Article here. Excerpt:

'If we are honest with ourselves, we have long known that masculinity kills men, in ways both myriad and measurable. While social constructions of femininity demand that women be thin, beautiful, accommodating, and some unattainable balance of virginal and fuckable, social constructions of masculinity demand that men constantly prove and re-prove the very fact that they are, well, men.

Both ideas are poisonous and potentially destructive, but statistically speaking, the number of addicted and afflicted men and their comparatively shorter lifespans proves masculinity is actually the more effective killer, getting the job done faster and in greater numbers. Masculinity’s death tolls are attributed to its more specific manifestations: alcoholism, workaholism and violence. Even when it does not literally kill, it causes a sort of spiritual death, leaving many men traumatized, dissociated and often unknowingly depressed. (These issues are heightened by race, class, sexuality and other marginalizing factors, but here let’s focus on early childhood and adolescent socialization overall.) To quote poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “tis not in death that men die most.” And for many men, the process begins long before manhood.

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'If you want to get a distilled version of the present moment in American politics, it’s not a bad idea to listen to what poets are saying, believe it or not. Right now, of course, a lot of the arguments are about identity. Elisa Gabbert is a poet and essayist who lives in Colorado and is the author of The French Exit and The Self Unstable. Last week, in an advice column for Electric Literature, she answered a note from a white male poet worried that “the need for poems from a white, male perspective just isn’t there anymore.” The column ran under the provocative headline “Should White Men Stop Writing?” and caused a storm on social media. The letter summed up a conversation about writing and gender and race and identity that's been going on for a long time but building momentum again since the poets Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young's paper about gender balance in experimental poetry journals and anthologies, "Numbers Trouble," was published in 2007. And then with the annual VIDA counts that break down contributions to literary magazines by gender, and more recently ethnicity. I was on a airplane when the storm over Gabbert’s column hit, but we’d corresponded in the past, so I asked her about it.
...

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'If you've ever been forced to stand for a long journey on a bus as some average-sized bloke spread his thighs across three seats, or spent an entire flight with your knees in your nostrils because the guy next to you was carelessly spreading his legs, you will be familiar with "manspreading".

It's a newish buzzword for an old bugbear. For some men, it almost seems the different poles of the earth pull their knees in opposing directions as they sit, hoarding space between their legs.
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Like people who think their bags are too precious to sit on the floor or in their laps, and instead give their inanimate belongings a seat of their own, manspreading reeks of entitlement.

There was plenty of publicity and appreciation then, when New York City, where I now live, appeared to declare war on manspreading six months ago. It started with a public awareness campaign, and escalated recently with reports that two men had actually been arrested.'

Story here. Robert Franklin reports on a study by a Dr. Brenda Williams that reveals some troubling information about child support enforcement. Some excerpts:

Blacks are 87% of those incarcerated:

"My non-profit group, The Family Unit, recently studied the incarceration of non-custodial parents in Sumter County for non-payment of child support. We found that 87 percent of those incarcerated are African-Americans and the majority are indigent, don’t have a high school diploma, live in low-income neighborhoods and are unemployed."

Fathers are 98% of those jailed:

"Based on all the incarcerations of parents for child support arrears in the state except three counties, those data revealed that some 98% of those incarcerated were fathers."

NCPs are jailed for failing to pay attorneys:

Story here. Excerpt:

'A WOMAN held up a provocative sign dismissing the idea of a 'rape culture' in the West at a feminist rally which was trying to raise awareness of sexual assault.

Lauren Southern, a reporter with TheRebel, held up the controversial placard on the steps of a march organised in association with SlutWalk in Vancouver which read: 'There is no rape culture in the West' and then documented what happened.

She describes how she got into a "huge confrontation" with those involved, and claims that her cameraman was shoved, her sign torn up and that she was the victim of misogynist language - from other women.

Ms Southern also wrote that she decided to perform the stunt as a way to "challenge the fear mongering feminist narrative about men, women and violence".

"It is intellectually dishonest to think we are living in a rape culture," Ms Southern says in the introduction to the video.'

Video here.

Article here. Excerpt:

'It takes courage to tell a bunch of Canadian feminists marchers against ‘rape culture’ that they are talking rubbish. And courage is something Lauren Southern, a reporter for The Rebel, appears to have in abundance. She had the guts to go to a ‘SlutWalk’ in Vancouver holding a sign that said: ‘There is no rape culture in the west’. You can see her video above.

