Article here. Excerpt:

'I admire Newsom for using her considerable talent to advocate for boys. But I worry that she is less concerned with helping boys than with re-engineering their masculinity according to specifications from some out-of-date gender-studies textbook. The trailer is suffused with males-are-toxic ideology but shows little appreciation for how boys’ nature can be distinctively good. The Mask You Live In is scheduled to be released later this year. Let’s hope there is still time for edits.

Here are a few suggestions:
1. Recognize that masculinity is more than a “mask”
The title and content of the film suggest that masculinity is a cultural creation. That is only marginally true. A lot of typical boy behavior, such as rough-and-tumble play, risk taking and fascination with gadgets rather than dolls, appears to have a basis in biology. ... A recent study on sex differences by researchers from the University of Turin, in Italy, and the University of Manchester, in England, confirms what most of us see with our eyes: with some exceptions, women tend to be more sensitive, esthetic, sentimental, intuitive and tender-minded, while men tend to be more utilitarian, objective, unsentimental and tough-minded. We do not yet fully understand the biological underpinnings of these universal tendencies, but that is no reason to deny they exist.
...

Article here. The Minneapolis Star Tribune never fails when it comes to parroting issues brought forward by women's lobbying groups. No exception here. Missing of course are any issues faced by men in the workplace, such as the fact that 90% of workplace fatalities are males, or a decent explanation of the so-called "wage gap." Excerpt:

'After nearly three dark years, the lights are back on at the Office on the Economic Status of Women in the Minnesota State Office Building. It’s co-convening the first Minnesota Women’s Economic Security Summit in a long while Thursday in St. Paul, and several hundred participants are expected.

Among the presenters will be House Speaker Paul Thissen, armed with an ambitious package of 17 bills comprising the Minnesota Women’s Economic Security Act of 2014. The speaker’s personal stamp on a set of initiatives is rare, and should serve to raise the package’s visibility and chances for enactment.

Story here. Excerpt:

'An Ottawa girl has been found guilty of 30 of 33 charges against her in connection with a prostitution ring involving teenaged girls.

Court heard the girl, identified as the ringleader of the group, used physical violence and verbal threats to force other teenaged girls into prostitution.

She pleaded not guilty in April 2012 to the 33 charges including assault, human trafficking, robbery and making and distributing child pornography.

A sentencing date has yet to be set and the Crown says it will seek an adult sentence.

Two other teens accused in the case pleaded guilty to several charges in September in a surprise about-face after having pleaded not guilty earlier last year.

The three girls, whose identities are protected under a publication ban were arrested in June 2012 in the Ottawa area.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'Meredith Borowiec has given birth to four children.

The first was born in a panic and left in a dumpster next to her Calgary home. A second baby a year later was similarly discarded; neither body was ever found.

Her third child was born in October, 2010. Borowiec, again, hid the child in the trash. But this time, the infant was rescued after its cries were overheard by a man named Ian Turnbull — Borowiec’s long-time boyfriend and the baby’s father. He had been unaware of her pregnancy.

On Wednesday, Borowiec was sentenced to 18 months in jail. The judge condemned her actions, but resisted a prosecution recommendation that she be sentenced to as many as 12 years.

“This is a terrible case,” Judge Peter McIntyre told Borowiec. “You’ve shocked the community and you’ve shamed yourself. I have to remind myself to be dispassionate about this case.”'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Tom Martin, a student at the London School of Economics, filmed a series of interviews with other students, addressing his lawsuit against the school, for teaching a sexist, bigoted ideology. One of those students, who participated in the interview knowing it would be uploaded is now trying to censor this video by having it taken down from Youtube (on Tom Martin’s channel, this is a mirror).

