Article here. Feminists love to say porn is an invention of men meant to commodify women. And yet... seems these days the movers and shakers in adult entertainment are likely to be lesbians. Mannish ones, but lesbians nonetheless. Excerpt:

'But one speaker stood out. On the left side of the stage sat 37-year-old Bree Mills, a porn director, an actual outsider in the adult world, and the lone panelist to refrain from corporate-porn Newspeak. She is, in her words, a “shit disturber.”

Mills, a compact blonde with Clark Kent glasses and boy-band bangs, had come to talk about her latest polarizing project: Adult Time, a subscription service for high-budget, well-produced adult videos, series, and movies, and an archive of some 50,000 high-quality scenes. She’s calling it the “Netflix of Porn.”
...

Article here. Excerpt:

'Fewer than one in five young women would call themselves a feminist, polling in the UK and US suggests.

That might come as a surprise as feminism - the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of equality of the sexes - has been in the spotlight lately.
...
So it is perhaps unexpected that the identity "feminist" has not gained more popularity among young women in the Western world.

In the UK there has been a small increase in the number of women who identify as such.

A 2018 YouGov poll found that 34% of women in the UK said "yes" when asked whether they were a feminist, up from 27% in 2013.

It's a similar picture in Europe, with fewer than half of men and women polled in five countries agreeing they were a feminist. This ranged from 8% of respondents in Germany, to 40% in Sweden.

However, people do not appear to reject the term feminism because they are against gender equality or believe it has been achieved.

Article here. Excerpt:

'But the main argument of the “intactivists” – the most vocal pro-foreskin group in the US – is that Big Circumcision is peddling the lie that the procedure is in any way necessary. A historian notes that, in the 19th century, circumcisions were carried out to prevent the “disease” of masturbation. By the time of AIDS crisis, circumcision was purported to help prevent HIV. These studies, which were carried out “in Africa” – the doc doesn’t go into which specific countries; perhaps another red flag – seem not only to have manipulated the figures in favour of circumcision, but also led to the spread dangerous misinformation which suggests circumcision making condoms redundant.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Mere hours before New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady got his hands on his sixth Lombardi Trophy and Adam Levine took his shirt off at the Super Bowl halftime show, attendees at University of Pennsylvania’s “Men and Masculinities” summit discussed the “performative” nature of today's mainstream masculinity.

"[T]he masculine gender in itself is very performative in certain instances, so creating dialogue and conversation as to what not to do and what’s toxic about that performance is impactful to the kind of interactions you have on campus with other people, Wyatt Perez, a student organizer for the event, said,  according to the Daily Pennsylvanian.
...
Lastinger often interacts “with undergrads of various genders” and said that graduate associates “often see students who have a lot of internalized toxic masculinity,” according to the Daily Pennsylvanian. The graduate associate previously hosted “A Conversation on Racism” for a freshman dorm to commemorate Thanksgiving.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Australia's peak body for psychologists says it will consider developing new practice guidelines for psychologists working with boys and men after the American Psychological Association announced its own set of guidelines for the group last month.

The APA guidelines, which say that "traditional masculine ideology has been shown to limit males' psychological development … and negatively influence mental health", were designed to provide psychologists with an "evidence-based approach" for responding to the particular needs of boys and men.

"The guidelines support encouraging positive aspects of 'traditional masculinity', such as courage and leadership, and discarding traits such as violence and sexism, while noting that the vast majority of men are not violent," the APA wrote on Twitter.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax on Monday said he had a consensual one-night stand with a woman in 2004 who now accuses him of sexual assault, saying that he is the victim of a political “smear.”

“Everything was 100 percent consensual. Not only that, the same person called me sometime later and wanted to meet with me, wanted to come visit me … wanted me to meet her mother,” Mr. Fairfax told reporters in Richmond.

Attributing sinister motivations to his accusers, Mr. Fairfax said he took Biblical advice and donned “armor of God” that “allows us to deal with the devil’s schemes and tricks.”

The sexual assault allegation swamped Mr. Fairfax as he stood poised to become governor if Gov. Ralph Northam heeds unrelenting calls to resign over a racist yearbook photo.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'A former French lawmaker's defamation lawsuit against six women who accused him of sexual misconduct and four journalists who reported the allegations goes to trial Monday in what some fear illustrates a backlash against the #MeToo movement.

Nearly 1½ years before allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein became a reckoning event for powerful men in entertainment and media, France's Mediapart website and radio station France Inter published accounts from 14 women who alleged Denis Baupin had groped, sexted and otherwise harassed them.

Baupin, a prominent Green Party member and former Paris city official, resigned as vice president of the lower house of parliament when the reports came out in May 2016. He denied wrongdoing and the next month, sued the journalists, the six accusers who agreed to be named in the news reports and two men who were quoted corroborating some of the alleged misbehavior.

Article here. Excerpt:

'A group of South Korean lawmakers’ proposed bill for half of elected seats in parliament to be reserved for women has prompted backlash from younger men alleging “reverse sexism”.

