Feckblog

I have been guilty of this before

2012-01-26T11:30:00.001+01:00

As seen on Reddit (thanks BearofHappiness):

Both men and women have genuine, valid concerns regarding the wider treatment of their gender that need to be addressed.

No matter what 'side' you're on, relegating all members of the opposite group according to your opinions of it's loudest (and usually most fundamental) members is not constructive, either to their cause, or yours. It's what makes conversation quickly crumble into individuals (rightly) defending themselves against what is essentially a personal attack.

I agree although as the title says have done the opposite as well.

What we need....

2012-01-26T11:25:00.001+01:00

Some exposure for male DV victims in the dailymail. This man speaks the truth:

'I can completely understand why some men will feel embarrassed speaking out - men generally don’t like talking about their feelings.

'But the bigger issue is that lots of men don’t know where to go for help and there’s a lot of gender bias.

'The massive problem is that men are not seen as victims.

'We need a gender neutral awareness campaign, or even a male-specific one.'

Despite his experience, Ian isn’t put off having a relationship again.

'It’s going to be difficult when I meet someone who doesn’t know what I’ve been through,' said Ian.

'They will no doubt ask about my scars, and I’m not going to lie.

'My fear is that they will wonder what I did to deserve it.'

The reason why we should "not" pretend that men are not raped.

2012-01-25T12:11:00.001+01:00

From a recent NYTimes article:

Like women, men who are raped feel violated and ashamed and may become severely depressed or suicidal. They are at increased risk for substance abuse, problems with interpersonal relationships, physical impairments, chronic pain, insomnia and other health problems.

But men also face a challenge to their sense of masculinity. Many feel they should have done more to fight off their attackers. Since they may believe that men are never raped, they may feel isolated and reluctant to confide in anyone. Male rape victims may become confused about their sexual orientation or, if gay and raped by a man, blame their sexual orientation for the rape.

“If you’re sexually assaulted, there’s this idea that you’re no longer a man,” said Neil Irvin, executive director of the organization Men Can Stop Rape. “The violence is ignored, and your sexual orientation and gender are confronted.”

Many rape crisis centers — which often also provide services for victims of domestic violence — do not have the resources to counsel male victims. Remarkably few male victims seek professional help for injuries, screening for sexually transmitted diseases or counseling after an attack, often waiting years or decades.

One study of 705 men in Virginia found that 91, or 13 percent, had been sexually assaulted, a vast majority of them before they turned 18. Fewer than one-fifth of victims had ever received professional services related to the assault.

“Men are affected — they have high rates of P.T.S.D. and depression — but the majority don’t get help,” said Dr. Saba W. Masho, the lead author of the Virginia study and an associate professor of epidemiology and community health at Virginia Commonwealth University. “It’s easy for you and I to talk about it, but when you put yourself in that victim’s shoes, they’re asking, ‘Do I want people to know? How do I seek help? Do I want my doctor to know? Where do I go?’ ”

To repeat: "Since they may believe that men are never raped, they may feel isolated and reluctant to confide in anyone."

We have to change that! Even more so when it comes to female on male rape (people are even less likely to believe that). I include some more data from a recent Genderratic post:

studies have shown that sexual abuse does have a profound impact on men, and this includes female-on-male sexual abuse. For instance, the link between sexual abuse and suicide attempts is stronger in boys (Rhodes et al. 2001) and sexually abused boys are twice as likely to commit suicide (Molnar et al. 2001) than sexually abused girls. In addition to that, there is a risk factor for sexually abused men to sexually abuse others is if their abuser was female (Salter et al. 2003.)

Custody in Washington

2012-01-24T10:52:00.001+01:00

F&F again with some data on custody decisions:

Washington is the only state that meticulously tracks all custody decisions by its family judges and commissioners. The data show about as clear a bias in favor of mothers as can be imagined. [...]

As but a few examples, in about 65% of cases, mothers get greater parenting time than do fathers. By contrast, fathers get more in only about 17% of cases.

More telling are cases involving “risk factors.” Those are parental behaviors like abuse or neglect of children, drug or alcohol abuse, mental health problems and the like. So, when the parent had one or more risk factor, fathers were far more likely than mothers to be denied all access to their children. For example, 75% of fathers who had abused or neglected their children were denied all access to them, while only 50% of mothers were.

Adding insult to injury, when the father had no risk factor and the mother had one, he got full custody in only 26% of cases. When the sexes were reversed, she got custody 44% of the time.

Novelists and gaps...

2012-01-23T11:26:00.001+01:00

I am confused as I found this via Feministing. Here is the piece:

According to Slate's blog Double X, "Over about two years, from June 29, 2008 to August 27, 2010, the Times reviewed 545 works of fiction—338, or 62 percent, were by men." [...] After counting the number of men and women reviewed in The New York Times in 2011, she found that only 40 percent were female. Additionally, 10 men were given two reviews and a profile, while only one woman was (Téa Obreht, author of our first Book Club pick "The Tiger's Wife").

This is something I expected from an article found via Feministing. However this:

And even if men are favored in the literary fiction world, are reviewers really to blame? Salon reported that, when you look at the demographics of books that are published, reviewers are representing the field accurately. In a survey of imprints big and small, "women accounted for around 30 percent of the list, with small independent presses turning out to be even more male-heavy than a behemoth like Random House."

This would mean, (a) if you want to look for sexism, you should look somewhere else (publishing) and (b) if there is a bias, women are actually overrepresented (30% of published books / 40% of reviewed books). Oh my....

Child support, deadbeat moms and debtors prison

2012-01-23T09:14:00.001+01:00

Starting point is a Dr. Helen post. I'll jump straight to the data:

A person being in arrears on child support payments is not unusual: in 2008, 11.2 million U.S. child support cases had arrears due.[1] The number of persons kept in jail or in prison for child support arrears is not generally tracked. Based on a publicly available collection of relevant data, an estimated 50,000 persons are kept in jail or in person [sic]on any given day in the U.S. for child support arrears.[2] Hence Turner v. Rogers does not merely concern a technical question of legal procedure. Being in arrears on child support payments is a situation that many persons experience. Moreover, as a result of child support debt, many persons in the U.S. are being imprisoned.

[1] - U.S. Office of Child Support Enforcement, FY 2008 Annual Report to Congress, Table 73.
[2] - Galbi, Douglas. "Persons in Jail or in Prison for Child-Support Debt," published Mar. 22, 2011.r

And a comparison between "deadbeat" dads / moms:

Census figures show only 57 percent of moms required to pay child support -- 385,000 women out of a total of 674,000 -- give up some or all of the money they owe. That leaves some 289,000 "deadbeat" mothers out there, a fact that has barely been reported in the media.

That compares with 68 percent of dads who pay up, according to the figures.

[...]men also still pay much more in child support. The Census Bureau last month also released numbers showing fathers paid an average of $3,000 to custodial moms in 1997. Women paid little over half that. Moms also get about 60 percent of what they are owed, whereas dads only get 48 percent.

Not only are the dads paying up more when they don’t have custody, but when the court does hand the kids over to dads, they work more than moms who have custody.

While 7 percent of custodial moms work more than 44 hours a week, 24.5 percent of single custodial dads work more than 44 hours. And only about half as many custodial dads get government help than moms.

Income and Income

2012-01-22T23:33:00.002+01:00

I made this argument here several times as you will see when you look at my articles about the wage gap, and the spending power of women. Here is the economic connection:

Why do we care about the wage gap? B/c its a proxy of wealth? Any economist will tell you that income can be measured as good and serviced produced OR as goods and services consumed. Maybe we chose to examine the gender wealth gap in production terms b/c its simply convenient and objectively measured (ie payroll), but I can’t help but think that we don’t discuss wealth in consumption terms b/c feminists would really rather not explore a dimension of the gender binary that would very probably find a female privilege.

Attention, I am not an economist, and certainly do not wish to become one. But did do some digging around:

National income is the amount of goods and services produced in a country over a year, measrued in terms of money. It is the sum total of wages, rents, interests and profits received annually by the citizens of a country. It can also mean the rewards paid to the four factors of production -- land, labour, capital and organization -- over a year for their cooperation in producing goods and services consumed by the people of the country. - Business Environment - A.C. Fernando

He does not seem to be far off. I am not sure if that is only about the national level, but the points still stands. I believe if we look at a gap in terms of spending power, there will be a gap in the other direction.

Cultural Suppression of Female Sexuality

2012-01-20T11:33:00.001+01:00

An interesting find via Reddit. Thanks Sigi1, certainly an interesting paper:Cultural Suppression of Female Sexuality (2002). I cite:

Four theories about cultural suppression of female sexuality are evaluated. Data are reviewed on cross-cultural differences in power and sex ratios, reactions to the sexual revolution, direct restraining influences on adolescent and adult female sexuality, double standard patterns of sexual morality, female genital surgery, legal and religious restrictions on sex, prostitution and pornography, and sexual deception. The view that men suppress female sexuality received hardly any support and is flatly contradicted by some findings. Instead, the evidence favors the view that women have worked to stifle
each other’s sexuality because sex is a limited resource that women use to negotiate with men, and scarcity gives women an advantage.

[...]

The most compelling evidence, in our view, involved the direct influences on adolescent female sexuality, because any culture that wanted to suppress female sexuality would probably direct its strongest efforts toward newly pubescent females. These data uniformly supported the female control theory: Almost all influences on female adolescent sexuality are female, and the sole male influence (the boyfriend) tends to operate to promote rather than suppress female sexuality. Put simply, the influences that restrain female adolescent sexuality are female. Evidence about adult female sexuality converged with the evidence about adolescent influences. Adult women seem more disapproving of female premarital sex and other female sexual activity than adult men. Women have supported the double standard more strongly than men. The more extreme evidence about surgical interventions designed to curb female sexual responses likewise pointed toward female rather than male control.

[...]

Finally, sexual deception seemed most consistent with the female theory. Women conceal their interest in sex from prospective partners, which would be most relevant to negotiating the terms of what the man will exchange for sex. The male control hypothesis that men want to stifle their wives’ sexuality is contradicted by evidence that women pretend to have more rather than less pleasure than they actually have (such as by faking orgasms).

Pretty interesting and also reminds me of a study I have floating around, Study: Displaying cleavage, sexiness can alienate other women:

New University of Ottawa research documented women's aggression against other women wearing revealing outfits; women showing too much leg or cleavage are likely to be ostracized from female social circles as dangerous rivals, the scientists claimed.

[...]

In background information, the researchers noted that competition among males over sexual access to females has been documented extensively for many species, including humans, while relatively few studies have examined intrasexual competition among women over attention from males.
According to Vaillancourt and her team, these results fill a gap by providing evidence that women also see their sexy counterparts as threatening rivals and react against them aggressively.

Not gonna edit....I guess I have to ask thesaurus for a good "interesting" alternative the next time. Ah well, it is all about the data anyway.

"Feminism is the idea that you can create equality by focusing on the issues of only one sex."

2012-01-19T11:36:00.001+01:00

As seen on Reddit. This is certainly true of gynocentric feminism.

CDC once again, this time DV

2012-01-19T10:33:00.000+01:00

Something not so usual happened as I skimmed through my emails, which I really do not do that often. Well reddit was down, so that is probably why. It is a good thing though. I am opposed to SOPA and PIPA as every thinking human should be and so their protest is a good thing. Anyhow, while skimming through my mails, one friendly fellow forwarded me his summary of the data of the "2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey". And while I can not praise the site they are representing (due to affiliation with NOMAS among others). This was a pretty good post. You can read it here. A look at the data shows me there is much about DV we already know, but some interesting tidbits. Time to use my Ascii skills again:

2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey
---------------------------------------------------------
                             Last Year %      Lifetime %
Type                         Men   Women      Men   Women
---------------------------------------------------------
Rape / Made to penetrate     1.1     1.1      6.2    18.3 
- by intimate partner        0.5     0.6      2.2     9.4

Violence by intimate partner:
Physical violence            4.5     3.6     25.7    30.3
Severe violence              2.0     2.7     13.8    24.3
Psychological violence      18.1    13.9     48.8    48.4
----------------------------------------------------------

Other than that, stalking is mostly something women experience with mostly male perpetrators while for men the rate between the sexes was more equal. Also, as for the more violent items of severe violence, it is more women who suffer from it, which is something we already knew (well you knew, if you read my summary). What surprised me at first was that the intimate partner rape in the last year was almost equal as well. Even though one could have figured that out via the equal overall rate, I didn't make that mental connection yet.

Title IX - A summary

2012-01-19T09:36:00.001+01:00

Found via an article in an article. Somehow. Credit goes to mensactivism.org. Here is the summary:

In actuality, between 1981-2005 men's teams per school dropped 17 percent while women's teams rose by 34 percent. The reason is this: the proportional participation clause in Title IX, upheld by Duncan's own department, states that if the number of female athletes is not "proportional" to the number of women enrolled at an institution then the school is technically "discriminating."

This little line may be small enough for Duncan to forget, but it's significant enough to have schools scared silly. Colleges frequently end up cutting men's teams -- James Madison University alone cut ten teams in 2007, seven of which were male -- in order to balance the gender scales, meaning men's athletics have become dependent on women's interest and participation.

The problem with anti-discrimination legislation like Title IX is not with its intentions. The trouble is that the goal posts keep moving. It's not longer sufficient to have gender equality -- now feminists are seeking gender parity. Organizations like the AAUW fail to accept that men and women are different, and that they may choose to participate in different activities.

That is it in a nutshell. The paper linked in the article (Title IX and Athletics: A Primer (2008)) made some interesting points:

Title IX should focus on the overall availability of opportunities to accommodate interest, not on the selections of those opportunities by one sex or the other. Ironically, Title IX policy ignores actual interest levels and capabilities of either sex as determining factors in whether the interests and abilities of students have been met.

A variety of research points to lower interest in sports, on a variety of levels, among girls compared to boys. Girls’ participation rates and behaviors in all types of physical activity consistently lag behind those of boys. Boys are more likely to participate on sports teams than girls.24 Girls also join organized sports at later ages than boys and drop out earlier.

Many Title IX advocates say, “If you build it, they will come.” But that hasn’t proved true. When Brown University was sued in 1992 under Title IX, the varsity female teams at the university had more than 80 unfilled slots. The school had built it, but the women didn’t come. Further, coaches of female teams have talked on camera about their difficulty in keeping female athletes who don’t make the travel squad, even when they are receiving some financial aid. Coaches have also talked about their difficulty in filling the minimum number of positions desired by the athletic director to achieve proportionality, often because the minimum demands more players than the sport itself requires.

Men’s teams, on the other hand, are often no longer allowed to keep any of the numerous men seeking walk-on positions. Further, many schools have capped the number of men on team rosters, usually at numbers far lower than a competitive program needs.

Of course interest is important, that should be common sense as Title IX shouldn't be used to reduce possibilities, but to create new ones. The report points to other different interests:

U.S. Department of Education data show that women are more likely than men to participate in various afterschool activities, except for athletics.43 Among high school sophomores, 55% of men, compared to 42.5% of women, competed in interscholastic athletics.

But in other activities, women comprise the majority:

9.9% of women, compared to 6.8% of men, participate in academic clubs.
19.2% of women, compared to 8.1% of men, participate in cheerleading and drill team.
10.9% of women, compared to 8.1% of men, participate in hobby clubs.
26.8% of women, compared to 16.3% of men, participate in music programs.
9.1% of women, compared to 7.6% of men, participate in vocational clubs.

If the same strict proportionality standards applied to these extracurricular activities, women would likely face the same roster caps and program cuts that men face in athletics.

The last part people, the original article had a similar argument:

the AAUW and other feminist outlets would like to see Title IX-like legislation used to tackle disparities in academics, namely the "crisis" of women in math and science. In short, they want Congress to legislate parity in these disciplines, once again ignoring the real and important differences that exist between the genders. (Of course, this is always one-sided. I have yet to see the AAUW argue for more male English or Psychology majors. Nor have I seen any outrage about the shortage of male nurses.)

There is an obvious double standard here as inequality seems to be defined by the lack of female participants, yet never by the lack of male ones.

On with some more data:

across the board, opportunities for women were increasing, while opportunities for men were decreasing. From 1981 to 2005, male athletes per school declined 6%, and men’s teams per school dropped 17%. Meanwhile, female athletes per school rose 34%, and women’s teams per school rose 34%.52 The total number of women’s teams has exceeded the number of men’s teams since 1995 [...] Every male sport, with the exception of baseball, has decreased or remained static. Non-revenue sports such as wrestling, tennis, and gymnastics have been the hardest hit. [...] men’s gymnastics is practically extinct, with fewer than 20 varsity programs left in the country.

The discussion on this issue, or the huge BUT usually centers around football. As the fixation on football teams leads to less resources. Of course a lack of diversity is certainly not good. Here is what the report says about football:

when the resources are invested to create a competitive program, football helps women. A Social Science Quarterly article by Patrick James Rishe concluded that women’s sports at schools with big football programs fared better than women’s sports at schools with smaller football programs. While Rishe’s research does verify what the quota proponents tell us—expenditures are higher for football players than for any other sport—the research also calculates that where the football expenditures are highest, so, too, are the expenditures on female athletes.

In another study by Donald E. Agthe and R. Bruce Billings for the Journal of Sport Management, the authors concluded that football profits were a significant influence on achieving financial gender equity in athletic departments.

The Chronicle of Higher Education found a similar pattern when it examined Division I schools with and without football programs:

While women’s sports are clearly on the rise across the board, the rate of growth varies widely among the different kinds of colleges in Division I. Wealthy sports programs can subsidize new opportunities and greater spending for women, but those without revenue-producing football and basketball teams lag. And the gap between the haves and the have-nots is widening.

[...] Football is not the issue causing schools to drop men’s sports. The Title IX gender quota drives schools to drop men’s programs despite the schools’ best efforts and fervent wishes for keeping all teams intact. Even when there is no football team to blame, men still suffer. That is not equal opportunity.
The College Sports Council study shows that even football has seen a decline in the Title IX era. As shown in Figure 3, the percentage of NCAA member schools with football teams has declined since 1980.

Surely some food for thought. Damn, I really suck at writing that last thoughtful line.

The CDC Survey, copy and paste resource

2012-01-18T13:25:00.001+01:00

I had a recent far too long discussion on Reddit lately regarding the results of the survey and was pretty much surprised how offended an otherwise open community (2X) would react on such outlandish concepts that "Men and Women can stop rape" as opposed to "Men can stop rape". Of course I brought up the CDC statistics and the almost equal number of male and female rape victims, there was however a lot of bantering, back and forth and denying what was going on. So to save me some time for the future this is going to become my copy and paste go to place for this interesting survey:

Using the legal definition of rape, the "National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (2010)", a large (more than 18,000 people interviewed) survey by the CDC, comes to the conclusion that the risk to fall victim to a rape / an attempted rape / a drug induced rape in 2009 was about equal for men and for women (both 1.1%). For men the chance that the perpetrator in that case was a woman was about 80%. A ballpark number for the sex of the perpetrators tells me it is a 60/40 split, meaning about 40% of rapes / attempted rapes / drug induced rapes have been committed by women.

Clarifications, citations and calculations:

As this was not a prominent finding of the survey (as a focus on male victims / female perpetrators is seldom in the spotlight) and the CDC failed to define female-on-male rape as rape, I have to explain in detail where this data is coming from.

Consider the following example:

*** Trigger warning for rape scenario ***

Scenario A: Jane passes out drunk at a party. John has sex with her.

Scenario B: Jack passes out drunk at a party. Jill has sex with him.

*** Trigger warning for rape scenario ***

Both scenarios are an equivalent to each other and to my best knowledge both scenarios are considered rape in most parts of the USA.[1] Via the CDC definitions, Scenario A would have been considered as rape, while Scenario B would have been considered "Other Sexual Violence - Made to penetrate".[2] Legally speaking, I am comparing oranges with oranges here, even though the CDC pulls the "that wasn't rape-rape" card. Now if you compare the percentage of rape for women with the percentage of "Other Sexual Violence - Made to penetrate" (=rape) for men (again, both numbers include attempts as well as drug induced rape) the number in the last year for both is 1.1%.[3]

As for the other numbers, 98.2% of women have only been raped by men and 79.2% of men have only been raped by women.[4] Via these numbers, one can calculate the split of the perpetrators (my ballpark number).[5]

Most of the discussion around these numbers involve the difference between the lifetime numbers and the numbers for the last year.[3] Looking at the lifetime numbers we get a 18.3/4.8 (female/male) difference. What is going on here? The lifetime numbers are a reflection of the past, while the numbers of last year show us what is going on recently. None of us can affect the past, but we all can affect the now and the future with our actions. Only looking at the past (lifetime) figures while ignoring more recent figures is a poor baseline for making good choices now. Several explanations can be made why the numbers differ so much. For once, one can argue that women have become more aggressive (there are more female-on-male rapes now)[6] or/and that men have become less aggressive (there have been more male-on-female rapes in the past than now)[7] or/and that the male lifetime numbers suffer from a poor understanding of male victimization in the past (the male lifetime number is underreported as the view of male victimization is changing)[8]. People tend to recall events taking place within recent history better then events that have taken place more distantly in their memory. Thus statistics regarding recent history tend to be more accurate.

At least one other study has found comparable victimization rates.[9]

Sources:

[1] - Wikipedia: Laws regarding rape - There is no national rape law in the United States, due to the United States v. Morrison ruling that parts of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 were unconstitutional. Each state has its own laws concerning sexual aggression. Nor is there any national standard in the US for defining and reporting male-male or female-perpetrated rapes. In most states, the definition of rape is broad, with respect to genders and the nature of the acts involved. Info on the 4 largest states (containing 1/3 of US pop): (In case this reference is questioned/challenged as inaccurate.) None are gender-specific, all include CA: "A Penal Code 261 pc "rape" occurs...under California rape law...when an individual engages in sexual intercourse with another person when the sexual act is accomplished (1) against that person's will, or (2) without that person’s consent.." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_regarding_rape

[2] - See table on page 19 and the definitions on page 17:

Rape is defined as any completed or attempted unwanted vaginal (for women), oral, or anal penetration through the use of physical force (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threats to physically harm and includes times when the victim was drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent. Rape is separated into three types, completed forced penetration, attempted forced penetration, and completed alcohol or drug facilitated penetration.

Being made to penetrate someone else includes times when the victim was made to, or there was an attempt to make them, sexually penetrate someone without the victim’s consent because the victim was physically forced (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threatened with physical harm, or when the victim was drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent. - -Among women, this behavior reflects a female being made to orally penetrate another female’s vagina or anus. - -Among men, being made to penetrate someone else could have occurred in multiple ways: being made to vaginally penetrate a female using one’s own penis; orally penetrating a female’s vagina or anus; anally penetrating a male or female; or being made to receive oral sex from a male or female. It also includes female perpetrators attempting to force male victims to penetrate them, though it did not happen. - http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_Report2010-a.pdf

[3] - Table 2.1 on page 18 and table 2.2 on page 19

[4] - For female rape victims, 98.1% reported only male perpetrators [...] a majority of male victims reported only female perpetrators: being made to penetrate (79.2%) - Page 24

[2][3][4] - National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (2010) - http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_Report2010-a.pdf

[5] - Calculation of the ballpark number:

98.1 + 20.8 = 118.9 male rapists
79.2 + 1.9 = 81.1 female rapists
81.1 / 200 = 0.4055 -> 40% female rapists

Limitation of that number. We can not be sure that the 1.9% and the 20.8% include ONLY male/female perpetrators as we do not know the figure of people who have been raped by both men and women. Also, even though most victims of both sexes report only one perpetrator we can not be sure how people who report multiple rapes would influence the number.

