- Or ‘Why Men Need Safe Spaces From Women’
e mail rj.cookofnorthbucks@btinternet.com
https://www.waterstones.com/author/robert-cook/435753/page/1
The love letter generator that foretold ChatGPT
Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey created a ground-breaking computer program that allowed them to express affection vicariously when so doing publicly, as gay men, was criminal.
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In the early 1950s, small, peculiar love letters were pinned up on the walls of the computing lab at the University of Manchester.
Darling Sweetheart
You are my avid fellow feeling. My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish. My liking yearns for your heart. You are my wistful sympathy: my tender liking.
Yours beautifully
M U CHoney Dear
My sympathetic affection beautifully attracts your affectionate enthusiasm. You are my loving adoration: my breathless adoration. My fellow feeling breathlessly hopes for your dear eagerness. My lovesick adoration cherishes your avid ardour.
Yours wistfully
M U C
These are strange love letters, for sure. And the history behind them is even stranger; examples of the world’s first computer-generated writing, they’re signed by MUC, the acronym for the Manchester University Computer. In 1952, decades before ChatGPT started to write students’ essays, before OpenAI’s computer generated writing was integrated into mainstream media outlets, two gay men—Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey—essentially invented AI writing. Alongside Turing, Strachey worked on several experiments with Artificial Intelligence: a computer that could sing songs, one of the world’s first computer games, and an algorithm to write gender-neutral mash notes that screamed with longing.
June 17th 2024
22 May 2021 — During a 10-day period she killed three men in what came to be known as the Peterborough Ditch murders. … The serial killer stabbed three men …
22 May 2021 — During a 10-day period she killed three men in what came to be known as the Peterborough Ditch murders. … The serial killer stabbed three men …
Joanna Dennehy: serial killer becomes first woman told by …
The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com › uk-news › feb › joanna…
28 Feb 2014 — Judge told the murderer of three men she was ‘a cruel, calculating, selfish and manipulative serial killer‘
12 Feb 2014 — Dennehy used this lock knife in all three murders and two attempted murders … Composite of female serial …
Men’s rights movementWikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Men’s_rights_movement
The men’s rights movement (MRM) is a branch of the men’s movement. The MRM in particular consists of a variety of groups and individuals who focus on …
June 16th 2024
I grew up without a dad – it took me years to realise it wasn’t my fault
First Person
What kind of alchemy turns some men into fathers, while others fall away? What do families lose when one primary parent exits the process?
By Georgie Codd
June 14, 2024 6:00 am(Updated 9:31 am)
Growing up, everyone around me had a father who was visible in one form or another: as a live-in dad, divorced dad, single dad; as a dead dad being grieved.
Me, I had my mother and maternal grandmother, but through childhood and adolescence the space my father occupied was a blank. My form of a father was: absence. Growing up I didn’t know his name, what he looked like, the sound of his voice, where he lived. Sometimes Mum told me snippets about him; rarely would I remember them.
What stuck was the information that he was her ex, that he avoided paying child maintenance and that he didn’t want to meet me, this small person shaped by his genes.
https://buy.tinypass.com/checkout/template/cacheableShow?aid=Xi7fMnt7pu&templateId=OTDEKJMG2GFZ&templateVariantId=OTV0A0OLLDNTE&offerId=fakeOfferId&experienceId=EX94U7VN8UTD&iframeId=offer_042e2b8d34ed97a5ab3b-0&displayMode=inline&pianoIdUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fid.tinypass.com%2Fid%2F&widget=template&url=https%3A%2F%2Finews.co.uk
As a child I did what most children do when faced with unsupportive behaviour from a grown-up. I accepted the status quo, stuck closer to loving family figures and carried on.
Along the way I barely noticed the core assumption I’d made: that the social norm of having a dad was one I could never experience. Underneath that was a deeper, more painful assumption, one common to plenty of people who experience parental absence: that I must have done something wrong. Why else would my father behave in a way that most other dads didn’t? It would take me years, lots of therapy and a very weird project to realise there were other ways to interpret his choices.
A basic but important point first: being without a dad can shape lives in ways that are both stark and subtle. While there still aren’t many statistics on fatherless children – and the stats there are can be sparse and infrequent – the numbers that exist paint some big pictures.
There are 2.9 million lone-parent families in Britain today, 84 per cent of which are headed by a lone mother. At the Centre for Social Justice’s last count, 236 “men deserts” exist in England and Wales (areas where at least half of local households are families with no father present) – with a 2013 study reporting that within wards including Riverside (Liverpool), Ladywood (Birmingham) and King’s Cross (Camden), over 60 per cent of homes with dependent children had no father present. At the same time, as many as one in 10 non-resident UK fathers have zero contact with their children.
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The stories behind those numbers are diverse and complex. Some of those men will be absent because they’re unwilling or uninvited. Some because of war, imprisonment or mental illness. Some because they’ve lost custody battles. Some because they agreed to sperm donation and nothing more. Not that I thought about this growing up. I didn’t think much about fathers, full stop. By that point I’d convinced myself I didn’t need one. Not least because wanting a father seemed like a betrayal of my mother figures.
Then, in 2018, I was thrown a curveball. Granny Codd had died two years earlier, and Mum booked us onto a cruise to help celebrate her life. I was 31, living with a long-term boyfriend.
Early on in the trip we befriended a male passenger aged 70, or he befriended us. Peter was unmarried, had no children, travelled solo and liked a natter. Near the end of the voyage, bad weather redirected our ship from Shetland to the mainland. We found ourselves in a small Scottish town with little to do.
Peter was also twiddling thumbs, so the three of us went to a café. When a woman asked to join our table, he reacted with an impromptu prank: “I was just telling my wife and daughter it’d be lovely to have some company.” Surprised, grinning, intrigued, I played along while Mum kept schtum, performing the aloof spouse role to perfection.
In the aftermath of that strangeness Peter told me he’d always wondered what it would be like to have a daughter. His words unearthed a feeling I’d long-buried: that I had always wondered what it would be like to have a dad.
Later I would be told by Dr Jeremy Davies of the Fatherhood Institute that: “For a child, whether a father is present or not, the idea of a father is there, whether they want that idea or not … it’s a very powerful thing for a child.”
While biological anthropologist Dr Frank L’Engle Williams explained: “In many cases, humans can develop relatively normally without a father. In other cases, humans can’t. We have to compensate for the lack of the father: so mothers can step in, older siblings can step in, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and help to fill that gap as best as possible. But there’s still that loss that can never be repaired.”
Many studies describe negative outcomes from being fatherless, though few resonated with my experience. Some report that fatherless children are more likely to have poorer cognitive outcomes and to experience lifelong socioeconomic disadvantage. Others conclude that “well-fathered” daughters are more likely to have emotionally fulfilling relationships with men – even that fatherless daughters are more likely to start puberty earlier than their peers.
Conversely, one study by Sheffield University found that: “On average, those who have been in a single-parent family at some point report higher levels of life satisfaction than those children who have never lived in a single parent family.” While elsewhere, scientists have proved that all adults have the neurological potential to fulfil both male- and female-associated parenting roles, regardless of their gender.
As our ship left Scotland, those insights had yet to come my way. In a feverish excitement, not exactly sure what I was aiming for or why, I realised there must be lots of men like Peter. Perhaps I could experience what it was like to have a father – one who wanted to be there – while they could finally try out having a daughter. I just needed to know where to look.
My weird project was born: I decided to search for father figures by placing classified adverts (“dadverts”) in newspapers and magazines, and see if I could find anyone willing to take on the role that my biological father avoided; men who might be brilliant dads but perhaps never had the chance.
The thing was, as I quickly learned, finding good father figures involves contending with fundamental questions; questions that many fatherless people I’ve spoken with since say they have asked themselves too – especially when considering whether or not to have kids of their own.
Like, what kind of alchemy turns some men into fathers, while others fall away? Is there anything dads alone offer that mums can’t? And what do families and parents lose when one of those primary parents exits the process?
It took over a year of searching for dads and experts, and the writing of a whole book, to get inside those questions. But if, like me, you grew up with a parent absent, here’s a spoiler you may need to hear now: these issues are bigger than both of us – and you did nothing wrong.
‘Never Had a Dad by Georgie Codd published by William Collins out now
Myth That Women Are Never Liars Or Killers. Men Need Safe Spaces
3 days ago — Bone fragments in ashes were also located inside Nelson’s fireplace,” the release said. Nelson entered a guilty plea on Wednesday, which vacated …
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Woman accused of attempting to murder man and child
- Published7 hours ago
A woman has appeared in court accused of attempting to murder both a man and a child.
Jacqueline Mounsey, aged 53, faces two charges. One alleges that she attempted to murder a man in Carlisle on 10 June.
A second charge alleges that Ms Mounsey also attempted to murder a female child on the same date.
Ms Mounsey appeared in the dock at Carlisle Magistrates’ Court on Saturday.
During a five-minute hearing she spoke to confirm her name, date of birth and address, at Whernside in the city.
No pleas were entered to either of the charges she faces. A brief outline of the allegations was provided by prosecutor Peter Conroy, who told magistrates that the man and child had each suffered stab injuries to their necks.
The case was adjourned by magistrates and she is next due to an appear at Carlisle Crown Court for a plea and trial preparation hearing on 24 June.
No bail application was made and Ms Mounsey has been remanded in custody until her next court appearance.
Just who are men’s rights activists?
BBChttps://www.bbc.co.uk › news › magazine-17907534
2 May 2012 — An increasingly vocal men’s movement argues that anti-male discrimination is rife. Who are the activists and what do they want?
Missing:endorsing dubious
Acknowledging that Men are Moral and Harmed by Gender …
Springerhttps://link.springer.com › Sex Roles
by A Vázquez · 2024 — The rise of far-right parties with antifeminist sentiments constitutes a new challenge in the path to gender equality.
Leader’s Suicide Brings Attention to Men’s Rights Movement
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1 Mar 2012 — Feminist-crafted anti-domestic violence legislation did the rest. “Twenty-five years ago,” he wrote, “the federal government declared war on men …
Men’s Rights Activists: What You Need to Know
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24 Jan 2024 — The Men’s Liberation Movement believes in freeing men from their traditional roles and understandings of masculinity. Conventional gender roles …
Missing:endorsing dubious
CMV: Men’s Rights is less about supporting men and more …
Reddit · r/changemyview460+ comments · 4 years ago
Toxic masculinity is a thing, whining against it doesn’t change anything. I don’t know a single MRA that believes there are parts of male gender …
What men’s rights are men’s rights activists fighting for, that …
Quorahttps://www.quora.com › What-mens-rights-are-mens-ri…
Let’s consider the following things * Men have nothing to do with birth In a legal standpoint, if the mother decides to abort the child the …
Lefty men’s failures have radicalised women | Victoria Smith
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Men’s rights and male hysterias
Overland literary journalhttps://overland.org.au › Latest
12 Mar 2013 — Growing out of feminism, the movement acknowledged that men had disproportionate and unjust levels of power but insisted this was not the …
Where are the men’s rights movements and why is nothing …
Quorahttps://www.quora.com › Where-are-the-mens-rights-m…
Because showing men as victims is a taboo in our society. We believe the fact that children, women and animals can be victims but it’s still …
Jordan Peterson and the return of the men’s rights movement
Washington Posthttps://www.washingtonpost.com › … › Made by History
24 Jul 2018 — It’s time to bring back the patriarchy. That, anyway, is the argument of a new generation of men’s rights activists, who have diagnosed the …
Missing:dubious | Show results with: dubious
I think the Men’s Rights Movement is just an excuse to talk …
Reddit · r/changemyview850+ comments · 10 years ago
I don’t think that it actually promotes rape or misogyny, like some people say, but from my experiences men’s rights activists are almost …
There’s a better way to talk about men’s rights activism
Voxhttps://www.vox.com › Technology › Social Media
21 Sept 2016 — Generally speaking, MRAs hate feminism and believe it’s at least partly responsible for the downfall of society and the gender-based oppression …
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Male Supremacy
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I’m trans and I understand JK Rowling’s concerns about …
The Correspondenthttps://thecorrespondent.com › im-trans-and-i-understa…
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Gender Recognition – Hansard – UK Parliament
UK Parliamenthttps://hansard.parliament.uk › commons › debates › Ge…
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“THE MALE SEX ROLE” – An Analysis of the Men’s Liberation
jstorhttps://www.jstor.org › stable
by MA Messner · 1998 · Cited by 402 — Men’s liberation leaders grappled with the paradox of simultaneously acknowledging men’s institutional privileges and the costs of masculinity to men. The …
Human rights in Saudi Arabia Amnesty International
Amnesty Internationalhttps://www.amnesty.org › … › Saudi Arabia
Migrants were subjected to serious human rights abuses, including killings at the border with Yemen and treatment that may amount to human trafficking for the …
Four Myths About Trans Athletes, Debunked
American Civil Liberties Unionhttps://www.aclu.org › news › lgbtq-rights › four-myth…
30 Apr 2020 — Your donation helps to fund strategic litigation, advocacy, and organizing needed to take on discrimination based on gender identity and sexual …
Jimmy Carter set a virtuous example as president. To …
CNNhttps://www.cnn.com › 2024/06/11 › politics › jimmy-c…
1 day ago — Is virtue overrated in politics? Historians address that question by comparing the legacies of two former presidents: Jimmy Carter and …
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a Teacher of Virtue
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2 days ago — Is the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a good law or a bad one? There are people of all political stripes on both sides of that debate.
A Woman’s Take On the Men’s Rights Movement
Foundation for Economic Educationhttps://fee.org › articles › a-womans-take-on-the-mens-r…
5 Apr 2022 — “Activists (in this movement) argue that society has become biased and sexist against men. They also argue that men face discrimination from the …
Missing:dubious | Show results with: dubious
Child Custody Evaluators’ Beliefs About Domestic Abuse …
Office of Justice Programs (.gov)https://www.ojp.gov › pdffiles1 › nij › grants
31 Oct 2011 — This project was supported by Grant No. 2007-WG-BX-0013 awarded by the National Institute of. Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. …
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman | Online Library of Liberty
Online Library of Libertyhttps://oll.libertyfund.org › titles › wollstonecraft-a-vindi…
Wollstonecraft first defended the rights of men in response to Burke’s pamphlet on the French Revolution, then turned to the rights of woman a couple of …
Topic · Men’s rights
Change.orghttps://www.change.org › men-s-rights-en-us
The account I like best is that of John Harvey Kellogg, yes, the co-founder of Kellogg’s, promoted circumcision not only to prevent male masturbation, but …
Caitlin Moran: what’s gone wrong for men – and the thing …
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1 Jul 2023 — The feminist author has spent years writing about how to be a woman. Now she’s turning her eye on the opposite sex.
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Is Gregg Berhalter the man for the job, after all? Winners & …
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2 days ago — Taylor Swift fans are finally getting to enjoy the UK leg of her Eras world tour – but with VIP ticket prices going as high as £799 a pop …
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Convincing men of the feminist cause? Not my job. – CFFP
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22 Mar 2023 — Once and for all – feminism does not equal gender equality! Working at a feminist organisation and being a Black feminist activist, I …
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Why more men should fight for women’s rights | Owen Jones
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24 Feb 2015 — To end the harm inflicted by aggressive masculinity men must embrace feminism – without stealing it.
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Organising Strategies of the Indian Men’s Rights Movement
jstorhttps://www.jstor.org › stable
by S BASU · 2015 · Cited by 8 — questions about marriage and maintenance relating to equality and protection that strike at fundamental feminist debates.2. Perhaps most provocatively, the mrm …
Human rights in Iran Amnesty International
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Women and girls, LGBTI people, and ethnic and religious minorities were subjected to systemic discrimination and violence. Cruel and inhuman punishments, …
Barriers to Men’s Help Seeking for Intimate Partner Violence
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by JC Taylor · 2022 · Cited by 72 — Evidence suggests that male victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) are less likely to seek help for their victimization than female …
3 Being involved
Project MUSEhttps://muse.jhu.edu › pub › oa_monograph › chapter
Having looked at the routes into involvement, we now turn to the experiences of men once they are involved in men’s activism to end violence against women.
How to Do Men’s Rights Rightly
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Patriarchy – an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
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Patriarchy is an analytical concept referring to a system of political, social, and economic relations and institutions structured around the gender inequality …
Being a Man.
Michael Cuenco
June 6, 2024 6 mins
On 6 June 1944, nearly 160,000 soldiers from the Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy and commenced the reconquest of Western Europe from the Nazis. The man in charge of this massive operation, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, would go on to be elected president, ushering in an era of peace, stability, and mass affluence.
Yet by the end of the Fifties, Eisenhower was rejected by the nation’s tastemakers as dull, doddering and spent: Ike, they said, played golf for eight years. As the GIs were domesticated by middle-class life in the suburbs, there came a new hero to behold: JFK also fought in the war, but his distinguishing traits were youth, manly vigour and an irrepressible sense of hipness, which had special appeal for those born after the war — the “Baby Boomers”.
Responding to this air of expectation was Norman Mailer, the enfant terrible of the literary world, who in both his novels and his personal life exuded machismo: an angry undercurrent of male alienation that flowed just beneath the surface of the reigning suburban culture.
Weeks before the 1960 election, Mailer wrote his first political essay. Published in Esquire, his aim in “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” was not just to boost Kennedy as the hero Americans needed, but to attack and discredit everything the Eisenhower era represented: its deeply “square” ideas of manhood — arising from notions of duty, responsibility, self-control and an engrained respect for authority — sounded almost Victorian to Mailer’s ears. “A tasteless, sexless, odourless sanctity in architecture, manners, modes, styles has been the result” of Ike’s leadership, he claimed. In place of the conformist “organisation man” of the Fifties, Mailer envisioned a new and vital masculine archetype for the Sixties, someone who can “touch depths in American life which were uncharted”.
Holding up JFK as the vessel, Mailer hoped that politics could be fused with the “underground river” of the American psyche — the unconscious realms of myth, art, instinct and aesthetics — and thus turned into an arena for limitless self-expression. His vision was a potent expression of the Sixties ethos, predicated as it was on the individual’s restless spirit of rebellion against the institutions.
Though that decade saw the rise of feminism, a no less important but overlooked development was the change in the dominant models of masculinity. The old masculine archetypes — the GI, the pioneer, the sheriff, the crew-cutted astronaut — represented the austere vanguard of modernity which heralded the arrival of civilisation and progress. The new male archetype birthed by the post-Boomer pop culture — the long-haired rock star, the brooding beat poet, the hippie wildman, the Third World guerilla, Mailer’s own “White Negro” — were sensuous rebels against modernity, who sought to topple the structures of civilisation in the name of a heedless and undefined freedom.
This permissive cultural emancipation of the Sixties after Kennedy was then enlarged by the neoliberal economic emancipation of the Eighties under Reagan, which entrenched the new moral status quo, or what may be called “the Boomer consensus”, based on the formula of hedonism plus markets. This dispensation was embodied in equal part by the two dominant Boomer politicians of the Nineties, the liberal Bill Clinton and the conservative Newt Gingrich, who both expanded the reach of unregulated markets, shrank the size of the state and subjected US politics to their boundless egos and libidos.
Why America needs a monarchy
Three decades later, the results of this social revolution for each of the genders are clear enough: women have made great economic and cultural strides — a welcome development — but the opposite sex appears to have faltered. On a host of metrics, from educational achievement to economic performance and career advancement to life expectancy and cultural prestige, men are shown to be either falling behind women or underperforming relative to previous generations of men. Yet structural explanations and conventional policy prescriptions have little resonance among today’s “angry young men”. They have, instead, turned to far more radical answers.
Enter the rise of a revanchist masculine identity politics on the online Right, where “vitalist” movements call for the overthrow not just of liberalism but of the pre-modern Christian foundations of Western civilisation. Inspired by Nietzschean thought, they seek the revival of a pagan morality that glorifies primal ideals of strength, beauty and sensuality. The most prominent expositor of this view is the pseudonymous “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP), later unmasked as one Costin Alamariu. They are distinguished by their fondness for bodybuilding, eccentric natural lifestyles and garish aesthetics, conveyed through homoerotic imagery and classical art. Throw in racist and misogynist “shitposting” that playfully straddles the line between irony and sincerity, and one gets a fuller picture of their sensibility.
Among competing narratives around male decline, this has garnered the most widespread following among a certain class of ambitious, educated, intellectually inclined and highly online professional young men. Scouring the ranks of Congressional staff offices, Ivy League schools, conservative think tanks, as well as the worlds of tech and finance, may reveal sizeable cadres of “Bronze Age” followers, who will reveal themselves when they are “in front of the control panel”, as one such devotee put it to The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood — that is, when they are ready to seize power.
For all their frightening and exotic “reactionary” flairs, however, these currents are best understood as inversions of the Sixties countercultural Left, sharing its militant subversive and anti-institutional dispositions. All that’s really happened is that it has come full circle: this sensibility began on the far-Left but has now migrated to and metastasised on the far-Right. And just as the original counterculture was easily co-opted to serve neoliberalism (“woke capitalism”), so too is the online Right — with even less resistance — being made to prop up the same, with the emergence of “based capitalism”. This is shown by Alamariu’s rambling endorsement of Javier Millei and his attempt to sell an ideology of Aryanised Reaganism on steroids to impressionable followers: by dressing it up with edgy memes, he has essentially found an ingenious way to make neoliberal policy attractive to discontented youths, who would otherwise have turned away from the GOP’s free market dogmas. (He is thus revealed to be little more than a “red-pilled” Paul Ryan.) BAP and the online Right now amount to a Millennial mirror image of Mailer-ism and the Boomer counterculture. It matters less that Mailer was an idiosyncratic Marxist or that Alamariu is a would-be race warrior, for the result is the same: hedonism plus markets.
Indeed, as adjacent influencer “Zero HP Lovecraft” admitted, they aspire to “a precise mirror of the world in which we live today”, only with all the progressive slogans and aesthetics swapped for reactionary ones, but with presumably the same malfunctioning economy and decaying infrastructure left in place. Such statements reveal the inherent limitations of this movement, which deals in memetic forms of discourse that discard all programmatic content in favour of pure subjectivism and impulse: a “vibes-only politics”. Consider BAP’s fixation on looks as a political criterion; or more troublingly, his giddy glamorisation of violence; or his disdain for family life, which supposedly dilutes the male spirit (all things he happens to, in varying degrees, share with Mailer). Vapidity, nihilism, and cruelty are the whole point. And for all their apparent dislike of legacy conservatism, this is what allows these reactionaries to be repeatedly co-opted into some variant of neoliberalism.
“Vapidity, nihilism, and cruelty are the whole point.”
If today’s dissatisfied young men want to achieve greatness, they can do so not by trying to rehash the failed faux-radicalism of the Boomers, Mailer and Alamariu, with its degenerate libertinism and contempt for institutions, but rather by rediscovering the non-reactionary masculine ethos of the Eisenhower era. Far from being stale or parochially conservative, the Fifties were actually a time of great institutional creativity and innovation as embodied in post-war mixed-economy industrial capitalism (the antithesis of neoliberalism); this was, after all, the decade when the mass-middle class was forged, a status and standard of living which many Millennials and Gen Zs have been denied.
This will require rejecting romanticism and personal liberation in favour of a different value set for young men, one that: abides by the logic of institutions rather than that of aggressive individualism (even as they seek to reimagine and reform their institutions); realises the need for rational, long-term plans of mass coordination as a means of steering society at the level of both state and market; and accepts reasonable limits on personal autonomy in the name of these larger national goals and imperatives. This is, in other words, the same disciplined high modern ethos that made D-Day possible — that won the Second World War and built the greatest economy in all history — after the preceding era of institutional collapse in the Thirties necessitated renewal. For this generation, masculinity was forged within and through institutions rather than against them: the family, the army, the state, the corporation, the union, etc. The very things Mailer and his like have railed against as tyrannical and effeminising were in fact the bedrocks of American strength. To restore that order and dynamism that were Eisenhower’s legacies, young men must dam the “underground river” and re-establish boundaries between the mythic-aesthetic and material-political dimensions of civilisation, lest they be constantly seduced and intoxicated by the former, as they are now, while losing sight of the latter. For the true rebirth of vitality in the West will not come from a miserable narcissistic dictatorship of bohemians, dandies and aesthetes — of the kind that Mailer and BAP would revel in — but from practical feats. The matchless heroism of D-Day, when free men fought and triumphed against barbarism, stands as just such an example: one more encapsulation of what is missing in contemporary masculinity, and of what may yet be regained.
Michael Cuenco is a writer on policy and politics. He is Associate Editor at American Affairs.
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29 Comments
Most Voted
Matt Hindman
5 days ago
What is it about a Cuenco word salad that makes me feel a headache coming on? Dude seriously, your history needs work, your comparisons are apples and oranges, and you spend way too much time in parts of the internet that not even 4chan would take seriously. During the 30’s and 40’s institutions across America were forced to enact reforms because of the recognition they had failed. Now institutions across the Western World are intrenched bureaucracies that refuse to admit any failings let alone subject themselves to reform. Also, most of America’s military leadership were not up to the task at the start of the war. Eisenhower was only a lieutenant colonel when it started. He rose rapidly through the ranks because of his genius logistical ability and excellent leadership skills. Then we get to the military itself. Despite whatever problems it may have had, the US Army at the time had actual accountability and leaders who took responsibility for their actions. Something that makes comparisons to the recent farce that was The War on Terror useless. The only person punished after the Afghanistan pull out debacle was a Marine officer who was foolish enough to publicly complain about the lack of accountability among senior leadership. You’re going to have to try a lot harder than simply name dropping a man of great character and accomplishments then comparing him to some nobody from the dark corner of the internet hardly anyone has ever heard of, let alone cares about.
June 7th 2024
More Women Than Expected Are Genetically Men
Sex chromosomes usually determine whether you are female or male. Women are XX. Men are XY. However, genetically, a few women are actually men. They grow up as women with a woman’s body, and most only discover well into puberty that they are different. Danish researchers map for the first time how many women are genetically men. The proportion was higher than expected.
Published
October 25th, 2016
BY MORTEN BUSCH
Sex chromosomes usually determine whether you are female or male. Women are XX. Men are XY. However, genetically, a few women are actually men. They grow up as women with a woman’s body, and most only discover well into puberty that they are different. Danish researchers map for the first time how many women are genetically men. The proportion was higher than expected.
You cannot see it if you do not know what you are looking for. One in 15,000 males is born and grows up as a girl. And neither these girls nor their parents know it. These girls do not discover anything different until puberty.
“Girls born with XY chromosomes are genetically boys but for a variety of reasons – mutations in genes that determine sexual development – the male characteristics are never expressed. They live their lives as girls and then women, and a few can even give birth. Our research, which is the first nationwide survey in the world, shows that this group is up to 50% larger than previously assumed. How these girls discover the facts and talk openly about their situation also varies greatly,” explains Claus Højbjerg Gravholt, who led the study and is Clinical Professor in the Department of Clinical Medicine of Aarhus University.
Together with colleagues, he is investigating why sex chromosome abnormalities occur and therefore how people with XY chromosomes can become women. Two types of genetic mutations mostly make the difference; these were previously referred to as Morris syndrome and Swyer syndrome but are now collectively referred to as disorders of sex development (DSD).
“Morris syndrome is now called 46,XY DSD: androgen insensitivity syndrome. These people have an extremely high level of testosterone and other male sex hormones, but the testosterone does not affect the foetal cells that usually develop into male sexual organs because of a mutation in the androgen receptor gene. These people therefore have male chromosomes but are women socially and in external appearance. They do not have internal female sexual organs, and they form testicles that remain concealed in the abdominal cavity.”
THE HIDDEN MEN
Typically, most of the girls with androgen insensitivity syndrome discover by puberty that they differ from other girls. They do not menstruate, and most will never be able to give birth. Apart from the discovery that more women have XY chromosomes than previously assumed, the researchers were also surprised about the variation in when these girls and women discover that something is different. The girls with androgen insensitivity syndrome were diagnosed at an average age of 7–8 years old but some 34-year-old women with the syndrome had not yet been diagnosed.
“This is surprising, although most of these women know that they cannot give birth and that they are configured slightly differently than other women. They just do not know why. Even more surprising, however, is the fact that the average age of girls being diagnosed with gonadal dysgenesis, previously known as Swyer syndrome, is 17 years.”
The reason for this high age at diagnosis is presumably that these women actually develop sexual organs that are almost normal. Women with gonadal dysgenesis have a mutation in the SRY gene of the Y chromosome that encodes for a protein known as the testicular determining factor that normally results in the testicles developing in the early weeks of foetal development. In the absence of the protein, the testicles do not develop and female sexual organs that are almost normal develop instead.
“The women do not develop secondary female characteristics such as breasts, but they have a womb, so with appropriate hormone treatment and fertilized egg implantation they can actually become pregnant and give birth. The greatest problem is that their ovaries are not developed, and if the ovaries are not removed they have an increased risk of developing ovarian cancer.”
DENMARK IS UNIQUE
Claus Højbjerg Gravholt’s group focuses intensively on the resulting diseases associated with sex chromosome abnormalities. These are mostly important for the people with the abnormalities but are also important in a wider context for understanding many disease processes at the genetic, molecular, clinical and epidemiological levels.
“The idea is that this research can help us to understand major disease groups such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease that are more frequent among people with sex chromosome abnormalities. Since these people have a higher prevalence of the resulting diseases, detecting the patterns is also easier. Ultimately, we hope that this knowledge will benefit these women and other people with diabetes or heart disease.”
