Story here. Excerpt:

'The writer of a blockbuster Rolling Stone magazine story about an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity has said that she was unable to contact or interview the men who supposedly perpetrated the crime.

In interviews with The Washington Post and Slate.com last week, writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely declined to answer repeated questions about the men’s response to an allegation by a female student named Jackie that they had sexually assaulted her at a U-Va. fraternity party in 2012.

However, in a podcast interview with Slate, Erdely indicated that she was unable to locate the fraternity brothers in the course of her reporting to get their side of the story.

“I reached out to [the accused] in multiple ways,” Erdely said in the Slate interview. “They were kind of hard to get in touch with because [the fraternity’s] contact page was pretty outdated. But I wound up speaking . . . I wound up getting in touch with their local president, who sent me an e-mail, and then I talked with their sort of, their national guy, who’s kind of their national crisis manager. They were both helpful in their own way, I guess.”
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There have been no arrests in the case, and no alleged assailants have been publicly identified.

Article here. Excerpt:

'You may have heard that San Diego State University’s Greek leadership has suspended all frat “socializing” indefinitely and mandated sexual-assault prevention training after a particularly bad week. U-T San Diego reports:

"On Friday, a “Take Back the Night” march reportedly was interrupted by fraternity members yelling obscenities, waving sex toys and hurling eggs at the marchers. Saturday night, a woman reported she was sexually assaulted at a party near campus — the seventh such report this semester. Hours later, a 19-year-old woman reported that six men tried to pull her into their car near campus."

That “reportedly” is important, because it appears that in an age where everyone is constantly taking smartphone pics and video, no one is sharing hard evidence of this harassing behavior against nearly three dozen marchers.

Dildo-waving not interesting enough to document

Article here. Excerpt:

'The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in September on young men found guilty in university hearing procedures whose lives were turned upside down.

One drives a delivery truck and may never finish college, The Chronicle reported. Another was expelled from his dream college, although, he said, his ex-girlfriend had wrongly accused him of sexual assault. A third lost a $30,000 scholarship and his place on the football team.

All three were expelled after their colleges found them responsible for sexual assault, The Chronicle reported. They join those who think the movement to bring attention to sexual violence on college campuses has gone too far, labeling innocent students rapists.

“The way that universities are handling the entire situation is terrible,” one of the men, Joshua Strange, told The Washington Post in an Aug. 20 article. “It’s kind of a broken system.”'

Article here. Excerpt:

'A New Jersey lawmaker has a plan that would make it a crime to lie in order to sleep with someone.
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The assemblyman has introduced a bill that would make lying to get someone to have sex equal to rape.
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Under the bill, it would require more than a little white lie to land you in jail. The lies would have to be continuous and rise to a high level of deceit.

“When you are told lies of identity, you’re basically having a sexual relationship with a person who is a total stranger,” Joyce Short said.

Short supports the bill. She claims she was deceived for years by her now ex-husband.

“He lied about his marital status, he lied about his education. He said he had a bachelor’s in accounting from NYU and was, in fact, a high school dropout,” Short said.'

Link here. Excerpt:

'The global HIV/AIDS response is a shared responsibility. In addition to working with partner governments in the 65 countries with bilateral and regional programs, PEPFAR builds strategic public-private partnerships to maximize the U.S. government’s investment. With over 80 percent of new HIV infections among adolescents in the hardest hit countries occurring in girls, the U.S. Department of State, through PEPFAR, is partnering with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Nike Foundation on a $210 million initiative to reduce new HIV infections in adolescent girls and young women in up to 10 countries.

The goal of the partnership is to help girls develop into determined, resilient, empowered, AIDS-free, mentored and safe women. It will provide a core package of evidence-based interventions that have successfully addressed HIV risk behaviors, HIV transmission, and gender-based violence. Evidence shows that girls can reach their full potential when they have access to multiple interventions.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'At least 109 women have been prosecuted in the last five years for making false rape allegations in the UK, according to campaigners who are calling for an end to what they claim is the aggressive pursuit of such cases.