While this is annoying, it also suggests that the student has matured, and now recognizes their own point of view, as expressed during the interview, is in fact ignorant and bigoted. Unfortunately, they’re still evidently immature enough to believe censorship is a good path to pursue to cover up their bigotry.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'In an editorial coined by New Hampshire Senator Sylvia Larson (D-Concord) today, she makes the already disproven claim that there is a ‘wage gap’ between men and women in the workforce. Larson is so hell bent on believing the studies that have been proven false, she’s willing to hurt women in the workforce by passing an unnecessary bill. The wage gap that Larson speaks of is a myth. In the past, women indeed were paid less than men but it has been proven over and over again that women earn the same or more than men if all things are equal (experience, education, time on the job etc.). What Larson’s ill-conceived bill (the same bill that failed in Washington D.C. previously with a Democrat controlled Senate) will do is set women back decades despite the great strides they have made since entering the workforce.

How will the Paycheck Fairness Act hurt Granite State women? Simple, it will put employers in a position of either paying women less than they negotiate for when seeking a new job or it will take away women’s flexibility in negotiating for a lower salary for more flexible hours. ...
...

• If a man is currently working at a job and a woman applies for the same job but is smart and negotiates for a higher salary than the man is currently making, the employer is not going to offer her what she wants (and/or deserves), they are going to have to pay her the lower salary that the man is making. Why? If the man finds out she’s making more than him for the same job (despite the fact she was simply a better negotiator) the man can turn around and sue the employer for discrimination!
  

Article here. Excerpt:

'President Obama let his feminist flag fly during his State of the Union address on Tuesday night. Citing pay disparity and paid leave policy, he argued — to loud applaude — that women are still unequal in the United States, and that there are policies that can change that:

Today, women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment. A woman deserves equal pay for equal work. She deserves to have a baby without sacrificing her job. A mother deserves a day off to care for a sick child or sick parent without running into hardship – and you know what, a father does, too. It’s time to do away with workplace policies that belong in a “Mad Men” episode. Let’s work together – Congress, the White House, and businesses from Wall Street to Main Street – to give every woman the opportunity she deserves. Because I believe when women succeed, America succeeds.

Article here. Excerpt:

'A female lawmaker from Port Orchard says men in Washington are being unfairly forced to pay child support for children who aren’t theirs, and the state should let them escape that burden.

A measure introduced by state Sen. Jan Angel, R-Port Orchard, would allow a man to challenge his status as a child’s legal parent in court if genetic tests prove he is not the father.

Current law in Washington generally only gives fathers four years to challenge a child’s parentage, and assumes a man is the father if he was married to the child’s mother close to the child’s birth date.

Angel’s bill would let a man try to sever his legal ties to a child at any time within two years of learning he is not the child’s biological father — whether the child’s age is 5 or 15.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Paternity leave has also begun to enter the corporate and cultural mainstream. According to a study by the Boston College Center for Work and Family, which surveyed men in a number of Fortune 500 companies, most new fathers now take at least some time off after the birth of a baby, though few depart the workplace for more than two weeks. In England, Prince William took two weeks’ leave from his job as a military search-and-rescue helicopter pilot when his son, George, was born. Even Major League Baseball has formalized paternity leave—albeit three days’ worth—for players, partnering with Dove’s line for men in a pro-fatherhood campaign called Big League Dads.
...
The genius of paternity leave is that it shapes domestic and parenting habits as they are forming. While most mothers in the United States now work, many women still see their careers suffer after they became parents, in part because they end up shouldering the bulk of the domestic load—a phenomenon the sociologist Arlie Hochschild has dubbed the “second shift.” A 2007 study found that 60 percent of professional women who stopped working reported that they were largely motivated by their husbands’ unavailability to share housework and child-care duties. Paternity leave is a chance to intervene at what one study called “a crucial time of renegotiation”: those early, sleep-deprived weeks of diaper changes and midnight feedings, during which couples fall into patterns that turn out to be surprisingly permanent.
...

