The rise of 'toxic femininity': Author reveals female colleagues tricked her into making mistakes so she wouldn't be promoted and told her everyone hated her - and insists other women create the REAL glass ceiling

Imagine turning up to work every day knowing the person sitting opposite you is doing everything in their power to push you out of your job.

That was the shocking reality for Naomi Joy, a 30-year-old former PR director from London, who witnessed and experienced 'toxic femininity' throughout her career.

She reveals one female colleague in her thirties once declared everyone in the office 'hated her', while another tricked her into making a mistake so that she would be favourite for a promotion.

It eventually led to Naomi quitting her job and penning The Liars, a psychological thriller about two rivals competing for a promotion, inspired by her own shocking experience.

While researching her book, she conducted a survey of 1,000 employed British women and found more than half claimed to have been sabotaged at work by another member of the so-called sisterhood, while more than a third (37 per cent) said they'd actually felt scared or threatened by a female colleague.

Here Naomi tells FEMAIL how she coped with all-out office war - and how you can attempt to break through the 'sisterhood ceiling'...

It had been building for a while. I'd been walking on eggshells for months, trying not to provoke one particular female colleague prone to passive aggression and making snide remarks.

In her early thirties, bright and energetic, she had seemed supportive at first, keen to be friends in the chic PR agency where we worked.

Now she'd finally come out with it: 'Everyone in this office hates you. Everyone wants you to leave.' Furious, I remember clenching my hands so hard the nails punctured the skin on my hands, drawing blood.

And what did I do next? Well, nothing of course - instead I tried to placate her, like so many women would have done in my place. Yet something changed forever that afternoon. It was the beginning of the end of a life lived in the shadow of other women's toxic femininity.

I thought I'd learned my lesson about female rivalry at the very start of my career when, as a young intern, I was fortunate enough to land a dream full-time job at PR and events agency.

The boss - a brilliant, rather fierce woman with high-arched eyebrows and dark-red lips - had decided to give me the position, much to the chagrin of the other female intern who would have to leave.

This girl, who I'll call Tara*, said nothing to my face - but then she didn't need to. Instead she made sure I had the wrong information for the following day's photoshoot, while I was too naive to bother checking.

I spent the following morning dashing along Oxford Street hunting for pairs of gold designer heels. Shoeboxes were piled high in my arms as, eyes watering as I stuffed receipts from Manolo Blahnik, Louboutin and Jimmy Choo into my purse. I hadn't been given a credit card as juniors were expected to stomach expenses like this and wait a month to be reimbursed. I couldn't afford it.

I got to the shoot at lunchtime as instructed, bright red and sweating, only to be met with a single brusque question: 'Where have you been?'

I looked around to see the cameras were packed up, blow-up palm-tree props deflated, a pair of bright-gold designer heels flung to one side.

Tara stood smugly across the room, hand covering her mouth, jaw dropped with faux-shock. I handed the shoes to the woman who had offered me the job, stuttering an explanation.

'What are these?' she snapped. 'The shoot finished an hour ago. There was no one on hand to fetch coffees. I had to do it myself!'

Tara got the job instead of me - a sign of things to come.

Millions will recognise what I'm talking about - that world of women who flash you a broad smile as they turn on their computers in the morning, teeth still on show as they huddle into their screens while angrily plotting your demise in secretive emails.

These are the women who actively block your path to success if they deem you a threat; women who, in my experience, create a ceiling far harder to break than a glass one. And, much as it pains me to say it, they exist in offices everywhere.

I conducted my own survey of 1,000 women in full-time employment in Britain, and a troubling 58 per cent of them told me that they had at some point been sabotaged at work by another member of the so-called sisterhood. There was no bias in terms of age, location or wealth.

My second job took me to some of London's most exciting red-carpet occasions. I held vast black umbrellas over the heads of celebrities. I set up events with Olympic athletes and worked on publicity campaigns that made a real difference to people's lives.

The culture was much better. Even so, there was one woman who, when my promotion was announced, took me to one side to say I hadn't deserved it. 'I had to wait a year to be promoted, you only had to wait nine months,' she said. 'It's not fair.'

Her disruption became systematic. She blamed her mistakes on me. She blocked my chances to work on more important projects, spreading rumours that I would probably leave the company soon. This woman, by the way, was supposed to be my mentor - and, despite everything, I wanted her to like me.