On Tuesday, the charity Women Against Rape (War) is taking its campaign to the House of Commons, where some of those who have been jailed for lying about rape allegations will speak out against their treatment by the authorities.

The vast majority of the convictions in the last five years, 98 out of 109, involved prosecutions for perverting the course of justice – which carries a maximum life jail term – rather than the lesser offence of wasting police time, which has a maximum tariff of six months in prison or a fine.

Article and video here. She approaches the matter of sexism at first from a femino-gynocentric standpoint but as her talk progresses, her working definition of sexism expands to include sexism as directed toward males. She points out many ways in which boys' and men's self-expression options and freedom to become and grow in ways that suit them as individuals are restricted by the expectations of others around them. Worth listening to. Excerpt:

'Oh, Hi, Babes. Some of you probably already know that I have a 16-year-old brother. This is him. He's basically my favorite person on the planet, and he's up there on the list of reasons why feminism is important to me. Boys facing a number of pressures related to their gender. For example: pressure to be physically tall and muscular, to push down feelings, especially fear and pain, to never or be vulnerable, pressured to be into sports, or to have manly hobbies, to prove yourself using violence or intimidation to solve problems, to prove your manhood by having lots of sex, learning to see women as sex objects, and struggling to have meaningful relationships with them, pressure to be one of the guys, to make harmless jabs at each other meant to establish dominance, pressure to be the protector in a relationships, never the protected, to be the bread winner, the handyman, the money manager, to pursue physically demanding, dangerous, or even violent jobs, pressure to be the leader, and to always have the answers. Is this sexism against man? Sexism is about exclusion and unequal power in society.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Colleges across America are in political uproar over new federal policies on how to conduct campus rape hearings. Feminists and the left-leaning demand a halt to the "rape culture" which they claim has caused an "epidemic" of campus assault. Civil libertarians and conservatives see an hysteria that could ruin young lives by stripping away due process from accused students.

On November 18, I entered this melee by speaking at a Janus Forum event at Brown University. My counterpart was the politically correct feminist Jessica Valenti. At Valenti's request and to my surprise, armed security guards were conspicuously present. Apparently, some students also feared an eruption of violence but informed the administration, rather than Janus, of their concern.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Some years ago, when I was an editor at George magazine, I was unfortunate enough to work with the writer Stephen Glass on a number of articles. They proved to be fake, filled with fabrications, as was pretty much all of his work. The experience was painful but educational; it forced me to examine how easily I had been duped. Why did I believe those insinuations about Vernon Jordan being a lech? About the dubious ethics of uber-fundraiser Terry McAuliffe?

The answer, I had to admit, was because they corroborated my pre-existing biases. I was well on the way to believing that Vernon Jordan was a philanderer, for example—everyone seemed to think so, back in the ’90s.

So Stephen wrote what he knew I was inclined to believe. And because I was inclined to believe it, I abandoned my critical judgment. I lowered my guard.

The lesson I learned: One must be most critical, in the best sense of that word, about what one is already inclined to believe. So when, say, the Duke lacrosse scandal erupted, I applied that lesson. The story was so sensational! Believing it required indulging one’s biases: A southern school…rich white preppy boys…a privileged sports team…lower class African-American women…rape. It read like a Tom Wolfe novel.

And of course it never happened.

Which brings me to a magazine article that is causing an enormous furor in Virginia and around the country; it’s inescapable on social media. Written by a woman named Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the article is called “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'A recent revelation that a Palm Springs teenager fabricated a story about a kidnapping and sexual assault is a costly back step in the cultural campaign to combat sexual violence, which some experts say may dissuade true rape victims from reporting their attackers to police.
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False reports of rape are rare, but even a few cases can do incalculable damage to the nationwide efforts to expose and apprehend sexual predators. False reports make the public more suspicious of actual rape victims, and can disillusion law enforcement so they are less receptive to future reports of such offenses. The ramifications are magnified when a few false reports are given more media coverage than real cases of rape, which strike every day.

Worst of all, false reports make actual rape victims question whether their stories will be believed. Afraid to come forward, these victims are more likely to suffer in silence, leaving their attackers free to strike again.

