What I want from men to help end gender wars

Angela Mollard (below) is a generally sensible Australian lady not given to feminist extremes but she has been sucked in by some feminist claims.  What she is not loading is that men CANNOT end the gender wars -- because we are not waging them. The war is a one-sided thing being waged on men by feminists.  So only they can end it. 

But they will not.  They seem to need to trace all evils to men and show nil awareness that men can have problems too.  Men are not a monolithic blob. They are infinitely different so treating them as all the same is just bigotry and huge ignorance.  It is as stupid as racism. Some men will treat women well and some will treat women badly.  And most will be somewhere in between

Now that women are a majority of university graduates, it is clear that systematic discrimination against women is at an end.  All that is left are human relationships in their infinite variety



DEAR men,

I’m tired.

I suspect you’re tired. Indeed, we’re all tired of the insidious gender warfare that’s spilt into every sphere of society leaving festering pools of anger, uncertainty and resentment. It’s a year this week since The New York Times published sexual harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein, provoking a global reckoning and the emergence of the #MeToo campaign. Ergo it seems as good a time as any to reflect — not simply on what happens in the hallowed halls of Hollywood — but in our living rooms, bedrooms and workplaces.

The Brett Kavanaugh hearing has catapulted the movement from the silver screen to the Supreme Court but I’m less interested in one man’s alleged mistreatment of women in his ascent to power than I am in the everyday interactions and ideologies that guide who we are and how we relate.

Genuine, lasting societal change will be brought about less by grandstanding and more thorough understanding and so let’s try this: here’s what I want from and for men.
The Brett Kavanaugh hearings have once again highlighted the MeToo movement, but it’s how everyday men and women interact that’s important. Picture: AP

Foremost, I want the toxicity to end. Change and progress are painful but we don’t need to be so polarised. When the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke at the UN the line widely reported was her insistence #MeToo becomes #WeToo. But she said something a minute later that was arguably a more powerful call to arms. In trying to achieve peace, prosperity and fairness, New Zealand was pursuing one concept, she explained. “It is simple and it is this. Kindness.” Imagine what we might achieve if kindness — from both women and men — underpinned the way we operated in the world.

Critically, I want men involved in their children’s lives. Whether in intact or reconfigured families, men should be pivotal. The model of the workaholic dad is rightly dying and while many men need to create fuller identities beyond their job title, women need to stop seeing men as walking wallets who are singularly responsible for financially supporting the family. For every man who rather enjoys upholding the patriarchy as if it was a set of dumbbells representing status and money, I’d venture there’s three or four who’d happily hand over half the weight to a willing partner. We all have much to gain from a creative redrawing of our work and domestic spheres. Work offers purpose and a pay packet, home delivers connection. Sharing the responsibility of both is not only more equitable, it extends both partners’ capabilities and understanding of each other. As for women who deny their former husband access to their children simply because they are hurt or angry, shame on you. It happens too often and it’s a cruelty that benefits no one.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke during the General Debate of the 73rd session of the General Assembly at the United Nations in New York last month. Picture: AFP

Further, I want the powerful men and women at the top of our corporations and institutions to drive transformation. Leadership is not just managing people and making money, it’s leaving a legacy. For too long the decisions have been made by men in suits largely supported by a housewife at home. Yet when men like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian take paternity leave and encourage their employees to do likewise, they effect profound change. People at the top will change conditions at the bottom so that all can benefit from pay parity, flexible workplaces and healthy superannuation balances.

Equally, I want ordinary men to stop claiming women are mad. Emotions are simply another operating system and when combined with a firm grasp of facts bring a fuller and more nuanced comprehension to every realm of life. Too often women are dismissed as menstrual or menopausal. It’s more than 25 years since Anita Hill was smeared as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” but still such debasing presumptions persist. In return, women need to drop the “all men are bastards” schtick and the blasé view that it’s no big deal if a few innocent men are unfairly convicted or besmirched in the march for equality. We also need to stamp out the growing notion that women are inherently more “good” than men. All those years as Stepford wives didn’t turn us into saintly creatures waiting nobly in line until we’re passed the baton to do a better job. Most of us are as equally defective as the next bloke. Which means we’re equally as capable.

As for domestic violence, it is not just causing death and injury to women but a horrendous stain on the male gender. Good men are appalled but they need to do more. In her next book, the feminist author Caitlin Moran is including an invitation to men to join the fight. As she says there’s a huge void where good men feel it’s all a bit “icky” and that feminists don’t want them involved. Men need to ask themselves, “Okay, if not me, who?”