She wasn't the only one. There was a senior colleague who quite incorrectly pointed the finger of blame at me in a crisis meeting. 'You understand why I had to do that, right?' she said afterwards.  'I'm the head of this project, if they think I'd f****d up we would have been fired. Thanks for understanding, hun. You're the best.'

I put it down to being junior, telling myself that my brilliant female bosses - and they were brilliant - wouldn't want to hear about such petty problems. My female friends agreed. This was just the industry we're in, we said. Things would get better as we moved through the ranks.

They didn't. The higher I climbed, the more toxic the female rivalry became.

Top PR offices have a few things in common. There are the white walls splashed with vibrant art, the model receptionists, the sound of manicured nails typing furiously on sleek silver keyboards. It's all rather Devil Wears Prada - in more ways than one.

I was 24 when I landed a job at a boutique PR agency in central London, working with a range of clients in health and beauty.

One of my new colleagues stood out among the rest. Around my age, she had the confidence to be brusque with juniors, seniors and clients alike. I liked her. She knew her stuff and she was great at her job. I wanted her to like me.

For a while, everything was harmonious until, with the annual review of salaries on promotions on the horizon, things began to change.

She started ignoring my emails. She wouldn't take part in team meetings if she thought I'd be running them. In fact, she avoided working with me on anything at all.

She started referring to herself as my senior. She tried to find out how much money I was earning per year. She even told a colleague she was keeping a log of the things I did in my free time - and that she was determined to make sure I couldn't get ahead of her in any regard.

I had laser eye surgery; she bought a new pair of glasses and had a make-over. I had my teeth whitened; she went to the same clinic to have hers done a week later. Her competition with me was fierce and about so much more than work.

Then, after nearly a year, came that derisive outburst - the claim that 'everyone hates me'. Childish, yet devastating.

I didn't leave the agency right away. Instead I started writing about what I'd seen and felt – the things that happened to me in offices in London and California. About the repeating pattern of women turning against each other in order to get ahead.

Six months later I had a literary agent and a three-book deal. My first novel, The Liars, launched a few weeks ago.

SOURCE  






Candace Owens Blasts Modern Feminism – Once a good thing and now hijacked by the left

Candace Owens kicked off Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit Thursday afternoon and blasted the “scam” of feminism during a passionate speech.

Candace Owens gave the audience of young women a brief background on her past as a liberal Democrat. It was a college course — Feminism 101 — that made her realize that feminism was not for her.

The “BLEXIT” founder argued that feminism — once a good thing — has been hijacked by the left.

“What the left is really good at doing is hijacking a term that once meant something and pretending that it’s still the same thing when, in fact, it’s not,” Owens said.

“Really, if you want to see something toxic, tell a feminist — who says they support every idea a woman has — tell a feminist that you’re not a feminist and see what happens. See the way that you get treated,” she continued.

“I can’t think of women that are nastier and meaner than the ones who exist under these pussy hats, right?” she added.

Owens pivoted to her distaste for the #MeToo movement and the backlash she received for speaking against it. However, she said the truth eventually came out in the form of the Kavanaugh hearings.

“Suddenly, everybody woke up and they realized that this was not about empowering women,” she said. “This was not a movement that was really about giving people a voice who have struggled in their past. It was about getting power and getting it by any means necessary.”

She said the “bitter” and “angry” left can’t understand the fact that men and women cannot be separated and blasted the left for telling women otherwise.

She told the crowd about an upsetting comment she read online after having a conversation on the dangers of feminism with Allie Beth Stuckey. The comment was from a 55-year-old woman who said she fell for the modern day feminist lies, leaving her with no children and forcing her to take medication regularly.

“If there’s anything I could go back and do, I would’ve warned myself against the scam of feminism,” the woman wrote.

Owens brought up a number of far-left feminist icons in Hollywood, including Lena Dunham, Miley Cyrus, and Chelsea Handler.

“I believe these voices like Lena Dunham, and Miley Cyrus, and Chelsea Handler are convincing women against themselves, telling women, ‘You don’t need a man. You don’t need anyone. You should want to do everything by yourself. And if you do aspire to that — if you aspire toward nature — then something’s wrong with you,’” Owens said.

She told the crowd to “pause” and ask the following question: “Who is the most extreme feminist you know today?”  Owens named Handler, Dunham, Sarah Silverman, and Alyssa Milano as some that came to mind.

