"Women who cry rape were warned by the Court of Appeal today that prison was 'inevitable' for an offence which attacks the criminal justice system.
Rejecting a sentence challenge by a woman jailed for two years after making a false allegation against an innocent man, two senior judges emphasised the impact of such a crime on conviction rates." Reference
Great news! But sadly, the judge in question seems to have little concern for falsely-accused men. All he is concerned about is the effect that false accusations have on the conviction rate. Still, it's a good start.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Friday, October 30, 2009
The Feminist’s Guide To Debate Tactics
I wanted to draw your attention to this article on the excellent website The Spearhead:
Observing comments made by feminists on MRA blogs – or on any blog or forum post which is even slightly critical of any aspect of feminism – for the last few years has made something very clear: feminists have no idea how to debate.
This is probably due to the overwhelming feminist hegemony in educational institutions. Women dominate the teaching profession, particularly in grade school, and all of these women are feminists. Girls have a powerful innate need to please the authority figures in their lives, and all they have to do to please their teachers is parrot feminist propaganda on cue. This leaves them completely unprepared for the outside world, where reciting this bunk results in demands that they produce facts and logic, things they have never been asked for before. The poor feminists are startled that their dutiful recitations do not result in a pat on the head, but instead in challenges they do not know how to meet.
So as a public service, I am providing this handy guide for feminists on common debate mistakes. This way, the next time you encounter one of those nasty old misogynists, your attempts at argument will not simply confirm his existing low opinion of women!
Mistake #1: “You’re only saying that because you never get laid!”
There are two problems with this argument. One is that in many cases, it isn’t true. Most of us misogynists started out believing all the bullshit about female equality we heard in school and on TV. It took a great deal of experience with women, in the workplace as well as in dating, to make us realize that in fact, women are very different from men, and in most respects inferior. Most feminists are straight women, so you’ll just have to take my word for this: having sex with women does not in any way enhance respect for women. Quite the contrary.
The second problem is, even if the man you are addressing is celibate, this proves nothing. It has no bearing whatsoever on sex discrimination laws, child custody agreements, polemics about the “male gaze”, women in combat, or anything else you might be debating. A very smart man in ancient Greece called this the “ad hominem” argument. You have probably seen this phrase in internet fora, but it is usually used incorrectly, by people who apparently have no idea what it means but know that it is a bad thing. An “ad hominem” argument is an attack on the person making the argument in lieu of a reasoned rebuttal of the argument itself.
Mistake #2: “You must have a small dick!”
This is another ad hominem argument. Once again, men with small dicks are still capable of stating facts which are correct. Unless you have some scientific studies that show that men with small dicks are always wrong, it’s best not to use this one. Besides which, MRA’s have all heard it so many times that it makes them conclude, probably correctly, that you don’t have any actual information that might back up your contentions. “You must have a small dick!” is basically feminist code for “I have no clue what I’m talking about!”
Mistake #3: (used against female antifeminists) “If it weren’t for feminism, you wouldn’t have the right to keep a blog!”
I have seen this charge levelled against women whose antifeminist opinions are far more moderate than mine. Feminists seem to believe that women used to be barred from the First Amendment until some heroic feminists got us in on it. The fact is, women and men have always had the same degree of freedom of speech. In the days when the Inquisition could burn people at the stake for heresy, men did not get away with any more heresy than women did. In Europe today, men and women, at least white ones, are equally subject to spurious hate speech laws. That women pre-Women’s Lib did not have freedom of speech would have come as a great surprise to Sojourner Truth, Carry Nation, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abby Kelley Foster, Madame de Stael, Renee Vivien, Radclyffe Hall, Rebecca Protten, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Baker Eddy, Mary Hunt, Elizabeth D. Golek, etc. etc.
If you want to use this argument, if you want it to be taken seriously you must offer the names of these mysterious feminists who gave women the right to blog. Dates and how they went about doing so, as well as some sort of evidence that women used to be kept silent, would also be useful.
Mistake #4: “Okay, so it’s true that women aren’t as good at science and stuff, but that’s because girls are raised differently from boys! If we were raised the same we’d be just as good at it!”
First, we don’t know that. The only reason to think that it is the case is that feminists want to believe it. There is no evidence. Your wishes are not a valid argument.
Second, there is considerable evidence that sex differences are innate. Feminists who try to teach their boys not to be violent are invariably dismayed when their toddling sons use the dolls they’re given as weapons. A boy who was raised as a girl after a botched circumcision knew even before he was eventually told the truth that he wasn’t actually a girl, and the attempt to turn him into one resulted in severe psychological problems; he ended by committing suicide at 38. For more on this, go to my blog and see the sidebar sections on “What Schools Are Doing to Boys” and “Biology Is Destiny”.
Mistake #5: “Women were too busy taking care of children and doing housework to invent things or discover things!”
And just what do you imagine men were doing while your ancestresses were cooking dinner or sewing clothes? The vast majority of them weren’t lounging happily in a library devising the principles of geometry or gazing through a telescope. They were mostly breaking their backs on farmland or in mines or smithies, enduring months of malnutrition and brutality aboard trading ships, getting shot at in armies, and other such fulfilling career paths. Yet somehow, men managed to build civilization in between.
For thousands of years, babies were delivered by midwives. Women had complete control of this profession. It never even occurred to the men who ruled the societies to interfere with midwifery. None of these women with the freedom and opportunity for hands-on experience invented the forceps. Instead, a man named Peter Chamberlen invented them around 1600, when the idea of male doctors delivering babies was still a controversial idea, and one chiefly engaged in by the decadent rich. In other words, men had scarcely arrived on the scene before they were inventing things that women had not imagined in thousands of years.
Commenter Paul came up with another excellent example: for the last few centuries, upper- and middle-class women were encouraged to learn to play musical instruments. A lot of these women had the leisure to spend a great deal of time on their music. Yet there have been very few female composers of any note, and black American men – not a privileged group by any means – invented both blues and jazz.
Finally, in the last few decades a great deal of effort has been expended on “encouraging” women and girls to achieve in traditionally male fields, and the lower and higher education systems are feminist-dominated. Where is the Renaissance of female creativity? Where are the female Leonardos, Isaac Newtons, and Mozarts? Women have made achievements – before and after feminism – but they are not equal to those of men.
