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.
'There are man-haters everywhere, it seems, from children’s telly to high culture. Charges of sexism have been levelled against the creators of the Daddy Pig character in Peppa Pig — daddy is portrayed as a hopeless bumbling idiot while Mummy Pig is the embodiment of good sense — and the literary critic Harold Bloom argues that there is ‘a strong element’ of misandry in Shakespeare (whereas misogyny, he says, is hard to find).
The latest challenge invited you to climb aboard the bandwagon and compose an extract from an imaginary novel written from the perspective of a female chauvinist author. In a small but accomplished entry, Sergio Michael Petro, Frank Upton and Sandra McGregor deserve an honourable mention, the winners take £30 each and Adrian Fry pockets the extra fiver.
'But in the need to ensure there are safe places for women to be educated – which is crucial – isn’t it worth asking if there can be safe places for men to gather without suspicion of being a cabal of misogynist terrorism? In the heated discussion about rape culture, the feminist voice is loudest at the moment, which makes many young men feel that their every move, every thought, is policed. Some might even suggest they’re victims of misandry, if they weren’t sure their complaints would fall on deaf ears.
A witch hunt, you say? Well, I won’t use that loaded term, because it only serves to ratchet-up the gender wars when what we need is a little calm.
That said, some of the research about fraternity culture is not kind. A 2007 study by professors at the College of William and Mary – the place, ironically, where the first Greek-letter fraternity, Phi Beta Kappa, was founded in 1776 with the motto “Philosophy is the guide to life” – found that men in fraternities were three times more likely to rape than those who weren’t.
A culture of male peer support for violence against women coupled with excessive drinking practices contribute to a higher risk for sexual assault, the study found, leading some scholars to suggest fraternities should be banned. Other research has added to the alarm. Elizabeth Armstrong and other professors at Indiana University studied the social life at a large Midwestern university for five years, producing a book in 2013, Paying for the Party, How College Maintains Inequality, and a paper on sexual assault that described how fraternities contribute to the reproduction of gender inequality.
'Gov. Greg Abbott said Thursday that he and other elected officials can’t fight domestic violence alone — ordinary residents must join the battle, too.
Abbott stopped here Thursday morning for the grand opening of The Gatehouse, a 96-unit apartment community for abused women and children.
...
“No woman should be trapped in an abusive relationship,” he said. “No woman should feel unsafe in her own home. No woman should feel helpless with no place and no one to turn to.”
...
...
“This is not a women’s issue,” he said. “This is a man’s issue … and we need to draw a line in the sand and say you never, ever, ever hit a woman.”
'On Wednesday, California Democrat Barbara Lee proposed a resolution in the House of Representatives that claims women will eventually be forced into prostitution in order to obtain life-sustaining food and water for their families.
Lee introduced House Concurrent Resolution 29, warning that women will be forced into “transactional sex” to get enough food and clean water — all because global warming will create “conflict and instability” in the world.
...
Lee’s document goes on to urge Congress to agree on the “disparate impacts of climate change on women,” and goes on to demand that Congress use “gender-sensitive frameworks in developing policies to address climate change.”
Lee also charges that women, who are “often underrepresented in the development and formulation of policy regarding adaptation to climate change,” are doubtless in the best position to offer policy ideas.'
'A team of Hillary Clinton “super volunteers” warned a New York Times reporter on Wednesday against using words about Clinton that they deem to be “sexist.”
The group, “HRC Super volunteers,” wrote Times reporter Amy Chozick, the paper’s Hillary Clinton reporter, and put her on notice regarding “coded sexism.”
Sexist words, according to the group, include: “polarizing,” “calculating,” “disingenuous,” “insincere,” “ambitious,” “inevitable,” “entitled,” “over confident,” “secretive,” will do anything to win,” “represents the past,” and “out of touch.”
“You are on notice that we will be watching, reading, listening and protesting coded sexism,” the group reportedly wrote her.'
'I’ve been very interested in the last few days to read about Kayode Modupe-Ojo, who has spoken to the press about being falsely accused of rape.
Even though Mr. Modupe-Ojo's experience is a lot more painful than mine – he was jailed for a short time, named publicly, and saw his business tainted by association, while I avoided all three mainly due to the ineptitude of my accuser – I still have a first-hand insight into what it’s like to be falsely accused of sexually assaulting somebody.
...
Firstly, what was interesting, even unique, about my false accusation is that I knew it was going to happen. To explain, my accuser was a one-night stand who had taken to harassing me after I denied her a second date, turning up drunk at my flat and sending me abusive texts and voicemails. In the early summer of 2010 she stepped up the frequency of her visits. When I found her stood outside my home one evening in the pouring rain, intently watching my bedroom window, I told her that I was going to have to go to the police if the behaviour continued. She responded by telling me that if I did go to the police, she would tell them that I had drugged her and sexually assaulted her.
Unsurprisingly, I didn't go to the police straight away, but eventually the persistence of her harassment gave me little choice. It's a faintly surreal experience telling a police officer that, by the way, when you arrest her, she's probably going to tell you that I raped her, but I figured that my warning them at least would slightly discredit her if she went through with it.
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.
...
'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.
'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.’'
'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.
'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.
'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.'
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
