Article here. [Warning: Using Firefox but not IE, a "slide show" opens in the lower part of the page as an overlay that contains NSFW images. Salon has really sunk even for it; some of these images are pornographic. Only reason I don't *not* post it is because when using IE, the "slideshow" does not seem to come up. But regardless of what browser you use, navigate to it while at work at your own risk.]

Excerpt:

'So let’s ban frats, right? Let’s empty their houses and pressure the national organizations to donate the space to be turned into something else. (Repurposed dorms open to all students or maybe, you know, the headquarters for a chapter of Men Can Stop Rape.) Let’s push the thousands of former Greeks to join other public service groups if they really want to help their communities. Let’s open the doors and let sunlight disinfect the whole mess.

Racism and misogyny on campus won’t suddenly disappear if this happens, but shuttering the Greek system could be seen as an institutional commitment to lowering the number of dead drunk kids, women assaulted or otherwise dehumanized and racist parties defended as harmless fun.

This is the side I ultimately come down on, but here’s where I get stuck: You can ban frats, but you can’t ban large groups of entitled white men from living together. You also can’t simply ban toxic masculinity and white supremacy. These are frat problems, of course. But they are also our problems.
...

Article here. Excerpt:

'The bottom line: There’s no evidence the assailant “Jackie” named to friends actually exists, no evidence a party was held at the fraternity that night and, of course, no evidence the alleged gang rape happened.

Furthermore, “Jackie’s” veracity was called into a question on an unrelated matter. In April 2014, “Jackie” told university officials she had been attacked on a Charlottesville street, struck in the face with a glass bottle and that her roommate picked out the shards. However, that roommate told police she did no such thing. “Jackie” also said she called her mother that night. Police say phone records show no such call.

There’s one sure conclusion to be drawn from this: Rolling Stone got snookered by a story that seemed too good to be true for its purposes. If the pop culture magazine had bothered to do some of the serious reporting that The Washington Post, in particular, did, this whole ugly situation could have been avoided.

Story here. Excerpt:

'A man shot by his girlfriend is still in critical condition.

Police say she shot him during a domestic dispute.

It happened at the Park Estates Apartment Homes on Estate Drive between Poplar and Park in East Memphis.

The YWCA says an increasing number of men are becoming victims of domestic violence.

Men are calling the crisis helpline more and more.

Jacquelyn Williams with the YWCA says they want to know how to get out of their situation.

“They’re curious because they’re experiencing some aggression from either their wives or girlfriends and they’re wanting information,” she said.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'TV presenter Mary Portas [link added], who has been married to both a man and a woman, claims that bringing up children is better with a lesbian.

‘I have to say that sharing motherhood with a female makes it doubly wonderful,’ gushes Portas, 54, whose wife, 41-year-old fashion journalist Melanie Rickey, gave birth to their son Horatio in 2012.

‘Women are so capable — they are able to do an awful lot of things.’

Portas disclosed last month that Horatio was conceived artificially using sperm donated by her brother Lawrence Newton.

‘Melanie and I don’t even have to sit and talk about how we want to bring Horatio up,’ she adds. ‘We just agree.’'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Men cited helping children as their top cause for volunteering and donating to charity, a new study has found.

The findings suggest that family dynamics might play a larger role in motivating men to give and volunteer than fundraisers, communications staff, and others working on behalf of charities have realized, says Brittany Hill, the study’s lead researcher.
...
Ms. Hill said that she and her colleagues were motivated to do the study, which they titled "The Forgotten Man," after noticing a growing emphasis on women. "In recent years," she wrote, "we’ve noticed an industrywide shift in focus towards women as the target audience for cause efforts."'

Article here. [Warning: NSFW image at top of article] Excerpt:

'On Friday, the pettiness of modern, online protest feminism versus the stark truth that Britain is becoming increasingly hostile toward men was brought cruelly into view, when two seemingly unconnected news stories collided on the same day. To add a typically British undercurrent of black humour, both stories centred around the human bottom.
...
Only now, 26 years later – in the world of freely-available online porn, no less – the sclerotic eye of online protest feminism has seen something altogether more sinister in it. Of course, Tennis Girl is sexist – and regular observers of modern feminism like myself only half-sobbed: “How did it take you so long?”
...
The choice of target image felt totemic. Cruelly outing the Athena Tennis Girl as in some way misogynistic felt like a sort of historical abuse allegation against all men. It exhumed and shamed long-forgotten masculine desires felt by millions of us as we set off on our paths of sexual awakenings.