Mistake #6: “Men have higher IQs, but that’s because the IQ test doesn’t measure female aptitudes!”
First, demanding that the rules be changed because you are losing impresses no one.
Second, the historical fact is that the IQ test is rigged in favor of women.
“The one exception to the general rule that different groups or populations usually differ in average IQ is that both sexes have approximately the same average IQ on most tests. This is not, however, a true empirical finding but a consequence of the manner in which the tests were first constructed…the two sexes were defined to have equal intelligence rather than discovered to have equal intelligence.” (Evans and Waites, 1981, 168).
(Evans, B.. & Waites, B. (1981). IQ and mental testing: An unnatural science and its social history. London, UK: Macmillan.)
More discussion of the slanting of the IQ test to minimize differences between men and women can be read here, here, here, and here. And despite the slanting in women’s favor, men still score consistently higher on them.
Mistake #7: “I guess Thomas Jefferson’s slave mistress wasn’t oppressed then, huh!”
Hijacking the misfortunes of other groups – slavery, the Holocaust, indentured servitude, dhimmitude, the potato famine, etc. – is tacky and does not prove that women are equal to men.
Mistake #8: “I cannot believe how ignorant you are!”
I think that feminists don’t know what the word “ignorant” means. It means that the person doesn’t know something. For example, I am ignorant of the Mandarin word for “insect”, because I have never studied Mandarin.
The only way this charge would make sense would be if you thought that the person you were talking to had never heard the glad tidings that women are equal to men. Unless you can come up with convincing evidence that someone on this planet hasn’t heard this nonsense, calling an MRA “ignorant” makes no sense whatever. We have all heard the feminist gospel. We aren’t ignorant of it. We simply don’t believe it. Indeed, given that feminists apparently believe that it was a heroic feminist campaign that won women the right to keep blogs and clearly don’t know that IQ tests are slanted against men, you are clearly the ignorant ones.
Of course, as a male blogger pointed out and I discussed, what women actually mean when they say this is that it’s stupid to believe unfashionable things because unconventional opinions make it harder to be socially accepted. For women, who are by nature dependent creatures, this is of paramount importance; the abstract value of truth has little appeal for most women.
Mistake #9: “I think this site must be a joke! You’re a troll!”
The world is full of people who disagree with you. Facing this fact is part of growing up.
Mistake #10: “You’re just too immature to handle a relationship with an independent woman!”
First, see #1. “Ad hominem”, remember that?
Roger Devlin handled this one quite ably:
A highly successful women’s magazine editor has written a book of advice for young wives stating: “Giving, devoting, sacrificing … these are the actions of a good wife, no? No. These are the actions of a drudge, a sucker, a sap.” Instead, women are urged to emulate a wife who threw her husband’s clothes into the garden to teach him not to leave socks on the floor: “He understood I meant it.” Or another who wanted her husband to help with the laundry, and hollered at him: “Are you a f***ing retard that you don’t see me running up and down stairs? Listen to me and stop your bulls**t.” Or another who discovered this interpersonal skill: “Just stand there and start screaming. If you stand there and scream long enough, someone is going to realize that you’re standing in the middle of the room screaming [and ask] ‘Why are you screaming?’” (pp. 245-47)
What could be wrong with men these days that they refuse to commit?
Mistake #11: “I am so very upset by what you’ve said! I nearly fainted! I almost threw up! I am trembling in horror!”
Evolution has designed women to use their emotions to manipulate their mates into providing for them and tending to them. We know you can’t really help it, but in a debate, particularly one about the alleged equality of women, it isn’t appropriate.
We know that a lot of what you’re doing here is putting on a display for other feminists. “See how terribly upset I am by this heresy! I am one of you! I am, like, totally sincere!”
But when debating with us, all that such “arguments” do is convince us that we’re right, that women should, for the most part, be kept out of masculine realms such as industry and science, because they are too weak to endure hearing facts they don’t like.
When Nancy Hopkins responded to Larry Summers mentioning the possibility that men might be somewhat naturally better suited to science – he even added, “I hope it isn’t true” – by fleeing from the room in a nauseated swoon, all she actually accomplished was to demonstrate to the world that women are too delicate and fragile for serious business like science. Do male scientists flee from the room when they hear hypotheses they hope aren’t true? Even black men respond more constructively to discussion of the black-white IQ gap.
If this is how women react to disagreement, it is a matter of public safety to keep them legally unequal:
Somebody in the Massachusetts Department of Motor Vehicles needs to look into suspending Dr Hopkins driver’s license. She obviously doesn’t need to be driving.
Now, I’m not saying that women can’t drive, nor am I implying that Ms Hopkins’ remarks are evidence in that direction. Republican women mostly seem to do ok at it, anyway.
However, given her self-reported reactions to Summers remarks, what would happen if she were driving down the street and accidentally punched up Rush Limbaugh on the radio, for example? Rush makes one of his “feminazi” jokes, and she throws up and blacks out.
When she then plows into a busload of innocent children, the blood will be on Rush’s hands, obviously. Still, that doesn’t help The Children.
Source: Should Nancy Hopkins be driving?
Also? Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
Mistake #12: “What are you smoking and where can I get some?”
This was funny the first 5,000 times we heard it, but it’s getting old. More importantly, it’s irrelevant. I don’t use illegal substances, but even if my bloodstream were a cocktail of half the things Americans can be arrested for using, I might still be right.
Mistake #13: “Just because I’m wrong about the trivial details doesn’t mean that there were no Battles To Be Fought for women’s rights.”
Vague, sweeping assertions are not a viable argument. Those “trivial details” you can’t be bothered with are. If you don’t have any concrete facts, your rhetoric is just that.
So what kind of arguments will MRAs listen to?
We like facts. Go looking for dates, names, legislation, documentation, and statistics. Find a scientific study, if you can, that indicates that women might in some field have the potential to be equal to men. Find statistics showing that society has become better in some way since women’s privilege, er I mean feminism, took root. Of course, you’re at a disadvantage here, since all of the facts show that women are innately inferior, that women of superior achievement will always be in the minority, and that women’s liberation leads to all sorts of social pathologies – rampant divorce, child abuse, inflation, eating disorders, and a general lowering of standards so that women can keep up. But if you hope to change our minds, you’ll have to try to find some facts that support your case instead of ours. Good luck!