[6] Women are increasingly taking on a role where they are the sexual aggressor/sexual initiator. That role does not come without risks and one of them is presuming consent where there is none. The narrative that the overwhelming majority of rapist as well as the insistence (of media, law and surveys) of categorizing those actions by women as something else than rape only increases the risks that these women will at some stage rape a partner since they are less likley to evaluate their own behaviour because why make efforts to avoid something that almost never happens and which only truly evil girls do. See also From Deviance to Normalcy: Women as Sexual Aggressors (2002) - Studies have revealed that young girls have become socially assertive in calling young boys on the telephone and even asking for dates at a very early age (Anderson, Arceneaux, Carter, Miller, & King, 1995). Also, women are now expected to take an active role in sex (O'Sullivan & Byers, 1996), and are expressing themselves sexually in aggressive behavior patterns (Anderson & Struckman-Johnson, 1998). Rates of sexually aggressive behaviors among women vary from one segment of the United States to another, but the evidence presented here shows that as many as 7% of women self-report the use of physical force to obtain sex, 40% self-report sexual coercion, and over 50% self-report initiating sexual contact with a man while his judgment was impaired by drugs or alcohol (Anderson, 1998). Given these numbers, it is appropriate to conclude that women's sexual aggression now represents a usual or typical pattern (i.e., has become normal), within the limits of the data reviewed in this paper. - http://www.ejhs.org/volume5/deviancetonormal.htm

[7] - BJS - NCVS Rape Rates - http://www.bjs.gov/content/glance/rape.cfm

[8] - Men are becoming aware of this issue and to a lesser degree buy into the narrative that men should welcome all sex. This notion I suspect also explains some (I don’t have any idea of how much) of the difference in lifetime numbers as elder men are more likely to recall past events as being consensual when they in fact were not. In order to recall them as non-consensual one must recognize that one have the option to consent or not. / Researchers into the field of traumatic memory recovery note that the longer the period of time a person is asked recall a traumatic event, the less likely they are to remember it. How this works is that surveys that ask about a traumatic event in the last six months get less false negatives than those that ask about a traumatic event in the last twelve months which, itself, gets considerably fewer false negatives than lifetime prevalence. For men this effect is even more pronounced. "16% of men with documented cases of sexual abuse considered their early childhood experiences sexual abuse, compared with 64% of women with documented cases of sexual abuse. These gender differences may reflect inadequate measurement techniques or an unwillingness on the part of men to disclose this information (Widom and Morris 1997)." [...] Comparing the lifetime rate of sexual abuse for men and women is misleading in determining their relative risk of sexual violence, simply because men disclose childhood sexual abuse four times less often than women. There may be many reasons for this. It’s unlikely that it’s due to sexual abuse being less impactful on men because studies have shown that sexual abuse does have a profound impact on men, and this includes female-on-male sexual abuse. For instance, the link between sexual abuse and suicide attempts is stronger in boys (Rhodes et al. 2001) and sexually abused boys are twice as likely to commit suicide (Molnar et al. 2001) than sexually abused girls. In addition to that, there is a risk factor for sexually abused men to sexually abuse others is if their abuser was female (Salter et al. 2003). One possible reason for men not disclosing, or even “forgetting”, is quite simple: our social narrative does not allow for, nor does it depict, the sexual abuse of males. To a degree it allows for the sexual abuse of boys by men, but not boys by women or adult men by anyone. In a study on the effects of retention interval and gender on the perception of violence, Ahola et al. (2009) found that eyewitnesses rated female perpetrators less violent than male when reporting after an interval of one to three weeks as opposed to ten minutes. Ahola et al. (2009) proposed that over time eyewitnesses reinterpreted the behavior of perpetrators in order to conform to gender stereotypes regarding violence. Widom and Morris (1997) propose that a similar process is occurring with male victims of sexual abuse (particularly by females) as, over time, they reinterpret their victimization to conform with the dominant social narrative regarding sexual abuse: that it happens to women and is perpetrated by men. They will do this by reframing their abuse as consensual or as a rite of passage or less violent than it was or by “forgetting” it completely. The more time passes, the more our memories conform to the dominant social narrative. "Gender differences in reporting and in perceptions of early childhood experiences may reflect early socialization experiences in which men learn to view these behaviors as non-predatory and non-abusive. Many of the sexual experiences considered to be sexual abuse (showing/touching sex organs, kissing in a sexual way) may be seen as developmental rites of passage, part of a learning process (Widom and Morris 1997.)" Note that this “forgetting” does not mean that there is no psychological effect; only that the source of that effect is buried, becoming a silent trigger for self-destructive behavior.- http://www.genderratic.com/?p=836

[9] - Predictors of Sexual Coercion Against Women and Men: A Multilevel, Multinational Study of University Students (2007) - http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/ID45-PR45.pdf

EDIT: Some clarifications taken from the feministing post of that survey

EDIT: Genderratic has a great post on that same survey. Read it here. Added one part of their article to the sources section.

The "A Voice for Men" Overview.

2012-01-18T10:58:00.001+01:00

While I do not agree with everything they say, here is a nice overview of numbers. This time with written out links to have a nice copy & paste resource:

Unsheltered Homeless (2009) [http://www.societaldistress.org/files/HO-HAR2009.pdf]
Women – 12,000 – 4%
Men – 240,000 – 96%

Life Expectancy (2006) [http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0105.pdf]
Women – 80.8 Years
Men – 75.7 Years

Suicides (2008) [http://www.afsp.org/index.cfm?page_id=04ECB949-C3D9-5FFA-DA9C65C381BAAEC0]
Women – 7,585 - 19%
Men – 28,450 - 81%

Deaths by Homicide (2004) [http://www.disastercenter.com/cdc/Table_12_2006.html]
Women – 3,856 – 20%
Men – 14,717 – 80%

Deaths from Cancer (2004) [http://www.disastercenter.com/cdc/Table_12_2006.html]
Women – 269,819
Men – 290,069

Deaths from HIV/AIDS (2004) [http://www.disastercenter.com/cdc/Table_12_2006.html]
Women – 3,357
Men – 8,756

Federal Funds for Sex Specific Cancer Research [http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/NCI/research-funding]
Women – Breast Cancer – $631,000,000 - 40,000 Deaths
Men – Prostate Cancer – $300,000,000 - 33,000 Deaths

Deaths on the Job (2010) [http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfoi_rates_2010hb.pdf]
Women – 355 - 7%
Men – 4,192 - 93%

Injuries on the Job (2007) [http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/osh/case/osch0040.pdf]
Women – 36%
Men – 64%

College Enrollment (2009) [http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98]
Women – 58% - 11,658,000
Men – 42% - 8,770,000

Affirmative Action Education Programs (Gender Specific) [http://www.avoiceformen.com/men/mens-issues/bias-against-men-expands-education-gap/]
Women – Yes
Men – No

Unemployment Rates (2010) [http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat2.pdf]
Women – 8.6% – 6,199,000
Men – 10.5% - 8,626,000

Average Hours Worked Per Week (2010) [http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat22.pdf]
Women – 36.1
Men – 40.2

High School Graduation Rates (2005) [http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_48.htm]
Women – 72%
Men – 65%

Incarceration Rates (2009) [http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/pim09st.pdf]
Women – 114,979 - 7%
Men – 1,502,490 - 93%

Child Custody Rates [http://deltabravo.net/custody/bias_essay.php]
Women – 11,268,000 custodial mothers
Men – 2,907,000 custodial fathers

US Military Deaths From 1950 – 2010 [http://www.militaryfactory.com/vietnam/casualties.asp][http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf][http://usiraq.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=000671#miltfatstat]
Women – 139 - 0.01%
Men – 100,063 - 99.9%

Federally Funded Battered Shelters [http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/fysb/content/familyviolence/factsheet.htm]
Women – 2,000+ $300,000,000 per year
Men – None – $0

Federally Funded Health Offices and Research 1970 – Present (not including cancer research) [http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/government-tyranny/mens-health-the-forgotten/]
Women Only – Office, Projects and Programs 70+ – Funds – $100,000,000,000
Men Only – None – $0

Forced Selective Service
Women – No
Men – Yes

Drug and Alcohol Addiction and Abuse Rates (2010) [http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/NSDUH/2k10NSDUH/2k10Results.pdf]
Women – 5.8%
Men – 12.2%

NCFM asks the United Nations to end all forms of discrimination against men | National Coalition For Men (NCFM)

2012-01-18T10:29:00.001+01:00

Well even I hesitate to completely steal that one. A good summary of discriminations against men, as presented by the NCFM for the UN. One really has to wonder why anything like this isn't considered yet. Some examples:

States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that the lives of men are considered equally as valuable as the lives of women.

States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that men have just as much right to be evacuated from war zones as women have (an exception can be made in cases of pregnant women and nursing mothers).

While reserving priority space on lifeboats for children over adults would still be permissible, men must be given equal priority as women with regards to being evacuated from ships (an exception can be made in cases of pregnant women and nursing mothers).

Men shall be evacuated from all other dangerous situations with equal priority as women (an exception can be made in cases of pregnant women and nursing mothers).

States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that men’s health is given equal priority to women’s health, including in such areas as state funding for medical research. An exception can be made in instances in which a State Party wishes to spend more research money on behalf of the sex with a lower life expectancy.

States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that all social welfare services treat men equally with women and are just as available to men as they are to women.

This is mostly just common sense, it is kind of sad that this isn't considered already. Read the whole thing here

"Man Up" is code for "fuck how you feel. conform to your traditional gender role"

2012-01-13T10:51:00.000+01:00

Stolen from a redditor. Short and straight to the point, I like it.

Btw....Alzheimer is not a women's disease either...

2012-01-05T16:32:00.001+01:00

Found via Jerry's blog, here is the pdf:

More women than men have Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. Almost two-thirds of all Americans living with Alzheimer’s are women. Of the 5.2 million people over age 65 with Alzheimer’s in the United States, 3.4 million are women and 1.8 million are men. Based on estimates from ADAMS, 16 percent of women aged 71 and older have Alzheimer’s disease or other dementia compared with 11 percent of men.

Further analyses show that the larger proportion of older women than men who have Alzheimer’s disease or other dementia is primarily explained by the fact that women live longer on average than men. Moreover, many studies of the age-specific incidence (development of new cases) of Alzheimer’s disease or any dementia have found no significant difference by gender. Thus, women are not more likely than men to develop dementia at any given age.

Men just die earlier.

Circumcision to reduce HIV in Africa....well maybe not that good idea

2012-01-05T11:44:00.003+01:00

We talked about it here before. It seems some of the worries here are becoming true:

Male circumcision is becoming a canal for new HIV infections as men are now reluctant to use condoms on the basis that they are 60 percent safe, a government official has said. [...] “We have a huge challenge where male circumcision has created a canal to those who do not want to use condoms. [...] According to Khumalo, Sub-Sahara Africa still records the highest figures of new infections with about 7 000 estimated infections despite the increase in the numbers of men who are getting circumcised.

*Sigh*

Besides that there is a lot going on with circumcision:

More than 40 000 Zimbabwean adult men, according to reports, have been circumcised since the programme began in 2010 and 100 000 more are expected to undergo circumcision by the end of 2012.

Zimbabwe has set a goal of circumcising 1,2 million men by 2015.

Sinokuthemba Xaba, Zimbabwe’s national male circumcision co-ordinator told the state media that approximately 11 000 men were circumcised by December 2010, with over 20 000 having been circumcised this year alone.

He said preparations were under way for the launch of a neo-natal circumcision programme, where the medical procedure will be performed free of charge on male babies as soon as they are born.

In August, government started an ambitious programme aimed at male cabinet ministers, MPs and councilors to undergo circumcision.

Oh my....

Recent DV data from the CDC Survey

2012-01-05T11:32:00.000+01:00

I didn't really look at the DV data in the recent CDC study. Luckily someone else did. God, I am lazy. Via Glenn Sacks:

within the past year, 6.5% of men and 6.3% of women said they were victims of violence at the hands of an intimate partner. Another 18% of men and only 14% of women reported themselves the victims of “psychological aggression.” And when it came to being a victim of “coercive control” by an intimate partner, males outnumbered females by almost a 3:2 margin, 15.2% to 10.7%.

That last is significant of course because the entire DV industry has for years told us that DV is all about power and control. So isn’t it interesting that women do that far more than do men.

When it comes to lifetime violence (as defined by the survey), women do indeed report greater victimization, but the gap between men and women isn’t great. For example, lifetime figures for physical violence victimization by an intimate partner are 32.9% for women and 28.2% for men.

U.S. Census Child Support Figures

2012-01-05T11:27:00.001+01:00

Via Glenn Sacks:

While we’re on the subject, it’s worth noting that the U.S. Census Bureau came out with the latest child support figures earlier this month. The most recent data here are for 2009.

The good news is that the number of custody orders with dads as the custodial parent has rocketed skyward. In 2007, they were only 16.2% of the total; in 2009 17.8% of parents with custody orders were dads. At that rate it’ll only be 20 years before we reach equality in child custody. Break out the champagne.

What’s also true is that, even though they’re ordered to pay more than mothers, fathers do a lot better job of doing so. Fathers are ordered to pay, on average, $5,997 per year whereas mothers are only ordered to pay $5,601. Despite being ordered to pay more, fathers pay 62.8% of the ordered amount while mothers pay 54.6%. And 42% of custodial mothers receive all of what they’re owed, while only 34.1% of fathers do.

Rule 34 explains

2012-01-04T11:42:00.002+01:00

It is a novelity account from reddit about rule34 (if it exists, there is porn of it). Pretty interesting:

On the surface, Rule 34 seems like a hilarious idea; if it exists, there is porn of it. The humor lies in the shock and surreality of the moment for the average user stumbling upon the pornographic interpretation of an idea held dear.

And while I agree that it often times can be funny, the truth is that most of these are not being created as a joke. If Rule 34 really was just an anti-authoritarian 'rebel yell' of the internet, it would have passed into obscurity long ago. But we can see that it has been consistently happening since the dawn of the world wide web, and even longer before. Truth be told, the only difference between today and a few centuries ago is the means of distribution.

It's human nature to sexualize. For every conceivable person, concept, object or emotion there has been at least one person who got off thinking about it. There is no shame in that either; for we are merely prisms, refracting the energies of biology and evolutionary drive into a rainbow spectrum of sexuality. Yet despite the rich diversity of what is capable, we may sometimes feel forced to see the world, and even ourselves, through the colored lenses of a chosen few. This is no way to live your life. You will not feel whole without being at peace with your sexual identity, and you will not be able to love your fellow peoples as deeply without being able to truly see them.

Yes, that above is a picture of Donnie Darko kissing Frank the Rabbit, and it exists because someone out there truly enjoys the sentiment of the idea. Someone out there was moved by the characters, and so took it upon themselves to create from nothing, a way to express their desires and ultimately themselves. It is this form of expression that will ultimately reach across the spans of the internet to touch the soul of someone, somewhere who needs it the most. They may be an avid masturbator, comfortable and experienced with their wants and their body, or they may be in the midst of a sexual awakening, alone and terrified of the implications of their desires. Either way, this art form will for one brief moment allow them a shared connection and reminder that they are not alone.

tl;dr You wonder what the people that draw these are like, and I tell you they are no different from anyone else.

More on the ugliness penalty for men

2012-01-03T08:56:00.002+01:00

I already blogged about this, apparently there is more:

A team at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg in northern Germany questioned more than 3,000 people about their career, and compared this with rankings of how attractive they were.

The results suggest that being one point more attractive was worth a three percent wage hike, while being five points more attractive boosted a career by the same amount as having a university degree.

Professor Christian Pfeifer said his study, published this week in the Applied Economics Letters journal, also showed that the importance of looks in the workplace was even more important for men than it was for women.

Act surprised people. Found via Typhonblue on Reddit. Thanks.

Men's health covers

2012-01-02T16:32:00.002+01:00

God, I need those abs....

(Not really, it is just cosmo for men)

Sometimes I just like to cite Hugo Schwyzer....

2011-12-17T15:19:00.000+01:00

*Sigh* I usually do not agree with that guy, but when he has a point, he has a point:

Women are shamed for their sexuality in a way that men aren’t. That has innumerable consequences. For example, we raise women to be objects of desire. This is where we get the famous Paris Paradox (which goes back long before Paris Hilton), where girls learn how to be sexy long before they discover their own sexuality.

At the same time, we raise boys to believe their bodies aren’t as beautiful, as desirable, as appealing as those of girls. Boys get to be sexual, but too rarely get to trust that they’re wanted, lusted for, desired. Girls are much more visual and much more sexual than we admit; boys “long to be longed for” to a far greater extent than we realize.

You just can't make this shit up....

2011-12-17T00:29:00.000+01:00

Assume the following, a large study by a government body finds, among other data, that in the last 12 month the same number of men and women have been raped (almost 50/50). The study however has a flaw and defines the rape of men not as rape but as something different. Now assume a major feminist blog posts about the study yet does not mention that little fact (almost 50/50 rape victims in the last 12 months). When called out said feminist said she does not name that number because she trusts other data in the study more. Of course said feminist also does misinterpret data so that it seems that men are most of the perpetrators. This is happening right now.

The study we are talking about is the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey by the CDC, sample size a tad more than 16,000. Now the CDC is a bit shaky with their definitions of rape, and with shaky I mean these fuckers do not call male rape, rape. Which strangely reminds me of Whoopie Goldberg's it wasn't "rape-rape" remark.

Toysoldier has a nice summary (as always; read it all).

-Among women, rape includes vaginal, oral, or anal penetration by a male using his penis. It also includes vaginal or anal penetration by a male or female using their fingers or an object.

-Among men, rape includes oral or anal penetration by a male using his penis. It also includes anal penetration by a male or female using their fingers or an object. (Page 17)

Horrible fail, most male rape cases via that study got covered via this category:

being made to penetrate someone else could have occurred in multiple ways: being made to vaginally penetrate a female using one’s own penis; orally penetrating a female’s vagina or anus; anally penetrating a male or female; or being made to receive oral sex from a male or female. (Page 17)

As for the results, we take a look at page 18-19 (this number also includes attempted rape as well as alcohol/drug facilitated rape):

Made to penetrate in the last 12 months: 1.1% (There was only a male number as there were not enough women reporting this item)

Rape in the last 12 months: 1.1% (There was only a female number as there were not enough men reporting this item)

The lifetime numbers is where it gets confusing. Although we have the same number (almost, they count 1,270,000 female and 1,267,000 male victims) in the last 12 months the lifetime numbers are 4.8% (male) vs 18.3% (female). Why? I could only speculate. It might be that men are more likely these days to label their experience as rape, it might be that women have become more aggressive of course we have to keep in mind that men are still less likely to report than women. I don't know and I am really waiting for an expert to explain that. However this doesn't change the fact that in the last 12 months the same amount of men and women have been raped (and this even leaves out incarnated men and boys living on the street where both groups are more likely to be rape than similar female ones). This is fucking significant. I can not stress that enough, similar to DV studies there is a study here saying, victims, equal. Sadly, the figure that will be cited everywhere will be the figure with the most female and the least male victims, the lifetime rape number (which also excludes the being forced to penetrate definition). On another note we now have several large scale studies with a huge chunk of male victims. The NVAWS found that 1/3 of rape victims were male (even though they ignored being made to penetrate. A huge multinational study on several campuses found more male victims than female ones. And now the CDC.

So what about the perpetrators:

Most perpetrators of all forms of sexual violence against women were male. For female rape victims, 98.1% reported only male perpetrators. Additionally, 92.5% of female victims of sexual violence other than rape reported only male perpetrators. For male victims, the sex of the perpetrator varied by the type of sexual violence experienced. The majority of male rape victims (93.3%) reported only male perpetrators. For three of the other forms of sexual violence, a majority of male victims reported only female perpetrators: being made to penetrate (79.2%), sexual coercion (83.6%), and unwanted sexual contact (53.1%). For non-contact unwanted sexual experiences, approximately half of male victims (49.0%) reported only male perpetrators and more than one-third (37.7%) reported only female perpetrators (data not shown). (Page 24)

In short for the rape categories it is 98.1% male on female and 79.2% female on male. Which gives us a divide of 60% male perpetrators and 40% female perpetrators. That is a whole lot of women. Surprised? Well to cite from one of my latest posts, maybe not.

Anderson (1998, 1996), presented self-reported prevalence rates for women's sexual coercion of between 25% and 40% and for physically forced sexual contact between 1.6% and 7.1%. Of perhaps greater significance was the women's self-reports of engaging in a classic date-rape scenario - taking advantage of someone who was under the influence of alcohol or drugs. When asked about initiating sexual contact with a man when his judgment was impaired by drugs or alcohol, between 32% and 51% of the women said that they had. Further, between 5% and 15% of women reported giving a man alcohol or drugs in an attempt to have sexual contact with him.

So a short recap, last year almost same amount of female and male rape victims, with a whole lot of female perpetrators. For reasons unknown, the life time figure looks quite different. Also in this study they really fucked up the rape definition BUT of course we have to be glad they asked the question of "being forced to penetrate at all". So there was a reaction on feministing, probably the most important and most popular feminist blog out there. Now recently I said somewhere, I am mostly okay with this site, well, not this time. Some citations:

Men are affected by sexual violence too.

As Hugo Schwyzer said, “Though men remain the overwhelming majority of perpetrators of rape, the new research makes it more evident than ever that men are also its victims.” One in 71 men (1.4%) have been raped and nearly 5% have been made to penetrate someone else in their lifetimes. (By the way, this is the first national study to distinguish between being forced to penetrate someone and being penetrated.) [...] * Note: In this study, “rape” was defined as “completed forced penetration, attempted forced penetration, or alcohol/drug facilitated completed penetration.”

Hm, while they mention the "rape-rape" problem, no critique of it, and not mentioning the huge amount of male victims that were there last year? What is going on here. She clarified it in the comments:

when I discuss the way men are affected by sexual violence. Obviously, the study’s definition of rape is imperfect–which is why I included a note so it would be clear that I was using their definition, not my own. But perhaps it wasn’t clear. My apologies.

Imperfect? You have got to be kidding me. Alienating male victims is imperfect? It is more than that. I would say it is scandalous (even if expected). It is mindbogling, those guys point out every ism there is under the sun on a daily basis, yet when it comes to men they start to dodge around the issue like politicians. "I admit that their definition of rape wasn't entirely perfect". I'll help to spell it out for you Maya. That is some blatant sexism right there.

What about the numbers:

I highlighted the lifetime stats, as opposed to the figures for the past 12 months, because, with limited space to go into every single finding, those seemed to paint the most comprehensive picture of what’s going on. I’d be interested to hear an explanation from an expert for the more equal numbers by gender for the past 12 months, but I’m still gonna lean toward trusting the lifetime stats. And I still feel pretty confident in saying that “men remain the overwhelming majority of perpetrators of rape.”

Did I get it right she didn't trust the last year results from the same survey? The results that could really be more accurate? I am not sure what to say, but Jebus, that view of the world is kind of fucked up as she basically says "yeah that study is nice and such, but only when it comes to female victims". Selective reading of the worst kind....and sadly business as usual.

On alcohol, sex and rape...

2011-12-09T13:05:00.001+01:00

To be honest, I am not 100% sure how I stand on that issue. There is only a thin line between a drunken hook-up you regret the next morning and someone using alcohol to coerce or even rape you it seems. This is what I gather from several posts from feministing or feministe. I can't even call out a certain post it just seems to be a mindset, that when it gets to drunken hook-ups we are always talking about rape, as if consent and sex while drunk as well as regretting it the next day is not possible. I do not see it framed that way often on feminist sites. And I admit I am not fair here as I really can't pin down a post especially. Those two go sort of in the direction but are just close. Now I don't blame the victim, there should always be consent, the more enthusiastic, the better. It just seems to me that when there is talk on feminist spaces that goes in the direction of alcohol, sex, consent and victim blaming the possibility of drunken men as possible victims and the possibility of a regretful yet consensual sexual encounter fly out of the window.

Two posts come to mind which I saw the last week. The first one was on Reddit and had a headline in it that said something akin to "50% of women have raped a man". Now I can not find the headline again, but luckily saved the article. My first thought after reading that headline was "bullshit" after reading the data, well. Look yourself:

Anderson (1998, 1996), presented self-reported prevalence rates for women's sexual coercion of between 25% and 40% and for physically forced sexual contact between 1.6% and 7.1%. Of perhaps greater significance was the women's self-reports of engaging in a classic date-rape scenario - taking advantage of someone who was under the influence of alcohol or drugs. When asked about initiating sexual contact with a man when his judgment was impaired by drugs or alcohol, between 32% and 51% of the women said that they had. Further, between 5% and 15% of women reported giving a man alcohol or drugs in an attempt to have sexual contact with him.

Now, I know that this is a sample of college students and that there are several samples in that ranging between 32-51% but dammit that are a whole lot of cases. If we had a several study with the genders reversed, where men admitted to initiating sexual contact with a woman when here judgment was impaired by drugs or alcohol I can totally see certain feminist argue that, to bring up my previous headline again, "50% of men have raped a woman".

There is obviously a double standard, something I see with myself. To me "men admitted to initiating sexual contact with a woman when here judgment was impaired by drugs or alcohol" sounds worse than with the sexes reversed. Which is of course sexist. There is a recent case about this form of sexism:

The College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts expelled a young man the day before he was supposed to graduate last May with a 3.13 grade point average. The expulsion was punishment following a college board's determination that the young man was responsible for raping a female student. Now the young man, Edwin Bleiler, 23, is suing the school for breach of contract and for violating his civil rights in a case that raises an important issue with possibly widespread implications.

At issue is this: if a male and female college student engage in sexual activity while intoxicated (not incapacitated), should the male be deemed a "rapist" while the female is deemed a "victim"? That's what Mr. Bleiler alleges happened in his case, and if that's correct, it's a gross distortion of even the semblance of equal justice, not to mention a breach of the school's contract with its students.

According to the complaint: “The college’s sexual misconduct policy imposes a form of strict liability on male students: if a male and female student are both intoxicated and engage in sexual activity, the male student could face expulsion for violation of the policy without any evidence of coercion, manipulation, force or any additional culpable behavior.”

To finish my incoherent ramblings, I am still not sure where I stand on that issue or what the data should tell us. We should either get a better understanding of the studies, maybe a better way to differentiate between date rape / drunken hook-ups, or we should accept that also many men are raped that way. Something tells me the solution is somehow in the middle, the situation now though surely smells fishy.

Two famous DV victims

2011-12-09T12:42:00.001+01:00

Who would have thought Lincoln and Hawking were abuse by there spouses:

Abraham Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, physically abused him routinely, pelting her husband with potatoes and books and whacking him with firewood, according to a new biography.

Michael Burlingame, a historian at Connecticut College, argues in "The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln," due next month from the University of Illinois Press, that the 16th president was a classic victim of spousal abuse.

"She threw coffee in his face and chased him with a knife," Burlingame said.

- from here

A nurse who cared for Professor Stephen Hawking claimed last night that she saw his wife abusing and mistreating him.

Elaine Hawking called her disabled 62-year-old husband a cripple, bathed him in water that was too hot and allowed him to wet himself, it was alleged.

The nurse was reported as saying: "She gets angry and has thrown him on the bed where he kicks his limbs or hurts himself. She allowed him to slip down low in the bath so the water goes in the hole in his throat.

"She has left him in the garden without his computer mouse so he cannot talk and call for anyone. She gives him lots of verbal abuse and calls him a cripple and an invalid, which depresses him.

"She would withhold the bottle he used to go to the toilet so he wet himself, which he does not like because he is a very dignified person and a very private person. The verbal abuse is unbelievable. Her mouth is like a sewer. We (his nurses) got so used to it we forgot it was not normal behaviour.

"She throws things around the kitchen to frighten people and has temper tantrums.

"During one visit to hospital she was asked to leave because she was throwing things around."

[...] Professor Hawking's 24-year-old son by his first wife Jane said yesterday he felt certain his stepmother was behind a string of alleged assaults on the academic.

Tim Hawking described his father's alleged abuse as "completely despicable and unacceptable".

He added: "I believe quite strongly that it's true, based on what I have been privy to in the past.

"It makes me feel sick, as I'm sure anyone would be in my position. I feel completely helpless. He denies it every time I speak to him and I would hope he would respect me enough to tell me the truth."

Tim's mother Jane said: "The situation is far worse than any of us imagined."

Cambridgeshire Police confirmed they will be speaking to a nurse about allegations of assault on the academic.

- from here

It can happen to everyone.

Circumcision.....a huge sigh

2011-12-09T12:39:00.001+01:00

Kind of funny, it is Clinton again, this time with something different:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently announced that 1 million circumcisions have been performed over the last 4 years, three-quarters funded by the U.S. government. This is just 4% of the number of circumcisions needed in sub-Saharan Africa.

This is just sad.

Circumcision is Africa’s best weapon against AIDS

No you idiots, condoms are. Oh my...

EDIT: User ml66uk makes a good case in the comments:

NO NO NO. Condoms are the best weapon against AIDS for Africans as well as for everyone else.

From the USAID report “LEVELS AND SPREAD OF HIV SEROPREVALENCE AND ASSOCIATED FACTORS: EVIDENCE FROM NATIONAL HOUSEHOLD SURVEYS”
“There appears no clear pattern of association between male circumcision and HIV prevalence—in 8 of 18 countries with data, HIV prevalence is lower among circumcised men, while in the remaining 10 countries it is higher.”
http://www.measuredhs.com/pubs/pdf/CR22/ CR22.pdf

The South African National Communication Survey on HIV/AIDS, 2009 found that 15% of adults across age groups “believe that circumcised men do not need to use condoms”.
http://www.info.gov.za/issues/hiv/survey _2009.htm

From the committee of the South African Medical Association Human Rights, Law & Ethics Committee :
“the Committee expressed serious concern that not enough scientifically-based evidence was available to confirm that circumcisions prevented HIV contraction and that the public at large was influenced by incorrect and misrepresented information. The Committee reiterated its view that it did not support circumcision to prevent HIV transmission.”

The one randomized controlled trial into male-to-female transmission showed a 54% higher rate in the group where the men had been circumcised btw:
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet /article/PIIS0140-6736(09)60998-3/abstr act

ABC (Abstinence, Being faithful, and especially Condoms) is the way forward. Promoting genital surgery will cost African lives, not save them.

Gay rights = human rights

2011-12-08T11:02:00.001+01:00

"Some have suggested that gay rights and human rights are separate and distinct; but, in fact, they are one and the same. Now, of course, 60 years ago, the governments that drafted and passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were not thinking about how it applied to the LGBT community. They also weren’t thinking about how it applied to indigenous people or children or people with disabilities or other marginalized groups. Yet in the past 60 years, we have come to recognize that members of these groups are entitled to the full measure of dignity and rights, because, like all people, they share a common humanity.

This recognition did not occur all at once. It evolved over time. And as it did, we understood that we were honoring rights that people always had, rather than creating new or special rights for them. Like being a woman, like being a racial, religious, tribal, or ethnic minority, being LGBT does not make you less human. And that is why gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights."

Nothing more to add.

Once in a committed relationship, men and women have similar attitudes toward sex

2011-12-08T10:53:00.001+01:00

Not much to say, but pretty interesting stuff:

“Men experience a lot of pressure in our society to have sex with a number of different partners,” said one of the study’s researchers, Paul Perrin, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Florida, “the opposite of what women experience as kind of the gatekeepers of sexuality.”

Past studies, the scientists point out, have shown that compared with women, men are more sexually permissive, endorse casual sex at higher rates and masturbate more often.

And even in dreamland, men are from Mars and women from Venus. A recent study showed men were more than twice as likely as women to report dreams about multiple sex partners.

[...]While women placed more emphasis on the emotional aspects of sex, men focused more on the physical side of sex. Men were much more likely to find sex personally and physically pleasurable, while women were more likely to think sex violates social taboos.

Thoughts often turn into actions. “Sexually restrictive gender roles too often become self-fulfilling prophecies because women know that they are expected to be less sexual than men,” the scientists write, “and men know that they are expected to be more sexual than women.”

Men gave much higher ratings for risky sexual behaviors, such as “I should have sex with as many people as possible,” than women. And women were more apt to endorse waiting longer and not engaging in premarital sex.

When Mr. Right shows up, however, women ditch society-imposed gender roles, warming up to sexual pleasures, the researchers found.

In the context of an intimate relationship, both genders expressed that sex was important as a way to bring couples closer, to help maintain healthy relationships and to increase one’s self confidence.

“People in romantic relationships give more importance to their own feelings and their partners’ than they do to social expectations about sexual behavior,” Perrin said.

Flirting...

2011-12-08T10:30:00.001+01:00

Came across some interesting studies about flirting, body language and sex differences. We start with a study and two articles that are based on the study that come to totally different conclusions. It again shows us not to trust the media that much:

70 percent of college women reporting an experience in which a guy mistook her friendliness for a sexual come-on, Farris said.

In the study, appearing in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, men who viewed images of friendly women misidentified 12 percent of the images as sexually interested. Women mistook 8.7 percent of the friendly images for sexual interest.

Both men and women were even more likely to do the opposite -- when viewing images of sexually interested women, men mistakenly called 37.8 percent of the images "friendly." Women mistook 31.9 percent of the sexual interest cues for friendliness.

"Relative to women, men did not oversexualize the image set in our study," said lead author Coreen Farris, a doctoral student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at IU Bloomington. "Both men and women were reluctant to state that ambiguous cues were 'sexual interest.' In fact, men and women utilized nearly identical thresholds for the degree of sexual interest that must be perceived before they were willing to go out on a limb and state that the nonverbal cues were sexual in nature."

[...] "The observed advantage among women in ability to discriminate between friendliness and sexual interest extends to processing of sad and rejecting cues. This suggests that the increased tendency among young men to incorrectly read sexual interest rather than friendliness may simply be an extension of a general disadvantage in reading nonverbal cues, rather than a process unique to sexual signaling."

The study involved 280 heterosexual college-age men and women, average age of 19.6. Seated in a private computer room, the men and women each categorized 280 photo images of women (full body, fully clothed) into one of four categories -- friendly, sexually interested, sad or rejecting. Images were selected for each of the categories based on an extensive validation process.

The study found that both men and women were least accurate at correctly identifying the photos indicating sexual interest. Farris, whose research focuses on sexual aggression in men, noted that the results reflect average differences.

"The data don't support the idea that all men are bad at this or that all women are great at this," she said. "It's a small difference."

Pretty interesting stuff. Another study (pdf warning) had a different finding, women are harder to read:

Furthermore, as predicted, it was on average easier for observers to gauge men’s intentions than it was to gauge women’s intentions (though there was high variance in observers’ performance levels across individual daters of both sexes). The lower overall accuracy concerning women’s intentions was not due to observers guessing or
performing at chance but to a systematic overperception of female daters’ interest (Fig. 3)—surpassing 80% erroneous interest predictions for the five hardest-to-read women.

This dramatic rate of incorrect perception supports our hypothesis that women are harder to read, presumably because
they mask their true intentions: As Grammer et al. (2000) argued, the biologically deep-rooted sex inequality in parental investment (Trivers, 1972) puts greater risks on the females of a species during mate choice. As a result, females, including women in speed dating (Todd, Penke, Fasolo, & Lenton, 2007), are much more critical and picky when making mate-choice decisions. And, in order to evaluate potential mates longer without signaling their true intentions, women behave more covertly and ambiguously during initial interactions with the opposite sex. Men, in contrast, face lower risks and consequently should be less likely to hide their intentions.

And while we are at it, something about women initiating:

He (Perper 1985) made note, however, of the fact that it was the womans's behaviour, that was more likely to usher in the next stage. Similarly, when Kendon (1975) filmed a kissing couple seated on a park bench he found that the womans's behavior particularly her facial expressions, functioned as a regulator, modulating the behaviour of her partner. Cary (1976) also has shown that the woman's behavior is important in initiating conversations between strangers. Both in laboratory settings and in singles' bars, conversation was initiated only after the woman glanced at the man. And Perper (1985) discovered in his filed of studies on couples in singles' bars that the woman was responsible for courtship initiation approximately seventy percent of the time.

Interesting stuff...

EDIT: And a recent one:

The researchers found that:
Men who wanted a short-term sexual encounter were more likely to overestimate a woman's desire for them.
Men who believed they were "hot" also thought the women were hot for them, but men who were actually considered attractive by women did not think this way.
The more attractive a woman was to a man, the more likely he was to overestimate her interest.
Women tended to underestimate men's desire.

The female Fritzl

2011-11-23T20:42:00.001+01:00

I do not usually feature examples of horrible crimes, but that one was on a whole different level (found via F&F):

Just a few weeks ago, police entered Weston’s house, located a low door that led to a sub-basement and opened it. No light came from the small, windowless room with a dirt floor, but when they shined a flashlight, human beings started moving in the darkness. These were the mentally impaired adults Weston had kidnapped and locked away from the eyes of the world. They were injured, malnourished. They had only a bottle of water and one of orange juice for nutrition. One man was chained to a radiator. Sanitary facilities consisted of buckets on the floor. News media have uniformly dubbed the scene a “dungeon.”Weston’s apparent motive was to collect their checks from the Social Security Administration that her captives received due to their disabilities.But that was only part of the reason that, over possibly as long as 30 years, Linda Ann Weston gained control over children and the mentally disabled. The other was torture. What else can explain the fact that she starved her subjects, beat them, burned them with hot implements? After all, if your interest is strictly monetary, you don’t kill the people whose checks you’re receiving. On the contrary, you want them to survive for as long as possible. [...] Weston’s interest in forced sex to produce children and therefore income from SSI wasn’t confined to her own siblings. Apparently she also forced the mentally impaired adults in her dungeon to do the same.[...] The girl was found locked in a closet on the third floor of the building that contained the basement dungeon, away from the other victims and children. She was pulled from the closet with her head wrapped in clothing, covering open wounds and scars. On the rest of her body, scars covered her face, a burn mark from a heated spoon was imprinted onto her skin, fractured bones had healed over incorrectly, and her ankles showed signs of repeated shooting from pellet guns, police said.

I am speechless. Final word from F&F:

I want people to understand that men have no monopoly on depravity. I want them to learn that, despite our persistent mythmaking of the “sugar and spice and everything nice” variety, men and women should be judged by the same standards because they’re equally capable of behavior that horrifies. Last, dozens of articles have already been written about Linda Ann Weston. Even though many of her victims were her blood relatives, so far, not one article has called her crimes “domestic violence.” So I did.

Thanks feminism!

2011-11-23T20:29:00.001+01:00

I am a bit stressed by life, but will try to post regularly again. So why not comeback with something atypical? If you have clicked through that blog, you might have noticed that I tend to be critical of feminism. To say it that way, I would like to call myself egalitarian but I am biased toward a masculist opinion. And there are certain aspects of feminism that makes lives for men harder, which is where I am coming from. Anyhow recently read this on feministe:

In the years leading up to the birth of “Ms. Magazine”, women had trouble getting a credit card without a man’s signature, had few legal rights when it came to divorce or reproduction, and were expected to aspire solely to marriage and motherhood. Job listings were segregated (“Help wanted, male”). There was no Title IX (banning sex discrimination in federally funded athletic programs); no battered-women’s shelters, rape-crisis centers, and no terms such as sexual harassment and domestic violence.

Well done, no really!To add to the above, I read feministing regularly and can mostly agree with what they are saying (I don't read the community posts, that is probably a very different beast), especially their opposition to "pro-life laws" (I am pro-choice), most stuff on politics, the stuff on body acceptance, sex-positivity, pro-transgender, anti-racism etc. In that vein, I am sure I have been unfair to feminists / feminism in the past, so apologies for that.I wonder if I will get backlash for that post.....we will see.

Study shows why underrepresented men should be included in binge eating research

2011-10-27T23:04:00.001+02:00

Also via NSWATM I believe. The study in question:

As so few studies have included men there is concern that men may be reluctant to seek treatment, or health care providers may be less likely detect a disorder in a male patient, because eating disorders are widely seen as female problems. Health services report that the number of men who receive treatment for binge eating is well below what would be expected based on estimates of prevalence.
Dr Striegel's team used cross-sectional data from a sample of 21743 men and 24608 women who participated in a health risk self-assessment screening. The team analyzed any differences within the group for obesity, hypertension, dyslipidemia, diabetes, depression and work productivity impairment.

The team found that out the 46351 people questioned 1630 (7%) men and 2754 (11%) women were found to binge eat, defined as experiencing at last one binge episode in the past month. The impact on clinical and mental health as a result of binge eating was found to be comparable between men and women.

This study also indicated that binge eating has an impact on work productively in both men and women, suggesting the need for employers to recognize binge eating as a damaging health risk behavior alongside stress or depression.
"The underrepresentation of men in binge eating research does not reflect lower levels of impairment in men versus women," concluded Striegel. "Efforts are needed to raise awareness of the clinical implications of binge eating for men so they can seek appropriate screening and treatment."

Nice quote on false rape accusation vs believing rape victims

2011-10-27T23:00:00.001+02:00

“People are making a false dichotomy out of this. It’s not either believe rape victims or give the accused due process. Believe rape victims insofar as it warrants personal kindness and aid. Believe the accused insofar as it warrants a fair trial and the presumption of innocence until guilt is proven. Saying you don’t want to rush and call someone a rapist doesn’t mean you want to rush and call someone else a liar.”

Thanks for the find Vejuz

Why are most divorces filled by women and other divorce myths

2011-10-26T10:46:00.001+02:00

Sometimes I am confused that a statistic I used myself and read about can not be found on this blog. So there is a nice NYT article on an interesting study:

Across America, at least two-thirds of divorce suits are filed by women. Researchers who have interviewed divorcing couples have repeatedly found that, in cases where the divorce is not mutally desired, women are more than twice as likely to be the ones who want out. After the split, women are typically happier than their exes.

This trend has inspired what is probably the first paper in the American Journal of Law and Economics ever to be named after a Nancy Sinatra song. In "These Boots Are Made for Walking: Why Most Divorce Filers Are Women," Margaret F. Brinig and Douglas Allen, both economists, analyze all 46,000 divorces filed in one year, 1995, in four different states: Connecticut, Virginia, Montana and Oregon.

They looked for different reasons that would prompt a woman to file for divorce. One would be to escape an abusive husband -- like a man who is adulterous or violent. But in the state with the best records of grievances, Virginia, only 6 percent of divorces were granted on grounds of violence, and husbands were cited for adultery only slightly more often than wives.

"Some women file for divorce because they're exploited in really bad marriages," said Dr. Brinig, a professor of law at the University of Iowa. "But it seems to be a relatively small number, probably less than 20 percent of the cases."

[...]"The question of custody absolutely swamps all the other variables," Dr. Brinig said. "Children are the most important asset in a marriage, and the partner who expects to get sole custody is by far the most likely to file for divorce."

And while we are at it, there was a nice collection of data on Glenn's blog:

“Two‑thirds or more of all divorces involving couples with children are initiated by mothers, not fathers.”

Source: Margaret F. Brinig and Douglas A. Allen, "'These Boots Are Made For Walking": Why Most Divorce Filers Are Women" American Law and Economics Review 2‑1 (2000): 126‑169.

Source: John Tierney, "A New Look at the Realities of Divorce," New York Times, July 11, 2000.

Source: Sanford Braver, Marnie Whitley, and Christine Ng, "Who Divorced Whom? Methodological and Theoretical Issues," Journal of Divorce and Remarriage 20, 1993, p. 1.

Source: Cathy Young, "The Sadness of the American Father," The American Spectator, June 2000. See http://fact.on.ca/news/news0006/as000601.htm.

-----

“A randomized study of 46,000 divorce cases published in the American Law and Economics Review found that in only 6% of cases women claimed to be divorcing cruel or abusive husbands, and that adultery was cited by women as a cause of divorce only slightly more than by men. Surveys of divorced couples show that the reasons for their divorces are generally a lack of closeness or of "not feeling loved and appreciated."

Source: Margaret F. Brinig and Douglas A. Allen, “These Boots Are Made For Walking": Why Most Divorce Filers Are Women" American Law and Economics Review 2-1 (2000): 126-169.

Source: John Tierney, "A New Look at the Realities of Divorce," New York Times, July 11, 2000.

Source: Beuhler, "Whose Decision Was It?" Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 48, pp 587 - 595, 1987.

Source: Cathy Young, "The Sadness of the American Father," The American Spectator, June 2000. See http://fact.on.ca/news/news0006/as000601.htm.

-----

“There are almost as many unfaithful wives as there are unfaithful husbands. Research generally estimates that for every five unfaithful husbands, there are four unfaithful wives.”

Source: Maggie Scarf, “Intimate Partners: An examination of the underlying architecture of love relationships—the influence of the past, the causes of infidelity, and the systems that couples create,” The Atlantic Monthly, November 1986. The article can be viewed here. Look for “Emotional Triangles: Infidelity.”

Source: John Przybys, “Unfaithfully Yours: Men, women have differing ideas about fidelity,” Las Vegas Review‑Journal, March 29, 1998. The article can be found here. Look for “Paul Wulkan.”

Source: Jennifer P. Schneider, Richard R. Irons, and M. Deborah Corley, “Disclosure of Extramarital Sexual Activities by Sexually Exploitative Professionals and Other Persons with Addictive or Compulsive Sexual Disorders,” Journal of Sex Education and Therapy 24:277‑287, 1999. The article can be found here. Search in the text for the word “infidelity.”

-----

The vast majority of accusations of child sexual abuse made during custody battles are false, unfounded or unsubstantiated. Source: Douglas J. Besharov and Lisa A. Laumann, "Child Abuse Reporting,” Social Science and Modern Society, Vol. 33, May/June, 1996, p. 42.

Source: Blush, Gordon & Ross, Karol, 1986, The SAID Syndrome. Sterling Heights, MI: Family and Conciliation Courts Review.

-----

Nationwide divorced fathers are ten times as likely to commit suicide as divorced mothers, and more than twice as likely to commit suicide as married fathers.

Source for divorced fathers vs. married fathers: Augustine J. Kposowa, Ph.D., "Marital Status and Suicide in the National Longitudinal Mortality Study," Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, March, 2000, Volume 54, No. 4, pages 254‑261 See http://wizard.ucr.edu/~akposowa/Status.pdf. Search for "divorced men."

Source for "10 times as likely" is Warren Farrell, Father and Child Reunion: How to Bring the Dads We Need to the Children We Love, Penguin Putnam Inc, 2001, pg. 174 & 279.

-----

"Men win custody in only 10% of contested custody cases"
(Note: To avoid confusion: the sources below do not all indicate 10%--some indicate 15 or 20%, some indicate less than 5%. As a whole, the average is around 10%.)

Source: Eleanor E. Maccoby and Robert H. Mnookin, Dividing the Child (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 104-105, 149-150.

Source: Stephen J. Bahr, J.D. Howe, M. Morrill Mann, "Trends in Custody Awards: Has the Removal of Maternal Preference Made a Difference?", Family Law Quarterly, Vol, pp. 247-267, Summer 1994.

Source: Wendy Reiboldt and Sharon Seiling, "Factors Related to Men's Award of Custody," Family Advocate, Winter 1993, pp. 42-44. Published by the Family Law Section of the American Bar Association.

Source: William T. K. Dolan, Esq., Empirical Study of Child Custody in Divorce Decrees in Arlington County, Virginia: July 1, 1989--December 30, 1990, © 1991.

Source: Rich Blake, "Father Says System is Unfair to Men in Custody Battles," Alexander (VA) Gazette Packet, October 22, 1992 .

Source: Robert Seidenberg, The Father's Emergency Guide to Divorce-Custody Battle, JES Books, 1997, pp. 11-15, 60-61.