It was almost like Everyday Sexism were claiming most British men have been inexorably sexist from age seven, when most of us first saw it on a bedroom wall of an older sibling or school pal. Now the image was “disappointing,” as Everyday Sexism called it, in the favoured, terse language of the purse-lipped, disapproving matron.
...
By the time I clocked in to Twitter at 4 a.m. on Friday morning, Tennis Girl’s detractors were calling for it to be “eradicated from history” – sharing poisonous lexicon with history’s most heinous despots and totalitarian censors.

Seething with finger-curling indignation, I made my way to the Sky News studios for my weekly newspaper review, where I chose to cover the second big story that was affecting men that day, a shocking Prostate Cancer UK report in the Daily Mail.

Article here. Excerpt:

'A very thorough police investigation has found no evidence whatsoever to support the allegations of rape at the University of Virginia as sensationally reported in Rolling Stone magazine which provided such a boost to efforts to reduce rapes at colleges and universities.

This Rolling Stone debacle, coupled with the recent memory of phony allegations of rape at Duke University, and a Justice Department study showing that widely cited estimates of the rate of rapes and other sexual assaults on college campuses has been grossly exaggerated, may blunt so-far successful efforts by the federal government and anti-rape groups to force colleges to not only crack down but to also convict more male students, says public interest law professor John Banzhaf.

Story here. Excerpt:

'A woman threw a Molotov cocktail at three pro-life volunteers who were praying in front of a Planned Parenthood facility in Austin, Texas, Monday night.

One of the three women saw the flaming cocktail coming directly at her, and was able to dodge it and stamp it out. Another woman got the woman’s license plate number, and police later arrested her.

The women were volunteering for the Central Texas Coalition for Life, whose executive director, Heather Gardner, recounted the details to The Daily Caller News Foundation. ”People will throw eggs or styrofoam cups or get verbally aggressive, but nothing violent like this happen before,” Gardner said.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'“And I’m going to speak slowly here so all the feminist blogs can get this one because I’m sure they’ll clip it,” she continued. “There is a war happening on boys on these college campuses.”

According to Tantaros, President Barack Obama’s administration was “scrutinizing these college campuses to come down hard on cases of rape.”

“This is a real problem,” she insisted. “They say there’s no opportunity to discover the facts, there’s no opportunity to confront witnesses and to present a defense. This also hurts lower income students because they can’t retain legal representation. They cannot fight back."

“And so you have Lena Dunham, Rolling Stone — it is a theme in this country to go after boys in this rape culture,” Tantaros said. “What happens after they assassinate their character? What happens to Lena Dunham? What happens to these fraternity boys? Absolutely nothing! And it hurts the women and the victims at the end of the day the most.”

Watch the video below.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'College fraternities and sororities, concerned that students accused of sexual assault are treated unfairly, are pushing Congress to make it harder for universities to investigate rape allegations.

The groups’ political arm plans to bring scores of students to Capitol Hill on April 29 to lobby for a requirement that the criminal justice system resolve cases before universities look into them or hand down punishments, according to an agenda reviewed by Bloomberg News.

“If people commit criminal acts, they should be prosecuted and they should go to jail,” said Michael Greenberg, leader of 241-chapter Sigma Chi, one of many fraternities participating in the legislative push.

The Fraternity & Sorority Political Action Committee, or “FratPAC,” and two other groups will ask Congress to block colleges from suspending all fraternities on a campus because of a serious incident at a single house. In addition, the Greek representatives want a rule against “any mandate” for chapters to go co-ed.
...
Dozens of men have filed lawsuits claiming they have been unfairly treated in campus hearings. Fraternity groups also point to cases of what they call a rush to judgment against Greek houses. University of Virginia suspended activity at all houses after Rolling Stone magazine published a since-discredited article in November claiming fraternity members had gang-raped a student. On Monday, police in Charlottesville, UVA’s home, said they found no evidence supporting the Rolling Stone account and were suspending their investigation.