Article here. Excerpt:

'As the Obama Administration steps up the federal effort against an alleged epidemic of campus rape, some states are contemplating measures of their own. A recent Newsweek story on a bill pending in the California State Assembly, discussed by K.C. Johnson on Minding the Campus, raises a number of troubling issues: among them, potential spillover from the campus crusade into the criminal justice system and actual spillover from the radical feminist blogosphere into the mainstream media.

he legislation, AB 1433, introduced on January 6 by Southern California Assemblyman Mike Gatto, requires colleges and universities to promptly bring to local law enforcement all campus reports of violent crimes (homicide, rape, robbery or aggravated assault) and hate crimes--unless the complainant requests anonymity. Federal law--the 1990 Clery Act, named after Jeanne Clery, a 19-year-old Lehigh University (Pennsylvania) student who was raped and murdered in her dorm in 1986--already requires colleges to record all crimes reported to campus authorities in a public log and in an annual security report, and to disclose them to the U.S. Department of Education.
...
The problematic nature of the bill is compounded by the fact that, due to input from campus activists whom Newsweek describes as "sexual assault survivors," accusers will be allowed to decide whether their charges should be reported to the police or not. (The alleged survivors told Gatto, and Newsweek, that they would not have gone to the campus authorities if they knew they would have to deal with actual law enforcement as well.) Not only does this leave the universities' "shadow justice system" entirely intact, it also underscores the extent to which feminist activism is pushing to make sexual assault or rape a subjectively defined offense.

Article here. Excerpt:

'More than half of male newborns in America are circumcised before they leave the hospital. As with any medical procedure, if it results in injury, the medical professional involved could face discipline by licensing authorities in Pennsylvania and other states.

No comparable state oversight, however, governs the same procedure when it's conducted by a religious practitioner with no medical license. And that, says a Pittsburgh lawyer suing over a catastrophic injury suffered by a newborn in April 2013, needs to change.

The lawsuit, pending in the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas, is seeking damages from Rabbi Mordechai Rosenberg for alleged negligence and inflicting of emotional distress on the boys' parents, who witnessed what the lawsuit called a "gruesome and torturous event." Rabbi Rosenberg has since 1990 worked as a mohel, the traditional term for one who performs circumcisions as part the traditional Jewish rite of passage.

Story here. Excerpt:

'Chilling images of deformed penises on a website slamming botched traditional circumcisions in South Africa have raised the ire of cultural commentators who called on Monday for the site to be shut down.

Dutch doctor Dingeman Rijken set up the webpage www.ulwaluko.co.za after scores of boys and young men died last year when the initiation ceremony into manhood went wrong. But critics say it betrays their culture and should have been handled differently.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Medical associations in Sweden and Denmark have strongly recommended a ban on the non-medical circumcision of boys, reports the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The Sweden Medical Association, which counts 85% of the country's physicians as members, recommended setting twelve as the minimum age for the procedure and requiring a boy's consent in a resolution which was unanimously passed by the ethics council, reported the Svenska Dagbladet.

The Danish College of General Practitioners, a group with 3,000 members, made a statement that ritual circumcision of boys was tantamount to abuse and mutilation, according to Danish newspaper BT. They polled their readers and found that 87% were in favor of a ban on non-medical circumcision.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Slaughter believes that the best way to reduce the disparity between men and women is to encourage the greatest number of women to reach the highest positions of influence. She believes that to make this a reality more men must stay at home. “It is far, far easier to be at the top of a major organisation if you have a primary or full-time caregiver at home,” she wrote.

Slaughter wanted to conduct a poll at Davos to find out how many participants had a life partner who is either at home full time or works outside the house but is the primary caregiver. “If the numbers are, say, 80 per cent or higher,” she wrote, “then future Forum gender equality polls should assume that women will only achieve parity with breadwinning men when men achieve parity with care-giving women.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'Be wary of the claim that one in five students has been sexually assaulted or raped at some point in their college careers. In an era of declining violent crime rates, the statistic is remarkably resilient.

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reports a sharp drop in total rapes and sexual assaults nationwide — down 38.7 percent between 2008 and 2009, which are the most recent years for which data are readily available. Yet the White House stubbornly repeats the one-in-five claim, a number that has circulated since at least 2000.

As my Manhattan Institute colleague Heather Mac Donald noted in 2011 — the last time the White House touted the campus rape issue — there were 36.8 rapes per 100,000 residents of Detroit, a city with one of the worst violent crime rates in America. That’s a rate of 0.037 percent.