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'"There's a reason why we have Title IX, which is now over forty years old," California Congresswoman Jackie Speier said in an interview today. "There's a reason why we put the spotlight on inequality that exists in women participating in sports."

Now Speier wants to focus that spotlight on the world of professional sports, starting with a summit on gender inequality this Wednesday, August 25, at Mercy High School in her home district of San Francisco.

You may remember Speier as being one of several legislators in an official letter from Congress to chastise FIFA for unequal prize money, lack of equal developmental opportunities, and inferior playing conditions in the wake of the Women's World Cup. At the time the letter seemed ambitious, but it seems to have caught some attention at FIFA's headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland. Speier and company received a reply from FIFA last week.'

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'British politician Jeremy Corbyn proposed reinstalling female-only train cars on Wednesday as a solution to a reported increase in sexual harassment on public transit. The candidate for the Labour Party’s leadership post also proposed a 24-hour hotline so women can report perceived sexual offenses as soon as they occur.

Rail carriages reserved exclusively for women existed on British trains for nearly 100 years, until 1977; until now, no public figure as high-profile as Corbyn, who has developed a reputation for proposing radical solutions to social problems, has talked publicly of reviving the practice.'

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'The Department of Human Settlements said women in construction build better quality houses than men.

Deputy Minister Zou Kota-Fredericks hosted a Women in Construction Summit yesterday under the theme 'Women in Construction Taking South Africa Forward'.

Kota-Fredericks said she's pleased to see women enter the male dominated industry.

“The ones that are built by woman normally are of good quality, because the women are normally in terms of detail. They've got a high acumen. They make sure the product that they give us as government is a quality product.”

Kota-Fredericks said the department is on track to build 1,9 million houses by 2019.'

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'When spiked’s law editor Luke Gittos decided to write a book on ‘rape culture’ he must have known it was likely to cause him a lot of trouble. Gittos is a privileged, white, London-based, (possibly cis-gender) male lawyer who claims no experience of forced sex. His book could not be more of a challenge to the current zeitgeist.

Hence, there will be those who say his privileged, white maleness disqualifies him from speaking out on the issue of rape, and that this book, Why Rape Culture is a Dangerous Myth: From Steubenville to Ched Evans, is a ‘mansplaining’ display of insensitive arrogance by someone with no sense of women’s experience. Others will probably be tempted to dismiss any man who writes a book challenging ‘rape culture’ as an attention-seeking controversialist intent on provoking feminist fury. The publisher should probably have issued a Twitterstorm alert.

But such attempts to dismiss the relevance of Gittos’s arguments would be mind-numbingly stupid. Because, despite his gender and background (neither of which are his fault), Gittos has produced a useful and intelligent analysis that clarifies and makes sense of an issue that has become very muddled.

Gittos’s tightly written polemic argues against the accepted view that we live in a society in which misogyny and everyday sexism have created a so-called rape culture, in which rape is pervasive, underreported and ignored. He does not believe that the police and the law courts are failing women by failing to convict rapists. On the contrary, Gittos argues that the obsession with a ‘culture of rape’ has seriously distorted our view of sexual violence, and that the expansion of laws to protect women is eroding areas of privacy and inviting state regulation of our most intimate affairs.

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'Columbia University on Friday asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit by a recent graduate who said it allowed a student who accused him of rape to harass him by carrying a mattress around campus in protest, even though the school had cleared him of the allegation.

In a filing in Manhattan federal court, Columbia said the discrimination lawsuit by the plaintiff, Paul Nungesser, suggested that the school had an obligation to silence his accuser, Emma Sulkowicz, from speaking publicly about sexual assault on college campuses, an issue of national concern.

Nungesser in April sued Columbia and visual arts professor Jon Kessler, who oversaw Sulkowicz' senior thesis "Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight)," in which she drew national attention by carrying a mattress around the campus in Manhattan's Morningside Heights. Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, was also named as a defendant.

Article here. Remember: It's only a problem if it affects women, and then only as it affects women. Excerpt:

'Many people work at dangerous heights, or with deadly chemicals or crushing equipment. But, as the gruesome killing of reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward reminded us Wednesday, murder happens surprisingly often on the job. Out of nearly 4,600 workplace deaths in 2013, 9 percent were caused by homicides, according to the census of workplace deaths by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It's a pattern that disproportionately affects women. After car accidents, homicide is the most likely way for women to die at work, representing 21 percent of workplace deaths. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to die many other ways. Murders represent 8 percent of workplace deaths for men, preceded by car accidents, falls and contact with objects and equipment.

