Commentary Batavick: Why do boys fail? It starts in elementary school

Article here. Excerpt:

'It begins early. Claudia Buchmann, Ohio State professor of sociology, writes, “Girls enter kindergarten more prepared than boys, and derive more satisfaction from pleasing parents and teachers than boys do.”

Our elementary schools are really designed for girls who tend to adapt better to classroom regimens than do boys. We have a grandson who is plenty bright but also rambunctious, and the havoc his lack of self-discipline causes has been cited by teachers for the last six years.

Richard Whitmire, author of “Why Boys Fail,” thinks the problem with boys’ performance begins with their teachers who are almost all female. He believes that they become “annoyed as hell by all the boys in their classrooms who aggressively wave their arms in the air when a question is asked.” Some teachers think this intimidates the shyer girls who are then called on more frequently to encourage them.

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UK: "Use creative arts to ‘challenge perceptions of what boys do and are like’"

Article here. Excerpt:

'A crowd of teachers sacrificed their Saturdays last weekend and gathered at Westminster City School for a unique CPD experience organised by Carly Moran (pictured above), a regional leader of national women’s networking group WomenEd and assistant headteacher at the school.

Peter Broughton, Westminster City School’s head, explained his “boys to men” agenda and the challenges of supporting male students in inner London.

“The ‘boys to men’ agenda is about challenging boys to conceive of themselves in different ways,” he said.

“In creative arts in particular we have got a beautiful way to challenge those perceptions of what boys do and are like. It gives them some of those skills and characteristics they will need to take themselves forward.”

Many of the school’s pupils come from challenging backgrounds, and some are even involved in trafficking.

“I have permanently excluded four boys since I’ve been here. In all four cases they didn’t have a dad that was present,” he added.'

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The children of Japan’s single mothers have become a despairing underclass

Article here. Excerpt:

'Yet while Japan’s overall population is declining, the number of single-mother households in the country rose by about 50 percent to 712,000 between 1992 and 2016, according to the labor ministry. The child-poverty rate for working, single-parent households in Japan stood at 56 percent, the highest among OECD nations, compared with 32 percent in the U.S.

Those that get alimony or child support from their ex-spouse or live with their parents are the lucky ones. In Japan, single parents are more likely to live in poverty with a job than without, according to the OECD.
...
Behind that facade, the city’s report of the crime tells a different story, one of hardship, brutality and a struggle to keep up appearances in public. The single mother of two boys was sick and looking for a part-time job. When she found one at a supermarket, she couldn’t start because she didn’t have child care during Sunday shifts.

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N.B.A. Power Brokers Gather, With No Men Allowed

Article here. Excerpt:

'As the sun set on another day at the N.B.A. Summer League this month, a group of 60-odd power brokers gathered at an upscale restaurant on the Las Vegas Strip. They were among the league’s elite: executives who help engineer blockbuster trades, salary-cap gurus who devise contracts and scouts who identify prospects.

They sipped wine, nibbled hors d’oeuvres and made conversation; perhaps an unremarkable scene except for one thing: They were all women.

“This is the first time, to our knowledge, that this has ever happened,” said Liliahn Majeed, the N.B.A.’s vice president for diversity and inclusion.

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UK: Police 'need to offer female offenders support not prison'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Police should treat female offenders differently because they are usually much less dangerous than male suspects and their crimes are linked to poverty or mental health problems, a report recommends.

The report from the London assembly covers the capital but has national importance. It comes as leaders of the justice system increasingly embrace the idea that it is better and cheaper to tackle the underlining causes of offending, rather than just jailing people.

The report reveals that Britain’s biggest police force, the Metropolitan police, will start a new scheme so that female offenders get help for their problems rather than facing the courts or jail.

The Met police pilot scheme starts this summer and supporters hope it will cut the number of women entering the criminal justice system, make them less likely to reoffend, and save the taxpayer money.'

