacted with fury last night after the head of a teachers' union said staff who have sex with pupils over 16 should escape prosecution.
...
Teachers who have sex with sixth form pupils are only guilty of an 'error of professional judgement' and it is unfair to put them on the sex offenders register, she insists.
...
Dean Dainty, who was 16 when he had a sexual relationship with his 22-year-old drama teacher Nicola Prentice, says the teacher's abuse of her position wrecked his life.

In an interview for the programme he said: ‘Looking back now, I wish it had never all happened. It affected me in a big way, my personality and things, and I started to do stupid things after it and not be myself.

'It took me a long time to get myself back together – I suppose it took a piece of my life away really.’"