Article here. Excerpt:

'Rolling Stone magazine apologized to readers Friday for discrepancies in an article about an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house, with the publication's editors saying their trust in the woman who gave the account "was misplaced."

Rolling Stone editors made the choice not to contact the man who allegedly "orchestrated the attack on "Jackie" (the woman who was the subject of the article) nor any of the men she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her," a decision the magazine says it now regrets.

"In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced," Rolling Stone said.
...
According to the magazine, Jackie, who at the time had just started her freshman year at the Charlottesville school, claimed she was raped by seven men at Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, while two more gave encouragement, during a party.

However, the University of Virginia's Phi Kappa Psi chapter did not have a party the night of September 28, 2012, the date when the alleged attack occurred, or at all that weekend, the chapter said in a statement Friday. The chapter's lawyer, Ben Warthen, told CNN email and fraternity records are proof.
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Warthen said there were other discrepancies in the accuser's account. For example, the accused orchestrator of the alleged rape did not belong to the fraternity, the fraternity house has no side staircase, and there were no pledges at that time of year.

Jackie told the magazine she hurried out a side staircase after the incident and said her attackers egged each other on, asking, "Don't you want to be a brother?"
...

Article here. Excerpt:

'The UK is aggressively prosecuting women who make false rape allegations, but victim advocates argue it's unjust

Between headlines about the UVA frats, the Canadian broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi and Bill Cosby, it seems like sexual assault allegations dominate the news. But in Britain there has been a recent spate of headline-grabbing cases where the people ultimately charged aren’t the alleged rapists, but the women who filed the claims in the first place.
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But de Freitas is not alone. Over the past five years, the CPS has prosecuted 109 women for making false rape allegations to authorities, according to the group Women Against Rape (WAR). The majority of those who were prosecuted — a full 98 — were charged with perverting the course of justice like de Freitas. But WAR, a London non-profit, held a public meeting at the House of Commons on Tuesday night, protesting what they believe is the unfair and aggressive prosecution of women.

Article here. Excerpt:

'"My generation of boys is f**ked," says Rupert, a young German video game enthusiast I've been getting to know over the past few months. "Marriage is dead. Divorce means you're screwed for life. Women have given up on monogamy, which makes them uninteresting to us for any serious relationship or raising a family. That's just the way it is. Even if we take the risk, chances are the kids won't be ours. In France, we even have to pay for the kids a wife has through adulterous affairs. 

"In school, boys are screwed over time and again. Schools are engineered for women. In the US, they force-feed boys Ritalin like Skittles to shut them up. And while girls are favoured to fulfil quotas, men are slipping into distant second place.

"Nobody in my generation believes they're going to get a meaningful retirement. We have a third or a quarter of the wealth previous generations had, and everyone's fleeing to higher education to stave off unemployment and poverty because there are no jobs. 

Story here. This is a case where we see two females assaulting a youth. The media assumes it a sexual harassment case and the two females will be rewarded for fighting back. The guys lose their jobs and then this revelation that it was all over a different issue. There is a rush to be on the "correct" side of the story. Never do people want to be on the *right* side of the story. Guess we will never know what the truth is. Excerpt:

'Haryana Police, probing the November 28 incident of misbehaviour with the girls and a pregnant woman on a State transport bus, said they had a watertight case against the three accused.
...
While some village elders of Asan village — to which the three accused belong — claimed that a Haryana police constable was also travelling by the same bus and his statement would be highly credible in establishing the sequence of events, the police said they were not aware of any such person.

Article here. Excerpt:

'It was just three days before she was due to on trial for making a false allegation of rape, and the fear of giving evidence had, he said, left her a nervous wreck. Nothing, however, has been heard from the wealthy young man who she sensationally claimed had drugged and assaulted her in his Chelsea flat – until now.

And when you read what he has to say, you may well take a very different view about his role in this strange and disturbing tragedy.

What emerges is not just the terrible detail of a nightmare that so many men fear – of being falsely accused of rape, ostracised and fearful of jail. It also becomes clear in his compelling account of what truly happened between them that Eleanor, who had mental health issues, led a secret double life – one she would without doubt have feared being opened up to the scrutiny of the courtroom.

Article here. Excerpt:

'By now, many have heard of the powerful Rolling Stone article published in late November that told the tale of a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed University of Virginia freshman who was allegedly gang raped at a frat party in 2012 in such a brutal and disgusting fashion that administrators have, in the wake of the article’s publication, suspended all fraternity functions, pledged a zero-tolerance on sexual assault, profusely apologized, and promised a more thorough police investigation. Meanwhile, the school’s reputation may have been irreparably harmed.
...
Do I believe something horrible happened to Jackie that fateful night? Yes. I have experienced the frat culture and I know it can be a gritty place where alcohol and drug-induced peer pressure and feelings of entitlement sometimes trump compassion and reason, where a pack mentality can take over and prompt young men to disavow their morality.

But it’s the finer details of Jackie’s claim that bother me – most notably that she could be gang raped over shards of broken glass for three consecutive hours and not bleed to the point of needing hospitalization. That just seems medically implausible from a subjective standpoint.

Also, when Jackie awoke at 3 a.m. after the assault and stumbled unnoticed out of the frat house as the party raged on even though she was horribly disheveled and bleeding, then called her friends to come get her and explained what happened – only to be told by them just go home and sleep it off so she wouldn’t ruin their school’s reputation or their chances at getting into more frat parties: Seriously?

I remember thinking – how is that even possible for “friends” to say such a thing if she was bleeding after getting gang raped by seven guys? You almost have to suspend reality to buy that.
...

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.”
...
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.”