The following organizations were early supporters of Mensactivism.org, and we thank them for their support. If you'd like to trade links with us, see our Mensactivism.org supporters page.
'In May, Judith Shulevitz wrote in the New York Times about how women are still responsible for most of the “worry work” in their homes—a type of labor that requires “large reserves of emotional energy to stay on top of it all.” Sociological research finds that moms continue to direct most or all of domestic and familial matters, even if fathers are increasingly helping in the execution of such tasks. “Whether a woman loves or hates worry work,” Shulevitz writes, “it can scatter her focus on what she does for pay and knock her partway or clean off a career path. This distracting grind of apprehension and organization may be one of the least movable obstacles to women’s equality in the workplace.”
'2015 was the year that Emma Sulkowicz graduated from Columbia University carrying her mattress across the stage as the ultimate symbol the school had failed her as a sexual assault victim.
It was also the year that her accused rapist, Paul Nungesser, filed a federal complaint against the school, citing gender discrimination under Title IX for “condoning a hostile educational environment” against him, even after he was cleared of sexual assault charges.
The same Title IX protections that sexual assault victim advocates were using to create sweeping federal reforms began to be used by the (almost uniformly) male students who were expelled or suspended.
"I think that what’s happening is that the pendulum has swung so far over to the side of unfair campus proceedings that lawyers for some of the accused students are trying everything they can to get a fair hearing,” civil rights attorney Harvey Silverglate told The Daily Beast in April.
'No single issue earned more Pinocchios than dubious claims about sex trafficking.There are not 300,000 children at risk for sexual exploitation. There are not 100,000 children in the sex trade. Human trafficking is not a $9.5 billion business in the United States. Girls do not become victims of sex trafficking at an average age of 13 years.The federal government has not arrested hundreds of sex traffickers. These were all false claims made in 2015 by politicians, advocacy groups and government officials.'
'A succession of high-wattage thefts in New York has uncovered a bizarre pattern involving women who target wealthy men at nightclubs, accompany them home and then disappear with tens of thousands of dollars in cash and jewellery.
...
In a separate case, a 19-year-old woman from New Jersey, Alexandra Martinez, was arraigned Wednesday in Brooklyn Criminal Court on grand larceny charges in two incidents in which she is accused of having accompanied men home from bars, mixed them drinks that made them lose consciousness, and stolen watches and cash, according to a criminal complaint.
...
The criminal complaint against Martinez says that in one incident, in September, she and another woman prepared a cocktail at a man's home that knocked him out.'
'Free speech and academic freedom are endangered species on American college and university campuses. Speech codes, trigger warnings, the heckler’s veto and politically correct inquisitions have become the norm.
While there are many causes for this, the main culprit is Title IX, a federal statute enacted in 1972 that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education program or activity.
Title IX goes beyond merely prohibiting sex discrimination; it also requires that schools take proactive measures to eliminate any such discrimination.
'Rolling Stone magazine is urging a judge to throw out a lawsuit filed by three former fraternity members at the University of Virginia who claim they suffered humiliation and emotional distress because of the magazine's debunked article about a campus gang rape.
George Elias IV, Stephen Hadford and Ross Fowler sued the magazine in July, claiming they were defamed by the November 2014 article written by journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely, which described in chilling detail a student's account of being raped by seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house in September 2012. The former Phi Kappa Psi members also sued Erdely and Rolling Stone's publisher, Wenner Media.
The men claimed the article "created a simple and direct way to match the alleged attackers" to them based on details provided in the story. For example, they said friends and family of Elias "would have reasonably concluded" that the incident happened in the man's room based on descriptions in the article.
'The common sense and resolve shown by several members of Harvard Law School’s faculty in responding to hot–button issues – notably fair treatment in campus sexual assault and harassment proceedings – hasn’t always been matched by their administrators.
Dean Martha Minow recently addressed graduating students at her alma mater, the University of Michigan, for the school’s winter commencement, The Harvard Crimson reported.
Telling students to be “upstanders” – those who intervene when they see injustice – Minow compared apartheid and forced segregation of public schools to … accidentally offending someone:
“Taking even seemingly small acts in one’s own school can build the culture that prevents violence, bullying, sexual assault, and racial microaggressions,” she said.
Seriously? Dean Minow cites three categories of intentionally threatening language and action andthen tags on a phenomenon that, by its very definition, is unknown to those who practice it.'
'A few days ago, I saw one of those stories that keeps coming around. A mom was lamenting the emptiness of her empty nest after her last child went to college. And thinking about how happy she will be to see her children again at Christmas.
But for many of us, the empty nest happened when the children were six, not 17, and they will not be back home for Christmas. It is eternally amazing to me that the media never make the connection between these two stories, one a story of children naturally taking wing from the nest, and the other an unnecessary tragedy caused by the fecklessness of the family courts. The connection is the human heart.