Finally, men and women have to rediscover what we like about each other. We need to cherish our differences and champion progress and approach all of it with humour, joy and a sense of expectation. Equality is not like landing on the moon. We won’t raise a flag when we’ve arrived. But along the way we’ll, all of us, feel in our bones, when we’re getting it right.

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The feminist movement has shifted the definition of rape to include regret

The confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court dealt the #MeToo and #BelieveSurvivors movements their first major defeat. Those feminist ideologies will continue wreaking havoc throughout American institutions, however—especially the claim that self-professed sexual-assault victims deserve unqualified belief.

That idea—that the presumption of innocence, fundamental to common law, should be suspended for accusations of sexual assault—has been the cornerstone of the campus-rape bureaucracy; during the Kavanaugh hysteria, that conceit jumped out of the ivory tower into the world at large. It will be no easy task to put it back. In preparation for the next Salem witch trial-like ordeal, therefore, it is worth empirically rebutting the #BelieveSurvivors mandate, as well as its corollary: the claim that if most self-professed rape survivors in our patriarchal culture don’t report their assaults, that’s because the “social and emotional” costs are too high, as California congressman Ted Lieu explained on MSNBC last Sunday.

Columbia University’s infamous “mattress girl,” Emma Sulkowicz, was conducting an on-again, off-again sexual relationship with another student, Paul Nungesser. Two days after one of their consensual couplings, in August 2012, Nungesser invited Sulkowicz to a party in his room. She texted back: “yusss,” adding: “Also I feel like we need to have some real time where we can talk about life and thingz because we still haven’t really had a paul-emma chill sesh since summmmerrrr.” A week later, she suggested that they hang out together: “I want to see yoyououoyou.” Two months later, she texted: “I love you Paul. Where are you?!?!?!?!”

It wasn’t until eight months after their August 2012 coupling that Sulkowicz filed a campus-rape charge, alleging that Nungesser had anally raped her while she struggled and told him to stop. She claims that she waited so long to file so as to avoid re-traumatizing herself. Nungesser argues that she was simply chagrined that they had not become an exclusive couple. Whatever Sulkowicz’s motivation for filing, it is impossible to read her post-coital pleas to Nungesser as the aftermath of the most terrifying experience a woman can have, short of murder, rather than as the attempts of a female to reel a favored male back into her orbit.

Nevertheless, Sulkowicz was canonized as a martyr to rape culture, thanks to her stunt of carrying around a mattress to protest Columbia’s failure to expel Nungesser. New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand declared herself “inspired by Emma and all of her sisters in arms who have made their voices heard and given voice to thousands of other survivors all around the country.” Gillibrand invited Sulkowicz to President Obama’s 2015 State of Union address in order to “further amplify her voice.”

In September 2013, two freshmen at Occidental College in Southern California had sex after both had been on a 24-hour drinking binge. After making out at a party in the male’s dorm room, they conspired to evade the girl’s friends, who had escorted her back to her own room. The male, known as “John Doe” in court papers, texted “Jane Doe”: “The second that you away from them, come back.” Jane responded: “Okay.” John wrote back: “Just get back here.” Jane responded: “Okay do you have a condom.” John replied: “Yes.” Jane texted back: “Good, give me two minutes.” Before leaving her dorm room for their appointed tryst, Jane texted a friend from back home: “I’m going to have sex now.” After their sexual encounter, Jane texted a smiley face to her friends. She then went to a common room and sat on another guy’s lap, joking about NASCAR. The next day she went back to John’s room to pick up her earrings and belt.

Jane reported their coupling to campus authorities only after seeing that John was unaffected emotionally by it, whereas she, having lost her virginity, felt distracted and unable to concentrate. Having been instructed in the ways of the patriarchy by Occidental’s Title IX bureaucracy, she decided that she should not have to experience the psychological discomfort of randomly running into John Doe around campus, and that he should be expelled. Occidental was only too happy to comply. It found John Doe guilty of rape and expelled him in December 2013.

Jane’s psychological distress was undoubtedly real. Sexual liberation pretends that males and females respond identically to one-night stands, and that the loss of virginity is just an insignificant way station en route to the rounds of casual sex expected of contemporary adults. In fact, women are hormonally and emotionally affected by intercourse in a way that most men are not. And traditional culture was right to regard the loss of virginity as a milestone in a girl’s life, and to surround it with the sanctifying rituals of marriage.

But however understandable Jane’s post-coital emotions, they do not justify converting what was clearly a mutually agreed-upon coupling into rape. Any male whose partner asks about condoms, then voluntarily enters his bed for the express purpose of sex, is going to assume consent, and with reason.