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Autistic student gets Title IX investigations over fist-bump, selfie

Article here. Excerpt:

'The first incident occurred in the first week of September when Marcus was in the Student Services office and asked a female student working there if he could “fist bump” her. She agreed but soon filed a Title IX complaint.

The next week Aurora and Marcus were asked to meet with the school’s Disabled Students Programs and Services coordinator, who allegedly called the fist bump “inappropriate behavior.” Aurora told The Fix that Marcus did not “bump” anything other than the female’s knuckles. (The Fix has reached the coordinator but that person has not been available for a phone interview as of Thursday night.)

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Women and men get research grants at equal rates — if women apply in the first place

Article here. Excerpt:

'Women face an uphill battle in biomedical science, on many fronts. There is bias in hiring and in how other scientists view their research. Fewer women are chosen to review scientific papers. Men still outnumber women at the ivory tower’s highest floors, and of course, women in science face harassment based on their gender. But once the top of the hill is in sight — once a female scientist gets a coveted major research grant — the playing field levels out, a new study shows. Women who get major grants stay funded and head their labs just as long as men. The hitch? Women must reach the top of the academic hill and apply for those grants in the first place.

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Father’s Fight: Dad scores big win for biological fathers in Florida Supreme Court

Article here. Excerpt:

'Can a biological father be blocked from seeing his child? In Florida, the answer in some cases was yes. But one dad’s case made it all the way to Florida’s Supreme Court. 7’s Brian Entin has our special report in “Father’s Fight.”
...
Connor Perkins: “I raised my child for three years, and then all the sudden, I’m nothing, right? I have no rights. I am not considered a father, I get stripped of all my rights.”

Connor had the baby with a married woman. A DNA test proved he was the biological father.

But when the little girl was 3 years old, the woman and her husband argued in court they would raise the child, and wanted Connor out of the picture.

Legally, they could do that. An old Florida law said marriage overrides biology when it comes to a man’s parental rights.

Connor Perkins: “I never could have imagined that I would be in this situation today, where I’d be fighting for rights to my own daughter.”

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How Government Caused 'the Boy Crisis’

Article here. Excerpt:

'Warren Farrell, author of The Boy Crisis, was once associated with the feminist movement. Then he changed his views. "I don't agree with the part of feminism that says, 'Men are the oppressors and women are the oppressed,'" Farrell tells Maxim Lott, a senior producer of Stossel on Reason.

For example, men die five years earlier than women, have more dangerous jobs, and are often passed over for custody. Boys are two times more likely than girls to commit suicide. Boys are 29 percent less likely to get a college degree than girls.

So why do men earn more and have more influence in government and business? A big reason, Farrell argues, is that men are filling social expectations to become the family breadwinner.

"Our dads and our grandpas, they made sacrifices...to make more money, and then the feminist movement turned all of that sacrifice on the part of men against men," Farrell says.

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What Feminists Can Do for Boys

Article here. Excerpt:

'One of the many political ironies of our time is that feminism’s most powerful cultural moment has coincided with the rise of extreme misogyny. While women protest, run for office and embrace the movement for gender equality in record numbers, a generation of young, mostly white men are being radicalized into believing that their problems stem from women’s progress.

Whether it’s misogynist terrorism, the rash of young men feeling sexually entitled to women or the persistent stereotype of “real men” as powerful and violent, it’s never been clearer that American boys are in desperate need of intervention.

Though feminists have always recognized the anguish that boys face in a patriarchal system, we haven’t built the same structures of support for boys that we have for girls. If we want to stop young men from being taken in by sexism, that has to change.'

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Not Everything Is A Feminist Issue

Article here. Excerpt:

'Feminism is no longer a specific political outlook, with specific issues attached. No, today it seems that everything is a feminist issue, from adverts on the Tube to the level of air-conditioning in an office. Thinking about buying a razor? There’s a feminist issue to be considered there, too.