"It hurts us," said Scott Berkowitz, president of the Rape Abuse & Incest National Network, the largest anti-sexual violence organization in the country. "False reports make the public doubt, and they make police more skeptical the next time a real victim walks in the door. Anytime police put a lot of energy into a case that turns out not to have been true, it is naturally going to discourage them and make them more suspicious next time."
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Speaking generally, Program Director Winette Brenner said false reports often stem from deep-seated pain. Every case is different, but most of the time a person who makes a false report is in desperate need, and does not have any malicious intent, Brenner said.

"It's a cry for help … from a person who is in so much pain that they don't know how to deal with that pain any further," she added.

Story here.

'Police say a Pennsylvania woman chased her boyfriend around a dining room and stabbed him in the chest because he started eating Thanksgiving dinner while she slept off a bender.

Authorities say Jacklyn Blake confessed to officers who responded to her Wilkes-Barre home Thursday. Officers found her boyfriend inside holding a towel over his chest. He was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.

The 47-year-old Blake is charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, simple assault, reckless endangerment and making terroristic threats. It wasn’t clear if she has a lawyer.

According to police, Blake’s boyfriend says she’d been drunk earlier in the day and attacked him after waking up from a nap. He says she stabbed him and then threw the knife, striking him just below the left eye.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'What I hadn’t expected was how many people would assume that we were having a boy (perhaps because boys are still preferred, even in this supposedly modern time) and would then instruct us about how essential it was to get this hypothetical child circumcised. We heard all the usual arguments: circumcision is necessary due to the laws of Judaism; it is cleaner; it is healthier; it is wrong and even harmful not to circumcise; a Jewish boy will feel “left out” if not circumcised; it’s against our forefathers and everything they went through to not do it; and so on. I was, frankly, stunned by all this. Such comments felt like an attack, and a very personal one too.
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Eventually, exhausted by these conversations, I asked that we stop talking about it. I said my wife and I understood their point of view, but we’d made the decision not to circumcise, and we hoped everyone else could accept and respect it. There was a brief time when relatives stopped bringing it up.

But then the offensive mounted new attacks by emailing us anecdotes from men, including non-Jews, who said they were “glad” and “grateful” that their parents circumcised them. We were also sent scanned pages from books and articles about the importance of circumcision. My irritation increased, so in retaliation, I began photocopying pages from books too and sending links to medical research. I said I was happy for those men who were grateful to be circumcised but that not everyone was appreciative of such a major decision being made on their behalf when they were infants; we reminded people about various medical and legal cases where men had physical, mental, emotional, or sexual damage from their circumcisions.
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Article here. Excerpt:

'National Parents Organization is encouraging its members and friends to share recent media coverage of National Parents Organization’s inaugural Shared Parenting Report Card. The media attention heightens awareness of the need for child custody reform and supports shared parenting.  Spread the news to as many people as possible!  We need to win in the court of public opinion in order to move us forward on the path toward change in family that has children’s best interests at heart.

Article here. Excerpt:

'In spite of the online interest, Washington has one of the lowest circumcision rates in the U.S.

In 2012, the Jewish Daily Forward reported that 15 percent of boys born in Washington were circumcised. The top-ranked state is West Virginia, with a rate of 87 percent, according to the Forward’s research.
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When she became pregnant, Andersen was adamant about keeping her son’s foreskin intact — and finding a foreskin-friendly pediatrician.

“I figured he was born with it, I’m sure there’s a reason that it’s there,” said Andersen, who was shocked at the procedure’s prevalence in the U.S. “American doctors are not educated on how to take care of it. The one thing they learn about the foreskin is that they have to cut it off.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'"If I were you I wouldn't put up with that", “How can you let this happen?”, “Why don’t you just leave?” or “Why don’t you just kick her out?” Until the last sentence, many reading the first three questions would assume that the questions were directed at a woman suffering in an abusive relationship rather than a confused battered husband.

Women today can be combat pilots, astronauts and prime ministers, and yes, they can also physically assault their spouses and life partners.