The Danish researchers mainly focus on helping and treating the women and men with sex chromosome abnormalities. These people typically face physical challenges related to their sexuality, their inability to give birth or the diseases resulting from lack of sex hormones. They also face mental challenges.
“It is very upsetting for people who have grown up and lived for years believing that they are of a particular sex to suddenly discover that they are actually of the opposite sex. This can be a relief but can also be a loss. For most people it comes as a shock that upends their whole identity. Coping with this can take years,” concludes Claus Højbjerg Gravholt.
“Incidence, prevalence, diagnostic delay, and clinical presentation of female 46,XY disorders of sex development” was published in September 2016 in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.
In 2013–2015, the Novo Nordisk Foundation awarded a grant for research on sex chromosome syndromes to the Claus Højbjerg Gravholt group at the Department of Clinical Medicine of Aarhus University
June 3rd 2024
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June 2nd 2024
5 Trans icons who inspire us – as creatives and people
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My Lab Conducted A Study On Preschool Girls. What We Discovered Should Disturb You.
“We need to do whatever we can to combat all of this. My research shows we have a huge problem on our hands.”
May 29, 2024, 07:59 AM EDT
Over the past year, a friend’s daughter — let’s call her Lily — has repeatedly called herself ugly. When Lily is supposed to be brushing her teeth, she looks in the mirror with a frown on her face, eyes scanning her features with disappointment. Lily has wavy dark-brown hair; she wants straight blond hair.
One morning Lily put pink marker all over her mouth. The day before, a child at school had called her ugly, and she thought the “lipstick” would make her look prettier.
Lily is 4. And she is beautiful.
How has the world warped this child’s view of herself? Why does Lily even need to care about looking beautiful at 4? Is she worried about getting a date for the class field trip?
More attention is finally being paid toward the harmful effects of social media on teens’ body image and mental health. However, a recent study my lab conducted suggests that we are missing an important piece of the puzzle. Specifically, we discovered that among girls, a preoccupation with appearance starts as young as age 3.
In our study, we interviewed 170 children ages 3 to 5 to examine when kids start to value being beautiful. Across all of the measures that we assessed, girls on average greatly valued their appearances. Girls said that to be a girl they needed to be pretty, and looking pretty was important.
When asked to select from an array of outfits and occupations, the girls in our study tended to select many fancy outfits and appearance-related occupations, like being a model or makeup artist. They showed good memory for pictures of fashionable clothing when these pictures were later hidden from view. When explaining why they liked a pop culture character, girls often said things like, “I like all the princesses because they are pretty.” In a previous study,young girls also tended to purchase many toys that focused on appearance (e.g., a vanity set) with play money.
Across both studies, not only did girls tend to care highly about appearances, but they also did so more than boys. Girls were about five times more likely than boys to say they liked a character due to what I refer to as “appearance reasons.” Boys more often cited “action reasons,” such as liking Spider-Man “because he jumps high, climbs and shoots webs.” Our study concluded that gender differences related to how much emphasis we place on beauty likely start in preschool.
While girls around the world have long been taught that beauty is of utmost importance, conversations with other gender development experts point to the early 2000s as a pivotal period when a new “girlie-girl” culture emerged. One driver of this culture was the launch of the Disney Princess franchise in 2000, which continues to enamor young girls. My two young daughters have probably drawn upwards of a thousand pictures of Moana over the past two years. Although Disney movies have evolved and now try to include more agentic heroines, the take-home message received by children still centered on beauty.
By adolescence, children are already primed to be preoccupied with how they look — a vulnerability that social media, often a very visual platform, taps into and exploits. Decades of research have shown that tying self-worth to looks and having a distorted body image are linked to a whole host of negative outcomes, which can include poorer physical health (e.g., eating disorders, substance abuse) and mental health (e.g., depression). An unhealthy focus on appearance can also detract from a focus on school, interfere with academic performance and limit the career aspirations of young women.
If we know that emphasizing physical appearance sets girls up for unhappiness — or worse — we must rethink our words and actions that instill this value, and we must begin before adolescence and social media use.
The preschool and kindergarten years are especially critical, as it’s during this time that children typically begin to strongly identify with a gender — whether the one they were assigned at birth or the one they know themselves to be — and they are hungry to learn what that gender means. Children form gender stereotypes based on the information that is available to them and often doggedly follow these stereotypes. Because children are learning that girls are defined by how they look and boys by what they do, we must change the information they receive.
We can do this in a variety of ways. One is to (re)examine the images and toys our children encounter on a daily basis. Those beloved princesses and mermaid dolls with absurd body proportions can create internal standards that are impossible to attain. Although adults understand the metaphor in making a superhero larger than life, children, who are extremely visual and swayed by how objects and people look, take these images at face value. We need to buy and create toys that feature diverse body shapes and sizes, varied and accurate facial features, different hair textures and a spectrum of skin colors.
There are some bright spots already out there. Our family loves the three Madrigal sisters from the movie “Encanto.” Mirabel, the main protagonist, has glasses and curly hair. Her oldest sister Luisa is renowned not for her beauty, but for her physical strength. Isabella, the middle sister, has darker skin and realistic body proportions that my children not only see but also feel when handling their dolls. The village values all three of them for their helpfulness, and their primary goals do not center around attracting a prince. Barbie is also making more diverse dolls, but those more representative toys are still the minority.
There are also toys and games that encourage girls to solve problems, build structures and robots and use their creativity, but because our culture is still so influenced by gender stereotypes, young girls are often not exposed to them. We need to not only add positive and diverse images and toys, but move away from featuring and selling the harmful ones that currently dominate the market.
Until corporations do better, it’s up to us to do what we can. If you find yourself reaching for an “appearance toy” for a girl in your life, look for toys that encourage a wider variety of activities. Believe me, harmful images and toys will seep into your household, often through gifts from friends and family members, so parents and teachers need to take an active stance. Don’t feel guilty saying no to a toy that promotes an unhealthy approach to appearance.
We can also change how we talk to the children in our lives. Instead of constantly commenting on a child’s appearance — “You look so pretty!” or “That’s a beautiful dress!” — try focusing on other admirable attributes, especially when you’re speaking to girls.
On a broader level, let’s expand the idea of what a girl or a boy can be. By having more examples of the different ways that kids can be their gender (whether by being more or less traditionally feminine, masculine or something in between), everybody wins.
Of course, it’s important to instill a sense of pride in one’s appearance. But this is possible without focusing on traditionally esteemed — and frequently policed — characteristics. It can be even more complicated for children of color or children from low-income backgrounds, where looking “good” can be unfairly and dangerously tied to respectability. In these contexts, parents are often actively fighting to keep their kids from internalizing insidious white beauty standards, in addition to challenging gender stereotypes. And although appearance is typically emphasized more among girls, boys also face unrealistic standards regarding muscles and strength. One recent study found that 49% of boys ages 8-12 were unhappy with their appearance and another found that boys as young as 6 showed preferences for thinner and more muscular bodies.
Many of us relate to feeling dissatisfied with the way we look and have experienced negative outcomes due to our fixation on it. As a 12-year-old, I was obsessed with the weight I gained during puberty. Though doing varsity volleyball and track and field made me fit and strong when I was 15, I was unhappy with my body, and experienced depression and suicidal ideation.
I was not alone. I knew many other girls who were dealing with similar feelings. When I later attended Stanford, I was surrounded by incredible, high-achieving women, some who were world-class athletes, but who also struggled with their body images and disordered eating. Seeing so many others who also suffered made me realize that these appearance- and health-related matters were bigger than just me. Ultimately, I was motivated to study gender development as a career, which I’ve been doing for 17 years, in hopes of addressing this complex and alarming societal issue.
I am anxious about what will happen when my two young daughters become teens, in a society where sexism and patriarchy still run rampant. My husband and I have even contemplated leaving Los Angeles, arguably one of the most image-obsessed cities in the world. Whenever we drive down Santa Monica Boulevard, billboards and advertisements expose my daughters to the supposed wonders of plastic surgery, implants and freezing off fat. When we traipse down Montana Avenue, a swanky shopping area, we pass dozens of eyelash salons, hair salons, nail salons, waxing salons, sugaring salons and skincare shops squeezed in tightly next to each other along the street.
I know that these messages would still reach them no matter where we moved. This is the world we live in. This is the culture we’ve been told to want. These are the messages our children pick up — not just from where they live, but from the shows they watch, the movies they see, the songs they hear, the friends they make and even in their schools. And thanks to social media, AI technology, filters and photoshopping, it’s only getting worse.
So, we need to do whatever we can to combat all of this. My research shows we have a huge problem on our hands. If a child is already steeped in these gender stereotypes and dysmorphic body ideals by age 5, just imagine what she’ll be thinking by 15. It’s our responsibility to do whatever we can to foster healthier values and provide more diverse images and ideas of what it means to be a girl, a boy and a human being. I want my daughters — and everyone else’s kids — to always be able to recognize their own unique beauty, and I want them to know their value does not depend on that beauty.
May Ling Halim, Ph.D., is a developmental psychologist and is a mother of two girls. She is a Professor of Psychology at California State University, Long Beach, and the Director of the Culture and Social Identity Development Lab. Her research focuses on gender identity development among diverse young children. Her work has been published in leading academic journals on child development.
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May 27th 2024
Women also sexually abuse children, but their reasons often differ from men’s
Published: February 19, 2017 7.05pm GMT
Females offend against younger victims and are less discriminant about victim gender. from shutterstock.com
Published: February 19, 2017 7.05pm GMT
Author
- Xanthe Mallett Forensic Criminologist, University of New England
Disclosure statement
Xanthe Mallett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
University of New England provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.
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Data from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recently revealed that, between 1950 and 2010, 60% of all abuse allegedly took place at faith-based institutions. Evidence showed that, in Catholic institutions, 95% of alleged offenders were men. This means the remaining 5% (or 96 of the 1,880 accused) were women.
This may come as a surprise. There is a common misconception that all child sex offenders are men. But women child sex offenders do exist, although they differ from male counterparts in several ways.
How many women abuse?
A study for the Home Office in the UK in 1998 indicated less than 5% of child sex offences were committed by women. This is supported by data coming out of the Royal Commission – that 5% of the alleged abusers associated with the Catholic Church were religious sisters – as well as research based on correctional services data in Australia.
The author of the UK report acknowledged the number may be lower than the reality. A 2015 study looked at virtually every substantiated child sexual abuse case reported to child protective services in the United States in 2010. It concluded more than 20% of child sexual abuse cases reviewed involved a primary female perpetrator – so estimates vary significantly.
In 2009, the BBC reported a large rise in the number of children calling the UK charity Childline to report sexual abuse by a female. Between 2005 and 2006, 2,142 children reported they had been sexually victimised by a female.
Why do women abuse?
There are some important points of difference between male and female perpetrators of child sex abuse. Generally speaking, females tend to offend against younger victims and are less discriminant about victim gender.
There are a number of theories as to why women sexually abuse children. Researchers suggest some women abuse their own daughters as a result of narcissistic tendencies. In these cases, an older woman’s need for admiration and exaggerated sense of self importance, for example, leads to jealousy of her daughter.
A significant number of females who sexually abuse children fall into the “teacher/lover group”. This comprises women in their 30s who victimise males with an average age of 12 years. The women may see the relationship as based on love, and may not see it as abusive or recognise its inappropriate nature.
Women in this group can be driven by a need for intimacy and trying to compensate for emotional needs not met elsewhere. This group can include the female teachers who become sexually involved with male pupils. They are invested in the idea of a relationship, find adolescent boys less threatening than men of their own age, and have more control over the relationship.
Another category is one researchers have termed the “predisposed molester”. Women in this group often experience abuse themselves and may have addictive personalities.
A similar category, of the “mother molester”, may comprise a significant proportion of female child sex offenders. Research has routinely indicated that women are 4.5 times more likely to offend against their biological child, as well as other children in their care.
Indirect and co-abuse
There’s another group of women who harm their own children. These are “male-coerced offenders” – passive females in relationships with abusive males who would do just about anything to keep their man happy. They may think co-abuse will actually bring them closer together as a couple.
The “male-accompanied offenders” who are not coerced may sexually abuse their children out of anger or jealousy.
Another group comprises the “criminal homosexual offenders”, who may have an entirely different motivation for their offending histories. Many of the offences include forcing behaviours – such as forcing young girls into prostitution. Here the motivation might be more economic than sexual in nature.
I worked on a case involving a childcare worker who took indecent images of children and distributed them across a paedophile network. During the police interview she expressed no sexual gratification in the acts she photographed.
In my experience, I have never seen a man involved in the sexual abuse of children or paedophile rings who did not express a sexual attraction for children.
But female child sex offenders are a mixed group and while for some, the sexual abuse of children is purely financially driven, other women engage in abuse as well. An example would be the infamous UK case of Marie Black, who was jailed in 2015 for 23 offences including rape, conspiracy to rape, and inciting a child to engage in sexual activity.
Her victims were five young children: two boys and three girls. And her crimes included taking them to sex parties and “raffling them off’” for abuse by others.
A key point of difference between male and female sexual abusers of children is in the power relationship with their victims. Sex crimes perpetrated by men are considered crimes of power over the victim. But while female sex offending can be control-driven, the need for intimacy seems to play a larger role than domination.
Is child sexual abuse by women on the rise?
Estimates indicate somewhere between 90 to 95% of all sexual abuse goes unreported, and the number is probably even higher for female-perpetrated sexual abuse.
The evidence does not necessarily indicate child sexual abuse by women is increasing. But it may indicate that – due to increased media attention – more children feel comfortable to speak out without fear of stigmatisation.
Our current understanding of women who sexually abuse children is founded on very limited research. Therefore, we need to reconstruct our ideas about child sex offenders to include woman as a distinct sub-group, and undertake considerably more research to get a better understanding of the causes behind these offences.
Why would someone lie about being a domestic violence victim?
January 11, 2023 By Law Office of James R. Snell, Jr., LLC
There are a number of reasons why someone might lie about being a victim of domestic violence. Some of the most common reasons include:
Manipulation and control: A person may falsely claim to be a victim of domestic violence in order to manipulate or control their partner, or to gain an advantage in a child custody dispute.
Fear of arrest: A person may lie to the police about what happened in an argument, in order to shift responsibility onto their partner. This can result in the police arresting the wrong person for the offense.
Intoxication: A grossly intoxicated person, either as a result of alcohol or drug use, may imagine that they have been the victim of domestic abuse when in reality no such thing occurred. This can cause them to report a fictitious attack to the police or others, resulting in criminal charges.
Extreme Anger: Sometimes people lie about being a domestic violence victim when they are especially angry at their partner. For example, a woman who just discovered her husband is cheating on her might lie in order to try to get back at him.
Financial gain: In some cases, a person may falsely accuse their partner of domestic violence in order to gain a financial advantage, such as a larger share of the couple’s assets in a divorce.
Falsely accusing to gain immigration status: Non-citizen victims of domestic violence may falsely accuse their partner of domestic violence in order to obtain a U-Visa, which allows certain victims of crime to remain in the United States.
Mental Health Issues: Someone suffering from a mental health condition might falsely report being the victim of a domestic violence episode as a result of their condition. Whether their condition is a delusional disorder, personality disorder, or depression, false reports can be made as a result.
Attention seeking: Some people may lie about being a victim of domestic violence for attention or sympathy from friends, family, or authorities.
False accusations of domestic violence can have serious consequences for both the person making the false accusations and the person falsely accused. It’s important for the authorities to thoroughly investigate and collect evidence from both parties before determining the facts of the case and moving forward with the legal process. Unfortunately, police in South Carolina typically don’t spend a significant amount of time in responding to a domestic violence call, and oftentimes jump to conclusions without conducting a comprehensive investigation.
Attorney James R. Snell, Jr., is the author of the book “Challenging CDV.” Now in its third edition, this is the book on the topic of South Carolina domestic violence law and defense procedures. He has represented hundreds of men and women charged with misdemeanor and felony domestic violence.Categories:
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May 17th 2024
School teacher found guilty of child sex offences against two pupils
Main article content
Published: 16:07 17/05/2024
Rebecca Joynes (30/12/1993) of Waterman Walk, Salford, was found guilty by a majority verdict at Manchester Crown Square Court today (Friday 17 May 2024) of six sexual offences against two boys.
Joynes was arrested on suspicion of sexual activity with a child on 18 October 2021 and was later charged with six counts of sexual activity – four counts of sexual activity with a child, and two counts of sexual activity with a child by a person in a position of trust.
The court heard that Joynes contacted two teenage boys – who cannot be named for legal reasons – she met while she was a teacher at a Greater Manchester school.
Jurors previously heard Joynes groomed one pupil by taking him to the Trafford Centre, where she bought him a £345 Gucci belt, before having sex with him in her flat.
Joynes was later suspended from her post and was discovered to have fallen pregnant with the second boy, who she first met aged 15.
She was arrested, suspended from work and bailed while we investigated the allegations about the first victim.
At this time, Joynes was in contact with the other boy on social media, despite a ban on her contacting anyone aged under 18.
She claimed they only had sex after she was sacked, which was when she fell pregnant, despite Joynes allegedly telling him it was ‘almost impossible’ for her to conceive due to a health issue. He learned she was pregnant ‘to his great shock’ after she gave him a baby grow.
Their daughter was taken from her following an emergency court hearing 24 hours after delivery.
Joynes will be sentenced at a later date.
Detective Constable Beth Alexander, of our Child Protection Investigation Unit in Salford, said: “Firstly, I would like to thank the victims and their families for being brave enough to come forward and work with us in our investigation.
“Rebecca Joynes is a sexual predator. She was their teacher and they rightfully put their trust in her.
“But Joynes decided to abuse her position and used it to groom two teenagers.
“We welcome today’s verdict and now wait for Joynes to face the consequences for her actions.
“I would like to thank the officers who have worked closely with the victims and their families in establishing the full circumstances of this case, as well as the investigation team for their hard work and dedication during this investigation.
“The two victims and their families have asked for their privacy to be respected now and moving forward – they all wish to carry on with their lives and put this ordeal behind them.”
Comment At least she didn’t play the rape card. Women can be sexual predators and expert liars.
R J Cook
May 14th 2024
The End of Alcohol- with comment by R J Cook
Glamorous influencers are blending science and superstition to help people “change their relationship to drinking.” Did I miss out by getting sober the old-fashioned way?
- Virginia Heffernan
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- Illustration: Genie Espinosa
- She was dressed in a cartoon-spangled onesie, while he wore a tiny denim jacket and wide-legged pants. It was a bluebird day in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and I was eavesdropping on the couple at a crosswalk.
- “Sobriety is a big thing these days,” she said.
- “Yeah,” he said. “For babies.”
- Babies are sober, and adults drunk. Browsing in a cavernous thrift store, I rolled the idea around. It’s true I sometimes feel remedial and juice-boxy holding a Sprite at a cocktail party, as I often have over the past 10 years. But I also remember someone sharing in a 12-step meeting that she used to think she was a cold, calloused femme fatale when she was blackout drunk—the soul of sophistication. I used to think the same thing. Later, she realized that she drank because she couldn’t bear one electron of pain. Some alcoholics call this Queen Baby Syndrome. She self-soothed, she said, by sucking on a bottle of Georgi. (I’ve changed some details here to protect privacy.)
- This person hit bottom, she said, when she woke up on a deflated air mattress spooning with a drag queen who looked like Ted Cruz. I’ve never forgotten that.
- Though I still describe myself as an alcoholic, the word has fallen out of favor with marquee nondrinkers, and for good reasons. Above all, it’s a coarse portmanteau, one that has set off its share of linguistic crises, notably “chocoholic.” But “alcoholic” also confounds because it designates not an ordinary person with a problem (cf. “diabetic,” “asthmatic”) but a problem person whose intractable nature somehow includes an eccentric orientation toward an otherwise benign if flammable organic compound, ethanol. Ethanol is not as ubiquitous as (say) gluten, but, as desperate alcoholics know, it can be found not just in whiskey sours but in perfume, mouthwash, and windshield-wiper fluid.
- In traditional 12-step treatments for alcohol addiction, as opposed to the beguiling new ones that I’m now curious about, inveterate boozers are also represented as having an eccentric orientation to lying, cheating, stealing, boasting, and mean-spiritedness. But are these eccentricities measured in numbers, divined by introspection, or evaluated with respect to cultural norms? Maybe none—or all three. In 1633, the English poet and priest George Herbert brilliantly tried his hand at alcoholism analysis in “The Church-porch.” He warned that drinkers court shame, and perhaps emesis, if they don’t dump excess booze:
- Drink not the third glasse, which thou canst not tame,
- When once it is within thee; but before
- Mayst rule it, as thou list; and poure the shame,
- Which it would poure on thee, upon the floore.
- Herbert’s special worry about the shame brought by the third drink brings to mind another three-stage adage about the progression of alcoholism: “The man takes a drink, the drink takes a drink, the drink takes the man.” Herbert then switches to the personal pronoun and imagines that the third drink would cast him on the floor, where he would literally hit bottom.
- It is most just to throw that on the ground,
- Which would throw me there, if I keep the round.
- Herbert, of course, wrote centuries before the habit of consuming more than a third of a six-pack was considered a pathology rather than a failure of will. But the 20th-century disease model, often associated with Alcoholics Anonymous, brings more confusion. Why does the affliction that’s said to define the alcoholic—“alcoholism”—lack clear biological markers? Finally, it’s “ism,” not “itis.” Is alcoholism a disease or an ideology?
- If etymology is any help, “alcohol” comes from the Arabic al-kuhl, referring to kohl, the black eyeliner powder dating back to the fourth millennium BC; kohl was made of a refined mineral, and then it came to be used for anything distilled. I Googled this once when I was drunk. Another spelling of the word, in Latin, is alcool. All cool.
- Illustration: Genie Espinosa
- Sobriety is a big thing these days.
- The hip crosswalk woman was right. And she was especially right if sobriety has something to do with “changing your relationship to drinking,” talking about it all the time, and exploiting sobriety’s market potential. Instagram is fully awash in pastel George Herberts—dancing soberfluencers who soberglow while soberaf. The 21st century has been a boon to young abstainers who reject the word alcoholic, and to anyone who wants to quit drinking without becoming a sad sack or a prig.
- It’s hard to know when AA lost its luster. One starting point is the early aughts. Since then, an increasingly robust swath of people testing the zero-proof waters of sobriety has sworn off drink and joined the international reverse-rave known as Dry January. In 2013, Dry January launched as a branded public-health initiative in the UK, attracting some 4,000 people. By 2021, that number had jumped to 130,000. The fever for abstemiousness also caught on in the US, which will forever be known as both puritanical and hedonistic; the challenge of refraining from drinking for 31 days has seemed to energize those eager to observe secular Lents. Last January, nearly one in five American adults tried Dry January.
- For years, too, there’s been a stampede of self-help books by alcohol skeptics, most of them women, many of whom once had trouble drinking not the third bottle. These books have included My Unfurling, by Lisa May Bennett; Her Best-Kept Secret, by Gabrielle Glaser; This Naked Mind, by Annie Grace; The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober, by Catherine Gray; Mindful Drinking, by Rosamund Dean; Drink?, by David Nutt; Sober Curious, by Ruby Warrington; and Quit Like a Woman, by Holly Whitaker. The subtitles run together, but they make big promises. If they follow the instructions, readers of these books—and listeners to adjacent and spin-off podcasts, including Recovery Happy Hour and Edit Podcast—will break up with alcohol, emerge from the grip of anxiety, radically defy patriarchy and capitalism, and become happy, healthy, and even wealthy. As 12-steppers will tell you, traditional recovery from alcoholism guarantees none of these marvels.
- Some of the intoxication with nonintoxication may be more than a pose. People really do seem to be cutting back on drinking. According to Gallup, in 2019, 65 percent of American adults drank alcohol; in 2021, even after the claustrophobia and worry of the plague years, that number went down to 60 percent. What’s more, Americans went from (an avowed) four alcoholic drinks weekly in 2019 to 3.6 in 2021.
- To cater to these newly temperate types—that is, to get those who decline to consume to keep consuming—sober-friendly bars have shot up like crocuses in New York, Denver, Miami, Austin, and San Francisco. Some of these places serve no booze at all. Others feature extravagant mocktails alongside full bars. At these places, someone with a drink the color of rust or algae can generally pass as a habitué. Amid chic decor, mixologists lace soft drinks with sophistication-signifiers and wallet-declutterers like orgeat, tobacco syrup, and chinotto orange.
- In the last year, household-name mocktail moguls including Blake Lively, Bella Hadid, and Katy Perry have introduced their nonalcoholic beverages in collectible, high-design containers. The promises made by these drinks, which are largely water and tea plus high style, complement the ones made on the covers of sobriety books. Several available on Amazon, including Tranquini and Recess, come with herbal adaptogens, the latest wide-spectrum panacea for stress, in place of alcohol, the best wide-spectrum panacea for stress. Töst, one sober beverage brand, offers a “grown-up, complex” fake wine, while another called Seedlip distills plants to make a “flavorful, sophisticated, adult option.” Maybe sobers do fear being perceived as babies.
- Just the way Big Food engendered Big Diet, Big Alcohol seems well on its way to engendering a new market sector with Big Sobriety. That could mean hefty payouts for opportunists who are more entrepreneurial than sober. Already, an 8-ounce can of Katy Perry’s De Soi Purple Lune drink, a fizzy tea with rose and myrrh that comes with outlandish health claims about balance and stress relief, can be yours for $6. This is nearly five times the price of a can of Bud.
- All the better, I guess, to toast the charismatic influencers who inhabit the highly nonanonymous sobriety … space. (There’s always a space.) You might think there would be an oligopoly in neo-sobriety superstardom, but no, it’s a thousand points of light, and each soberfluencer has staked out a niche approach or at least some trademark design elements. Many also sit in Venn patches with lifestyle masters in apparently related realms: exercise, spirituality, prosperity, productivity, and even conspiracy. From what I’ve divined from a heady three-day scrolling bender, the biggest influencers in the sobriety space fall pretty clearly into three categories: mystical gurus who ground their sobriety in rococo superstitions, professional habit-breakers who regard sobriety as a happiness hack, and reps from the managerial class who advocate for medical interventions and cognitive science to treat a brain malfunction they now refer to as alcohol use disorder.
- On the ground floor of sober influence is of course Russell Brand (Perry’s ex-husband), the flamboyant one-time heroin user who swapped drugs for the sober papacy in 2002. He now calls himself prophetic, dresses like the Lizard King, and flaunts a crucifix tattoo and rudraksha mala beads. His florid self-promotion and orientalist affectations (including zeal for dime-store Hare Krishnaism) are at odds with both the anti-mysticism of science-based sobriety and the imperative to humility of traditional 12-step sobriety. Lately, Brand has espoused so-far-left-it’s-right politics that confuse the principles of liberal humanism with the market-driven neoliberalism he naturally despises, and occasionally he seems determined to consign the whole liberal project—including science and voting—to the trash heap of history. On YouTube, Brand-branded sobriety comes packaged with his ideology of rad individualism, conspirituality, and kitchen-sink disinformation about vaccines, Russia, and Hillary Clinton.
- On the softer side of gurudom is Ruby Warrington, a lifestyle influencer in the so-called Now Age and creator of an astrology “tool” called the Numinous Astro Deck. “Little old middle-class me,” as Warrington describes her pre-franchise self in her memoir, used to overconsume chardonnay and cosmopolitans. She then found herself #sobercurious, as she has tirelessly memed it. In 2016 she helped launch an event series called Club Söda NYC—the sober umlaut strikes again—and she now hosts other happenings for people who are kind of thinking about quitting drinking, or thinking about kind of quitting drinking.
- Before the pandemic, these events featured “plant-based family-style brunch” meals, TED-style sermons-on-the-mount, and high hopes—the usual aesthetic comforts of the WeWork/Obama era. From the photos, Warrington’s events are also abuzz with Instagram-farm vibes. At Club Söda (“sober or debating abstinence”), quitting drinking is not styled as a last-ditch way to address “incomprehensible demoralization,” as the soul’s dark night is known in AA, but as the royal road to bliss, focus, and deep connection. Sex and productivity, it sounds like. Good gig if you can get it; the 12 steps tend to scare away dates more than they spike libido.
- A less astral influencer is Holly Whitaker, a social-justice optimizer and author of the 2019 bestseller Quit Like a Woman. In 2013, Whitaker, a San Francisco Bay Area rise-and-grinder, decided that drinking was a drag on her girlboss well-being. One year later she founded an online alcohol-counseling startup called Hip Sobriety (now Tempest) that offers its paid services to help people, yes, “change [their] relationship with alcohol.” Whitaker’s programs use techniques like coaching and online communities, and with fewer fireworks and less insight than Russell Brand, she connects patriarchy and capitalism to boozing, because those things kindle overconsumption. At the same time, she describes her online business as a product and a business model: “a for-profit, consumer-focused, design-forward thing … geared toward people like me.” In 2020, she gave an interview to How I Raised It about how to get venture capital in Silicon Valley as shrewdly as she did, having raised $15.4 million for Tempest in three investment rounds. By contrast, the only venture money in 12-step programs, which have no dues or fees, is crumpled singles dropped into a hat during meeting breaks.
- Gabrielle Glaser, a distinguished health journalist who has never had a drinking problem, is committed to data over all spiritual folklore, from AA’s “higher powers” to Warrington’s astrology cards. But she’s not a personal brand; she has no recovery story of her own. In 2013, her densely researched book Her Best-Kept Secret: Why Women Drink—and How They Can Regain Control had 12-step programs squarely in its sights. As Glaser underscores, AA doesn’t have much science backing it up. The anonymous program is notoriously hard to track, and Glaser is right that it’s tricky to prove empirically that it works.
