Article here. Excerpt:

'Describing the words someone uses as ‘unacceptable’ can appear politically neutral, unemotive and simply commonsense. It allows the speaker to take the moral highground by suggesting there are ways of speaking and behaving that all right-thinking people agree upon. Those whose words are labelled ‘unacceptable’ are deemed to have crossed a line and committed a transgression against such normal codes of decency and politeness. As we have seen with Charlotte Proudman’s calling-out of the supposedly sexist barrister, and all those who rushed to decry Tim Hunt’s joke, the biggest infringement against the acceptable is to commit speech crimes against feminism. The feminist war on unacceptable language now encompasses everything from jokes and compliments to mildly flirtatious comments.

The roots of this obsession with policing language began at least as far back as the 1980s. A social constructionist view of gender as performative rather than biological met an emerging postmodernism that assumed discourse constructs not just perceptions of reality but reality itself. This led feminist theorists, such as Julia Kristeva, to argue that it is language that constructs power relations and the conditions for oppression. According to this view, women’s oppression could be challenged by changing the language and images through which people constructed the world. Today, when young women are seemingly quicker than ever to declare themselves victims of everyday sexism and casual misogyny, the notion that words are pre-eminently important in shaping reality has remained. Only now it has been joined by the notion that language can inflict mental harm on women, who are seen as vulnerable to everything from adverts on the Tube to clapping.

Article here. Excerpt:

'One of the things that got overlooked last week was a congressional hearing "before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training on the topic of 'Preventing and Responding to Sexual Assault on College Campuses.'" The highlight (or lowlight depending on your view of the Constitution) came from Rep. Jared Polis, (D-CO).

Sparks flew when Rep. Polis said "It seems like we ought to provide more of a legal framework, then, that allows a reasonable likelihood standard or a preponderance of evidence standard. I mean if there’s 10 people that have been accused, and, you know, under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all 10 people. We’re not talking about depriving them of life or liberty, we’re talking about, they’re transferred to another university, for crying out loud."'

Article here. Excerpt:

'On what planet is it right to punish the innocent in a quixotic effort to curb campus rape?

Unfortunately, it’s a-okay in the bizarro world that is Capitol Hill. Democrat Colorado Rep. Jared Polis earned roaring applause on Thursday when the lawmaker declared it is just to expel all students — regardless of guilt — who are accused of sexual assault.

“I mean, if there’s 10 people that have been accused and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, seems better to get rid of all 10 people,” Polis said at a House hearing on campus sexual assault. “We’re not talking about depriving them of life or liberty, we’re talking about their transfer to another university.”'

Article here. Excerpt:

'A fundraising walk this month aims to bring discussions about suicide and mental health “out of the darkness” and into the light.

The eighth annual Watertown Out of Darkness Walk for Suicide Prevention will be held at noon Sept. 26 at Thompson Park.

The walk is one of more than 300 Out of Darkness Walks around the country organized by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. It raises money to support research and local education programs to fight suicide.

“When you walk in an Out of Darkness Walk, you join with people across the country to help raise awareness of suicide and financially support the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, which supports the survivors of suicide loss, advocates for public policy and invests in research and educational programs to prevent suicide,” event organizer Vicki S. Hill said in a news release.

Ms. Hill said she became involved with the event to honor her brother, Joe Morse, who was lost to suicide in January 2012.'

Story here. Most military PTSD victims are men, but there are many ways a person can get PTSD. If this story's substance pans out, it'd be a huge game-changer. Excerpt:

'MDMA, often known as Ecstasy or Molly, has for decades been used as a party drug — consumed in clubs, fuel for all-night raves. But lately, the substance is also being used in very different settings, for a very different purpose: to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

The Food and Drug Administration has approved phase two clinical studies of the treatment, and they're now underway in four locations. Results so far have been promising, according to reporter Kelley McMillan, who has been investigating this new use of MDMA and has written about it in the current issue of Marie Claire.

Article here. Didn't their plan also include murdering her husband? How soon we forget. And what a pathetic gender card approach to her rationalizations. Hope they toss the key. Excerpt:

'Joyce Mitchell, the upstate prison worker who aided the escape of two murderers in June, said she was going through depression and “got in over my head” when she conspired with the two men.

Mitchell, in her first public comments, told NBC’s Matt Lauer that she loves her husband, but got swept up in the allure of helping inmates David Sweat and Richard Matt, who she was believed to be having an affair with inside the prison.

“I know it’s hard to believe. But I do love my husband. And I’ve always loved my husband. I just– I was going through a point in my life — a lot of people go through depression,” Mitchell said, according to excerpts released Friday by NBC. “A lot of people go through that. And I just got in over my head. And I couldn’t get out.”'

Article here. Excerpt:

'A young man from Indiana who had consensual sex with a 14-year-old girl who told him she was older has been removed from Michigan's sex offender registry pending his resentencing.

Zach Anderson, a 20-year-old Elkhart, Indiana, resident, spent 75 days in jail after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor.

He was given a five-year probation that banned him from using computers or the Internet and also had faced 25 years on Michigan's sex-offender registry.