Observing comments made by feminists on MRA blogs – or on any blog or forum post which is even slightly critical of any aspect of feminism – for the last few years has made something very clear: feminists have no idea how to debate.
This is probably due to the overwhelming feminist hegemony in educational institutions. Women dominate the teaching profession, particularly in grade school, and all of these women are feminists. Girls have a powerful innate need to please the authority figures in their lives, and all they have to do to please their teachers is parrot feminist propaganda on cue. This leaves them completely unprepared for the outside world, where reciting this bunk results in demands that they produce facts and logic, things they have never been asked for before. The poor feminists are startled that their dutiful recitations do not result in a pat on the head, but instead in challenges they do not know how to meet.
So as a public service, I am providing this handy guide for feminists on common debate mistakes. This way, the next time you encounter one of those nasty old misogynists, your attempts at argument will not simply confirm his existing low opinion of women!
Mistake #1: “You’re only saying that because you never get laid!”
There are two problems with this argument. One is that in many cases, it isn’t true. Most of us misogynists started out believing all the bullshit about female equality we heard in school and on TV. It took a great deal of experience with women, in the workplace as well as in dating, to make us realize that in fact, women are very different from men, and in most respects inferior. Most feminists are straight women, so you’ll just have to take my word for this: having sex with women does not in any way enhance respect for women. Quite the contrary.
The second problem is, even if the man you are addressing is celibate, this proves nothing. It has no bearing whatsoever on sex discrimination laws, child custody agreements, polemics about the “male gaze”, women in combat, or anything else you might be debating. A very smart man in ancient Greece called this the “ad hominem” argument. You have probably seen this phrase in internet fora, but it is usually used incorrectly, by people who apparently have no idea what it means but know that it is a bad thing. An “ad hominem” argument is an attack on the person making the argument in lieu of a reasoned rebuttal of the argument itself.
Mistake #2: “You must have a small dick!”
This is another ad hominem argument. Once again, men with small dicks are still capable of stating facts which are correct. Unless you have some scientific studies that show that men with small dicks are always wrong, it’s best not to use this one. Besides which, MRA’s have all heard it so many times that it makes them conclude, probably correctly, that you don’t have any actual information that might back up your contentions. “You must have a small dick!” is basically feminist code for “I have no clue what I’m talking about!”
Mistake #3: (used against female antifeminists) “If it weren’t for feminism, you wouldn’t have the right to keep a blog!”
I have seen this charge levelled against women whose antifeminist opinions are far more moderate than mine. Feminists seem to believe that women used to be barred from the First Amendment until some heroic feminists got us in on it. The fact is, women and men have always had the same degree of freedom of speech. In the days when the Inquisition could burn people at the stake for heresy, men did not get away with any more heresy than women did. In Europe today, men and women, at least white ones, are equally subject to spurious hate speech laws. That women pre-Women’s Lib did not have freedom of speech would have come as a great surprise to Sojourner Truth, Carry Nation, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abby Kelley Foster, Madame de Stael, Renee Vivien, Radclyffe Hall, Rebecca Protten, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Baker Eddy, Mary Hunt, Elizabeth D. Golek, etc. etc.
If you want to use this argument, if you want it to be taken seriously you must offer the names of these mysterious feminists who gave women the right to blog. Dates and how they went about doing so, as well as some sort of evidence that women used to be kept silent, would also be useful.
Mistake #4: “Okay, so it’s true that women aren’t as good at science and stuff, but that’s because girls are raised differently from boys! If we were raised the same we’d be just as good at it!”
First, we don’t know that. The only reason to think that it is the case is that feminists want to believe it. There is no evidence. Your wishes are not a valid argument.
Second, there is considerable evidence that sex differences are innate. Feminists who try to teach their boys not to be violent are invariably dismayed when their toddling sons use the dolls they’re given as weapons. A boy who was raised as a girl after a botched circumcision knew even before he was eventually told the truth that he wasn’t actually a girl, and the attempt to turn him into one resulted in severe psychological problems; he ended by committing suicide at 38. For more on this, go to my blog and see the sidebar sections on “What Schools Are Doing to Boys” and “Biology Is Destiny”.
Mistake #5: “Women were too busy taking care of children and doing housework to invent things or discover things!”
And just what do you imagine men were doing while your ancestresses were cooking dinner or sewing clothes? The vast majority of them weren’t lounging happily in a library devising the principles of geometry or gazing through a telescope. They were mostly breaking their backs on farmland or in mines or smithies, enduring months of malnutrition and brutality aboard trading ships, getting shot at in armies, and other such fulfilling career paths. Yet somehow, men managed to build civilization in between.
For thousands of years, babies were delivered by midwives. Women had complete control of this profession. It never even occurred to the men who ruled the societies to interfere with midwifery. None of these women with the freedom and opportunity for hands-on experience invented the forceps. Instead, a man named Peter Chamberlen invented them around 1600, when the idea of male doctors delivering babies was still a controversial idea, and one chiefly engaged in by the decadent rich. In other words, men had scarcely arrived on the scene before they were inventing things that women had not imagined in thousands of years.
Commenter Paul came up with another excellent example: for the last few centuries, upper- and middle-class women were encouraged to learn to play musical instruments. A lot of these women had the leisure to spend a great deal of time on their music. Yet there have been very few female composers of any note, and black American men – not a privileged group by any means – invented both blues and jazz.
Finally, in the last few decades a great deal of effort has been expended on “encouraging” women and girls to achieve in traditionally male fields, and the lower and higher education systems are feminist-dominated. Where is the Renaissance of female creativity? Where are the female Leonardos, Isaac Newtons, and Mozarts? Women have made achievements – before and after feminism – but they are not equal to those of men.
Mistake #6: “Men have higher IQs, but that’s because the IQ test doesn’t measure female aptitudes!”
First, demanding that the rules be changed because you are losing impresses no one.
Second, the historical fact is that the IQ test is rigged in favor of women.
“The one exception to the general rule that different groups or populations usually differ in average IQ is that both sexes have approximately the same average IQ on most tests. This is not, however, a true empirical finding but a consequence of the manner in which the tests were first constructed…the two sexes were defined to have equal intelligence rather than discovered to have equal intelligence.” (Evans and Waites, 1981, 168).