- What Glaser recommends instead is a less absolutist approach, notably touting naltrexone, an opiate antagonist, as a way to cut back on booze. When you take opiate antagonists, alcohol stops bringing pleasure to the brain, which reduces cravings. John David Sinclair, the psychologist who created this regimen for addiction and died in 2015, published his discoveries in peer-reviewed journals over four decades. Glaser cites a 2001 study by Sinclair in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism that shows a 78 percent success rate of naltrexone alone in helping patients cut their drinking down to 10 drinks a week.
- Oh … OK. So 78 percent sounds like a good chunk, but holy smokers: Ten drinks a week, which easily could still fuel my old weekend blackouts and hangovers, plus a new pill that antagonizes my brain’s own pleasure systems? That’s success?
- Leafing through thousands of influencer posts, a hundred ads for top-shelf celebrity soft drinks, and a dozen journal studies of brain receptors doesn’t, blessedly, make me want to drink. But all of this does make me want to drop my last name, grab a steel folding chair, and indulge in some old-time AA, complete with sloganeering in a musty church undercroft. Keep it simple, stupid. Or my favorite: Easy does it. I’ve decided these new abstainers have an entirely different goal than the anonymous alcoholics of yesteryear.
- Illustration: Genie Espinosa
- For every culture that includes fermented drink among its sacraments or refreshments, there is a unique perspective on drunkenness. Over a century ago, the French poet Charles Baudelaire counseled, “Be always drunk”; the Nigerian Afropop singer Joeboy advocates wine as a break from troubles in his 2021 hit “Sip (Alcohol).” Among the European colonizers of North America, drunkenness became a religious issue, a lapse from Christian virtue. In the 1870s, Protestant women, long before they could vote, centered their politics on the temperance movement as a way to keep their men in line and keep the rowdies away. By 1900, nativism had crept into the temperance discourse, as immigrants from Ireland and Italy were associated with drunkenness and moral turpitude. Some proponents of temperance required that churchgoers keep pledges of abstinence, on pain of damnation.
- Later, after Prohibition ended in 1933 as a failed experiment, public-heath officials tried a new approach, condemning drunkenness less as a sin, like adultery, or an unhealthy lifestyle choice, like smoking, and more as a threat to public safety, like brawling. The states made laws to curb drunk driving, and programs sprang up to educate students about how drunkenness can lead to every kind of violence. Public health as a framework for alcoholism is Janus-faced. On the one hand, when drunkenness is framed as a shared public problem with social remedies, hard drinkers might be faulted less often for personal failure. On the other, when law enforcement gets involved, some people get stopped for speeding or frisked for drugs far, far more than others. Twelve-step groups are filled with white drunks marveling at how often they got away with driving drunk while people of color describe being jailed for far lesser offenses.
- In parallel with the post-Prohibition approaches to hard drinking, Alcoholics Anonymous, which was formed by a doctor and a stock broker in 1935, evolved as a project of moral betterment. Yes, you’re expected to stop drinking in the program. But the longer you sit in the rooms the clearer it becomes that AA doesn’t see abstinence from alcohol as an end in itself but as a baseline precondition for a life of honesty, faith, and service to others.
- A therapist once told me that people don’t come to therapy to change; they come to get out of pain. You have to coax them into changing. The same is true in 12-step programs. People come into the rooms heartbroken, bruised, unemployable, and in dire need of comfort (and, often, money). Within days, even if they’re trembling with withdrawal symptoms, they’re urged to help others, if only by mopping the floor and stacking chairs. Soon after, they’re encouraged to seek a “power greater than ourselves” in which to invest their faith. The so-called “God stuff” has turned people off from the start, although atheists have cooked up plenty of higher power workarounds, like ”the universe” or “nature.” The self-important but amusing AA manual known as the Big Book even offers a chapter called “We Agnostics,” which tries to allay fears that sobriety requires specific pieties. Some sober nonbelievers find the chapter disingenuous.
- Still, if you stick around, the helping-others part almost always sinks in. As does the imperative to self-examination. It also becomes a source of wry humor. Some months in, while most drunks are fuming about the garbage people who’ve done them wrong, you’re encouraged to write out an inventory of the people you, the original garbage person, have harmed. If you’ve ever once padded your expenses or faked an orgasm, a guide to the program—your sponsor—might make you add it to an inventory. You’re a thief. You’re a liar. It stings.
- One of my favorite stories from the rooms was told by a 12-stepper who noticed a friend reading The Art of Happiness, by the Dalai Lama.
- “I doubt I’ll read it,” the guy said, morosely. “Can you just tell me the secret?”
- “You’re not going to like it,” his friend replied.
- “Oh no. It’s not—”
- “Yep.”
- “Please say it’s not.”
- “It is.”
- “It’s ‘help other people,’ isn’t it?”
- “Uh-huh.”
- “Fuuuuck.”
- When I came into a 12-step program, I hated the idea that helping others was supposed to take the place of screw-top wine and benzos. Helping others is the key to happiness? What do you know. I really thought it was money.
- This old-fashioned parable of sobriety, in which the untreated drunk is a scoundrel and not a wellness entrepreneur, showed up in an unexpected place: a sitcom on Hulu called Single Drunk Female. Created by TV writer Simone Finch, who is herself a recovering alcoholic, this extremely charming show, which premiered in January, stars Sofia Black-D’Elia as Sam, a blackout drunk who is remanded to 12-step meetings after an assault charge.
- To my surprise, scenes of meetings and deep cuts of AA jargon in Single Drunk Female don’t exist entirely to set up exciting relapses, as they do in many shows that feature problem drinkers. In fact, Sam’s recovery with the 12 steps was so spot-on and moving to me that I wondered if someone else might see the whole show as merely AA propaganda, like that run of Archie comics that had an unnerving undertow of Christianity. Archie and his crew would be having normal fun in a convertible, facing midcentury temptations like cigarettes or making out, and one would say something like, “You know, Jughead, read John 14:6! God has a perfect plan for us!” My partner assured me that Single Drunk Female was not like this. But I noticed he didn’t choke up like I did when Sam got her 30-day chip. And when she finally realized the world doesn’t owe her a living and started coming through for other people? Forget about it. I cried.
- A big criticism of AA is that the hair-shirting—AITA? Yes and always—can tilt into moral masochism. Though the bracing inventories of my own “defects of character” seem to keep me honest, some in the program who suffer with trauma see AA’s insistence that alcoholics are all sinners as victim-blaming. Searching for your part in your life’s low ebbs might lead you to repress your own suffering or, worse, compound it.
- There’s plenty more to dislike. Though the rooms are more socially heterogeneous than just about anywhere I’ve been on earth, talking about politics is essentially forbidden in the program’s loose guidelines, which are called its “traditions.” (I was once kicked out of a meeting for complaining about Brett Kavanaugh.) What’s more, the sexism in parts of the Big Book is preposterous. In the horrifying chapter “To Wives,” the ideal handmaidens of boozers are instructed to forgive their drunken men everything from profligacy (“the checking account melted like snow in June”) to violence (“they struck the children”) to bad company (“the sheriffs, the policemen, the bums, the pals, and even the ladies they sometimes brought home”).
- But, though some 12-step members are textual fundamentalists and cultural conservatives (the tenor of meetings is highly regional), the programs live less in scripture than in the eclectic lore and aphorisms accumulated in the rooms over the past 80-plus years. This never-ending document includes “qualifications” and “shares.” Through these ritual forms of storytelling, alcoholics discuss their experience, the perspective they’ve gained, and the hope they cultivate. The bulk of the Big Book is also not gospel from midcentury white men. Instead, after the opening chapters that explain the program, it contains mini-memoirs by diverse alcoholics, including queer drunks, indigenous drunks, doctor drunks, and hobo drunks who rode the rails. In many meetings, members read from these stories, sometimes taking the “I” pronoun into their own mouths, embodying identities foreign to them; when an elderly auntie drunk reads the words of a young felon drunk, there are ironies—but also the supreme sweetness that comes from acknowledging the expansiveness of other minds and the universality of suffering. Good sponsors also keep sponsees from zeal, and help you laugh at the program’s dogma, contradictions, and anachronisms.
- Less pleasantly, a sponsor will also remind you that you don’t get sober in order to win “cash and prizes.” These are things like cars, sex, fame, dough, or even physical health—the super things sober influencers model, and even offer. Nor do sponsors countenance drinking “in moderation,” much less 10 drinks/week. A hazard of drinking for a traditional alcoholic is that it invariably leads to dishonesty. A formidable matriarch in the room once warned me not to “get cute with this disease” when I asked whether I could taste a dessert with a touch of cooked-off Grand Marnier. She definitely doesn’t mess with near beer or Katy Perry’s $6 mocktails.
- Illustration: Genie Espinosa
- Part of why I can’t take too seriously the scientific rejections of AA like Glaser’s is that researchers seem to use a vision of success that, in 12-step programs, would not count as sobriety, which the fellowship generally sees as a moral and spiritual state that only starts with “putting down the drink.” In the end, AA makes an extremely modest set of promises. According to a list called the Ninth Step Promises, recovering alcoholics who make amends to people they’ve hurt can expect only a few vague dividends. By not drinking and by helping others, you get a measure of peace, renewed interest in others, keener intuition, and freedom from regrets, self-pity, bafflement, and fear of economic insecurity. (nb: Freedom from fear of economic insecurity ≠ money.)
- So much of the new sobriety flex is anathema to the captious alcoholics of 12-step groups. But carping that others aren’t doing sobriety right is such a common mistake among recovering alcoholics that Bill W., the founder of AA, came up with excellent slang for the carpers: “bleeding deacons.” God knows where that phrase comes from, but I imagine gaunt figures in black pope hats with open, oozing stigmata. According to popular interpretation in the rooms, bleeding deacons insist that if you stray from their narrow path—failing to pray, say, or arranging coffee cups wrong—you’ll literally die.
- I have no authority at all when it comes to quitting drinking. It took me till I was 41 to quit. (Russell Brand was 27; yes, I compare-and-despair about that.) Very little love or light informed my pissed-off cold-turkey detox. Quitting with the use of opiate antagonists, hot yoga, and nonalcoholic tequila seems every bit as righteous—and evidently more effective—than sweating it out in the rooms.
- But the way I learned it, to get sober is not to stop drinking. It’s to undertake a program that is chronically uncool in the quaint hope that it will make you a better person. People in the rooms talk less about drinking than about yielding to other drivers, feeding a stranger’s meter, buying a sandwich for a panhandler. The new sober influencers have convinced me that this cornball 12-step stuff isn’t for everyone. Certainly, its benefits can’t be tabulated by science. In my experience, they are indeed beyond measure.
- Virginia Heffernan (@page88) is a contributor at WIRED. She is the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. Before coming to WIRED she was a staff writer at The New York Times—first a TV critic, then a magazine columnist, and then an opinion writer. She has a PhD in English from Harvard. In 1979 she stumbled onto the internet, when it was the back office of weird clerics, and she’s been in the thunderdome ever since.
How Do I know ? – a comment by R.J Cook
This comment is a response to the above. Feminist writers are social engineers reserving the right to define and control men. They do not do cause and effect. They are never wrong and don’t like men drinking or doing anything else outside of their control and observations. The gender commentary cannot be reversed. If it was, then it would be called coercion and control.
Women are never guilty of coercion and control because our authoritarian society says not. The wealthy elite has a major problem with young white males whose feral behaviour has everything to do with a) being brought up in a female dominated single parent family b) listening to teachers and media cliques adumbrating white boy negative stereotypes, portraying the dangers pf their inevitable progress into violent drunken female abusing rapists and rapists.
Is it any wonder that so many little white boys want to be pretty little white girs in a world away from the dangers, consequences of Dracinian laws biased against them and terrifying responibilities of being male. With no credible male role models at home and a feminised version offered at school, is it any wonder that mental illness is a big issue for both sexes – with the terrifying reality that the police will be called to deal with any over 18 year old showing signs of lunacy or other female defined inappropriate behaviour ?
Feminists can’t stand transsexuals, outraged that they expect to be treated as women. They, with high profile encouragement from fantasy female writer Ms J K Rowling and insipid U.K PM Rishi Sunak, trade on the grotesque libel, slander and hate crime basically calling transsexual women public toilet rapists in waiting.
Because it is all about them, these people would feel so much safer, should the brainwashing fail. They would rather see young white males chemically castrated and hooked on powerful anti psychotics. In this way they can create perfect untroublesome white men. It doesn’t matter that their memories will fade and they won’t be able to form new ones. It doesn’t matter that they will be sexually incapacitated, because the poor female victims can get that from black males who are fellow vcitims, so they will do the emotional engagement that white men can’t do. Of course this does not apply to Royalty and the upper class ruling elite who fear an uprising from the increasingly impoverished lower classes.
Nor does it matter that starting young males on anti psychotics – as standard practice for psychiatrists and response to dealing with anger issues and what they call ‘paranoid personality disorder’ – have debilitating and life changing side effects because the system has to do this for the overall good in Britain’s bastion of freedom and democracy.
The side effects are just what the doctor ordered and will certainly block out the recipients’ need for alcohol. They won’t even know what alcohol is. They will be ever so happy. They won’t notice their loss of balance, bladder control, bowel control or anything else. Best of all they will lose their memories and ability to make new ones.
How do I know ? Because Thames Valley Police have been trying to do this to me for years, helped by a very friendly and corrupt NHS psychiatrist who, along with his employers still refuse to explain themselves. Due to ongoing legal proceedings, I cannot explain their very interesting motives or currently name the corrupt psychiatrist or the involvement of my GP.
R J Cook
May 3rd 2024
StylistThe ‘Would you rather be trapped in the woods with a man or a bear’ debate shows the reality of misogynistic violence
The online debate over man versus bear, and the responses to it, shows the the reality of misogynistic violence.
Comment Under current repressive law, women never lie, only use violence in self defence and a man simply raising is voice and or swearing constitutes domestic violence. So the above opinion piece condemns men as more predatory than killer bears.
The reality of feminist fascism is that it all about defining and controlling all white men outside the ruling class who are the ultimate agenda setters. Male to FemaleTranssexuals are seen as threat to the women’s rights movement as J K Rowling proclaimed. Anti white male vicious defining prejudice uses statements like ‘privilged white males’, mansplaining which is a crime because feminists think women know everything worth knowing, and ‘toxic masculinity’.
This is is undoubtedly hate speech. The Stylist magazine article link above labels white men as one violent blob and women as benign loving caring victims. The more these people and political opportunists accept the exalted superior protected female status, the male anger becomes a self fulfilling prophecy and excuse for the ruling elite to pass more Police State laws.
There are many reasons for the explosion of male to female transsexuals. The only one Fascist Feminists are interested is the revolting sick that men go through the dangers and humiliations of sex change treatment simply to enter ladies smelly toilets and perfume parlour rest rooms to rape them. For those who object to me singling out white men as objects of feminist hate, consider the media silence whenever dark skinned ethnic minority men like the recent asylum seeker throwing acid in a woman’s face or the latest Bradford Muslim hate crime and honour killings in general.
R J Cook
April 27th 2024
21 hours ago — Killer Fiona Beal pleads guilty after luring partner into bedroom with the promise of sex, tying him to bed and stabbing him in neck.
Teacher Fiona Beal admits murdering and burying partner in Northampton
- Published
- 1 day ago
By Phil Shepka and PA Media
BBC News, Northamptonshire
A primary school teacher has admitted murdering her partner whose tied-up body was found buried in their garden.
The partly mummified remains of 42-year-old Nicholas Billingham were found in Northampton in March 2022, four months after he was last seen alive.
A first trial heard that Fiona Beal, 50, used his phone to send messages to his friends and work colleagues, after she had killed him.
Beal has changed her plea to guilty during a retrial at the Old Bailey.
Prosecutor Hugh Davies KC told the retrial Beal stabbed builder Mr Billingham in the neck.
“Promising sex after a bath, she stabbed him in the neck when he was wearing a sleep mask and was probably cabled-tied on their bed,” he said.
Beal had also bought a forged handled utility knife in the days before, the court heard.
He said Beal “wrapped her dead partner up and dragged him down the stairs, destroying the banister rails upstairs in order to do so” and buried him at their home on Moore Street.
Mr Davies told jurors Mr Billingham’s “grave” comprised of concrete that Beal had mixed and a “de facto coffin” made of breeze blocks, timber and sheets.
She had already admitted the lesser charge of manslaughter by reason of loss of control at the beginning of the retrial, which followed a previous trial at Northampton Crown Court last year where the jury was discharged after 10 weeks.
That trial heard that records showed the defendant, who worked at Northampton’s Eastfield Academy as a Year 6 teacher, was absent from work between 1 and 12 November 2021.
Beal messaged several people from Mr Billingham’s phone in early November to say they had both contracted Covid-19 and needed to isolate.
The prosecutor called this “as heartless as it was self-serving”, and said Beal sent messages to her sisters saying she and Mr Billingham had split up.
Prosecutors told jurors the narrative that Mr Billingham had run off with another woman was “completely false”.
Giving evidence in the first trial, Beal said their relationship deteriorated during the first Covid lockdown in 2020.
She said she could not remember much about the killing or the months afterwards, but admitted smoking “quite a lot of cannabis” before Mr Billingham was killed.
The prosecution said police traced Beal to a cabin in Cumbria in March 2022, and a journal was found in which entries “certainly do contain some unambiguously clear declarations of what she had done”.
The journal – which included reference to a “second self” called Tulip22 – had an entry that read: “Hiding a body was bad. Moving a body is much more difficult than it looks on TV.”
Jurors at her first trial were told the notebook contained a claim that Beal had been spat on and threatened during sex, and subjected to cruel and belittling treatment by the deceased.
It can now be reported that the original trial collapsed after a legal mistake, when it emerged Rachel Drummond, a key defence witness, was a court custody officer who had conducted welfare checks on Beal in her cells.
Ms Drummond had given evidence which, in the words of original judge Adrienne Lucking KC, described observing a relationship that had the hallmarks of abuse, although she had not seen Beal for about seven years.
But after Ms Drummond’s employment became known during cross-examination – Judge Lucking said there was no way to “ensure a fair verdict and a safe conviction”.
At the retrial, Judge Mark Lucraft told the defendant: “You have this morning pleaded guilty to murder, which, as you have no doubt been told, carries a sentence of life imprisonment.”
He told Beal, who was tearful as jurors left the courtroom, there would be a two-day sentencing hearing from 29 May.
Det Ch Inspector Adam Pendlebury, of Northamptonshire Police, said: “We are pleased Fiona Beal has now taken the decision to admit she did indeed murder Nick Billingham and hope that it brings the start of some closure to his family who have faced a torrid time for more than two years, including sitting through the original trial in Northampton in 2023.
“Today’s news will have come as a great relief as they await her sentencing next month.”
Got a story? Email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp 0800 169 1830
Comment Women can always fall back on the domestic abuse card. They are licenced to play the innocent victim. Mothers of sons should see the dnager hear if they have any brains and step away from the sisterhood.
R J Cook
Fiona Beal conviction: I had no idea my son’s body was buried in the garden, says mum
- Published
- 12 hours ago
By Phil Shepka & Jon Ironmonger
BBC Investigations, Northamptonshire
Yvonne Valentine thought her son had moved out when she popped over to the home of his long-time partner around Christmas time. The pair shared a drink, but little did she know her son was buried a few feet away in the back garden. How did a primary school teacher become a killer and how was her crime uncovered?
Nicholas Billingham had been in a relationship with Fiona Beal, a well-liked Year 6 teacher at Northampton’s Eastfield Academy, since about 2004.
But in late 2021 his mum received what she described as a “really long text” from his phone, which was “a bit unusual for Nick”.
The message said he had just come out of a football match at Manchester United’s ground, he was living in Essex and working with cars.
It went on to say he was now in a relationship with someone called Faye and “I know you must think of me… but I’m really happy”.
Yvonne said: “I left it at that and said, ‘well as long as you’re happy Nick’, which I was more concerned about.”
The message was not from Nick.
Prosecutors told Beal’s first crown court trial that she used his phone to send messages to friends and work colleagues, pretending that he was still alive.
She had, in fact, stabbed Nick in the neck and buried him in the garden of the home they shared in Moore Street, Northampton, under a mound of bark chippings and building materials.
Beal had told the school she had tested positive for Covid-19 and she was absent from work between 1 and 12 November 2021.
https://emp.bbc.co.uk/emp/SMPj/2.52.1/iframe.htmlMedia caption,
The Northampton teacher’s murder trial was shown video of her buying compost
On 13 November, she was caught on CCTV in a B&Q, being helped by a member of staff with two trollies carrying bags of compost and stones and a light-coloured plastic planter.
When she returned to work she said her partner had left her, but there were no concerns about her performance.
Unaware her son had been killed by Beal, Yvonne went over to the home.
“Fiona offered me a Christmas drink. I said, ‘oh thank you’. So we sat there with this drink,” she said.
“But then it always gets to me because I think Nick was buried in the garden just a few feet away and I didn’t know he was there. It just seemed normal, like I’d been to visit them before.”
Looking back, she tries not to think about it too much “but when I do it just, it’s sort of draining – it’s horrible to think of how she buried him”.
“How you could hate somebody that much to do what she did? I thought she loved him.”
It was not until March 2022 when Yvonne received a call from Northamptonshire Police to inform her Nick was a missing person.
“And I said, ‘what?’ I couldn’t believe it, just couldn’t believe it,” she said.
Police had become involved after Beal was absent from work.
She was detained under the Mental Health Act when officers traced her to a rented lodge in Cumbria.
A notebook found there said: “I thought about leaving but the things he said and did fuelled my dark side – I call her Tulip22, she’s reckless, fearless and efficient. Ruthless.”
It later added: “I got him to wear an eye mask. It was harder than I thought it would be. Hiding a body was bad. Moving a body is much more difficult than it looks on TV.”
Beal claimed in the notebook she had been spat on and threatened during sex, and subjected to cruel and belittling treatment.
Yvonne said her son “wasn’t an angel. I don’t think I know anybody who is an angel”.
“He had his moments like we all do I suppose. He wasn’t an angel but I don’t think he was a devil either,” she said.
Change of plea
In Beal’s first crown court trial, she accepted the killing but denied murder, with her defence team stating she had been manipulated by the “psychologically domineering” Nick to the point where she was “broken”.
But that original trial collapsed after a legal error, when it emerged a key defence witness was a court custody officer who had conducted welfare checks on Beal.
Shortly into her retrial at the Old Bailey on Friday, Beal changed her plea, admitting murder. She is due to be sentenced next month.
Speaking last year while the first trial was ongoing, Yvonne said: “I still expect to bump into Nick somewhere, you know, up the high street or in a pub or somewhere and I’m sure his friends probably do as well.
“But I think we’ll just have to try and move on. Nick’s always there in my heart.”
Got a story? Email eastinvestigationsteam@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp 0800 169 1830. Follow East of England news on Facebook, Instagram and X.
Related Topics
April 21st 2024
Is a sexless marriage grounds for divorce UK?
However, divorce law covering England and Wales was radically changed from April 2022 and removed the need for one party to be blamed. So, you no longer need to prove “fault” in your spouse’s behaviour, including a lack of intimacy, to be able to apply for a divorce.8 Feb 2023
Norwich has the highest divorce rate compared to any other area in the UK, with a 12.8 per cent rate. Following Norwich, the second-highest divorce rate in the UK is in Hastings and Blackpool, both with a 12.1 per cent rate. Other areas in the UK with high divorce rates include: Lincoln 11.9 per cent.
Divorce is the second-highest life stressor, following the death of a spouse, on the Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS). No one wants this stress, so it is not as though couples enter marriage hoping or even expecting to go through the trauma of divorce. So why do they? Research by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) revealed that the 3 most common reasons spouses divorce were:
- Lack of commitment.
- Infidelity.
- Too much conflict.
Comment Women marry for money, status and security. The above areas of the U.K have higher than average levels of unemployment and poverty. Women initiate most divorces with coercive controlling behaviour and domestic violence frequently cited as reasons guaranteeing custody of the children and massive payout. Women do marry for money, commit adultery, initiate domestic violence, child abuse and have no qualms about divorce. Tears work well for them in court, better than evidence. Nor is evidence required for restrospective sex abuse allegations. Febrile feminists have hailed divorce as empowering. Hence the joke about ‘Divorced Barbie.’ She comes with all men’s stuff. Men need to think very carefully about marriage because it is a one sided business contract.
R J Cook
April 20th 2024
Sydney Killings Another Excuse To Blame All Men ? Do Feminists, Politicians, Educators, Virtue Dignallers, State Psychiatrists & Wider Masses Really Want Answers Or Just More Laws ? I wonder and may well elaborate my thoughts later.
Meanwhile Intelligent People Might Look Up A Book Called ‘Soft City’ By Jonathan Raban. It’s An Old Story.
Think about The Black Man who targeted 6 people in Nottingham, killing 3. Authorities almost immediately discounted racist terrorism. It was all down to mental illness. Think about the young white boy killed by a black gang, held while another stabbed him at Primrose Hill New Years Celebrations. Think about young white footballer killed by a young black who had rallied his posse to a night club because the white guy had previously brushed past him at a Birmingham.
The now consequently dead white guy was with his mixed race girl friend at the time. Read the following and ask yourself if it would be acceptable to warn my sons about black men, their ‘impulses’ and ‘knife culture’ ? No. That would be race hate. The woman claiming more protection from ‘men’s impulses’ is typical of the acceptable female sexism that has grown out of control since the 1960s and is at the heart of this problem and the killing that the consensus does not want to understand.
On the domestic front, when a woman like Caroline Flack commits an act of violence on her sleeping partner, it is always the man’s fault. The woman who ran over and dragged her partner under her car because he talked to another girl at a party, played the domestic violenc card. I know what it is like to be on the receiving end of that treatment. For men there is no escape but submission, which is why illustrious fantasy writer Rowling has rallied the sisterhood and PM Sunak to her cause that it is impossible for men to change sex, so they must be outed because all they want is to rape women in public toilets of other female ‘safe spaces.’ When Pevert Police Man Wayne Couzens abducted, raped and killed Sarah Everard, out came the feminist collective with demands to curfew all men.
The narrow minded thought process and female blob egotism is well fed at school. Men have good reason to avoid women but with no safe spaces and always being watched, there is no chance of that. The phrase ‘women are always right’ used to be a friendly jest. Now it is a directive from feminist high command.
The double standard is excriciating. – R J Cook.
Written in the early 1970’s, The Soft City is a psychological look at the metropolis and its inhabitants, built around anecdote, impression and insight, almost exclusively based on London, with brief interludes into the America of Boston and New York.
The ‘hard city’ is the city of buildings and maps, the ‘soft city’ the one that “awaits the imprint of an identity…invites you to remake it”. Essentially a series of related essays, Raban eschews the statistics that a sociologist would rely on and instead relies on his own experiences and a handful of sources and literary quotations.
As such, it’s a hit an miss affair.
He nearly lost me in the first chapter where he used the example of an esoteric gang of thugs, The Envies, who attack random people just because they look relatively prosperous, to try and suggest that perhaps most muggings happen around entertainment areas like Soho because “the victims were chosen simply because they seemed to be enjoying themselves”, rather than the more obvious reason that thy are out on the spend and have money in their pockets.
Things improve though, via an interesting look at the newcomer (‘Greenhorn’) to the city, and how it encourages us to make personas, become a character; like the fantasist Ronnie Kray projecting his elevated self-image as a ‘gangster’ onto the city, rather than appear as what he actually was, a slow-minded criminal thug.
Raban casts a few cursory looks at the thoughts and deeds of town planners and architects such as Mumford and Corbusier, mostly disparagingly, but on the whole the narrative comes from his own projections, his own ‘soft city’. At times this leads to a faintly novelistic approach, even an overt one, such as the slightly unpleasant chapter about an Eastern European girl’s fleeting visit to London.
Indeed Raban, though professing to love the city, does not seem to have much tolerance for his fellow citizens. One time he upbraids a source for adopting a tone of “unconsciously ferocious snobbery”, and, though Raban might be conscious of his own snobbery, he often sneers at his fellow ‘isolates’. The hippies and Hare Krishnas get a particular hosing down.
Because of this, despite his seeming detachment, an intolerant, fogeyish quality emerged at times.
From Paul Whitford’s Reviews marked anon.
Sydney stabbing: Bondi attack on women devastates Australia
By Simon Atkinson in Sydney and Hannah Ritchie et al.
BBC News
The man who went on a stabbing rampage in a Sydney shopping centre appears to have targeted women, police say.
Joel Cauchi, 40, sent the crowded Westfield Bondi Junction complex into panic on Saturday when he began stabbing people with a long blade.
Five of the six people who died were women. Several others, including a baby girl, were injured.
The New South Wales police commissioner told Australia’s ABC News that it was “obvious” Mr Cauchi focused on women.
The only man killed in the attack was security guard Faraz Tahir, 30, who tried to intervene.
The other victims were Jade Young, 47; Pikria Darchia, 55; Dawn Singleton, 25; Ashlee Good, 38; and Yixuan Cheng, who is believed to be in her 20s.
Mr Cauchi was already known to police but had never been arrested or charged in his home state of Queensland. He had lived itinerantly for several years and was first diagnosed with a mental illness at 17, Queensland Police said.
When asked about Mr Cauchi’s interactions with New South Wales Police, assistant commissioner Anthony Cooke said he was only aware of a “move-along-type situation” when he was sleeping rough.
Mr Park said there was no information showing Mr Cauchi had accessed treatment in New South Wales for mental health issues, but that there would be a “deep dive” into his history.
