Article here. Excerpt:

'The first thing President Teresa Sullivan of the University of Virginia needs to do in the wake of what now appears to be a faux rape scandal is to apologize to the victims – that is, to the members of Phi Kappa Psi, who have been vilified, forced to move off campus into motels, and suffered suspicions even from family members and close friends. That would be the human and moral response. That Sullivan will not do so is nearly as certain as the chance of her taking false accusations as a matter that needs university attention.

Article here. Excerpt:

'In a now-infamous Nov. 19 story in Rolling Stone, disgraced journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely asserted that at least five members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity gang-raped a freshman named Jackie at a frat house party, then left her in a bloodstained dress to exit via a conveniently vacant side staircase.
...
Whatever Erdely’s motive, her discredited piece begs the question: Is it remotely true that American college administrators and college students are indifferent to the allegations of rape victims? What about the exponential growth of rape activism on campus? What about the routine occurrence of “take back the night” vigils?

Could this perceived indifference actually be warranted skepticism? In fact, the number of completely fraudulent rape allegations made by women on American college campuses is far from trivial.

Article here. Excerpt:

'What does a night in the life of a dad look like? For 28-year-old Jon Arrigo, who posted a picture on Reddit last week entitled “Just being a dad,” it looks pretty good: Playing video games, snuggling with one daughter while getting his toenails painted by the other.
...
Responses to the photo were mixed. Some commenters noted that letting his daughter paint his nails demonstrated Arrigo’s willingness to have a little fun. “That’s awesome, no shame in making your kids happy, this warmed my heart up :)” wrote user Sasha_Fire. “I hope so much that if/when my [significant other] and I decide to have children he’s this awesome of a parent,” echoed Kmccain9. 

Article here.

'A new recommendation from the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says the benefits of circumcision outweigh the risks. The procedure has been shown to reduce the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, with little or no loss to sexual pleasure.

Dr. Avshalom Zoossmann-Diskin, a geneticist and director of Ben Shalem, tells host Ilene Prusher that some of the conclusions about health benefits in this recommendation are simply wrong. He believes that those in favor of circumcision for religious reasons are looking for medical justifications for a procedure about which they have already made up their minds. In addition, since 88 percent of white males in the US are circumcised, Dr. Zoossmann-Diskin believes that white males in the CDC are grasping at medical justifications for procedures that were done to them and that they are doing to their children.

Article here. Excerpt:

'The National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers of Michigan sponsored an event Sunday, titled “New Perspectives on Circumcision,” at the Michigan League in order to discuss the merits and pitfalls of the debated practice.

John Geisheker, executive director of the nonprofit Doctors Opposing Circumcision, and Robert Van Howe, professor and interim chair of Pediatrics at the Central Michigan University College of Medicine, spoke. The event addressed medical and ethical problems associated with circumcision, a surgical procedure that removes the foreskin around the tip of the penis most commonly performed on newborn males.
...
Rackham student Andrew Kohler, member of the University’s chapter of the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers, said he believes that circumcision violates one of the most fundamental human rights.

Letter here. Excerpt:

'No feminist can be satisfied with the Pacetti and Andrews affairs. In the face of the demand by the feminist movement for absolute equality between men and women, these affairs tend to confirm the worst suspicions that male chauvinists hold.

Both men were politically blacklisted by the Liberal party and suffer the full glare of reputation- destroying publicity on the basis of accusations alone. The women levelling the accusations are kept from public view and maintain their party standing.
...
Neither woman is prepared to publicly come forward and level accusations, saying they are "too traumatized" and "fearful of being exposed." What was that business about being equal again?

This episode of the Steve Wilkos show suggests how we all, including men, are inclined to believe what a woman says and become judgmental of the man. In this episode, the host does that mistake but thankfully apologizes later. It's the story of a cheating wife who sleeps around while her husband is working hard, which also brings me to think: shouldn't men today have the right to know if they are raising their own biological children?

Article here. Excerpt:

'The Obama administration is moving to outlaw public school curriculum establishing single-sex classrooms, where boys are taught about bikes and girls are quizzed about bracelets.

The Education Department issued guidance this month to clarify George W. Bush-era regulations that expanded the use of gender-specific education. 

Groups have increasingly questioned the legality of education policies that have cropped up in the years since the 2006 rule was enacted.  

“As we receive increasing inquiries about single-sex offerings we want to be clear what federal law allows: protect civil rights and promote achievement,” Catherine Lhamon, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a news release. 

Civil rights groups say they hope the guidance will put an end to unproven practices that have been creeping up across the country.

Story here. Excerpt:

'A week of protests came to a head inGeorge Will’s Saturday morning speech about Michigan State University’s embodiment of what the role of government should be.

Will, a columnist with the Washington Post, spoke to graduates from the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, James Madison College and the colleges of Arts and Letters, Business, Education, Music and Social Science.

Will gave a history lesson about the Morrill Act of 1862, which made MSU the first land grant university, and the GI Bill of Rights from 1944, which allowed college enrollment to explode. He said the current toxic political climate in Washington D.C. can be solved if lawmakers look to the past, and places like Michigan State.

