Article here. Excerpt:

'Our treatment of young men needs to be questioned. Should we accept it's open season on them? Should we accept using them as a punchbag for an emotional battering? Should we expect them to soak up the pressure and absorb everything we throw at them? If you think we should, why are so many young men not living happy lives as well adjusted individuals ready to cope with loving relationships and fatherhood?

We've all tried and failed loads of times. More often than not the process has made us better people. The thought of being jeered in the street, accused of being bad at our jobs, being a bad person who doesn't care and we should quit our jobs would destroy us all, wouldn't it?
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Paul Bristow, from the Mental Health Foundation, supports the view that there's something going wrong with men.

"We urgently need to know more about why being male is itself a risk factor in suicide and to do more to help men, especially young men, seek assistance rather than suffer in silence," he has said.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'As the World Cup dominates headlines around the globe, soccer star Hope Solo has found herself in the news but not for reasons she or her fans probably hoped. Solo was arrested for allegedly assaulting two relatives. Solo becomes yet another high-profile woman accused of assault. Security footage reportedly capturing rapper Jay-Z on the receiving end of an attempted assault by his wife Beyonce’s younger sister, Solange, in an elevator became one of the biggest stories of the year.

Yet the footage didn’t inspire any serious discussion of inter-family violence. Instead it resulted in a lot of speculation—and jokes. Saturday Night Live produced one of its most inspired, and funniest, sketches in recent memory on the incident. But if the genders were reversed, would anyone be laughing?

Article here. Excerpt:

'ESPN reported the ugly scene from the police report. Statements given to police by the USA soccer goalkeeper’s 17-year-old nephew reveal that Solo arrived at her half-sister’s house upset that her husband, former NFL tight end Jerramy Stevens, had refused to take her to the airport for a flight.

Solo was inebriated and became even more upset when she thought her nephew had insulted her. Things calmed down for a bit until her nephew’s interest in acting was mentioned. The nephew said you need to have an “athletic state of mind” to be an actor, to which Solo responded he was “too fat and overweight and crazy to ever be an athlete,” according to the police report.

Story here. Excerpt:

'Over at the American Enterprise Institute's blog, AEI scholar and professor of economics Mark Perry crunches the numbers on instances of sexual assault at the main University of Michigan campus (Perry teaches at the sister campus in Flint).

Story here. Makes my skin crawl to read about these kinds of horrid things happening. I just wish people in general reacted with the same degree of disgust when boys are mutilated as when girls are. I wonder why people don't get it that if it can be done to boys, it can be done to girls, too -- once the principle is accepted, the specific follows. Those seeking to end FGM will I hope soon realize that taking up equally the end of MGM will not only expand their circle of allies in the cause and access to resources, but also the goal is more likely to be met sooner than not. Excerpt:

'School health services in the small Swedish city of Norrköping have found 60 cases of female genital mutilation (FGM) among schoolgirls since March, with evidence of mutilation found in all 30 girls in one class, 28 of the most severe form.

Article here. Excerpt:

'National Parents Organization member Mike Connors has developed a following on TalkShoe for his regular podcast, Connor’s Corner. Using his success in this medium, Mike is hosting several podcasts about National Parents Organization’s issues and work. Mike is volunteering his expertise to promote National Parents Organization and to engage new members.

To kick it off, Mike invited me to speak with him about National Parents Organization’s key successes and our work on shared parenting and parental equality within family law. Our discussion is an overview of where National Parents Organization is in its goals; how I got involved; and where we are heading. Of course, my time with National Parents Organization has been marked with drastic change.

Article here. Excerpt:

'On May 9th, 2014 the Government of Mexico joined Brazil in creating legislation on parental alienation. It is immediately included in their Civil Code. Possible penalties include immediate loss of child custody, restriction on visitation and even provisions for jail term.

This is apparently the text in Spanish, an unofficial translation into English follows. (If any member can help with a better translation, please post it. I got very confused - and concerned - at one time while struggling with translation, until I realised that the Spanish for 'father' is the same word as for 'parent'.)'

Article here. Excerpt:

'The arrest of an Olympic gold medalist on charges of domestic violence would normally be an occasion for a soul-searching conversation about machismo in sports, toxic masculinity and violence against women. But not when the alleged offender is a woman: 32-year-old Hope Solo, goalkeeper of the U.S. women’s soccer team, who is facing charges of assaulting her sister and 17-year-old nephew in a drunken, violent outburst. While the outcome of the case is far from clear, this is an occasion for conversation about a rarely acknowledged fact: family violence is not necessarily a gender issue, and women—like singer Beyoncé Knowles’ sister Solange, who attacked her brother-in-law, the rapper Jay Z, in a notorious recent incident caught on video—are not always its innocent victims."
...

Article here. Excerpt:

'The defamation lawsuit former Iowa State University basketball player Bubu Palo has filed against the woman who accused him of sexual assault two years ago will be difficult to win, risks introducing new criminal evidence against him and, should he prevail, could discourage others from reporting rapes to police, according to legal experts and a leading Iowa victims’ advocate.

In May 2012, Palo and his friend Spencer Cruise were accused of raping the alleged victim after agreeing to give her a ride home from a Campustown bar and instead taking her to Cruise’s father’s house, where the two men allegedly assaulted her. Palo and Cruise were subsequently charged with second-degree sex abuse, a class B felony punishable by up to 25 years in prison.