“Ask yourself a very simple question: Do you think those women are happy?” she asked. “There’s no chance that they’re happy.”

“That is why I believe feminism is a scam,” she continued. “It’s not about uplifting women. It’s about tearing women down.”

SOURCE  







Wisdom in unexpected places

Meryl Streep Rejects 'Toxic Masculinity' Term.  She notes that "women can be pretty f-ing toxic too." Is this a watershed moment?

See the Video: here







Brent Bozell: Abortion Is Sacred in Hollywood

In recent years, generous tax credits have brought a wave of Hollywood productions to Georgia. Then the state legislature passed, and the governor signed a very protective pro-life bill. The reaction was furious. How can the will of the people stand?

Network reporters, all aligned with movie and TV studios, pronounced that their conscientious corporate overlords might forgo the tax breaks to show their support for untrammeled abortion, even though there is no demand from their shareholders — their owners — that they do any such thing.

None of these major media companies felt any anger or angst when the state of New York did just the opposite in January, passing a bill that would allow abortions up to birth — and allow non-doctors to perform them. These leftist networks barely noticed the bill was passed and signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo as legislators cheered ... because that's the kind of America they want, in all 50 states.

But now power players in Hollywood have rushed to the ramparts of Georgia.

Peter Chernin, who worked for Rupert Murdoch for decades, announced a campaign to raise $15 million for the American Civil Liberties Union to fight any abortion restrictions in Georgia and other red states. ACLU boss Anthony Romero gushed to CNN, "Peter Chernin's leadership in Hollywood has been critical to sounding the alarm among industry leaders."

Chernin, like the typical self-interested Hollywood executive, wants the tax benefits and an overturned pro-life bill.

David Simon, the creator of "The Wire" and other TV shows, said he would boycott Georgia and that Hollywood "must undertake production where the rights of all citizens remain intact." In Tinseltown's utopia, unborn babies do not have the right to remain intact.

Miley Cyrus, so far removed from her teenage Disney Channel days, not to mention taste, was pictured licking a round white cake with the sides covered with rainbow sprinkles that read "ABORTION IS HEALTH CARE."

George Orwell, call your bakery. Perhaps there should have been a disclosure saying that "no bakers were harmed in the creation of this cake."

There were some terrific tweets about this picture. LifeNews.com was amazed, saying, "The irony of @MileyCyrus using a birthday cake to promote abortions when abortions deny babies a birthday."

Ben Sixsmith wrote, "It's interesting how the right to kill the unborn is advertised with such neotenous aesthetics. Children get in the way of adults behaving like children." ("Neotenous" is a $10 Bill Buckley word for "juvenile.")

A tweet from the fashion brand Marc Jacobs features Cyrus topless in jeans holding two grapefruits in front of her breasts. That was part of the design of a hooded sweatshirt by Marc Jacobs that says, "Don't F—- With My Freedom." It's a lyric in her new single called ... "Mother's Daughter." The lyrics that follow aren't on the shirt: "I'm nasty, I'm evil / Must be something in the water or that I'm my mother's daughter."

All proceeds from the hoodie sales go to Planned Parenthood. One hoodie costs $175.

Cyrus was a fervent backer of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2016 and runs a nonprofit called the Happy Hippie Foundation, whose stated mission is "to rally young people to fight injustice facing homeless youth, LGBTQ youth and other vulnerable populations."

Isn't it amazing that the left is so fixated on feminist ideology and consequence-free sex that it cannot see the unborn babies as the most "vulnerable population" in America?

Unborn babies are not merely dehumanized in abortion activism. They are not even an afterthought. They are literally and metaphorically obliterated.

SOURCE  






Michelle Malkin: From Convicted Murderer to Exoneree to Law Grad

What would you do if you were falsely accused and convicted of a brutal rape and murder you didn't commit?

How would you handle a violent maximum-security prison, sentenced 16 years to life, at age 17?

And where would you go, what would you choose to do, if you won your freedom back after full exoneration?

Jeffrey Deskovic, 45, graduated from Pace University School of Law three weeks ago to rousing cheers from friends, family and faculty. On its own, the achievement warrants celebration. Any graduation does. But Deskovic's feat is just one of an extraordinary set of milestones in the extraordinary life of an extraordinary man I'm honored to know and support.