Lauren made the not unreasonable point that Canada is hardly a rapist’s paradise. ‘Rapists go to prison here,’ says Lauren. ‘Rapists are actually hated here. Rapists are fired from their jobs. Men who make rape jokes are fired from their jobs.’ But it is lost on the SlutWalkers, who are so desperate to talk about — and display — their bodies that they will not listen to reason.

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'In a Time op-ed, she made two alarming claims, claims that — if true — would mean that the plight of women on college campuses truly was a national crisis, one that should command the attention of all levels of government. First, she echoed President Obama and the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, declaring that “the price of a college education should never include a one in five chance of being sexually assaulted.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'One of the most frustrating things about debating feminists and feminist academics is how readily they reach for words such as “abuse,” “harassment” and “safety” – particularly, it seems, when they are losing the argument.

Yesterday I debated Dr Emily Grossman on women in science and, sure as night follows day, she reached for the same vocabulary afterwards, claiming on Twitter that she was “absolutely reeling” from the “mysogynistic [sic] backlash” and that she “hadn’t quite realised the extent of #everydaysexism.”

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'Small press And Other Stories has answered author Kamila Shamsie’s provocative call for a year of publishing women to redress “gender bias” in the literary world.

The novelist made what she called her “provocation” in Saturday’s Guardian, revealing that just under 40% of books submitted to the Booker prize over the past five years were by women, and pointing to everything from the author Nicola Griffith’s research, which found that far more prize-winning novels have male than female protagonists, to the Vida statistics showing that male authors and reviewers command more space than female.

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'But this year a group of undergraduates — mostly women — will be shunning all this. They will be staying in their college rooms, fingers flying across their keyboards as they scowl at the screen. They are the hard core of a feminist cult that has gripped Oxford and makes life miserable for hundreds of undergraduates across the university. The cult uses Facebook to snoop on students who aren’t ‘proper’ feminists. It tries to force young women to use its extreme rhetoric and denounces them if they don’t.

Its digital tirades can poison college life. One young woman told me that new friends she’d made at Oxford suddenly shunned her in the dining hall after the word went out that she held ‘incorrect’ views on women’s rights. (She was so worried about repercussions that she asked me not to mention which area of women’s rights she felt strongly about.)

Article here. Excerpt:

'But how? Here’s one idea. Get women in university to switch their majors. Instead of sociology, they should take petroleum engineering, which pays three or four times as much. That would close the gap in no time.

In fact, most (not all) of the wage gap is a myth, based on the same sort of flawed statistics that vastly inflate the problem of “rape culture.” Yet if you doubt the magnitude of either of these problems, you will probably be denounced as a misogynist, or worse.

Just ask Christina Hoff Sommers, a mild-mannered feminist who argues that modern feminism has gone off the deep end. Take the pay gap. She points out that much of the gap is explained by the fact that women choose career paths that pay less than the work men choose. Once you correct for occupational differences, hours worked per week, and tenure in the work force, most of the pay gap disappears. The statistics bear her out.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'And then Emma Sulkowicz came forward and told her story, which led to a backlash, and then a backlash to the backlash, and questions are still being asked about it. And then you have the Rolling Stone story, which prompted completely appropriate questions of a different sort. And these discussions, regardless of where you land on what they mean or who is right or wrong, take the conversation to a different place than where you are trying to lead it.

Article here. Excerpt:

'As a criminal defense attorney and longtime feminist, I am startled at the current social climate against young men accused of sex assaults. In light of all the negative press surrounding the Missoula County Attorney’s Office, the public outcry to prosecute more campus sex assault cases and the biased journalism in town, people have forgotten about the Constitution and the presumption of innocence. Our justice system is designed to protect the accused from rumor, speculation and mob mentality. Victims’ “rights” do not trump the rights of the accused.

Story here. Excerpt:

'A man and a woman who had apparently just met on a Chula Vista trolley on Valentine’s Day allegedly had sex outside a dress store in an incident that stunned onlooking employees and customers, a San Diego-area station reported.
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The man and woman reportedly didn’t even know each other names, and police said they had just met on a trolley.

The station reported that the woman was ticketed while the man was taken away in handcuffs.'

Article here. Excerpt: