Intro:Are You Man Enough for the Men's Rights Movement?
Probably not, at least according to a growing army of pissed-off activists who are convinced that the male species is profoundly endangered by our feminized society. They say it's a woman's world now—that women have the upper hand in sex, in universities, in custody battles. And don't even get them started on all those bogus rape cases. It's enough to make a certain kind of man join a revolution. Jeff Sharlet reports from the movement's first national gathering and meets the true believers who want you to fight for your right to patriarchy


A Voice for Men's first International Conference on Men's Issues convened a month after the killing. The issues were as varied as the manosphere: fathers' rights, suicide, and circumcision (a.k.a. male genital mutilation), and also false accusations of rape, male victims of rape, and unfaithful wives "cuckoo for cocoa penis puffs," as one speaker would put it, plus "mangina" journalists who "cherry-pick" quotes such as "cuckoo for cocoa penis puffs" out of context. 1. It was supposed to be at the Detroit DoubleTree, a swank downtown hotel, but the feminists protested, and since the elite hospitality industry is pretty much in the thrall of feminism, or because the feminists floated death threats, or because a member of the men's movement floated death threats so people would understand that the feminists are floating death threats even if they did not, in this instance, float any death threats—for one of these disturbing reasons, A Voice for Men was told by the DoubleTree to "go elsewhere."

Elsewhere is a town called St. Clair Shores, and in it a VFW, Post 1146, known as "the Bruce." As in the sign out front that declares, cruising at the bruce / every friday night / 5–9 P.M. (By "cruising" they mean muscle cars, a fact I mention because A Voice for Men is surprisingly pro-gay, or at least anti-anti-gay.) There's artillery on the lawn and a faded sign on a fence around a parking lot: warning, of what, to whom, it is not clear. The blacktop beyond, where conference attendees line up to go through "security," is broken with weeds, but the men don't notice the decline in the conference's circumstances. They're too excited about "security." They keep saying, "No feminist better try coming here!" Local police have dispatched four officers, and the conference attendees have deputized even more security from their own ranks. "Security" wears black polo shirts, and there are a lot of black polo shirts, but since the line is slow, security decides to sweep us all in with a request to return for a "check." Nobody does. Only one feminist later attempts entry, an activist who goes by the handle "Dark Horse Swore." The black shirts eighty-six her. She sets up at a nearby bar, orders pizza, opens a tab, and invites any conference attendee who cares to talk. No takers. Feminist pizza? Not a chance. These men, they're hip to feminine wiles. They've taken the red pill, they like to say.

The red-pill moment, explains one men's rights activist (MRA), "is the day you decide nothing looks the same." It's what the movement calls the born-again experience of opening your eyes to women's Matrix-like control of the modern world. For a young MRA named Max von Holtzendorff, the red-pill moment was being accused of sexual harrassment by a co-worker to whom he proposed sex, "being blunt and forthright, because that seemed the best way to ensure consent." For Dan Perrins, one of the security black shirts, it was the day he ended up in jail, after he says he lodged a complaint against his ex, the beginning of a legal battle that led him to a hunger strike. "I should have killed the bitch five years ago," he tells me. "I'd be out by now." For Gunther Schadow, an M.D.-Ph.D., it was a "meta-study" on domestic violence that inspired him to seed a foundation with about half a million dollars, with which he now hopes to overturn the Violence Against Women Act. For Dan Moore, whose MRA name is Factory, the red pill was a revelation in stages. First, he says, his wife cheated on him. Then she wanted him to know it. "She'd laugh at me." His low point: lying on the floor in a fetal curl while she stood over him mocking him. He says she had a butcher knife in her hand. (She denies this. All of it.)

"Women gone insane with the power of the pussy pass" is how Elam describes the movement's raison d'être in an essay called "When Is It OK to Punch Your Wife?" Another one of his provocations. Elam's white, but he identifies with Malcolm X; he believes he needs to shock society to be heard. He says his talk of "the business end of a right hook" and women who are "freaking begging" to be raped is simply his version of Malcolm's "by any means necessary." To wit: Elam's proposal to make October "Bash a Violent Bitch Month," in which men should take the women who abuse them "by the hair and smack their face against the wall till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won't fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles."
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201503/mens-rights-activism-the-red-pill

#8. The Duh-DoS
The first and worst asshole technique for arguing against feminism is demanding proof of sexism every single time the subject is raised. It's a popular strategy because it pretends to be in good faith. New claims do require proof. But sexual inequality isn't a new claim. Sexual inequality is almost the entire history of our species. When nearly every social statistic in every country on the planet is evidence of the problem, people fighting it don't have to list them all to justify the discussion.


