Article here. Excerpt:

'What does this mean for American politics? While some politicians use cliched dog-whistles like the Second Amendment or immigrant-bashing to appeal to men, these no more speak to many men’s difficulties than other politicians and public figures who see men’s problems through the simplistic lens of “toxic masculinity.”

So, here’s a dare to presidential and congressional candidates: Tell us your views on the following:

1. Paid parental leave that lets men, as well as women, to take time off to care for a new baby, with employers prohibited from discriminating by gender.

2. Creating a federal Office of Men’s Health to support research and outreach on physical and mental health problems affecting men.

3. Providing a variant of the earned-income tax credit targeted to those who have been out of the workforce for more than one year.

4. Significantly expanding public-private partnerships to provide training and job placement.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Jordan Peele’s revival of the Twilight Zone isn’t the one you grew up with back in the day. It’s not about thought-provoking political or social commentary wrapped around clever or dangerous ideas. Well that definitely wasn’t the case with the seventh episode of Twilight Zone titled “Not All Men” that aired on May 8th, 2019 on the CBS streaming service.

There are some obvious spoilers ahead, but the gist of the episode is that a meteor shower hits a small town, including its water supply. The men begin acting strange, more volatile, aggressive and violent. At first it seems like the message is that the meteors are making the men “toxic”, but at the end of the episode we find out that the meteors had no effect on the men’s behavior, because a gay male is not acting “toxic” because he chooses not to.

The message was basically that the men were just acting toxic because that’s how most men are.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'An open letter, signed by over 240 people, is protesting an event scheduled to be held next month by the anti-feminist group ‘Justice for Men and Boys’ (J4MB) in the Alison Richard Building on Sidgwick Site. The open letter is addressed to vice chancellor Stephen Toope.

With the event being organised by J4MB for the 24th May, a description of the event on the group’s website reads: “I am pleased to announce a new strategy for J4MB, engaging with university students and academics, particularly those studying or teaching subjects close to our mission”.

The letter calls for the event to be cancelled, and failing that, asks for it to be “moved to a non-departmental University venue” so individuals can choose to be present at the time of the event. It argues that the event is not “in line with the values and mission of the University, especially our stated core value of “freedom from discrimination”.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Arguably the most infamous demand of The Communist Manifesto is the “abolition of the family.” The family, Marx and Engels noted, was where patriarchy and capitalism worked in tandem to produce willing, alienated workers, where women became little more than “instruments of production” for the men who lorded over them. Radical queer politics in the 1960s and ’70s added to their critique of the bourgeois family when activists challenged the heteronormativity of familial relations. That demand, however, has since almost completely vanished from the leftist imaginary.

Sophie Lewis, a feminist theorist and geographer, takes up this forgotten struggle in her work. Her new book, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019) specifically links family abolition to a radical reconceptualization of pregnancy itself. The act of carrying a child to term, she insists, is work—labor that has long been exploited and overlooked by the academy—and so is mothering.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'The annual Americana Honors & Awards have faced mounting criticism that they, too, like the Grammys, have seen a preponderance of male winners taking the stage. Last year, the much beloved Brandi Carlile and Margo Price were both nominated in the top three categories — artist, album and song of the year — and many believed it was Carlile’s year, especially. So there was notable groaning in the Americana ranks when those women walked away empty-handed while Jason Isbell won another three awards, like clockwork.

This year, the Americanas have made sure, if nothing else, that a guy won’t win artist of the year — by only nominating women in the category.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'The guidelines focus heavily on the persistence of subtle forms of sexism, including microaggressions. Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce, who coined the term in 1970, described them as racially charged "subtle blows ... delivered incessantly." A little more than a decade ago, Columbia psychology professor Derald Wing Sue expanded the concept of microaggressions to include its affects on other marginalized groups, including women.

"There have been changes in how racism and sexism are exhibited. Now it can show up more in terms of microaggressions and sometimes the person who is engaging in the behavior — whether a hetero-sexist, an ageist, a racist — may not be aware they're doing that because of their implicit biases," Comas-Díaz said.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'You would think that the British Film Institute’s sponsorship of a month-long festival celebrating some of the most memorable female characters in cinema would draw plaudits from feminists. You would be wrong.
...
Like many a liberation movement, the fight for women’s equality has steadily suffered from its own success. These many ‘waves’ of feminism roil across an ever more level playing field. Today’s much-deplored ‘gender pay gap’ is overwhelmingly a statistical fix, engineered to seem yawning by comparing carrots and kumquats; in the main, equal pay for equal work is the form.

