Saturday, 30 April 2011
Thursday, 28 April 2011
Friday, 22 April 2011
Seneca Falls and Spiritualism
From here:
The fist women’s rights conference was held in Seneca Falls, New York. It was also the birthplace of the movement of what we call “spiritualism,” which involved séances and spirit raps and talking to the dead.
Per's MANifesto September 1998
Per's MANifesto: A newsletter of news and opinion on
man-bashing, anti-male stereotypes and other great moral principles.
September, 1998.
WELCOME, READERS, and our apologies for our recent hiatus. We're back
in the swing with an issue we're sure you'll love if just for the
title alone. It's called "The Failed Morality of Liberalism." Does it
have something to do with Bill Clinton? How did you guess! Also,
you'll read about a really swinging teacher, and we ask the burning
question: does feminism cause cancer? Enjoy.
MANifesto is available on the web at
http://idt.net/~per2/manifest.htm
INDEX:
I. THE ONLY TRUE SIN
II. THE FAILED MORALITY OF THE LIBERALS
III. CRACKDOWN ON CRACK MOMS, PART II
IV. A LETTER TO MANIFESTO
V. FEMINISM CAUSES CANCER?
VI. MEN'S HEALTH
VII. WHEN BILL CLINTON FARTS IN AN ELEVATOR
==========
THE ONLY TRUE SIN
President Bill Clinton has admitted what was obvious to those
willing to look objectively at the facts: that he had a sexual
relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and lied about
it. After denying the affair, after attempting to smear and intimidate
those who dared disagree with him, Mr. Clinton finally admitted the
truth only when he was backed into a corner.
The feminist response to the Clinton scandals again displays
that feminism is not a movement of principles or morality. It is a
movement of cynically calculated expediency in which the only true sin
is not being of benefit to feminism. "Per's Rule of Feminist Support"
is verified once again: to feminists, it doesn't matter how you treat
or mistreat women, just so long as you treat feminists well.
By his own admission, Clinton had engaged in the type of
behavior that usually draws the condemnation of feminists and results
in termination or worse for less powerful people. In addition, there
are numerous other accusations that have not yet been proven. In the
case of both Clarence Thomas and Senator Bob Packwood, such
he-said/she-said accusations alone were enough for the feminists to
demand that these men should be removed.
With Bob Packwood, feminists ran newspaper adds demanding to
know: If your boss stuck his tongue in your mouth, would he still have
a job?
Now we know that Mr. Clinton has stuck his cigar in a White
House intern, that he is accused of groping Kathleen Willey in a
manner that might have made Packwood blush. But Clinton still has his
job. And feminists want him to.
Eleanor Smeal, Patricia Ireland, Betty Friedan, and other
feminist leaders held a press conference to say that Mr. Clinton
should remain in office, despite a longer list of misconduct and
accusations than Thomas and Packwood combined. (1) These feminists
made it clear that their reaction to Clinton's misdeeds was entirely
political -- they like his politics, so they don't want him removed.
In other words, an act is an offense if feminists don't like
you, and it's not an offense if they do like you. Your actual guilt or
innocence are irrelevant. Truth is irrelevant. You are to be tried and
convicted based on whether you have a record of helping feminists.
And no, that is not hyperbole. Just ask Barbara Battalino,
who used to be a psychiatrist at the Veterans Administration Hospital
in Boise, Idaho. The Clinton administration's Justice Department just
had her fired and arrested for one act of oral sex in the workplace.
Battalino lost her job, was fined $3,500, and was sentenced to six
months of house arrest. She had performed oral sex once on a patient
under her care and was caught lying about it. (2)
As chief executive, Mr. Clinton is in charge of a government
that regularly punishes people for that same sort of conduct that he
insists is just between him and his family when he does it. Air Force
lieutenant Kelly Flinn was discharged when she committed adultery and
was caught lying about it. Men in the military have gotten worse
punishment for that offense, including military prison. The Army
disciplined or discharged several male drill sergeants who faced
unproven accusations of having sex with female recruits -- punishments
that feminists solidly supported. (They were sorry only when some men
were acquitted.)
The White House rescinded a job offer for Joseph Holley, who
had sold his home and moved to Washington to be a speech writer for
Hillary Rodham Clinton. He was denied the job when the White House
learned he had been a defendant in a sexual discrimination and
harassment lawsuit seven years ago -- even though he was cleared.
Hershel Gober had to withdrawn his nomination to be the Clinton
administration's secretary for veterans affairs because of
four-year-old, unproven accusations of "sexual misconduct."
And so on.
One has to wonder about the impact of all this on the military
and Clinton's power to punish soldiers or send them into danger. It
has not escaped the notice of soldiers "that if Clinton were a service
member, he certainly would be facing a court-martial on multiple
charges and likely eviction from the military for violating
fundamental precepts of fidelity and integrity." (3)
Mr. Clinton is overseeing a government that tacitly is finding
people guilty of not being Mr. Clinton.
Feminists are advocating a program of punishing people found
guilty of not being useful to feminists.
---
(1) "Feminists Urge Against Impeachment," By Lawrence L.
Knutson, Associated Press Writer, Thursday, September 24, 1998; 6:01
p.m. EDT.
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19980924/V000808-092498-idx.html
(2) "Doc Paid Stiff Price for Lying Like Bill," Deborah Orin,
New York Post, http://www.nypostonline.com/news/5112.htm)
(3) "Military Leaders Worry Privately About Impact; Some
Troops Offended by Double Standard," By Bradley Graham, Washington
Post Staff Writer, Tuesday, September 15, 1998; Page A10
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-09/15/082l-091598-idx.html
==========
THE FAILED MORALITY OF THE LIBERALS
The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal has thrown the double standards
of feminism and liberalism into high relief.
Sometimes liberals are quite open about their double
standards, while other times they deny even those double standards
that are glaringly obvious. They are, for example, quite open about
their agenda to discriminate against people based on their skin color,
ethnic group, or sex, just so long as the discrimination benefits
people in the liberal camp. However, they deny they are engaging in
racial or sexual stereotypes even as they flail away at "dead white
European males," "the patriarchy," "male oppressors," and so on.
Feminists have gone to absurd lengths to deny that they have
double standards in the cases of Clinton, Clarence Thomas, and Bob
Packwood. A coalition of feminist leaders -- including many groups who
demanded harsh punishments for other men accused of sexual misconduct
-- recently rallied around Bill Clinton. They issued a statement that
said: "As feminist leaders, we will not stand idly by while a Congress
made up of nearly 90 percent men attempts to remove the first
president elected by women voters." (1)
The hypocrisy of that statement rolls richly on the tongue. We
are to understand that Congress is somehow bad. Why? Because it's
mostly male. Male equals bad. And Clinton, who has probably mistreated
and harassed more women than any president since John F. Kennedy, is
to be defended. Why? Because he was elected by women. Woman equals
good.
And, oh, by the way: Feminists are opposed to gender
stereotypes and sexism, you know.
In a way, the Clinton fiasco provides a valuable, widely
published example of the moral dishonesty of the major feminist
organizations. It helps the public understand just what type of amoral
policies are being advanced in the name of "fairness." Previously,
this awareness was limited mostly to those who took the trouble to
examine the holes in the phony statistics, the fabricated studies, the
skewed research, and outright propaganda that feminists had succeed so
well in placing in the mainstream media. Now, the malleable and
convenience-prone ethics of feminism are manifest for all to see.
The modern hero of liberalism and feminism is Bill Clinton.
Once upon a time, Clinton said: "No question that an admission of
making false statements to government officials and interfering with
the FBI is an impeachable offense." Clinton was applying this
standard to Richard Nixon in 1974. In liberal fashion, he considers
himself exempt from the standards he applies to others.
Clinton also said: "I think it is plain that the president
should resign and spare the country the agony of impeachment and
removal proceedings." (2)
Now, of course, Clinton has been caught making false
statements to government officials. His administration some how
illegal obtained 700 FBI files, most of them on political enemies. In
the Nixon administration, Charles Colson went to prison for receiving
just one FBI file illegally.
But when Clinton acts as though the rules should not apply to
him, he is right in step with today's liberal movement: Liberals
believe it is their place to dictate moral principles, not to follow
them.
The ethics of liberalism today are pretty much the same: Rules
are for other people to obey. Morality is something that you use to
manipulate moral people. An offense is an offense only if someone else
commits it. Discrimination, hatred, sexism, and racism are bad only
when directed at groups in the liberal fold. It's acceptable, even
desirable, to aim those same attacks at people the liberals don't like
or can't use.
If these words anger you, then show us liberal politicians who
are opposing man-bashing and anti-male policies. Show us feminists who
oppose anti-male propaganda. Show us liberals who are willing to say
that discrimination based on sex or skin color is wrong when the sex
is male and the skin color is white.
If you cannot show us such liberals, then our point is well
taken. From there, liberals will merely try to justify the bigotry and
expediency in their camp.
When morality and fairness become a topic for liberal leaders,
it consists of them telling all the rest of us what we must do and
what sacrifices we must make to make the world a better place.
Of course, this world usually ends up being a better place
only for liberals. And once they are in control of the lives of the
rest of us, they feel no compunction to practice the moral principles
they demand that we follow. They tell us it is wrong to discriminate,
to stereotype, to hate people because of their sex or the color of
their skin. And when they gain power, they actively discriminate
against us, stereotype us, and hate us because of our sex or the color
of our skin.
What is particularly scary about liberals is that there are no
liberal Commandments we can cite, no liberal book of moral teachings
we can quote, to ask them to conduct themselves in a moral and ethical
manner. If there is someone on the conservative Christian right who is
being hateful or judgmental, we can point out how these actions are
un-Christian. But how can you tell a liberal that affirmative-action
discrimination and class warfare are un-liberal when they are at the
heart of liberalism?
If a political conservative preaches racial bigotry, we can
point out that the political system they are defending insists that
all men are created equal. We can appeal to their moral conscience.
But what liberal work can we cite to ask liberals to behave morally?
"The Feminine Mystique"? "The SCUM Manifesto"? Ms. Magazine?
When feminists engage in anti-male hatred and discrimination,
many people mistakenly thought they could appeal to feminism's moral
conscience by pointing out that feminism (supposedly) was opposed to
such gender bigotry. After several decades of trying to do so, those
people have only wasted their breath, and feminism has gone on
promoting anti-male hatred, anti-family and anti-father sentiments,
and discrimination.
This is because feminist literature and Women's Studies
courses are not about fairness or equality -- they are about sexual
partisanship -- female chauvinism and bigotry.
Accusing feminists of gender bias does not faze them. They've
never really been against it. Oh, it's wrong if *you* engage in gender
bias against them, but they feel entitled to wield that sword
themselves.