Hollywood couldn't manufacture a nightmare and redemption script as compelling as Deskovic's real-life saga.

In November 1989, Deskovic's Peekskill, New York, high school classmate, 15-year-old Angela Correa, was raped, beaten and strangled to death. Detectives decided that Deskovic, who did not know Correa, had acted excessively upset at the murdered sophomore's memorials. Police succumbed to tunnel vision and confirmation bias, misinterpreting Deskovic's amateur passion to help solve the crime as a sign of guilt. After speaking with him multiple times, steadily feeding him information about the case, they brought the 17-year-old Deskovic in for a polygraph.

The young teen who had never been in trouble with the law was interrogated for more than seven hours without a lawyer, family member or food. Detectives bullied, cajoled and lied to him about failed the testing. It's a classic recipe for a false confession and undue process. The coercive interrogation ended with Deskovic in a fetal position under the polygraph table.

Despondent, Deskovic attempted suicide twice before trial. In January 1991, he was "convicted by jury of 1st degree rape and 2nd degree murder, despite DNA results showing that he was not the source of semen in the victim's rape kit." Deskovic told Westchester Magazine: "It just didn't seem real. It was like I was observing it from the outside. I felt I was in Fantasyland."

Maintaining his innocence from the start, the sensitive high schooler who grew up behind bars earned an associate's degree and appealed to anyone on the outside who would listen. After multiple rejections, the Innocence Project took up his case and won postconviction DNA testing that identified the real rapist and killer: a man named Stephen Cunningham.

Injustice compounded injustice: While Deskovic was paying the price for the guilty man's sins, Cunningham was on the loose in 1993, committing a second murder. The victim was Patricia Morrison, his girlfriend's sister. He was in prison for that tragically preventable crime when new forensic testing methods yielded a hit in a state DNA database of convicted felons and Cunningham confessed to killing Correa.

In 2006, Deskovic was freed and won a judicial determination of actual innocence. He received an apology from an assistant district attorney, along with multimillion-dollar civil suit awards from New York state, Westchester County, Peekskill and Putnam County. Transitioning to life as a free man was not easy, but Deskovic has not wasted a single moment of it as an exoneree. On a whirlwind quest to prevent and undo miscarriages of justice like the one he suffered, he has earned a bachelor's degree, a master's from John Jay College of Criminal Justice and now a law degree (making the dean's list the last four semesters of a hectic year).

While in law school, he traveled to Armenia and Argentina to give wrongful conviction presentations, played an instrumental role in prosecutorial misconduct reform in New York state, gave dozens of radio, TV and documentary interviews (including one for my 2017 program called "Railroaded: Surviving Wrongful Convictions"), started the Deskovic Foundation for Justice (which has helped exonerate seven people), and taught multiple classes on criminal justice to judges and police academies.

Phew! Is there a bucket list that can match this one?

It's Deskovic's unique willingness to reach out to law enforcement and enlighten them, instead of to demonize them, that makes him an invaluable leader in criminal justice reform. Lt. Michael Devine of the Bergen County Law and Public Safety Institute was so impressed with Deskovic's presentations to corrections recruits that he successfully requested that the exoneree become a certified instructor for the New Jersey Police Training Commission.

Dr. Kevin J. Barrett, a 32-year veteran of the Englewood, New Jersey, Police Department and chair of the criminal justice department at Rockland Community College, says his students were "mesmerized" by Deskovic's presentation and "will carry the lessons they learned from Mr. Deskovic for the next 25 years of their careers. He has a much needed story to tell."

And the rest of this story has only just begun.

Deskovic will take the bar exam in eight weeks. His foundation just helped win retrial scheduled in September for Andrew Krivak, a man wrongfully convicted of the rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl in Putnam County, N.Y. in 1997. No physical evidence connected Krivak or his co-defendant Anthony DiPippo to the victim or the crime scene. The prosecution relied on a fake polygraph exam administered by the same official involved in Deskovic's wrongful conviction. (I told you Hollywood couldn't make this up!)

DiPippo, exonerated in 2016 after three trials and 20 years in prison, attended Deskovic's graduation with hundreds of others. He hailed his friend as "the future of the grass-roots innocence movement."

I agree, which is why I have lent my time, heart, and financial support to the Deskovic Foundation and hope you will, too. You can find out more about this tireless human being at

https://www.deskovicfoundation.org/.

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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