So, for many of us, Christmas will not be the joyous celebration of faith and family that we see on television. The absence of those precious children will make Christmas more like the opening of a wound than the celebration of life and hope.
"I want to beg Senators [Claire] McCaskill and [Kirsten] Gillibrand to see the destruction of an innocent life, to feel his pain, to see his trauma, to know what it's like to pick up your child who is in a crumble on the campus lawn, to ask them why his life doesn't matter," she wrote, "but the silencing continues, and the war wages on."
It is doubtful that her pleas would have any effect on Senator McCaskill who has written this in an opinion piece in Time Magazine about her efforts to reform the UCMJ:
"As a former sex crimes prosecutor who’s personally held the hands of victims and fought to put rapists behind bars, I’ve judged each policy idea with one yardstick: Will it lead to better protections for victims and more prosecutions of predators?"
'"Rwanda is beating the U.S. In Gender Equality" That is a headline from a recent news story in the Washington Post. Well, could it be true? Let's check the facts.'
'Just days after a judge denied a Georgia Institute of Technology student's request for a preliminary injunction to halt an expulsion, another student has filed a gender discrimination claim against the school.
John Doe, as he is referred to in court documents, has filed a lawsuit against the university and the same administrators who failed to follow school procedures against the other complainant.
The twist in this case is that Doe is also bisexual, and is alleging that Georgia Tech has not only a bias against male accused students, but an exceptional bias against non-straight male accused students.'
'Four former students of William Paterson University who were accused of raping a student on campus last year have filed a lawsuit against the school, alleging that they were falsely arrested, maliciously prosecuted and subjected to civil-rights violations that left them with ruined educational futures and permanently tarnished reputations.
The students, who were arrested and charged with aggravated sexual assault and numerous other offenses, were suspended from the school in November 2014. University President Kathleen Waldron at the time issued a statement in which she sympathized with the accuser and said she was “angry and dismayed that this crime was committed on our campus and allegedly by students.”
A few months later, however, a Passaic County grand jury refused to indict and all charges were dismissed against all five defendants: Noah Williams of Camden, Garrett Collick of Paterson, Darius Singleton of Jersey City, Termaine Scott of Vineland and Jahmel Latimer of Hoboken.'
'“Next thing we do, pay equity for women workers. Women should not be making 79 cents on the dollar compared to that.”
—Sanders
There is clearly a wage gap, but differences in the life choices of men and women — such as women tending to leave the workforce when they have children — make it difficult to make simple comparisons.
Sanders is using a figure (annual wages, from the Census Bureau) that makes the disparity appear the greatest—21 cents on the dollar.
But the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the gap is 18 cents when looking at weekly wages. The gap is even smaller when you look at hourly wages — 13 cents — but then not every wage earner is paid on an hourly basis, so that statistic excludes salaried workers.
'At Saturday night's Democratic presidential debate, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said he would fix the economy in part by closing the gender wage gap. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also brought up "equal pay for equal work," implying that is not currently the case and that there is some unspoken rule in business that women can be paid less.
The problem with this statement is that the gender wage gap is due to the choices women make and is therefore not fixableunless those choices are controlled — which is a ludicrous suggestion.
And it's not even properly called a "wage gap," it is more appropriately called an "earnings gap," because that is the claim that women earn 77 or 78 cents on the dollar compared to men.'
At a reader's suggestion I have enabled upload of images along with story content. Let's see how this works. Images will be scaled so that they are no larger than 640x640 pixels and limited in size to 1 MB, with 100 MB/user as the total upload limit. I don't imagine we will see too heavy usage of this feature but it's nice to have it when posting information better shown graphically, or when an original story depends on an image to make its point.
How to add an image to your submitted story? When creating a story, click "File Attachments" and use the "Browse..." button to browse to the image you want to attach and click "Attach" after choosing it. Obviously, all images should be 'G' rated and if for some reason you feel it necessary to post something NSFW (e.g.: original images of topless crazed feminists throwing pies at Vladimir Putin or something), please indicate such in the content. To demonstrate, attached is a screen cap of the "File Attachments" section of the content options found under the text area for a story. Should be easy enough to figure it out.
Due to problems with user accounts being used for spam, we require all new user account requests to be sent via email to: newaccounts@mensactivism.org Please let us know what username you would like in your email. Thanks for your patience while we look for a more permanent resolution to our spam problems.
We encourage everyone to distribute the information found on our site, and we only ask that you help to spread the word about Mensactivism.org in the process: so please, say you saw it on Mensactivism.org!
Thank You!
- The Men's Activist News Network
"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality." - Ayn Rand