Feminist programs on "domestic violence" are not aimed at
ending violence in the home. They are aimed only at ending violence
against women. Women's violence -- against men, against children, and
against other women -- is not a concern of the "domestic violence"
activists. Violence is only wrong when done to them, but not when done
by them.
Feminist programs on language have managed to replace
"chairman" with "chairperson" and "policeman" with "police officer,"
while maintaining "con man," "bag man," "hit man," "gun man." Feminist
programs on the Bible have tried to remove references to God as male
or as a father -- while keeping the devil male. Feminists strive to
remove what they see as bias against women, while also reinforcing
bias against men.
We can't ask liberals to behave ethically because their ethics
are fluid and situational at best. They define some group as the
"oppressor" and some group as the "oppressed." Then any attack a
supposedly oppressed person makes on a human being who is pigeonholed
as an "oppressor" is deemed a noble act of liberation, retribution,
and freedom. Maybe you just didn't realize you were an "oppressor"
when you were denied a job for being male.
That's why the feminist movement, which came to power claiming
to oppose gender discrimination and stereotypes, immediately began
practicing gender discrimination and stereotypes. Why? Because they
were discriminating against the male "oppressor" in favor of the
female "victim." It didn't matter if the man they were discriminating
against came from a poor background and the women benefitting from all
this were upper-class. Goodness and badness were assigned by your
group. The "good" people could then use the dirtiest of tactics,
including but not limited to character assassination, false
accusations, phony science, gender discrimination, censorship,
intolerance toward differing views, and even violence, to attack the
"bad" people and benefit the "good."
In liberalism there are no "shall nots." There are no actions
that are wrong no matter who does them. There is only "thou shall not
do this to me, but I can do it to you."
And they do.
Bill and Hillary Clinton came to office promising the most
moral administration in the history of the republic. They have left a
trail of lies, bribery, abuses of power, defiance of the law, invasion
of privacy, corruption, misrepresentation, smear tactics, dirty
tricks.
And through it all, the Clintons have been perfect exemplars
of liberal morality. They have committed every offense they supposedly
objected to -- they objected to them only when they were done by
someone else.
Looking back on the Watergate scandal of Republican President
Richard Nixon, we realize that Nixon would never have been removed
without the actions of many Republicans of conscience who decided
Nixon had gone too far. In the Clinton scandal, a similar sense of
conscience has been glaringly absent from the Democratic ranks.
Senator Joseph Lieberman made a brief and heartfelt objection to the
immorality of Clinton. But Democratic loyalists have since closed
ranks around the president. Perjury and obstruction of justice? They
are sins only when someone else commits them.
---
(1) "Clinton Team Regains Optimism As Battle Moves to
Political Realm" John F. Harris, Washington Post Staff Writer, Friday,
September 25, 1998; Page A18
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-09/25/075l-092598-idx.html
(2) "Release of Clinton Tape Delayed: Partisan Bickering
Forces House Panel to Continue Debate Today," By Juliet Eilperin and
Peter Baker, Washington Post Staff Writers, Friday, September 18,
1998; Page A01
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-09/18/102l-091898-idx.html
==========
CRACKDOWN ON CRACK MOMS, PART II
The feminist movement is known for continually sounding the
alarm that the rights of women are supposedly being eroded.
Of course, it's a pretty odd catalog of rights. Like the right
to sever your husband's penis, or to kill him while he's sleeping. The
right to be free of discrimination while practicing it against others.
The right to take out your hostilities on men in a workplace that must
be free of hostilities against you. The right to have any man fired on
the unprovable claim that you were made uncomfortable by his jokes,
even if you tell the same kind of jokes yourself.
Now another "right" seems to be eroding: the right to take
drugs while pregnant, to subject an unborn child to a lifetime of
crippling maladies or premature death, and then dump the
responsibility on society.
In Aurora, Illinois, Cynthia Smith was sent to jail after
giving birth to five babies born with cocaine in their systems.
Our reaction is not "Oh, it's her body, her choice, her rights
are being violated."
Nope. Our reaction is, "Why did it take so long?"
According to a Chicago Tribune article, "Beginning in 1992,
Smith gave birth to a cocaine baby each year for five years. The last
baby was stillborn in 1997."
Technically, Smith wasn't jailed for harming the children. She
was jailed for violating her probation by testing positive for drugs
and for missing sessions with her probation officer and a drug
rehabilitation program.
If a male drug user had punched a pregnant woman in the
stomach and caused damage or death to the fetus, we doubt he would
have been let loose to do it four more times.
---
("Woman Jailed For Using Drugs While On Probation,"
http://chicagotribune.com/splash/article/0,1051,SAV-9808060276,00.html)
==========
A LETTER TO MANIFESTO
Here's a letter we just received relating to Tracie Ribitch,
the 19-year-old Macomb County, Michigan, woman who stuffed gauze into
the mouth of her newborn child and left it to die. She was sentenced
to lecturing teenagers about safe sex. (We first mentioned this slap
on the wrist in the March 1997 issue of MANifesto.)
Then we got a letter purporting to be from the brother of Ms.
Ribitch. It says:
To: <per2@idt.net>
Subject: Fuck Off
From: "Frank J. Ribitch III" <ribitch@cps.cmich.edu>
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1998 10:57:28 -0400
Dear asshole
My name is Frank J. Ribitch III, the brother of Tracie
Ribitch. Until you known all of the facts on my sisters case, shut the
fuck up. The only things you know on the case are the lies the the
local media publishes. By deleting words from quotes, an new quote
meaning the exact opposite of the original is created, which the media
did. You want the truth, go to the court transcripts, not the press.
Because of assholes like yourselves, my family was fucked over. Fuck
off!!
Our response: We can understand your desire to protect your
sister, but we also know what the facts are. An innocent and
defenseless child was killed. Ms. Ribitch was "sentenced" to giving
lectures to teenagers. We can't help but wonder how this is going to
be received by that teenage audience. It presents to impressionable
teenagers that you can kill a child and receive an absurdly light
sentence. What if a member of that audience decides that this form of
punishment is worth it to get out of parenthood?
If you really are Ms. Ribitch's brother, then the child that
was killed was not some inconvenient "choice." It was your niece or
nephew. We think people should feel some obligation to protect those
lives, as well.
==========
FEMINISM CAUSES CANCER?
Does feminism cause cancer? No, we're not talking about the
moral rot of shifting principles and situational ethics so common to
feminism. We're talking about skin cancer.
Cancer experts in England say that children are going to be
more vulnerable to skin cancer because teachers have been told not to
help students apply sun screen. The reason: fear of sexual harassment
accusations.
The Local Government Association and teachers unions are
telling teachers they should refuse to apply sun screen to students
even if the parents request it.
According to an article in the Electronic Telegraph: "Cancer
experts urged the LGA to reconsider, pointing to research showing that
children who suffer severe sunburn are twice as likely to develop skin
cancer later. Kate Law, of the Cancer Research Campaign, said: 'A lot
of youngsters are going to do a haphazard, dabbing job. It is a great
shame they can't be helped.' "
Indeed it is a shame. But the shame is not on the teachers.
Much as we regret this situation, we can't blame them.
Feminists have fostered an atmosphere of paranoia in this area. We
can't blame people for being too careful after teachers and day-care
operators have had their lives ruined over imaginary offenses:
"satanic" cults that didn't exist, "ritual abuse" that never occurred,
and false memories brought on by the darling of the feminist movement,
Recovered Memory Therapy. If you can have your life ruined by the
phantoms running through the twisted imagination of feminists, how can
you blame people for being careful?
Now that feminists have made people afraid to protect students
from skin cancer, they can go back to defending a president who
applies cigars to a White House intern.
Meanwhile, more bad news from the U.K. An article in The
Guardian states:
"Men are turning away from careers as primary school teachers
because they fear being branded perverts for showing an interest in
working with young children, according to evidence presented yesterday
to the British Educational Research Association conference in
Belfast."
"... Mary Thornton, a researcher at Hertfordshire University
specialising in male teacher recruitment, said physical contact with
children was one of the key concerns brought up by men on teacher
training programmes."
" 'For females, working with young children is viewed as an
extension of the mothering role. When males opt for primary teaching
or work with young children, it is perceived as unnatural... Fear of
such perceptions is present amongst these students and may be a factor
in deterring men from work with young children,' Dr Thornton said."
The article also notes that David Hart, general secretary of
the National Association of Head Teachers, said that if the research
is correct, it is a horrifying reflection of the fact that teachers
are becoming obsessed by the risk of prosecution for child abuse,
though he expressed skepticism as to whether it was so.
When we hear of such fears and stereotypes, we wonder who
benefits from them.
Figures show that female teachers in nursery and primary
schools outnumber men by about five to one. There is no equality
there. When a situation is biased in favor of women, you no longer
hear feminists calling for equality.
Now is that because women make such better teachers?
Ask the students of Hermina Brunson.
In New York, this substitute teacher has been arrested and
charged with bashing students with chairs. Her reason: she wanted to
stop the class from making noise.
Brunson, 64, allegedly injured two 11-year-old students by
swinging metal-and-wood chairs at them.
One of the injured students, Olivia Boyd, said Brunson hit her
on the left side of the face. "I ducked twice and she hit me on the
cheek with the chair the third time," she is quoted in the May 6 New
York Post.
The ensuing investigation revealed that Ms. Brunson had
previously been banned from city schools for a year for using corporal
punishment, but she was somehow rehired. Schools officials are at a
loss to explain that.
Remember, don't be sexist when you refer to Ms. Brunson. She's
a chair woman, not a chair man.
And in Fukuoka, Japan, nine women have been charged with
robbing more than 50 businessmen after the men drank too much. The
women are accused of taking more than $150,000 over four years from
their inebriated male victims.
You go, girl.
Straight to jail, that is.
When they get out, these women should have a great future
ahead of them. They have all the essential talents of an affirmative
action director.
---
(1) "Abuse alert over school sun cream," Daniel Waddell,
Electronic Telegraph,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=000502331060165&rtmo=QpOewS0R&atmo=99999999&pg=/et/98/8/14/nabu14.html
(2) "Male teachers fear slurs: Primary school careers
'tainted,' "By John Carvel, Education Editor, The Guardian, Saturday
August 29, 1998,
http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/8/29/18956.html
(3) "Police arrest nine Chinese and Korean women for crime
spree," the Associated Press, May 30, 1998.)
==========
MEN'S HEALTH
We were encouraged to see that September 21-27 was the 10th
Annual Prostate Cancer Awareness Week. Kudos to The National Men's
Resource Center for publishing much valuable info on its website at
http://www.menstuff.org/cgi/daily.cgi.
Here's what Gordon Clay, Executive Director of The National
Men's Resource Center has to say:
"The first year of the program (1989), there were fewer than
100 screening centers in the United States. Today, this number has
increased to over 1000 locations providing free or low-cost prostate
cancer screening. ... This public awareness and education program was
conceived and instituted by the Prostate Cancer Education Council
(PCEC) which represents urology, oncology, patient advocacy,
minorities, clinical and behavioral research. Because of the alarming
percentage of men presenting advanced, incurable prostate cancer, the
PCED was formed in 1988 to promote awareness, screening and early
detection of prostate cancer. General Norman Schwartzkopf has served
as national PCAW chairman since 1994 and in 1996 actor Danny Glover
joined as co-chairman in order to help recruit African American men,
who have the highest risk of prostate cancer in the world. Over
300,000 men will be diagnosed this year and 41,000 will die because
they didn't get an examination soon enough."
The National Men's Resource Center
PO Box 800, San Anselmo, CA 94979
www.menstuff.org menstuff@menstuff.org
==========
WHEN BILL CLINTON FARTS IN AN ELEVATOR
1.) Blames the White House travel office. Has them fired.
2.) Hillary stands by her man ... just not so close.
3.) N.O.W. is brought in to declare that everything smells
just fine.
4.) When he says he didn't inhale, this time we believe him.
5.) White House mysteriously loses the receipt to Bill's
Bean-A-Rama Mega Meal at Taco Bell.
6.) Bill defines "farting" to not include flatulence.
7.) Turning green and fainting is declared to be a sign you're
a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy.
8.) But most important of all ... DON'T LIGHT THAT CIGAR!
=============================
THE FINE PRINT
Per's MANifesto is a monthly newsletter containing news and opinion
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You can find Per's MANifesto on the Usenet each month in
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(MANifesto is copyright 1998by Per. Please feel free to copy,
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==========
man-bashing, anti-male stereotypes and other great moral principles.
September, 1998.
WELCOME, READERS, and our apologies for our recent hiatus. We're back
in the swing with an issue we're sure you'll love if just for the
title alone. It's called "The Failed Morality of Liberalism." Does it
have something to do with Bill Clinton? How did you guess! Also,
you'll read about a really swinging teacher, and we ask the burning
question: does feminism cause cancer? Enjoy.
MANifesto is available on the web at
http://idt.net/~per2/manifest.htm
INDEX:
I. THE ONLY TRUE SIN
II. THE FAILED MORALITY OF THE LIBERALS
III. CRACKDOWN ON CRACK MOMS, PART II
IV. A LETTER TO MANIFESTO
V. FEMINISM CAUSES CANCER?
VI. MEN'S HEALTH
VII. WHEN BILL CLINTON FARTS IN AN ELEVATOR
==========
THE ONLY TRUE SIN
President Bill Clinton has admitted what was obvious to those
willing to look objectively at the facts: that he had a sexual
relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and lied about
it. After denying the affair, after attempting to smear and intimidate
those who dared disagree with him, Mr. Clinton finally admitted the
truth only when he was backed into a corner.
The feminist response to the Clinton scandals again displays
that feminism is not a movement of principles or morality. It is a
movement of cynically calculated expediency in which the only true sin
is not being of benefit to feminism. "Per's Rule of Feminist Support"
is verified once again: to feminists, it doesn't matter how you treat
or mistreat women, just so long as you treat feminists well.
By his own admission, Clinton had engaged in the type of
behavior that usually draws the condemnation of feminists and results
in termination or worse for less powerful people. In addition, there
are numerous other accusations that have not yet been proven. In the
case of both Clarence Thomas and Senator Bob Packwood, such
he-said/she-said accusations alone were enough for the feminists to
demand that these men should be removed.
With Bob Packwood, feminists ran newspaper adds demanding to
know: If your boss stuck his tongue in your mouth, would he still have
a job?
Now we know that Mr. Clinton has stuck his cigar in a White
House intern, that he is accused of groping Kathleen Willey in a
manner that might have made Packwood blush. But Clinton still has his
job. And feminists want him to.
Eleanor Smeal, Patricia Ireland, Betty Friedan, and other
feminist leaders held a press conference to say that Mr. Clinton
should remain in office, despite a longer list of misconduct and
accusations than Thomas and Packwood combined. (1) These feminists
made it clear that their reaction to Clinton's misdeeds was entirely
political -- they like his politics, so they don't want him removed.
In other words, an act is an offense if feminists don't like
you, and it's not an offense if they do like you. Your actual guilt or
innocence are irrelevant. Truth is irrelevant. You are to be tried and
convicted based on whether you have a record of helping feminists.
And no, that is not hyperbole. Just ask Barbara Battalino,
who used to be a psychiatrist at the Veterans Administration Hospital
in Boise, Idaho. The Clinton administration's Justice Department just
had her fired and arrested for one act of oral sex in the workplace.
Battalino lost her job, was fined $3,500, and was sentenced to six
months of house arrest. She had performed oral sex once on a patient
under her care and was caught lying about it. (2)
As chief executive, Mr. Clinton is in charge of a government
that regularly punishes people for that same sort of conduct that he
insists is just between him and his family when he does it. Air Force
lieutenant Kelly Flinn was discharged when she committed adultery and
was caught lying about it. Men in the military have gotten worse
punishment for that offense, including military prison. The Army
disciplined or discharged several male drill sergeants who faced
unproven accusations of having sex with female recruits -- punishments
that feminists solidly supported. (They were sorry only when some men
were acquitted.)
The White House rescinded a job offer for Joseph Holley, who
had sold his home and moved to Washington to be a speech writer for
Hillary Rodham Clinton. He was denied the job when the White House
learned he had been a defendant in a sexual discrimination and
harassment lawsuit seven years ago -- even though he was cleared.
Hershel Gober had to withdrawn his nomination to be the Clinton
administration's secretary for veterans affairs because of
four-year-old, unproven accusations of "sexual misconduct."
And so on.
One has to wonder about the impact of all this on the military
and Clinton's power to punish soldiers or send them into danger. It
has not escaped the notice of soldiers "that if Clinton were a service
member, he certainly would be facing a court-martial on multiple
charges and likely eviction from the military for violating
fundamental precepts of fidelity and integrity." (3)
Mr. Clinton is overseeing a government that tacitly is finding
people guilty of not being Mr. Clinton.
Feminists are advocating a program of punishing people found
guilty of not being useful to feminists.
---
(1) "Feminists Urge Against Impeachment," By Lawrence L.
Knutson, Associated Press Writer, Thursday, September 24, 1998; 6:01
p.m. EDT.
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19980924/V000808-092498-idx.html
(2) "Doc Paid Stiff Price for Lying Like Bill," Deborah Orin,
New York Post, http://www.nypostonline.com/news/5112.htm)
(3) "Military Leaders Worry Privately About Impact; Some
Troops Offended by Double Standard," By Bradley Graham, Washington
Post Staff Writer, Tuesday, September 15, 1998; Page A10
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-09/15/082l-091598-idx.html
==========
THE FAILED MORALITY OF THE LIBERALS
The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal has thrown the double standards
of feminism and liberalism into high relief.
Sometimes liberals are quite open about their double
standards, while other times they deny even those double standards
that are glaringly obvious. They are, for example, quite open about
their agenda to discriminate against people based on their skin color,
ethnic group, or sex, just so long as the discrimination benefits
people in the liberal camp. However, they deny they are engaging in
racial or sexual stereotypes even as they flail away at "dead white
European males," "the patriarchy," "male oppressors," and so on.
Feminists have gone to absurd lengths to deny that they have
double standards in the cases of Clinton, Clarence Thomas, and Bob
Packwood. A coalition of feminist leaders -- including many groups who
demanded harsh punishments for other men accused of sexual misconduct
-- recently rallied around Bill Clinton. They issued a statement that
said: "As feminist leaders, we will not stand idly by while a Congress
made up of nearly 90 percent men attempts to remove the first
president elected by women voters." (1)
The hypocrisy of that statement rolls richly on the tongue. We
are to understand that Congress is somehow bad. Why? Because it's
mostly male. Male equals bad. And Clinton, who has probably mistreated
and harassed more women than any president since John F. Kennedy, is
to be defended. Why? Because he was elected by women. Woman equals
good.
And, oh, by the way: Feminists are opposed to gender
stereotypes and sexism, you know.
In a way, the Clinton fiasco provides a valuable, widely
published example of the moral dishonesty of the major feminist
organizations. It helps the public understand just what type of amoral
policies are being advanced in the name of "fairness." Previously,
this awareness was limited mostly to those who took the trouble to
examine the holes in the phony statistics, the fabricated studies, the
skewed research, and outright propaganda that feminists had succeed so
well in placing in the mainstream media. Now, the malleable and
convenience-prone ethics of feminism are manifest for all to see.
The modern hero of liberalism and feminism is Bill Clinton.
Once upon a time, Clinton said: "No question that an admission of
making false statements to government officials and interfering with
the FBI is an impeachable offense." Clinton was applying this
standard to Richard Nixon in 1974. In liberal fashion, he considers
himself exempt from the standards he applies to others.
Clinton also said: "I think it is plain that the president
should resign and spare the country the agony of impeachment and
removal proceedings." (2)
Now, of course, Clinton has been caught making false
statements to government officials. His administration some how
illegal obtained 700 FBI files, most of them on political enemies. In
the Nixon administration, Charles Colson went to prison for receiving
just one FBI file illegally.
But when Clinton acts as though the rules should not apply to
him, he is right in step with today's liberal movement: Liberals
believe it is their place to dictate moral principles, not to follow
them.
The ethics of liberalism today are pretty much the same: Rules
are for other people to obey. Morality is something that you use to
manipulate moral people. An offense is an offense only if someone else
commits it. Discrimination, hatred, sexism, and racism are bad only
when directed at groups in the liberal fold. It's acceptable, even
desirable, to aim those same attacks at people the liberals don't like
or can't use.
If these words anger you, then show us liberal politicians who
are opposing man-bashing and anti-male policies. Show us feminists who
oppose anti-male propaganda. Show us liberals who are willing to say
that discrimination based on sex or skin color is wrong when the sex
is male and the skin color is white.
If you cannot show us such liberals, then our point is well
taken. From there, liberals will merely try to justify the bigotry and
expediency in their camp.
When morality and fairness become a topic for liberal leaders,
it consists of them telling all the rest of us what we must do and
what sacrifices we must make to make the world a better place.
Of course, this world usually ends up being a better place
only for liberals. And once they are in control of the lives of the
rest of us, they feel no compunction to practice the moral principles
they demand that we follow. They tell us it is wrong to discriminate,
to stereotype, to hate people because of their sex or the color of
their skin. And when they gain power, they actively discriminate
against us, stereotype us, and hate us because of our sex or the color
of our skin.