His father, Andrew Cauchi, told reporters his son had battled with mental illness and recently come off his medication.
“To you he is a monster. To me, he was a very sick boy,” he said, in a video posted by The Australian newspaper.
“He wanted a girlfriend and he’s got no social skills and he was frustrated out of his brain,” he added, when asked about why his son may have targeted women.
“You can’t run with a pram. That’s the thing that really hit me,” says her friend Jane Zhou with tears in her eyes, one hand absentmindedly stroking her own three-month-old baby.
“Like, if I was there, what would I have done?”
Likewise, the teenage girls I speak to all say they’re feeling vulnerable.
“It’s shitty,” Zali Deep says, adding that she forced herself to come to the centre to pay her respects, but also to “reclaim it”.
“We don’t want him to take away from things and places that we enjoy,” she says.
Another 14-year-old admits she’s angry.
“It just frustrates me that I need to be aware of men’s impulses… I don’t want to be worrying like ‘Oh, that guy over there, he could just suddenly be like, ‘I want to kill you’.”
Anita says the events of Saturday have consumed her thoughts all week – but none more so than what happened to Ashlee Good and her baby.
The world let out a collective sigh of relief on Tuesday when the nine-month-old was moved out of the intensive care unit.
More questions than answers
The crowd here, and the broader community, have lots of unanswered questions.
Why did Cauchi attack?
What role did mental health play?
If he did indeed target women, why? Were there just more women in his path? Did he think they posed less of a physical threat? Did he resent them?
Police have said it’s a “very, very complex investigation” which will take time, but at this stage they have pointed to his mental health and said there is no indication any ideology was a motive.
His parents – who spotted their son on the news and alerted police – have said he was a diagnosed schizophrenic who had gone off his medication, suggesting he may have been obsessed with knives.
Others ask, how long was Cauchi planning this? Could he have been stopped?
Authorities know he visited two other Westfield shopping centres in the lead-up to the attack, and the incident has sparked debate over whether security guards are appropriately armed.
Millions of dollars have been promised to set up a massive coronial inquest which will endeavour to get some closure for families and the community.
But police have flagged that we may never get the answers to some of these questions.
In the meantime, many in the country – particularly women – are feeling uneasy and unsafe.
The big question on their lips: Could this happen again?
“How could the health system have helped him, to prevent him coming here doing this?” Ms Zhou asks.
While Australia may be doing better than other nations, experts say mental health services are drastically underfunded and unable to offer the care they should.
But blaming events like this on mental health conditions only further stigmatise those living with them, they add.
Although there is an increased risk of violence in people with schizophrenia, psychologists have stressed the vast majority will never commit a violent offence. In fact, they are far more likely to be the victims of violence themselves – almost five times that of the general population.
“Implying that the Bondi Junction attacker’s mental health diagnosis alone can explain why he decided to attack and murder multiple people is simplistic, offensive and damaging,” journalist Elfy Scott – who has authored a book on complex mental health conditions – wrote in Crikey.
For some, the question is whether Australia is taking the threat of misogyny seriously enough.
“My first thought was, ‘Oh here we go again’,” one Bondi mother tells me.
On Friday the nation’s attorney general conceded: “We have a crisis of male violence in Australia.”
In fact, less than 24 hours before the attack in Bondi, crowds gathered at a rally in Ballarat after three women in the regional town were allegedly killed by men within in a month – a jogger who allegedly died at the hands of a stranger, and two women allegedly murdered by current or former partners.
Others point out another stabbing which rocked Sydney this week – at a church in the city’s south-west – was quickly labelled a terror attack by police, although no one was killed. Why isn’t a massacre of women a terrorist act?
Experts – and police too – say it is too soon to tell if the Bondi attack fits the definition of misogyny-motivated terrorism, but in general, it is a creeping threat all over the world.
- ‘Action on incel culture’ urge relatives of Plymouth shooting victims
- Should misogyny be a hate crime?
“Taking all of these acts of violence and just saying… it’s a private grievance or it’s a lone wolf or it’s someone who’s mentally ill is ignoring the problem,” Dr Shannon Zimmerman told the BBC.
“Misogyny is powerful enough and is important enough – both in other extremist ideologies and on its own – to motivate acts of violence.”
On the whole, Australia seems to be acting faster than many other countries, she says.
The nation’s intelligence agency in 2021 broadened its definition of terror and explicitly named misogyny as an ideology which could inspire attacks – clearing the path for more funding, research and education on the threat it poses.
“It’s on the radar of the security services… it’s on the radar of the police,” Dr Zimmerman says.
But that’s little comfort to Mary. She has three young daughters and says the attack has shattered her family’s sense of safety.
“I’ve tried to teach my children… there’s nothing, really, you can’t do as a woman.”
“Except keep yourself safe,” she adds after a pause.
April 19th 2024
Review: Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department finds the star vulnerable but vicious
By Mark Savage
Music correspondent, BBC News
That Taylor Swift would write a break-up album is no surprise.
Over her last 10 records, the star has taken a scalpel to her personal life, filleting the details of flings and trysts and heartbreaks to create some of pop’s most memorable lyrics.
For the last half-decade, she’s been in romantic mode. Songs like Delicate, Lover, Invisible String and Lavender Haze were all inspired by her boyfriend of six years, the British actor Joe Alwyn.
They were so close that Swift moved to London, and shared writing credits with Alwyn (under the pseudonym William Bowery) on her Grammy Award-winning albums Folklore and Midnights.
Then, in April 2023, a month after Swift kicked off her record-breaking Eras tour, it was announced that they had split.
An anonymous source told People magazine it was “amicable” and “not dramatic”. But when the singer announced her 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department, at the Grammys this February, fans began to speculate it would deal with the fall-out.
They were quick to note how the title bore similarities to a group chat shared by Alwyn and his fellow actor Paul Mescal: The Tortured Man Club.
Then, Swift told the audience at a concert in Melbourne that the album was her most cathartic project yet.
“It kind of reminded me of why songwriting is something that actually gets me through my life,” she said. “I’ve never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it on Tortured Poets.”
It certainly feels like a purge.
The singer is bereft and bewildered. Vulnerable in a way we’ve never heard before.
She sings of being so depressed she can’t get out of bed, comfort-eating children’s cereal, and crying at the gym.
You can hear her heart breaking on So Long, London, as she accepts defeat and moves out.
Manchester nightlife videos: Women ‘feel unsafe’ after being secretly filmed
By Laura O’Neill
BBC News
Women in the north-west of England say they feel unsafe after videos taken of them on nights out without their knowledge have gained millions of views on social media and attracted a slew of misogynistic comments.
Police say they are now actively trying to catch the person making the videos.
They are asking anyone who has been filmed to come forward.
Meg, 23, from Manchester, was a victim of the disturbing social trend.
The make up artist and TikTok influencer said she was filmed on a night out in Manchester. She said she did not realise she had been filmed until she was sent a link to the video.
“I didn’t see him, I didn’t know I was being recorded,” she said.
“I can’t believe I’ve been targeted in that way. He looked at me and thought ‘yeah, I’ll video them’.”
Meg said she was filmed while walking along Deansgate with two women she did not know. She had noticed they were being harassed by a group of men and offered to walk with them.
“I just walked with them to get a taxi, so we were all together,” she said.
“I just ended up having a little conversation with them.”
The video of Meg was posted later that night by a stranger.
It is one of dozens uploaded daily to platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, usually on the same night they are filmed.
The clips, which are often titled “Manchester nightlife” or “Liverpool nightlife”, have racked up millions of views along with an abundance of misogynistic comments.
“I have no words really other than it just made me feel a bit sick,” she said.
“It’s just not nice at all, and obviously not just in a selfish way, but also towards the other women. A lot of them will be really, really young girls, maybe even underage girls not knowing that they were being recorded.
“There’s videos of girls like falling over and having their underwear on show and stuff. And then being posted online like that, something really needs to be done about it.”
Greater Manchester Police (GMP) says it is actively working to catch the people making the videos.
Officers are being briefed on the situation ahead of their shifts.
GMP said although it is not illegal to film people in public, if the action is causing distress or harassment it could be considered criminal.
PCs Ellison and Seu from GMP said it could be difficult to spot people filming due to the technology they use.
“A lot of people speak to their phone as they’re walking past,” PC Ellison said.
“We don’t know if they’re videoing or not as they’re going up the street. So it can be quite hard to get that one.”
PC Seu said one woman had approached him about being filmed.
“She said he had like little Ray Ban glasses and at the corner was a camera that flashed red,” he said.
Ch Insp Stephen Wiggins of GMP’s City of Manchester central district urged anyone who has been filmed or featured in the videos to come forward.
“We are very much up against it if we don’t get that intelligence, that information, coming from the actual victims and communities themselves,” he said.
“We have intervened recently on a number of occasions where we had males acting suspiciously in the city centre.
“So our plea from our organisation is that people ring us if they see any suspicious behaviour in the city centre and will make sure that will be there.”
Charlotte, from Trafford Rape Crisis, is calling on social media platforms to shut the accounts down.
She said the victim-blaming nature of the comments made it harder for people who had experienced sexual violence to come forward.
“It absolutely is a direct causal link to sexual violence,” she said.
“These sorts of victim-blaming commentaries introduce another level of shame.
“That becomes a barrier to women accessing the support.”
TikTok and YouTube said they had removed a number of videos and accounts relating to this content for violating the guidelines.
A TikTok spokesperson said: “Misogyny is prohibited on TikTok. Any content found to violate these guidelines will be removed.”
For Meg, the day the accounts are shut down cannot come soon enough.
“They shouldn’t be allowed to be posted online without consent.
“These videos are creating almost a danger of violence towards women.
“The video that was took of me was posted on the same night. So if I was still out that night and that video was posted, that creates some sort of danger of violence I believe.”
Listen to the best of BBC Radio Manchester on Sounds and follow BBC Manchester on Facebook, X and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk
April 18th 2024
Martine Croxall: News presenter to begin legal action against BBC
By Noor Nanji
Culture reporter
News presenter Martine Croxall is to begin legal action against the BBC next month, according to official documents.
The newsreader, 55, is listed for an employment tribunal against the corporation, the documents revealed.
The details of her claim are not known, but the tribunal listing indicates that the complaint includes issues relating to age and sex discrimination, and equal pay.
The BBC and Croxall declined to comment.
She joined the BBC in 1991 and was most recently a regular presenter on the BBC News Channel.
The two-day tribunal is due to start on 1 May in central London.
It comes after a high-profile equal pay dispute between the BBC and the presenter Samira Ahmed.
In 2020, Ahmed won the employment tribunal she had brought against the corporation. She had claimed she was underpaid by £700,000 for hosting audience feedback show Newswatch compared with Jeremy Vine’s salary for Points of View.
The BBC had argued the two performed “very different roles”.
But the unanimous judgement said Ahmed’s work was like that done by Vine, and the BBC had failed to prove the pay gap wasn’t because of sex discrimination.
In 2021, the BBC revealed it had spent more than £1 million on legal fees to fight equal pay and race discrimination cases brought by staff.
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Top Stories
April 12th 2024
The Stigma of Being Men – by R J Cook
It is very sad when people are driven to suicide by unjust outcomes of gender relationships. I know the feeling well. However, women and their pressure groups campaigned for what they dubiously like to call equality, as if all women belong to a helpless herd of sheep needing ever more laws to protect them from potentially violent men. Women’s groups put domestic violence and sex crimes on top of the police agenda. But those resultant laws were only passed on the premise that only men commit those crimes. The mantra is that women are only violent in self defence and never lie. The simple reality of Flack’s case is that Ms Caroline Flack was a former children’s TV Presnter who used her blonde glamorous good looks to get a job hosting a blatantly moronic sex obessessed TV Show called ‘Love Island’ and dressed accordingly.
Childless and in her 40s, her and her toy boy enjoyed the high and London club life. Then Ms Flack discovered she was perhaps not old enough for her boy, spotting his text messages to a sixty something woman. Had her lover been scanning Flack’s message, it would have been called coercing controling behaviour. Had he attacked her, while she slept, with a heavy table lamp causing hospitalising injuries, he would have been arrested, convicted, jailed and ruined.
When it is a woman attacking a man, it is akways his fault for provoking her, especially when she is glamorous and wealthy. When it is a man accused, there is not even need for evidence or statute of limitations. That is the reality for men. Ironically it was a female police officer who wanted to prosecute because women know women better than men do. Feminism has relied on romanticisng men to support them, usually father’s of daughters who are reponsible for the massive imbalance of power in favour of women’s rights.
Campaigns for men’s rights are the subject of mainstream media, feminist and consensus politics nasty ridicule. This is based on a similar feminist presumption written in stone, that men are all potentially liars and abusers – excepting black men who feminists award equal victim status – a herd of raging bulls when in close proximity to womens. The assumption is that white men are ‘toxic’ and ‘privileged’ regardless of class. In this connection, there is a presumption that white men, regaedless of wealth, status and class, have all the rights. So a bulk of those so called human rights, particularly regarding intimate and domestc relationships, must be transferred to women. Increasingly men realise their growning vulnerability, hence the INCELS and plethora of male to female ( mtf ) transsexuals outraging powerful TERF feminists like J K Rowling because they want to escape the stigma of being men..
R J Cook
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April 11th 2024
Suffering Shouldn’t Be a Normal Part of Womanhood
6 minute read
Ideas
April 9, 2024 7:00 AM EDT
Malone is a board-certified OB/GYN and a certified menopause practitioner who has practiced medicine in the nation’s capital for more than thirty years. She is the chief medical advisor of Alloy Women’s Health and a passionate advocate for improved research and education around women’s health in midlife
One of the most important lessons medical schools teach is one my mom mastered as a teenager left to fill her own mother’s shoes: how to figure out who is really sick and needs immediate attention and who can wait (or what we in the medical field call “triage”). Nothing I learned in med school or since has contradicted what I learned at Bertha’s knee.
At the time, the practice of medicine was rudimentary—and that’s putting it nicely. So, the diagnoses typically made at home were probably not that different from those of a bona fide doctor. The more serious common ailments were things like dropsy (now known as “swelling” or “edema,” due to congestive heart failure); consumption (used to describe any disease that seemed to consume the body, like tuberculosis); weak hearts (for people who tired easily or had fainting spells due to congestive heart failure); and “fits” (which could apply to anything from seizures to strokes). These were terms my mother and aunties still used when I was a child, although I had no idea what they were talking about.
I had 12 years of training to become an OB/GYN and have benefited from some outstanding teachers and colleagues. But I still stand in unmatched awe of my mother’s incredible gifts as a diagnostician.
As big and boisterous as our brood was, no family doctor or pediatrician ever saw our family on a regular basis. An earache, known in today’s parlance as an “ear infection,” was treated with sweet oil (which I have only in adulthood come to know was olive oil) on a cotton ball stuffed in your ear. I have no idea why it worked, but my siblings and I can all hear. And pediatricians are now acknowledging the overuse of antibiotics in the treatment of many childhood infections. Such treatments were commonly known, but by and large, prevention was not a thing. Sickness, like bad weather before Doppler radar, was unpredictable, unavoidable, and something to be endured.
And it’s true: life comes with some unanticipated and unavoidable suffering. But why, when we’re given the option to suffer or not, do so many of us choose suffering? The answer to this question is complex.
Read More: They Say Suffering Will Make You Stronger—But It’s Not That Simple
For starters, we’ve been raised to view suffering as an integral part of womanhood. In short, we have normalized suffering. We have incorporated the language of misery into the lexicon so effectively that we take suffering for granted. Girls suffer from menstrual cramps. Women suffer through childbirth and postpartum depression. We also suffer with migraines, suffer from heartbreak, and suffer through abusive relationships.
At one end of the reproductive life spectrum, we suffer from PMS, or premenstrual symptoms, only to then suffer on the tail end from the onslaught of symptoms that accompany The Change. In that sense, menopause is simply the finale on a continuum of suffering that starts the moment we begin puberty.
But the expectation that feeling bad is a natural part of growing up and growing older has got to go. Chronic pain, persistent discomfort, and feeling lousy are not normal. We have incorporated the perceived inevitability of suffering into our psyches so much that we cannot fully grasp the notion that not suffering is a viable option.
Where did this tendency come from? For Black women, it has its origins in slavery. The surgeon J. Marion Sims, once lauded as the Father of Gynecology, is documented as having operated on enslaved women repeatedly and without anesthesia, even after anesthesia became available. We’re not talking minor procedures here.
Sims performed gruesome vaginal surgeries on these Black mothers, sisters, and mere girls, some of whom had been raped by their slave masters, to learn how to fix injuries sustained during childbirth. And trust me, he wasn’t doing this for their benefit. Sims performed these surgeries in an attempt to restore these women’s value as breeders.
The common misperception—still prevalent today in certain misguided corners of medicine—that Black people are capable of enduring more pain than white people, was reinforced by the circular logic of having to endure more pain. In fact, a study done in 2019 found that some white medical students and residents believed that Black patients had higher pain tolerances than white patients. It is galling and enraging that in the twenty-first century, Black people are still consistently undermedicated for surgical and post-op pain as well as for chronic medical conditions known to be excruciating, such as sickle cell crises.
This occurs, in part, because of miseducation and the stubborn prevalence of these misguided beliefs. They must be eradicated.
Women’s pain is all too frequently ignored or simply minimized as women being hysterical or overly dramatic. Even the word hysteria is most often associated with females, as it is derived from “hystera,” the Greek word for uterus. The linguistic implication is that being born with a uterus makes one more inclined to unfounded, uncontrollable emotional exaggeration, which is, of course, untrue. Back in 2020, more than 200 women were not believed when they complained mightily of excruciating pain during their egg retrievals at a Yale fertility clinic. The following year, a nurse at the facility pleaded guilty to tampering with the fentanyl meant for the women’s procedures, having replaced the opioid with saline. Now ask yourself why it took five months and two hundred women before anyone figured out what was going on.
Read More: Self-Silencing Is Making Women Sick
I did mention that this took place at Yale, right? Why do we continually doubt women or decide that their concerns are unworthy of redress?
The ongoing lack of gender and racial diversity, self-examination, and historical knowledge within the medical profession has led to a complicity in the acceptance of suffering, particularly for certain groups. We should never forget the hard lessons of the past, and we must continue to hold the medical establishment accountable for its ethical failings and broad inequities. But we mustn’t allow these problems to prevent us from seeking every medical benefit available to us today. Mother wit and homeopathy have their place, but there are things that only modern medicine can do.
Our mothers and grandmothers did the best they could with what they had. Imperfect as things are today, we have more and better resources available. We just need to stay aware of what those resources are and how best to access them. We have to learn how to prevent disease and recognize its early warning signs. Today, we have more in our medical tool kits than leeches and rusty saws. To honor these women and the dreams they placed in us, we must do more, and be better at alleviating our own suffering and getting the care they could not.
From the book Grown Woman Talk: Your Guide to Getting and Staying Healthy by Sharon Malone, M.D.. Copyright © 2024 by Sharon Malone, M.D.. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
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FERM – Female Exclusionary Radical Males by R J Cook
Introduction by R J Cook with more stories below.
This page replaces the Hate Male Pages now archived above. The purpose is to look at stories of feminist double standards, female hypocrisy,, excusing serious female crime like child abuse, female initiated domestic violence, their hatred of transsexuals with reasons why and their ever receding horizons. Feminism is not about equality. It is about domination. There have never been so many females at the top of the western power structure. Nor has there ever been so much violence, male suicide and wars, now approaching a nuclear holocaust – with Scandinavian female politicians taking the war mongering bait to join NATO. In my past working life, I have been in many mixed gender meetings where anyone trying to tell a powerful woman anything is accused of mansplaining. A few years before my divorce, I told my wife that all decisions were a default to her. I said whenever I wanted anything there was always a row. She replied : “I feel I have to challenge you.”
Power is a zero sum. The power that matters is at elite level. Men like billionaire George Soros saw the value of promoting feminism, because dividing, controlling and ruling the masses along gender lines, as they have already done with race, protects and enhances their power. Among the western masses, the genders are drifting further apart. It is no wonder homosexuality is increasing with both sexes along with transsexualism. Fantasy writer J K Rowling, whose only claim to fame is the popular dumbing down Harry Potter series, makes her offensive and asinine assertion that transsexuals make the drastic change to get inside female safe spaces to assault or rape the female occupants.
Women are free to lie because, in our prejudiced society, backed by their doting fathers, they look so nice and have softer non threatening voices until they lose their temper, coming at you with a broken wine glass as I experienced in my own kitchen. If they maim or kill it is put down to hormones and the ‘fact’ that the man asked for it. So in my view, it is men and male to female transsexuals who need safe spaces. I suggest someone forms an organisation called FERM – Female Exclusionary Radical Males. The trouble is, that would, or soon will be illegal.
This is because feminists would call it misogynistic and sexist. Men need to understand that female intrusion into male safe spaces is State approved. Women are a secret police force watching over men. If a man raises his voice to his wife, partner or children, she or the neighbours will call the police and he will soon be homeless and ruined. According to the religion of feminism, men are a synonym for festering violence waiting to erupt. He must know his place but never aspire to wear female clothing, make up or having feminising surgery. Men need firm direction from the sisterhood, ubiquitous and ever reforming. The feminist dogma states that we need as much female leadership as possible – Thatcher was a wonderful example ( sic ).
Men tried forming a group called ‘Families need fathers’. They established an internet profile and protests. Undercover police moved in very quickly to close them down as hate preachers. The State needs feminism, pretty much as George Orwell predicted. By their very nature,women only see the immediate advantage to them of any choice or action, not the ruin and even suicide of their children. The conceit and arrogance of the worldwide feminist lobby is redolent in their churlish response to the ‘Barbie’ film receiving no Oscar nominations. This diatribe conveys the message that women must rebel against being valued just for their appearance and expectation of serving men. This theme is so cliched and typical of the white liberal elite. It has no bearing on the appalling and fragmented reality of the western world. But it is great fanatsy for little women who want to feel big when they put down boyfriends, brothers and men in general.
The proponents of this poison cannot or will not see the national and social destruction correlated – and in my view caused by – to the rise of feminism. It is a western , especially Anglo American mantra, that lower class white men are domestic abusers and racists waiting to happen. That is the Barbie films feminist message, even if they have had what is now called ‘gender reassignment.’ The feminists and Rishi Sunak won’t have this, all having the mentality to worship and promote women as godesses. No wonder there is such a big market and so many adverts for Viagra. After 31 years as lackey and scapegoat in married life, I reached the point of wondering why I ever wanted sex let alone bring two sons into such an unhappy relationship and dangerous world for men.
Why is it that, in this wonderful rainbow world of equality, that the men were locked in to fight for Ukraine in the NATO proxy war on Russia, and the women were allowed to flee with their children because they were the mothers ? It goes on further with the rubbish that Ukraine needs another 500.000 people if they are not going to lose that war. What Zelensky means is that he needs another 500,000 men ( privileged white males ), not women. The pretence of an equal world where women are ultimately in charge and morally superior is rather like a ship full of holes. Eventually there will be no men left to keep working the pumps to bail out the water. When did women stop being aninals like the rest of us ? Answer is, ‘when their daddies put them on a pedestal’ and the State cashed in.
Never shy about sharing their opinions, users on X (formerly Twitter) let loose on the deep irony of Ken, but not Barbie, getting an Oscar nomination about the challenges of womanhood and the dangers of toxic masculinity.
Ken getting nominated and not Barbie is honestly so fitting for a film about a man discovering the power of patriarchy in the Real World.— Michael. (@yosoymichael) January 23, 2024
Wait Ryan Gosling got nominated for his role as Ken, but Margot Robbie didn’t get nominated for Barbie?! And Greta got snubbed for Best Director?!?!
Way to justify the literal plot of the movie @TheAcademy 🥴 #Oscars2024 pic.twitter.com/6MEHaSeTjZ— Shirleigh (@ShirleighShirlz) January 23, 2024
April 3rd 2024
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The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin was also positive, awarding the film four stars and describing it as “deeply bizarre, conceptually slippery and often roar-out-loud hilarious”.
March 28th 2024
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March 16th 2024
How to talk to boys so they grow into better men
Counteracting the Andrew Tate effect isn’t just the purview of parents and teachers.
By Keren Landman, MD@landmanspeaking Mar 12, 2024, 8:00am EDT
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Keren Landman, MD is a senior reporter covering public health, emerging infectious diseases, the health workforce, and health justice at Vox. Keren is trained as a physician, researcher, and epidemiologist and has served as a disease detective at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Men are not okay.
They’re less likely to graduate high school and go to college than women, have dwindling circles of friends, and are sitting out of the labor market at startling rates. Compared with women, they’re two to three times likelier to die of drug overdoses and nearly four times likelier to die by suicide. The disadvantages are particularly marked for working-class men and men of color.
The problem begins in boyhood — and so should the solution, says award-winning health educator Christopher Pepper, writer of the Teen Health Today newsletter and co-author of the forthcoming book Talk To Your Boys. In his view, a future where men are healthier and happier starts with better conversations with boys.
Technology has made those conversations harder to have. Back when family phones were in kitchens or living rooms — and casual communication usually involved talking to each other — more of the conversations kids were having with their friends and peers happened within earshot of parents and teachers. That gave adults more opportunities to coach kids on how to talk to each other, says Pepper. Now, kids learn to communicate on cell phones and social media largely out of view of adults during the key years they’re building social skills.
Boys suffer the social consequences of that more because while adults typically emphasize social skills in teaching girls how to interact with each other, there’s less of an imperative to guide boys in that way, Pepper says. That might explain why researchers have found that on average, girls demonstrate better social skills than boys as early as kindergarten — and that advantage widens over the course of elementary school as boys’ social abilities decline.
“Boys often don’t really learn the basics of social relationships and responsibility and communication,” says Pepper. Social skills adults may take for granted, like all the steps involved in making plans to meet a friend, are skills that aren’t necessarily taught. The consequences for boys aren’t good: As they grow up, they often lose close friendships with other boys, even though they really want them.
The absence of clear guidance for many boys on how to be and act creates massive opportunities for internet misogynists like Andrew Tate, says Pepper. “Tate has figured out that boys are actually really interested in talking about gender, talking about masculinity, and thinking about what it means to be a successful man,” says Pepper. Many boys don’t get much other messaging on these issues from their families or schools, leaving a void easily filled by charismatic jerks.
Bad behavior among students is worse now than it was pre-pandemic, perhaps especially among boys. Although the causes are unclear, adults often blame increased social isolation and screen time, plus the popularity of figures like Tate and the viral spread of various dumb TikTok trends.
On a broader scale, though, Tate’s popularity shows what boys are missing, says Pepper: “There’s a real opening for adults to step up to more positive conversations about masculinity and what it means to be a man, and how they would like men to be in the world.”
I asked Pepper what those conversations could and should look like. Below is what he told me, in his own words, edited for length and clarity.
Make it clear you’re a trustworthy adult before you need to have difficult conversations
Depression, suicide, substance abuse — these can be scary things to learn about or to talk about. Sometimes adults have the impulse to rush into a conversation about a difficult topic and be very prescriptive and authoritarian — to say, “These are all the things you should not do.”
But shame and judgment tend to really shut off conversation. So instead, I would lean into curiosity in conversations before you get to the difficult stuff. When a boy invites you into his world, even in a little way, take that opening. Like if he’s talking about a song, or a funny meme, or a video game that he’s playing that he loves, be curious about it. And really listen, reflect back what he’s saying. Make sure you’re understanding where he’s coming from, and just do what you can to keep those conversations open so that when more challenging topics come up, you still have those lines of communication open — you’re still interested in hearing from each other.
Model, celebrate, and reinforce taking care of other people and experiencing a full range of emotions —especially if you’re a father
Another thing you can do — and this is especially for fathers, but really, for any parents — is be reflective on your own life: Are you making time to actually see your friends and be a good support, and to let the boys in your life see you doing that? Do you talk about your friends and the people you care about?
One of the things that happens as boys are growing up is they learn about a very restrictive version of masculinity, a list of things that you’re not allowed to do or say. Particularly around emotions: You’re allowed to be angry, and you might be able to cry if something’s really bad — like a sports team you’re on loses a really important game, or someone died. But part of being a full human is being able to access and express a fuller range of emotions. So for adults, it’s important to ensure it’s safe for boys to do that, that you’re not criticizing them or judging them for it. If you hear other kids making fun of them for showing their emotions, stick up for them and say, “Hey, it’s actually good and positive to be connected to your feelings and to be able to show them.”
When boys are showing care and concern and support for other people, celebrate it in the same way that you might celebrate more traditional things that are celebrated for boys, like sports victories or catching a big fish. You want to celebrate when they care for friends or family, too — like, “I saw how responsible you were with your little sister today when she was upset and really helped our family get through dinner,” for example. Really recognize and celebrate those things. They might be coded as feminine, but they’re really life skills that will help them grow into men who are good fathers, good partners, and good friends.
When conversations get complicated: Notice signals that they don’t understand, know your own mind, and get comfortable with do-overs
When boys blame girls or feminism for the problems in the world, that’s a big red flag — it often happens when they learn about issues from social media.
If you hear a boy talking along these lines, it’s a good moment to engage him in some critical thinking. But rather than saying, “Oh, you’re totally wrong,” try something like, “I was surprised to hear you say that. Can you tell me more about what you’re thinking?” And if they mention learning something from a video, you can ask them to watch the video together and talk about it.
Boys often dismiss especially questionable or offensive statements as jokes — Peggy Orenstein got into this in her recent book, Boys & Sex. For example, they’ll say something about rape or the Holocaust and follow it up with, “Can’t you take a joke?” That’s often a signal that they want to learn more about something, or that they don’t understand it.
It can make an impact when an adult takes those jokes seriously — especially when men do. You could say: “Joking about sexual harassment or rape is a red line, is not okay with me, and I want to tell you why.” For some boys, hearing from an adult man that the subject is serious and that they want to be able to talk about it — that will feel different than hearing it from a woman. Saying these things is a skill that gets easier with practice, and I think is an important thing for adults to get better at.
When adults are having these conversations, it’s good for them to get clear about their own values. Think through what you believe about gender equality, yourself, and what you understand about racism or sexism or homophobia. Recognize they can be hard but important things to talk about.
Being able to talk about these issues will be super useful to boys as they’re going through their lives. When they repeat things they hear online, they’ll be better able to decide if that’s something they actually believe.
Remember that as a parent, you have lots of chances — so it’s OK if you get it wrong the first time! If you have a conversation that kind of goes sideways, you can come back to it and say, “Hey, we talked about this yesterday and I thought about it later and realized I kind of misspoke. I wonder if we can talk about that again.” You can apologize to young people for getting angry; you can ask for a do-over of tough conversations, for a do-over of trying to understand them. In fact, asking for a do-over helps model and develop self-reflection and taking responsibility for a mistake in a way that can help boys be successful in their own lives.
Create places where boys can grow socially and emotionally
More schools should have boys’ groups.
It’s pretty easy for a boy to go through a whole school day and not talk to anyone, except maybe about the assignments that are due, or to maybe have some sort of surface-level conversation about a sports game or a video game. The surgeon general has said loneliness is a national crisis — but on the whole, schools haven’t been putting a lot of effort into the social and emotional lives of boys. Schools often don’t have spaces where boys can talk reflectively to other boys and talk to a trusted adult about what’s going on in their lives.
When they create these spaces — groups where boys can talk to other boys about what it is like to be a boy today and what’s going on in their lives, and get help with the day-to-day struggles in navigating the social and emotional side of the world — boys love them.
There are great models of this all over the place. A Canadian nonprofit called Next Gen Men has a free curriculum — in addition to their in-person groups, they have one online on Discord. In Oakland, where I live, there’s a group called the Ever Forward Club, and in New York, there’s A Call to Men, which has a free curriculum. Other programs engage coaches of boys’ sports teams in teaching healthy masculinity to their players. [See the sidebar below for more resources.]
I’d like to see these kinds of programs expanded into more schools, just to encourage boys to really think about the world they’re living in, how they treat people, how to make friends, and to get support when they need it.
Coaching programs:
- Coaching Boys Into Men (from Futures Without Violence)
- Teams of Men
Free resource guides for running boys’ groups:
- Live Respect (from A Call to Men)
- Manhood 2.0 (from Equimundo)
- Next Gen Manual (from Next Gen Men)
Model programs:
- NGM Boys+ Club (online on Discord)
- The Ever Forward Club
Even if you don’t live or work with boys, treating them like caring humans helps
There are still lots of ways you can help boys develop into better men [if you’re not a parent or someone who works closely with them]. There are formal mentoring and tutoring programs, but on a more day-to-day basis, I think trying to recognize the humanity of boys is meaningful. Sometimes, the way adults talk about teenage boys, it’s like they’re really scary, or a different species. There are a lot of jokes about how terrible teenage boys are.
It’s helpful if we recognize they’re human beings who will grow up to be men in our world. These are going to be our co-workers and neighbors. It’s often easier to build relationships with teenage boys individually, rather than trying to do so with a whole group of kids you don’t know.
So treat them as individual people and be curious about them.
That could mean building a mentoring relationship, but it could also mean hiring somebody for a job, like to be the dog walker, or thinking about boys as possibly being babysitters or people who can take care of things. I would encourage people to kind of check their stereotypes about who can do that kind of care work — it’s not only teenage girls who could be good babysitters. Recognize everybody’s different.
March 14th 2024
Who says women never lie about rape?
Why are some women habitual liars? What kind of …
The “believe the woman” zealotry promoted by Juanita Broaddrick’s defenders is bad for feminism.
By Cathy Young
Juanita Broaddrick’s explosive charge that President Clinton raped her 21 years ago has elicited the feminist movement’s toughest — and most confused — response yet to Clinton’s chronic woman troubles. National Organization for Women president Patricia Ireland issued a statement that managed to be simultaneously too harsh and too weak. Too harsh because it essentially forbade Clinton to defend himself, denouncing in advance as a “nuts and sluts” tactic any claim that Broaddrick made the story up or was depicting consensual sex as assault. Too weak because, after endorsing her “compelling” account, it urged the country to move on and “stop wasting time on unprovable charges.” If you believe we probably have a rapist in the White House, shouldn’t you be demanding his resignation? Clearly, feminists remain torn between loyalty to Clinton — or at least reluctance to do anything that would aid his political opponents — and the belief that a woman who makes an accusation of rape must be supported.
This is not a dilemma for me. I have never voted for Clinton; as a libertarian conservative, I question most of his “pro-woman” policies, from affirmative action to the Violence Against Women Act. As for Broaddrick, I have no way of knowing if her story is true. The allegation is deeply disturbing; so is the fact that the president of the United States has so little credibility that his denials count for nothing. But I am also troubled by the “believe the woman” zealotry that may be as bad for feminism as knee-jerk allegiance to a political ally. This zealotry is now being embraced by some conservatives, who are uttering the stock feminist lines about how lack of support for Broaddrick will discourage other victims from coming forward.
Read More https://www.salon.com/1999/03/10/cov_10news/
| Believe Her! The Woman Never Lies Myth Frank S. Zepezauer* ABSTRACT: Empirical evidence does not support the widespread belief that women are extremely unlikely to make false accusations of male sexual misconduct. Rather the research on accusations of rape, sexual harassment, incest, and child sexual abuse indicates that false accusations have become a serious problem. The motivations involved in making a false report are widely varied and include confusion, outside influence from therapists and others, habitual lying, advantages in custody disputes, financial gain, and the political ideology of radical feminism. Male sexual misconduct — rape, incest, stalking, sexual harassment, child molestation, pornography trafficking — has, according to some observers, become a problem so big that it demands a big solution, not only the reform of our legal system but of our entire society. Yet the increasingly heated debate over this crisis has focused primarily on how these misbehaviors are defined and how often they occur. The estimated numbers keep mounting. We hear that perhaps 31 million women are suffering from some form of rape, 41 million from harassment, 58 million from child sexual abuse, and all 125 million of them — from toddlers to grandmothers — from a toxic “rape culture” that suffocates the feminine spirit. Much less discussed is how often an allegation of male sexual misconduct is false. The question seldom enters the debate because, presumably, it had long ago been settled. Pennsylvania State Law Professor Philip Jenkins (1993), in a review of the “feminist jurisprudence” which leads the sex crisis counterattack, reports that in response to the question its proponents have established an “unchallengeable orthodoxy.” It is that “women did not lie about such victimization, never lied, not out of personal malice, not from mental instability or derangement” (p.19). Jenkins is not the first to cite this will to believe. Wendy Kaminer (1993) reported that “it is a primary article of faith among many feminists that women don’t lie about rape, ever; they lack the dishonesty gene” (p.67). Eight years earlier, in 1985, John O’Sullivan discovered a widespread defense of the belief that “no woman would fabricate a rape charge” (p.22). Feminists themselves admit as much. Law Professor Susan Estrich stated that “the whole effort at reforming rape laws has been an attack on the premise that women who bring complaints are suspect” (Newsweek, 1985, p.61). Some feminists believe that even defending that premise is a sex crime. Alan Dershowitz (1993) reports that he was accused of sexual harassment for discussing in class the possibility of false rape allegations. Believing the self-proclaimed victim of sexual misconduct has thus evolved from ideological conviction to legal doctrine and, in some jurisdictions, into law. California now requires that jurors be explicitly told that a rape conviction can be based on the accuser’s testimony alone, without corroboration (Associated Press, 1992; Farrell, 1993). Canada is proposing that a man accused of rape must demonstrate that he received the willing consent of a sexual partner. These new rules rest on the assumption that women do not lie because they have no motive to lie. Consequently, as Jenkins (1993) states, the question of the “victim’s credibility” has now become “crucial.” Is that credibility warranted, particularly as feminist jurisprudence would want it established, as nearly automatic? Not if we consult recent history. And if we do, we will find that we do indeed face a sexual misconduct crisis, but not the one radical feminists now insist is ubiquitous in our society. False Accusations of Rape Begin with evidence of false accusation of rape, the crime which has become not only the metaphor for all cases of sexual misconduct but for male sexuality itself. Alan Dershowitz (1991), for example, has further harassed his students by telling them that an annual F.B.I. survey of 1600 law enforcement agencies discovered that 8% of rape charges are completely unfounded. That figure, which has held steadily over the past decade, is moreover at least twice as high as for any other felony. Unfounded charges of assault, which like rape is often productive of conflicting testimony, comprise only 1.6% of the total compared to the 8.4% recorded for rape. Consult also a recent development, DNA testing, which is now becoming routine in rape investigations (Krajik, 1993). Also routine is the discovery that a third of the DNA scans produce non-matches. Consequently, a growing number of men are not only gaining acquittals but are also being released from prison. As with all rape statistics, these figures need careful scrutiny. Police investigators warn, for example, that a mismatch proves innocence only when the DNA could have come from no one but the assailant and its profile or makeup doesn’t match the suspect’s. Even so, the DNA tests, primarily a prosecutorial weapon, have now been added to the arsenal of defense attorneys, and more evidence of false allegation is appearing. Although useful, the F.B.I. and DNA data on sex crimes result from unstructured number gathering. More informative, therefore, are the results of a focused study of the false allegation question undertaken by a team headed by Charles P McDowell (McDowell & Hibler, 1985) of the U.S. Air Force Special Studies Division. Its significance derives not only from its scholarly credentials but also its time of origin, 1984/85, a period during which rape had emerged as a major issue, but before its definition included almost any form of non-consensual sex. The McDowell team studied 556 rape allegations. Of that total, 256 could not be conclusively verified as rape. That left 300 authenticated cases of which 220 were judged to be truthful and 80, or 27%, were judged as false. In his report Charles McDowell stated that extra rigor was applied to the investigation of potentially false allegations. To be considered false one or more of the following criteria had to be met: the victim unequivocally admitted to false allegation, indicated deception in a polygraph test, and provided a plausible recantation. Even by these strict standards, slightly more than one out of four rape charges were judged to be false. The McDowell report has itself generated controversy even though, when rape is a frequent media topic, it is not widely known. Its calculations are no doubt problematic enough to raise serious questions. If, out of 556 rape allegations, 256 could not be conclusively verified as rape, then a large number, 46%, entered a gray area within which more than a few, if not all, of the accusations could have been authentic. If so, the 27% false allegation figure obtained from the remaining 300 cases could be badly skewed. Moreover, the study itself focused on a possibly non-representative population of military personnel. The McDowell team did in fact address these questions in follow-up studies. They recruited independent reviewers who were given 25 criteria derived from the profiles of the women who openly admitted making a false allegation. If all three reviewers agreed that the rape allegation was false, it was then listed by that description. The result: 60% of the accusations were identified as false. McDowell also took his study outside the military by examining police files from a major midwestern and a southwestern city. He found that the finding of 60% held (Farrell, 1993, pp. 321-329). McDowell’s data have received qualified confirmation from other investigators. A survey of seven Washington, D.C. area jurisdictions in the 1991/2 period, for example, revealed that an average of 24% of rape charges were unfounded (Buckley, 1992). A recently completed study of a small midwestern city was reported by Eugene J. Kanin (1994) of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Purdue University. Kanin concluded that “false rape allegations constitute 41% of the total forcible rape cases reported during this period” (p.81). Kanin provides significant confirmation of McDowell’s findings in several ways. Kanin’s subject, for example, covered a nine-year period — 1978-87 — during which rape had become a highly-politicized issue. Members of the police department from which the data was taken were therefore sensitive to the kinds of misperceptions about which parties to the dispute had complained. The city offered a relatively useful model: free of the unrepresentative populations found in resort areas, remote from the extreme crime conditions plaguing large communities, small enough to allow careful investigation of suspicious allegations, but large enough to produce a useful sample of 109 cases. The investigators also separated “unfounded” from “false” rape allegations, a distinction sometimes blurred in other reports. Moreover, among the strict guidelines used to determine an allegation’s unreliability was McDowell’s requirement that only unambiguous recantations be used. Equally revealing were addenda following Kanin’s basic report. They reported studies in two large Midwestern state universities which covered a three-year period ending in 1988. The finding of the combined studies was that among a total of 64 reported rapes exactly 50% were false. Kanin found these results significant because the women in the main report tended to gather in the lower socioeconomic levels, thus raising questions about correlations of false allegation with income and educational status. After checking figures gathered from university police departments, he therefore reported that “quite unexpectedly then, we find that these university women, when filing a rape complaint, were as likely to file a false as a valid charge.” In addition, Kanin cited still another source (Jay, 1991) which supported findings of high frequency false allegations in the universities. On the basis of these studies, Kanin felt it reasonable to conclude that “false rape accusations are not uncommon” (p.90). Sexual Harassment Alan Dershowitz’s experience with an esoteric definition of sexual harassment also raises questions about false allegations in this newly-defined but widely publicized crime. Skeptical checking has revealed that, as with rape, the percentage of unfounded accusations of sexual harassment may reach astonishingly high levels. That was the claim of Randy Daniels, whose confirmation for New York City’s Deputy Mayor was almost derailed by a sexual harassment charge he was able to refute. To see whether his experience was relatively rare, Daniels checked with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He found that in 1991, the EEOC investigated or mediated 2119 cases of sexual harassment and found that 59% were determined to have no cause (Daniels, 1993, p. 1). Since the Hill/Thomas affair they have gone up sharply — up 64% in one year — but so have false allegations, remaining steadily in the plus 50% range. Child Sexual Abuse This rape and sexual harassment pattern — expanding definitions, rapidly increasing accusations, intensely politicized publicity campaigns, and significantly high percentages of false allegations — has also appeared in still another arena, the agencies which deal with the sexual molestation of children. With this kind of sexual misconduct the credibility of a third party, the child, becomes a factor, and we hear, in addition to appeals to “believe the woman” an appeal to “believe the child.” We are now learning that children can be manipulated into supplying dramatic testimony of sexual abuse and that in most cases the accusation originates not with the child but with the mother. Thus the question of credibility once again focuses on women. As one lawyer put it, “For a lot of these people ‘believe the child’ is just code. What they really mean is, ‘believe the woman, no questions asked”‘ (Stein, 1992, p. 160). To keep this issue in perspective, note three significant facts. The first is that of the 2,700,000 cases of child abuse reported every year less than 10% involve serious physical abuse and only 8% involve alleged sexual abuse (Schultz, 1989). The second is that, contrary to the male victimizer/female victim paradigm of feminist ideology, at least as many boys as girls are victimized by child abuse, if not more. The third is that the majority of child abusers are women, that the most dangerous environment for a child is a home formed by a single mother and her boyfriend, and the safest is formed by a married mother and a husband who is the child’s biological father.1 In many cases allegations of child sexual abuse occur in a nasty divorce made nastier by a custody fight. It is now so common that it has received scholarly attention and its own acronym, S.A.I.D. (Sexual Allegations in Divorce). The consensus is that in “S.A.I.D. syndrome” cases the number of such allegations increased so rapidly — up from 7 to 30% in the eighties — that one scholarly team called it an “explosion.” Others, noting how often the guilt of the accused was assumed, used the word “hysteria” and searched for analogies in the Salem and the McCarthy witch hunts (Stein, 1992). Another consensus is being reached: that the majority of these allegations are false. Melvin Guyer, Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, reports that “in highly contested custody cases where the allegation is made, a number of researchers have found the allegations to be false or unsubstantiated in anywhere from 60 to 80% of those cases ” (Felten, 1991). Another investigative team stated that of 200 cases they studied” about three-fourths have ultimately been adjudicated as no abuse” (Felten, 1991). Some studies have come in with a lower but still significant estimate. For example, a 1988 study by the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts said that sexual molestation charges in divorces are probably false one-third of the time (Dvorchak, 1992). Allegations of child abuse, both divorce related and in general, are flying out so frequently that those who believe themselves victimized by false charges have organized a nationwide support group, VOCAL (Victims Of Child Abuse Laws), which now includes 80 local chapters. This group refers its members to both informal and professional counsel, sends out a newsletter, and offers access to a rapidly expanding data base. In 1989, its summary of relevant statistics cited 23 studies which reported findings on both sexual and non-sexual child abuse. Among these, the lowest assessment of false allegation was 35%, the highest 82%, averaging at 66%. Recovered Memories Those joining VOCAL are finding that an even more dramatic form of child abuse allegation is now sweeping the country. It originates with a “recovered memory” of sexual atrocity, often involving incest or satanic ritual abuse, usually made by an adult daughter against her father, and almost always discovered in therapy. This form of allegation made the headlines when celebrities such as Roseanne Arnold, La Toya Jackson, and Suzanne Sommers declared they had suddenly remembered a long repressed victimization. It is also claiming celebrities among the accused, most notably Cardinal Bernardin of the Roman Catholic Church, which was however later recanted. In such cases the question of credibility applies not only to the accuser or accused but also to the therapist as well as the therapeutic technique and its supporting theory. Because cases of recovered memory of abuse have surfaced relatively recently, skeptical criticism is just now beginning to appear in the media although the underlying issues have been under debate for decades. One result has been the formation of an organization whose title already makes an assertion, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Thus to VOCAL we can add FMSF among the acronyms coined in response to the false allegation problem. It appears to be widespread. The FMSF reported that within two years of its founding in 1991, it had built a file of 12,000 families who believed themselves victimized by accusations prompted by false memories. Eleanor Goldstein (Goldstein & Farmer, 1992) estimates that the actual number of involved families reaches into the tens of thousands. She also cites data from the National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse on the highly inflated estimates of victimization. Contrary to statements that one in four women have been abused prior to the age of 18, retrospective surveys reveal great variations, from 6 to 62%, which means, Goldstein says, “that we don’t have any valid statistics at all” (p.2). How many of those reports of remembered child abuse, whether in the high or low range, were false? Several sources suggest that they may match figures on false allegations in reports of rape and sexual harassment. The National Center for Child Abuse reported that false allegations, which were 35% of all claims in 1975, had by 1993 reached 60% (FMSF Newsletter, 1993). Other sources suggest that the kind of child abuse caused by satanic ritual cults is almost totally a myth. There may be a satan and he may have followers but, contrary to widely held belief in the mid-eighties, they did not surface all over middle America. Where accusations actually led to trials, as in Jordan, Minnesota and in Los Angeles in the McMartin Preschool Case, prosecutors suffered embarrassing defeats. An extensive New Yorker report of a Washington State case reveals that at least one conviction was indeed achieved. However, after a careful analysis of the facts, the writer concludes that it was a grievous miscarriage of justice, one more ghastly example of the recovered memory theory gone amok (Wright, 1993). With regard to recovered memory cases which do not involve satanism, other indications point to a high number of false allegations. A strong phalanx of professional opinion has raised significant doubts about the veracity of long repressed memories even within a carefully disciplined therapeutic context. For that reason emphatic warnings are now being issued against their being used in a courtroom — not to mention a press conference — without persuasive corroboration, which, it appears, is often missing. Some mental health experts make the point more pungently. Dr. Paul Fink, head of Psychiatry at Albert Einstein Medical Center said, “If a therapist says 70 to 80% of patients remember abuse, I say the therapist ought to be a shoemaker” (Sifford, 1992). Dr. Richard Ofshe, a member of the FMSF professional advisory board who exposed the proliferating fallacies in the Washington State case, stated that “the incidence of cases in which repressed memories correspond with facts about abuse is as common as Siamese twins joined at the head” (Brzustowicz & Csicsery, 1993, p.8). Motivations of Accusers Even so, reasonable doubts about a woman’s veracity in all these often sensationalized sexual misconduct cases do not necessarily mean that she has deliberately lied. She may, for example, have suffered from confusion, a problem now proliferating as the definition for sex crimes becomes increasingly complicated and inclusive, leaving all parties struggling with questions about definition and propriety. Or she may have been affected by emotional instability or mental illness, which one study reported was a factor in 75% of false allegation in divorce cases (Wakefield & Underwager, 1990). In some cases a woman or her defenders might exaggerate a misdemeanor into a felony or, as happened in Washington state, translate bad parenting into sexual misconduct. In addition, there has been a tendency to emphasize what a victim felt rather than what happened. Thus, a woman can truthfully say she felt raped, abused or harassed by behavior which is actually non-criminal. Moreover, the woman’s feelings are often influenced by outside parties with whom she has confided — friends, family members, social workers, therapists, clergymen, rape counselors, lawyers, political activists — any of whom can interpret her emotion as a sign of felonious abuse. With regard to recovered memory, evidence published by the FMS Foundation suggests that the woman may be as much victimized by therapy or by recovery movement” enthusiasm as by a perpetrator hidden in her subconscious. Ericka Ingram, the primary accuser in the Washington State case, had come under the influence of both secular and religious counselors. Their intrusive encouragement helped to loosen a flood of wild charges she leveled against her father and mother as well as two of her father’s colleagues. These realizations have led to an increasing number of lawsuits now being filed by former patients against incompetent or overzealous therapists. By the same token, among the divorcing wives who file sexual molestation charges against their husbands are some who have been coached by self-serving lawyers. Columnist Barbara Amiel (1989) stated that “a lawyer is coming close to negligence if he does not advise a client that in child custody cases and property disputes, the mere mention of a child abuse allegation is a significant asset” (p.25). In The Morning After, Katie Roiphe (1993) reported still another cause of false allegations: political passions generated by activities such as the “Take Back the Night” marches. She tells about “Mindy” who so wanted to be a “part of this blanket warmth, this woman-centered nonhierarchical empowered notion” that she was “willing to lie” (pp. 40-41). A similar story was told by a Stanford University professor whose daughter was, he claimed, behind a conspiracy to murder him. He testified that he had had a good relationship with her until she attended an anti-rape rally. “She appeared to have gotten swept up … and was experiencing great emotional distress” (Wykes, 1993). These mitigating circumstances have often softened the judgment of authorities who confront women guilty of misrepresentation. In the Washington D.C. area, for example, police send women who lied about rape not to the court room but to a counseling center. The Princeton woman who accused a fellow student suffered no more than an obligation to write a public apology. Because of these sometimes compelling reasons for a departure from the truth, many officials hesitate to call a woman a liar. But it appears, some women with little or no evidence do not hesitate to call a man a rapist. It also appears that more than a few of them have in fact knowingly and willfully lied. Regardless of the influences working on Ericka Ingram, for example, there came a point when the evidence openly confounded her story, leaving her with the choice either to persist or recant. Because she not only persisted but further embellished her story, Richard Ofshe called her an “habitual liar” (Wright, 1993, p.69). Whether Anita Hill lied about Clarence Thomas still cannot be determined, but David Brock demonstrated that in several other matters she had indeed lied. And as Charles P. McDowell and other rape allegation researchers have discovered, at least one out of four women in their study population have openly admitted to having lied. Such disclosures should encourage skepticism toward the now widely held belief that, in accusations of sexual misconduct, women never lie. The same skepticism should be activated when we hear its supporting explanation: that filing such a charge is so painful that only a truthful woman would proceed. That belief, although equally strong, is equally suspect. The research that revealed how many sexual misconduct allegations are false has also revealed how often these unfounded accusations are strongly motivated. The clearest example of compelling motive can be found in the Sexual Allegation in Divorce (S.A.I.D.) syndrome. In such cases questionable allegations multiply because the accuser has far more to gain than to lose. Simply charging a divorcing spouse with child molestation — or wife battering or spousal rape — can turn a hot but evenly balanced custody battle into a rout. In many cases, the accused husband must vacate what had been the “family” home and submit to prolonged alienation from his children. He also finds himself ensnared by both the criminal justice and the social service bureaucracies whose conflicting rules of evidence can deny him the presumption of innocence. In a process that only a Kafka can describe, he must then devote his resources to defending himself rather than pursuing the original divorce litigation. Even then he may find himself in jail or in court ordered therapy while his accuser has won de facto custody not only of the children but of the house. Should he eventually win vindication, a process which can literally take years, he may enjoy at best a hollow victory which leaves him financially and emotionally drained, nursing a permanently injured reputation and functioning as an “absent” father with a sparse schedule of controlled visits. It is no wonder, then, that to express the reality commentators have sometimes used dramatic language, such as “the ultimate weapon” or the “atom bomb.” The impressive results that are so often easily achieved with false allegations in custody disputes suggest the kind of temptations women may feel in other situations. Among those found to have lied about rape or sexual harassment, for example, a number of motivations have been identified. The McDowell report listed those they uncovered in declining order of appearance. “Spite or revenge” and “to compensate for feelings of guilt or shame” accounted for 40% of such allegations (Farrell, 1993, p. 325). A small percentage were attributed to “mental/emotional disorder or attempted extortion.” In all cases, then, the falsely alleging woman had any of several strong motives to lie. But, as with the S.A.I.D. syndrome, the most common motive was anger, an emotion which prompts more than a few embattled women to reach for “the ultimate weapon. Although money gained through extortion ranked low among the motives for false rape allegations, it appears to rank higher when sexual harassment claims prove to be unfounded. A casual survey of some of the suits that have been filed suggests why. In the eighties, successful claims often brought damages in the $50,000 to $100,000 range. After the explosion ignited by the Hill/Thomas case, not only the number of claims but damage awards have skyrocketed. A clothing store cashier successfully sued her employer for $500,000. Employees of Stroh’s Brewery claimed that the company’s commercials, which showed the “Swedish Bikini Team,” constituted harassment and sued for damages ranging between $350,000 and $550,000. In the famous locker room harassment case, Lisa Olson was reported to have received a settlement ranging between $250,00 and $700,000. Damage claims — and awards — in the millions are becoming more common. In some cases which were later proved to be false, the financial stakes were particularly high. One lawyer was charged with coaching six of his clients to “embellish or lie” about some of the incidents on which they based a sexual harassment case. They had asked for $487,000 (Gonzales, 1993). Eleven women from the Miss Black America Pageant, after claiming that Mike Tyson had touched them on their rears, filed a $607 million lawsuit against him. Several of the contestants later admitted they had lied in the hope of getting publicity and cashing in on the award money which would have given them around $20 million each (Farrell, 1993, p.328). But where extortion does appear, the motivation may be political as well as monetary not only in particular cases but in the growth of the entire sexual misconduct crisis. Whether it is rape or sexual harassment or divorce-related child molestation or recovered incest memory, many of the investigators eventually mention the influence of ideological feminism. Katie Roiphe, for example, found feminist politics at work in the phony rape story invented by Mindy, the imaginative Princeton co-ed. Norman Podhoretz, who wrote about “Rape in Feminist Eyes,” attributes the current over-publicized obsession with rape to “the influence of man-hating elements within the (women’s) movement (which) has grown so powerful as to have swept all before it” (1992, p.29). As far back as 1985 John Sullivan attributed the overheated denial of false accusation to attempts to defend the “feminist theory of rape.” And Philip Jenkins (1993), who reported the trend toward automatically-assumed female credibility, stated that it was part of a larger campaign to establish “feminist jurisprudence.” Whatever their motivations in particular cases, there is little doubt that ideological feminists have achieved significant political gains from publicizing the sexual misconduct crisis. Lisa Olson’s feelings of harassment may for example have been genuine, but as the focus for a prolonged media event that established for female reporters an access to locker rooms it was as unpopular with the general public as it was with male athletes. The real Anita Hill may or may not have been lying, but the Hill/Thomas affair propelled sexual harassment into a hot issue that rapidly generated a subindustry of scholars, consultants, and bureaucrats, prompted a “Year of the Woman” campaign that helped several women into congress, and revived a flagging women’s movement. The same spectacular results may follow from the Tailhook Scandal, which, like Hill/Thomas, is raising serious questions about motive and credibility. Whether Paula Coughlin’s testimony will become as clouded as Anita Hill’s, her whistle-blowing has already scuttled the careers of a still growing number of naval officers, not to mention the Secretary of the Navy himself, intensified in-service anti-sexual harassment campaigns, reinforced an already strong feminist presence in the armed forces, and helped soften the military’s granitic opposition to women in combat. These incidents also helped to power a “Violence Against Women” bill through congress which will channel still more millions of government money into women’s programs, not to mention winning congressional validation of feminist jurisprudence. That’s a lot of political gain achieved by the words of a few women who suffered little more than an affront to their sensibilities. Conclusions This growing gap — between the anguish suffered by the victims of traditionally-defined sex crimes and what is suffered by victims of ideologically-defined crimes — suggests that the crisis we face is not the result of a sexual misconduct epidemic but of the crisis mentality itself, an ever more hysterical vision of a “rape culture.” It has a foundation in reality. In what has become a ritual disclaimer, those who have exposed the surprising number of false allegations of sexual misconduct have also admitted the appalling number of genuine accusations. And those who have attacked the incompetence, self-interest, and zealotry that has denied the extent of false allegation have also recognized the courage and energy that has exposed the problem of honest allegation begging vainly for belief. They have therefore applauded the effort to seek for this long ignored injustice both social and legal remediation. But that effort, carried too far and exploited too often, has generated another gap: between our awareness of the now highly visible victims of sexual misconduct and the almost invisible victims of false allegation. The lesser known victims have their own stories to tell, enough to reveal another long ignored injustice that demands remediation. False allegations of sexual misconduct have deprived a rapidly growing number of men and women of their reputations, their fortunes, their children, their livelihood, and their freedom; have wasted the time and money of countless tax-supported agencies; have destroyed not only individuals but entire families and communities; and have left some so desperate that they have taken their lives. For that reason, in the current revision of our sexual misconduct code, we must retain as a guiding premise the realization that women can lie because we know that, for several reasons, more than a few women have lied, more often than researchers into false allegation had expected, far more often than “rape culture” ideologues have admitted … too often, in any event, to be ignored by our jurisprudence, feminist or otherwise. Endnote 1. These assertions are themselves widely disputed. However, one of the most extensive studies on the subject, by Strauss and Gelles (1990) reports that for physical abuse, the rate is higher for mothers than for fathers: 17.7% for mothers vs. 10.1% for fathers. They found that preteen boys are slightly more likely to be abused than their sisters but that the pattern changes alter puberty. Strauss and Gelles, however, also refer to some contravening studies that show higher rates for fathers. Susan Steinmetz (1977/78) who has collaborated with Strauss and Gelles, reported independently that “mothers abused children 62% more often than fathers, and that male children were more than twice as likely to suffer physical injury” (p.499). David C. Morrow (1993) reports: “Drawing upon reports of the American Humane Association, the Association of Juvenile Courts, the National Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse, and the FBI’s 1978 crime report, John Rossler of Equal Rights for Fathers of New York State estimated that mothers commit over two-thirds of all child abuse, 80% of it in sole custody and none in joint custody situations, while boyfriends and new husbands perpetrate most of the rest. A similar study conducted a few years earlier in Utah by Ken Pangborn showed abuse 37% higher among single mothers than the general population and 67% of all abuse in the doing of women of whom 80% are single mothers.” Diane Russell (1986) reports that of adult women in San Francisco who reported one or more experiences of incestuous abuse, overall 4.5% were abused by a father (biological, step, foster or adoptive). But the abuse was much more likely to occur with a stepfather. Russell reports that 17% of the women who were raised by a stepfather were abused by him compared to 2% of the women who were raised by a biological father. This indicates the greater risk to a girl of growing up in a household without her biological father. Thomas Fleming (1986) cites a Canadian study that concluded that preschoolers were 40 times as likely to be abused in broken and illegitimate families as compared to those in intact two-parent families. The consensus thus appears to support the assertion that child abuse is much more common in single parent families or families missing the biological father, that women are more often the abusers, and that male children are more often the victims. [Back] References Amid, B. (1989, November 24). Feminism hits middle age. The National Review, p. 25. Associated Press (1992, May 8). Ruling favors victim’s word in rape cases. San Diego Union-Tribune. Brzustowicz, Jr., R. & Csicsery, G. P. (1993, January). The remembrance of crimes past. Heterodoxy, p.8. Buckley, S. (1992, June 27). Unfounded reports of rape confound area police investigators. The Washington Post, p. B-1. Daniels, R. (1993, May/June). Sexual harassment. Transitions (PO Box 129, Manhasset, New York, NY 11030, p. 1. Dershowitz, A. M. (1991, September). Justice. Penthouse, p. 52. Dershowitz, A. M. (1993, December). Sexual harassment. The Liberator, p. 22. Dvorchak, R. (1992, August 22). Sex abuse charge, “ultimate weapon” in custody cases. Houston Chronicle. Farrell, W. (1993). The Myth of Male Power ()()(). New York: Simon and Schuster. Felten, E. (1991, November 25). Divorce’s atom bomb: Child sex abuse. Insight, pp. 6-11, 34-36. Fleming, T. (1986). Uncommon properties. Chronicles. Reporting on Trend report, February. 1986, Rockford Institute, 934 N. Main Street, Rockford, IL 61103-7061. FMS Foundation Newsletter (1993, July 3). 3401 Market Street, Suite 130, Philadelphia. PA 19104. Goldstein, E., & Farmer, K. (1992). Confabulations (). Boca Raton, FL: Sirs Books. Gonzales, S. (1993, October 14). D.A.: Lawyer told sex-bias clients to lie. San Jose Mercury, p. 1B. Jay, D. R. (1991). Victimization on the college campus: A look at three high-profile cases. Campus Law Enforcement Journal, 35-37. Jenkins. P. (1993, October). Hard cases and bad law. Chronicles, p. 19. Kaminer, W. (1993, October). Feminism’s identity crisis. The Atlantic Monthly, p. 67. Kanin, E. J. (1994). False rape allegations. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 23(1), 81-92. Krajik, K. (1993, November 1). Genetics in the courtroom. Newsweek, p.64. McDowell, C. P., & Hibler, N. S. (1985). False allegations. Holland: Elsevier. Published for the Behavioral Science Unit, FBI Academy, Quantico, VA. Morrow, D. C. (1993). Toward Gynology. Aladdin’s Window, Issue # 3, Afterglow Publications, P.O. Box 399, Shingletown, CA 96088. Newsweek (1985, May 20). Rape and the law. p. 61. O’Sullivan, J. (1985, August). Rape in the New Age. American Spectator, p. 22. Podhoretz, N. (1992, November). Rape in feminist eyes. Commentary, p. 29. Roiphe, K. (1993). The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus (). Boston: Little, Brown & Company. Russell, D. E. (1986). The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women (). New York: Basic Books, Inc. Sifford, D. (1992, March 15). A special tribute. Philadelphia Inquirer. Stein, H. (1992, June). Presumed guilty. Playboy, pp. 74-76, 160-165. Steinmetz, S. K. (1977/78). The battered husband syndrome. Victimology, 2, p. 89. Strauss, M. A., & Gelles, R. J. (1990). Physical Violence in American Families ()(). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Wakefield, H., & Underwager, IL (1990). Personality characteristics of parents making false accusations of sexual abuse in custody disputes. Issues In Child Abuse Accusations, 2(3), 121-l36. Wright, L. (1993, May 17 & 24). Remembering Satan: Part I & Part II. New Yorker, pp. 60-83, & 54-76. Wykes, S. L. (1992, December 9). “Plot” target says daughter changed. San Jose Mercury, p.1-B. * Frank S. Zepezauer is a teacher and writer at 1731 Wright Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94087. [Back] |
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Which gender is more prone to mental illness?
Women have a significantly higher frequency of depression and anxiety in adulthood, while men have a larger prevalence of substance use disorders and antisocial behaviors. Women also have a higher prevalence of depression and anxiety disorders due to genetic and biological factors.
The Most Dangerous Woman in the World
“Chicago May” was a classic swindler who conned her way around the world in the early twentieth century. She was also a sign of hard times.
By: Ashawnta Jackson
It takes a lot to be branded “The Most Dangerous Woman in the World.” You need to live a life that’s more skeletons than closet. You keep your head on a swivel, trying to stay a step ahead of the people in hot pursuit—the press, the cops, your victims. This was life for Mary Ann Duignan, a.k.a. May Churchill Sharpe, a.k.a. “Chicago May,” who made her way from Europe to America and back again as one the most notorious criminals of the early 1900s. As historian Laurence William White writes, “by allying prostitution with robbery and blackmail, [Chicago May] was soon a familiar figure among the gamblers, gangsters and courtesans.”
Duignan was born in Ireland in 1871. But life across the ocean was calling her, and she answered by leaving home in 1890. This wasn’t an unusual decision, explains Lauren Byrne in her review of Nuala O’Faolain’s biography of Duignan. Half the population of post-famine Ireland was emigrating, but Duignan did things a little differently.
“May left home in the middle of the night, taking her family’s life savings with her,” Byrne notes. And unlike other European emigrants, Duignan made that transatlantic trip in luxury, using her stolen gains to travel first-class. “She relished the social havoc she caused,” writes Byrne, “a peasant among the gentry.”
After a stop in New York, Duignan made her way to Nebraska, where she met and married Dal Churchill, “the first of her several short-lived marriages,” Byrne explains. When Mr. Churchill was killed, she moved to Chicago, assuming the sobriquet “Chicago May.”
The city was buzzing with the excitement of the 1893 World’s Fair. Even though the exhibition promised to bring new jobs and vitality to an area that was experiencing massive unemployment and homelessness, it wasn’t a promise it could keep. As Byrne writes, “When one hundred jobs were advertised for women at the world’s fair, 10,000 applicants responded.” There was simply more need than opportunity. And May, like many women in the city, turned to sex work to make ends meet. Though she did often have sex with clients, she also had another hustle.
“She preferred to call herself a ‘badger,’” Byrne explains, “a con-woman who entices her victim with sex, then robs him before she has to complete her part of the bargain.”
But no matter how good of a criminal you are, you need to know when to leave the scene.
She later returned to New York where she made her living both continuing her “badgering” and as a chorus girl. There aren’t many references to how good she was on the chorus line, but her badgering skills kept growing, plus she added blackmail to her repertoire. As White writes, “using compromising letters or photographs; victims made substantial and repeated payments to avoid exposure or the threatened wrath of her fictitious ‘enraged husband.’” She managed to work her con in both North and South America.
These cons enabled her to live a life of luxury, with one newspaper describing her as a girl whose “diamond rings were as big as hickory nuts.” She charmed or bribed her way through the city for years. But no matter how good of a criminal you are, you need to know when to leave the scene. And Chicago May knew her time was up, fleeing to Europe when the cops got too close.
In London she met Eddie Guerin; they robbed an American Express office in Paris together. Though she managed to get to London before being arrested, she “loyally, if stupidly” returned to France, “and for her trouble she received five years in Montpelier [sic] prison,” Byrne writes.
But she didn’t stay incarcerated for long. As White explains, May “seduced and blackmailed the prison doctor into signing a medical certificate for her release” halfway through her sentence. She found herself back in court after an attempt on Guerin’s life, resulting in another stint in prison.
Though May eventually went back to America, it wasn’t the glamorous life she’d known. As White writes, “in poor health and suffering from alcoholism, she experienced indifferent success and frequent scrapes with the law.” She died in 1920 following complications from surgery.
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It’s easy to look at her as a dangerous, uncaring woman—she even wrote that “crime never occurred to me as being a sin”—but there’s much of her life that speaks to the times.
“The options for a peasant woman in nineteenth-century Ireland were marriage or emigration,” Byrne writes. “The grinding monotony of household drudgery was hardly an attractive proposition to someone who had sailed across the Atlantic in first-class splendor.”
May’s life and motivations might always be a mystery. As Byrne muses, “can we ever understand the past, or do we just endlessly rework it to suit us in the present?”
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March 12th 2024
Demography. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 Sep 21.
Published in final edited form as:
Demography. 2015 Jun; 52(3): 751–786.
doi: 10.1007/s13524-015-0391-4
PMCID: PMC4576914
NIHMSID: NIHMS717232
PMID: 25962867
Black-White Differences in Attitudes Related to Pregnancy among Young Women1
Jennifer S. Barber, Jennifer Eckerman Yarger, and Heather H. Gatny
Author informationCopyright and License informationPMC Disclaimer
The publisher’s final edited version of this article is available at Demography
Abstract
In this paper we use newly available data from the Relationship Dynamics and Social Life (RDSL) study to compare a wide range of attitudes related to pregnancy for 961 Black and white young women. We also investigate the extent to which race differences are mediated by, or net of, family background, childhood socioeconomic status, adolescent experiences related to pregnancy, and current socioeconomic status. Black women are less positive, in general, than white women, toward young non-marital sex, contraception, and childbearing, and have less desire for sex in the upcoming year. This is largely because Black women are more religious than white women, and in part because they are more socioeconomically disadvantaged in young adulthood. However, in spite of these less positive attitudes, Black women are more likely to expect sex without contraception in the next year, and to expect more positive consequences if they were to become pregnant, relative to white women. This is largely because, relative to white women, Black women have higher rates of sex without contraception in adolescence, and in part because they are more likely to have grown up with a single parent. It is unclear whether attitudes toward contraception and pregnancy preceded or are a consequence of adolescent sex without contraception. Some race differences remain unexplained – net of all potential mediators in our models, Black women have less desire for sex in the upcoming year, but are less willing to refuse to have sex with a partner if they think it would make him angry, and expect more positive personal consequences of a pregnancy, relative to white women. In spite of these differences, Black women’s desires to achieve and to prevent pregnancy are very similar to white women’s desires.
Keywords: Attitudes, Sex, Contraceptive Use, Pregnancy, Race
Read More https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4576914/
March 11th 2024
Alicia Kearns rebukes MP for removing ‘T’ from ‘LGBT’ in Commons debate
Alicia Kearns rebuked an MP for removing the “T” in “LGBT” as he spoke in the House of Commons on Friday 1 March.
The Alba party’s Westminster leader, Neale Hanvey, praised Ms Kearns for making a “really important point” about members of the community “feeling safe” – but dropped the “T” from the acronym, which stands for transgender.
“I will not stand for that,” the Tory MP said, hitting back.
“When you say LGBT [and] you remove the ‘T’, you suggest that they are lesser… when you choose to eradicate, that is wrong.”
Alicia Kearns rebukes MP for removing ‘T’ from ‘LGBT’ in Commons
Proposed questions on sexual orientation and gender identity for the Census Bureau’s biggest survey
Sunak’s trans ‘joke’ will make life more dangerous for people like me
March 9th 2024
J K Rowling’s Ever Exrending Fantasy World by R J Cook
J K Rowling is a right one to call India Willoughby obsessive and defamatory. She has deliberately confused transsexuals with transveestites, appears obsessed with the weird idea that modern Western women are so desirable – in spite of so many EDF men needing Viagra – that men will go to any extreme to get into ladies toilets rest and locker rooms to sexually assault and rape them. Every effort is being made to boost rape convictions on the basis that women never lie and that Statute of Limitations must never apply because it may take some women years to overcome their modesty and shyness before complaining. Evidence is no match for a woman’s word.
It seems to me that there should be a whole new approach to CIS males outing themselves as mtf transsexuals, if we are to follow fantasy writer Rowling’s TERF Diktat. Any such gender confused person, presenting themselves as women, should immediately be arrested by the PLODS and put on the Sex Offenders’ Register as people who probably committed historic rape or thought about doing it and intended to do so in the future. Of course, in fairness, women wearing male clothes, short male hair cuts, especially close cropped, should be suspected as lesbian and treated with suspecion if they enter ladies toilets and rest rooms.
Ironically, bearing all of this in mind, it should be no wonder that increasing numbers of men are seeking sex change. Many school boys are told they must control their natural instincts and be more like girls. Too many men are products of broken homes, brought up by divorced or single mothers or running away from modern wives and harridan women. According to modern equality law, these men have no equivalent protection to females protected gender philopsphy and status. With feminist extremists so rampant, there are also many men seeking transsexual women as an alernative to slave status and being a divorce cash cow for modern women who want more laws to protect them from scrutiny, criticism and accountabilty.
Rowling is undoutedly a very clever woman wrapping up this vile attack on white men in general as protecting women from men in women’s c;lothes. Her persistent utterings and writings on gender are riddled with the same convuluted intrigue, devils , demons and monsters that we find in her epic Harry Potter series about the righteous ones bravely fighting forces of darkness. This is her mindset. She is the author of an ever extending fantasy world where she must never be exposed as the evil one. Anyone who tries will be exterminated or locked up by the power of her magic money and her little narrow minded deferential elves -aka the police.
In Rowling’s Potter fantasy, the uglyLord Voldemort represents the worst of men and their Dark Magic Harry defends the good High Magic. He is everything a new female user friendly man should be. In hernew fantasy world, Rowling is the Queen of all women fighting for their freedom, true consciousness and self actualisation in a war against what she thinks men are if they are not reined in by rampant hectoring limiting feminism.
In this new fantasy story, Transsexuals are the ever expanding dark force that all women must heed her warning. The transsexuals so called women, must be outed and not subject to hasassment laws. Their camouflage must be stripped away. Being a woman is the mark of the blessed chosen ones. They are nature’s mothers when not busy with careers and finding themselves. They must lead the way to a New World on the Moral High Ground. Like ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, facing the Wolf who is pretending to be her grandmother, he must be stripped of his female clothing and dealt with as the wild evil male threatening animal that he is.
If what Rowling has said about their being no law that compels her or anyone else to call mtf transsexuals women, then that has devastating consequences for transsexuals. This is effectively a call to anti trans action. It means it is perfectly legal to hound transwomen to suiciide, justify verbal and written abuse – and ultimately give energy and self justification to the type of disturbed bigots who brutally murdered 16 year old trans girl Brianna Ghay last year. Organisations like NHS Tavistock Trust and the London Gender Identity Clinic need to warn their patients or clients of this new risk to their lives as adumbrated by J K Rowling. The law must be urgently ammended to protect trans women from Rowling like bigotry or sex change be totally outlawed with its agencies immediately closed down. If it is accepted that there is no such thing as female brains in male bodies, then those incriminated agencies must forfeit a mass of public money to help their misguided victims cope with the psychologcal, social and material damage to their lives . It is a very simple equation.
R J Cook.
March 8th 2024
Gender Equality Should Conscript Women Into Front Line Military Roles & Combat – R.J Cook
| Investigation |
| Rape trials are broken. Are juries to blame? |
| Sexism How lads’ mags went soft KATHLEEN STOCK 5 MINS Referendum Ireland doesn’t care for women RACHEL O’DWYER 7 MINS |
Comment Feminist arguments are highly selective about their database and prejudiced in their analysis. They expect juries to accept that any man prosecuted for rape is guilty. Using more female jurors , they required courts to simply help boost their statistics that women are the only victims and never lie. Women as a collective behave as if their birth gender is an achievement while males must accept their toxic masculinity and privileged white status. Andrew Tate’s reputation as global chief misogynist terrorist is used to guilt all men to make them kneel to women’s global rights. The fact that Tate, like Jake Davison, is the product of a single mother family, is never mentioned. Davison, like so many problem men, had a SMOTHER, not a Mother.
So when Davison shot his mother after going on an around town gun rampage, like Michael Ryan in Hungerford U.K some years before, it is all men who get the blame, not weirdo mothers who groom their sons as ersatz captive husbands. Such examples abound. A MUM was found stabbed to death in a car before a teen believed to be her son was killed by a train nearby, an inquest heard last February. Mayawati Bracken, 56, was discovered in a Lexus with a fatal knife wound in Pangbourne, Berkshire. Around 30 minutes later, Julian Bracken, 18, was found dead on a railway track.
This is just more consequences of the top down elite run New World Order where violence is already overwhelming. In this normality and this grave new world, there is no such being as an independent woman because they are all married to the state under the feminist dogma which must remain above criticism. Women have made their changes for ‘personal growth, freedom and economic gain.’ Feminists, who dominate mass media and education, demand men change to suit this agenda. No wonder we have Transsexuals, Tate’s Incels, women demanding their men take Viagra, record male suicides, cross gender mental illness with dire often violent consequences and collapsing white birth rates.
R J Cook
March 2nd 2024
Here’s What J.K. Rowling Has Actually Said About Trans People
By Claire Lampen, editor and writer
terfs Feb. 16, 2023
On Wednesday, the New York Times received two open letters — one from advocacy and human-rights groups and another from hundreds of contributors — urging the paper to reform its approach to covering stories about transgender people. According to GLAAD, the Times has routinely adopted a devil’s-advocate approach in articles that question medically accepted standards for gender-affirming care. Its reporting has been used by conservative politicians to justify new laws targeting trans youth, and it has published pearl-clutching columns worrying that gender-inclusive language amounts to the erasure of women or that giving children more latitude to express their gender undoes some of feminism’s gains.
For all of those reasons, GLAAD’s first request of the Times is that it “stop printing biased anti-trans stories” immediately. Instead, one day after the letters went public, the paper published another divisive opinion by Pamela Paul, the columnist who authored both of the takes mentioned above. On Thursday, Paul came out with “In Defense of J.K. Rowling,” an op-ed arguing that criticism of the author — whose definition and understanding of womanhood seems to hinge on biological sex — as transphobic is neither fair nor accurate. Paul doesn’t take the time to analyze the Harry Potter author’s actual comments but nonetheless concludes the following:
Nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic. She is not disputing the existence of gender dysphoria. She has never voiced opposition to allowing people to transition under evidence-based therapeutic and medical care. She is not denying transgender people equal pay or housing. There is no evidence that she is putting trans people “in danger,” as has been claimed, nor is she denying their right to exist.
No, she simply doesn’t seem to believe that trans women really are women — an attitude that denies the validity of their existence. When Rowling flags herself as an ally — when she writes that “trans people need and deserve protection” or “I want trans women to be safe” — she routinely follows up with some form of “but” that draws a thick line between trans women and all other women. That is why some of Rowling’s former fans have branded her a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), and while she dislikes the label, she shares the gender-essentialist view at its core: that womanhood is fixed, intrinsic, and anatomically determined. Rowling has stuck to this line for years, even though doctors and scientists agree that sex assignment and gender are not the same thing.
The first controversy came in December 2019, when Rowling tweeted her support for Maya Forstater, a British researcher whose contract was not renewed when the think tank that employed her found “offensive and exclusionary” language — such as her statement that “men cannot change into women” or “transwomen are male,” to name just a few examples — in her social-media and Slack history.In Rowling’s retelling, this was a case of a woman being “forced” out of her job “for stating that sex is real” — an oversimplification but a telling one. Trans-exclusionary feminism relies on the idea that “sex is a biological fact and is immutable,” as Forstater would put it, and that it determines whether a person is a man or a woman.
Operating on that premise, Rowling has identified menstruation as a hallmark of womanhood, wondering what to call “people who menstruate” in a June 2020 tweet. “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people,” she wrote, “Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” This, too, received pushback: Having a uterus is a prerequisite for getting a period, and while many people in that camp are cisgender women, many others are trans men, nonbinary people, the list goes on. At the same time, lots of cisgender women can’t or don’t get periods for a wide range of biological reasons including menopause, an overactive thyroid, and polycystic ovary syndrome. In response to the criticism of her quip, Rowling reiterated her stance: “If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”
The truth is that sex isn’t the decisive factor in determining identity that Rowling thinks it is. What of people born with XXY chromosomes, androgen insensitivity syndrome, or ambiguous genitalia? But Rowling won’t let it go, and her obsession seems rooted in a misplaced fear — that trans women will harass, assault, even rape “natal girls and women” if they are allowed to use the same protected spaces. In an essay addressing the June 2020 Twitter controversy, “TERF Wars,” Rowling acknowledged that trans people, and particularly trans women, face disproportionate rates of violence. According to a recent study, they are more than four times as likely as cisgender people to experience rape, sexual assault, and aggravated or simple assault — including at the hands of a partner. But, Rowling wrote, “When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman — and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones — then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.” It’s not, though. There’s no evidence to suggest that trans people are committing crimes in bathrooms.
Every time she starts talking about trans issues, Rowling seems to resurfaceanotherdamaging and debunked misconception. She has claimed, erroneously, that youths who transition often “grow out of their dysphoria” and regret their decision — an attitude that is, right now, guiding Republicans as they restrict access to gender-affirming care for minors. She has speculated that hormone therapy is just “a new kind of conversion therapy for young gay people.” In that sense, beliefs like Rowling’s are dangerous — particularly when they’re peddled by a figure with her level of reach and influence.
Paul and Rowling are both cisgender women — a status for which neither is under attack (I say all of this as a cisgender woman myself), but which naturally means they can’t speak with authority on what it means to be a transgender woman. Yet when Rowling’strans readers say, “What you said hurt me and here’s why,” she seems to skip over introspection and springs to self-defense. Everyone is entitled to their opinions, yes, but opinions can be offensive too. They can be bigoted. They can be factually unsupported. They can be damaging. They can do harm — intentionally or not. That’s something Paul and the Times don’t seem to grasp.
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Related
- What Did J.K. Rowling Say This Time?
- J.K. Rowling Triples Down on Transphobia
- Who Did J.K. Rowling Become?
February 29th 2024
Feminism is Beyond Reasoned Argiment. It Is Sanctified State Approved Bigotry & Prejudice – R.J Cook
‘I was hounded out of Oxfam over JK Rowling’ A former employee reveals how she was silenced – “If you are a woman, you will always be a target” ( J.K Rowling )
Julie Bindel
June 6, 2023 7 mins
It’s hard to imagine a more agreeable place to work than a charity bookshop. Staffed by civic-minded volunteers, the shelves groan with musty old paperbacks, lovingly donated in the hope they’ll find a new home and also raise money for good causes.
For Maria, the chance to work for one of Oxfam’s global outreach programmes, helping to end violence against women in the workplace, was a dream come true. And for a few years, it was — right up until the moment a fellow co-worker asked on an internal messageboard if Oxfam shops should ban the sale of J.K. Rowling’s books.
Three years ago, the Harry Potter author found herself accused of transphobia for having supported women who have “concerns around single-sex spaces”. During a discussion on Oxfam’s intranet, Maria had come to the defence of Britain’s most popular living author, asking for evidence of Rowling’s supposed transphobia. It was a decision that prompted a gruelling internal investigation, one in which Maria struggled to clear her name, led to her having a nervous breakdown and leaving both her job and the country.
Oxfam eventually offered a grovelling apology for the “procedural mistakes” that caused Maria such upset, but she is still struggling to make sense of it all. Speaking for the first time about the episode, she reveals: “My life has been torn apart. It drove me to a breakdown, I lost my confidence and, worst of all, I began to doubt myself.”
What Maria endured is part of a wider woke culture in the charitable sector, where female employees are silenced and treated like bigots for believing that sex-based rights matter. Certainly, Maria is so convinced that her career remains in danger — that any woman accused of transphobia will be blacklisted by much of the charitable sector, even when they have been exonerated — that she has agreed to speak to UnHerd under a pseudonym. “This will hang over me for the rest of my life,” she says. For decades, Oxfam — which was formed in 1942 to send food supplies to starving mothers and children in Nazi-occupied Greece — was one of the UK’s most respected charities, providing international aid to end hardship around the globe. But in recent years, its reputation has been tarnished. In 2018, evidence emerged that senior staff had paid survivors of the 2010 Haiti earthquake for sex, and that the use of prostitutes during the relief effort was covered up by the charity, allegations that Oxfam denies.
It was Maria’s concern for vulnerable women that first drew her to work for Oxfam: “I have experienced rape and domestic violence in the past, so I wanted to help others in the same situation.” Born in Spain, where she had worked as a pre-school teacher and volunteered at a sexual assault centre, she moved to the UK in 2017.
‘I will never call my rapist father a woman’
“I loved my job,” says Maria, “being able to see how Oxfam’s work improves the lives of other women and children.” Three years after joining the charity, she was promoted to a co-ordinating role within the women’s rights team, whose remit was to ensure that female equality was reflected in Oxfam’s work.
She realised almost immediately how impossible that aim would be, given the growing dominance of a pro-trans mindset within Oxfam. Along with many other charities and institutions, it had capitulated to gender-based ideals, ones that asserts that “trans women are women” and that the categories of male and female are on a spectrum, rather than biological realities. On the advice of Stonewall — the discredited charity whose workplace diversity scheme sought to “recognise and celebrate the efforts of leading employers to advance LGBT inclusion” — Oxfam advised its employees to state their pronouns in meetings and on correspondence. “It was regularly using Stonewall materials to advise staff on LGBTQ+ inclusion in the workplace, with a heavy emphasis on transgender ideology above all else.”
Maria says that she initially toed the party line on the matter, staying silent when trans issues were discussed. “But then I began to see how women’s rights were attacked, particularly because it was obvious that single-sex spaces, such as rape crisis centres, were labelled as ‘anti-trans’.”
The Oxford kids are alright
Oxfam staff were invited to join company-wide online groups related to their interests, and Maria joined the LGBTQ+ group. In September 2020, a charity shop manager asked the group: “What is your opinion on selling J.K. Rowling books?” The employee, who is a transwoman, worried that the writer’s latest thriller, Troubled Blood, written under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith, might be “highly transphobic”. She wondered whether it might be covered by Oxfam’s “unsuitable for sale” policy.
Several staff engaged with the forum thread, widening the debate to include Rowling’s suitability as an Oxfam-stocked author, and added their concerns about her supposed transphobia, until Maria asked the question: “Can you explain why she is transphobic or why the book is transphobic?” When her query went unanswered, Maria went on to express concerns about banning books by “one of the most important woman writers in the UK”, before adding: “Actually, we are selling books from paedophiles and rapists. We are selling religious books. Stopping selling something we don’t like is called censorship and is the opposite of freedom of speech.”
The manager then left the conversation, and Maria thought that was the end of the matter. “She had said she was uncomfortable with the conversation and did not want to discuss it any further.” But following the exchange, Maria discovered she had been labelled in private chats as a transphobic bigot by other members of the LGBTQ+ group. Another manager sent her private messages, suggesting that Maria could lose her job after posting her comments. “They felt threatening to me,” says Maria. “She said my views were ‘incredible’, and that she would be reporting me. There is absolutely no way I am anti-trans. I am merely pro-women’s rights.”
Why should lesbians sleep with men?
In the next few days, members of the LGBTQ+ group encouraged colleagues to complain about the discussion, stating that “transphobia is not tolerated here”. “They did not name me, but it was obvious who they were referring to,” says Maria. Next, a petition signed by 70 staff members was sent to all staff via the intranet, calling for Oxfam’s leadership to “take a stand” and “communicate a zero-tolerance approach to transphobia”.
Senior management replied to the petition authors, saying: “No one in our organisation should be subjected to hate speech, discrimination or other forms of harm” and “It is of great concern that members of the wider LGBTQIA+ community have felt intimidated by workplace conversations.” Oxfam’s CEO got involved, and gave a “no-debate” steer, adding: “We value the experience of our trans and non-binary colleagues, friends and partners and we do not expect their experience to be debated in our workplace.”