John P. McCahey, J.D., LL.M, et al., Child Custody and Visitation Law and Practice. Matthew Bender, New York. Volume 3, 1983, Section 13.01.

-----

The commonly cited factoid that “men win custody half of the time or more when they contest it” is a myth.

Source: "Do fathers have the edge in divorce?," Cathy Young, Detroit News, December 10, 1996. See: http://www.vix.com/menmag/youngdet.htm.

Source: Robert Seidenberg, The Father's Emergency Guide to Divorce-Custody Battle, JES Books, 1997, pp. 11-15, 60-61.

Sexual Dysfunction and Circumcision

2011-10-25T11:35:00.003+02:00

Intact News gives us some interesting studies:

This preliminary study investigates what role early trauma might have in alexithymia acquisition for adults by controlling for male circumcision. Three hundred self-selected men were administered the Toronto Twenty-Item Alexithymia Scale checklist and a personal history questionnaire. The circumcised men had age-adjusted alexithymia scores 19.9 percent higher than the intact men; were 1.57 times more likely to have high alexithymia scores; were 2.30 times less likely to have low alexithymia scores; had higher prevalence of two of the three alex-ithymia factors (difficulty identifying feelings and difficulty describing feelings); and were 4.53 times more likely to use an erectile dysfunction drug. Alexithymia in this population of adult men is statistically significant for having experienced circumcision trauma and for erectile dysfunction drug use.

- from here

METHODS: This prospective study was conducted in the Bungoma district, Kenya, where male circumcision is universally practised. Young males intending to undergo traditional or clinical circumcision were identified by a two-stage cluster sampling method. During the July-August 2004 circumcision season, 1007 males were interviewed 30-89 days post- circumcision. Twenty-four men were directly observed during and 3, 8, 30 and 90 days post-circumcision, and 298 men underwent clinical exams 45-89 days post-procedure. Twenty-one traditional and 20 clinical practitioners were interviewed to assess their experience and training. Inventories of health facilities were taken to assess the condition of instruments and supplies necessary for performing safe circumcisions.FINDINGS: Of 443 males circumcised traditionally, 156 (35.2%) experienced an adverse event compared with 99 of 559 (17.7%) circumcised clinically (odds ratio: 2.53; 95% confidence interval: 1.89-3.38). Bleeding and infection were the most common adverse effects, with excessive pain, lacerations, torsion and erectile dysfunction also observed. Participants were aged 5 to 21 years and half were sexually active before circumcision. Practitioners lacked knowledge and training. Proper instruments and supplies were lacking at most health facilities.

- from here

METHODS: Ninty-five patients were investigated on erectile function by questionnaire before and after circumcision, respectively.RESULTS: Eighteen patients suffered from mild erectile dysfunction before circumcision, and 28 suffered from mild or moderate erectile dysfunction after circumcision(P = 0.001). Adult circumcision appeared to have resulted in weakened erectile confidence in 33 cases(P = 0.04), difficult insertion in 41 cases(P = 0.03), prolonged intercourse in 31 cases(P = 0.04) and improved satisfaction in 34 cases(P = 0.04).CONCLUSIONS: Adult circumcision has certain effect on erectile function, to which more importance should be attached.

- from here

METHODS: The vibrotactile thresholds were measured at the forefinger and glans penis in 73 normal volunteer controls and 96 patients with simple redundant prepuce before and after circumcision by biological vibration measurement instrument, and the changes in the perception sensitivity of the body surface were analyzed.RESULTS: The G/F (glans/finger) indexes in the control and the test group were respectively 2.39 +/- 1.72 and 1.97 +/- 0.71, with no significant difference in between (P > 0.05). And those of the test group were 1.97 +/- 0.71, 2.64 +/- 1.38, 3.09 +/-1.46 and 2.97 +/- 1.20 respectively before and 1, 2 and 3 months after circumcision, with significant difference between pre- and post-operation (P < 0.05).CONCLUSION: There is a statistic difference in the glans penis vibration perception threshold between normal men and patients with simple redundant prepuce. The glans penis perception sensitivity decreases after circumcision.

- from here

SUBJECTS AND METHODS: Adult male volunteers with no history of penile pathology or diabetes were evaluated with a Semmes-Weinstein monofilament touch-test to map the fine-touch pressure thresholds of the penis. Circumcised and uncircumcised men were compared using mixed models for repeated data, controlling for age, type of underwear worn, time since last ejaculation, ethnicity, country of birth, and level of education.RESULTS: The glans of the uncircumcised men had significantly lower mean (sem) pressure thresholds than that of the circumcised men, at 0.161 (0.078) g (P = 0.040) when controlled for age, location of measurement, type of underwear worn, and ethnicity. There were significant differences in pressure thresholds by location on the penis (P < 0.001). The most sensitive location on the circumcised penis was the circumcision scar on the ventral surface. Five locations on the uncircumcised penis that are routinely removed at circumcision had lower pressure thresholds than the ventral scar of the circumcised penis.CONCLUSIONS: The glans of the circumcised penis is less sensitive to fine touch than the glans of the uncircumcised penis. The transitional region from the external to the internal prepuce is the most sensitive region of the uncircumcised penis and more sensitive than the most sensitive region of the circumcised penis. Circumcision ablates the most sensitive parts of the penis.

- from here

Methods. This cross-sectional study was conducted at a primary care clinic over a 3-month period in 2008. Men aged 18–70 years attending the clinic were recruited, and they completed self-administered questionnaires that included the Premature Ejaculation Diagnostic Tool (PEDT), International Index of Erectile Function, sociodemography, lifestyle, and medical illness. The operational definition of PE included PE and probable PE based on the PEDT.Main Outcome Measure. Prevalence of PE.Results. A total of 207 men were recruited with a response rate of 93.2%. There were 97 (46.9%) Malay, 57 (27.5%) Chinese, and 53 (25.6%) Indian, and their mean age was 46.0 ± 12.7 years. The prevalence of PE was 40.6% (N = 82) (PE: 20.3%, probable PE: 20.3% using PEDT). A significant association was found between ethnicity and PE (Indian 49.1%, Malay 45.4%, and Chinese 24.6%; χ2 = 8.564, d.f. = 2, P = 0.014). No significant association was found between age and PE. Multivariate analysis showed that erectile dysfunction (adjusted odds ratio [OR] 4.907, 95% confidence interval [CI] 2.271, 10.604), circumcision (adjusted OR 4.881, 95% CI 2.346, 10.153), sexual intercourse ≤5 times in 4 weeks (adjusted OR 3.733, 95% CI 1.847, 7.544), and Indian ethnicity (adjusted OR 3.323, 95% CI 1.489, 7.417) were predictors of PE.Conclusion. PE might be frequent in men attending primary care clinics. We found that erectile dysfunction, circumcision, Indian ethnicity, and frequency of sexual intercourse of ≤5 times per month were associated with PE. These associations need further confirmation.

- from hereAlso, that study

MATERIALS AND METHODS: Men 18 years old or older when circumcised were identified by billing records during a 5-year period at an academic medical center. Medical charts were reviewed for confirmation of the procedure and to identify the indication(s). These men were surveyed to assess erectile function, penile sensitivity, sexual activity and overall satisfaction. Data were analyzed using paired t tests to compare category scores before and after circumcision.RESULTS: A total of 123 men were circumcised as adults. Indications for circumcision included phimosis in 64% of cases, balanitis in 17%, condyloma in 10%, redundant foreskin in 9% and elective in 7%. The response rate was 44% among potential responders. Mean age of responders was 42 years at circumcision and 46 years at survey. Adult circumcision appears to result in worsened erectile function (p = 0.01), decreased penile sensitivity (p = 0.08), no change in sexual activity (p = 0.22) and improved satisfaction (p = 0.04). Of the men 50% reported benefits and 38% reported harm. Overall, 62% of men were satisfied with having been circumcised.

- from here

Of the 200 men who underwent urethroplasty 152 who were 17 to 83 years old (mean age 45.7) completed the questionnaire. Average followup was 36 months (range 3 to 149). Overall there was a similar incidence of sexual problems after urethroplasty and circumcision. Penile skin flap urethroplasty was associated with a slightly higher incidence of impaired sexual function than other procedures (p > 0.05). Men with a longer stricture were most likely to report major changes in erectile function and penile length (p < 0.05) but improvement was evident with time in 61.8%.

- from hereOther points made by the article:

Eighteen percent of adult American men—three-fourths of whom are circumcised—have ED, affecting 18 million men. Circumcision’s role as a risk factor may be reflected in ED drug sales; while the United States represents 5% of the world’s population it also accounts for 46% of Viagra sales. [...] A fourth before-and-after study found that 35% of participants had a worsened sex life after circumcision and that their partners had a 46% reduction in satisfaction. The study implicated loss of nerve endings as a reason—addressed below. The true dissatisfaction rate is probably higher than these failure rates since all of the men elected circumcision, and would naturally be biased toward the outcome being beneficial even when it wasn’t.

It is certainly a good read and another argument against circumcision.

Not listening to women is a misogynist act.

2011-10-18T16:13:00.000+02:00

Via Shakesville:

this is a statement of fact: Not listening to women is a misogynist act. [...] This is not an argument that women are always right, or wise. It is an argument that, even if a woman is wrong, the wrongest that any wrong person could be, she still deserves to be heard, and her wrongness dismissed on its merits, which requires listening in the first place.

Not too sure what I should think about that post. Generalisations (almost) always have an exception (and apparently by even thinking about that I am a misogynist as well). For instance should one listen to the religious woman protesting in front of a Planned Parenthood, when wanting an abortion? Or to the girl bullying you in high school? Or not walking away and listen to your significant other scream obscenities at you during an argument instead of walking away so that the situation does not escalate? Especially when you live in an abusive relationship?

I may be nitpicking here, because certainly she has a point, especially with:

Actively tuning out women is a misogynist act. Passively failing to seek out women's perspectives is a misogynist act. Shouting down or talking over or reflexively contradicting women is a misogynist act. Treating women as though they are not experts on their own lives and experiences is a misogynist act. Appropriating women's ideas is a misogynist act. Tokenizing women in lieu of making room for meaningful participation is a misogynist act. Marginalizing women's voices, through systemic and deliberate exclusion or a careless failure to practice diversity, is a misogynist act.

If we think about misandry for a moment and the often used "What about the menz" interjection, one can reach the conclusion that a whole lof of feminists are indeed manhaters.

Rapists who were sexually abused by women

2011-10-18T15:58:00.001+02:00

Title says it all:

Most rapists were subjected to some form of sexual abuse in childhood. A startling amount is perpetrated by females. Peer-reviewed studies conclude that between 60% to 80% of "rapists, sex offenders and sexually aggressive men" were sexually abused by a female. [...] According to a 2004 U.S. Department of Education mass study of university students, 57% of students reporting child sexual abuse cited a male offender, and 42% reported a female offender. Interestingly, 65% of the survivors of female abuse who opened up to a therapist, doctor or other professional were not believed on their first disclosure. Overall, 86% of those who tried to tell anyone at all about their experiences were not believed. According to a 1996 report from the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (NCCAN), about 25% of child sexual abuse is committed by women, but that figure may be low, because survivors are far more conflicted and shamed in admitting abuse by their mothers than by fathers. In one study of 17,337 survivors of childhood sexual abuse, 23% reported a female-only perpetrator and 22% reported both male and female. A U.S. Department of Justice report finds that, in 2008, 95% of all youths reporting sexual misconduct by staff member in state juvenile facilities said their victimization experiences included victimization by female personnel, who made up 42% of the staff. [...] One study found 8% of female perpetrators were teachers and 23% were babysitters.

Based on what one could read on reddit, sources for the stats are here and here. Also.

Attractive Women May Be Less Likely to Get Hired

2011-10-18T15:06:00.000+02:00

Interesting article, do women discriminate against themsevles? Apperently in some cases they do:

The study involved sending 5,312 resumes in pairs to 2,656 advertised job openings in Israel. In each pair, one resume was without a picture while the second, otherwise almost identical resume, contained a picture of either an attractive male or female, or a plain-looking male or female.

[...] The results showed that the resumes of "attractive" males received a 19.9 percent response rate, nearly 50 percent higher than the 13.7 percent response rate for "plain" males and more than twice the 9.2 percent response rate of no-picture males.

[...] "Among female candidates, no-picture females have the highest response rate, 22 percent higher than plain females and 30 percent higher than attractive females. Our findings on penalization of attractive women contradict current psychology and organizational behavior literature on beauty that associate attractiveness, male and female alike, with almost every conceivable positive trait and disposition," explain the authors, Bradley Ruffle, a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Ph.D candidate Ze'ev Shtudiner.

[...] However, when the corporation at which the candidate might work recruited directly, attractive females received a response rate of about half that of plain and no-picture women. This is likely due to the high number of women in human resources staffing positions, the researchers conclude.

To verify this stereotype, the researchers conducted a post-experiment survey in which they spoke with the person at the company who screens candidates. That person was female in 24 of the 25 (96 percent) of the companies they interviewed. Moreover, these woman were young (ranging in age from 23 to 34 with an average age of 29) and typically single (67 percent) -- qualities more likely to be associated with a jealous response when confronted with a young, attractive competitor in the workplace.

"Indeed, the evidence points to female jealousy of attractive women in the workplace as a primary reason for their penalization in recruitment," Ruffle said.

Who would have thought...

Prejudice of the privileged

2011-10-18T15:01:00.000+02:00

Some food for thought, from Reddit:

There's a bizarre train of thought that I see in some places [...] that say that prejudice is acceptable against groups that have it well. [...] This thinking is harmful because it implies that racism, sexism, and prejudice are only contextually bad- not inherently immoral. If there are acceptable targets for such treatment that depend on one's situation, then that means that we're all potentially subjected to it. [...] It's just that those who try to rationalize prejudice against some completely miss the point of why we don't accept prejudice against others. It's not that there are some groups that are arbitrarily designated to be protected. It's that everyone is entitled to be judged by their individual character. Anything less than that jeopardizes it for all.

Well said.

A Survey on False Allegation by SAVE

2011-10-18T14:58:00.001+02:00

The way the survey is worded is a bit disappointed as one would like to see more detailed results. Anyhow, still somewhat interesting / relevant.:

Telephone calls were placed to 10,000 households around the country. [...] These are the highlights:

- 11% of respondents said they themselves had been falsely accused of abuse
- Over 15% of the respondents personally knew someone who has been falsely accused
- 81% of the falsely accused persons were male
- Nearly 70% of the accusers were female
- In over a quarter of the cases – 26% – the accusation was made as part of a child custody dispute

Recently in England

2011-09-23T00:41:00.002+02:00

While I do usually focus on the Us of A...some noteworthy stuff that popped up in my google reader this (and the last) week:There was the case of a student suing the London School of Economics because there gender studies course was misandrist:

The 39-year-old, who attended the university last year to take up a Gender, Media and Culture Masters degree, said there was “systemic anti-male discrimination”.

A statement by the school kind of agree

The university’s legal team has asked for the case to be struck out, claiming the core texts were not compulsory, merely recommended readings, and that the texts were equally available for both men and women to read, so therefore did not directly discriminate against men. The team also argues that “any discriminatory effect [against men] was plainly justifiable”.

Read the excellent analysis by TS here.Then there was this

Liberal Democrat Lynne Featherstone has launched a scathing attack on her male counterparts, insisting the world's continuing financial crisis was a direct result of men's failure to make the correct choices.'In terms of decision making I have always gone out and advocated to women you must get your hands on levers, you must get hold of power, you must be where decisions are made.Because otherwise if you leave it to - I'm going to say men in this case because that's the way the world has worked - you get terrible decisions.'Look at the mess the world is in, and look who has been in charge. I leave it there.'

Kind of disturbing that the person saying this is the equality minister there.

Meanwhile, fellow Conservative MP Priti Patel told the Evening Standard: 'These comments are really ill-thought out. As equalities minister she has got to be unbiased about the value that both men and women bring to decision-making. 'She works in a department that is trying to address inequalities in society - to then dump the blame for a range of problems on one sex is completely wrong and misguided.'

From the same party that wants this.

[2d] 'Enabling vulnerable families to stay together by implementing the Corston recommendatons, which would see a gradual closure of all women's prisons and their replacement with some small custodial units for serious and dangerous oﬀenders, and, for most women oﬀenders, a larger network of support and supervision centres in the community.' [found via reddit]

More misandry in that teachers case:

Mr Pullinger had almost 20 years' teaching experience when he was dismissed in 2009. The GTC heard this month that he had allowed a pupil to sit on his lap, shared a chair with another and, on numerous occasions, "failed to disengage immediately when girls ran up to him and put their arms around his legs". He had been warned in writing on two occasions, but had "failed to heed" the advice. In its ruling, the GTC said it had "noted the positive testimonials about Mr Pullinger and the fact of the positive assessment of his technical abilities".But it ruled that his behaviour amounted to "a breach of the standards of propriety expected". The ruling added: "His behaviour demonstrated a failure to establish and maintain appropriate and professional boundaries in his relationships with children in his care."

I guess the following is not that surprising:

Around a quarter of primary schools [...] now have no male teachers, and experts have warned that a lack of male role models may be putting boys off school at an early age.

And we had of course this:

At present, a woman can start receiving her state pension at the age of 60 years and seven months. A man must wait until he is 65. Under the changes, the age will be 65 for both men and women in November 2018, rising to 66 by April 2020.[...] ‘We’ll make sure that the state pension they do get is calculated in a fairer way. At the moment, pensions are often bad news for women and I’m determined as the minister to change that.‘There’s a range of things that you can do, whether it’s about dates or about other bits of the system, that would ease the financial pressure for those most affected. ‘I won’t pre-empt what we’ll say to Parliament in some weeks’ time but the crucial thing for us is fairness.’

Fair eh?

Some Radical Feminist Quotes

2011-09-22T15:23:00.001+02:00

“When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression.”
- Sheila Jeffreys: professor, political activist and author

“I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.”
- Robin Morgan: civil rights, antiwar and radical feminist activist, writer, poet, and editor of Ms. Magazine

“To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he's a machine, a walking dildo.”
- Valerie Solanas (1936-1988): Author of the SCUM Manifesto, attempted murderer of Andy Warhol

“I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig.”
- Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005): writer, antipornography activist

“We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men.”
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902): social activist, abolitionist, women’s suffrage movement leader

Man can indeed do what he wants, but he cannot control what it is that he wants.

2011-09-12T14:26:00.000+02:00

Arthur Shopenhauer.

Even crazier case from France

2011-09-06T13:28:00.001+02:00

And while we are at it....take a look at this:

The 51-year-old man was fined under article 215 of France’s civil code, which states married couples must agree to a “shared communal life”.A judge has now ruled that this law implies that “sexual relations must form part of a marriage”. [...] But the 47-year-old ex-wife then took him back to court demanding 10,000 euros in compensation for “lack of sex over 21 years of marriage”.The ex-husband claimed “tiredness and health problems” had prevented him from being more attentive between the sheets.But a judge in the south of France’s highest court in Aix-en-Provence ruled: “A sexual relationship between husband and wife is the expression of affection they have for each other, and in this case it was absent.“By getting married, couples agree to sharing their life and this clearly implies they will have sex with each other.”

The implications of that one make my head spin.

Crazy child support case

2011-09-06T12:04:00.001+02:00

I don't usually blog cases, but that is just too crazy. Via F&F:

She has 4% of the parenting time; he has the other 96%. So you’d think she’d be paying child support to him, but no. It’s the other way around. [...] In 2009, her child by her second husband was injured while under her care and both children were taken from her and given to their dads.

So Jon did the obvious thing; he asked the court to reduce his child support from $10,000 a month to nothing. After all, he was the custodial parent and custodial parents don’t pay child support, they receive it, right? Well, as the court admitted, that’s usually the case, but not here. Here, Jon must continue paying Sarah $8,000 a month even though she only sees the child 4% of the time.

[...]Sarah answered Jon’s request for a reduction of child support by saying it’s her only income, which apparently it is. That’s because she hasn’t had a job of any kind since 2005. Into the bargain, she’s not looking for one. In her last filing, she listed her monthly income (outside of child support) as zero and her monthly expenses as over $13,000.

So, according to both the trial and the appellate courts, because Sarah is too much of a deadbeat to even attempt to support herself, Jon must continue to support her with the child providing the weakest of pretexts for doing so.

I don't even....what? Read the original...it is a good article.

Misogyny - sexual preference edition

2011-09-06T11:54:00.002+02:00

Two posts from feministe:

Do you have a right to refuse to have period sex because you think bleeding vaginas be nasty? Of course. And do I have a right to leave your ass and think less of you because of that? You betcha. Because it does come down to misogyny, basically [...] Lots of healthy vaginas expel blood. And if you think that’s gross, well, maybe spend your naked extracurricular time with someone who is vagina-free [...] Basically, dudes who have sex with women and think period sex is disgusting are the brothers-in-badnews-sexytime with people who think oral sex is gross. Don’t like normally-functioning vaginas? Then you should be disallowed from fucking them.

Toysoldier's take on another one.

So is a woman a misandrist if she doesn't like her boyfriend coming in her mouth?

Cincinnati LGBT Group Holds Fundraiser for Fathers and Families

2011-09-02T00:35:00.000+02:00

Well just read the headline....to me this sounds like a nice development.

Cincinnati LGBT Group Holds Fundraiser for Fathers and Families « Fathers & Families

Female Gamers

2011-08-25T11:01:00.001+02:00

Some demographic on female gamers:

Nielsen breaks down computer players by age and gender, revealing some interesting nuggets. Women in the 25 - 54 year old group made up the largest percentage of computer video game players. Men in the same age bracket came in second. Women age 55 and up came in third.

Mostly, all these groups played Windows Solitaire and other free titles included with the operating system. World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG), is the most popular non-card game title, as measured by number of players. Nielsen figures about 1.2 million male players in the US along with 600,000 women played World of Warcraft in December, 2008.

While women showed the strongest numbers in "casual" game areas, young men still dominated in the more "hardcore" games like the latest Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 titles.

-from here

According to a Nielsen Company study last April, almost 50 percent of all PC gamers are female, with hit PC titles like The Sims played primarily by women.

In NPD's Gamer Augmentation 2009 report released today, the industry-tracking group revealed new figures that show 28 percent of all console video gamers are female in 2009, up from 23 percent last year. NPD attributed the five-point rise to the Nintendo Wii, which it believes has attracted a large number of new female gamers. It reports that Wii usage has increased by 19 percent from 2008 for all demographics.

At the 2007 Women in Games Conference, Electronic Arts VP Sharon Knight said that the Wii is attractive to female gamers because of the console's accessibility.

"The Wii levels the playing field," she said. "You don't embarrass yourself--you can grab it and right away start having fun. ... [Wii games] don't require the same investment to learn and to master how to pick up and play [as other consoles' games]."

-from here

It was also a common stereotype that men predominated in video game consumption but the numbers are now evening out as 2 out of 5 gamers are female.

Gamer is broad term so let us look at the breakdown of gender versus console preference. Females just love Nintendo’s Wii with 80% saying that it is their primary console, or console of choice. Just 11% play Microsoft’s Xbox360 and even fewer (9%) play Sony’s Playstation3. Males are more divided in terms of console preference. 41% still play the Wii primarily but fully 38% prefer Xbox and 21% like the Playstation3.

-from here

One of the common statistics often cited by video game industry trade groups is that the average age of a gamer nowadays is around 30 years old. What you might not know, however, is that among game players between the ages of 25 and 34, women far outnumber men, according to a new study by the Consumer Electronics Association (as reported in The New York Times).

The CEA study found that 65 percent of women in the 25-34 age bracket play video games, while only 35 percent of men in that group said that they play video games. Apparently, the key factor involved with these findings is the increasing popularity of casual games, especially among women.