What is particularly scary about liberals is that there are no
liberal Commandments we can cite, no liberal book of moral teachings
we can quote, to ask them to conduct themselves in a moral and ethical
manner. If there is someone on the conservative Christian right who is
being hateful or judgmental, we can point out how these actions are
un-Christian. But how can you tell a liberal that affirmative-action
discrimination and class warfare are un-liberal when they are at the
heart of liberalism?
If a political conservative preaches racial bigotry, we can
point out that the political system they are defending insists that
all men are created equal. We can appeal to their moral conscience.
But what liberal work can we cite to ask liberals to behave morally?
"The Feminine Mystique"? "The SCUM Manifesto"? Ms. Magazine?
When feminists engage in anti-male hatred and discrimination,
many people mistakenly thought they could appeal to feminism's moral
conscience by pointing out that feminism (supposedly) was opposed to
such gender bigotry. After several decades of trying to do so, those
people have only wasted their breath, and feminism has gone on
promoting anti-male hatred, anti-family and anti-father sentiments,
and discrimination.
This is because feminist literature and Women's Studies
courses are not about fairness or equality -- they are about sexual
partisanship -- female chauvinism and bigotry.
Accusing feminists of gender bias does not faze them. They've
never really been against it. Oh, it's wrong if *you* engage in gender
bias against them, but they feel entitled to wield that sword
themselves.
Feminist programs on "domestic violence" are not aimed at
ending violence in the home. They are aimed only at ending violence
against women. Women's violence -- against men, against children, and
against other women -- is not a concern of the "domestic violence"
activists. Violence is only wrong when done to them, but not when done
by them.
Feminist programs on language have managed to replace
"chairman" with "chairperson" and "policeman" with "police officer,"
while maintaining "con man," "bag man," "hit man," "gun man." Feminist
programs on the Bible have tried to remove references to God as male
or as a father -- while keeping the devil male. Feminists strive to
remove what they see as bias against women, while also reinforcing
bias against men.
We can't ask liberals to behave ethically because their ethics
are fluid and situational at best. They define some group as the
"oppressor" and some group as the "oppressed." Then any attack a
supposedly oppressed person makes on a human being who is pigeonholed
as an "oppressor" is deemed a noble act of liberation, retribution,
and freedom. Maybe you just didn't realize you were an "oppressor"
when you were denied a job for being male.
That's why the feminist movement, which came to power claiming
to oppose gender discrimination and stereotypes, immediately began
practicing gender discrimination and stereotypes. Why? Because they
were discriminating against the male "oppressor" in favor of the
female "victim." It didn't matter if the man they were discriminating
against came from a poor background and the women benefitting from all
this were upper-class. Goodness and badness were assigned by your
group. The "good" people could then use the dirtiest of tactics,
including but not limited to character assassination, false
accusations, phony science, gender discrimination, censorship,
intolerance toward differing views, and even violence, to attack the
"bad" people and benefit the "good."
In liberalism there are no "shall nots." There are no actions
that are wrong no matter who does them. There is only "thou shall not
do this to me, but I can do it to you."
And they do.
Bill and Hillary Clinton came to office promising the most
moral administration in the history of the republic. They have left a
trail of lies, bribery, abuses of power, defiance of the law, invasion
of privacy, corruption, misrepresentation, smear tactics, dirty
tricks.
And through it all, the Clintons have been perfect exemplars
of liberal morality. They have committed every offense they supposedly
objected to -- they objected to them only when they were done by
someone else.
Looking back on the Watergate scandal of Republican President
Richard Nixon, we realize that Nixon would never have been removed
without the actions of many Republicans of conscience who decided
Nixon had gone too far. In the Clinton scandal, a similar sense of
conscience has been glaringly absent from the Democratic ranks.
Senator Joseph Lieberman made a brief and heartfelt objection to the
immorality of Clinton. But Democratic loyalists have since closed
ranks around the president. Perjury and obstruction of justice? They
are sins only when someone else commits them.
---
(1) "Clinton Team Regains Optimism As Battle Moves to
Political Realm" John F. Harris, Washington Post Staff Writer, Friday,
September 25, 1998; Page A18
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-09/25/075l-092598-idx.html
(2) "Release of Clinton Tape Delayed: Partisan Bickering
Forces House Panel to Continue Debate Today," By Juliet Eilperin and
Peter Baker, Washington Post Staff Writers, Friday, September 18,
1998; Page A01
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-09/18/102l-091898-idx.html
==========
CRACKDOWN ON CRACK MOMS, PART II
The feminist movement is known for continually sounding the
alarm that the rights of women are supposedly being eroded.
Of course, it's a pretty odd catalog of rights. Like the right
to sever your husband's penis, or to kill him while he's sleeping. The
right to be free of discrimination while practicing it against others.
The right to take out your hostilities on men in a workplace that must
be free of hostilities against you. The right to have any man fired on
the unprovable claim that you were made uncomfortable by his jokes,
even if you tell the same kind of jokes yourself.
Now another "right" seems to be eroding: the right to take
drugs while pregnant, to subject an unborn child to a lifetime of
crippling maladies or premature death, and then dump the
responsibility on society.
In Aurora, Illinois, Cynthia Smith was sent to jail after
giving birth to five babies born with cocaine in their systems.
Our reaction is not "Oh, it's her body, her choice, her rights
are being violated."
Nope. Our reaction is, "Why did it take so long?"
According to a Chicago Tribune article, "Beginning in 1992,
Smith gave birth to a cocaine baby each year for five years. The last
baby was stillborn in 1997."
Technically, Smith wasn't jailed for harming the children. She
was jailed for violating her probation by testing positive for drugs
and for missing sessions with her probation officer and a drug
rehabilitation program.
If a male drug user had punched a pregnant woman in the
stomach and caused damage or death to the fetus, we doubt he would
have been let loose to do it four more times.
---
("Woman Jailed For Using Drugs While On Probation,"
http://chicagotribune.com/splash/article/0,1051,SAV-9808060276,00.html)
==========
A LETTER TO MANIFESTO
Here's a letter we just received relating to Tracie Ribitch,
the 19-year-old Macomb County, Michigan, woman who stuffed gauze into
the mouth of her newborn child and left it to die. She was sentenced
to lecturing teenagers about safe sex. (We first mentioned this slap
on the wrist in the March 1997 issue of MANifesto.)
Then we got a letter purporting to be from the brother of Ms.
Ribitch. It says:
To: <per2@idt.net>
Subject: Fuck Off
From: "Frank J. Ribitch III" <ribitch@cps.cmich.edu>
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1998 10:57:28 -0400
Dear asshole
My name is Frank J. Ribitch III, the brother of Tracie
Ribitch. Until you known all of the facts on my sisters case, shut the
fuck up. The only things you know on the case are the lies the the
local media publishes. By deleting words from quotes, an new quote
meaning the exact opposite of the original is created, which the media
did. You want the truth, go to the court transcripts, not the press.
Because of assholes like yourselves, my family was fucked over. Fuck
off!!
Our response: We can understand your desire to protect your
sister, but we also know what the facts are. An innocent and
defenseless child was killed. Ms. Ribitch was "sentenced" to giving
lectures to teenagers. We can't help but wonder how this is going to
be received by that teenage audience. It presents to impressionable
teenagers that you can kill a child and receive an absurdly light
sentence. What if a member of that audience decides that this form of
punishment is worth it to get out of parenthood?
If you really are Ms. Ribitch's brother, then the child that
was killed was not some inconvenient "choice." It was your niece or
nephew. We think people should feel some obligation to protect those
lives, as well.
==========
FEMINISM CAUSES CANCER?
Does feminism cause cancer? No, we're not talking about the
moral rot of shifting principles and situational ethics so common to
feminism. We're talking about skin cancer.
Cancer experts in England say that children are going to be
more vulnerable to skin cancer because teachers have been told not to
help students apply sun screen. The reason: fear of sexual harassment
accusations.
The Local Government Association and teachers unions are
telling teachers they should refuse to apply sun screen to students
even if the parents request it.
According to an article in the Electronic Telegraph: "Cancer
experts urged the LGA to reconsider, pointing to research showing that
children who suffer severe sunburn are twice as likely to develop skin
cancer later. Kate Law, of the Cancer Research Campaign, said: 'A lot
of youngsters are going to do a haphazard, dabbing job. It is a great
shame they can't be helped.' "
Indeed it is a shame. But the shame is not on the teachers.
Much as we regret this situation, we can't blame them.
Feminists have fostered an atmosphere of paranoia in this area. We
can't blame people for being too careful after teachers and day-care
operators have had their lives ruined over imaginary offenses:
"satanic" cults that didn't exist, "ritual abuse" that never occurred,
and false memories brought on by the darling of the feminist movement,
Recovered Memory Therapy. If you can have your life ruined by the
phantoms running through the twisted imagination of feminists, how can
you blame people for being careful?
Now that feminists have made people afraid to protect students
from skin cancer, they can go back to defending a president who
applies cigars to a White House intern.
Meanwhile, more bad news from the U.K. An article in The
Guardian states:
"Men are turning away from careers as primary school teachers
because they fear being branded perverts for showing an interest in
working with young children, according to evidence presented yesterday
to the British Educational Research Association conference in
Belfast."
"... Mary Thornton, a researcher at Hertfordshire University
specialising in male teacher recruitment, said physical contact with
children was one of the key concerns brought up by men on teacher
training programmes."
" 'For females, working with young children is viewed as an
extension of the mothering role. When males opt for primary teaching
or work with young children, it is perceived as unnatural... Fear of
such perceptions is present amongst these students and may be a factor
in deterring men from work with young children,' Dr Thornton said."
The article also notes that David Hart, general secretary of
the National Association of Head Teachers, said that if the research
is correct, it is a horrifying reflection of the fact that teachers
are becoming obsessed by the risk of prosecution for child abuse,
though he expressed skepticism as to whether it was so.
When we hear of such fears and stereotypes, we wonder who
benefits from them.
Figures show that female teachers in nursery and primary
schools outnumber men by about five to one. There is no equality
there. When a situation is biased in favor of women, you no longer
hear feminists calling for equality.
Now is that because women make such better teachers?
Ask the students of Hermina Brunson.
In New York, this substitute teacher has been arrested and
charged with bashing students with chairs. Her reason: she wanted to
stop the class from making noise.
Brunson, 64, allegedly injured two 11-year-old students by
swinging metal-and-wood chairs at them.
One of the injured students, Olivia Boyd, said Brunson hit her
on the left side of the face. "I ducked twice and she hit me on the
cheek with the chair the third time," she is quoted in the May 6 New
York Post.
The ensuing investigation revealed that Ms. Brunson had
previously been banned from city schools for a year for using corporal
punishment, but she was somehow rehired. Schools officials are at a
loss to explain that.
Remember, don't be sexist when you refer to Ms. Brunson. She's
a chair woman, not a chair man.