The Ames Tribune does not publish the names of alleged victims of sexual assault.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Let’s set the stage. As the politically correct, faux-Marxist college campus environment continues to deteriorate, average American families—and students—are beginning to seriously question just what they’re getting in return for enslaving themselves to increasingly inflated tuition bills.

It’s a big problem for college men in particular. In addition to having to maintain and increase both grade point averages and personal alcohol tolerance in a competitive environment, they also are required to behave like celibate monks when it comes to interacting with the opposite sex.

That’s because all college men, particularly those of the Caucasian persuasion, are viewed by college administrators and professional campus feminists as feral, potential rapists.'

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The video on YouTube is here.

Article here. Excerpt:

'This puts me in a quandary. Men's football is loved in Britain simply because the players are men, and men like watching other men play football, and what men like to do and like to watch is, de facto, culturally important. Even the fact the men's World Cup is not explicitly stated to be a men's competition erases women – I predict there will be little fuss made of the Women's World Cup in Canada next year. So do we women sideline ourselves by boycotting the games or do we take up space and holler along because it is fun and exciting? You could argue that the Fifa World Cup is also ageist and disablist (footballers are doomed to retire as soon as their wisdom teeth fully descend and disabled people are tacitly excluded – let's not forget that a former England coach was even sacked for his dodgy views) and there is a difference in football's relationship with women.

Article here. Excerpt:

'A call to make this Father's Day a Feminist Fathers' Day and for dads, papas, bapas and all parents along the masculine gender spectrum to embrace feminism and resist misogyny in our families and society.

In the wake of the Santa Barbara mass shooting and the misogynistic and racist manifesto the killer left behind, women all over the world launched a Twitter-based rebellion that put misogyny and sexism front and center. Far too many men have responded, "but not all men act that way," using the hashtag #notallmen. At best, that such a defense is even needed proves that there is a very real, unavoidable problem; at worst, it sounds as though they are saying, "don't blame me."

Rad Dad Magazine believes patriarchal violence in society is epidemic and takes place in a vast culture of misogyny, male entitlement and male privilege. Against the reactionary cry "not all men," we say, "all men need to actively challenge misogyny and cultivate feminism in their lives, families, communities and society."

Article here. Excerpt:

'A social movement that promotes equal rights for men who want to parent their children is essentially feminist. But the current fathers’ rights movement is not.

I could simply point to the fathers’ rights fringe groups, with their misogynist rants and close ties to the men’s rights movement, to make the case that the movement is not only anti-feminist but anti-women.

But even the more moderate groups within the fathers’ rights movement engage in a backlash against feminism when they attempt to discredit the experiences of female victims of intimate partner violence and roll back legal protections for all victims of domestic and sexual violence.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Why is there no uproar about boys falling behind all other groups? It could be because it doesn’t fit the media-favored and feminist-promoted falsehood that girls are at a disadvantage in what they call a “patriarchal” society. The college completion report explores the complex reasons for the gaps as well as what we can do to improve the outcome for young men. One reason identified by the authors is the absence of a father in the home. While evidence shows little girls can escape some of the negative effects of growing up with only a mother, the same situation is devastating for boys.
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In a New York Times article, “A Link Between Fidgety Boys and a Sputtering Economy,” the author states: “Girls who grow up with only one parent — typically a mother — fare almost as well on average as girls with two parents. Boys don’t.” In the same article, Elaine Kamarck, a former Clinton administration official, states: “We know we’ve got a crisis, and the crisis is with boys.” (New York Times, 4-29-14)

A Wall Street Journal opinion article, “Ignoring an Inequality Culprit: Single-Parent Families,” bravely addresses a sensitive issue. The authors write that “Roughly a third of American children live apart from their fathers.” They continue, “From economist Susan Mayer’s 1997 book What Money Can’t Buy to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart in 2012, clear-eyed studies of the modern family affirm the conventional wisdom that two parents work better than one.” (Wall Street Journal, 4-20-14) This lack of fathers in the home is of particular consequence for young men who need male role models, discipline, and mentoring.
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Article here. [Ed. note: The embedded links in this post are modified from how they are in the referenced story as it currently exists. It appears as if the Time web site folks made a mistake with these links; when clicked in the cited page, they send the browser over to Time's on-line Outlook web access portal, undoubtedly not something they wanted to have done. I have sent them an email making them aware of this fact. As for the embedded hyperlinks below, they have been corrected from the originals to point to their intended places.] Excerpt:

'A weary wrestling coach once lamented that his sport had survived the Fall of Rome, only to be vanquished by Title IX. How did an honorable equity law turn into a scorched-earth campaign against men’s sports? This week is the 42nd anniversary of this famous piece of federal legislation so it’s an ideal time to consider what went wrong and how to set it right.
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Title IX applies to all areas of education but is best known for its influence on sports. Women’s athletics have flourished in recent decades, and Title IX deserves some of the cheers. But something went wrong in the law’s implementation. The original law [see ed. note below full item view] was about equality of opportunity and indeed forbade quotas or reverse discrimination schemes. But over the years, government officials, college administrators and jurists — spurred on by groups like the National Women’s Law Center and the Women’s Sports Foundation — transformed a fair-minded equity law into just such a quota-driven regime, with destructive results.