Three days later, Maria was invited to a meeting with her line manager and a member of Human Resources and told that she was under investigation because of her “transphobic comments”. Maria says: “They should have told me what the actual topic of the meeting was, and I could have brought a union representative with me. I apologised for upsetting anyone and tried to outline the rationale for my views and beliefs, but they refused to accept it.” Signed off sick with anxiety and depression, Maria felt alone and scared of losing her job, particularly in the middle of a pandemic. “All my family and relatives were in Spain and the borders were closed.”
Six weeks later, two days before Christmas, Maria learned that she’d been found guilty of misconduct and was issued with a final warning. Oxfam told Maria that her comments online “breached the requirement of the Code of Conduct to treat all persons with respect and dignity”, and reminded her that “transgender people are protected from discrimination under the Equality Act 2010”. The letter did not give a definition of transphobia or say how her posts were transphobic. Refusing to accept that finding, Maria appealed. “As a woman I have always had to fight for everything,” she says. “I knew that if they beat me then they were trampling on all of us.”
JK Rowling and the lunch of secrets
Three months later, Maria was informed she had lost her appeal. The letter informing her of this decision also offered, for the first time, a definition of transphobia (not for want of asking): “Oxfam refers to Stonewall definitions to support our understanding, which states transphobia is the ‘fear or dislike of someone based on the fact they are trans’.” Feeling she was left with no choice but to resign, Maria took Oxfam to an employment tribunal. “I became determined that this should not happen to another woman,” she says.
Maria claimed constructive dismissal and belief discrimination. In July last year, during judicial mediation, both parties agreed to settle, with Oxfam issuing a public apology for its handling of the process. “We believe that each member of our community has a right to their own religious or philosophical beliefs, including the belief that ‘sex is immutable’ and ‘sex is important’. We acknowledge that in dealing with your case and during the disciplinary process we made mistakes. We acknowledged that it was not appropriate to give you a final written warning, and we would like to offer our sincere apologies for the upset that this has caused you.”
Earlier this year, Oxfam updated its language guide, which is an internal document advising staff how to speak about its work. The document includes the instruction that, rather than using the phrases “biological male” and “biological female”, “AMAB and AFAB” (assigned male/female at birth), should be used instead; and when talking about “expectant mothers”, use the phrase “people who become pregnant”.
I was hounded out of school for ‘transphobia’
“I hope every single woman, especially those stronger and richer than me, fight every time this happens within the charity sector,” Maria says. “Oxfam is supposed to be protecting women and girls in the most vulnerable situations all over the world, and this ideology will ruin it.”
In response, an Oxfam spokesperson said: “We are sorry for the procedural mistakes we made in the handling of this case and we have apologised to the individual concerned. We fully support both an individual’s right to hold religious and philosophical beliefs and a person’s right to have their identity respected, regardless of their gender identity and expression, sex, or sexuality. We believe LGBTQIA+ rights are human rights.”
Now back in Spain, Maria has just finished an internship at a refugee camp in Greece, with the aim of a career in humanitarian work. “I lost so many friends,” she tells me. “I lost my job. My mental health suffered. Enforcing the views of the trans lobby, at all costs, seems more important to Oxfam than meeting their actual charitable aims.”
She says she often thinks of the author who changed the course of her life — and believes the way Rowling has been vilified for simply supporting and defending the rights of women who have suffered domestic abuse and rape is proof that misogyny has no limits. “No matter how much money or power you have achieved, if you are a woman, you will always be a target,” says Maria. “I fought my case so that all women know they can fight, and win, against this crazed ideology.”
Julie Bindel is an investigative journalist, author, and feminist campaigner. Her latest book is Feminism for Women: The Real Route to Liberation. She also writes on Substack.bindelj
A Review of Research on Women’s Use of Violence With Male Intimate Partners
Suzanne C. Swan, PhD, Laura J. Gambone, MA, Jennifer E. Caldwell, MA, Tami P. Sullivan, PhD, and David L. Snow, PhD
Author informationCopyright and License informationPMC Disclaimer
The publisher’s final edited version of this article is available at Violence Vict
Abstract
This article provides a review of research literature on women who use violence with intimate partners. The central purpose is to inform service providers in the military and civilian communities who work with domestically violent women. The major points of this review are as follows: (a) women’s violence usually occurs in the context of violence against them by their male partners; (b) in general, women and men perpetrate equivalent levels of physical and psychological aggression, but evidence suggests that men perpetrate sexual abuse, coercive control, and stalking more frequently than women and that women also are much more frequently injured during domestic violence incidents; (c) women and men are equally likely to initiate physical violence in relationships involving less serious “situational couple violence,” and in relationships in which serious and very violent “intimate terrorism” occurs, men are much more likely to be perpetrators and women victims; (d) women’s physical violence is more likely than men’s violence to be motivated by self-defense and fear, whereas men’s physical violence is more likely than women’s to be driven by control motives; (e) studies of couples in mutually violent relationships find more negative effects for women than for men; and (f ) because of the many differences in behaviors and motivations between women’s and men’s violence, interventions based on male models of partner violence are likely not effective for many women.
Keywords: women’s violence, women’s aggression, partner abuse, domestic violence
How you gonna love me, hurt me, and abuse me at the same time? You can’t love me and abuse me.1
A sizable minority of individuals arrested for domestic violence each year in the United States is female (Miller, 2005). For example, a study conducted in Tennessee found that 16% of those arrested for intimate partner violence were female (Feder & Henning, 2005); in Concord, New Hampshire, women comprised 35% of those arrested (Miller, 2005). Many of these women are court-mandated to receive services, such as a batterer intervention program or anger management program (Miller, 2005). The military also provides services for a large number of women identified as committing physical abuse against a spouse. One study of 2,991 Air Force personnel who committed physical abuse against a spouse found that 23% of the offenders were female (Brewster, Milner, Mollerstrom, Saha, & Harris, 2002). Another study of reports of spouse abuse in the Army Central Registry from 1989 to 1997 found that 33% of persons identified as domestic violence offenders were women (McCarroll et al., 1999).
IMPLICATIONS FOR SERVICE PROVIDERS
The literature review and the data presented here provide important information for individuals providing services and interventions to women who are violent toward intimate partners. To a great extent, women who are violent are also victims of violence from their male partners. In addition, women are more likely than men to be injured during domestic violence incidents and to suffer more severe injuries. Thus, safety issues are paramount for women who are domestically violent.
In some cases, women may be perpetrating as much or more physical violence as their partners, but their partners may be committing other types of abuse that are not always assessed, such as sexual abuse or coercive control. We recommend that service providers assess not just physical violence but all types of abuse that the woman has perpetrated and that her partner may have perpetrated against her. Such an assessment may reveal, for example, that a woman’s physical violence is in response to her partner’s attempts to coercively control her. In this case, interventions to promote behavioral change in both partners would be necessary for the abuse to stop.
Because of the many differences in behaviors and motivations between men’s and women’s violence, as discussed here, interventions based on models of male violence against women may not be effective for many women (Feder & Henning, 2005; Hamberger, 2005; Kernsmith, 2005). Gender-specific interventions tailored to the needs of women who are violent are more likely to be successful in creating behavior change.
Read More https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2968709/
February 28th 2024
It Can Only Get Worse – by R J Cook
Fantasy writer turned Crime Writer J K Rowking has an interesting obsession with transsexuals. She is back again, jumping at the chance of portraying all transsexuals as perverts, rapists and murderers. So out she comes with the line that Scarlet Blake’s vile crimes are ‘not our crimes.’ By this she means they are not the sort of crimes a cis female would commit – but all men could. There are too many examples to the contrary to list against this same old Rowling precious bigotry. Suffice it to say that the terrible murder of trans teenager Brianna Ghey is testament to the evil that teen female Scarlett Jenkinson proved capable of.
It is implicit in Rowling’s latest attack on us trans people that all of us are implicated in the case of the Scarlet Blake atrocities. It is also implicit that Rowling sees women as all part of a benign blob at the mercy of a blob of evil violent men. It also appears to be the case that Rowling seems oblivious of the fact that Blake is a member of an ethnic minority. This is because to say so would be the sort of hate crime Rowling needs to avoid. But hate crimes, like the one her attitude spreads and threatens genuine trans females, had much to do with Blake organising and helping to execute in the grotesque murder of young Brianna, are acceptable. The moronic masses with a worthless excuse for identity are vulnerable to the media amplified pronouncements of the person who gave the world ‘Harry Potter.’
Nor does Rowling wish to confront the reality that Scarlet Blake has had no bona fide expert assessment or transsexual treatment. Thus, Blake has unfettered male genitals and the testosterone to go with it. Theresa May and her Scottish PM, Nicola Sturgeon, counterpart trivialised sex change by making it a matter of self identification – effectively defining a delusional state of mind. This suits bigots like Rowling. The success of her dreadful stereotypical violence filled Potter books is testament to the nation and wider western world’s poor literary tastes. Rowling’s crime books also pander to her prejudice where a trans man in women’s clothes makes a perfect suspect. It is very odd that she produces this pulp fiction using a man’s name, Robert Galbraith.
The common element in this tale of the two killer Scarletts is that they are both tales derived from the feral world of feral film and the Dark Net. People like bourgeois Rowling and the TERFS have been laying down the laws of feminism for too long. They feed into an elite run top down system that has brainwashed women into even abandoning or shutting away their sons for careers ( sic ) feeding oversize egos way beyond their brain power and potential. All they see and hear around them has to be shrunk down to fit the lack of space inside their heads. These women date and partner with trophy airheaded men, so desperate that they carry on where their daddies left off, pandering to and making them worse. When women tire of these imbeciles, they make excuses for themselves labelling all men as being the same. In this nightmare world we plunge toward World War Three, our leaders more concerned with the Royal Family’s health scares, policing language and defining laws of social contact in broken societies than what has really gone wrong and why it can only get worse.
J.K Rowling is asserting that all transsexuals must be seen as owning the perverted crimes of Scarlet Blake. Genuine transsexuals are a major threat, cause of offence and competition for the cis woman feninist blob, where they are more than equal and never responsible for their mistakes. Rowling wants all transsexuals identified and collectively punished. She defines all that is wrong with feminism, its bigotry and institutionalised intolerance that did so much to inform the killers of Brianna Ghey. They are not just above the law, they are the law..
R J Cook
JK Rowling criticises Sky News for referring to cat killer as woman: ‘I’m so sick of this’
‘This is not a woman. These are #NotOurCrimes’ she wrote before facing online backlash
Four months before the killing Blake live-streamed killing a cat and putting it in a blender having been inspired by the hit Netflix series ‘Don’t F*** with Cats’
BMW worker Mr Carreno (pictured) had been on a night out when he was approached by Blake
Netflix true crime documentary Don’t F*** with Cats tells the story of how Luka Magnotta, who killed kittens before murdering a student, was brought to justice
Blake had admitted dissecting the animal, removing the fur and skin and placing it in a blender but blames her former partner Ashlynn Bell, pictured
TRENDING
JK Rowling hits out at cat killer being classed as a woman1.9k
The victim’s family sat through hours of distressing evidence as prosecutors described how Blake smashed Carreno over the head with a vodka bottle rendering his helpless and then strangled him.
After the guilty verdict, Jorge’s devastated family who had travelled from Spain to attend the trial paid tribute to ‘beloved son and brother’.
Sick picture captures moment trans killer puts cat in a blender before carrying out twisted murder which bares harrowing similarities to Luka Magnotta’s real-life crime
A sick picture captures transgender killer Scarlet Blake relishing the moment she puts a cat in a blender before carrying out a twisted murder in a chilling echo of a Netflix true crime documentary.
Blake, 26, live-streamed the killing and dissection of a cat four months before she targeted Jorge Martin Carreno, 30, as he walked home from a night out in Oxford in July 2021.
She had admitted dissecting the animal, removing the fur and skin and placing it in a blender but blames her former partner Ashlynn Bell.
The court previously heard Blake had an ‘extreme interest in death and in harm’ and killed the family pet after watching a Netflix documentary called Don’t F*** With Cats: Hunting An Internet Killer.
In the programme a man, Luka Magnotta, kills kittens before filming a murder.
Prosecutors had alleged the cat killing was relevant to the murder trial as it shows Blake has a ‘disturbing interest in what it would be like to harm a living creature’.
Blake deliberately set out to kill after previously revelling in the slaughter and dissection of a neighbour’s cat.
While her death obsessed partner Bell watched from her home in the US, Blake live streamed cutting up the cat while it was still alive.
A vet determined it would have been in extreme pain until its heart was ripped out.
Police would later find the heart in a trinket box that Blake kept as a souvenir.
It was only after Blake’s arrest in August 2023 they discovered the cat killing video and her fetish for strangulation and they launched Operation Ingmar.
They said: ‘The loss of Jorge has left an open wound in the heart of his family but also in all those who had the pleasure of knowing him.
‘This loss feels like a traumatic, devastating blow, leaving a void impossible to fill. Going through the pain of losing a son, a brother, under such tragic and unjustified circumstances, is a trial no family should face.
‘Today his absence leaves a deep wound in our hearts.’
Dressed in a black suit and flanked by two prison guards she stared ahead from the dock and did not look at the jury.
Her mother Chen, who seated a few feet away, showed no emotion as her daughter was found guilty.
Judge Martin Chamberlain told Blake she will be sentenced Blake on Monday.
The judge thanked the jury and said they wanted to seek help over the distressing evidence they had heard during the trial they should do so.
Blake had admitted dissecting the animal, removing the fur and skin and placing it in a blender but blames her former partner Ashlynn Bell.
The court previously heard Blake had an ‘extreme interest in death and in harm’ and killed the family pet after watching a Netflix documentary called Don’t F*** With Cats: Hunting An Internet Killer. In the programme a man, Luka Magnotta, kills kittens before filming a murder.
His body was pushed into the River Cherwell where he drowned.
Prosecutors said Blake had deliberately set out to kill after previously revelling in the slaughter and dissection of a neighbour’s cat.
While her death obsessed partner Bell watched from her home in the US, Blake live streamed cutting up the cat while it was still alive.
A vet determined it would have been in extreme pain until its heart was ripped out. Police would later find the heart in a trinket box that Blake kept as a souvenir.
Jurors have also seen videos of the defendant and her partner engaging in consensual strangulation with ligatures.
Prosecutors had alleged the cat killing was relevant to the murder trial as it shows Blake has a ‘disturbing interest in what it would be like to harm a living creature’.
Mr Martin Carreno, who is from Spain and worked for BMW at their Cowley plant, had been on a night out with work colleagues in Oxford city centre before he died.
He had been out drinking with friends to celebrate the lifting of Covid lockdown restrictions in July 2021.
Unfamiliar with the streets of Oxford and separated from his friends, Blake came across him sitting on a bench around 4am.
CCTV shows Blake – wearing a heavy-duty coat, face mask and carrying a backpack – walking around the city centre before approaching Mr Martin Carreno, who was sat down.
The sixth form school dropout persuaded Mr Carreno to follow her to isolated beauty spot Parsons Pleasure overlooking the River Cherwell. CCTV captured Carreno as he was led to his death but there were no cameras at the riverbank where he met his death.
Blake had claimed Mr Carreno was alive when she left him there to walk home.
His body was found by dog walkers two days later with a postmortem showing signs of blunt force trauma to the head and strangulation.
Police believe Blake would have got away with the sadistic murder had she not later had a bitter falling out with Bell
Prosecutors say Scarlet Blake, 25, was searching the streets of Oxford looking for someone to kill, and found Jorge Martin Carreno, 30, who was unable to find his way home
The footage shows Mr Carreno, a Spanish national, trying to find his way home, and not realising he has dropped his wallet
Eventually Mr Carreno is seen sitting down in Radcliffe Square, where Blake later finds him and shares her vodka with him
Blake even took trophy photos at the spot where she killed the 30-year-old BMW engineer – and sent them to her partner Ashlynn Bell (pictured)
Despite being the tipping point in the case by identifying the murder – potentially crucial witness Bell – who herself was obsessed with guns and death – told police that she was too mentally damaged to give evidence in court Read in full: Family pay tribute to ‘beloved brother and son’ Jorge Carreno and say their devastating loss has ‘left an open wound in the heart’ of all who knew him
‘We as a family, wish to pay tribute to Jorge, our beloved son and brother, an extraordinary being full of passion and kindness.
Jorge was not only an exemplary child but also an exceptional being. He was distinguished by his incredible affection, friendliness, and his ability to give himself fully to others.
Jorge’s innate curiosity and creativity drove him to explore, learn, and experiment tirelessly. He studied electrical engineering, where his dedication and passion were evident in every project he undertook, manifesting in a deep commitment to innovation.
He dreamed of a future where he could make a difference with his skills and ambitions, aspiring to create and build a better world.
His life was imbued with love for music, photography, reading, and sports. He played the guitar skilfully and radiated kindness and humour among all those lucky enough to have known him.
Being a triplet brother, Jorge shared not only blood ties with his brothers but was also their best friend. His friends adored him.
He had an affable heart and sense of humour that filled every space with laughter and complicity. Jorge, with his caring and friendly nature, lit up any place, always spreading joy with his wit and contagious curiosity.
With a great sense of humour, his immense desire to live and enjoy life made him a special being.
Always ready to help and listen to others; he was above all, an incredibly good person. The loss of Jorge has left an open wound in the heart of his family but also in all those who had the pleasure of knowing him.
This loss feels like a traumatic, devastating blow, leaving a void impossible to fill.
Going through the pain of losing a son, a brother, under such tragic and unjustified circumstances, is a trial no family should face. Today his absence leaves a deep wound in our hearts. His life was stolen, cutting short his projects and dreams.
This tribute is a reminder of Jorge but also a call to justice. There can be no peace until justice is served.
We ask not only for justice for him but also for protection to prevent other people, other families, from suffering the immense pain caused by such cruel and senseless murders.
We extend our heartfelt thanks for the incredible support from family, friends, the police, and our lawyers during this tough time.
Your kindness, support and solidarity have been a guiding light in the pursuit of justice for Jorge, providing hope and showing immense respect to our family.
To those who offered comfort and helped honour Jorge’s memory, your generosity is deeply appreciated. Thank you for advocating for Jorge and standing with us.
May this inexplicable loss drive us to fight for a world where justice prevails and where we can build a safer future for everyone.
Every day, we will remember Jorge, his laughter, his joy, his zest for life, and all those unforgettable moments we shared.
hank you for being part of this family; we feel fortunate to have had you in our lives. Thank you for teaching us to live with heart and soul. Jorge, you will always be present in our hearts.’
His death remained unsolved for almost two years until police received a call from Ashlynn Bell who revealed she had a ‘murder confession’ from Blake.
She also produced a combat jacket worn by Blake on the night of the killing and captured on CCTV.
Despite her evidence being crucial she was never called as a witness due to ‘serious mental issues’.
Blake admitted to making the confession after giving evidence in her own defence and claimed it was all made up to please Bell, a gun and death obsessed transexual.
She said they had talked about what it was like to kill someone and had wanted to impress Bell.
But following a falling out at Bell’s Colorado home she contacted police who flew to the US to take her statement.
She said they had talked about what it was like to kill someone and had wanted to impress Bell.
It was only after her arrest in August 2023 they discovered the cat killing video and her fetish for strangulation and they launched Operation Ingmar.
Prosecutors were worried that her appearance – and obsession withe guns and death – would derail their case.
The defendant told jurors she had falsely confessed to murdering Mr Martin Carreno because Miss Bell, who lives in the US, had wanted her to kill a person after the cat incident.
Referring to the alleged confession, Blake told the jury she had seen news reports of the body being found and created a fictitious story.
‘I told Ashlynn that I killed that person, I made up the details in a dramatic way,’ she said.
‘I told her I used a garotte that I made to try and remove the person’s head but it was more difficult than I would have imagined and then I dumped the body in the river which is what they are now pulling out.’
Blake has been on remand since her arrest last August and been held in a male prison -despite identifying as female as she had not undergone surgery to remove her male genitals.
Blake’s mother Chen, a medical researcher, attended every day of her daughter’s trial but declined to comment.
After the guilty verdict, senior investigating officer Detective Superintendent Jon Capps said: ‘Today’s verdict marks the end of a long and complex investigation.
‘I know that many will want to focus on the actions and behaviour of this defendant.
‘There are several aspects of this case that have been truly disturbing to see, hear and deal with.
‘This defendant showed calculated cruelty. The acts Blake has been convicted of are barbaric and chilling. The murder was premeditated with total disregard and distain for life.
‘Thankfully crimes such as these are incredibly rare.
‘I want rather to focus on Jorge and his family and pay tribute to them and the enormous dignity they have shown throughout this ordeal.
He continued: ‘Jorge was enjoying a night out with friends and had his life in front of him.
‘He had made plans, he was happy and in the words of his friend, ‘ready to enjoy every single drop of his life’. That has been taken away from him.’
‘He clearly meant so much to so many. It is Jorge’s life that will be remembered over and above the actions of this defendant.’
‘Whilst our investigation can never ease the pain felt by the family, I hope that this outcome at least gives a sense of justice and has given a voice to Jorge, whose life will forever be remembered by all those he meant so much to.’
The police investigation will feature in a documentary later this year called ‘Catching a Killer.’
Alison Morgan KC, prosecuting, told the jury: ‘He died because he encountered the defendant on that night’
Prosecutors say Blake had a fetish for strangulation and was obsessed with violence and death. Jurors were previously shown a collage of nine female killers that was saved by Blake
J.K. Rowling lashes out at media outlet for not ID’ing killer as transgender: ‘This is not a woman’
The “Harry Potter” author, long called out by the trans community and allies, posted that she was “so sick of this s—” after a transgender woman sentenced for murder was referred to as a woman.
J.K. Rowling is once again voicing her controversial opinions on the transgender community, hitting back at a gruesome Sky News report that identifies a murderer who is trans as a woman.
“I’m so sick of this shit,” Rowling wrote alongside a news report about Scarlet Blake, a transgender woman found guilty of the murder of a man four months after she filmed herself torturing a cat and putting the animal in a blender. “This is not a woman. These are #NotOurCrimes.”
Rowling also shared a post by The Guardian writer Louise Tickle, who called out her own publication for not identifying Blake as a transgender woman in its trial coverage. The Harry Potter author added in a follow-up: “1. Crime statistics are rendered useless if violent and sexual attacks committed by men are recorded as female crimes. 2. Activists are already clamouring for this sadistic killer to be incarcerated in a women’s prison. 3. Ideologically-driven misinformation is not journalism.”
Rowling first courted controversy for stances that have been widely perceived as transphobic in 2020, when she tweeted, among other comments, that “if sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased.” She claimed early last year in a podcast interview that her remarks have been “profoundly” “misunderstood” and that she had little concern over a tarnished legacy.
“You know, what a pompous way to live your life walking around thinking, ‘What will my legacy be?’ Whatever, I’ll be dead,” Rowling said. “I care about now. I care about the living.”
Rowling’s comments over the years have been condemned by notable Harry Potter actors, including Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, and Eddie Redmayne, while Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes have come to her defense. While much of the Potter fandom have shunned the author, Warner Bros. retained Rowling as executive producer for the upcoming Harry Potter TV series.
Casey Bloys, chairman and CEO of HBO and Max content, evaded questions about the controversy at a press presentation early last year. “That’s a very online conversation, very nuanced and complicated and not something we’re going to get into,” Bloys said. “Our priority is what’s on the screen. Obviously, the Harry Potter story is incredibly affirmative and positive and about love and self-acceptance. That’s our priority — what’s on screen.”
February 27th 2024
Horse trainer ‘killed husband while on the phone to her
A hypnotist horse trainer fatally stabbed her husband in the back “in a fit of temper” and left the knife in him as he followed her through the fields of their North Devon home, a murder trial has been told.
A hypnotist horse trainer fatally stabbed her husband in the back “in a fit of temper” and left the knife in him as he followed her through the fields of their North Devon home, a murder trial has been told.13 hours ago
The Timeshttps://www.thetimes.co.uk › article › horse-trainer-killed…
Horse trainer ‘stabbed husband to death while on phone call with her daughter’, trial hears
Comment The standard female defence here is that the man killed was a long term domestic and sex abuser. Feminism has an attitude thar defines legal reponses and so the maw.
R J Cook
February 23rd 2024
Nonbinary student dead following beating by group in Oklahoma high school bathroom
Chase Lawrence
Nonbinary student dead following beating by group in Oklahoma high school bathroom
16-year-old Nex Benedict was cornered by three older female students and suffered severe head injuries, passing away the following day. The attack takes place amid a far-right campaign against LGBTQ students led by the Republican Party.
February 11th 2024
Feminism & Elite Vested Interests Dodging the Truth of White Infertility In the Age Of The Big Police State – a comment on the following.
Feminism is an aggressive cock withering ball breaking dangerous ideology arguing that laws protecting this Nazi style prejudice is a human right. Feminist are led in this crazed white man hating cult by the ‘uni girl’ and ‘me too ‘gender fluid air heads and funded by the super rich parasites like George Soros who whipped up insurrection when Trump won the 2016 Presidential election. They kept this up for Trump’s entire term of office.
Modern white women and the black ones they are forever liberating, are self centred egomaniacs putting careers and power grabbing first. Even if they have them, children are the last things on their mind beyond treating them as status synbols and meal tickets. Women admire and love themselves too much, They are not romantic which is why so many men focus their hopes and illusions on transsexual women like me. I am pleased that old timer sports star big girl Sharon Davies recognises that trans women like me are superior in sport compared to women. Logically the same goes for manual labour. I saw no women labouring alongside me during my days in the then dangerous construction industry. By contrast women were the majority of my teaching colleagues burning with enthusiasm pushing the white man hating feminist and anti racist cause in the classroom.
So it is no wonder so many little boys want to be little girls – all the more so considering how many fathers have been driven out of the marital home onto the streets – assuming they were ever allowed to be there in the first place.
TV after watershed advertising parades adverts for Viagra with cartoon images of sexually frustrated women petulantly demanding the right to marital and partner sex. Reversing the roles placing similarly frustrated men juxtaposed with frigid women in bed with their work laptops .whingeing that their women should take a sex drug cum female viagra ( money is the only viagra that works for modern women ), would elicit feminist Nazi cries of rape. The world does not have to make sense in this horribly sterile feminised world.
Donald Trump’s experience with E J Carroll should warn any man to keep their distance from CIS women.
Song by Bob Dylan
As I was out walking on a corner one day,
I spied an old hobo, in a doorway he lay.
His face was all grounded in the cold sidewalk floor
And I guess he’d been there for the whole night or more.
Only a hobo, but one more is gone
Leavin’ nobody to sing his sad song
Leavin’ nobody to carry him home
Only a hobo, but one more is gone
A blanket of newspaper covered his head,
As the curb was his pillow, the street was his bed.
One look at his face showed the hard road he’d come
And a fistful of coins showed the money he bummed.
Only a hobo, but one more is gone
Leavin’ nobody to sing his sad song
Leavin’ nobody to carry him home
Only a hobo, but one more is gone
Does it take much of a man to see his whole life go down,
To look up on the world from a hole in the ground,
To wait for your future like a horse that’s gone lame,
To lie in the gutter and die with no name?
Only a hobo, but one more is gone
Leavin’ nobody to sing his sad song
Leavin’ nobody to carry him home
Only a hobo, but one more is gone
R J Cook
Is Infertility on the Rise?
June 16th, 2022
Written by Dr. Sara Barton, a board-certified reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist at CCRM Fertility of Colorado
Infertility is defined as being unable to get pregnant after 1 year of unprotected sex if women under 35 years of age, or 6 months in women 35 years and older. There are many reasons why women and couples can experience infertility. Problems with ovulation, fallopian tubes, gynecologic conditions such as endometriosis or fibroids, and concerns with sperm count and sperm quality can all have an effect on fertility.
Lately, it may seem that more and more people are going through infertility or fertility treatments. Turns out, there’s some truth to that. Here, we’ll discuss statistics related to infertility, why infertility may be increasing, and how you can help boost your own fertility.
Is infertility on the rise?
Infertility rates are rising, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). There used to be a worldwide average of 5 children per woman in 1950, but in 2020, that average has fallen to 2 children according to the United Nations. In the United States, about 11% of women and 9% of men of childbearing age have infertility.
Infertility statistics worldwide
The World Health Organization states about 60 to 80 million couples worldwide have infertility.
Southern and Eastern Europe and East Asia have some of the lowest fertility rates, with 1.5 children per woman.
On average, 1 in 4 couples in developing countries experiences infertility. Data indicates that assisted reproductive technology (ART) has increased 5% to 10% annually.
Infertility statistics in the United States
The CDC states in heterosexual women 15 to 49 years who have never given birth, about 19%, experience infertility.
A woman is less likely to experience infertility if she has had at least one birth. About 6% of these married women 15 to 49 years have infertility.
Infertility statistics by sex
About 10% of women ages 15 to 44 in the United States have infertility, but infertility affects men and women close to equally. When broken down, infertility statistics by sex are as follows:
- One-third of couples with infertility have a problem with the man.
- One-third of couples with infertility have a problem with the woman.
- One-third of couples have a mix of both.
Continued Reading: Dr. Aaron Styler discusses how to increase sperm naturally.
Infertility statistics by age
For healthy couples age 30 and younger, 40% to 60% can get pregnant within 3 months of trying. By the time they’re in their 30s however, women’s fertility decreases by half as when they’re in their early 20s.