And in Fukuoka, Japan, nine women have been charged with
robbing more than 50 businessmen after the men drank too much. The
women are accused of taking more than $150,000 over four years from
their inebriated male victims.
You go, girl.
Straight to jail, that is.
When they get out, these women should have a great future
ahead of them. They have all the essential talents of an affirmative
action director.
---
(1) "Abuse alert over school sun cream," Daniel Waddell,
Electronic Telegraph,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=000502331060165&rtmo=QpOewS0R&atmo=99999999&pg=/et/98/8/14/nabu14.html
(2) "Male teachers fear slurs: Primary school careers
'tainted,' "By John Carvel, Education Editor, The Guardian, Saturday
August 29, 1998,
http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/8/29/18956.html
(3) "Police arrest nine Chinese and Korean women for crime
spree," the Associated Press, May 30, 1998.)
==========
MEN'S HEALTH
We were encouraged to see that September 21-27 was the 10th
Annual Prostate Cancer Awareness Week. Kudos to The National Men's
Resource Center for publishing much valuable info on its website at
http://www.menstuff.org/cgi/daily.cgi.
Here's what Gordon Clay, Executive Director of The National
Men's Resource Center has to say:
"The first year of the program (1989), there were fewer than
100 screening centers in the United States. Today, this number has
increased to over 1000 locations providing free or low-cost prostate
cancer screening. ... This public awareness and education program was
conceived and instituted by the Prostate Cancer Education Council
(PCEC) which represents urology, oncology, patient advocacy,
minorities, clinical and behavioral research. Because of the alarming
percentage of men presenting advanced, incurable prostate cancer, the
PCED was formed in 1988 to promote awareness, screening and early
detection of prostate cancer. General Norman Schwartzkopf has served
as national PCAW chairman since 1994 and in 1996 actor Danny Glover
joined as co-chairman in order to help recruit African American men,
who have the highest risk of prostate cancer in the world. Over
300,000 men will be diagnosed this year and 41,000 will die because
they didn't get an examination soon enough."
The National Men's Resource Center
PO Box 800, San Anselmo, CA 94979
www.menstuff.org menstuff@menstuff.org
==========
WHEN BILL CLINTON FARTS IN AN ELEVATOR
1.) Blames the White House travel office. Has them fired.
2.) Hillary stands by her man ... just not so close.
3.) N.O.W. is brought in to declare that everything smells
just fine.
4.) When he says he didn't inhale, this time we believe him.
5.) White House mysteriously loses the receipt to Bill's
Bean-A-Rama Mega Meal at Taco Bell.
6.) Bill defines "farting" to not include flatulence.
7.) Turning green and fainting is declared to be a sign you're
a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy.
8.) But most important of all ... DON'T LIGHT THAT CIGAR!
=============================
THE FINE PRINT
Per's MANifesto is a monthly newsletter containing news and opinion
for people interested in gender equality and gender stereotypes.
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Each month's current issue of Per's MANifesto is on the web at
http://idt.net/~per2/manifest.htm
And the Per's MANifesto Home Page is at
http://idt.net/~per2/index.htm featuring links to back issues.
With a link to The POW Page! -- a collection of favorite satire
featuring Colleen Hyphenated-Lastname and the Propaganda Organization
for Women.
You can find Per's MANifesto on the Usenet each month in
soc.men, alt.feminism, and alt.mens-rights.
(MANifesto is copyright 1998by Per. Please feel free to copy,
forward, repost, fax and otherwise distribute MANifesto. If you
excerpt any section, please excerpt it in its entirety.)
==========
Per's MANifesto September 1997
Per's MANifesto: A newsletter of news and opinion on
man-bashing, anti-male stereotypes and other progressive moral ideals.
September, 1997.
WELCOME, READERS. In the movie theaters right now is a
propaganda film called "G.I. Jane," purporting to show that women are
tough as nails and can handle any adversity. Meanwhile, in the real
world, feminists are doing their best to demonstrate that women are
too delicate to stand up to naughty words, or pictures, or even a
certain "Peyton place." And feminists aren't the only ones trying to
pull a fast one with sexual harassment rules today -- men are getting
in on the act. But men and woman alike are being affected by
feminism's neo-Victorian insistence that they be treated like royalty.
So we'll call this issue "Feminism: Doing A Job On Us All."
(Per's MANifesto is available on the web at
http://idt.net/~per2/manifest.htm Featuring links to back issues,
Mondo Feminism, and The POW Page.)
INDEX:
I. AN ACCUSATION EQUALS A CONVICTION
II. THE POLITICS OF FALSE ACCUSATIONS
III. BUDDY, CAN YOU SPARE A JOB?
IV. PORN TEMPLE PILOTS
V. G.I. JANE NEEDS TO TRAIN
VI. TAKING A CRACK AT CASHING IN
VII. FIRED FOR A "LACK OF SENSITIVITY"
VIII. MICKEY MOUSE LAWSUIT
==========
AN ACCUSATION EQUALS A CONVICTION
Joseph Holley was pleased that he had landed a new job,
writing speeches for first lady Hillary Clinton.
To take the job, he had to break his lease, quit his old job,
pull his kids out of school and move his family to Washington from
Texas.
Then, in the middle of this, the job offer was revoked. The
White House had learned that Holley had been the defendant in a sexual
discrimination and harassment lawsuit seven years ago.
Holley's employer at that time, the San Diego Tribune
newspaper, had settled the lawsuit with no admission of wrongdoing.
The suit had been brought by a writer Holley once supervised. He says
the accusations were "absurd" and "fiction." The paper's internal
review showed Holley did nothing wrong and recommended no disciplinary
action against him.
But the White House said the job was off. They wouldn't even
give Holley a chance to tell his side of the story.
His accuser, San Diego journalist Lynne Carrier, is applauding
the decision. Yes, that's right, she's a journalist.
What she accused Holley of was allowing a "male locker room"
work environment featuring coarse sexual comments.
Even if her accusations were true, it brings up the spectacle
of a feminist journalist explaining to us why the First Amendment no
longer works. Or at least why it doesn't apply to men.
Feminists like Carrier are demanding Victorian protection from
naughty words. Carrier might demand sensitivity for herself, but the
newspaper described her as having an uncontrolled temper. Sensitivity
seems to be a one-way street.
Harold W. Fuson Jr., vice president and legal counsel for The
Copley Press Inc., owner of the San Diego Tribune, said: "Frankly, I
think Joe's the victim of a modern form of blacklisting, and I don't
think it's a lot different than the 1950s version."
It would be interesting to see what would happen if the
standards the White House used against Holley were applied to Bill
Clinton himself. After all, he has had a few accusations of his own.
(See "White House Rescinds Job Offer to Writer Once Accused in
Bias Suit," by John F. Harris, Washington Post, Monday, September 1,
1997; Page A04.)
==========
THE POLITICS OF FALSE ACCUSATIONS
Holley's case wasn't the only one to hit the White House
recently.
The Drudge Report, an internet newsletter of political gossip,
recently claimed that White House aide Sidney Blumenthal "has a
spousal abuse past that has been effectively covered up."
The newsletter quoted an unnamed "influential Republican" as
saying "There are court records of Blumenthal's violence against his
wife."
The story turned out to be utterly unfounded -- something
planted for political purposes.
Matt Drudge, author of the newsletter, retracted the story and
deleted it from his web site on American Online. He also said: "I
apologize if any harm has been done."
If?
Since when do we assume there is no harm in smearing innocent
people?
It appears that Blumenthal was the target of a politically
motivated smear. Some Republicans had been upset over unverified abuse
accusations leveled against Republican political consultant Don Sipple
in Mother Jones magazine. It appears that someone put out a false
story on Blumenthal as retaliation -- an attempt to switch the
spotlight from a Republican to a Democrat.
"Someone was trying to get me to go after [the story] and I
probably fell for it a little too hard," Drudge acknowledged. "I can't
prove it. This is a case of using me to broadcast dirty laundry. I
think I've been had."
This sorry state of affairs shows just how politicized the
entire debate over sexual harassment and abuse has become. Extremist
feminists have created an overheated emotional atmosphere that is ripe
for this sort of abuse. False or trumped-up accusations of harassment
or abuse have become weapons in the political arena, in divorce and
custody cases, and in the chase for fat legal judgments. And it is not
just radical feminists who are making them. Even Republicans can get
in on the act.
We wonder how far this will go, how much damage will be done,
before society says that false accusations are never acceptable.
(See "Blumenthals Get Apology, Plan Lawsuit: Web Site Retracts
Story on Clinton Aide," by Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, Tuesday,
August 12, 1997; Page A11)
==========
BUDDY, CAN YOU SPARE A JOB?
Patricia "Patti" Tehaney of Oxnard, California, recently lost
her job at a termite control company. She says it's because she posed
as Playboy magazine's Playmate of the Month more than twenty years
ago, in May 1976. She says her employer felt that this made her far
too much of a risk for sexual harassment. The company didn't want to
get sued if she ever claimed harassment in connection with her nude
pictures, so she says.
Her former employer says that Tehaney was fired for other
reasons, but that she violated an agreement to never discuss her
Playboy pictures with anyone at work. The company also says she once
brought to work a copy of her nude centerfold (she says she did so
reluctantly, at the request of her supervisor.)
Maybe that sounds like a raw deal for Tehaney. But with all
the lawsuits and claims over sexual harassment, can we really blame
the company for protecting itself?
The reader who alerted us to this story also included a quote
from Warren Farrell, who said that discrimination for women would
become discrimination against woman. It sounds like that might be
happening to Tehaney. If we are not hyper-vigilant in protecting
women, the result can be a devastating lawsuit. That can only make an
employer think twice when hiring.
But Tehaney has taken her case -- and her centerfold -- to the
web. A friend put up a web page for Tehaney, at
http://home.earthlink.net/~tehaney/, in which she pleads for help in
finding work. A lot of people thought the page was a gag, but Wired
magazine checked into it an verified the story, and she's been written
up in the December 19, 1996, Los Angeles Times. (You can see the Wired
article at http://www.wired.com/news/topframe/2205.html.)
Tehaney's page starts off by saying: "If you remember the 70s,
you may remember my centerfold pictorial in the May 1976 issue of
Playboy. Or my controversial cover in Nov. 1975. This may all seem
glamorous, but these 70's memories have suddenly become my 90s
nightmare! If you saw my recent story on NBCs Dateline (1/12) or the
LA Times on 12/16, you know that all this "glamour" has cost me my
job and continues to prevent me from finding a new one."
Tehaney had the page put up so that she could ask for work and
for donations to see her through her job search.
But right up at the top of the page, so it's one of the first
things you see, there is a reproduction of Tehaney's Playboy
centerfold. She's looking for work and money, and she's showing her
body.