(Evans, B.. & Waites, B. (1981). IQ and mental testing: An unnatural science and its social history. London, UK: Macmillan.)
More discussion of the slanting of the IQ test to minimize differences between men and women can be read here, here, here, and here. And despite the slanting in women’s favor, men still score consistently higher on them.
Mistake #7: “I guess Thomas Jefferson’s slave mistress wasn’t oppressed then, huh!”
Hijacking the misfortunes of other groups – slavery, the Holocaust, indentured servitude, dhimmitude, the potato famine, etc. – is tacky and does not prove that women are equal to men.
Mistake #8: “I cannot believe how ignorant you are!”
I think that feminists don’t know what the word “ignorant” means. It means that the person doesn’t know something. For example, I am ignorant of the Mandarin word for “insect”, because I have never studied Mandarin.
The only way this charge would make sense would be if you thought that the person you were talking to had never heard the glad tidings that women are equal to men. Unless you can come up with convincing evidence that someone on this planet hasn’t heard this nonsense, calling an MRA “ignorant” makes no sense whatever. We have all heard the feminist gospel. We aren’t ignorant of it. We simply don’t believe it. Indeed, given that feminists apparently believe that it was a heroic feminist campaign that won women the right to keep blogs and clearly don’t know that IQ tests are slanted against men, you are clearly the ignorant ones.
Of course, as a male blogger pointed out and I discussed, what women actually mean when they say this is that it’s stupid to believe unfashionable things because unconventional opinions make it harder to be socially accepted. For women, who are by nature dependent creatures, this is of paramount importance; the abstract value of truth has little appeal for most women.
Mistake #9: “I think this site must be a joke! You’re a troll!”
The world is full of people who disagree with you. Facing this fact is part of growing up.
Mistake #10: “You’re just too immature to handle a relationship with an independent woman!”
First, see #1. “Ad hominem”, remember that?
Roger Devlin handled this one quite ably:
A highly successful women’s magazine editor has written a book of advice for young wives stating: “Giving, devoting, sacrificing … these are the actions of a good wife, no? No. These are the actions of a drudge, a sucker, a sap.” Instead, women are urged to emulate a wife who threw her husband’s clothes into the garden to teach him not to leave socks on the floor: “He understood I meant it.” Or another who wanted her husband to help with the laundry, and hollered at him: “Are you a f***ing retard that you don’t see me running up and down stairs? Listen to me and stop your bulls**t.” Or another who discovered this interpersonal skill: “Just stand there and start screaming. If you stand there and scream long enough, someone is going to realize that you’re standing in the middle of the room screaming [and ask] ‘Why are you screaming?’” (pp. 245-47)
What could be wrong with men these days that they refuse to commit?
Mistake #11: “I am so very upset by what you’ve said! I nearly fainted! I almost threw up! I am trembling in horror!”
Evolution has designed women to use their emotions to manipulate their mates into providing for them and tending to them. We know you can’t really help it, but in a debate, particularly one about the alleged equality of women, it isn’t appropriate.
We know that a lot of what you’re doing here is putting on a display for other feminists. “See how terribly upset I am by this heresy! I am one of you! I am, like, totally sincere!”
But when debating with us, all that such “arguments” do is convince us that we’re right, that women should, for the most part, be kept out of masculine realms such as industry and science, because they are too weak to endure hearing facts they don’t like.
When Nancy Hopkins responded to Larry Summers mentioning the possibility that men might be somewhat naturally better suited to science – he even added, “I hope it isn’t true” – by fleeing from the room in a nauseated swoon, all she actually accomplished was to demonstrate to the world that women are too delicate and fragile for serious business like science. Do male scientists flee from the room when they hear hypotheses they hope aren’t true? Even black men respond more constructively to discussion of the black-white IQ gap.
If this is how women react to disagreement, it is a matter of public safety to keep them legally unequal:
Somebody in the Massachusetts Department of Motor Vehicles needs to look into suspending Dr Hopkins driver’s license. She obviously doesn’t need to be driving.
Now, I’m not saying that women can’t drive, nor am I implying that Ms Hopkins’ remarks are evidence in that direction. Republican women mostly seem to do ok at it, anyway.
However, given her self-reported reactions to Summers remarks, what would happen if she were driving down the street and accidentally punched up Rush Limbaugh on the radio, for example? Rush makes one of his “feminazi” jokes, and she throws up and blacks out.
When she then plows into a busload of innocent children, the blood will be on Rush’s hands, obviously. Still, that doesn’t help The Children.
Source: Should Nancy Hopkins be driving?
Also? Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
Mistake #12: “What are you smoking and where can I get some?”
This was funny the first 5,000 times we heard it, but it’s getting old. More importantly, it’s irrelevant. I don’t use illegal substances, but even if my bloodstream were a cocktail of half the things Americans can be arrested for using, I might still be right.
Mistake #13: “Just because I’m wrong about the trivial details doesn’t mean that there were no Battles To Be Fought for women’s rights.”
Vague, sweeping assertions are not a viable argument. Those “trivial details” you can’t be bothered with are. If you don’t have any concrete facts, your rhetoric is just that.
So what kind of arguments will MRAs listen to?
We like facts. Go looking for dates, names, legislation, documentation, and statistics. Find a scientific study, if you can, that indicates that women might in some field have the potential to be equal to men. Find statistics showing that society has become better in some way since women’s privilege, er I mean feminism, took root. Of course, you’re at a disadvantage here, since all of the facts show that women are innately inferior, that women of superior achievement will always be in the minority, and that women’s liberation leads to all sorts of social pathologies – rampant divorce, child abuse, inflation, eating disorders, and a general lowering of standards so that women can keep up. But if you hope to change our minds, you’ll have to try to find some facts that support your case instead of ours. Good luck!
What has feminism ever done for men?
The F-word
Written by Tuval Dinner
Tuesday, September 29 2009 18:35
"Last week I was hanging out downtown with my baby when a group of young women approached me and asked if they could interview me for a class assignment. First they asked me what my definition of feminism* is and then they followed up with a whole series of questions relating to feminism. The whole thing caught me off guard; I usually don't hear the word feminism in public nevermind being probed on the subject by a group of strangers. But their final question was the most surprising and interesting of all. They asked me, "what has feminism done for you?"
My immediate reaction was to say that feminism is the reason the government allows me to take paid time off of work to be with my newborn son (in Canada men can take parental leave). I didn't get past that comment before the students were off and searching for the next stranger to interview. But the question really stuck with me and I've been thinking a lot about what feminism has done for me and for men in general.
Usually, when people talk about feminism in relation to men it is in a very negative way. There are organizations (particularly in the USA) of men and women dedicated to the opposition of feminism and its perceived negative impact on society. In my mind feminism has only had positive impacts on my life. To me gender equity is a win-win scenario not one in which men lose and women win.
I would love to hear from men what they think feminism has done for them..."
Please write and tell him.
Written by Tuval Dinner
Tuesday, September 29 2009 18:35
"Last week I was hanging out downtown with my baby when a group of young women approached me and asked if they could interview me for a class assignment. First they asked me what my definition of feminism* is and then they followed up with a whole series of questions relating to feminism. The whole thing caught me off guard; I usually don't hear the word feminism in public nevermind being probed on the subject by a group of strangers. But their final question was the most surprising and interesting of all. They asked me, "what has feminism done for you?"
My immediate reaction was to say that feminism is the reason the government allows me to take paid time off of work to be with my newborn son (in Canada men can take parental leave). I didn't get past that comment before the students were off and searching for the next stranger to interview. But the question really stuck with me and I've been thinking a lot about what feminism has done for me and for men in general.
Usually, when people talk about feminism in relation to men it is in a very negative way. There are organizations (particularly in the USA) of men and women dedicated to the opposition of feminism and its perceived negative impact on society. In my mind feminism has only had positive impacts on my life. To me gender equity is a win-win scenario not one in which men lose and women win.
I would love to hear from men what they think feminism has done for them..."
Please write and tell him.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
A Deafening Silence
Dear Anna
Have you reached a conclusion about the issues I raised in my email of 9th October?
Is it acceptable for there to be a ratio of 3.3 female teachers to each male teacher? The attached link makes it clear that the Electoral Reform Society and the NAS / UWT consider an inequality of 5:1 unacceptable and worthy of protest.
http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/downloads/wpe24.pdf
Where does the tipping point lie? At a ratio of 4.1:1?
Regards
Peter Blades
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: pbla927
Date: Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 6:27 PM
Subject: Fwd: FW: Under-representation of men in primary school teaching
To: Anna Banton, Glenn Sacks
Dear Anna
Have you had any luck finding the answers to the queries in my previous email?
regards
Peter Blades
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: pbla927
Date: Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 7:19 PM
Subject: Re: FW: Under-representation of men in primary school teaching
To: Anna Banton
Cc: Glenn Sacks
Dear Ms. Banton
Thank you for your reply to my recent request. I have looked at the spreadsheet provided and have a few more follow up questions.
I see that the gender ratio of teachers employed is 3.32 Female to 1 Male for 1997-98 and 3.31 Female to 1 Male for 2007-08. Given these figures would you say that the efforts to bridge the gender gap in teaching recruitment have been successful?
As I understand it, these figures show the gender ratios for teachers across all pupil age groups. Are there no figures available at all for the gender ratios for teachers teaching 4-10 year olds or 4-7 year olds where;
a) the teacher's influence over the child's lifelong psychology, and consequently
b) the need for positive gender role models
...are the greatest? Surely a 3:1 gender disparity between female and male teachers in all pupil age groups can only place young men at a consistent disadvantage in the learning environment (given Harriet Harman's conviction that gender balanced groups make for better judgements). This might provide answers as to why young men are being consistently out-performed academically by young women in later school years.
If no such figures are available would it be a good idea to conduct more research? All that would be required would be a simple email poll amongst teachers with an email address, asking the recipient for their gender and the age group they teach (this would not generate any data protection issues as the respondents would not be providing information that could be used to identify them personally). Even a 10% response rate would provide a representative sample. Having spent £92,000 in the calendar years 2005-2009 on targeted recruitment, the results of this poll might help concentrate efforts more effectively towards the pupil age groups where the gender disparity is the greatest, and provide more specific answers as to why the money spent has not influenced the gender ratio over the 10 year timescale shown in the spreadsheet.
Many thanks for your help so far
Peter Blades
On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 4:51 PM, Anna Banton wrote:
Dear Mr Blades,
Thank you for your e-mail of 8 August 2009 to Harriet Harman regarding the under-representation of men primary school teachers. Your letter has been passed to me for reply. I am very sorry for the delay in responding to you.
In April 2009 we published the new Equality Bill. The Bill will expand the way positive action can be used so that employers can pick someone for a job from an underrepresented group when they have the choice between two or more candidates who are equally suitable, provided they do not have a general policy of doing so in every case. Positive action allows employers to make their workforces more diverse if they want to.
An example of where positive action can be used is to redress the imbalance of men primary school teachers. This example has been used by Vera Baird QC MP in media interviews.
Please note the Bill will not allow positive discrimination, which will remain unlawful.
Turning to your request for statistics, the data available which we can provide is based on an overall number of entrants by gender to full and part-time regular teaching service in local authority maintained sector schools for each year 1997-1998 to 2007-2008, on a March to March basis and not June to May (see table in sheet 1 of the attached spreadsheet).
The table does not show the number of contracts commenced each year as requested, but just the number of individuals who were in service at the end of the year who were not at the start. These are not the number of recruits either as some of them will have been in service before. These are entrants to regular service (i.e. excluding occasional teachers with short or no contract) and cover those with qualified teacher status (QTS) only. Where a teacher was previously teaching but did not have QTS, but then attained it, they are counted as an entrant. Where a teacher was teaching outside of the English local authority maintained sector and moved to within it, they are also counted.
The table in sheet 2 of the attached spreadsheet, provided by the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA), represents funds spent on advertising for ‘men into primary’ which is only available from 2005 to the present day.
The TDA has done a lot to attract men to train to be primary teachers - with more male centred recruitment campaigns, stressing the financial rewards and career development prospects, and taster courses.
I hope this is of assistance.
Kind regards
Anna Banton
From: Peter Blades [mailto:pbla927@googlemail.com]
Sent: 08 August 2009 01:01
To: HARMAN, Harriet
Cc: glenn@glennsacks.com
Subject: Under-representation of men in primary school teaching
Ms. Harman
In a recent interview quoted at:
http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/news/display.var.2523671.0.harman_blames_men_for_the_credit_crunch.php
...it was reported that you said:
"I didn't actually say you can't trust men, I basically said you get better decision making in a team if it's a balanced team with women and men working alongside each other," she said.
I appreciate that you are not in a position to influence what was reported on this website, and that the comment was made in the context of a gender disparity in recruitment to posts in the City of London.
Did the website report your comments accurately?
Can you direct me towards a public record of any statement you have made on the under-representation of men as teachers in primary schools?
I would like you to provide me with a report showing a count of;
a) the number of women and
b) the number of men
...who began a contract to teach children aged between 4 and 10 years in fully state-funded schools between the dates 01/06/1997 and 01/06/2008. I would like the report to show a sub-total of the number of men and the number of women recruited in each year (contract start dates 1st June to 31st May) within this date range.
Next to each yearly sub-total I would like you to show the government spend (in pounds) allocated in that year (calendar year or 1st June to 31st May - whichever best represents your view of the efforts made) on advertising aimed at attracting the gender that is less well represented (in terms of members recruited in that year) into the profession.
Bearing in mind the standard checks made on prospective primary school teachers, and the nature of the data they are required to provide, you will be aware that the information I am asking for is held centrally and can be provided without disproportionate cost. The advertising figures can be rounded to the nearest £10,000. If no advertising effort has been made to target the under-represented gender in a specific recruitment year please give a brief description of why (next to each sub-total), and the name and contact details of the officer responsible for making this decision.
I have made this request on 08/08/2009 and - given your position - I feel I need not remind you of your obligations under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
Peter Blades
Have you reached a conclusion about the issues I raised in my email of 9th October?
Is it acceptable for there to be a ratio of 3.3 female teachers to each male teacher? The attached link makes it clear that the Electoral Reform Society and the NAS / UWT consider an inequality of 5:1 unacceptable and worthy of protest.
http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/downloads/wpe24.pdf
Where does the tipping point lie? At a ratio of 4.1:1?
Regards
Peter Blades
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: pbla927
Date: Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 6:27 PM
Subject: Fwd: FW: Under-representation of men in primary school teaching
To: Anna Banton
Dear Anna
Have you had any luck finding the answers to the queries in my previous email?
regards
Peter Blades
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: pbla927
Date: Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 7:19 PM
Subject: Re: FW: Under-representation of men in primary school teaching
To: Anna Banton
Cc: Glenn Sacks
Dear Ms. Banton
Thank you for your reply to my recent request. I have looked at the spreadsheet provided and have a few more follow up questions.
I see that the gender ratio of teachers employed is 3.32 Female to 1 Male for 1997-98 and 3.31 Female to 1 Male for 2007-08. Given these figures would you say that the efforts to bridge the gender gap in teaching recruitment have been successful?
As I understand it, these figures show the gender ratios for teachers across all pupil age groups. Are there no figures available at all for the gender ratios for teachers teaching 4-10 year olds or 4-7 year olds where;
a) the teacher's influence over the child's lifelong psychology, and consequently
b) the need for positive gender role models
...are the greatest? Surely a 3:1 gender disparity between female and male teachers in all pupil age groups can only place young men at a consistent disadvantage in the learning environment (given Harriet Harman's conviction that gender balanced groups make for better judgements). This might provide answers as to why young men are being consistently out-performed academically by young women in later school years.
If no such figures are available would it be a good idea to conduct more research? All that would be required would be a simple email poll amongst teachers with an email address, asking the recipient for their gender and the age group they teach (this would not generate any data protection issues as the respondents would not be providing information that could be used to identify them personally). Even a 10% response rate would provide a representative sample. Having spent £92,000 in the calendar years 2005-2009 on targeted recruitment, the results of this poll might help concentrate efforts more effectively towards the pupil age groups where the gender disparity is the greatest, and provide more specific answers as to why the money spent has not influenced the gender ratio over the 10 year timescale shown in the spreadsheet.
Many thanks for your help so far
Peter Blades
On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 4:51 PM, Anna Banton
Dear Mr Blades,
Thank you for your e-mail of 8 August 2009 to Harriet Harman regarding the under-representation of men primary school teachers. Your letter has been passed to me for reply. I am very sorry for the delay in responding to you.
In April 2009 we published the new Equality Bill. The Bill will expand the way positive action can be used so that employers can pick someone for a job from an underrepresented group when they have the choice between two or more candidates who are equally suitable, provided they do not have a general policy of doing so in every case. Positive action allows employers to make their workforces more diverse if they want to.
An example of where positive action can be used is to redress the imbalance of men primary school teachers. This example has been used by Vera Baird QC MP in media interviews.
Please note the Bill will not allow positive discrimination, which will remain unlawful.
Turning to your request for statistics, the data available which we can provide is based on an overall number of entrants by gender to full and part-time regular teaching service in local authority maintained sector schools for each year 1997-1998 to 2007-2008, on a March to March basis and not June to May (see table in sheet 1 of the attached spreadsheet).
The table does not show the number of contracts commenced each year as requested, but just the number of individuals who were in service at the end of the year who were not at the start. These are not the number of recruits either as some of them will have been in service before. These are entrants to regular service (i.e. excluding occasional teachers with short or no contract) and cover those with qualified teacher status (QTS) only. Where a teacher was previously teaching but did not have QTS, but then attained it, they are counted as an entrant. Where a teacher was teaching outside of the English local authority maintained sector and moved to within it, they are also counted.
The table in sheet 2 of the attached spreadsheet, provided by the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA), represents funds spent on advertising for ‘men into primary’ which is only available from 2005 to the present day.
The TDA has done a lot to attract men to train to be primary teachers - with more male centred recruitment campaigns, stressing the financial rewards and career development prospects, and taster courses.
I hope this is of assistance.
Kind regards
Anna Banton
From: Peter Blades [mailto:pbla927@googlemail.com]
Sent: 08 August 2009 01:01
To: HARMAN, Harriet
Cc: glenn@glennsacks.com
Subject: Under-representation of men in primary school teaching
Ms. Harman
In a recent interview quoted at:
http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/news/display.var.2523671.0.harman_blames_men_for_the_credit_crunch.php
...it was reported that you said:
"I didn't actually say you can't trust men, I basically said you get better decision making in a team if it's a balanced team with women and men working alongside each other," she said.