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'Question: What's the one thing that's more annoying than men who sit with their legs too far apart on public transport?

Answer: the word used to describe it.

Manspreading might be a silly made-up word to explain the selfish male practice of splaying oneself in an antisocial manner on a bus or train carriage (or even chat-show sofa), but it has now been recognised by the online Oxford dictionary.
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But what is particularly irritating about manspreading is that it is one of seemingly countless modern words to adopt the prefix "man-". And none of them reflect well on men.

Those three simple letters can turn almost any noun, verb or adjective into something rude, sexist, vulgar, pathetic, vain or childish, as the list below demonstrates.'

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'Jeff Goldblum had his son circumcised, but didn't hold a bris — the ceremonial Jewish circumcision ritual — he told Conan O'Brien, when Conan asked. Instead, he and his wife and their pediatrician, a former New York Met, sang "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during the procedure. Goldblum asked Conan and sidekick Andy Richter if they had circumcised their sons, and Richter took the bait.

Richter did not have his son circumcised, and that's only the tip of the personal iceberg he shared. O'Brien stayed out of the debate, only jumping in occasionally to let everyone know how uncomfortable he was with the turn of the conversation. "With my son, as I told the doctor, I said, 'He was born perfect — why change him?'" Richter said, to appreciative murmurs from the audience. "So, what I'm saying is, you've mutilated your child," he added, good-naturedly ribbing Goldblum. Goldblum said that Ricther was probably right, and Conan took the opportunity to wrap up the debate. ...'

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'Circumcision is supposed to be a rite of passage, but a new study by World Vision has confirmed the fears of many that some boys are subjected to abusive and bullying practices.

The charity's study, In the Name of Culture: Forced Initiation in Orange Farm South Africa, which was carried out in Orange Farm, south of Johannesburg, found that boys who do not go, or do not complete initiation, are picked on and excluded.

"For example, fellow students will take away their chairs and won’t allow them to use the school bathrooms unless they pay a fee," World Vision said a statement.

Paula Barnard, national director of World Vision SA, said society is not acting cohesively or fast enough to deal with illegal initiation schools.'

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'Yale is reporting not only on cases brought forward since Jan. 1, but also providing updates on past cases.

In one example, one of the school’s Title IX coordinators “brought a formal complaint alleging that a [Yale College] student engaged in sexual touching without consent.” Upon further review, the school “did not find sufficient evidence to support the allegation,” but continued to maintain no-contact restrictions on the cleared student.

On other occasions, accused students did not even get a hearing, receiving punishments directly from Title IX officers.

On one occasion, a student accused another of inappropriate sexual touching but decided to not go forward with the case. Without any adjudication of the allegation’s merits, the Title IX coordinator “counseled the one identified respondent on appropriate conduct and referred the respondent for training on sexual consent.”'

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'At the University of Minnesota, yes now officially means yes.

The U’s revised “affirmative consent” policy on student sexual relations will roll out next week, in time for freshmen to begin arriving on campus for Welcome Week Sept. 2-7.
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Critics of affirmative consent say it places an unfair burden on the accused. The policy has been implemented at schools across the country during the past year. But this summer, courts in Tennessee, California and Virginia have criticized it in cases where students accused of sexual assault didn’t receive due process.

“What the court said is that you cannot require someone to prove that consent was manifested, particularly in a typical date-rape situation where there is no other evidence and where it often comes down to he-said, she-said,” said John Banzhaf, a law professor at George Washington University.'

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'A Maryland politician was busted on charges of indecent exposure and trespassing at her ex-husband’s house, court documents show.

Delegate Ariana Kelly flipped out when she dropped off the couple’s kids in Bethesda and realized her former spouse’s fiancee was home,the Washington Post reported.

The 38-year-old state lawmaker rang the doorbell over and over during the June 27 encounter, and then pulled out her breasts, according to the complaint.

The Montgomery Democrat stood “with one breast in each hand (shaking) them up and down,” according to the documents obtained by the Washington Post.

Kelly’s ex-husband, Barak Sanford, recorded the bizarre episode on his cell phone and called police, authorities said.'

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'The psychological and forensic profile of men who murder their intimate partners varies from murderers who kill people they don’t know, a study published online Friday in the Journal of Forensic Sciences suggests.

The study, conducted by scientists at Northwestern University, involved more than 1,500 hours of interviews with 153 male and female murderers charged with and/or convicted of first-degree murder in Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Colorado and Arizona.

“You learn a lot about them in that amount of time,” lead author Robert Hanlon, director of the forensic psychology research lab at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said in a news release. “I saw the same patterns and trends over and over again.”

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