It seems to us that any prospective employer concerned about
harassment issues would have second thoughts about a woman who is
using a nude picture as part of her job search.
For one thing, it invites all sorts of jokes about her
"resume" and her "assets." And those jokes are precisely the type of
thing that could get someone sued for harassment.
==========
PORN TEMPLE PILOTS
If you think that the company that fired Tehaney is being
overly cautious, remember that sexual harassment lawsuits over nude
pictures are a very real concern, and very expensive.
For example, Continental Airlines is being sued by a female
pilot, Tammy S. Blakey, who says male pilots belittled her and left
pornography around the cockpit.
The company says her accusations of harassment began only
after she was cited for poor attendance. It's interesting to note when
a harassment accusation is made after an employee's job performance is
criticized.
Blakey says she was belittled once when she found a 10-inch
doll in the pilot's seat with blonde hair in a ponytail, like hers.
"I was belittled. That was uncalled for," she says.
It will be interesting to see how many thousands of dollars
she thinks will soothe the trauma. (And remember, when companies are
hit with large damage awards, they have to find a way to pass the cost
onto the consumer. In the end, the public ends up paying for our
efforts to shield women from life.)
She also said that pilots left "pornography" around the
cockpit (insert bad pun here) and in flight manuals.
"It was embarrassing. I knew those guys were looking at it,"
she said.
Now, we don't support porn. But do people lose their rights to
read what they want as soon as a woman is embarrassed to know they
read it?
Maybe we can try this tactic the next time a Women's Study
class reads Andrea Dworkin or excerpts from "The S.C.U.M. Manifesto."
(http://www.wps.com/texts/SCUM-manifesto.html) Just go to your
diversity department and tell them to stop the feminists from reading
it because it's embarrassing. "I knew those feminists were looking at
it."
Hmm. It would certainly be ironic if some of those pilots were
viewing Patti Tehaney's Playboy centerfold.
==========
G.I. JANE NEEDS TO TRAIN
While the propaganda film "G.I. Jane" purports to show a woman
undergoing the same rigorous military training as men, the Army is
finally planning to narrow the difference in its separate-and-unequal
fitness standards for men and women.
In the wake of accusations of sexual harassment against women
in the Army, a special Army panel conducted a gender investigation. In
reporting the story, the Washington Post sounded amazed at the
"surprising results" indicating that men feel aggrieved by gender
bias.
What do you know! Men resent gender bias against them. Why,
who ever would have thought it!
Mainly, the men are concerned about the far-easier fitness
standards for women. Only half of the men said they thought that women
"pull their load." But nearly all soldiers, including the women, felt
that male soldiers "pull their load."
Many of the men felt that women received favorable treatment,
and 28 percent of men said "women have an advantage over men when it
comes to having a successful military career." And 30 percent thought
female soldiers get treated better.
Feminists will probably try to dismiss this as backlash among
men who don't want women in the service. But nearly 70 percent of the
men said they felt women should be allowed to do any job "for which
they can qualify."
The problem is, the qualifications for women are often
remarkably lower. A 25-year-old man is required to do 40 push-ups and
47 sit-ups in two minutes and run two miles in 16 minutes and 36
seconds. A 25-year-old woman must do 16 push-ups, 45 sit-ups and run
the same distance in 19 minutes and 36 seconds. (The difference in
running ability is notable. Apparently the Army thinks the enemy will
be courteous enough to wait until the women catch up.)
The standards for women are so low that overweight smokers
could pass with ease, while men often struggled to meet their higher
standards. This is one form of discrimination you didn't hear
feminists complaining about. There is no demand for a "level playing
field" when the field tips so far in women's favor.
New rules will require women to do a few more push-ups and
will slightly lower the time for the two-mile run. The number of
sit-ups will stay the same.
As the Washington Post noted, men found extra burdens being
placed on them when women soldiers got pregnant: "Men complained about
a battalion-level fuel handler who became pregnant and was assigned a
desk duty until she gave birth so her unborn baby would not be exposed
to chemical hazards. There were only a few fuel handlers assigned to
the battalion and because she technically remained on the unit
payroll, the battalion could not request a temporary substitute." The
remaining men had to take up the slack.
So women's "equal" rights translate into more responsibilities
for men -- as usual.
(See "Army Moves to Toughen Fitness Standards for Women," by
Dana Priest, Washington Post, Saturday, September 13, 1997; Page A01)
==========
TAKING A CRACK AT CASHING IN
Jamie Whited is in the money after reaching a settlement with
the University of Tennessee.
Whited, a female athletic trainer, netted $300,000 in the
settlement. What terrible trauma merited giving this delicate woman
more than a quarter of a million dollars?
She supposedly was mooned by quarterback Peyton Manning.
Manning says he was joking around with a male track athlete in
a training room and didn't see Whited.
You can't really blame Whited for being so traumatized. What
has society done to prepare women for such an assault on their
delicate sensibilities?
And how could Whited have even known that an athletic trainer
might one day go into a room and see a bare butt?
==========
FIRED FOR A "LACK OF SENSITIVITY"
District Judge Alexander MacNichol of Maine has lost his job
because he was accused of not being sensitive enough to women who
claimed they were abused.
Governor King refused to reappoint MacNichol -- although
reappointment of judges has been almost automatic in Maine.
His supporters say MacNichol is a victim of political
correctness.
"He wasn't a rubber stamp for anybody. He has always been
willing to look at both sides," Henry N. Berry III, a lawyer and
former political adversary, told the Associated Press. "That's what
got him in trouble -- he wasn't politically correct."
Obviously, looking at both sides in domestic violence
accusations is deadly for your career. Extremist feminists have been
trying for years to make sure the public gets only one side -- the
side that paints men as evil. They've been pretty successful. Most
campaigns depict domestic violence as something only men do.
What's remarkable about the case is that MacNichol is not
accused of botching any cases or causing harm. He often granted the
restraining orders that women sought. But he is being fired for a
"lack of sensitivity."
Advocates accused him of "revictimizing" a woman seeking a
protection-from-abuse order. "Revictimizing" is a feminist code-word
meaning "you did not automatically believe our accusations against a
man."
In this case, MacNichol actually granted the protection order
to the woman he was "revictimizing." But he also ordered the woman to
repay $800 she was accused of stealing from the man and he gave the
man instructions concerning small claims court. To bystanders, it
sounds like MacNichol was trying to use legal channels to defuse the
dispute that brought the man and woman to court in the first place.
But, to activists, this was "revictimizing" the woman.
And out he goes.
That'll teach a judge to listen to both sides of a case.
==========
MICKEY MOUSE LAWSUIT
Billie Jean Matay, a grandmother and former Mouseketeer, sued
the Walt Disney Co. for negligence after she was robbed at Disneyland
in August 1995.
In particular, she says her grandchildren were traumatized
after the robbery because they saw employees taking off their Mickey
Mouse and Lion King costumes.
Matay had been in her car the parking lot with three
grandchildren, ages 5, 7 and 11, when a robber put a gun to her neck
and demanded her money. After the robbery, employees took her to a
staging area where cast members were changing costumes.
In court in Santa Ana, California, she often sobbed and cried
uncontrollably on the stand. She panted and sobbed so much on the
stand that the judge removed the jury from the courtroom. She did
manage a mournful account of how she had taken her grandkids to "share
the happy feeling" at Disneyland. But she said Disneyland was
negligent for allowing the robbery to happen. And she said that her
grandkids were traumatized all over again when they watched employees
get out of their Mickey Mouse and Lion King costumes.
Lawyers for Disney Co. said the company is not responsible
because a crime takes place.
Superior Court Judge Richard Luesenbrink agreed with Disney's
request to dismiss the suit. "There's nothing to suggest this incident
could reasonably have been avoided," he ruled.
What a lack of sensitivity, huh?
Imagine the legal precedent this sets. Now someone could even
unmask Santa Claus and not spend one day behind bars.
=============================
THE FINE PRINT
MANifesto is a monthly newsletter containing news and opinion for
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(MANifesto is copyright 1997 by Per. Please feel free to copy,
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==========
-----
A giant eunuch Jesus? "Patriotic" human sacrifices? Cosmic patterns
striking a convention of feminists? Gloria Steinem getting down with
Satan? What's it all about? It's about MONDO FEMINISM!
Learn the truth, if you dare. See the MONDO FEMINISM Page at
http://idt.net/~per2/mondofem.htm
man-bashing, anti-male stereotypes and other progressive moral ideals.
September, 1997.
WELCOME, READERS. In the movie theaters right now is a
propaganda film called "G.I. Jane," purporting to show that women are
tough as nails and can handle any adversity. Meanwhile, in the real
world, feminists are doing their best to demonstrate that women are
too delicate to stand up to naughty words, or pictures, or even a
certain "Peyton place." And feminists aren't the only ones trying to
pull a fast one with sexual harassment rules today -- men are getting
in on the act. But men and woman alike are being affected by
feminism's neo-Victorian insistence that they be treated like royalty.
So we'll call this issue "Feminism: Doing A Job On Us All."
(Per's MANifesto is available on the web at
http://idt.net/~per2/manifest.htm Featuring links to back issues,
Mondo Feminism, and The POW Page.)
INDEX:
I. AN ACCUSATION EQUALS A CONVICTION
II. THE POLITICS OF FALSE ACCUSATIONS
III. BUDDY, CAN YOU SPARE A JOB?
IV. PORN TEMPLE PILOTS
V. G.I. JANE NEEDS TO TRAIN
VI. TAKING A CRACK AT CASHING IN
VII. FIRED FOR A "LACK OF SENSITIVITY"
VIII. MICKEY MOUSE LAWSUIT
==========
AN ACCUSATION EQUALS A CONVICTION
Joseph Holley was pleased that he had landed a new job,
writing speeches for first lady Hillary Clinton.
To take the job, he had to break his lease, quit his old job,
pull his kids out of school and move his family to Washington from
Texas.
Then, in the middle of this, the job offer was revoked. The
White House had learned that Holley had been the defendant in a sexual
discrimination and harassment lawsuit seven years ago.
Holley's employer at that time, the San Diego Tribune
newspaper, had settled the lawsuit with no admission of wrongdoing.
The suit had been brought by a writer Holley once supervised. He says
the accusations were "absurd" and "fiction." The paper's internal
review showed Holley did nothing wrong and recommended no disciplinary
action against him.
But the White House said the job was off. They wouldn't even
give Holley a chance to tell his side of the story.
His accuser, San Diego journalist Lynne Carrier, is applauding
the decision. Yes, that's right, she's a journalist.
What she accused Holley of was allowing a "male locker room"
work environment featuring coarse sexual comments.
Even if her accusations were true, it brings up the spectacle
of a feminist journalist explaining to us why the First Amendment no
longer works. Or at least why it doesn't apply to men.