#7. The Semantic Quo
As well as wasting your time, assholes want those specific lists so they can move on to their second front: wasting more of your time. They'll try to disprove your points with all the obsession and specificity of someone proving Green Lantern could totally beat Superman. But less connection to reality. They'll apply more minute attention to detail than the search for the Higgs boson, and act like their results have more massive effects on reality


#6. Saint or GTFO
This imperfection attack is digging through someone's Internet history to see if they've ever said anything less than perfect. Because the only allowed options are immaculate saint or total asshole, and the antifeminists have the asshole side locked down. They're the Asshole Emperors, defending their rule by defecating over everything and everyone who's made the mistake of facing them. They'll extract something sort of stupid said several years ago, usually by ripping it more dangerously out of context than the core of an atomic warhead, and wave it around as if it was exactly that powerful.

#5. Accusing Victims of Faking It

anyone denying the existence of sexism can go to any YouTube video with a woman in it, read the comments, and fuck off. Victim-accusation isn't an impartial quest for truth or "hearing both sides." It's piling extra pressure on the victim as standard operating procedure.

While accusations of sexism apparently require a Supreme Court ruling as a cited source, accusations of faking sexism need no support whatsoever. "I'm just looking for proof," smiles the scumbag. "I'm just calling every woman a liar and acting like that's the unbiased course of action, instead of proof of the problem I'm denying, and if there was any justice in existence I would cease to do so."

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/8-a242423oles-who-show-up-every-time-word-feminism-used/#ixzz3SDHufFOU

Say hello to the Radical Brownies, a troop of a dozen East Oakland girls who are learning about the merits of activism. With a tip of their brown berets to the Black Panthers, the original Oaktown social justice warriors, the Radical Brownies have ambitious plans to revolutionize their community.

Co-founders Anayvette Martinez and Marilyn Hollinquest started the group for 8-12 year-old girls late last year with the aim of having a Girl Scout-like group that would be focused on social justice. Both Martinez and Hollinquest are queer women of color who each have over a decade of experience working with LGBTQ youth and young people of color, though Martinez has no personal experience with the Girl Scouts or old-school scouting.

The Radical Brownies “all came about organically” last year, says Martinez, spurred on by her fourth-grade daughter Coatlupe’s desire to join a young girls’ troop. "As she was blooming into a young girl of color, I watched her begin to navigate her identity and growth,” Martinez said. “I saw the need for a group that would empower and encourage her to form bonds of sisterhood with other girls in her community. I began to imagine what a radical young girl’s social justice troop looked like, a group that centered and affirmed her experiences as a beautiful and brilliant brown girl against so many societal pressures to conform to mainstream ideals of girlhood."

Today, Coatlupe is working toward her second Radical Brownies badge, this one in Radical Beauty. The youngster has a keen awareness of how stereotypes around beauty negatively her—Coatlupe told me that Radical Beauty is about “loving the skin you are in and ignoring commercials that say you need certain products to be beautiful when really you are beautiful just the way you are.”

Since the troop’s debut, they’ve received a ton of positive media attention (and some nasty critics, of course, like one person who described the troop as “future Marxist agitators”). On January 22, the Young Women of Color Leadership Council wrote to the Radical Brownies in an open letter, “Many of us grew up wishing we had something like what you have created and are so happy to see you forming this sisterhood. We know that sisterhood is radical and revolutionary and can see the love and support you have for one another in ourselves as well." I sat down recently and talk with Martinez about all these issues.

http://bitchmagazine.org/post/in-oaklands-radical-brownies-girls-collect-merit-badges-for-activism

Black, queer, feminist, erased from history: Meet the most important legal scholar you’ve likely never heard of


Ruth Bader Ginsburg has emerged as the liberal hero of a hopelessly right-wing Supreme Court, a ram in the bush for those of us who look on in horror as the court presides over the dismantling of key pieces of legislation like the Voting Rights Act, anti-discrimination law and affirmative action policy, which have been so critical to African-American advancement since the 1960s.

In a recent interview at Georgetown University, Ginsburg reflected on the history behind one of her key legal accomplishments, the 1971 case of Reed v. Reed. After an estranged couple lost their son, his mother, Sally Reed, petitioned to administer his estate. But Idaho law maintained that “males must be preferred to females,” in such matters. Ginsburg authored the plaintiff’s brief for the case when it reached the Supreme Court, arguing that the 14th amendment protected against discrimination based upon sex. When the court ruled in Sally Reed’s favor, it was the first time that the Equal Protection Clause had been applied to a case of sex discrimination.