Article here. Excerpt:

'But here in the REAL world, the one where technology has rendered the one true advantage men once had - strength - virtually obsolete, the ladies really do have it made (well, other than the occasional mentally-ill biological male dominating a few female sporting events by pretending to be a woman). Turns out, in what is the safest, most prosperous time in all of human history, from economic wealth to lifespans to criminal justice to literal murder, it’s far better to be female.

And it’s really not even close. Consider:

Article here. Excerpt:

'In the CNN profile, which highlights how she is “campaigning by living her best life,” Gillibrand let out a “hearty ‘yeah'” when asked whether she believed people were underestimating her efforts in the race.

“I think it’s just gender bias. I think people are generally biased against women. I think also biased against young women,” Gillibrand said. “There’s just bias and it’s real and it exists, but you have to overcome it.”

Gillibrand also stated that voters will “give a woman a shot” and insisted that that opportunity is needed.

“Voters will give a woman a shot. They just have to get to know her,” the low-polling presidential hopeful stated. “They might make a judgment without knowing her, but once they meet her and know who she is and why she’s running, it will give her that opportunity.”'

Article here. Excerpt:

'The investigation was requested by lawyers for a Swedish woman who alleges Assange raped her in 2010.
...
Assange, who denies the allegations, previously avoided extradition to Sweden after seeking refuge at the Ecuadorean embassy in London for seven years.

Sweden's deputy director of public prosecutions, Eva-Marie Persson, told reporters through a translator that "there is still a probable cause to suspect that Assange committed a rape".

"The Swedish courts, on several occasions, have examined the detention issue and arrived at the conclusion that Mr Assange was suspected of rape on the 17th of August 2010 on probable cause, which is the higher degree of suspicion," she said.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'On a spring night in 2018, I stood on a Manhattan sidewalk with friends, reading Shakespeare aloud. We were in line to see an adaptation of Macbeth and had decided to pass the time refreshing our memories of the play’s best lines. I pulled up Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy on my iPhone. “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,” I read, thrilled once again by the incantatory power of the verse. I remembered where I was when I first heard those lines: in my 10th-grade English class, startled out of my adolescent stupor by this woman rebelling magnificently and malevolently against her submissive status. “Make thick my blood, / Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse.” Six months into the #MeToo movement, her fury and frustration felt newly resonant.
...

Article here. Excerpt:

'The number of participants listed in a database of female scientists has now reached 10,000, according to the site’s curators.

The creators of ‘Request a Woman Scientist’, which launched in January 2018, documented 7,500 researchers across 174 scientific disciplines and 133 countries in the database’s first 11 months, according to a study in PLoS Biology1.

And the list continues to grow, says co-author Elizabeth McCullagh, a neuroscientist at the University of Colorado–Anschutz in Aurora. McCullagh and her colleagues are members of 500 Women Scientists, a non-profit organization based in Boulder, Colorado, that is dedicated to making science more inclusive and accessible.

The team created the database to allow users to easily locate female scientists through a number of parameters, including location, field of expertise, degree status and whether they are members of an under-represented group. These parameters, they say, could help conference organizers who are struggling to find female specialists in a particular discipline or field.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'A waiter at a New York City pizzeria was stiffed on a tip by two women because the women were unhappy that the restaurant did not have enough pictures of women on their wall. Then he discovered a $424,000 cashier's check left behind by two women.

A few days later, he returned the check to the elderly woman who left it behind thanks to some help from the New York Daily News, and refused the tip they belatedly tried to give him.
...
Vinacour said that she and her daughter weren't happy with Markaj's response when they asked why there were only a few photos of women on the restaurant's walls.

She recalled that Markaj told them, "Maybe women don't eat a lot of pizza?"

"Well, my daughter's kind of feisty and she didn't like that," Vinacour said. "So we didn't tip him."'

Article here.  Excerpt:

'Suzanne Owen faces sentencing and could get life prison after she pleaded no contest, to a charge of sexual activity with a child.

The married 36-year-old seduced the teen as the two began exchanging text messages at Evangelical Christian School in Fort Myers, Florida.

He was in her Spanish class and was 17-years-old when the affair began.
...
She was charged under Florida laws which make it illegal for a person who has "custodial authority" to have sex with someone between the ages of 12 and 17.

Her lawyers attempted to get her off by arguing the her and the boy were not at school, so she didn’t have authority – but the judge threw out the claim.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'A Redwood City woman accused of trying to drown a baby she had given birth to in a McDonald's restroom will not serve time in prison, court documents show.

On Friday, Sarah Jane Lockner, 27, was placed on four years supervised probation and one year in county jail with credit for time served. She was also ordered to complete parenting classes.

Lockner took a plea deal in January after prosecutors initially charged her with attempted murder. She instead pleaded no contest to felony child endangerment.'