I appreciate that you are not in a position to influence what was reported on this website, and that the comment was made in the context of a gender disparity in recruitment to posts in the City of London.
Did the website report your comments accurately?
Can you direct me towards a public record of any statement you have made on the under-representation of men as teachers in primary schools?
I would like you to provide me with a report showing a count of;
a) the number of women and
b) the number of men
...who began a contract to teach children aged between 4 and 10 years in fully state-funded schools between the dates 01/06/1997 and 01/06/2008. I would like the report to show a sub-total of the number of men and the number of women recruited in each year (contract start dates 1st June to 31st May) within this date range.
Next to each yearly sub-total I would like you to show the government spend (in pounds) allocated in that year (calendar year or 1st June to 31st May - whichever best represents your view of the efforts made) on advertising aimed at attracting the gender that is less well represented (in terms of members recruited in that year) into the profession.
Bearing in mind the standard checks made on prospective primary school teachers, and the nature of the data they are required to provide, you will be aware that the information I am asking for is held centrally and can be provided without disproportionate cost. The advertising figures can be rounded to the nearest £10,000. If no advertising effort has been made to target the under-represented gender in a specific recruitment year please give a brief description of why (next to each sub-total), and the name and contact details of the officer responsible for making this decision.
I have made this request on 08/08/2009 and - given your position - I feel I need not remind you of your obligations under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
Peter Blades
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
The Bogus Figures on Trafficking
I came across this excellent article examining the UK government's own bogus statistics on sex trafficking.
The Home Office report is based on such flawed methods as to be worse than useless, most of the figures are fabricated. While the authors use an apologetic tone and many caveats to excuse the poor data and high margins of error, Ministers, MPs and prohibitionists have seized upon figures as if they’re based on reality.
It makes me wonder if Harriet can read and write. It is beyond parody. It is like “Carry on Criminology”. If it wasn’t so tragic that women’s lives and savings are raided as a result of it, the poor methods would be funny.
The Home Office report is based on such flawed methods as to be worse than useless, most of the figures are fabricated. While the authors use an apologetic tone and many caveats to excuse the poor data and high margins of error, Ministers, MPs and prohibitionists have seized upon figures as if they’re based on reality.
It makes me wonder if Harriet can read and write. It is beyond parody. It is like “Carry on Criminology”. If it wasn’t so tragic that women’s lives and savings are raided as a result of it, the poor methods would be funny.
Female Violence on the Increase. Feminist Movement says Nothing
Drunk and baying like dogs, five women brutally attack a stranger in the street.
The women - all from the same family - targeted Matthew Campbell, 38, at random, kicking and stamping on him as he lay prone on the pavement.
Their sickening eight-minute assault was captured on CCTV and resulted in all the women being jailed for six months.
Mr Campbell, a commercial diver, told yesterday how he restrained himself from hitting back because he has never struck a woman before.
Reference
Why don't feminists have anything to say about this sort of incident? Especially on the influence of evil Patriarchal-Capitalist ideology, which prevented the victim from defending himself because he doesn't believe in hitting women? How does this square with feminist claims about male violence against women?
The women - all from the same family - targeted Matthew Campbell, 38, at random, kicking and stamping on him as he lay prone on the pavement.
Their sickening eight-minute assault was captured on CCTV and resulted in all the women being jailed for six months.
Mr Campbell, a commercial diver, told yesterday how he restrained himself from hitting back because he has never struck a woman before.
Reference
Why don't feminists have anything to say about this sort of incident? Especially on the influence of evil Patriarchal-Capitalist ideology, which prevented the victim from defending himself because he doesn't believe in hitting women? How does this square with feminist claims about male violence against women?
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Your next moral panic will be along shortly. Thank you for your patience.
Now that the sex-trafficking farce has finally been exposed as the charade that it so obviously was, I wonder what new moral panic we are going to be treated to next. My favourite has still got to be the one about the suburban paedophile rings run by gangs of devil-worshippers. That really is hard to beat for sheer absurdity.
Still, I'm sure the feminists will think of something...
Still, I'm sure the feminists will think of something...
Prostitution and trafficking – the anatomy of a moral panic
There is something familiar about the tide of misinformation which has swept through the subject of sex trafficking in the UK: it flows through exactly the same channels as the now notorious torrent about Saddam Hussein's weapons.
In the story of UK sex trafficking, the conclusions of academics who study the sex trade have been subjected to the same treatment as the restrained reports of intelligence analysts who studied Iraqi weapons – stripped of caution, stretched to their most alarming possible meaning and tossed into the public domain. There, they have been picked up by the media who have stretched them even further in stories which have then been treated as reliable sources by politicians, who in turn provided quotes for more misleading stories.
In both cases, the cycle has been driven by political opportunists and interest groups in pursuit of an agenda. In the case of sex trafficking, the role of the neo-conservatives and Iraqi exiles has been played by an unlikely union of evangelical Christians with feminist campaigners, who pursued the trafficking tale to secure their greater goal, not of regime change, but of legal change to abolish all prostitution. The sex trafficking story is a model of misinformation. It began to take shape in the mid 1990s, when the collapse of economies in the old Warsaw Pact countries saw the working flats of London flooded with young women from eastern Europe. Soon, there were rumours and media reports that attached a new word to these women. They had been "trafficked".
The Guardian
In the story of UK sex trafficking, the conclusions of academics who study the sex trade have been subjected to the same treatment as the restrained reports of intelligence analysts who studied Iraqi weapons – stripped of caution, stretched to their most alarming possible meaning and tossed into the public domain. There, they have been picked up by the media who have stretched them even further in stories which have then been treated as reliable sources by politicians, who in turn provided quotes for more misleading stories.
In both cases, the cycle has been driven by political opportunists and interest groups in pursuit of an agenda. In the case of sex trafficking, the role of the neo-conservatives and Iraqi exiles has been played by an unlikely union of evangelical Christians with feminist campaigners, who pursued the trafficking tale to secure their greater goal, not of regime change, but of legal change to abolish all prostitution. The sex trafficking story is a model of misinformation. It began to take shape in the mid 1990s, when the collapse of economies in the old Warsaw Pact countries saw the working flats of London flooded with young women from eastern Europe. Soon, there were rumours and media reports that attached a new word to these women. They had been "trafficked".