In 2014, Brett Sokolow, a prominent advisor on campus sexual-misconduct cases, provided another window into the consensual sex that the feminist-industrial complex converts into campus rape. In an open letter to the higher-education community, he described a series of trumped-up charges with which his Title IX consulting firm had been involved, including a female student who had spread rumors by social media that she had been raped by a male student. She then admitted to investigators that she had consented to their drunken hook-up. When asked why she had called the encounter rape, she replied: “You know, because we were drunk. . . . we just call it that when we’re drunk or high.”

In another case, a female student was caught by her boyfriend while cheating on him with another male student. She then filed a complaint of assault against that second male. The morning after their sexual encounter, they had exchanged texts. He wrote: “How do I compare with your boyfriend?” She responded to the boy she later accused of rape: “You were great.”

In 1985, Ms. magazine published a study by psychologist Mary Koss that gave rise to the statistic that one in four college females would be sexually assaulted during college. The study also found that 42 percent of putative rape victims went on to have intercourse again with their alleged assailant—a behavior inconceivable in the case of actual rape. In fact, it was the researcher herself who classified the subjects as victims; 73 percent of the women whom the researcher designated as rape survivors said that they hadn’t been raped, when asked directly.

According to the #BelieveSurvivors platform, the reason why most researcher-classified rape victims don’t report their rapes is because the reporting process is too anti-female and re-traumatizing. In fact, most researcher-classified rape victims don’t report because they don’t think what happened to them was serious enough to report—another conclusion inconceivable in the case of actual rape.

In 2015, the Association of American Universities (AAU) conducted a sexual-assault survey at 27 selective colleges. The vast majority of survey respondents whom the AAU researchers classified as sexual-assault victims never reported their alleged assaults to their colleges’ rape hotlines, sexual-assault resource centers, or Title IX offices, much less to campus or city police. And the overwhelming reason that the alleged victims did not report is that they did not think that what happened to them was that serious. At Harvard, for example, over 69 percent of female respondents who checked the box for penetration by use of force did not report the incident to any authority. Most of those non-reporters—65 percent—did not think that their experience was serious enough to report. Over 78 percent of Harvard female respondents who checked the box for penetration due to “incapacitation” did not report. Three-quarters of them said that what happened to them was not serious enough to report. This is a judgment not allowed by the campus rape industry.

Even before the sexual revolution destroyed the norms that once governed the male libido and that steadied the relationship between the sexes, sex was the realm of ambiguity and indirection. The #BelieveSurvivors contingent asserts that survivors rarely if ever lie about their experiences—meaning, they rarely make those experiences up out of whole cloth. This assertion is mostly true; in most cases of alleged campus rape, something did happen between the accused and the accuser. The issue is how to classify what happened. (To be sure, there are rapes that go unreported, but there are also outright fabrications, such as the Rolling Stone University of Virginia campus rape hoax, which cost the magazine millions in damages, and the Duke lacrosse team rape hoax, for which the local prosecutor lost his law license.) The #BelieveSurvivors movement claims unique authority to interpret women’s experiences, even if that means ignoring a woman’s own classification of her experience as not rape.

The rest of us need not accede to this assertion of monopoly interpretive power. Our booze-fueled hook-up culture has made relations between men and women messier than ever, leaving many girls and women with pangs of regret—but those regrets do not equal rape. If we were actually in the midst of an “epidemic of sexual assault,” as New Jersey senator Cory Booker asserted the evening of the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings, we would presumably have seen women and girls take protective actions, such as avoiding frat parties and flocking to single-sex schools. None of those protective actions has occurred, however. Either women are too clueless to avoid patent danger, or the epidemic of sexual assault is a fiction. All evidence points to the latter conclusion. Judge Brett Kavanaugh may be the latest male to have his life torn apart by that fiction, but he won’t be the last.

SOURCE






The Truth About Columbus

Is this the last time we can celebrate Columbus Day? A wave of cities have decided to remove the holiday from the calendar and replace it with “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”

Christopher Columbus, the Italian explorer credited with discovering America, and his legacy are under attack figuratively and, increasingly, literally.

Several Columbus monuments have been attacked and vandalized around the country. The towering Columbus statue at Columbus Circle in New York City now needs 24-hour guards after Mayor Bill de Blasio put it on the list of a commission to review “offensive” memorials.

And according to Far Left Watch, a watchdog organization, Antifa and other left-wing groups plan to deface and attack Columbus statues across the country on Columbus Day.