In fact, by the time a woman is 35, fertility decreases exponentially. This is because women are born with a limited egg supply that starts decreasing even before the first period start and this decrase is very rapid after the mid 30s. Issues of egg quality and problems with the genetic chromosomal makeup of the eggs also become prominent in the 30s and 40s.
Infertility statistics by race and ethnicity
The CDC doesn’t break down infertility data by race. However, data shows non-Hispanic Black married women were more likely to experience infertility than non-Hispanic white married women.
A 2019 study showed African American women ages 33 to 44 are twice as likely to experience infertility compared to Caucasian women in the United States. The study authors noted while infertility rates are decreasing in Caucasian women, they’re increasing in African American women.
Even if states have infertility coverage, care is still used significantly more by non-Hispanic white women who have high socioeconomic and educational status.
Why is infertility on the rise?
There are several reasons why infertility seems to be rising in women and couples.
Couples are having children later
About 13% of couples have trouble getting pregnant when the woman is age 30 and younger. That number increases to 22% when the woman is 30 to 39.
The main reason fertility decreases with age is because the quality of a woman’s eggs declines as she gets older. And, as women are born with all the eggs they will ever have, older women have fewer eggs. The natural aging process also means higher chances of miscarriage and having a child with a genetic condition.
The concern isn’t only with women, as aging can also affect men’s fertility, according to the CDC. There can be more challenges in achieving pregnancy if the male partner is over age 40. Research also shows declining sperm quality in men over age 40 can contribute to having a child with a genetic abnormality.
Our environment affects our fertility
In men, exposing the genitals to prolonged heat such as frequent saunas and hot tubs can affect short-term sperm production. Radiation exposure can also affect fertility for men and women.
In men, certain medications can have a negative effect on fertility, including:
- Bicalutamide
- Cimetidine
- Cyproterone
- Flutamide
- Ketoconazole
- Spironolactone
- Finasteride
Various toxins in the environment can also affect both male and female fertility. These toxins can include:
- Pesticides
- Mercury
- Lead
- Cadmium
- Bisphenol A
- Flame retardants
- Phthalates
Lifestyle factors can affect fertility
There are factors in day-to-day life that can have an impact on fertility, including:
- Smoking: Smoking tobacco can damage sperm, affect reproductive hormones, and make it more difficult to get pregnant.
- Alcohol use: Alcohol has an effect on both men’s and women’s fertility. For women, since no amount of alcohol is considered safe in pregnancy, it’s recommended to moderate alcohol use when trying to conceive.
- Weight fluctuations: Too much exercise and extreme weight loss can cause a condition known as functional hypothalamic amenorrhea (FHA) where a woman can stop menstruating, or having their period. A high BMI can lead to problems with ovulation and irregular periods.
- Stress: High levels of stress may lead to irregular or absent periods.
Continued Reading: Learn 8 ways to increase your optimal fertility.
Lifestyle factors can be controlled, and once modifications have been made, many people are able to become pregnant. Quitting smoking, limiting alcohol, maintaining a healthy weight, and managing stress can all help move couples towards better fertility health.
If you have concerns about getting pregnant, don’t hesitate to talk with your healthcare provider. While it’s important to be as healthy as possible before you conceive, you don’t need to wait to seek out help and start a conversation with your doctor. Call us today to make an appointment with a CCRM Fertility specialist.
Comment Viagra is a rape drug to cause dangerous invuluntary erections, covered by the feminist wisdom ( sic ) that women have a right to sex whenever they want it and men do not. When anything nasty happens to men, the media and court response is that they asked for it. When it happens to women, they are automatically counted as truth telling victims.
We live in a world where sensitive men progressively choose the gay or transgender options. The latter is particularly disturbing to women, feminsists in partucular , like patronising J K Rowling – with their TERF wisdom that transsexuals are actually transvestites disguising themselves to get into female public toilets to rape them.
The reality of rape statistics is that for racial harmony, ethnic minority men & immigrants must not be counted openly. In otherwise cases rape has been redefined to include any form of inappropriate male to female contact. This is underpinned by the legal attitude of guilty until proven guilty.
Viagra is make up to hide the horrible and dangerous sexual reality and how dangerous it is for men. Laws against misogyny are crucial in reinforcing this liberal left bigotry.
R J Cook
Mr Ford said: “Whilst deeply serious and tragic, we say this is a simple case. She lost her temper, had an argument with her boyfriend when they were in drink, in a motorcar. Things became fraught, he got out, kicked a door, and she lost her cool and used the car as a weapon.”4 Dec 2023
4 Dec 2023 — A WOMAN used her car as a “weapon” to run over and kill her boyfriend after they rowed at a party, a court heard.
Sally Challen on years of abuse that led to killing of her husband
The mother of two who killed her abusive husband admits she regrets his death and says she is sorry for what happened.
28 Jun 2023 — Penelope Jackson was convicted of murdering David Jackson but claimed she lost control following years of physical and emotional abuse at …
29 Oct 2021 — A woman who stabbed her husband to death, claiming she “lost control” after he subjected her to years of abuse, has been jailed for life ..
February 8th 2024
It would be simplistic to blame a series of apparently transphobic statements in him being a devout Hindu. However this religion has complex ideas on this and on homosexuality. While their concept of the third gender includes a few different groups in South Asia, the most common are the hijras. Hijras are often born male but look and dress in traditionally feminine ways. Many, but not all, choose to undergo a castration ceremony, removing their male genitalia as an offering to Hindu goddess Bahuchara Mata.
R J Cook
Female killiers know how to lie and know how to cry. Metro February 7th 2024
How I became a target in the gender-critical civil war
A small faction of activists won’t tolerate dissent
BY Andrew Doyle
A few nights ago, I attended a gathering at which friends and acquaintances were encouraged to mingle and chat. At one point I found myself discussing the films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz with a gentleman in advanced middle-age. I pointed out that I was very fond of Cleopatra and Sleuth, and that either one or the other should probably be seen as his best work. Almost immediately, my companion screamed: “Fuck you, his best film is All About Eve. You’re a brainless cunt and you should be killed.”
Of course, this didn’t actually happen, because people don’t talk like that in real life. Many do, however, engage in this way on social media, typically towards total strangers. This week I’ve been trending on X (or Twitter, as I stubbornly still call it) following a mass pile-on instigated by several gender-critical activists. This particular bombardment resulted in my decision to temporarily deactivate my Twitter account, to the glee of my critics and transactivists alike.
Having since been contacted by friends within the gender-critical movement, I have learned that many of them are exasperated by the “intolerant elements” within their community who seek to destroy anyone who does not conform to every single aspect of their worldview, even if it means that the cause is fatally undermined. They describe a “civil war” being waged by a small but intimidating minority who maintain that any slight point of disagreement is a form of heresy, that language has the capacity to shape reality, and that those found guilty of wrongspeak ought to be publicly shamed and alienated. Remind you of anyone?
This civil war within the gender-critical movement is, of course, a boon to the high priests of gender identity, those authoritarians who have been conducting a frighteningly effective campaign to reorganise society around the metaphysical belief that “gender” should take priority over sex when it comes to spaces, sports and human rights. Given that the stakes are so high, not least for women, children, and gay people, it might be worth considering what this in-fighting is all about and how it might be avoided in the future. In order to do this, I should first explain the background to this week’s furore.
I host a weekly show on GB News called Free Speech Nation, which explores all aspects of the culture wars and has a particular emphasis on the ongoing attacks on women’s rights in the name of “progress”. Even before last Sunday’s show had aired, I was contacted by regular viewers who had taken issue with me for inviting the trans writer and teacher Debbie Hayton to appear for an interview. As an admitted autogynephile — a heterosexual man who presents as a woman out of an erotic attraction to himself — Hayton is something of a hate figure for many in the movement. By conducting this interview, I was deemed guilty of “enabling” and “promoting perversion”, in spite of Hayton’s gender-critical beliefs.
Twenty years a Terf
Further context is required here. The day before my show, a profile appeared in The Times in which the interviewer, Janice Turner, referred to Hayton with female pronouns. Turner clarified her reasoning in a tweet: “The issue of pronouns is becoming absolutist on BOTH sides. Stonewall demands even bearded rapists be called “she”, GC ultras refuse to call any trans woman “she”. I reject both positions. I never call male sex offenders she/her. But I will be courteous to those who respect women.”
For many, the issue of pronouns has become a red line in the gender wars, and Turner’s efforts at compromise are seen not only as wrongheaded, but traitorous. It is widely held that trans-identifying individuals must never be described as anything other than their true biological sex, and cries of “hold the line” are often heard. Not only are the likes of Turner demonised for attempting to find a middle ground, but they are also told that they have been “groomed” by the men who are insisting that other people’s language must be modified in deference to their sense of self.
This tactic, of suggesting that an opposing view is the result of a delusion, is common to all ideological movements. Marxist theorists have often dismissed unbelievers as suffering from “false consciousness”. Similarly, many transactivists insist that those of us who believe that sex is immutable have been “radicalised online”. Yet this is also the identical approach of those gender-critical campaigners who deny the individual agency of their comrades and claim they are the victims of “grooming”. I suppose it is easier to explain away disagreement as the product of some collective fantasy rather than accept that not everyone thinks the same way as you.
The inevitable firestorm following Turner’s piece provided the backdrop to my own interview with Hayton on Sunday night. Initial feedback was cordial and productive: many feminists were pleased that I had listened to their concerns and asked questions about the use of toilets, single-sex spaces, and a schools guidance policy that Hayton had co-authored for the teachers’ union NASUWT in 2017. There were also many critical comments, which I welcomed and took seriously.
The first signs of trouble occurred when one of my critics began repeatedly railing against “the gays” in her posts. She complained that I had used the pronoun “her” in relation to Debbie in one of the introductory pieces to camera (as it happens, this was simply because the producer had written it that way in the autocue). I explained that I use pronouns to denote biological sex, and certainly when it comes to reporting on the news, because I do not believe in gender identity. But I also said that when it comes to personal friends who identify as the opposite sex, I have occasionally adopted their preferred pronouns and names. I have done this to avoid needless distress, not to signal that I share their belief-system. It would be like bowing my head for a prayer at a friend’s family meal, even if I didn’t believe in their particular god.
I respect and understand criticisms of this approach. Women are facing the erosion of their spaces and rights, and this is being actuated by gender-identity ideology and the compelled use of pronouns. I have written previously about the need to resist this pressure to conform to pronoun declaration, and I am particularly vexed by the tendency of journalists to describe rapists, paedophiles and other male criminals as “she” or to use nonsensical phrases such as “her penis”.
Inside Britain’s new trans clinics
Therefore, I answered many of my critics by agreeing that my view may be flawed, and that I was open to persuasion regarding their “slippery slope” argument. It was only when multiple anonymous accounts starting branding me a liar, a grifter and a hater of women, and outright telling me to “fuck off” that I realised this was beginning to turn nasty.
One of my traducers claimed that I lacked credibility and integrity because I adhere to “a deranged homophobic, sexist ideology”, even though I have consistently and outspokenly opposed it over many years. This struck me as an absurd overreaction, the kind of “you’re either with us or against us” purity demand that one has come to expect in these tribalistic times.
From there, matters escalated at a dizzying rate. I was repeatedly accused of being a misogynist, something which I find odd, given that over the past few years I have covered the rising threats to women’s rights on my show with a tenacity that has been notably absent in other media outlets. Every week I have invited women to appear, including Helen Joyce, Maya Forstater, Jo Phoenix, Julie Bindel, Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, Milli Hill, Kellie-Jay Keen, Dr Jane Clare Jones, Jo Bartosch, Mara Yamauchi, Holly Lawford-Smith, Sarah Phillimore, Kate Coleman, Rosie Kay, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Sharron Davies. If my critics are correct, and I am indeed a rabid misogynist, surely I at least deserve some credit for going to such elaborate lengths to disguise it?
Many of my detractors took the view that my homosexuality was the issue. One self-declared feminist confessed to being “a raging homophobe” and wrote: “I don’t like gay men anymore. I think most of them are miso[gynist] pieces of shhh [sic] that mock women and platform AGPs”. Another was more direct: “The gays are definitely to blame as well. First off, sticking a penis inside a man’s asshole is unhealthy. If you can’t admit this then you are part of the problem.” Another went with “I hate men in general”, and then clarified her misandry in an oddly specific way: “Gay MEN. Straight MEN. White MEN. Black MEN. All MEN. I don’t discriminate. I view you all with equal amounts of derision”. Then there was an especially malicious attack from law scholar Dr Alessandra Asteriti, who called me a liar and resorted to the defamatory claim that my objective was to “harm women and children”.
Despite the onslaught, I should emphasise that this kind of sociopathic behaviour is far from typical in the gender-critical movement. Yes, there exists a small contingent who despise gay men and seek to bully and harass anyone who takes a different view. But this is most definitely not the norm, and the overwhelming majority of women I have encountered in this fight have been generous, compassionate and incredibly courageous in the face of threats and wholly unfounded accusations of “hate” and “transphobia”. It is only thanks to their hard work that we have seen a recent sea-change in public understanding of the dangers of this ideology.
The forgotten genius of Compton Mackenzie
Naturally, at the time, I found it difficult to distinguish between legitimate criticisms and outright abuse. And once I started becoming defensive, it of course made matters worse. It’s always worth bearing in mind that, in the eye of a Twitter storm, one does not see individuals, but rather an army determined to see you crushed. At that point, nuance becomes impossible.
And while I am fully aware that most of those participating in the pile-on would have been appalled by the excesses of the few, that isn’t much consolation. This had all begun with one woman griping about “the gays” and ended hours later with complete strangers on my timeline discussing why gay men are so vile, invariably misogynistic, and have a tendency towards paedophilia (the most repugnant and common prejudice of them all). By the time someone posted an audio recording of one of my detractors saying that she would enjoy murdering gay men, I was out.
And of course, transactivists noticed the abuse I was receiving and were quick to weaponise the situation. One of them emailed me directly: “I don’t want to say ‘I told you so’ but… ha.” Many have since boasted on social media that the attacks were karma for my stupidity in associating with this brood of reactionaries. They have shared screenshots of the worst tweets and taken this as confirmation of what they have been alleging all along: that the gender-critical movement is a front for far-Right homophobes.
My experiences this week have certainly alerted me to a dark element within gender-critical circles, one that has become a source of considerable concern for many women in the fight. I have retreated from Twitter and instead launched a Substack, in the hope that I may continue these conversations with those who are able to remain civil even while robustly disagreeing. I now understand that serious discussions about this issue are simply not possible on Twitter, and my mental health has to come first.
For all that, gender-critical feminism remains an essential force in protecting our rights in these maddening times. The genuinely bigoted elements of the movement may be aberrations, but they are increasingly being perceived as the norm. If this cannot be rectified, it will prove a disaster not just for women and gay people, but for truth and sanity itself.
February 3rd 2024
Andrew Tate is a symptom, not the problem’: why young men are turning against feminism
Teachers describe a deterioration in behaviour and attitudes that has proved to be fertile terrain for misogynistic influencers
Heather StewartSat 3 Feb 2024 08.00 GMTLast modified on Sat 3 Feb 2024 08.02 GMT
“As soon as I mention feminism, you can feel the shift in the room; they’re shuffling in their seats.” Mike Nicholson holds workshops with teenage boys about the challenges of impending manhood. Standing up for the sisterhood, it seems, is the last thing on their minds.
When Nicholson says he is a feminist himself, “I can see them look at me, like, ‘I used to like you.’”
Once Nicholson, whose programme is called Progressive Masculinity, unpacks the fact that feminism means equal rights and opportunities for women, many of the boys with whom he works are won over.
“A lot of it is bred from misunderstanding and how the word is smeared,” he says.
But he is battling against what he calls a “dominance-based model” of masculinity. “These old-fashioned, regressive ideas are having a renaissance, through your masculinity influencers – your grifters, like Andrew Tate.”
The attitudes of young men came under further scrutiny this week after a survey suggested that 16-29-year-olds are more negative about feminism than men over 60 – and one in five had a positive view of Tate, the self-professed “misogynist” influencer.
Prof Bobby Duffy of Ipsos, which carried out the research for King’s College London’s Policy Institute and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, called this a “new and unusual generational pattern”, as younger cohorts have tended to be more liberal.
Not everyone believes attitudes have altered. Keziah Featherstone, executive headteacher of the Q3 Academy in Tipton, West Midlands, says: “I have not noticed anything significantly change. And I have worked in education for 30 years.” She is more worried about vaping and school absences than a spike in misogyny.
But other teachers, trainers and parents told the Guardian about shifting values and behaviour, against the backdrop of ubiquitous social media.
Anna, a secondary school teacher for 15 years until 2019, says she witnessed “a decline in feminism among young men” over that period – accompanied by an increase in troubling behaviour.
“We interviewed our students talking about the everyday sexism they encountered,” she says. “The upskirting, slut-shaming, predatory behaviour and casual microaggressions. It was horrifying to see how the girls saw it as just another part of life.”
Michael Conroy was also a longtime teacher before he founded the consultancy Men at Work, which runs workshops for teachers and social workers.
He too describes a deterioration in behaviour and attitudes, which he says accompanied the widespread availability of smartphones. “That shifted what we were used to in school. So instead of, like, a dick pic a month, it was five every week. And it wasn’t just year 10, it was year eight.”
Over that time, he says, the educators he works with have described “an obvious harshening of the way boys talk about women; and a growing sense that somehow they must be mistreated and hated because they are boys and men”.
He says Tate’s influence results from being able to channel boys’ powerful feelings – and his message fell on fertile ground among a generation with easy access to pornography.
Conroy says: “He wants to just exploit the naivety and confusion of boys.”
Tate is facing charges in Romania of human trafficking, rape, and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women, which he denies.
His slick videos, often delivered shirtless, cigar in hand, exhort men to work hard to make a lasting impact on the world – and combine that message with attitudes to women that he concedes are misogynist.
Daniel Guinness is the managing director of Beyond Equality, which carries out workshops with boys and men in universities and workplaces, as well as schools, challenging norms about masculinity. He says many feel under pressure because of “internalised expectations” about manhood, which they may feel they cannot fulfil.
He says: “It’s not showing that emotional weakness. It’s also the expectation to always be right. Like you are not able to show that you can fail; that there’s more shame in doing something and making a mistake than there is just sort of sitting it out or dropping out.”
He stresses that many of the men he deals with have positive attitudes to women and feminism, but he says some can feel they are being stereotyped, or blamed for others’ actions.
Guinness cites the Everyone’s Invited website, where young women in the UK shared their experiences of sexual harassment and assault, including in school environments, as part of the wider #MeToo movement.
“There was a collective raising awareness of the violence that women and girls experienced in certain parts of their lives. And the fact that that was being perpetrated by men, and the fact that some of the norms in our society either excused that violence as being just a joke, or part of flirting, or no big deal.
“That message was often heard by many rightwing commentators, but also by young people in schools, as, ‘people think that all men do this’ – rather than, ‘these things are happening, and they’re often being driven by some of these attitudes that men have, and so all men can play a role in fixing that and challenging that’.”
Some parents of boys worry that they are treated less sympathetically than their female peers. “My son is reluctant to go to school due to bullying by a group of girls,” says one woman from Derby, who wants to remain anonymous. “He feels that there is a big power difference in schools, where boys are always punished, not listened to, and not believed.”
Nick Hewlett, the head of St Dunstan’s college, a private sixth form in south London, says: “I think we are pushing boys into a place where they see no option but to take a kind of extreme view.”
He argues that what he calls “sometimes quite innate masculine traits” such as “competitive zeal” and “banter” can be punished in schools, instead of understood and channelled.
Hewlett says: “It’s not about stopping that. It’s about reshaping it. It’s certainly about bringing girls into that conversation, and having boys properly understand the impact of their behaviour, not just on girls but on other boys as well.”
And he echoes Conroy’s warning about the effect of pornography in shaping boys’ expectations. “They get drawn into a world where they look at coercive, controlling pornographic behaviour of boys, of men towards women, and they think that’s natural and normal.”
As for Tate himself, currently awaiting trial, teachers the Guardian spoke to suggested he was less popular than before his arrest, in late 2022. But Nicholson says even if Tate is convicted, there are plenty of alternatives waiting in the “manosphere”.
“There are already three or four influencers jockeying for position if he goes down,” he says. “He’s a symptom, not the problem.”
Mike Nicholson has over seventeen years experience in education as an English teacher and middle leader. Having worked in schools from every Ofsted category he has a wide range of experience across the educational spectrum and early in his career began to develop a reputation for his ability to have an impact on boys and young men deemed ‘difficult’ and ‘challenging’. Recognition of his work with this group led to a nomination for a Pearson National Teaching Award. In 2009 Mike took a sabbatical year to manage an education program called The English Language Improvement Centre in a rural area of Ethiopia, Africa. Whilst the conditions during this time were very challenging it provided Mike with a ‘once in a lifetime’ experience and a chance to change lives by developing the literacy skills of many who had previously been unable or denied the chance to learn.
Over the years Mike became increasingly interested in how our male pupils’ understanding of masculinity played such a pivotal role in their attitudes and behaviours. Researching, developing and piloting an early version of the Progressive Masculinity Program allowed him to see how so many of our young men put on a performance and a mask of what they think it means to be ‘a man’ gleaned from films, games, social media etc. The refined version of the Progressive Masculinity Program is Mike’s effort to give our young men the freedom and confidence to remove this mask and, through open dialogue and practical activities, reconstruct a healthier and more open-minded understanding of what it can mean to be ‘a man’.
June 26, 2023
45: Masculinity, and positive ways of supporting our teenage boys: An interview with Mike Nicholson from Progressive Masculinity
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1882538/13076984-45-masculinity-and-positive-ways-of-supporting-our-teenage-boys-an-interview-with-mike-nicholson-from-progressive-masculinity?client_source=small_player&iframe=true&referrer=https://www.buzzsprout.com/1882538/13076984-45-masculinity-and-positive-ways-of-supporting-our-teenage-boys-an-interview-with-mike-nicholson-from-progressive-masculinity.js?container_id=buzzsprout-player-13076984&player=small
Season 3BoysEmotionCommunication
The term toxic masculinity has been gaining traction, and is often used to talk about the type of masculinity where men use dominance, violence and control to gain power and superiority over others. There’s also been an increase in efforts to educate boys in how to talk more about their feelings. But with the rise of Incels, Andrew Tate, free porn, and pick up artists, you could be forgiven for wondering whether we’re really making progress at all.
So I contacted Mike Nicholson, Director of a programme called Progressive Masculinity. He goes into schools to talk to boys about masculinity. My key aim was to ask him more about how we as parents can better support our boys to develop a healthy style of masculinity.
Mike Nicholson: www.progressivemasculinity.co.uk
Other useful episodes on this topic:
Andrew Tate and the mansophere: 33
Pornography: 13
Teen male friendships and the ‘man box’: 16
Great role model:
Mark Lewis: https://www.marklewis.co.uk/
Novak Djokovic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=867mtHTsaDo
Role models suggested by Mike:
https://www.teenagersuntangled.com/blog/progressive-masculinity-and-great-models-for-our-boys/
Boys in education:
https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_reeves_how_to_solve_the_education_crisis_for_boys_and_men/c?user_email_address=261da4b3403e372197fe941147a78e48
Thanks for listening. Please hit the follow button if you like our podcast, and share it with anyone who might benefit. You can review us on Apple podcasts by going to the show page, scrolling down to the bottom where you can click on a star then you can leave your message.
Our website has a blog, searchable episodes, and ways to contact us:
www.teenagersuntangled.com
Susie is available for a free 15 minute consultation, and has a great blog:
www.amindful-life.co.uk
‘I’m divorcing my husband so I can become a part-time parent – I need a break’
A woman has shared how she is divorcing her husband so she only has to see her children 50 per cent of the time – but wants to know whether she’s doing the right thing
By
Paige FreshwaterContent Editor
- 07:00, 3 Feb 2024
A woman has sparked a debate after revealing she is divorcing her husband so she only has to parent her children 50 per cent of the time. Wanting to know whether she’s in the wrong for wanting to be a ‘part-time parent’, she has taken to social media to ask users for their thoughts.
She simply asked on Reddit: “Am I wrong for divorcing my husband so I can only see our kids 50 per cent of the time?” While some users believe her husband is the problem, not her children, others shared how leaving their partners impacted their overall health and wellbeing.
One user said: “It sounds like you want a divorce because you are miserable in your marriage, not necessarily because you want a break from all the responsibilities. Your husband sounds like a jerk. I would divorce his a*** too. Screw men who think they get a free pass in doing their half in the relationship.”
Another user added: “I don’t blame you for divorcing, however be aware you may end up with them 100% of the time on your own. I left my ex-husband as I gave birth to our third. I have full custody of one and most of the other two. There have been long stretches where I’ve had all three.
Mum and son incest couple go into hiding as police say mother could face 15 years in jail
Kim West told how she has been enjoying “incredible and mind-blowing” sex with son Ben Ford ever since they met in 2014
Kim West told how she has been enjoying “incredible and mind-blowing” sex with son Ben Ford ever since they met in 2014
Incest couple Kim West and Ben Ford have gone into hiding
January 26th 2024
Man without kids sparks outrage after claiming it’s a ‘privilege’ to be a stay-at-home mum
Published 08:16, 26 January 2024 GMT
| Last updated 08:16, 26 January 2024 GMT.png)
Featured Image Credit: SDI Productions/Getty Images / TikTok/@dustinpoynter
A man has sparked outrage after posting a video saying that being a stay at home parent is ‘not a job’, before going on to call it a ‘privilege’.
Now let’s be clear before we continue, looking after a child absolutely is a full-time responsibility, and both the physical and emotional labour is often still overwhelmingly taken on by women.
Not only that, but this work is enormously undervalued and frequently overlooked.
Well, a man named Jared took to TikTok to share his views that being a stay-at-home parent is ‘not a job’.
“Being a stay at home mom is not a job whatsoever, it’s a privilege,” he said in the now-viral clip.
Explaining the controversial view further, he said: ”I was laid off from work for four months, and I had to stay home, and it’s the easiest sh*t I’ve ever done in my life.
”I can do all the daily responsibilities that come with taking care of a house in no time and then other than that all you have to do is watch your kid.”
The TikToker continued: ”And I’m not knocking stay-at-home mothers, I have respect for them, and I honestly think the world needs more of them because it’s good for the kid.”
He then proceeded to try and dig his way towards the Earth’s core, saying: ”You can’t take a nap at a full-time job, you can’t watch TV at a full-time job, you have someone watching your every move at a full-time job demanding that you do what they say.”
The video was stitched by TikToker Dustin Poynter, whose theme consists of him stitching ‘toxic’ behaviour and then commenting while waving a large red flag.
Hitting back at the video, he said: “Look, I don’t have kids either, but I grew up with three siblings, a stay-at-home mother, and a stay-at-home stepmother.
”I witnessed first-hand the stress that comes with maintaining an entire house, Olympic diving across the kitchen to save your child from putting its hand in the garbage disposal 50 times a day, listening to constant screaming and meltdowns.”
He added: ”And most importantly, trying not to cause irrevocable physical and psychological harm to an innocent human being who didn’t ask to be here.”
Needless to say, people were not impressed by the original video.
One replied: “The audacity to think you just ‘watch’ your kids instead of ‘raise’ your kids.”
A second wrote: “Someone leave him alone with at least two kids under 5 for a week and see how he does.”
Another posted: “Other stay at home Mums are having naps?!?! Sign me up I don’t get to do that.”
Topics: News, Parenting, UK News, US News
Kit Roberts
Woman stunned after children admit they resent her for being stay-at-home-mum
Published 16:33, 16 November 2023 GMT
| Last updated 16:33, 16 November 2023 GMT
Featured Image Credit: Maskot/fizkes/Getty Images
There is no questioning that being a parent can bring an awful lot of challenges and a lot of unexpected curveballs your way.
Some are easier to overcome than others, but a few can be pretty heartbreaking and cause a lot of unhappiness.
When your own children express their resentment at your choices, that’s when things can get pretty upsetting for the majority of parents.
The exact issue was discussed on Reddit earlier this year as a stay-at-home mum opened up on what her children’s true feelings were towards her not going to work.
Taking to Reddit, in a post that has since been deleted, the anonymous mum penned: “I NEVER saw this one coming. My adult, grown kids (18-20) say they resent me for being a stay-at-home mum because now I can’t help with their life financially.
“They say things like, ‘You’ve never had a job or gone to school so you don’t understand’, and ‘The least you can do is get a job now to help me’, along with lots of other comments like, ‘You should’ve worked all those years’.”
The mum went on to explain how she sacrificed having a career and continuing her education at university to instead prioritise the ‘safety and well-being’ of her children.
“I thought it was best, and we made it by just fine financially,” she added.
Her children are now adults and she has since felt a bit of criticism from them surrounding the perception of being a stay-at-home mum.
As a result, she said she now feels: “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I wish my choices hadn’t hurt them. That was the total opposite of what I thought I was doing.
“I hope one day they’ll understand.”
The post gained a lot of attention on the parenting subreddit, with many users feeling sorry for the mum following her children’s reaction.
“Entitled is the keyword here. Your children’s comments sound extremely entitled! They also lack gratitude. Were they always this rotten?” one Reddit user wrote.
A second added: “Sounds like something my kid would say. Massive entitlement. Reality is harsh, unfortunately. While I don’t wish pain on anyway, OP’s kid is going through an adjustment to reality.”
While a third remarked: “I don’t understand why they feel entitled or have the expectation that they should have financial support as an adult. That has nothing to do with whether you were a single or dual-income household at all.”
Callum Jones
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