The Guardian
Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution
The UK's biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country.
The failure has been disclosed by a Guardian investigation which also suggests that the scale of and nature of sex trafficking into the UK has been exaggerated by politicians and media.
Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all.
The Guardian
There you have it, straight from the horse's mouth. I have been saying the same thing for years.
The failure has been disclosed by a Guardian investigation which also suggests that the scale of and nature of sex trafficking into the UK has been exaggerated by politicians and media.
Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all.
The Guardian
There you have it, straight from the horse's mouth. I have been saying the same thing for years.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Why Ideologies hate the family
Nick Cohen, in his book What’s Left? argued that the family is always a threat to any ideology. If you come home and say “I joined the Communist Party today”, it will be your mum or your dad or your granny who will say “Don’t be daft. Your dinner’s on the table”. The family represents an alternative power bloc to the ideology, an alternative demand on one’s loyalty, an alternative source of values, an alternative, and much more psychologically compelling, source of personal identity.
It is for this reason that religious cults often demand that members break off all contact with their families. One’s family often represents a source of support, a grounding in reality, and the ideology, the Cult or Party, rightly sees this as a threat. Any ideology which demands total unquestioning obedience will soon force you to abandon your family. Firstly, on the grounds that a man cannot serve two masters. Secondly, as a test of your loyalty.
Michael Portillo recently said in an interview that in his experience, governments always exceed their powers. It is a basic fact of political science that bureaucracies will always try to extend their remit, increase their power and their budgets.
It has been said that the State has no power over honest men. The only thing that the State can do is to punish criminals. As long as you remain inside your own house, the State cannot touch you. There are always some elements within any State which do not like this fact. Private life constitutes a no-go area, off limits to State power.
When cultish ideologies manage to get themselves into power, the family is always one of their first targets. If private life represents a threat to their infinitely-ambitious quest for power, by attacking the family, they can attack and undermine private life. They generally do this by attacking the soft underbelly of the family. Children and women.
In the twentieth Century, the Nazis and the Communists both encouraged children to report their parents to the authorities for ideological thought crimes such as criticising the regime. Teachers were recruited for this purpose, to encourage the children to write diaries describing their home lives. If a child wrote down “My daddy says that Mr Hitler is wrong”, or something similar, it would be acted upon. Russia and China operated similar tactics.
Mao Tse Tung encouraged teenage ‘Red Guards’ to terrorise the population during the Cultural Revolution. I met one middle-aged former Red Guard, now resident in the USA, who described how as teenagers, a group of them would stand on street corners, surveying the passers-by. They had the power to pull anyone aside that they wanted. “If we saw a woman with a pony-tail”, he told me, “we could just take her to one side and cut it off”. He also described to me how they used to beat prisoners to death with rubber hoses.
Hard-line Maoists in China thought that their policies had failed because they had not tried hard enough. They decided to use the small neighbouring country of Cambodia as a laboratory in order to have another try. The resulting Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia had similar policies, using children to pick out individuals who looked in some way different, who would then be summarily executed or tortured to death. They also used children as prison guards, and encouraged them to incriminate their parents.
The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia used to force 12 year olds to execute their own parents as a test of loyalty to the Party.
In the West since 1965, the target of Marxist agitation in the family has not been children, but women. Feminists have exploited issues such as domestic violence, rape and child abuse in order to prise open the family. By massively exaggerating the scale of these problems, and wrongly blaming them all on men, they have exploited women’s fears in order to win converts to their cult.
The feminist movement, and the paedophile panic, are just the latest in a long series of instruments used by socialist and totalitarian political interests to attack the family. The family itself is what these political interest groups find threatening.
It is for this reason that religious cults often demand that members break off all contact with their families. One’s family often represents a source of support, a grounding in reality, and the ideology, the Cult or Party, rightly sees this as a threat. Any ideology which demands total unquestioning obedience will soon force you to abandon your family. Firstly, on the grounds that a man cannot serve two masters. Secondly, as a test of your loyalty.
Michael Portillo recently said in an interview that in his experience, governments always exceed their powers. It is a basic fact of political science that bureaucracies will always try to extend their remit, increase their power and their budgets.
It has been said that the State has no power over honest men. The only thing that the State can do is to punish criminals. As long as you remain inside your own house, the State cannot touch you. There are always some elements within any State which do not like this fact. Private life constitutes a no-go area, off limits to State power.
When cultish ideologies manage to get themselves into power, the family is always one of their first targets. If private life represents a threat to their infinitely-ambitious quest for power, by attacking the family, they can attack and undermine private life. They generally do this by attacking the soft underbelly of the family. Children and women.
In the twentieth Century, the Nazis and the Communists both encouraged children to report their parents to the authorities for ideological thought crimes such as criticising the regime. Teachers were recruited for this purpose, to encourage the children to write diaries describing their home lives. If a child wrote down “My daddy says that Mr Hitler is wrong”, or something similar, it would be acted upon. Russia and China operated similar tactics.
Mao Tse Tung encouraged teenage ‘Red Guards’ to terrorise the population during the Cultural Revolution. I met one middle-aged former Red Guard, now resident in the USA, who described how as teenagers, a group of them would stand on street corners, surveying the passers-by. They had the power to pull anyone aside that they wanted. “If we saw a woman with a pony-tail”, he told me, “we could just take her to one side and cut it off”. He also described to me how they used to beat prisoners to death with rubber hoses.
Hard-line Maoists in China thought that their policies had failed because they had not tried hard enough. They decided to use the small neighbouring country of Cambodia as a laboratory in order to have another try. The resulting Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia had similar policies, using children to pick out individuals who looked in some way different, who would then be summarily executed or tortured to death. They also used children as prison guards, and encouraged them to incriminate their parents.
The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia used to force 12 year olds to execute their own parents as a test of loyalty to the Party.
In the West since 1965, the target of Marxist agitation in the family has not been children, but women. Feminists have exploited issues such as domestic violence, rape and child abuse in order to prise open the family. By massively exaggerating the scale of these problems, and wrongly blaming them all on men, they have exploited women’s fears in order to win converts to their cult.
The feminist movement, and the paedophile panic, are just the latest in a long series of instruments used by socialist and totalitarian political interests to attack the family. The family itself is what these political interest groups find threatening.
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