It is unfortunate to see what was once a uniting figure—who represented American courage, optimism, and even immigrants—is suddenly in the crosshairs for destruction. We owe it to Columbus and ourselves to be more respectful of the man who made the existence of our country possible.

Once Revered, Now Maligned

A few historians and activists began to attack Columbus’ legacy in the late 20th century. They concocted a new narrative of Columbus as a rapacious pillager and a genocidal maniac.

Far-left historian Howard Zinn, in particular, had a huge impact on changing the minds of a generation of Americans about the Columbus legacy. Zinn not only maligned Columbus, but attacked the larger migration from the Old World to the new that he ushered in.

It wasn’t just Columbus who was a monster, according to Zinn, it was the driving ethos of the civilization that ultimately developed in the wake of his discovery: the United States.

“Behind the English invasion of North America,” Zinn wrote, “behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private profit.”

The truth is that Columbus set out for the New World thinking he would spread Christianity to regions where it didn’t exist. While Columbus, and certainly his Spanish benefactors, had an interest in the goods and gold he could return from what they thought would be Asia, the explorer’s primary motivation was religious.

“This conviction that God destined him to be an instrument for spreading the faith was far more potent than the desire to win glory, wealth, and worldly honors,” wrote historian Samuel Eliot Morison over a half-century ago.

In fact, as contemporary historian Carol Delaney noted, even the money Columbus sought was primarily dedicated to religious purposes. Delaney said in an interview with the Catholic fraternal organization the Knights of Columbus:

"Everybody knows that Columbus was trying to find gold, but they don’t know what the gold was for: to fund a crusade to take Jerusalem back from the Muslims before the end of the world. A lot of people at the time thought that the apocalypse was coming because of all the signs: the plague, famine, earthquakes, and so forth. And it was believed that before the end, Jerusalem had to be back in Christian hands so that Christ could return in judgment."

Columbus critics don’t just stop at accusing him of greed. One of the biggest allegations against him is that he waged a genocidal war and engaged in acts of cruelty against indigenous people in the Americas.

But historians like Delaney have debunked these claims.

Rather than cruel, Columbus was mostly benign in his interaction with native populations. While deprivations did occur, Columbus was quick to punish those under his command who committed unjust acts against local populations.

“Columbus strictly told the crew not to do things like maraud, or rape, and instead to treat the native people with respect,” Delaney said. “There are many examples in his writings where he gave instructions to this effect. Most of the time when injustices occurred, Columbus wasn’t even there. There were terrible diseases that got communicated to the natives, but he can’t be blamed for that.”

Columbus certainly wasn’t a man without flaws or attitudes that would be unacceptable today.

But even as a man of an earlier age in which violence and cruelty were often the norm between different cultures and people, Columbus did not engage in the savage acts that have been pinned on him.

How Americans Once Viewed Columbus

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, most Americans were taught about Columbus’ discovery of the New World in school.

“In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue … ” went a popular poem about the Italian explorer who flew under the Spanish flag. At one time, Americans marveled at what seemed like an unbelievably courageous voyage across unknown waters with the limited tools and maps of the 15th century.

It is difficult in the 21st century to imagine what Columbus faced as he crossed the Atlantic in search of what he thought was a route to Asia. The hardship and danger was immense. If things went awry, there would be nothing to save his little flotilla besides hope, prayer, and a little courage.

Most people, even in the 1490s, knew that the Earth was round. However, Columbus made a nevertheless history-altering discovery.

The world was a much bigger place than most had imagined, and though Columbus never personally realized the scope of his discovery, he opened up a new world that would one day become a forefront of human civilization.

This is the man and the history that earlier generations of Americans came to respect and admire.

Unfortunately, Zinn and others’ caricature of Columbus and American civilization has stuck and in an era in which radicals and activists search the country for problematic statues to destroy, Columbus is a prime target.

Ku Klux Klan Pushed Anti-Columbus Rhetoric

Much of the modern rhetoric about Columbus mirrors attacks lobbed at him in the 19th century by anti-Catholic and anti-Italian groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

In fact, Columbus Day became a nationally celebrated holiday following a mass lynching of Italians in New Orleans—the largest incident of lynching in American history.

In 1892—the 400th anniversary of the Columbus voyage—President Benjamin Harrison called for a national celebration of Columbus and his achievements. Americans patriotically celebrated Columbus and erected numerous statues in his honor as the country embraced him.

Though American appreciation of Columbus deepened, some groups weren’t pleased.

As the pro-Columbus website The Truth About Columbus points out, the Ku Klux Klan worked to stop Columbus Day celebrations, smash statues, and reverse his growing influence on American culture.