Women were found to be slightly less likely than men in the 25-34 bracket to play traditional console games on systems like the PlayStation 2 or Xbox, while they gravitated more heavily towards simple types of games like Tetris or other puzzle games and card games like solitaire. These casual titles are typically found on web portals like Yahoo!, AOL Games, PopCap Games, EA's Pogo.com and elsewhere.

[...] Of the three hardware makers Nintendo is the only company that has gone out of its way to create unique titles for "non-gamers" and gamers outside of the typical core market — e.g. Nintendogs and Brain Age. With games like these and the simple, intuitive Revolution control scheme, it's clear that Nintendo is looking to leverage the casual market.

[NOTE: That was before the Wii was on the market and called Revolution. And the focus on casual games worked]

-from here

Study 1 found that young German women prefer rich social interactions in computer games, which most available products cannot offer, and also revealed the women's dislike of violent content and heavy gender-stereotyping in the presentation of characters.

[...] Overall, the findings contribute to an explanation of the substantial gender gap in computer game involvement. They also call for further theoretical discussion in entertainment research: Current explanations of why playing video games is fun (e.g., Klimmt, 2003; Vorderer & Bryant, 2006) need extensions to account for gender-specific models of pleasure. If competing, winning, and being a violent superhero do not appeal to women to the extent that they appeal to men, several mechanisms of enjoyment that have been proposed, such as pride in success and identification with attractive role models (e.g., Klimmt, 2003), should be reconsidered. Most importantly, the pleasures of social interaction with game characters, and with other players as well, require more attention in theories about (interactive) entertainment. The studies reported indicate that further gender-specific refinements are needed in entertainment theories and entertainment research in general.

In addition, differences related to frequency of game use among players should be added to the gender comparison. For example, research suggests that males who play games infrequently more closely resemble the stereotypical female game player in their preference for less violence in games (AAUW, 2000; Kafai, 1998).

-from here

Sentencing disparities in child-sex-assault cases point to double standard - The Denver Post

2011-08-24T10:11:00.001+02:00

No surprise here:

A Denver Post analysis of sentencing data provided by the Colorado Judicial Branch shows that of the 2,128 men convicted of sexual assault on a child by a person in a position of trust from 2006 through 2010, more than 50 percent were sent to prison.
Of the 79 women convicted of the same felony offense, 38 percent went to prison. A little more than 39 percent of female defendants in that same period — 31 — were put on intensive supervised probation. Less than 35 percent of men were given the same sentence.

[...]Several studies show that males molested by female caregivers run a huge risk of becoming sex offenders in adulthood. Also, 80 percent of male victims of female sexual abuse have been divorced, according to a study done by Stephanie Reidlinger, a law student at Regent University School of Law in Virginia Beach, Va.
Her study says that women who molest boys are most likely victims of abuse themselves. Reidlinger also says that many cases of woman-on- boy crimes are not reported at all, due in part to the media.

Survey: Women get more value out of college than men do | Reuters

2011-08-24T10:06:00.001+02:00

Some interesting findings:

Some 77 percent of respondents in a Pew Research Center survey said it was necessary for a woman to go to college to get ahead in life, while only 68 percent said the same for men. [...] Pew said women surpassed men in educational attainment in 1992, and the gap has continued to grow. In 2010, a record 36 percent of women ages 25-29 had earned a bachelor's degree while only 28 percent of their male counterparts had done the same, Pew said.

The same gender pattern was found across racial and ethnic groups, Pew said, with the widest gap within the black community. [...] Half of all women who have graduated from a four-year institution say it was money well spent, while just 37 percent of male graduates would agree. [...] Large majorities of both women and men said college was not affordable for most people, according to the survey. When it came to footing the bill, some 40 percent of women said their parents wrote the check to cover college expenses compared to 29 percent of men.

The Actor and the Observed, Man and Woman

2011-08-23T11:21:00.001+02:00

Kudos to Typhonblue on that one who linked to this article and started an interesting discussion:

A recent study by Marisa Bortolussi, Peter Dixon, and Paul Sopčák (2010) was about the effects of gender on reading fiction in Canada and Germany, but the results are best explained in terms of actor-observer differences.

The influence of gender on reading is a perennial question because it’s invariably found that more women than men read literary fiction. In the most recent large US survey by the National Endowment for the Arts (2009), which had 18,000 respondents, it was found that 58% of women had read a play, poetry, short-story or novel during the previous year, as compared 42% of men.

Bortolussi et al. selected four passages, each of about 1000 words, from contemporary novels, two with male protagonists, and two with female protagonists. For each passage with a male protagonist, they wrote a version of the same passage with a female protagonist, and for each passage with a female protagonist, they wrote a version with a male protagonist. They prepared versions in English (for the Canadian readers) and in German (for the German readers). Previous research has tended to find that males tended to prefer male protagonists and females to prefer female protagonists. With their clever manipulation of assigning people to the same stories but with different-sexed protagonists, Bortolussi and her colleagues found both male and female readers—in Canada and Germany—preferred male protagonists. That is to say: both males and female readers agreed more strongly with an item that stated, "I feel I can understand and appreciate the main character and situation of he story," and one that stated, "I would like to continue reading to find out what happens next in the story," when the protagonist was male as compared with being female.

The researchers explain this effect in terms of the actor-observer bias. In general, say Bortolussi and her colleagues, men in Western societies tend to be seen as acting in response to circumstances ("he did what he had to") whereas women tend more often to be seen in terms of their personality ("she behaved emotionally"). Thus, for both men and women, our social stereotypes make it easier in stories to understand and to identify with a male protagonist, the kind of character who acts in response to the situation he is in, than with a female protagonist, the kind of character who acts because of her personality.

Men seek beauty, women want wealth - Telegraph

2011-08-22T13:55:00.001+02:00

Men seek beauty, women want wealth - Telegraph:

The new research confirms that, while humans may pride themselves on being highly evolved, men really do go for an attractive mate - though will make do with someone who falls somewhat short of this ideal - while women - apparently understanding this - adjust their desire for a "high-quality" mate according to how attractive they perceive themselves to be. In other words, beautiful women want rich men.

That is the conclusion of research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Peter Todd, of Indiana University, Lars Penke, of Humboldt University, Berlin, Barbara Fasolo, of the London School of Economics, and Alison Lenton, of the University of Edinburgh.

Mr Todd said the problem with earlier work that suggested that likes attract was that the scientists had simply asked people about preferences while today's work showed what they actually did in a real world setting - a commercial speed dating operation with 46 people in Munich.

[...] "We found that what men and women say they want is not the same as what they actually choose and that the actual choices made by men and women accord with a rough evolutionary-predicted trade-off, in this case between men's overall mate value [combining their wealth and status, family commitment and health] and women's self-perceived attractiveness," said Mr Todd.
Women dominate this trade-off, he said, because "men are much less discriminating".

Although people may claim otherwise, beauty is the key for men, since it signifies "good genes", while women, the choosier of the sexes, leverage their looks for security, fitness and commitment.

"Ancestral individuals who made their mate choices in this way - women trading off their attractiveness for higher quality men and men looking for any attractive women who would accept them - would have had an evolutionary advantage in greater numbers of successful offspring."

Smell and social behaviour

2011-08-22T13:48:00.001+02:00

Two interesting studies:

Gender differences and similarity in personality and social behaviour Ros Barnett (2004)

Over a wide range of personality and social variables, there is much evidence of gender similarities. For the Big Five personality dimensions, there is no gender difference in openness to experience (d=.03) and small differences in conscientiousness (-.13), extraversion or gregariousness (-.14), and neuroticism (-.25); there is, however, a large difference in one aspect of agreeableness, termed tendermindedness or nurturance (-.97). The gender difference in self-esteem is small (.21). Likewise, there are many gender similarities in the realm of social behavior. The direction of the gender difference in helping behavior depends largely on the situation. In small groups, men and women are similar in their instrumental and expressive behaviors. The gender difference in democratic vs. autocratic leadership style is small (-.22 for democratic style). The research evidence does not support popular media claims about enormous gender differences in language use. The gender difference in self-disclosure is small (-.18). There are several exceptions to this pattern of gender similarities. Gender differences are moderately large for aggression (.50), smiling (-.63), and sensitivity to nonverbal cues (-.52).

And...

Scent of a Woman: Men’s Testosterone Responses to Olfactory Ovulation Cues

Women around the world spend billions of dollars each year on exotic smelling perfumes and lotions in the hopes of attracting a mate. However, according to a new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, going "au natural" may be the best way to capture a potential mate's attention.

Smells are known to be critical to animal mating habits: Animal studies have shown that male testosterone levels are influenced by odor signals emitted by females, particularly when they are ovulating (that is, when they are the most fertile). Psychological scientists Saul L. Miller and Jon K. Maner from Florida State University wanted to see if a similar response occurs in humans. In two studies, women wore tee shirts for 3 nights during various phases of their menstrual cycles. Male volunteers smelled one of the tee shirts that had been worn by a female participant. In addition, some of the male volunteers smelled control tee shirts that had not been worn by anyone. Saliva samples for testosterone analysis were collected before and after the men smelled the shirts.

Results revealed that men who smelled tee shirts of ovulating women subsequently had higher levels of testosterone than men who smelled tee shirts worn by non-ovulating women or men who smelled the control shirts. In addition, after smelling the shirts, the men rated the odors on pleasantness and rated the shirts worn by ovulating women as the most pleasant smelling.

The authors note that "the present research is the first to provide direct evidence that olfactory cues to female ovulation influence biological responses in men." In other words, this study suggests that testosterone levels may be responsive to smells indicating when a woman is fertile. The authors conclude that this biological response may promote mating-related behavior by males.

College Rape Accusations and the Presumption of Male Guilt

2011-08-22T13:45:00.001+02:00

The important part:

OCR requires universities to render judgment using "a preponderance of the evidence" standard. This means that in a rape case, a campus disciplinary board of faculty, administrators and perhaps students serves as both judge and jury. Few if any of these judges are likely to have professional competence in fact-gathering, evidence analysis or judicial procedure. Yet to deliver a verdict of guilty, they need only believe that the accused is more likely than not to have committed the crime.

This is the lowest standard. It is much less demanding than "beyond a reasonable doubt," which is used in the criminal justice system, and the intermediate standard of "clear and convincing proof." Yale, Stanford and many other universities have rushed to comply with OCR's directives.

On campus, where casual sex is celebrated and is frequently fueled by alcohol, the ambiguity that often attends sexual encounters is heightened and the risk of error in rape cases is increased. The consequences for a wrongly convicted student are devastating: Not only is he likely to be expelled, but he may well be barred from graduate or professional school and certain government agencies, suffer irreparable damage to his reputation, and still be exposed to criminal prosecution.

Some NOMAS citations

2011-08-18T11:28:00.001+02:00

As recently seen on reddit, some citations from their site:

NOMAS joined an amicus curiae brief prepared by the California Women’s Law Center, Queens’ Bench Bar Association of the San Francisco Bay Area, California Alliance Against Domestic Violence and several other California organizations in support of the shelters that addresses why it is important for women’s physical and psychological well-being that they have available domestic violence shelters that do not permit adult men.

-from here

There is a disturbing national trend toward laws mandating joint custody [...] Furthermore, court mandated joint custody is not in the best interests of mothers.

-from here

How can a dad – unemployed or working outside the home – be a good father? Not by fighting for custody or demanding “shared parenting” after divorce or breakup. The best way a dad can be a good father is by providing support to the mother of his children, including both financial and emotional support. [...] If dad wants to make sure his children thrive he must do whatever he can to ensure that their mother is thriving. Stop fighting for “shared parenting” or sole custody if you are in court. [...] So dads, the message is clear. If you want your children to grow up to be happy and healthy adults, the best thing you can do for them is to make sure that their mother is comfortable, healthy, and happy.

-from here

After years of exploring a wide range of batterer program models, the National Council of NOMAS has given its full support to the New York Model for Batterer Programs (www.nymbp.org). This model was determined to be most in keeping with NOMAS principles and beliefs about sexism, domestic violence and batterer programs.

[From the nymbp site which can also be linked to several NOMAS / Pro-feminists]

Women can be mean, abusive and violent toward their intimate partners. The perspective we share on this issue, however, is systemic and not individual. History and culture point to the pervasiveness of men’s entitlements, across the globe, to control women’s lives. This is the backdrop in which domestic violence became a social norm. This is fully borne out by statistics, no matter what reporting flaws are conceded. Another point is that typically, male domestic violence offenders control, dominate and terrorize their partners. Also typically, women who abuse are defending, fighting back, retaliating and rarely causing fear or disturbing the flow of their partner’s lives. It is noteworthy that the systemic supports of men’s domestic abuse are exposed by the harsh differential in punishment women get when tried for similar crimes.

-from here and here

Talk about disconnect from reality...Also recently from Reddit (hattip to Kill_the_rich), apparently Barry Goldstein who is co-chair of the NOMAS Task Group on Child Custody lost his law degree for lying on a child custody case. Oh my.

Male victims of 'intimate terrorism' can experience damaging psychological effects

2011-08-17T14:18:00.001+02:00

I wasn't even sure if I should blog this one as it seems to be common sense. Anyhow....some science:

[R]esearchers looked at two independent sample groups totaling 822 men between the ages of 18 and 59. The first sample was composed of 302 men who had sought professional help after being violently abused by their female partners. The authors called this "intimate terrorism," characterized by much violence and controlling behavior.

The second sample was composed of 520 men randomly recruited to participate in a national phone survey in which they were asked questions about their relationship. Of this general community, 16 percent said they had sustained minor acts of violent and psychological abuse during arguments with their female partners. This type of abuse was referred to in the research as "common couple violence," in which both partners lashed out physically at each other.

The researchers found that in both groups of men, there were associations between abuse and post-traumatic stress symptoms. However, the "intimate terror victims" who had sought professional help were at a much greater risk of developing PTSD than the men from the general community group who said they had engaged in more minor acts of violence with their partners, according to the researchers.

"This is the first study to show that PTSD is a major concern among men who sustain partner violence and seek help," said Hines.

Research has shown severe underreporting of spousal or partner abuse of men, according to Randle. For example, men are not as likely to report serious injuries due to abuse, and psychological or less violent abuse is more likely to go unreported to authorities. In addition, police are less likely to arrest female suspects accused of violence than male suspects, according to another study cited by Randle.

The lack of reliable data has led to some confusion in the literature on domestic violence effects on men, the researchers said. They suggest more rigorous research focusing specifically on male victims.

And there is nothing more to say...

New Paternity Test Can Tell at 12 Weeks

2011-08-17T14:11:00.001+02:00

Interesting...yet so expensive:

Manufactured by DDC, a privately held company that offers various genetic tests, the clunkily named Non-Invasive Prenatal Paternity Test analyzes what's known as circulating cell-free fetal DNA in the mother's blood to suss out daddy's identity.

[...]The new test, which costs $1,625, is able to separate fetal DNA from that of the mother and father — and any lingering genetic material from previous babies the mother carried, which can stick around up to 20 years.

[...]The results, says Michael Baird, chief scientific officer for DDC, are 99.9% accurate, according to internal testing and a biostatistican unaffiliated with the company.

Men and breast cancer

2011-08-16T11:55:00.001+02:00

An obvious double standard:

So, a patient advocate from the Charleston Cancer Center tried to help. She found a state program, federally funded, that provides medicaid for breast cancer patients and applied. But Raymond was denied.

Why? Because he's a man.

[...] Breast cancer in men may be rare, but it does happen. Statistics show one in 100 men will get it, roughly 2,100 cases a year.

On the Origins of Gender Roles

2011-08-15T13:22:00.001+02:00

Interesting stuff:

The plough was heavier than the tools formerly used by farmers. By demanding significantly more upper-body strength than hoes did, it gave men an advantage over women. According to Mr Braudel, women in ancient Mesopotamia had previously been in charge of the fields and gardens where cereals were grown. With the advent of the plough, however, farming became the work of men. A new paper* by Alberto Alesina and Nathan Nunn of Harvard University and Paola Giuliano of the University of California, Los Angeles, finds striking evidence that ancient agricultural techniques have very long-lasting effects.

Long after most people have stopped tilling the land for a living, the economists find, their views about the economic role of women seem to line up with whether their ancestors ploughed or whether they hoed. Women descended from plough-users are less likely to work outside the home, to be elected to parliament or to run businesses than their counterparts in countries at similar levels of development who happen to be descended from hoe-users. The research reinforces the ideas of Ester Boserup, an economist who argued in the 1970s that cultural norms about the economic roles of the sexes can be traced back to traditional farming practices.

[...] Despite a host of changes over the subsequent centuries—such as industrialisation and higher overall rates of female participation in the workforce—the economists find that variations between countries in the fraction of adult women who work outside the home can be explained rather well by the farming practices of their ancestors. This variation is huge. Only about a quarter of women in the Arab world work outside their homes, but 91% of women in Burundi do. In most industrialised countries the fraction ranges between half and three-fifths. But in countries like Rwanda, Botswana, Madagascar or Kenya, whose people are predominantly descended from hoe-users, women are far more likely to be in the labour force than those in historically plough-using places like India, Syria or Egypt.

[...]The economists were able to use measures of agro-climatic conditions to predict which parts of the world would adopt the plough. The data show that ethnic groups whose ancestors would have been expected to pick ploughs based on climatic conditions have sharply differentiated economic roles for the sexes even today. So it seems reasonable to argue that its use drove attitudes rather than the other way around.

Using data from the World Values Survey, they show that descendants of plough-users are significantly more likely to agree with a statement that men should have first dibs on jobs when unemployment is high. They also tend to agree that men make better political leaders. Such beliefs survive immigration: the authors find that the daughters of immigrants to America are less likely to work if their parents came from a traditionally plough-based society.

These attitudes are not fixed for ever. Many Western countries (which were predominantly, but not exclusively, inhabited by plough-users) became radically more receptive to mothers working full-time thanks to the second world war, which forced many women to take on hitherto “male” jobs. Yet even now, the share of adult women who work outside the home in OECD countries is about 16 percentage points lower than the corresponding share for men. Policies that make it easier for women to balance their family lives with the demands of the workplace are up against attitudes that have their roots deep in ancient history.

-from here

We find that, consistent with existing hypotheses, the descendants of societies that traditionally practiced plough agriculture, today have lower rates of female participation in the workplace, in politics, and in entrepreneurial activities, as well as a greater prevalence of attitudes favoring gender inequality.

-from here

Reasons on not reporting

2011-08-15T13:15:00.001+02:00

Take a look at this (found via frs I guess):

Comments from Scott Berkowitz, President & Founder of the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network

More victims may not be reporting their rapes, but the reasoning has changed over the past few decades. "A generation ago," the reasons were things like, "fear of not being believed; fear of being interrogated about and blamed for their own behavior, and what they were wearing. In short, they feared that they would be the one on trial."

Today, "the perception of many victims has evolved." Now they don't report for these reasons: "they don't want their loved ones to know what happened; they're ashamed themselves; they just want to put it all behind them." Today, "fear and shame of how the police wil treat them" has moved down on the list of reasons victims provide for not officially reporting the crime.

Those are good news....I fear though the reasons for male victims to not report are quite different.

Men and women in the same shelter?

2011-08-12T16:21:00.000+02:00

Found via mensactivism.org from NCFM-LA:

From 1990 to 1998, Patricia directed the Antelope Valley Domestic Violence Council in Lancaster, California, also known as the "Valley Oasis" shelter. After realizing male victims had no place to go, she courageously changed her women-only policy by setting aside one of her shelters for male victims and their children, and in rare cases of overflow she would obtain consent from residents in another one of her shelters to mix the sexes, which, she says, never created a problem. Nonetheless, Patricia was mistreated by other shelter directors who insisted services should only be for women. The mistreatment became so severe that she filed a complaint with the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, as she explains in her sworn declaration at http://www.ncfmla.org/pdf/overberg.pdf Patricia later joined NCFM's Advisory Board and the Speaker's Bureau of Stop Abuse For Everyone (SAFE) and remained closely in touch with battered men's advocates until the date of her death.

In 2004 Patricia encouraged NCFM to file a lawsuit to end the discrimination against male victims and their children. NCFM filed the lawsuit in 2005 and in 2008 won a landmark appellate victory that held it is unconstitutional for the State of California to exclude male victims from the state laws that fund domestic violence services. The case is David Woods v. Horton (2008) 167 Cal.App.4th 658 and can be read at http://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/2008/c056072/

Certainly a pioneer. An approach that could work elsewhere? Has somebody even tried?

About quotas

2011-08-10T10:38:00.001+02:00

Not ever sure anymore where I found this. Some citations:

A new study by Dittmar and Ross School colleague Kenneth Ahern, assistant professor of finance, analyzes the impact of a 2003 Norwegian law requiring all public-limited firms to have at least 40 percent representation of women on their boards of directors by 2005. At the time, only 9 percent of board seats in Norway were held by women. After voluntary compliance failed, the law became effective Jan. 1, 2006, with a two-year transition period. Firms that did not comply by January 2008 would be forced to dissolve.

Using a panel of 130 publicly listed Norwegian firms from 2001 to 2007, the researchers found a negative impact of the mandated board changes on firm value—a result that may be applicable to the United States and Britain since Norway's system of governance is similar.

[...]Dittmar and Ahern found that the stock price of an average firm dropped 2.6 percent in the three days following the first announcement of the new law and 5 percent for firms that had no women on their boards at the time of the February 2002 announcement.

The researchers also used a common market-based measure of corporate governance to determine firm value: Tobin's Q, a ratio of a company's market capitalization to the replacement cost of its assets (the sum of total assets and market equity less common equity divided by total assets).

They found that when a firm experienced at least a 10-percent increase in the proportion of women on its board, Tobin's Q dropped 18 percent.

"The negative effect of the regime shift supports the hypothesis that board structure affects value," Ahern says. "Firms that were required to make the most drastic change to their boards also suffered the largest negative returns. Our results indicate that boards do matter and that constraining the selection of board members has a large negative impact on value."

Dittmar and Ahern are quick to point out, however, that a loss in firm value was not caused by the gender of the new board members, but rather by their young age and lack of high-level work experience. In fact, gender effect is not significant once you account for these other experience-related differences, they say.

"The constraint imposed by the 40-percent women quota led firms to recruit women board members that were younger and had different career experiences than the existing directors," Dittmar says. "It is reasonable to suggest that these changes led to decreases in firm value because new directors did not have the same monitoring or advising capabilities of the other directors before the imposed change.

"When firms were free to choose directors before the rule, they tended to choose women that were similar to men directors. This is consistent with the idea that the large demand and small supply for women directors after the adoption of the 40-percent quota forced firms to choose directors that they would not have chosen otherwise."

-from here, study here

Another one:

Unfortunately, there is no consensus on the critical question of whether board diversity improves firm performance. Whereas some studies find evidence consistent with the theory that board diversity positively affects firm performance, others find no support or even contradictory evidence.

[...]More successful firms could have greater resources to dedicate to the pursuit of board diversity. Or more successful firms could be under greater public scrutiny and pressure to diversify their boards. Or female and minority directors could be scarce commodities who can choose to serve only on the boards of more successful firms.

Study cited in there:

Over the last generation, the concept of diversity has become commonplace and taken-for-granted in discourses ranging from law to education to business. In higher education, for example, it is hard to imagine a faculty job search or a student admissions discussion that was not heavily laden with talk of diversity, in the sense of the representative inclusion of women and racial and ethnic minorities in a group or organization. In this paper we present the results of an interview-based study of the discourse of diversity in a particular business setting: the corporate boardroom. Our principal observation is that - thirty-one years after the Supreme Court's Bakke decision introduced the term into public discourse - corporate insiders appear not to have arrived at a master narrative to explain the pursuit of diversity on boards of directors. Instead, their accounts stress a variety of factors and feature few concrete examples.