Less than 20 per cent of the country’s 300 parliamentary seats are occupied by women while no woman is serving as a provincial governor or a major city mayor, according to Park Young-sun, the female lawmaker representing the group.

About 30 men in their 20s and 30s attended a debate on the bill in parliament on Wednesday, with one announcing: “We are victims of reverse sexism, after the older generation discriminated against women in the past.”

Online news websites and Facebook pages were inundated with angry posts echoing that sentiment.

“Good. We must also fill half of the military ranks with women,” one wrote on a local TV Facebook page.

Another asked: “Who would [be] responsible if unqualified candidates are elected just because they are women?”'

Article here. Excerpt:

'The American Psychological Association (APA) recently released its Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men. It manages to be simultaneously predictable, reprehensible, infuriating and disheartening — no mean feat for a single document. Make no mistake about it: this document constitutes an all-out assault on masculinity — or, to put it even more bluntly, on men.

The coup of the APA undertaken by the ideologues is now complete. The field has been compromised, perhaps fatally. And the damnable guidelines provide sufficient, but by no means exhaustive, evidence of that.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Efforts on college campuses nationwide to combat so-called toxic masculinity are in full swing, and a recent decision by the American Psychological Association to offer guidelines calling “traditional masculinity” harmful likely buoyed those efforts.

But officials who run such programs are not ready to celebrate it publicly, at least not yet. If they see it as a victory, they’re not talking about it, at least to The College Fix. Nearly a half-dozen campus programs working to reduce traditional masculinity on campuses declined comment.

MasculinUT at the University of Texas at Austin declined to comment as they are currently under review by a steering committee to define the mission of the program, according to campus spokesman J.B. Bird.

MasculinUT “was launched in 2015 as a program to help reduce sexual assault and interpersonal violence, with strategies specifically tailored to men,” according to the university.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'An Infowars video producer has accused a Women’s March protester of inappropriately touching him during the 2019 D.C. demonstration, according to a report on Wednesday.

Isabel O’Shaughnessy, 21, was charged with misdemeanor sex abuse, the Washington Post reported. Local police told the outlet the Catholic University of America student surrendered to law enforcement on Wednesday, but a Superior Court of D.C. judge released her.

Owen Shroyer, the reporter for the far-right website, alleges in the arrest affidavit that O’Shaughnessy intentionally grabbed him by his genitals during this month's rally while he was conducting an interview with another participant. He also shared a video of the incident online.

“Here is the moment I was sexually assaulted by a #WomensMarch2019 protester. She laughed about it. The crowd cheered. The police did nothing," Shroyer tweeted on Jan. 21, two days after the march.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Last year, the Joanna Randall MacIver junior research fellowship, which was established in the 1930s exclusively for women specialising in the humanities, was opened up to all genders. This decision was made by the senior committee of the university – the Oxford Council – in response to accusations that the award was discriminatory on the grounds of gender. Retracting a fellowship for women in an institution which has historically left women by the wayside is a controversial move to say the least. However, this decision presents us with an opportunity to consider the place of women-only scholarships in our university and ask the question: Is it ever right to discriminate?
...

Article here. Excerpt:

'Couples are being recruited to take part in a groundbreaking trial of a male contraceptive gel that could allow men and women to take equal responsibility for birth control in future.

Eighty men in Manchester and Edinburgh will be asked to use a daily gel containing hormones that “send the testes to sleep”, meaning the sperm count drops to zero.

Couples will rely on the gel as their sole contraceptive for a year, as part of a clinical trial to assess how effective it is at preventing pregnancy and whether the side-effects are acceptable.

Richard Anderson, a professor of clinical reproductive science at the University of Edinburgh, who is leading the study, said the method was expected to be more effective than condoms, which in real-life conditions are about 82% effective. “We’re aiming to get it down to the sort of level you get with the pill which is a very small but not zero failure rate,” he said.'

Article here. Yep, Hell just froze over. Excerpt:

'It might be a sign of the end-times, or simply a function of our currently scrambled politics, but earlier this week, four feminist activists — three from a self-described radical feminist organization Women’s Liberation Front — appeared on a panel at the Heritage Foundation. Together they argued that sex was fundamentally biological, and not socially constructed, and that there is a difference between women and trans women that needs to be respected. For this, they were given a rousing round of applause by the Trump supporters, religious-right members, natural law theorists, and conservative intellectuals who comprised much of the crowd. If you think I’ve just discovered an extremely potent strain of weed and am hallucinating, check out the video of the event.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Clementine Ford is not going down without a fight.

The controversial feminist columnist and author — who describes herself as “a professionally angry person” — quit her job in spectacular fashion this week, unleashing a foul-mouthed tirade at her former employer, Fairfax.

Unveiling her new plan to make a living via the membership subscription platform Patreon — the 38-year-old claimed she recently had her Fairfax columns halved which means her wages were also halved before she spectacularly quit.