Feminists like Carrier are demanding Victorian protection from
naughty words. Carrier might demand sensitivity for herself, but the
newspaper described her as having an uncontrolled temper. Sensitivity
seems to be a one-way street.
Harold W. Fuson Jr., vice president and legal counsel for The
Copley Press Inc., owner of the San Diego Tribune, said: "Frankly, I
think Joe's the victim of a modern form of blacklisting, and I don't
think it's a lot different than the 1950s version."
It would be interesting to see what would happen if the
standards the White House used against Holley were applied to Bill
Clinton himself. After all, he has had a few accusations of his own.
(See "White House Rescinds Job Offer to Writer Once Accused in
Bias Suit," by John F. Harris, Washington Post, Monday, September 1,
1997; Page A04.)
==========
THE POLITICS OF FALSE ACCUSATIONS
Holley's case wasn't the only one to hit the White House
recently.
The Drudge Report, an internet newsletter of political gossip,
recently claimed that White House aide Sidney Blumenthal "has a
spousal abuse past that has been effectively covered up."
The newsletter quoted an unnamed "influential Republican" as
saying "There are court records of Blumenthal's violence against his
wife."
The story turned out to be utterly unfounded -- something
planted for political purposes.
Matt Drudge, author of the newsletter, retracted the story and
deleted it from his web site on American Online. He also said: "I
apologize if any harm has been done."
If?
Since when do we assume there is no harm in smearing innocent
people?
It appears that Blumenthal was the target of a politically
motivated smear. Some Republicans had been upset over unverified abuse
accusations leveled against Republican political consultant Don Sipple
in Mother Jones magazine. It appears that someone put out a false
story on Blumenthal as retaliation -- an attempt to switch the
spotlight from a Republican to a Democrat.
"Someone was trying to get me to go after [the story] and I
probably fell for it a little too hard," Drudge acknowledged. "I can't
prove it. This is a case of using me to broadcast dirty laundry. I
think I've been had."
This sorry state of affairs shows just how politicized the
entire debate over sexual harassment and abuse has become. Extremist
feminists have created an overheated emotional atmosphere that is ripe
for this sort of abuse. False or trumped-up accusations of harassment
or abuse have become weapons in the political arena, in divorce and
custody cases, and in the chase for fat legal judgments. And it is not
just radical feminists who are making them. Even Republicans can get
in on the act.
We wonder how far this will go, how much damage will be done,
before society says that false accusations are never acceptable.
(See "Blumenthals Get Apology, Plan Lawsuit: Web Site Retracts
Story on Clinton Aide," by Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, Tuesday,
August 12, 1997; Page A11)
==========
BUDDY, CAN YOU SPARE A JOB?
Patricia "Patti" Tehaney of Oxnard, California, recently lost
her job at a termite control company. She says it's because she posed
as Playboy magazine's Playmate of the Month more than twenty years
ago, in May 1976. She says her employer felt that this made her far
too much of a risk for sexual harassment. The company didn't want to
get sued if she ever claimed harassment in connection with her nude
pictures, so she says.
Her former employer says that Tehaney was fired for other
reasons, but that she violated an agreement to never discuss her
Playboy pictures with anyone at work. The company also says she once
brought to work a copy of her nude centerfold (she says she did so
reluctantly, at the request of her supervisor.)
Maybe that sounds like a raw deal for Tehaney. But with all
the lawsuits and claims over sexual harassment, can we really blame
the company for protecting itself?
The reader who alerted us to this story also included a quote
from Warren Farrell, who said that discrimination for women would
become discrimination against woman. It sounds like that might be
happening to Tehaney. If we are not hyper-vigilant in protecting
women, the result can be a devastating lawsuit. That can only make an
employer think twice when hiring.
But Tehaney has taken her case -- and her centerfold -- to the
web. A friend put up a web page for Tehaney, at
http://home.earthlink.net/~tehaney/, in which she pleads for help in
finding work. A lot of people thought the page was a gag, but Wired
magazine checked into it an verified the story, and she's been written
up in the December 19, 1996, Los Angeles Times. (You can see the Wired
article at http://www.wired.com/news/topframe/2205.html.)
Tehaney's page starts off by saying: "If you remember the 70s,
you may remember my centerfold pictorial in the May 1976 issue of
Playboy. Or my controversial cover in Nov. 1975. This may all seem
glamorous, but these 70's memories have suddenly become my 90s
nightmare! If you saw my recent story on NBCs Dateline (1/12) or the
LA Times on 12/16, you know that all this "glamour" has cost me my
job and continues to prevent me from finding a new one."
Tehaney had the page put up so that she could ask for work and
for donations to see her through her job search.
But right up at the top of the page, so it's one of the first
things you see, there is a reproduction of Tehaney's Playboy
centerfold. She's looking for work and money, and she's showing her
body.
It seems to us that any prospective employer concerned about
harassment issues would have second thoughts about a woman who is
using a nude picture as part of her job search.
For one thing, it invites all sorts of jokes about her
"resume" and her "assets." And those jokes are precisely the type of
thing that could get someone sued for harassment.
==========
PORN TEMPLE PILOTS
If you think that the company that fired Tehaney is being
overly cautious, remember that sexual harassment lawsuits over nude
pictures are a very real concern, and very expensive.
For example, Continental Airlines is being sued by a female
pilot, Tammy S. Blakey, who says male pilots belittled her and left
pornography around the cockpit.
The company says her accusations of harassment began only
after she was cited for poor attendance. It's interesting to note when
a harassment accusation is made after an employee's job performance is
criticized.
Blakey says she was belittled once when she found a 10-inch
doll in the pilot's seat with blonde hair in a ponytail, like hers.
"I was belittled. That was uncalled for," she says.
It will be interesting to see how many thousands of dollars
she thinks will soothe the trauma. (And remember, when companies are
hit with large damage awards, they have to find a way to pass the cost
onto the consumer. In the end, the public ends up paying for our
efforts to shield women from life.)
She also said that pilots left "pornography" around the
cockpit (insert bad pun here) and in flight manuals.
"It was embarrassing. I knew those guys were looking at it,"
she said.
Now, we don't support porn. But do people lose their rights to
read what they want as soon as a woman is embarrassed to know they
read it?
Maybe we can try this tactic the next time a Women's Study
class reads Andrea Dworkin or excerpts from "The S.C.U.M. Manifesto."
(http://www.wps.com/texts/SCUM-manifesto.html) Just go to your
diversity department and tell them to stop the feminists from reading
it because it's embarrassing. "I knew those feminists were looking at
it."
Hmm. It would certainly be ironic if some of those pilots were
viewing Patti Tehaney's Playboy centerfold.
==========
G.I. JANE NEEDS TO TRAIN
While the propaganda film "G.I. Jane" purports to show a woman
undergoing the same rigorous military training as men, the Army is
finally planning to narrow the difference in its separate-and-unequal
fitness standards for men and women.
In the wake of accusations of sexual harassment against women
in the Army, a special Army panel conducted a gender investigation. In
reporting the story, the Washington Post sounded amazed at the
"surprising results" indicating that men feel aggrieved by gender
bias.
What do you know! Men resent gender bias against them. Why,
who ever would have thought it!
Mainly, the men are concerned about the far-easier fitness
standards for women. Only half of the men said they thought that women
"pull their load." But nearly all soldiers, including the women, felt
that male soldiers "pull their load."
Many of the men felt that women received favorable treatment,
and 28 percent of men said "women have an advantage over men when it
comes to having a successful military career." And 30 percent thought
female soldiers get treated better.
Feminists will probably try to dismiss this as backlash among
men who don't want women in the service. But nearly 70 percent of the
men said they felt women should be allowed to do any job "for which
they can qualify."
The problem is, the qualifications for women are often
remarkably lower. A 25-year-old man is required to do 40 push-ups and
47 sit-ups in two minutes and run two miles in 16 minutes and 36
seconds. A 25-year-old woman must do 16 push-ups, 45 sit-ups and run
the same distance in 19 minutes and 36 seconds. (The difference in
running ability is notable. Apparently the Army thinks the enemy will
be courteous enough to wait until the women catch up.)
The standards for women are so low that overweight smokers
could pass with ease, while men often struggled to meet their higher
standards. This is one form of discrimination you didn't hear
feminists complaining about. There is no demand for a "level playing
field" when the field tips so far in women's favor.
New rules will require women to do a few more push-ups and
will slightly lower the time for the two-mile run. The number of
sit-ups will stay the same.
As the Washington Post noted, men found extra burdens being
placed on them when women soldiers got pregnant: "Men complained about
a battalion-level fuel handler who became pregnant and was assigned a
desk duty until she gave birth so her unborn baby would not be exposed
to chemical hazards. There were only a few fuel handlers assigned to
the battalion and because she technically remained on the unit
payroll, the battalion could not request a temporary substitute." The
remaining men had to take up the slack.
So women's "equal" rights translate into more responsibilities
for men -- as usual.
(See "Army Moves to Toughen Fitness Standards for Women," by
Dana Priest, Washington Post, Saturday, September 13, 1997; Page A01)
==========
TAKING A CRACK AT CASHING IN
Jamie Whited is in the money after reaching a settlement with
the University of Tennessee.
Whited, a female athletic trainer, netted $300,000 in the
settlement. What terrible trauma merited giving this delicate woman
more than a quarter of a million dollars?
She supposedly was mooned by quarterback Peyton Manning.
Manning says he was joking around with a male track athlete in
a training room and didn't see Whited.
You can't really blame Whited for being so traumatized. What
has society done to prepare women for such an assault on their
delicate sensibilities?
And how could Whited have even known that an athletic trainer
might one day go into a room and see a bare butt?
==========
FIRED FOR A "LACK OF SENSITIVITY"
District Judge Alexander MacNichol of Maine has lost his job
because he was accused of not being sensitive enough to women who
claimed they were abused.
Governor King refused to reappoint MacNichol -- although
reappointment of judges has been almost automatic in Maine.
His supporters say MacNichol is a victim of political
correctness.
"He wasn't a rubber stamp for anybody. He has always been
willing to look at both sides," Henry N. Berry III, a lawyer and
former political adversary, told the Associated Press. "That's what
got him in trouble -- he wasn't politically correct."
Obviously, looking at both sides in domestic violence
accusations is deadly for your career. Extremist feminists have been
trying for years to make sure the public gets only one side -- the
side that paints men as evil. They've been pretty successful. Most
campaigns depict domestic violence as something only men do.
What's remarkable about the case is that MacNichol is not
accused of botching any cases or causing harm. He often granted the
restraining orders that women sought. But he is being fired for a
"lack of sensitivity."
Advocates accused him of "revictimizing" a woman seeking a
protection-from-abuse order. "Revictimizing" is a feminist code-word
meaning "you did not automatically believe our accusations against a
man."