On othering of male victims

2011-08-04T12:54:00.001+02:00

As seen here, comment by Tamen:

Framing rape as a pre-dominately male-on-female thing to the point that all other forms of rape is an statistical abberation very much stops men from recognizing what happened to them as rape – not necessarily pathologizing them as victims, but to give them understanding and tools to process what happened in a healthy way. [...] In addition I believe that only talking about male-on-female rape and only barely and grudgingly acknowledge female-on-male rape as an statistical aberration place women at higher risk of being a perpetrator – increasingly so now when they’re rightfully getting more and more sexually assertive.

Applies to DV as well as lesbian rape, too.

Female rapists in war time

2011-08-04T10:51:00.001+02:00

A shorty from here:

One consequence of the neglect of male victims not mentioned in this article is that it perpetuates a false dichotomy that if women are the victims men must be the perpetrators. While I have no problem believing this is true in probabilistic terms, it is hard to know how strong that probability is given that analysts rarely consider the prevalence of female-perpetrated sexual violence in conflict zones.

One researcher who has - Dara Cohen – has found a significant number of female perpetrators – nearly a third – in her study of Sierra Leone (see the working paper linked to this site). And a study on the Congo published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association found survey respondents reported women perpetrating rape in 41% of cases where the victim was female, and 10% of the cases where the victim was male.

Data from one of the survey cited:

Association of Sexual Violence and Human Rights Violations With Physical and Mental Health in Territories of the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo

Kirsten Johnson, MD, MPH; Jennifer Scott, MD; Bigy Rughita, MSc; Michael Kisielewski, MA; Jana Asher, MSc; Ricardo Ong, MD; Lynn Lawry, MD, MSPH, MSc

Of the 1005 households surveyed 998 households participated, yielding a response rate of 98.9%. Rates of reported sexual violence were 39.7% (95% confidence interval [CI], 32.2%-47.2%; n = 224/586) among women and 23.6% (95% CI, 17.3%-29.9%; n = 107/399) among men. Women reported to have perpetrated conflict-related sexual violence in 41.1% (95% CI, 25.6%-56.6%; n = 54/148) of female cases and 10.0% (95% CI, 1.5%-18.4%; n = 8/66) of male cases. Sixty-seven percent (95% CI, 59.0%-74.5%; n = 615/998) of households reported incidents of conflict-related human rights abuses. Forty-one percent (95% CI, 35.3%-45.8%; n = 374/991) of the represented adult population met symptom criteria for MDD and 50.1% (95% CI, 43.8%-56.3%; n = 470/989) for PTSD.

“A lack of conviction doesn’t make a person innocent.”

2011-08-03T09:44:00.001+02:00

Says feminist Susan Brownmiller. Hattip to Toy Soldiers.

What about innocent until proven guilty?

The ugliness penalty - worse for men

2011-08-02T11:42:00.003+02:00

Hattip to reddit. Looks affect your earning potential. I have certainly heard that one before, apparently it affects men even more so. Consider me surprised. An article about Daniel S. Hamermesh book Beauty Pays:

[Beauty Pays] attempts to explain why attractive people make more money than unattractive people. A lot more money, in fact: $230,000 over the course of a lifetime, which holds true even in professions where looks wouldn’t seem to matter. Hamermesh found that fetching professors, for example, earn 6 percent more than their average-looking peers, while unattractive quarterbacks earn 12 percent less than their hunkier counterparts. Men, in fact, suffer the greater repulsiveness penalty in general: Unattractive women earn 3 percent less than average-looking women, while unattractive men’s take-home is reduced a whopping 22 percent.

But wait—how can something as subjective as beauty hold any value in an economic context? Therein lies the cold truth at the heart of these findings: A common standard of beauty does exist. Based on an attractiveness scale of one to five, most people surveyed will come to near agreement on a test subject’s looks, a finding that holds true across all cultures. And while extreme beauty and extreme ugliness are rare, 10 to 15 percent or so of the population falls into the “below-average attractiveness” category, where they will endure their pronounced asymmetries as long as they live. Beauty is not only scarce, it turns out, but unobtainable to those born without it: Studies show that homeliness is approximately as easy to change as race, which is to say, it’s not.

Interesting. Also an older study by Hamermesh google dug out.

Prenatal testosterone and gender-related behaviour

2011-08-01T13:25:00.001+02:00

Thanks to "Alles Evolution" again, another study:

Testosterone plays an important role in mammalian brain development. In neural regions with appropriate receptors testosterone, or its metabolites, influences patterns of cell death and survival, neural connectivity and neurochemical characterization. Consequently, testosterone exposure during critical periods of early development produces permanent behavioural changes. In humans, affected behaviours include childhood play behaviour, sexual orientation, core gender identity and other characteristics that show sex differences (i.e. differ on average between males and females). These influences have been demonstrated primarily in individuals who experienced marked prenatal hormone abnormalities and associated ambiguities of genital development (e.g. congenital adrenal hyperplasia). However, there is also evidence that testosterone works within the normal range to make some individuals within each sex more sex-typical than others. The size of testosterone-related influences, and perhaps even their existence, varies from one sex-typed characteristic to another. For instance: prenatal exposure to high levels of testosterone has a substantial influence on sex-typical play behaviour, including sex-typed toy preferences, whereas influences on core gender identify and sexual orientation are less dramatic. In addition: there appears to be little or no influence of prenatal testosterone on mental rotations ability, although mental rotations ability shows a marked sex difference. These findings have implications for basic understanding of the role of testosterone in normative gender development, as well as for the clinical management of individuals with disorders of sex development (formerly called intersex syndromes).

He says he said no to sex, now says no to child support - St. Petersburg Times

2011-08-01T12:56:00.001+02:00

Another one from reddit:

Around the country there are plenty of cases of underage boys who got a woman pregnant and then tried to avoid paying child support. The 15-year-old in California who was seduced by the 34-year-old mom next door. The 13-year-old boy in Kansas who had sex with his 17-year-old babysitter. The 15-year-old boy in Florida who impregnated a 20-year-old.

Under a strict interpretation of the law, these boys, by virtue of their age, were raped. But family courts have seen these incidents for what they were: consensual sexual encounters. And as a result, they have ordered the boys to pay child support.

Victim blaming in an extreme form. Playing reverse the genders here (as one poster on reddit did):

The 15-year-old girl in California who was seduced by the 34-year-old Dad next door.

Seduced? Really?

There are statutes addressing child support if a man rapes a woman, said O'Connor, Kris' lawyer. But not if a woman rapes a man.

No surprise here...about the case in question (having to pay child support when you were raped):

"The crux of the tension here," said Ruth Jones, a professor of law at McGeorge Law School in Sacramento, Calif., "is if . . . he is a victim of forcible rape, is that sufficient to alleviate him from the responsibility of child support?"

There is a case that deals with this. It's not exactly like Kris' case, but similar. It involves a 34-year-old man from Alabama who passed out at a party. A woman had sex with him while he was unconscious and she got pregnant. The court ordered him to pay child support.

[...] He says he knows it sounds harsh, but he doesn't want anything to do with Joshua. Ever.

"He was the result of something traumatic in my life, and I don't think I could bring myself to be a parent," Kris said. "It's not fair to him. It's not his fault."

Another case:

A US couple and their son are fighting for custody of a baby born to a woman charged with sexually abusing their son, who was 15 at the time of conception.A paternity test shows that the teen is the father of the baby born April 7 to Jane C. Crane, who was 19 when she became pregnant. Now, a judge has ordered him to pay $50 a month in child support and set visitation at seven hours a week.Crane, meanwhile, faces criminal charges. A Fairfield County grand jury indicted her last month on two counts of unlawful sexual conduct with a minor, a fourth-degree felony. Conviction carries a maximum sentence of 18 months in prison and a requirement to register as a sex offender for 25 years.Crane is living with the baby and her family in Lancaster.

Eating disorders in men

2011-08-01T12:47:00.001+02:00

As usual, there is a quite large stack of links to go through after the weekend....so here we start. Hattip to reddit for that one:

For years, eating disorders have been viewed as a “white woman’s disease.” And estimates of male eating disorders told a similar story: while the majority of women suffered from eating disorders, only about 10 percent of men did.

Recent research, however, paints a different, bigger picture: more men are suffering from eating disorders than previously thought. Out of 3,000 people with anorexia and bulimia, 25 percent were men (and 40 percent had binge eating disorder), according to a Harvard study.

[...] The diagnostic criteria for anorexia, for instance, focus on women, which is evident in its hallmark symptoms of amenorrhea (the absence of menstruation) and fear of fatness. Though some men do exhibit a fear of fat, others typically want to be muscular (particularly their chest and arms), obsess over attaining a low body fat percentage and focus their efforts on excelling at a sport (which prompts some to abuse steroids and exercise excessively).

Instead of engaging in traditional compensatory behaviors like vomiting or abusing laxatives, men instead are more likely to exercise compulsively (as cited in Weltzin, Weisensel, Franczyk, Burnett, Klitz & Bean, 2005).

[...] men are also feeling the pressure for physical perfection, surrounded by unattainable images of muscular physiques, six-pack abs, bulging biceps and lean bodies.

But, in contrast to women, where the images are one size fits all (thin is always in), men have a variety of images to emulate, psychiatrist Arnold Andersen, M.D., told The Wall Street Journal:

“Some want to be wiry like Mick Jagger; some want to be lean like David Beckham, and some want to be really buff and bulked, like Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

[...] Men might diet for different reasons than women, including (as cited in Greenberg & Schoen, 2008):

- to prevent weight gain (many eating disordered men were overweight as kids).
- excel in sports. (jockeys, wrestlers, distance runners, gymnasts)
- avoid health complications.
- improve appearance after childhood teasing.
- for their jobs (military)

Not surprisingly, these differences make it harder for professionals to diagnose eating disorders in men. And, oftentimes men are unaware that they’re suffering from an eating disorder in the first place.

[..] Eating disorders are more prevalent in gay and bisexual men than in heterosexual men (Feldman & Meyer, 2007), though one expert attributes the higher prevalence to a greater likelihood to seek treatment.

And as usual:

Since eating disorders are known as a woman’s disease, men might be embarrassed to seek treatment, worried that they’d be seen as less of a man. Because male eating disorders have only recently received attention, many treatment centers don’t have separate services that treat men.

Reminds me so much of the DV situation....really.

Feminist science?

2011-07-29T11:34:00.001+02:00

A critic of feminist science via two articles found by Pelle:

Only women bleed?: a critical reassessment of comprehensive feminist social theory (2009), Lindberg, Helen (Örebro University, School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences)

Is there a viable specifically feminist social theory that can serve as heuristic devise in our social research? This thesis is a critical reassessment of the ontological and normative assumptions of four social theories with specific and clear claims of being feminist. These are Catharine M MackInnon’s Radical Feminism, Anna G Jonasdottir’s Theory of Love Power, Luce Irigaray’s Feminism of Sexual Difference and Judith Butler’s Queer Feminism.

[...] The thesis concludes that it is highly problematic to do science feministly, but that we do need the critical questions feminists raise in order to reevaluate concepts, theories and research priorities. It is argued that feminist social theories are perhaps most helpful as ideological guidance for political action.

-from here

The website of SAGE, which publishes the journal, describes it as a "feminist, scientific, peer-reviewed journal." The authors also admit that their goal is to "reduce endorsement" of sexism. However, this constitutes a clear conflict of interest. A journal cannot state an ideological goal and simultaneously claim to be scientific. Would a global warming journal be taken seriously if it claimed "debunking the hoax" as one of its goals?

Put simply, ideology is not allowed in science. It is also not scientific to arbitrarily define your own terms. Real science requires precision and reproducibility, neither of which likely applies to this study. If the study were conducted again in a culturally conservative region, such as the Southern U.S., would it see the same result? Or how about in Asia? Probably not.

[...] Dressing up one's personal ideology in the language of science is an affront to the scientific method.

-from here

Scoundrels and personal freedom...

2011-07-29T11:19:00.001+02:00

“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” —H. L. Mencken

A nice one...overheard Hugh Ristik using it

No difference in women’s and men’s self-esteem in youth and early adulthood

2011-07-28T11:18:00.001+02:00

Found via mensactivism.org, article is here:

Self-esteem increases during adolescence, then slows in young adulthood, but contrary to popular belief, there is no significant difference between men’s and women’s self-esteem during either of those life phases, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

[...] “The converging evidence on gender similarity in self-esteem is important because false beliefs in gender differences in self-esteem may carry substantial costs,” Erol said. “For example, parents, teachers and counselors may overlook self-esteem problems in male adolescents and young men because of the widespread belief that men have higher self-esteem than women have.”

Who would have thought? Certainly not me...

Something more about circumcision

2011-07-26T11:51:00.001+02:00

From Mensactivism.org:

The harm caused by circumcision

Circumcision removes the most sexually sensitive parts of a boy’s penis, including the foreskin, the frenulum, and the ridged band of nerves [1]. The male foreskin is also designed to protect the glans of the penis throughout a man’s life, ensuring that the internal mucosal tissue remains moist and sensitive (much the same way that a woman’s clitoral hood protects the clitoris). In addition, the foreskin acts as a natural gliding mechanism to reduce chafing and dryness during intercourse [2].

Regardless of whether it is performed in a medical or non-medical setting, a significant number of boys subjected to the practice of circumcision will later fulfill the DSM-IV criteria for a diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder [3].

No national medical association in the world recommends that boys be forcefully circumcised for preventive health reasons, not even in Israel, where the Journal of the Israeli Medical Association published an article highlighting the high prevalence of urinary tract infections among boys who had undergone ritual circumcision [4].

The Royal Dutch Medical Association's very up-to-date policy on circumcision states that "KNMG is calling upon doctors to actively and insistently inform parents who are considering the procedure of the absence of medical benefits and the danger of complications", and that there is a good case for making it illegal [5].

1. Morris L. Sorrells, James L. Snyder, Mark D. Reiss, Christopher Eden, Marilyn F. Milos, Norma Wilcox, Robert S. Van Howe Fine-touch pressure thresholds in the adult penis British Journal of Urology International, Volume 99 Issue 4 Page 864 – 869 April 2007 http://www.nocirc.org/touch-test/bju_6685.pdf

2. Taylor, J.P., A.P. Lockwood and A.J.Taylor The prepuce: Specialized mucosa of the penis and its loss to circumcision Journal of Urology (1996), 77, 291-295 http://www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/taylor/

3. Samuel Ramos and Gregory J. Boyle. Ritual and Medical Circumcision among Filipino boys: Evidence of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Humanities & Social Sciences papers (2000). Available at: http://epublications.bond.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1120&context=hss_pubs

4. Toker O, Schwartz S, Segal G, Godovitch N, Schlesinger Y, Raveh D (2011) A costly covenant: ritual circumcision and urinary tract infection. Isr Med Assoc J. 2010 May;12(5):262-5 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20929075

5. KNMG (2010) Non-theraputic circumcision of male minors http://knmg.artsennet.nl/web/file?uuid=579e836d-ea83-410f-9889-feb7eda87cd5&owner=a8a9ce0e-f42b-47a5-960e-be08025b7b04&contentid=77976

Why are we afraid of male sexuality?

2011-07-26T11:35:00.001+02:00

An interesting Guardian article found via Arne's blog:

Since the era of the permissive society and the mainstreaming of modern feminism, western society has gone a long way towards liberating women's sexuality. Younger women have, to an unprecedented extent, been encouraged to believe they can be as sexual as they like and to experience and express their desires as they wish. Even the age-old proscriptions on female promiscuity have been largely broken down, exemplified by the glorious flowering of the SlutWalk movement.

Simultaneously, and perhaps not coincidentally, male sexuality has been increasingly seen as a problem. You can hear it in the gentle, dismissive mockery that says men are simple creatures who "only want one thing" or, at the extreme, outright vilification. The male gaze threatens, male desire is aggressive. Our primal instincts are pathologised with the jargon of gender studies. Righteous and necessary efforts to reduce sexual crimes have had the unwelcome effect of teaching generations of men that our sexuality can be dangerous and frightening.

[...] Again and again the message came out: girls have problems. Boys are problems. And yet does anyone doubt that there should be concerns about how easy access to porn impacts upon boys' sexual development, their self-esteem, their body image or performance anxieties? It's not as if young men bask in perfect mental health and happiness – young men commit suicide at nearly four times the rate of young women, and sex and relationships rank high on their list of concerns.

[...] Perhaps the greatest concern for men and women alike should be the way male sexuality and sexual expressiveness balances on a narrow tightrope of acceptability. One step off the wire and you tumble into the realm of perversion. As feminist blogger Clarisse Thorn noted last year, any man who hits on a woman and gets it wrong risks being branded a "creep" – sometimes deservedly so, of course, but often for no greater sin than being insufficiently attractive or socially skilled, or having misread a perceived signal of invitation. I've never heard of a woman being stigmatised or disparaged for expressing an attraction to big men, rough men, geeky men or whatever. A man who expresses similar desires for women who don't conform to standard norms of beauty is a perv, a fetishist, a weirdo.

[...] Male sexuality is no less diverse, complex and wonderful than women's or, for that matter, no more base, coarse and animalistic. [...] Women have been entirely justified in asking that we blokes respect their rights, autonomy and wishes, that we respect them as sexual beings. It shouldn't be too much to ask for a little of the same in return.

Are Men Society's Scapegoats?

2011-07-26T11:22:00.001+02:00

An article that gives us some neat factoids:

"Men are about 19 more times more likely than women to say they have been falsely accused of sexual abuse. About 85 percent of these abuse allegations are made by women during battles over parent time, during the throes of divorce, or when a live-in situation is failing. ... "(A) sex-abuse charge -- even if false -- often costs the father his job, his health, his friends, his reputation, and his relationship with his child." [Citing Warren Farrell]

[...] The U.S. Department of Health and Human Service's Administration for Children & Families says of the percentage of the 3.3 million referrals for child abuse and neglect in 2009 it investigated, "Two-thirds of reports found all allegations to be unsubstantiated or intentionally false (64.3% and 0.1%, respectively)."

[...] "As a society, we don't typically think of men in the role of a victim. We can't even recognize it when we're confronted by physical evidence," Palmatier writes. "On the other hand, we're inclined to believe accusations about men."

Not only is it unfair and dishonest, she says, but it's "damaging to boys and young men, gender relations, relationships, families and 'the best interests of the children.' And it gives the women who are predators a free pass."

Automatically assuming the worst of men is a form of discrimination, she, Farrell and others say. And they're right.

Some DV tidbits linked via that article:

Ongoing ASU research may create more understanding of female perpetrators of “intimate partner violence” and encourage services for both the perpetrators and male victims.
Kellie Palazzolo, an assistant professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, is the adviser for the research project that began fall 2009.
One goal of the research is to understand how college students perceive female and male perpetrators, she said.

[...] “It’s often been taken for granted that women can’t really do that much damage, so it’s OK to maybe slap your boyfriend or do something of that nature,” Palazzolo said.

[...W]hen the man or woman was violent against a victim but didn’t kill the victim, participants said the male perpetrator should be punished more than the female perpetrator.

“When a man hits a woman, society has a perception that a man should never hit a woman,” Scarduzio said. “That’s just kind of a cultural norm.”

Also, the results found that when a woman hits a man, there is another reaction.

“People try to explain that and say, ‘Well maybe she was acting in self-defense or maybe he did something to her to make her hit him or maybe it was an accident,’” Scarduzio said.

[...] “People don’t want to think that a female can be violent just on her own, without someone provoking her,” Scarduzio said.

She said this view can hinder services for women who are violent and need to be helped as well as for male victims.

[...] Katie Harris, a doctoral communications student working on the research, said male victims are portrayed negatively through stereotypes.

“When men are victims of intimate partner violence, people tend to say things like, ‘Oh, well, he’s a wimp for getting beat up by a girl. He isn’t a real man,’” Harris said.

Title IX - Stop favoring girls over boys

2011-07-26T11:03:00.001+02:00

Interesting:

Dwight Johnson’s son cannot play in a state-sanctioned volleyball tournament because he is a boy. The Colorado State High School Activities Association refuses to sanction a volleyball tournament for boys, even though it sanctions one for girls. Johnson, of Colorado Springs, is suing the U.S. Department of Education, claiming that federal efforts to protect girls have backfired on boys and caused them a lack of equal protection as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

[...]Because Title IX forbids discrimination, court decisions have upheld the clumsy use of boy/girl quotas. In using quotas to obey the law, schools have reduced opportunities for some students even though Title IX was intended to create opportunities.

Johnson’s son cannot play in a sanctioned tournament because Colorado has more state championships for boys than for girls. Establishing a volleyball tournament for boys would further tilt the balance, putting the state at risk of violating the discrimination clause of Title IX.

It is a legalistic, impoverished and creepy rationale for keeping boys from competing. Title IX was designed to ensure equal access, and a state volleyball tournament for boys would do nothing to prevent girls from participating in sports of their choosing. No one has argued that a state tournament for boys would eliminate an athletic opportunity for girls, just that it would skew boy/girl statistics.

Courts have upheld quotas because at the college level one man’s opportunity can, indeed, mean a distribution of wealth that reduces a woman’s opportunity. That’s because colleges trade in limited scholarships to attract the best athletes. If too many go to men, too few go to women.

But that formula isn’t at play in public school athletics, where athletic participation is driven by choice and not by the distribution of scholarships. In an environment of free choice, in which reasonable opportunities are established for girls and boys, quotas merely serve to discriminate. As argued in Johnson’s meritorious lawsuit, quotas in high school sports may counter the intent of Title IX by reducing opportunities for athletes on a basis of gender. We hope Johnson’s lawsuit helps to change that.

On decriminalisation of sex work

2011-07-25T14:18:00.001+02:00

Well, I support it, and have written about the Swedish case before, not sure where though, anyhow, good post:

Amongst anti sex work feminists, the model of sex industry law reform preferred to decriminalisation is known as the Swedish Model. Based on legislation introduced in Sweden in 1999, the Swedish model criminalises the buying of sexual services. Selling of sexual services is technically not a crime, but buying them is punishable by a fine or gaol time. This legislation is based on a redefinition of sex work as ‘male violence against women’. Proponents of the Swedish model claim that it has reduced the amount of sex work occurring in Sweden, although this claim is disputed by Swedish sex workers and some researchers.

Recently, Swedish researchers Susanne Dodillet and Petra Östergren published a paper on the Swedish model, The Swedish Sex Purchase Act: Claimed Success and Documented Effects (be warned about the language: it’s generally supportive, but it uses the p-word). The paper is a must read for anyone with an interest in this topic. Briefly put, it’s conclusions can be summarised as follows: contrary to claims otherwise, the Swedish legislation does not appear to have reduced the size of the Swedish sex industry, has not deterred clients, is unsupported by Swedish sex workers and may make sex work more dangerous and increase risk of STIs. As noted in a survey quoted in the report, support for criminalisation in Sweden is strong, however, the majority of people surveyed support the criminalisation of sex workers as well as clients.

[...W]hile the legislation does not specifically criminalise the sex worker, it criminalises everyone around the sex worker. It becomes illegal to rent a room, house, hotel room or apartment for anyone to do sex work out of, or the land lord risks being charged with pimping. The real world implication of this, of course, is that if a sex worker’s sex work status is revealed, they are most likely going to be evicted even if they are not working from that property, as the land lord will fear being charged under Sweden’s strict pimping laws. ‘Pimping’ is also a charge applied to anyone who assists in finding clients, provides security services, or allows advertising for sex workers. Sex workers cannot work together or they risk being charged with pimping each other, which dramatically decreases our opportunity to look out for each other’s safety, reduce overhead costs, and establish peer support networks, which are known to be our most effective method of reducing the STI rate. Services which provide support to sex workers risk running foul of legislators who oppose anything that looks like ‘promoting’ sex work, which may even include distribution of condoms to sex workers. Sex worker organisations do not receive condoms from the government and are not able to buy them in bulk, so have found themselves forced to obtain them from organisations that provide them to men who have sex with men.