But much of the legal groundwork for that argument can be attributed to Dr. Pauli Murray, a Howard University-trained lawyer, who began to argue in the 1960s, that the Equal Protection Clause should be applied to cases of sex discrimination in much the same way that it had been applied to cases of racial discrimination. Murray’s argument constituted what legal historian Serena Mayeri termed “reasoning from race,” in which race analogies were used to make clear the subordinate status of women. Though today we speak of these matters in the language of intersections, a term gleaned from legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, it is Pauli Murray’s initial invocation of the race-sex analogy for black women’s positionality within the law that is the most direct precursor to Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality.

Ginsburg named Murray and Judge Dorothy Kenyon as co-authors of her brief in the Reed case, because even though they didn’t help to write it, these two women had been pioneers in creating the legal strategy for fighting sex discrimination. Ginsburg’s choice to name these women as co-authors is a model for how to solve contemporary issues among young feminists over white feminists’ appropriation without attribution of the intellectual and political labor of women of color.

Looking back on his own life, he wrote in a blog post yesterday (archived here),

I saw women wholly unconcerned with their own safety and the character of men they developed intimate relationships with. I saw women who voluntarily numbed themselves with alcohol and other drugs in social settings before letting the direction of the night’s wind determine who they would follow into a private room. I saw women who, once feeling awkward, sad, or guilty for a sexual encounter they didn’t fully remember, call upon an authority figure to resolve the problem by locking up her previous night’s lover in prison or ejecting him from school.

While walking to my place, I realized how drunk she was. In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she legally couldn’t give her consent. It didn’t help matters that I was relatively sober, but I can’t say I cared or even hesitated. I won’t rationalize my actions, but having sex is what I do.

By attempting to teach men not to rape, what we have actually done is teach women not to care about being raped, not to protect themselves from easily preventable acts, and not to take responsibility for their actions. At the same time, we don’t hesitate to blame men for bad things that happen to them (if right now you walked into a dangerous ghetto and got robbed, you would be called an idiot and no one would say “teach ghetto kids not to steal”).

It was obvious to me that the advice of our esteemed establishment writers and critics wasn’t stopping the problem, and since rape was already on the law books with severe penalties, additional laws or flyers posted on dormitory doors won’t stop this rape culture either.
make rape legal if done on private property. I propose that we make the violent taking of a woman not punishable by law when done off public grounds.

Why Lesley Gore Mattered
Singer Lesley Gore, who died on Monday at 68, is best remembered for her hit single of 1963, "It's My Party." But don't make the mistake of dismissing her as a one-hit wonder. First, she scored several other top ten hits in the 1960s; true, none hit the heights of that first song, which reached No. 1 on the U.S. charts. Still, Gore did well enough to lip-synch to her single "California Nights" on the Batman TV show in 1967.

And "You Don't Own Me" was an important message to hear in a pop song at a time when feminism was gaining steam but not yet a current in the musical mainstream.

But what makes Lesley Gore important isn't a couple of hit pop tunes from 40 years ago. It's the connections, and unexpected consequences of her songs. "It's My Party" was produced by Quincy Jones. It was in fact his first hit song. I'm not suggesting that we would not know who this hugely influential man is today without her -- he was already a hot topic in the jazz world by then. But his astonishing career in pop music, including the record-breaking albums he made with Michael Jackson, had to begin somewhere -- and it began with the 16-year old high school student who took the name Lesley Gore.

And that song she sang on national television? That was one of several songs she recorded that were written by a young Marvin Hamlisch. Gore, Jones, and Hamlisch began working together in 1963, when she sang and Jones produced a song called "Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows."

http://soundcheck.wnyc.org/story/why-lesley-gore-mattered/

If the ingredients in your pills don’t really work, does it matter if they’re correct?

Well, yes. Even if that echinacea pill doesn’t cure the common cold, if a supplement manufacturer sells you an echinacea pill, they have to put echinacea in it.

Supplement makers can and do make all kinds of claims about the health benefits of the stuff they’re selling you. They claim that supplements can "boost your immune system," relieve aches and pains, improve memory, and promote "wellness," whatever the heck that means. Most this is nonsense, but thanks to the manufacturers’ special friend in the U.S. Senate, Senator Orrin Hatch, the federal government has almost no power to regulate these claims. Over the years, the supplement companies have been very generous to Senator Hatch, and he has returned the favor by defending them (though of course he denies any quid pro quo).

Even supplement makers have limits: they can’t sell you ground-up house plants, or rice powder, claiming that it’s St. Johns Wort. But as New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman revealed last week, that’s exactly what some of them have been doing. Amazingly, 79% of the supplements tested did not contain the primary ingredient listed on the label. Many of them contained other plant material, including plants that might cause an allergic reaction in unsuspecting customers.