But the conditions of that sentence no longer apply due to last week's decision to order a new sentence for Anderson, Berrien County Trial Court Judge Angela Pasula said at a bond hearing on Friday.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Colorado Congressman Jared Polis' comments about expelling students merely accused of sexual assault weren't just an affront to the American justice system, they were also incoherent.

At his Washington Post blog "The Volokh Conspiracy," Eugene Volokh summed up Polis' view: "If there are 10 people who have been accused, and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all 10 people."

Volokh, a professor of free speech law, wrote that while a "whiff of suspicion" may sometimes be enough to remove someone from his or her current position, he "just hadn't thought that being a college student would or should be one of them."

Polis had followed up his statement about expelling students with the claim that "We're not talking about depriving them of life or liberty, we're talking about them being transferred to another university, for crying out loud."

Article here. Excerpt:

'There has been a great deal of outrage over the past couple of weeks regarding the alleged discrimination between male victims of child sexual abuse and female victims.

The main argument seems to be that recent abuse against young boys only resulted in the abuser receiving weekend work detention. Abusers of young girls, in contrast, have received hundreds of years behind bars. This implies that the judicial system must not care about young boys.

But what if the gender discrimination is placed on the wrong side of the equation?

It was former Baltimore Ravens cheerleader Molly Shattuck's case that seemed to spark interest in this phenomenon. Shattuck was sentenced to 48 weekends at a work detention facility — spread out over the next two years — for statutory rape against a 15-year-old boy. Shattuck had performed oral sex on the boy, who was a friend of her own son.

Article here. Excerpt:

'We’re not new to studying women in science. Nor are we insensitive to the prejudice some women experience in academic science.

For the past decade, we have researched some of the challenges female scientists face that their male counterparts often don’t, such as balancing work and life demands like child care (see our 2012 article in American Scientist). Our guiding principle has been to follow the data wherever it takes us. We have found, for example, that women and men have comparable rates of success with grant and article submissions, and that affirmative action doesn’t lead to a preference for less-competent women (forthcoming), and that women have a harder time getting tenure in biology and psychology and are less satisfied with their jobs than men in the social sciences.

However, none of those findings have aroused the passions that our most recent research has. In a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we published an article on data from five national studies that took us to an unexpected destination. The data showed that, in tenure-track hiring, faculty prefer female job candidates over identically qualified male ones.

Because that finding runs counter to claims of sexist hiring, it was met in the news media and in academe with incredulity and often panic. We have responded to those criticisms in five pieces in the Huffington Post (parts one, two, three, four, and five), as well as another essay in American Scientist and one on the website of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Article here. Excerpt:

'For Sabrina Rubin Erdely, it’s all about her.

The disgraced author of a retracted Rolling Stone article about a gang-rape at the University of Virginia reportedly sobbed to one of her sources in the weeks after the story fell apart. But Erdely wasn’t upset because her 9,000-word piece, “A Rape on Campus,” had falsely accused a UVA fraternity of a gruesome gang-rape of a female student.

Instead, Erdely was worried about her career.

"She started bawling and said, ‘I am going to lose my job,'” Alex Pinkelton, a source of Erdely’s, told Vanity Fair in a new tick-tock about the fallout from the article.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Last fall at Oberlin College, a talk held as part of Latino Heritage Month was scheduled on the same evening that intramural soccer games were held. As a result, soccer players communicated by email about their respective plans. “Hey, that talk looks pretty great,” a white student wrote to a Hispanic student, “but on the off chance you aren’t going or would rather play futbol instead the club team wants to go!!”

Unbeknownst to the white student, the Hispanic student was offended by the email. And her response signals the rise of a new moral culture America.

Story here. Well it's "some justice," I suppose. Excerpt:

'A Sacramento federal judge ruled Wednesday that an early-release program for female inmates in California’s prisons is unconstitutional and must be expanded to include male inmates.

“When the state draws a line between two classes of persons, and denies one of those classes a right as fundamental as physical freedom, that action survives equal protection review only if the state has a sufficient justification for the classification. Here, the state does not,” U.S. District Judge Morrison C. England Jr. declared in a 35-page order.

The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation “shall immediately cease denying admission to the (Alternative Custody Program) on the basis that an applicant is male,” the judge ordered.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Are you a man who majored in business because it interested you or because you felt it would lead to a great career? That may be an unhealthy form of masculinity, according to a series of seminars coming next week from the Vanderbilt University Women's Center.

Yes, you read that correctly: A women's center seems to be telling men how they should and should not behave. Imagine the outrage if a male-dominated group attempted to tell women how they should and should not behave. You don't have to imagine, just remember all the anger that comes whenever a man speaks up about abortion. (Well, this actually happens only to the men who don't agree with feminists on abortion.)'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Benjamin Banneker Academic High School has an abundance of college-level classes and one of the highest graduation rates in the District. It’s also overwhelming female. Three out of four Banneker students last school year were girls.

Banneker is not the only high-performing District high school that serves mostly girls. Duke Ellington School of the Arts, which offers both arts and academic enrichment, was 67 percent female in 2014-2015, according to school data. And School Without Walls, where some students take classes at nearby George Washington University, was 60 percent female.