According to The Truth About Columbus, in the 1920s, the Klan “attempted to remove Columbus Day as a state holiday in Oregon,” burned a cross “to disturb a Columbus Day celebration in Pennsylvania,” and successfully “opposed the erection of a statue of Columbus in Richmond, Virginia, only to see the decision to reject the statue reversed.”

Attempts to quash Columbus failed, but they have re-emerged in our own time through the actions of far-left groups who want to see his legacy buried and diminished forever.

This would be a tragic loss for our generation and those of the future.

The bravery and boldness that Columbus displayed in his trek to America have been inherent in the American cultural DNA from the beginning.

We may never have the class, the taste, the sophistication of the Old World upper crust. But what we do have is a reverence for simple virtues of strength, boldness, and a willingness to push the envelope to secure for ourselves a better future than those who’ve come before.

We are a civilization that admires those who push the limits of the frontier, who don’t merely accept what is and want something more. The spirit that drove us west and in modernity, to the moon, is what we celebrate in men like Columbus.

President Ronald Reagan said it best in a Columbus Day tribute:

"Columbus is justly admired as a brilliant navigator, a fearless man of action, a visionary who opened the eyes of an older world to an entirely new one. Above all, he personifies a view of the world that many see as quintessentially American: not merely optimistic, but scornful of the very notion of despair.

When we have lost these things, when we no longer have the capacity to celebrate men like Columbus, as imperfect as they sometimes were, we will have lost what has made us great, and distinct."

SOURCE







Trump admin puts renewed focus on radical Islam, Iran, rolling back Obama efforts

The Trump administration is implementing a new, government-wide counterterrorism strategy that places renewed focus on combatting "radical Islamic terrorist groups," marking a significant departure from the Obama administration, which implemented a series of policies aimed at deemphasizing the threat of Islamic terror groups.

In releasing the first national counterterrorism strategy since 2011, the Trump administration is working to take a drastically different approach than that of the former administration, according to senior U.S. officials.

While the Obama administration sought to dampen the United States' focus on Islamic terror threats, the Trump administration has made this battle the centerpiece of its new strategy.

National Security Adviser John Bolton acknowledged in remarks to reporters Thursday afternoon that the new strategy is "a departure" from the former administration's strategy, which has been characterized as a failure by Republican foreign policy voices due to the increasing number of domestic terror attacks and plots across the United States

"Radical Islamist terrorist groups represent the preeminent transnational terrorist threat to the United States, and to United States' interests abroad," Bolton said.

"The fact is the radical Islamic threat that we face is a form of ideology," Bolton said. "This should not be anything new to anybody. King Abdullah of Jordan has frequently described the terrorist threat as a civil war within Islam that Muslims around the world recognize, and he is, after all, a direct descendent of the Sharif [inaudible], the keepers of the holy cities. If that's how King Abdullah views it, I don't think anybody should be surprised we see it as a kind of war, as well."

"One may hope that the ideological fervor disappears, but sad to report, it remains strong all around the world, and even with the defeat of the ISIS territorial caliphate, we see the threat spreading to other countries," Bolton added.

The Trump administration strategy also shifts the focus to Iran, characterizing the country as the foremost state sponsor of terror across the globe.

"The United States faces terrorist threats from Iran, which remains the most prominent state sponsor of terrorism that, really, the world's central banker of international terrorism since 1979," Bolton said. "And from other terrorist groups. Iran-sponsored terrorist groups such as Lebanese Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic jihad, continue to pose a threat to the United States and our interests."

The focus on Iran also represents a striking departure from the Obama administration's strategy, which sought to moderate Iran via the landmark nuclear deal and other diplomacy aimed at rewarding the Islamic Republic for moderation efforts.

The United States will also take greater steps to pursue "terrorists at their source" by destroying them militarily, as well as with international sanctions aimed at choking off their funding.

Additionally, it focuses on "protecting U.S. infrastructure and enhancing preparedness, countering terrorist radicalization and recruitment and strengthening the counterterrorism abilities of our international partners," according to the White House.

President Trump, in discussing the new strategy, also emphasized efforts to counter Iran.

"I ended United States participation in the horrible Iran deal, which had provided a windfall for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its proxies, funding Iran's malign activities throughout the world," Trump said.

In outlining what it calls "a new approach," the White House said it would actively combat "all terrorists with the intent and ability to harm our country." This includes both a military prong and other efforts to counter the spread of radical ideologies.

"America First does not mean America alone," the White House said in a preview of the full strategy guide. "The new strategy commits us to expand our partnerships at home and abroad to encourage partners' assistance in counterterrorism activities," including with NATO and other allies.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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