You see, as cheap as most supplements are (compared to real medicine, that is), rice powder is even cheaper.

Attorney General Schneiderman sent letters to four of the largest retailers of supplements in the country: Walmart, Walgreens, GNC, and Target, demanding them to immediately stop selling supplements that were falsely labelled, including echinacea, ginseng, St. John’s Wort, gingko biloba, and others

What did Schneiderman's office do? Well, they conducted a scientific study, using DNA sequencing to test the ingredients in six types of herbal supplements, looking at different brands from multiple stores. They tested each sample 5 times to ensure accuracy. They collected 78 different samples and ran 390 tests in all.
- See more at: http://genome.fieldofscience.com/2015/02/a-really-bad-week-for-supplements.html#sthash.yqirY6gA.dpuf

Rape Prevention and Risk Reduction: Review of the Research Literature for Practitioners

Kimberly A. Lonsway, Victoria L. Banyard, Alan D. Berkowitz, Christine A. Gidycz, Jackson T. Katz, Mary P. Koss, Paul A. Schewe, and Sarah E. Ullman With contributions from Dorothy Edwards

For many professionals working in the field of sexual assault, one of the most pressing questions is: ""What can we do to prevent it?"" Practitioners have been designing and implementing rape prevention programs for decades, and researchers have been evaluating them for almost as long. The purpose of this article is to summarize the answers we have so far, because the good news is that we have learned some important lessons along the way regarding the prevention of adult and adolescent sexual assault. (The prevention of child sexual abuse will not be addressed in this article). For the purposes of this review, the terms ""rape"" and ""sexual assault"" will be used interchangeably.

However, it won't take long for many readers to realize that there are far more questions than answers. The second purpose of this article is to provide concrete guidance for practitioners on how to design, implement, and evaluate rape prevention programs in the real world where we don't have all the answers from research conducted so far.

In recent years, several resource materials have been published to provide guidance for researchers and practitioners on sexual violence prevention.

For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a document in 2004 entitled Sexual Violence Prevention: Beginning the Dialogue.
Similarly, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center published Sexual Violence and the Spectrum of Prevention: Towards a Community Solution (Davis, Parks, & Cohen, 2006).
Both of these documents provide an overview for a comprehensive approach to prevention for practitioners, including detailed examples of interventions at various levels of influence (e.g., individual, interpersonal, community, societal). The CDC report also offers guidance for agencies to determine which components may best meet their organizational mission, goals, and resources. These documents can help practitioners to carefully think through their prevention strategy and understand where a particular intervention might fit within the larger picture. They can also help practitioners to identify specific goals for interventions that are targeted at different levels of influence and time points when prevention activities can occur. Many people believe that this type of an integrated approach is the most likely to create and sustain changes in broader societal norms.

In addition, the number of foreign women now being trafficked into Sweden for sex is nil. The Swedish government estimates that in the last few years only 200 to 400 women and girls have been annually sex trafficked into Sweden, a figure that's negligible compared to the 15,000 to 17,000 females yearly sex trafficked into neighboring Finland. No other country, nor any other social experiment, has come anywhere near Sweden's promising results.

By what complex formula has Sweden managed this feat? Amazingly, Sweden's strategy isn't complex at all. It's tenets, in fact, seem so simple and so firmly anchored in common sense as to immediately spark the question, "Why hasn't anyone tried this before?"

Sweden's Groundbreaking 1999 Legislation

In 1999, after years of research and study, Sweden passed legislation that a) criminalizes the buying of sex, and b) decriminalizes the selling of sex. The novel rationale behind this legislation is clearly stated in the government's literature on the law:

"In Sweden prostitution is regarded as an aspect of male violence against women and children. It is officially acknowledged as a form of exploitation of women and children and constitutes a significant social problem... gender equality will remain unattainable so long as men buy, sell and exploit women and children by prostituting them."

In addition to the two pronged legal strategy, a third and essential element of Sweden's prostitution legislation provides for ample and comprehensive social service funds aimed at helping any prostitute who wants to get out, and additional funds to educate the public. As such, Sweden's unique strategy treats prostitution as a form of violence against women in which the men who exploit by buying sex are criminalized, the mostly female prostitutes are treated as victims who need help, and the public is educated in order to counteract the historical male bias that has long stultified thinking on prostitution. To securely anchor their view in firm legal ground, Sweden's prostitution legislation was passed as part and parcel of the country's 1999 omnibus violence against women legislation