[...]I should note: the legislation, of course, is not inclusive of all women. When it is stated that sex work is ‘male violence against women’, what is meant is ‘cis male violence against cis women’. Women working explicitly as trans women (and cis and trans male sex workers) are completely erased in both legislation and discussion. They don’t fit neatly into the analysis, so they’re just ignored. As I’ve stated before, if your analysis doesn’t fit the affected community, it’s not the community that needs to change.

It’s a pretty simple decision to me: when the choice is between a legislative model that has been demonstrated to have some of the best health and safety outcomes for sex workers, and a legislative model that has the negative impacts on us listed above, I’m going to support the model that promotes our health, safety and well-being, and that sex workers actually want to work under. It’s not only the humane choice, it’s the feminist choice.

There was far more in the original. Good article.

Feminism is built on believing women’s accounts of sexual use and abuse by men.

2011-07-25T13:22:00.001+02:00

...said Catharine MacKinnon. This article gives us some numbers on false reporting:

Advocacy literature typically claims that about 2 percent of rape complaints are found to be false, the same rate as for reports of other violent crimes. But that figure seems to have no basis in research. According to the FBI, about 9 percent of rape reports are dismissed as “unfounded,” without charges being filed. While advocates claim that this is often because the authorities lack proof or distrust reports of acquaintance rape, dismissals due to insufficient evidence usually occur further down the pipeline. Generally, an “unfounded” complaint is one in which the accuser recants or her story is contradicted by available evidence.

Gauging the true prevalence of false accusations is extremely difficult, particularly since rape reports are handled and recorded differently from one jurisdiction to another. But what reliable information is available suggests that the figure is not insubstantial.

In a particularly controversial study published in 1994, now-retired Purdue University sociologist Eugene Kanin found that 40 percent of rape reports filed in an Indiana town over a 10-year period turned out to be false by the “victim’s” own admission. Kanin (ironically, a pioneering researcher on sexual assault in dating situations) has been widely criticized for using data from a police department that subjected rape complainants to lie detector tests, which many believe are likely to mislabel anxious or agitated victims as liars and pressure them to recant. He found a similar pattern, however, in police records from two state universities where lie detectors were not used and all victims were interviewed by female officers.

While Kanin has cautioned against generalizing from his research, his conclusion that “false rape accusations are not uncommon” is supported by other evidence. Some years ago, a Washington Post investigation in Virginia and Maryland found that nearly one in four rape reports in 1990-91 were rejected as unfounded, and many of the women in those cases admitted they had lied when the newspaper contacted them. In several surveys of prosecutors and law enforcement officials, estimates of the share of rape complaints that turn out to be false have ranged from one in eight to one in five.

Also there is this study:

Over 15% of the respondents personally knew someone who has been falsely accused
81% of the falsely accused persons were male
Nearly 70% of the accusers were female
In over a quarter of the cases – 26% – the accusation was made as part of a child custody dispute
11% of respondents said they themselves had been falsely accused of abuse

Those numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt though...

A short note about VAWA

2011-07-25T13:08:00.001+02:00

As seen on F&F:

Ignoring the mountain of evidence that women initiate physical violence nearly as often as men, VAWA has more than 60 passages in its lengthy text that exclude men from its benefits. For starters, the law’s title should be changed to Partner Violence Reduction Act, and the words “and men” should be added to those 60 sections.

And DADT is gone...

2011-07-25T11:23:00.001+02:00

Another step forward:

President Obama and Pentagon leaders gave the green light on Friday to start the 60-day time period for when “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” will be off the books and openly gay Americans will be entirely free to serve in the U.S. military.

[...] Under the repeal law signed in December, the military’s gay ban will be lifted once the president, the defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff certify the armed forces are ready for open service. Consequently, now that repeal has been certified, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” will be off the books on Sept. 20.

But:

Other inequities exist between gay service members with partners or spouses and straight service members in marriages on issues such as living expenses and medical care, travel, housing benefits. Much of this inequity is because of the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits federal recognition of same-sex marriage.

LGBT advocates are also expressing concerns about transgender people still being unable to serve openly in the U.S. military. But openly transgender Americans can’t serve openly not because of law, but by regulation — so the change could be implemented administratively.

An executive order prohibiting discrimination against service members based on sexual orientation and gender identity would also stop the separations of service members who come out as transgender.

The way it looks now...

2011-07-25T01:21:00.004+02:00

...will change. I am atm changing the layout and some of the postings a bit so um act surprised regular readers....ha!

Study on Sexdrive......I steal shamelessly....again

2011-07-22T20:26:00.000+02:00

I think I saw that study somewhere before. Jup it is the Baumeister one. Excerpts (copied from a German blog *Hallo!*):

The sex drive refers to the strength of sexual motivation. Across many different studies and measures, men have been shown to have more frequent and more intense sexual desires than women, as reflected in spontaneous thoughts about sex, frequency and variety of sexual fantasies, desired frequency of intercourse, desired number of partners, masturbation, liking for various sexual practices, willingness to forego sex, initiating versus refusing sex, making sacrifices for sex, and other measures. No contrary findings (indicating stronger sexual motivation among women) were found.Hence we conclude that the male sex drive is stronger than the female sex drive. The gender difference in sex drive should not be generalized to other constructs such as sexual or orgasmic capacity, enjoyment of sex, or extrinsically motivated sex

[...] Our review of the literature indicated that role of androgens (e.g., testosterone) was crucial in producing sex drive. We focused on the androgens for several reasons. First, scientists’ interest in the effects of testosterone have yielded a wealth of data on its effects. Second, testosterone is one of the primary organizational and activational hormones that differentiates men and women. Although both women and men have natural supplies of testosterone in their bloodstream, the amount of testosterone varies significantly between the genders. On average, men’s blood testosterone levels are 1,000 nanograms per deciliter, whereas women’s blood testosterone levels are only one seventh or one eighth of this amount (see Dabbs, 2000; Mazur & Booth, 1998). Postmenopausal women have especially low levels of testosterone (regardless of whether menopause occurs naturally or as a result of surgical procedures). Most commonly, surgically induced menopause is the result of an oophorectomy (i.e., removal of the ovaries and adrenals) or hysterectomy (i.e., removal of the uterus). Third and perhaps most germane to this analysis, evidence from the animal and human literatures suggests that androgens are responsible for active initiation of sexual activity (i.e., proceptivity), whereas estrogens are responsible for passive acceptance of sexual activity (i.e., receptivity; Beach, 1976; De Jonge & Van de Poll, 1984; Sherwin, 1988).

There are tons of studies cited over at "Alles Evolution" and it is well worth the read (even for people who don't know German).

“All efforts are being made to get rid of these people in the society"

2011-07-21T20:44:00.001+02:00

Ghana is a fucked up place:

Ghana’s Western Region Minister, Paul Evans Aidoo MP has ordered the immediate arrest of all homosexuals in the country’s west.
Aidooo has tasked Ghana’s Bureau of National Investigations and security forces to round up the country’s gay population and has called on landlords and tenants to inform on people they suspect of being homosexuals.

This world is a fucked up place...

The rape of men as a weapon of war

2011-07-21T11:14:00.001+02:00

Good article by the Guardian, sadly this is not something that surprises me. If one of my posts ever needed a trigger warning, this is it. Excerpts:

Of all the secrets of war, there is one that is so well kept that it exists mostly as a rumour. It is usually denied by the perpetrator and his victim. Governments, aid agencies and human rights defenders at the UN barely acknowledge its possibility.

[...] "There are certain things you just don't believe can happen to a man, you get me? But I know now that sexual violence against men is a huge problem. Everybody has heard the women's stories. But nobody has heard the men's."

It's not just in East Africa that these stories remain unheard. One of the few academics to have looked into the issue in any detail is Lara Stemple, of the University of California's Health and Human Rights Law Project. Her study Male Rape and Human Rights notes incidents of male sexual violence as a weapon of wartime or political aggression in countries such as Chile, Greece, Croatia, Iran, Kuwait, the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia. Twenty-one per cent of Sri Lankan males who were seen at a London torture treatment centre reported sexual abuse while in detention. In El Salvador, 76% of male political prisoners surveyed in the 1980s described at least one incidence of sexual torture. A study of 6,000 concentration-camp inmates in Sarajevo found that 80% of men reported having been raped.

[...] In Uganda, survivors are at risk of arrest by police, as they are likely to assume that they're gay – a crime in this country and in 38 of the 53 African nations. They will probably be ostracised by friends, rejected by family and turned away by the UN and the myriad international NGOs that are equipped, trained and ready to help women. They are wounded, isolated and in danger.

[...] Often, she says, wives who discover their husbands have been raped decide to leave them.

[...] Men aren't simply raped, they are forced to penetrate holes in banana trees that run with acidic sap, to sit with their genitals over a fire, to drag rocks tied to their penis, to give oral sex to queues of soldiers, to be penetrated with screwdrivers and sticks.

[...] Because there has been so little research into the rape of men during war, it's not possible to say with any certainty why it happens or even how common it is – although a rare 2010 survey, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that 22% of men and 30% of women in Eastern Congo reported conflict-related sexual violence. As for Atim, she says: "Our staff are overwhelmed by the cases we've got, but in terms of actual numbers? This is the tip of the iceberg."

[...] The research by Lara Stemple at the University of California doesn't only show that male sexual violence is a component of wars all over the world, it also suggests that international aid organisations are failing male victims. Her study cites a review of 4,076 NGOs that have addressed wartime sexual violence. Only 3% of them mentioned the experience of men in their literature. "Typically," Stemple says, "as a passing reference."

[...] "The organisations working on sexual and gender-based violence don't talk about it," he says. "It's systematically silenced. If you're very, very lucky they'll give it a tangential mention at the end of a report. You might get five seconds of: 'Oh and men can also be the victims of sexual violence.' But there's no data, no discussion."

As part of an attempt to correct this, the RLP produced a documentary in 2010 called Gender Against Men. When it was screened, Dolan says that attempts were made to stop him. "Were these attempts by people in well-known, international aid agencies?" I ask.

"Yes," he replies. "There's a fear among them that this is a zero-sum game; that there's a pre-defined cake and if you start talking about men, you're going to somehow eat a chunk of this cake that's taken them a long time to bake." Dolan points to a November 2006 UN report that followed an international conference on sexual violence in this area of East Africa.

"I know for a fact that the people behind the report insisted the definition of rape be restricted to women," he says, adding that one of the RLP's donors, Dutch Oxfam, refused to provide any more funding unless he'd promise that 70% of his client base was female. He also recalls a man whose case was "particularly bad" and was referred to the UN's refugee agency, the UNHCR. "They told him: 'We have a programme for vulnerable women, but not men.'"

[...] "Part of the activism around women's rights is: 'Let's prove that women are as good as men.' But the other side is you should look at the fact that men can be weak and vulnerable."

[...] "International human rights law leaves out men in nearly all instruments designed to address sexual violence," she continues. "The UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000 treats wartime sexual violence as something that only impacts on women and girls… Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently announced $44m to implement this resolution. Because of its entirely exclusive focus on female victims, it seems unlikely that any of these new funds will reach the thousands of men and boys who suffer from this kind of abuse. Ignoring male rape not only neglects men, it also harms women by reinforcing a viewpoint that equates 'female' with 'victim', thus hampering our ability to see women as strong and empowered. In the same way, silence about male victims reinforces unhealthy expectations about men and their supposed invulnerability."

Demographic of women's soccer

2011-07-20T10:50:00.001+02:00

I thought that was somehow interesting:

Nearly 2.7 million men tuned in to see the U.S. women take on Brazil last Sunday, while only 1.2 million female viewers watched.

More than 2/3 of watchers of women's soccer are men.

Also women's soccer was pretty successful:

Sixth Most-Viewed Soccer Telecast in U.S.; Second Most-Watched Daytime Program in Cable History;

Record Audience for a Women’s Sports Event on ESPN3.com

Sunday’s 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup Finals between the United States and Japan – which crowned Japan as tournament champion on a penalty shootout after the match ended in a 2-2 tie – was seen by an average 13.458 million viewers, based on a 7.4 U.S. household rating (8.58 million household impressions), making it the most-watched and highest-rated soccer telecast on an ESPN network, based on fast nationals by the Nielsen Company.

For every 100 girls...

2011-07-15T11:18:00.001+02:00

Pretty good resource with nice hard data hat tip to r/mensrights for that one. Some excerpts:

Death and Suicide:

- For every 100 girls and women ages 15 to 24 years who die 292 boys and men die.

- For every 100 females ages 15 to 19 that commit suicide 549 males in the same range kill themselves.

- For every 100 females ages 20 to 24 that commit suicide 624 males of the same age kill themselves.

Education:

- For every 100 women enrolled in college there are 78 men enrolled.

- For every 100 women enrolled in the sixth year or more of college there are 70 men enrolled.

- For every 100 American women who earn an associate’s degree from college 61 American men earn the same degree.

- For every 100 American women who earn a bachelor’s degree from college 75 American men earn a bachelor’s degree.

- For every 100 American women who earn a master’s degree from college 66 American men earn the same degree.

- For every 100 American women who earn a first-professional degree 104 American men earn a first-professional degree.

- For every 100 American women who earn a doctor’s degree from college 91 American men earn the same degree.

Sources are in the original which is well worth reading.

The effect of male circumcision on sexuality - Kim - 2006

2011-07-15T09:04:00.001+02:00

Found via Mensactivism.org, another study about circumcision:

In South Korea, many men are circumcised as adults, after they have led active sex lives; these men can compare their sex lives before and after circumcision. This is because circumcision in South Korea is a relatively recent event, having reached >100% circumcision rate (compared with the male birth population) in the last 20 years. This unique situation, in terms of research on circumcision’s effect on sexuality, contrasts with other cultures where adult circumcision is rare, simply because circumcision is practised on neonates or pre-teens. Even when such men have been found and interviewed, they do not represent the general population, but those with medical indications or religious convictions about circumcision. In this sense, South Korea provides a unique opportunity to study the effect of circumcision on sexual activity in a truly general population.

[...]The effect of circumcision on masturbation is interesting, as preventing masturbation was one of the main original reasons often cited for the popularity of circumcision in America. The frequency of masturbation seems to have decreased only slightly after circumcision, but there was a striking difference in the pleasure of masturbation, with 48% reporting less pleasure from masturbation after circumcision, in contrast to 8% who reported more pleasure. We think that this is one of the most important findings of the present study. This is consistent with more men finding masturbation more difficult after circumcision, possibly because of the loss of the foreskin.

Of the 138 men aged >30 years who could compare their sex lives before and after circumcision, >70% (102) reported that there was no difference. However, circumcised men were more than three times more likely to report less enjoyable sex lives after circumcision than better sex lives (28 vs eight men). While decreased sensation was the most frequently cited reason (21 of 28 men) for a less enjoyable sex life, complaints about the physical effects of circumcision on their penises and consequent adverse effects on sex life were also prominent (13 of 28; multiple complaints were separately counted). While this is consistent with our earlier study, it suggests that more attention should be given to anatomical alteration of the male genitalia by circumcision. This conclusion is supported by the reports of major scars by ≈ 9% of the circumcised men in the present study.

In summary, we studied the effects of circumcision on sexuality. There were no differences in sexual drive, erection and ejaculation, but circumcised men reported decreased masturbatory pleasure and sexual enjoyment. We conclude that adult circumcision adversely affects sexual function in a significant number of men, possibly because of loss of nerve endings. In addition, ≈ 9% of the circumcised men reported severe scarring of their penises, and this population probably overlaps with those who reported insufficient skin resulting in uncomfortable erections, penile curvature from uneven skin loss, and pain and bleeding upon erection/manipulation.

On intimate terrorism

2011-07-14T01:00:00.000+02:00

I found this article via google reader with at least 3 entries. And there was one thing about it that irked me the wrong way:

So-called “intimate terrorism,” overwhelmingly perpetrated by men, is embedded in a general pattern of power and control

Back in the days, when I wrote that large article about Deutsch's large DV article, there was a lot I was stumbling upon. There still is a big clustered article somewhere saved with links and stuff as I never finished that piece. It really got problematic. I read stuff and forgot where I read it and had to search and search on and on and did not finish it. I'll do it next week I thought and well, next week after next week after next week and still I won't touch that thing. So when I heard intimate terrorism, I recognized, there was something with it. A critique by Strauss I assume somewhere in a large pdf file not easily found. Luckily when this post came up on NSWATM someone did all the work for me. So Kudos for Tamen for pointing me to that resource(Again NSWATM proves that it is a great blog with great discussions taking place. The most pleasant surprise for me in 2k11 thus far):

Using Johnson’s domestic violence typology to classify men and women in a non-selected sample (2004)

These findings suggest that research that has used single-sex samples to provide information on their own and opposite-sex partner’s aggressive behaviors may have drawn conclusions about sex differences when in reality the effects were driven by self versus partner report bias. Johnson proposed, and found evidence for, the asymmetric nature of IT and VR (Johnson, 1999; Johnson & Leone, 2000), with men being perpetrators and women being victims of controlling physical aggression. However all previous analysis conducted by these researchers used only reports from women about their own perpetration and victimization, even when reports from men were available (Johnson & Leone, 2000). Research reported in previous analyses (Graham-Kevan & Archer, 2003b) suggested that the use of both men’s and women’s reports of perpetration and victimization may affect the distribution by sex within typology categories, although the non-selected sample used was too small to allow investigation of this. The present sample was large enough to allow a meaningful investigation of the distribution of men and women within the different categories of aggressive relationships. Here, contrary to Johnson’s predictions, it was found that IT and VR were essentially sex-symmetrical and that nonviolent victims, i.e. those who do not use any physical aggression towards a physically aggressive partner, of IT were more likely to be men than women.

If replicated in future studies, these findings have far-reaching implications. They provide support for researchers, such as Steinmetz (1978) and George (1994; 2003), who have claimed that not only can men as well as women be mutually victimized in intimate relationships, but also that men can be victims of ‘battering’ in the same way that women can. These conclusions are in direct contrast with feminist analyses, which have discounted such claims by asserting that men use controlling aggression and women use no (or more recently, self-defensive) aggression (R.P. Dobash & Dobash, 1979; R.P. Dobash et al., 1998; Giles-Sims, 1983; Okun, 1986; Pence & Paymar, 1993; Saunders, 1988; Stacy, Hazlewood & Shupe, 1994; Walker, 1979; Yllö, 1994). However, the present findings are supported by research that has investigated men’s victimization (George, 2003; Statistics Canada, 2000; McFarlane, Willson, Malecha, & Lemmey, 2000; Migliaccio, 2002; McLeod, 1984).

The invisibility of female victims of domestic abuse before the 1970s did not reflect a lack of such victims, only a lack of awareness. With that lack of awareness,perception of an absence of sanctions (both formal and informal) towards male perpetrators was fostered. One could propose then that, in its failure to address female victimization, society was implicitly supporting such abuse (although a lack of overt support had been evident for some time). This does not now appear to be the case, at least among western nations, where women have a measure of societal power (Archer, 2003).

Male victims may currently find themselves in a similar position to that of women victims pre-1970. The lack of a political advocacy and the strong resistance of many women’s groups may be obscuring the existence of male victims of women’s aggression. This invisibility is then used as evidence that such victimised men do not exist (R.P. Dobash, Dobash, Daly & Wilson, 1992; Semple, 2001).

Good stuff. I really have to finish that one post...

More about fathers via F&F

2011-07-14T00:30:00.000+02:00

Some interesting facts about fathers as seen on F&F:

- [T]he Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey that shows that, when paid and unpaid work are added together, men and women do essentially identical amounts. Men do more paid work, women do more domestic work including childcare. No one’s the slave, no one’s the master, and no one has his feet up while the other toils.

- [T]he recent Families and Work Institute survey showing that fathers have far more work-family conflict than mothers do and have for about 30 years.

- 44% — The percentage of working dads who are sole financial providers, up from 2010, according to a careerbuilder.com survey. More than one in five work more than 50 hours a week, and one in five bring home work at least three days a week.

- Three hours — The average time working dads spend with their children every workday, according to a survey by the Families and Work Institute.

- 80% — The percentage of dads who report that they change diapers as often as or more often than their wives when they’re home, in an Ipsos poll for Pampers. Pearlman complains about dads who refuse or don’t even know how. (The women polled say they change diapers more often but don’t say their husbands shirk diaper duty altogether.)

- 36% — The percentage of young children who had 15 or more outings with their father in the previous month, according to the census. Another 24% had eight to 14 outings; 37% had one to seven outings. Only a sliver had none, for any number of reasons. (These can be just with dad or with both mom and dad.) Pearlman describes dads who never take their kids out.

- From a Pew Research study: “Almost all fathers who live with their children take an active role in their day-to-day lives through activities such as sharing meals, helping with homework and playing.”

Dan Griffin certainly isn't a gentleman and a scholar...or why I dislike the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence

2011-07-12T00:54:00.003+02:00

Yeah, I finally kicked the Good Men Project out of my google reader. Feels somehow good. I figured if I add Hugo Schwyzer's feed (disclaimer, I mostly disagree with him, but the discussion surrounding his posts is quite good. Also, who doesn't like to rage every once in a while?) I get almost all interesting posts from that site. The straw that broke the camels back can be seen here. What happened? Dan Griffin presented statistics that minimized the number of male victims. I got in there, explained the hows and whys, he agrees with me and says he is going to change that one number I dislike AFTER the long weekend....and well here I am still looking at data that can only be called manipulative. Dan, Dan, Dan. I must admit my anger here is misdirected. I can somehow understand it. If I copy and paste statistics and some smartass from the Internets wants me to change one factoid, I would surely hesitate. What he said, the lip service and the stupid stuff, of course that is part of the problem. The bigger problem is where it comes from.

National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV)

When it comes to DV the NCADV is kind of a big fish. To copy from wiki:

As of 2008, NCADV has been involved with multiple legislative acts including; the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act (FVPSA), International Violence Against Women Act, and Legislative Action Day. [...] In addition to making safe-homes and shelters available to battered women, NCADV also works to improve current public policy by collaborating with legislators on the federal level. The Washington, D.C. office for the organization is the public policy office from which leaders of the organization make efforts to change and improve legislation dealing with domestic violence. In 1994 the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence got involved with several other advocacy organizations and helped to pass the Violence Against Women Act signed by President Bill Clinton to provide funding for investigation into domestic violence as well as greater prosecution of offenders. Another topic dealt with within the organization is that of custody battles involving offenders of domestic violence. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence works to create awareness of these situations and develop legislation which keeps the best interest of the children in mind. [...] The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence is also credited with creating and observing the first Domestic Violence Awareness month in October 1987. In 1994, NCADV teamed up with Ms Magazine to create the Remember My Name Project,an ever-growing list of victims who have lost their lives to domestic violence.

Looking through their site and realizing that they recently had a conference with Michael Kimmel (hint: not really believes in male DV victims) you get the picture. Those guys come out strong in the media and kind of downplay DV against men. But let us get back to the point. The statistic Dan copy and pasted can be seen on their national fact sheet here (Pdf Warning). My biggest concern with that fact sheet is the factoid about male DV victims:

85% of domestic violence victims are women

To explain why that point of data is problematic and why the usage here is manipulative at best, I have to explain where DV data comes from. Most of the official DV data is from the National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS). The big numbers from that fact sheet all come from that very survey:

One in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime

An estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner each year.

One in 6 women and 1 in 33 men have experienced an attempted or completed rape

And even though that survey has some flaws when it comes to male victims (I'll take about this in the end), we can generally say that survey finds quite a few male victims. It is a CTS based survey.