Beginning April 27 in Washington, the fraternity groups will provide two days of training to the student lobbyists, who will then split into small groups for visits with lawmakers and their aides. Members of congress, including recipients of FratPAC donations, will speak at its April 29 dinner.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has a history of calling people rapists without any proof. If she hears a rape accusation, she assumes it’s true. She skips niceties like “allegedly.” The way she sees it: If the accused isn’t guilty, why does he stand accused? Due process is for ladies only.
...
"Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who is pushing for stronger laws against rapes on college campuses, today warned against people criticizing the woman at the center of a University of Virginia sexual assault case…

“Victim blaming or shining the spotlight on her for coming forward is not the right approach,” Gillibrand said on “The Capitol Pressroom,” a public radio show in Albany. “In fact, what we have to focus on is how do we keep these campuses safe? How do we have better trained personnel on campuses so they can tell a survivor what her options are and so they can have all the facts?”

Article here. Excerpt:

'When I started this gig, I was a crime reporter. For the better part of 12 years, I covered everything from organized crime to petty theft to homicide.

Generally speaking, the murders I covered fell into two broad categories.

By far the most common were criminals killing other criminals, usually over drugs or money. The others were domestic murders.

Any experienced crime reporter will tell you the same thing: In the overwhelming number of cases, victims in domestic murders are women.

They were killed by their husbands or boyfriends, sometimes in one-time act of rage but usually as the final act of violence in a long history of domestic abuse.

Article here. Excerpt:

'I've never seen the Vagina Monologues. Perhaps I'm incurious, but I just never had any interest in sitting through segments with titles like The little coochie snorcher that could.
...
Anyway, the point is that the Vagina Monologues, so shocking when Eve Ensler wrote it in 1996, has become an entertaining relic. And its cancellation at Holyoke just seems like an attempt to find something new to protest.

Sorry, I know that sounds like old-man talk, but that's what it looks like.
...
Political correctness, apparently, is making a comeback, like a sharp-tongued schoolmarm coming out of retirement. (Yes, that was a deliberate speech violation, but PC always seemed sort of schoolmarmish to me.)

New York magazine ran a long article on the subject recently, describing groupthink and ideological bullying by students (and faculty) at American universities.
...
Eventually, the PC of the early '90s faded, partly because it annoyed audiences, and partly because university students do have to, well, grow up.

Cultural concerns yielded to economic concerns, first a rather serious recession, then the great big excessive party that followed.

Now, though, PC is back, but with new terminology.

Modern students are on the lookout for heteronormativity (for the unenlightened, that means the view that there are natural male-female roles); for anyone who might deny rape culture; and for micro-aggressions, which are little slights that belie racism or sexism in someone who tries to appear liberal and tolerant.
...
My grandchildren will no doubt someday stare agape at their parents for using the term "people of colour," and inform them that any reference to colour is divisive and ugly.

Or that "transgender" implies that there was ever any validity to "gender" in the first place.

Article here. Excerpt:

'The analysis below focuses on where the gender gap in reading stands today, not its causes. Nevertheless, readers should keep in mind the three most prominent explanations for the gap. They will be used to frame the concluding discussion.

Biological/Developmental: Even before attending school, young boys evidence more problems in learning how to read than girls. This explanation believes the sexes are hard-wired differently for literacy.

School Practices: Boys are inferior to girls on several school measures—behavioral, social, and academic—and those discrepancies extend all the way through college. This explanation believes that even if schools do not create the gap, they certainly don’t do what they could to ameliorate it.

Cultural Influences: Cultural influences steer boys toward non-literary activities (sports, music) and define literacy as a feminine characteristic. This explanation believes cultural cues and strong role models could help close the gap by portraying reading as a masculine activity.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'It also helps, Horowitz says, that misandry jokes don’t really cater to men, as the joke really succeeds as an inside joke between members of the same in-group (feminist women). Being in on the joke can help foster a connection and a sense of solidarity between women with common feminist goals, and for those who need it, it can serve as a coping mechanism for living in a world that wasn’t build for you.

More to the point, joking about misandry with your friends is a way to vent, while at the same time imagining a world where women are respected, and perhaps even in charge.

“I don’t want to say it’s empowering necessarily,” Horowitz says. “But it gives a lot of young women a sense of power while being in on this joke, and that power is attractive.”'