“We have had the knack before and we can have it again,” Will said about government passing policies that help its citizens. “But, then, Michigan State Univeristy not only understands this, it embodies this.”

Story here. Excerpt:

'Musician Lenny Kravitz [link added] is being honored for saying something remarkably sexist in an interview. “I personally think women should be running the world...I believe women are so much more sensible, have so much better intuition, and ultimately are stronger.”

Glamour.com raved: “And our favourite celebrity of the day is... Lenny Kravitz! Why? Because he recognises how wonderful us women are. That's right - Lenny Kravitz thinks women should be running the world because they are stronger and more sensible than men.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'Finally! A scientific explanation for Johnny Knoxville — he of “Jackass” fame — and the fans who keep him at his dangerous and moronic antics: Male Idiot Theory.

New research has rigorously tested Male Idiot Theory, which posits that, well, men are idiots and are driven to take ridiculous risks despite the clear prospects for self-harm, and for no defensible reason. Newly published by the venerable British Medical Journal (in its annual BMJ Christmas issue), the landmark study has shown that Male Idiot Theory holds up under strictly scientific scrutiny.

While the latest research does confirm that males can be idiots, it fails to shed light on a larger mystery that has preoccupied this correspondent since girlhood, growing up in a household with six brothers: How did these idiots ever convince the non-idiot gender that they were somehow superior (and worthy of earning close to 30% more, on average, in the United States)?'

More from the guilty-even-when-proven-innocent files. Petition here. Excerpt:

'In 2008 we adopted 5 adorable siblings and were finally able to add four girls and a boy to our family of two biological boys. We did our best to blend our children into a unit, but in late 2010, our world fell apart. Our oldest daughter ran away and the second oldest, upset at being left behind, made allegations of abuse against my husband. He was convicted of two counts of child molestation in December of 2011.

Six months later, our daughter told her caseworker that she had lied about the abuse. Finally, in Spring of 2013 she sent letters and testified at a hearing that she had perjured herself. Her caseworker also testified under oath that her office had been aware of the false accusation for over a year and that they were confident that there had been no abuse. Still, they did nothing. Scott's request for a new trial was denied on the basis that our daughter had not been charged with perjury therefore the judge could not award a new trial.

Article here. Excerpt:

'The uncritical rush to embrace of Rolling Stone story attests to the toxic climate created by this crusade. Erdely’s article should have quickly set off alarm bells (mine went off on the second reading). The preplanned initiation-ritual gang rape in which “Clockwork Orange”-level ultraviolence meets “Silence of the Lambs” (“Grab its motherf-----g leg,” yells one of the men); the reaction of the victim’s friends who see her disheveled and bloodied yet talk her out of going to the police or to the hospital because being “the girl who cried rape” would carry a social stigma; the nonchalance of the frat boy who casually chats her up shortly after engineering the attack—it all seems highly implausible, reading more like a rape-culture morality tale than a factual account. And that’s not even to mention the fact that Jackie supposedly endured three hours of rape while lying on sharp shards of glass from a smashed coffee table; or that later, when she had become an anti-rape activist on campus, a man supposedly threw a beer bottle at her as she walked past a bar and it broke on the side of her face but left only a bruise.
...

From 2011, but highly bookmark-able. Send this to anyone who throws the thoroughly-debunked (but not acknowledged as such by POTUS, et al.) 1-in-4 statistic at you. Excerpt:

'You can not have an article on sexual assault in college, of course, without a solemn invocation of that infamous, oft-repeated, almost-as-oft-debunked One-in-Fourstatistic. The Trib does not disappoint:

The National Sexual Violence Research Center in Enola, northwest of Harrisburg, estimates 20 percent to 25 percent of women are victims of forced sex during their time in college.

But where the Trib, like everyone else who uncritically accepts this uncritical notion, does disappoint is in its failure to acknowledge that the numbers do not add up. And, in fact, that they do not even come close.

As a supplement to that same article, the Trib published a Campus Safety sidebar that provided a list of reported sexual assault offenses for eight local colleges over the past three years. All told, there were 65. 

65. At 8 colleges. Among tens of thousands of female students. Over 3 years.

That’s a long way from 1-in-4. And thus a complete repudiation of the now-boilerplate statistic claimed in the article.

Those numbers, however, only represent reported assaults that occurred in student housing. Surely the numbers would be much higher, and much more alarming, once you counted sexual assaults that occurred elsewhere on campus and in the community at large. Surely that would get us much closer to the canonical 1-in-4 wisdom. 

I decided to test that theory by examining the sexual assault statistics at Pittsburgh’s three largest residential universities: the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and Duquesne University.
...

Article here. Excerpt:

'A study of sexual assault released by the federal government on Thursday challenges conventional wisdom about the heightened danger on college campuses, finding that women there are less likely than nonstudents to be victims. College women are also less likely, the study found, to report the incidents to the police.

The rate of rape and other sexual assault over the past two decades was 1.2 times higher for nonstudents of college age than for students, according to the study, by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. It showed an average of 7.6 cases per 1,000 nonstudents, compared with 6.1 per 1,000 college women. For the most recent year, 2013, those rates were almost identical, according to the study, which focuses on women ages 18 to 24.