The 85% factoid comes from a different kind of survey, a crime survey, more specifically the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The problem with the NCVS is that the survey asks if someone has been a victim of a crime and many DV victims do not see themselves as victims of crimes. This is even more so true for males and one reason why we generally do not use that survey to count DV victims. To me it seems, the only reason the NCVS is cited is to minimize male DV victims. To bring my point across here is what both of those studies found in terms of male and female victims in the previous 12 months:

Female     Male
--------------------------------------
1)NVAWS   1,309,061  834,732 (61% / 49%)        
2)NCVS      588,490  103,220 (85% / 15%)

You can use those studies together in many different ways, for instance, I could say the following:

About 103,220 men are battered each year (2) women are about 61% of the victims of DV (1)

Each year 834,732 men (1) and 588,490 women (2) are victims of DV

Both of these usages are dishonest and are used in a way that distorts the picture of DV. The NCADV chose the version here that minimizes male victims the most:

An estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner each year / 85% of domestic violence victims are women

Now, those guys should certainly know their statistics and I find it hard to believe that this has been a coincidence or mistake of some kind. I do believe they cherry picked their data to bring their agenda across which is "DV is about women".

So I wrote an Email:

NCADV National Fact Sheet

Hello!

After reading your fact sheet ( http://www.ncadv.org/files/DomesticViolenceFactSheet(National).pdf ) I have a problem with one of the factoids:

"85% of domestic violence victims are women"

This statistic from the National Crime Victimization Survey understates and distorts the true incidence of domestic violence, since victimized men are less likely to view partner aggression as a “crime.”
Citations:
Straus MA. The controversy over domestic violence by women: A methodological, theoretical, and sociology of science analysis. In Arriaga XB and Oskamp S (eds.): Violence in Intimate Relationships. Sage Publishers, 1999.http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/CTS21.pdf
Stets JE and Straus MA. Gender differences in reporting marital violence and its medical and psychological consequences. In Straus MA and Gelles RJ (eds): Physical Violence in American Families, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990. Table 15

For that reason, usually DV victims are not counted by crime surveys and of course, to count the number of female victims you used the National Violence Against Women Survey. That survey however found that 39% of DV victims are actually men.

Could someone explain to me why the statistics on the fact sheets are used that way, and if it is possible to change the number? I mean you don't actually want to minimize the number of male DV victims right?

Please note that I will publish this Email as well as answers to that Email on the internet.

With best regards

We will see how that goes. Before I forget...

Problems with the National Violence Against Women Survey

From a men's right perspective there are 2 major flaws with that study. First of all female-on-male vaginal rape was not included in their definition of rape:

Rape was defined as an event that occurred without the victim’s consent, that involved the use or threat of force to penetrate the victim’s vagina or anus by penis, tongue, fingers, or object, or the victim’s mouth by penis. The definition included both attempted and completed rape.

What is kind of sad, apparently this number is the best we got (according to RAINN):

We agree that NVAWS study has serious shortcomings and that its definition of rape is too restrictive to capture all crimes. Given those shortcomings, it likely under-counts the lifetime risk of sexual assault for men. However, it is the most reliable data we’ve been able to find, primarily because the sample size used in the study was significantly larger than almost all other surveys (8,000 men and 8,000 women). Also, the study used the same methodology for both men and women.
The dilemma we face is that we don’t have an alternate source of data for lifetime prevalence rates that is more trustworthy, with regards to sample size and methodology. Sample size is vitally important when attempting to measure sexual violence, since such a small portion of interviewees report having been victims.

Keeping in mind that there are studies out there that finds higher rates of female-on-male vaginal rape then male-on-female vaginal rape (granted, they didn't ask for lifetime prevalence) this is kind of sickening. We just didn't bother to ask apparently.

The other flaw is the framing of the questions asked in the NVAWS. Almost all CTS-based studies find almost equal victimization rates for men and women, so why not this one?

Straus said the following about the NVWS
"(1) It has been presented to the public as refuting the idea of neady equal rates of domestic partner assaults by men and women. (2) It is not ostensibly a crime study. (3) It is a large and well-designed study. (4) It carries the imprimatur of spnsorship by two respected Federal agancies. (5) Perhabs the most important reason is that it provides an example of how an cumulation of small details affecting respondent perception of the study and its prupose can add up to a large difference in findings." (Straus - The controversy Over Domestic Violence by Women - 1999)

Among several points by Straus the following surprised me the most. This was the second question asked by the researchers

"Do you think violent crime is more or less of a problem for men today than previously?"

Two "hot-button" words in one sentence at the beginning of our survey. That, plus the usage of "personal safety" and the low yearly rates (among some other things) is the reason Straus considers the NVWS as a crime survey.

But what do the researchers themselves say about the discrepancy of their study and the CTS?

"... it is likely that the manner in which screening questions are introduced and framed has more effect on intimate partner victimization rates than does the overall context in which the survey is administered"

From one of my older posts. As said previously when you present a study and mention violent crime and personal safety and men are less likely to see being at the receiving end of DV as crime and women are much more likely to be concerned about personal safety and the study also finds less victimization rates (for men and women) then other CTS studies there can only be the explanation that it leaves many victims uncounted.

All this stuff is saddening. One can only hope that one day there will be a large study that looks fair at male victims of DV and rape and that this study is officially used and accepted. Well, a man can dream...

Hijacking another feminist argument...

2011-07-08T15:46:00.001+02:00

Well it might just be me, but often when it comes to discussion about contraceptives or more specifically the lack of a male version thereof I get the "keep it in your pants" answer (even in feminist spaces. There is no incidence at hand, but figured I could use the following if such a thing happens again. From feministe:

Trying to think of a fresh angle from which to approach the issue of slut-shaming, I remembered the last time I debated an anti-choice, anti-rights activist who wanted to see women stripped of access to family planning services. Naturally the argument he ultimately resorted to after all his others had been debunked was: “If girls don’t want to get pregnant, they shouldn’t be opening their legs to everyone.”

“Wow,” I’d chuckled to myself, “he didn’t even wait 5 minutes before falling back on old-fashioned slut-shaming. Most anti-choicers at least pretend it’s about the fetus for a little while longer.”

It is similar in a way that when you get "keep it in your pants" while discussing male contraceptive options it can be framed as slut shaming. Might be a far fetch....found it interesting. Stop judging me....darn.

Men need more cuddles than women for a happy long-term relationship

2011-07-08T11:11:00.001+02:00

A report by the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, asking 1,000 couples who had been together an average 25 years with some interesting findings:

Tenderness in a long-term relationship is more important to middle-aged men than it is to women [...]

Men in a committed relationship are also more likely to report being happy, while women are more likely to say they are satisfied with their sex lives, surprised researchers said.

For men, relationship happiness was more likely if the man reported being in good health and if it was important to him that his partner experienced orgasm.

[...]Men did report more relationship happiness in later years, whereas for women, their sexual satisfaction increased over time.

Women who had been with their partner for less than 15 years were less likely to report sexual satisfaction, but after 15 years, the percentage went up significantly.

Gender equality myth: Women 'want rich husbands, not careers'

2011-07-08T11:06:00.001+02:00

Headline via Mail online. So what do we have here. A new report by Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics published by the Centre for Policy Studies:

[...]Despite years of equality campaigning, more women are choosing to marry wealthy men than in the 1940s

[...]Women’s aspiration to marry up, if they can, to a man who is better-educated and higher-earning persists in most European countries,’ she said. ‘Women thereby continue to use marriage as an alternative or supplement to their employment careers.’
The research, which drew on existing data drawn from Britain and Spain, showed that 20 per cent of British women married husbands with a significantly better education than their own in 1949.
By the 1990s, the percentage of women deciding to ‘marry up’ had climbed to 38 per cent – with a similar pattern repeated in the rest of Europe, the US and Australia.

[...]Dr Hakim added: ‘It is thus not surprising that wives generally earn less than their husbands, and that most couples rationally decide that it makes sense for her to take on the larger share of child care, and to use most or all the parental leave allowance.’ Her report also suggests that many women do not want to admit they want to be a housewife – even to their partners.
‘It has become impossible to say, “I wouldn’t mind being a housewife,” she said.
‘It is so politically incorrect that a lot of women don’t want to admit it.’

[...]‘Women today have more choices than men, including real choices between a focus on family work and/or paid employment.
‘Despite this, many politicians and feminists appear disappointed with the slow pace of change in women’s attainment of top jobs.
Sex differences are treated as self-evident proof of widespread sex discrimination and sex-role stereotyping rather than the result of personal choices and preferences.
‘Demands for further change rest on faulty assumptions and dated evidence. The latest research shows that most of the theories and ideas built up around gender equality in the last few decades are wrong.
‘Despite feminist claims, the truth is that many men and women have different career aspirations, priorities, and life goals.
‘Policy makers should therefore not expect the same job outcomes.’

The full report can be read here.

Official Medical Society Statements on Newborn Circumcision

2011-07-05T23:22:00.001+02:00

Via nocirc:

Canadian Paediatric Society:

"Recommendation: Circumcision of newborns should not be routinely performed."

The Royal Australasian College of Physicians:

"After extensive review of the literature the RACP reaffirms that there is no medical indication for routine neonatal circumcision."

British Association of Paediatric Surgeons:
"The practice [of male circumcision] should be discouraged by education."

British Medical Association:

"The BMA considers that the evidence concerning health benefit from non-therapeutic circumcision is insufficient for this alone to be a justification for doing it."

College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia:

"Current understanding of the benefits, risks and potential harm of this procedure, however, no longer supports this practice for prophylactic health benefit. Routine infant male circumcision performed on a healthy infant is now considered a non-therapeutic and medically unnecessary intervention."

American Medical Association:

The AMA calls infant circumcision "non-therapeutic." Regarding penile cancer, the AMA states "...because this disease is rare and occurs later in life, circumcision as a preventive measure is not justified."

American Academy of Family Physicians:

"While routine circumcision is widely practiced, the small medical benefits of circumcision lead many to consider routine circumcision to be a cosmetic procedure. This leads to questions regarding medical ethics..."

American Academy of Pediatrics:
“Existing scientific evidence demonstrates potential medical benefits of newborn male circumcision; however, these data are not sufficient to recommend routine neonatal circumcision.”

American Cancer Society:

“Most public health researchers believe that the penile cancer risk among uncircumcised men without known risk factors living in the United States is extremely low. The current consensus of most experts is that circumcision should not be recommended as a prevention strategy for penile cancer.”

Husband's employment status threatens marriage, but wife's does not, study finds

2011-07-05T00:58:00.001+02:00

I am losing track where I get my links from. Anyhow scientific stuff and Feck is interested:

According to the study, a woman's employment status has no effect on the likelihood that her husband will opt to leave the marriage. An employed woman is more likely to initiate a divorce than a woman who is not employed, but only when she reports being highly unsatisfied with the marriage.

[...]For a man, not being employed not only increases the chances that his wife will initiate divorce, but also that he will be the one who opts to leave. Even men who are relatively happy in their marriages are more likely to leave if they are not employed, the research found.

Taken together, the findings suggest an "asymmetric" change in traditional gender roles in marriage, the researchers say.

That men who are not employed, regardless of their marital satisfaction, are more likely to initiate divorce suggests that a marriage in which the man does not work "does not look like what [men] think a marriage is supposed to," the researchers write. In contrast, women's employment alone does not encourage divorce initiated by either party. That implies that a woman's choice to enter the workforce is not a violation of any marriage norms. Rather, being employed merely provides financial security that enables a woman to leave when all else fails.

"These effects probably emanate from the greater change in women's than men's roles," the researchers write. "Women's employment has increased and is accepted, men's nonemployment is unacceptable to many, and there is a cultural ambivalence and lack of institutional support for men taking on 'feminized' roles such as household work and emotional support."

The research used data on over 3,600 couples taken from three waves of the National Survey of Families and Households. Waves were conducted in 1987-88, 1992-94, and 2001-2

Liana C. Sayer, Paula England, Paul Allison, and Nicole Kangas. She Left, He Left: How Employment and Satisfaction Affect Men's and Women's Decisions to Leave Marriages. American Journal of Sociology, 2011

Men are entitled to fully experience and express all forms of nonsexual love.

2011-07-04T20:41:00.001+02:00

Found via Reddit and certainly something that makes you think:

We have rendered the modern male incapable of platonic love, incapable of experiencing romantic feelings without sex, incapable of valuing physical affection outside of sexual relationships. We hold him to the sexual standard of traditional, mainstream masculinity.

He is free to fuck whoever he wants—but when it comes to emotions, when it comes to love, he is in bondage. He must feel according the rules, love according to the rules. He can either love a person sexually or feel nothing for them at all, with the exception of anger, hatred, and tendency toward violence.

You may sit there and say, “Well, that’s an exaggeration, of course men love their families and their children and, yeah okay, probably, maybe their friends.”

But love is more than just a word. It’s more than an assumption. Men must be allowed to express that love as much as they want, however they want. They must be allowed to really feel it, however the feeling comes, whether it’s for a friend or a family member or someone that falls into a totally different category yet still is not a sexual interest. They must be given the freedom to make any given nonsexual relationship as emotional as they want it to be.

[...]It is time that men are allowed by society and also by themselves to function at their fullest emotional and relational potential, without the world making interpretations about their emotional connections through a sexualized lens. It’s time that men are seen as emotional beings first, sexual beings second. It’s time that men realize they are free to have relationships of emotional depth and significance that are also completely nonsexual; it’s time they realize they’re free to have social lives that are a hell of a lot more complex than “One very emotional romantic-sexual monogamous relationship/many sexual relationships and a bunch of emotionally shallow nonsexual relationships.” It’s time men are freed to experience romance outside of sexuality, if they are so inclined to explore that. It’s time we stop expecting men to sexually perform as justification for their emotions. It’s time we all understand that the emotional content of a male’s relationships has absolutely no bearing on his masculinity.

Clearing up my saved articles F&F edition

2011-07-04T20:32:00.001+02:00

A collection of interesting studies found on F&F:

We start with "a paper presented by Dr. William Fabricius of Arizona State University entitled “The Bad News about Divorce and Children Is Worse than We Thought, but the Good News Is Better than We Thought.”:

His own research into a cohort of 1,030 high school students indicates that

the effect of divorce on the father-child relationship depends heavily on the amount of parenting time the child has with the father. At equal parenting time, the quality of the relationship was at its highest; at the lowest levels of parenting time with father (0% to 15%) the quality of the relationship was at its worst.

That is, the more time a child has with his/her father post divorce up to 50%, the better the relationship between the two. More time beyond 50% doesn’t seem to improve matters. The implications of that for public policy should be obvious.

The bad news is that a large percentage – almost 40% — of the students had these minimal levels of parenting time with their fathers when they were growing up, and had damaged relationships with their fathers as young adults.

So, the failure of courts to grant fathers greater custody and to enforce visitation has a direct and negative effect on children both during childhood and after.

[...]When we consider that almost 40% of the students had had minimal parenting time with their fathers, and on average as young adults had damaged relationships with their fathers, and when we link that with the lifetime health outcomes of young adults who had reported similarly distant relationships with their parents, we can see that the bad news looks worse than we thought it was.

Another study is cited about the link between absent fathers and longevity:

What is now called the Longevity Project by current researchers, began in 1921. It continued through the death of its founder, Lewis Terman, and the involvement of a couple of generations of follow-up researchers. It’s still going on. The purpose is to find what factors contribute to longevity and which ones do the opposite. [...] The early death of a parent had no measurable effect on children’s life spans or mortality risk, but the long-term health effects of broken families were often devastating. Parental divorce during childhood emerged as the single strongest predictor of early death in adulthood. The grown children of divorced parents died almost five years earlier, on average, than children from intact families.

There was an interesting follow up for the above study, we talk about equal parenting now:

There is now a strong consensus among the general public that equal parenting time is best for the child. Large majorities favor it in all the locales and among all the demographic
groups in the United States and Canada in which this question has been asked, and across several variations in question format.

For example, in a nationwide poll done at the insistence of the Canadian Parliament, 78% of those asked said they “strongly preferred” or “somewhat preferred” a presumption of equal parenting post-divorce. In Massachusetts in 2004, 85% of voters in a non-binding referendum voted in favor of a presumption of equally shared parenting in custody cases.

Those have been followed up by recent studies done by Fabricius and Dr. Sanford Braver. In 2010, Fabricius asked a cohort of people waiting to serve on juries in Tucson the same question that Bay State residents were asked in the non-binding referendum. Some 87% of Arizonans asked favored the presumption of equally shared parenting.

This year, Braver, Fabricius, et al went further and designed a study that confronted respondents with various hypothetical fact situations and asked them to, in effect, be the judge, i.e. to “issue a custody order” in each hypothetical case.

When parents in the cases were said to have done about equal amounts of childcare during the marriage, 69% of respondents said they should have equal parenting time post-divorce. When childcare was radically unequal, almost half of respondents still awarded equal parenting time.

[...]Interestingly, fathers were more likely to be punished for instigating conflict than were mothers. Only 4% of respondents awarded equal parenting time to instigating fathers while 21% gave equal time to mothers responsible for conflict.

And with the next article it turns out it was mostly all about one survey. Now Robert Franklin argues against the researchers claim that fathers don't bargain hard enough:

To examine whether the residential time of children was related to the type of decision, cases in which there were no risk factors for either parent were compared. For agreed cases, 64% of the mothers received the majority of time, and 22% of mothers and fathers received equal time (see Exhibit 6). For the few contested cases, 67% of mothers received the majority of time, but only 5% of mothers and fathers received equal time.

So according to the Washington State data, contesting matters tends to be a bad idea for fathers. Certainly, those data aren’t definitive. They don’t tell us who’s contesting what and again the sample size isn’t large because the vast majority of cases are agreed to by the parties.

But what the data suggest is that things go better for dads if they don’t contest the case. Stated another way, they stand a better chance with their ex than they do with the judge.

In agreed cases, mothers get majority time in 64% of cases while in contested cases they rate goes up to 67%. That’s not much, but if a dad is going for equal time, contesting the matter is a bad idea. His chances of winning equal custody drop from 22% to 5% if he contests the matter.

Fabricius might argue that the same holds true for mothers. After all, her chances of getting equal time drop the same as dad’s - from 22% to 5%.

But that argument ignores one large, if inconvenient, truth. When a father fails to get equal time, he likely gets less; when a mother does, she likely gets more. So the drop from 22% to 5% of equal custody for both men and women when cases are contested masks an important fact - it’s a win for her and a loss for him.

Another fact that suggests bias against fathers and the idea of equal parenting is the fact that, although the idea has been around for many years, no jurisdiction (with the partial and short-lived exception of Australia) has ever passed a law mandating a presumption of equally shared parenting.

Granted, judges aren’t state legislators and vice versa, but the fact that proposed statutes establishing the presumption invariably fail surely tells us something about how fathers are viewed. Combine that with Fabricius and Braver’s conclusion that there’s widespread public support for equal parenting and we’re left with an unavoidable question - “why don’t legislatures do the will of the people in the case of equal parenting?”

Pretty good stuff. F&F almost always delivers. As usual I suggest you read it all.

We continue with data on shared parenting:

[From CHILD CUSTODY, ACCESS AND PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY: by Dr. Edward Kruk of the University of British Columbia]

A recent meta-analysis of the major North American studies comparing sole and joint physical custody arrangements has shown that children in joint custody arrangements fare significantly better on all adjustment measures than children who live in sole custody arrangements (Bauserman, 2002). Bauserman compared child adjustment in joint physical and joint legal custody settings with sole (maternal and paternal) custody settings, and also intact family settings, examined children’s general adjustment, family relationships, self-esteem, emotional and behavioral adjustment, divorce-specific adjustment, as well as the degree and nature of ongoing conflict between parents. On every measure of adjustment, children in joint physical custody arrangements were faring significantly better than children in sole custody arrangements: “Children in joint custody arrangements had fewer behavior and emotional problems, higher self-esteem, and better family relations and school performance than children in sole custody arrangements.” The positive outcomes of joint custody were also evident among high-conflict couples.

[...]Sole maternal custody often leads to parental alienation and father absence, and father absence is associated with negative child outcomes. Eighty five per cent of youth in prison are fatherless; 71 per cent of high school dropouts are fatherless; 90 per cent of runaway children are fatherless; and fatherless youth exhibit higher levels of depression and suicide, delinquency, promiscuity and teen pregnancy, behavioural problems and illicit and licit substance abuse (Statistics Canada, 2005; Crowder and Teachman, 2004; Ellis et al., 2003; Ringback Weitoft et al., 2003; Jeynes, 2001; Leonard et al., 2005; McCue Horwitz et al,, 2003; McMunn, 2001; Margolin and Craft, 1989; Blankenhorn, 1995; Popenoe, 1996; Vitz, 2000; Alexander, 2003). These studies also found that fatherless youth are more likely to be victims of exploitation and abuse, as father absence through divorce is strongly associated with diminished self-concepts in children (Parish, 1987).

[...]Children of divorce want equal time with their parents and consider shared parenting to be in their best interests. Seventy per cent of children of divorce believe that equal amounts of time with each parent is the best living arrangement for children, and children who have had equal time arrangements have the best relations with each of their parents after divorce (Fabricius, 2003).

[...]From the perspective of children, such de facto sole custody arrangements are woefully inadequate, often resulting in the loss of one of their primary caregivers. From the perspective of both international conventions (U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child) and reports such as that of the Special Joint House of Commons-Senate Committee on Child Custody and Access (1998), such arrangements undermine children’s fundamental need for both parents actively and responsibly involved in their lives.

Building bridges across the gender pay gap - Employment - NZ Herald News

2011-07-04T20:04:00.001+02:00

Not even sure how serious one should take that article, but well it seems I haven't blogged about the wage gap in ages, so what is going on here:

He and another economics professor, Andrea Ichino analysed personnel data at an Italian bank which recorded the date and duration of every employee absence from work and found the absences of women below the age of 45 followed a 28-day cycle.

The professors concluded the menstrual cycle did increase female absenteeism and this explained at least 14 per cent of the gender pay difference.

More about the sick times:

in many Western countries women typically have more sick days than men of the same age - 7.6 more in Europe and 5.2 more in America and Canada.

"We think that biological difference could explain at least some of it.

"What we find is consistent with medical studies where women have turned in diaries of their conditions and their sickness and doctors find an incidence of PMS-related absences that is very consistent with our own estimate that came from the Italian data."

Perhaps good to keep in mind.

Moretti told Weekend Review the research was simply a small step in trying to say what the facts are and what the role of biology might be in women earning less - his guess is that child-rearing is a much bigger factor.

There is more in the article about starting a debate by tongue-in-cheek suggesting extra days off for women and more about what the state could do to address the pay-gap, but it seems to be one of those instances where ones rage is better suited for different topics....or so.

The therapist gap

2011-07-04T19:46:00.001+02:00

Well, apparently there isn't only a lack of male teachers, there also seems to be a gap when it comes to therapists:

Researchers began tracking the “feminization” of mental health care more than a generation ago, when women started to outnumber men in fields like psychology and counseling. Today the takeover is almost complete.

Men earn only one in five of all master’s degrees awarded in psychology, down from half in the 1970s. They account for less than 10 percent of social workers under the age of 34, according to a recent survey. And their numbers have dwindled among professional counselors — to 10 percent of the American Counseling Association’s membership today from 30 percent in 1982 — and appear to be declining among marriage and family therapists.

Some college psychology programs cannot even attract male applicants, much less students. And at many therapists’ conferences, attendees with salt-and-pepper beards wander the hallways as lonely as peaceniks at a gun fair.

The result, many therapists argue, is that the profession is at risk of losing its appeal for a large group of sufferers — most of them men — who would like to receive therapy but prefer to start with a male therapist.

“There’s a way in which a guy grows up that he knows some things that women don’t know, and vice versa,” said David Moultrup, a psychotherapist in Belmont, Mass. “But that male viewpoint has been so devalued in the course of empowering little girls for the past 40 or 50 years that it is now all but lost in talk therapy. Society needs to have the choice, and the choice is being taken away.”

[...]In just the past few years, psychologists have identified a number of issues that are, in effect, male versions of the gender-identity issues that so many mothers face in the work force: the self-doubt of being a stay-at-home father, the tension between being a provider and being a father, even male post-partum depression.