But this week’s announcement that former Irish president and UN high commissioner Mary Robinson is launching a ‘feminist fight against climate change’ really takes the biscuit. Along with comedian Maeve Higgins, Robinson is hosting a new podcast called Mothers of Invention, which insists that ‘climate change is a manmade problem that requires a feminist solution’. Climate change, Robinson argues, is an issue which ‘affects women far more’, because ‘women are more likely to die in a climate disaster, and day to day they are the ones cooking on solid-fuel stoves that can ultimately poison them’.'

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"All Masculinity Is Toxic"

Article here. Excerpt:

'So, I was surprised and intrigued when I came across the powerful ideas of John Stoltenberg, whose theories kind of epitomize the fears of paranoid conservatives and undercut the more tepid critiques of machismo made by my fellow SJWs. In the past, the prominent feminist scholar has openly equated the idea of “healthy masculinity” with the oxymoron of “healthy cancer.” This is because he sees manhood as an identity built entirely out of oppression. He contends that the parts of manhood that we view as non-toxic don’t actually have a designated gender—and describing these actions or qualities as masculine just reflects our disdain for women. His emotive 1993 book The End of Manhood highlights his personal struggles trying to live up to the restrictive norms of manhood while guiding readers on how to drop the mask of manhood so that we can be free to give and receive love.

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Uni makes student reflect on 'masculinity' as punishment

Article here. Excerpt:

'A University of Texas-Austin student was forced to reflect on a film about toxic masculinity after a Title IX investigation found him guilty of harassment based on a non-criminal standard of evidence.

According to an internal letter obtained by Campus Reform, following an appeal of his sanctions, the student received a note from UT president Gregory Fenves stating that “nothing you allege, even if true, would change the ultimate outcome of this matter.”

The student—who requested anonymity—graduated in Spring with a JD. During his time in law school, a female student filed six Title IX complaints against him over two years: three for harassment, two for stalking, and one for violation of a no-contact order. 

Upon investigation, the student was found guilty of violating the school's harassment policy. The student, however, claims that the determination was made “on very questionable grounds” using the Obama-era “preponderance of the evidence standard,” rather than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” threshold used in criminal cases.'

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SAVE: Contact Jeff Sessions now to stop funding for Start By Believing

From SAVE:

An Open Letter denouncing inequitable "victim-centered" practices has garnered more than 150 signatures from criminal attorneys, law professors, and scholars across the country who are concerned about the lack of objectivity and balance being utilized in sexual misconduct investigations.

Many of the victim-centered practices discussed in the Letter have become widely utilized by college administrators, drawing the ire of judges in both state and federal courts. "[I]n a stunning collective judicial rebuke to many campuses' unfair treatment of students accused of sexual misconduct, courts have issued at least 102 rulings against universities since 2011 compared with 88 rulings in their favor." (1)

Victim-centered practices, sometimes referred to as "Start by Believing," are becoming widespread in the criminal justice system, as well.

Take a stand against "victim-centered" practices now and contact Attorney General Jeff Sessions at (202) 353-1555 to stop funding for Start by Believing.

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What To Learn From The Social Justice Warrior Who Was Eaten By His Own Mob

Article here. Excerpt:

'The mob’s newfound interest in family cohesion at the Mexican border should be clear to anybody who can think it through: it’s a political ploy to use the kids as pawns in order to open the borders. The anti-thought Left cannot win arguments on the merits, and certainly not with rule of law or due process. So it needs bodies, and gets them with bribes: welfare, health care, and education subsidies.

The anti-thought Left cares as deeply about family separation as it cares about the emotional health of individuals like Barrett Wilson whom they enlist in their rent-a-mobs. If they cared about the emotional health of mob participants, they’d be interested in helping them develop means of independent thought rather than force-feeding them a diet of identity politics and ignorance in the schools. They’d have promoted family cohesion and happiness for children. Instead, they’ve addicted them to the emotional rush of “progressive” mob politics.

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