Two famous DV victims

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

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

"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

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...

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

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!

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.