In this case, MacNichol actually granted the protection order
to the woman he was "revictimizing." But he also ordered the woman to
repay $800 she was accused of stealing from the man and he gave the
man instructions concerning small claims court. To bystanders, it
sounds like MacNichol was trying to use legal channels to defuse the
dispute that brought the man and woman to court in the first place.
But, to activists, this was "revictimizing" the woman.
And out he goes.
That'll teach a judge to listen to both sides of a case.
==========
MICKEY MOUSE LAWSUIT
Billie Jean Matay, a grandmother and former Mouseketeer, sued
the Walt Disney Co. for negligence after she was robbed at Disneyland
in August 1995.
In particular, she says her grandchildren were traumatized
after the robbery because they saw employees taking off their Mickey
Mouse and Lion King costumes.
Matay had been in her car the parking lot with three
grandchildren, ages 5, 7 and 11, when a robber put a gun to her neck
and demanded her money. After the robbery, employees took her to a
staging area where cast members were changing costumes.
In court in Santa Ana, California, she often sobbed and cried
uncontrollably on the stand. She panted and sobbed so much on the
stand that the judge removed the jury from the courtroom. She did
manage a mournful account of how she had taken her grandkids to "share
the happy feeling" at Disneyland. But she said Disneyland was
negligent for allowing the robbery to happen. And she said that her
grandkids were traumatized all over again when they watched employees
get out of their Mickey Mouse and Lion King costumes.
Lawyers for Disney Co. said the company is not responsible
because a crime takes place.
Superior Court Judge Richard Luesenbrink agreed with Disney's
request to dismiss the suit. "There's nothing to suggest this incident
could reasonably have been avoided," he ruled.
What a lack of sensitivity, huh?
Imagine the legal precedent this sets. Now someone could even
unmask Santa Claus and not spend one day behind bars.
=============================
THE FINE PRINT
MANifesto is a monthly newsletter containing news and opinion for
people interested in gender equality and gender stereotypes.
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==========
-----
A giant eunuch Jesus? "Patriotic" human sacrifices? Cosmic patterns
striking a convention of feminists? Gloria Steinem getting down with
Satan? What's it all about? It's about MONDO FEMINISM!
Learn the truth, if you dare. See the MONDO FEMINISM Page at
http://idt.net/~per2/mondofem.htm
Per's MANifesto September 1996
MANifesto: An electronic newsletter of news and opinion on gender issues,
man-bashing and anti-male stereotypes. September 1996.
WELCOME, READERS, to an issue of MANifesto where we take a look at the moral
leadership that we can expect from women as they guide us across the bridge
to the future and into the 21st Century. For example, there is a move on
today to make sure that the position of Secretary General of the United
Nations will go to a woman next. (After all, she could hardly be less
effective than Boutros Boutros-Ghali.) So it will be interesting to see if
the powers that be decide they're going to hire some woman -- any woman --
no matter what. Remember what happened when Bill Clinton decided he
absolutely had to have a female Attorney General. What an exciting thought
for us all! Just think -- maybe someone in charge of U.N. troops can do for
the world what Janet Reno did for Waco, Texas.
Feminists have told us that putting women in charge will make for a
more peaceful, honest and civilized world. We salute these forward-looking
sentiments by taking a gander at the great moral stances taken by women and
feminists everywhere.
MANifesto is now on the Web, at
http://members.gnn.com/peraddress/manifest.htm
With a link to The POW Page! -- a collection of favorite satire featuring
Colleen Hyphenated-Lastname and the Propaganda Organization for Women.
INDEX: NEWS AND VIEWS
I. DEDICATION: CAROL MOSELEY-BRAUN
II. A FEMINIST DEFENDS FREE SPEECH . . . WELL, SORT OF
III. WOMEN CLEAN UP POLITICS . . . (WELL, AT LEAST THEY CLEAN UP)
IV. SO NICELY THEY SETTLE THEIR DISPUTES
V. WOMEN ARE MORE ARTISTIC AND SENSITIVE
VI. A FEMINIST CONDEMNS MALE-BASHING . . . WELL, SORT OF
VII. MOTHERS GIVE YOU THE BUSINESS
VIII. NUTRITION LEADER FEEDS US A LINE
IX. COSMOWATCH
HUMOR:
THE HONEST FEMINIST CONTEST
YOU MIGHT BE A MALE FEMINIST IF . . .
POW SAYS DEAD MEN ARE HEALTHIER
==========
DEDICATION: CAROL MOSELEY-BRAUN
We'd like to dedicate this issue about feminist ethics to Senator
Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois.
1992 was dubbed the "Year of the Woman," and Moseley-Braun was a big
part of it. For one thing, she defeated a man to win her Senate seat. And
not just any male senator, but one who actually dared to question Anita
Hill's claims of sexual harassment. Women were mad. They wanted to oust
that male senator and replace him with someone with a bit more sensitivity
to the oppressed. When Moseley-Braun won, it was called a major feminist
victory, part of the drive to take power out of the hands of corrupt and
greedy men and give it to the disenfranchised and downtrodden.
So how has Senator Moseley-Braun advanced those principles?
Well, she has become a close ally, supporter and apologist for one of
the most brutal dictators on Earth.
General Sani Abacha rules Nigeria with an iron fist. He executes and
tortures dissidents, smashes the free press, oppresses people of color, and
loots the nation's wealth for every dime he can extort from it.
Just the type of person a moral, forward-looking feminist would want
to support.
Moseley-Braun won office largely because women were offended over what
they saw as harsh treatment for Anita Hill. So Moseley-Braun now chums up to
a man who does things a bit tougher than finding hairs on his Coke can.
While many nations are calling for international sanctions against
Abacha, Moseley-Braun has been speaking out in his defense. She's about the
only one to do so, especially in Congress. The State Department was not
pleased to learn that Moseley-Braun had made a secret trip to Nigeria on
business that she has not quite yet clarified.
Those looking for answers to Moseley-Braun's affections for a brutal
tyrant might want to take a look at her former fiancé, Kgosie Matthews. He
was her campaign manager and also shared a condo with her.
He also was a paid agent of the Nigerian government.
But if you're a feminist, you might not want to look too hard at Mr.
Matthews. Some of Moseley-Braun's staff accused him of sexual harassment.
Moseley-Braun ran for office by exploiting the rage and national
publicity over the Anita Hill sexual harassment case. Then sexual
harassment charges started hitting a bit closer to home. Sort of like a
candidate running on a law-and-order platform by day and hanging out with
felons and grifters by night.
The national rage focused on the Anita Hill case seemed to skip right
over the sexual harassment accusations against Matthews. But if feminists
were moved to so much anger by the charges Anita Hill made, why did they
have so little outrage over the accusations against Matthews? Or, for that
matter, the accusations made by Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones?
Well, here we can see that stringent feminist morality at work. The
rule of thumb: if the accusation involves someone we like, it doesn't count.
==========
A FEMINIST DEFENDS FREE SPEECH ... WELL, SORT OF
There were a lot of people who strongly condemned the Republicans
because pro-abortion speakers were not given time to state their views
during the GOP national convention.
One of them was outspoken feminist Bella Abzug. (See, we can be
charitable. We referred to her only as "outspoken.")
Ms. Abzug accused the convention of "muzzling some of their guys who
didn't agree with them about abortion."
Well, let syndicated columnist Nat Hentoff tell you what happened
next: "A reporter for the New York Post asked her what she thought of her
own party's refusal to allow Robert Casey, governor of Pennsylvania from
1987 to 1995, to speak at her convention. After all, Al Gore had promised on
ABC-TV: "We don't have a gag rule the way the other party does."
"So what?" said Abzug, the tribune of free speech, about the gagging
of Casey. "It's not required to have someone speak who has a position in
contrast to the majority of the party." Casey is pro-life, so he had to be
silenced."
Abzug defended free speech -- for her views only. She did not extend
those rights to others.
That's sort of like defending "equality for women."
-----
(Source: "The Democrats' Tiny Tent: The Siberian exile of a former
governor with one of the party's most effective records," By Nat Hentoff,
The Washington Post, Wednesday, September 4 1996; Page A15.)
==========
WOMEN CLEAN UP POLITICS ... (WELL, AT LEAST THEY CLEAN UP)
Benazir Bhutto -- seeking another term as prime minister of Pakistan
-- ran on an anti-corruption campaign. Since winning in 1993, she hasn't
done much toward cleaning up the government. But a luxurious estate she
reportedly bought in England indicates that at least she *is* cleaning up.
Pakistan has long had a reputation for corrupt governmental and
business practices. In a recent survey, business executives ranked Pakistan
as the second most corrupt, behind Nigeria. But on the campaign trail,
Bhutto said, "I will not compromise on political corruption of any member of
the ruling coalition."
But Bhutto has appointed several cabinet members who have been accused
of financial crimes. When Bhutto was out of power, she accused the
Saifullah family of being a "plunderer" of the nation's wealth. But when
she came back to power, she appointed a powerful member of the family to her
cabinet. "Then last month, her government exempted a cement company
co-owned by the Saifullah family from $400 million in excise taxes,
disregarding the objections of the national tax collection agency."
Her critics say it's a pattern of Bhutto treating her allies to some
lucrative business deals. Obviously there's some partisan sniping going on
here, with charges being hurled by people whose hands aren't particularly
clean either. But there certainly have been an unusual number of shady
associates for someone who ran so loudly on an anti-corruption platform.
For example, there's Mohammad Nawaz Khokhar, who used to be a fierce
critic of Bhutto. He has been arrested on charges of fraud, embezzlement
and official corruption. But he was released from jail, and a day later he
switched his allegiance to Bhutto's party and was named science and
technology minister. The charges against him then were dropped.
Then there's Munawwer Hussain Manj, arrested on charges of being a
major trafficker of hashish and heroin. He was named to a parliamentary
committee that oversees anti-drug operations.
When Pakistan recently permitted private ownership of TV and FM radio
stations, it granted a national TV monopoly and favorable FM deals, without
bids and without announcements they were available. They went -- free of
fees -- to someone who was an important aide to Bhutto and a high school
classmate of her husband.
But, according to Britain's Sunday Express paper, she's not sitting
out the deals herself. The paper reported that Bhutto and her husband had
bought a $3.9 million mansion in the English countryside near London -- a
335-acre estate with a private landing strip and indoor swimming pool.
Loads of antiques, carved furniture and other household items were
reportedly shipped from Bhutto's private seaside residence in Karachi to
London.
Bhutto denies that she bought the estate.
So what's going on with Pakistan's economy in the meantime? Bhutto's
latest budget calls for a $1 billion tax increase, and the International
Monetary Fund is pressing her to impose even greater fiscal austerity.
Bhutto probably isn't any more corrupt than any of her predecessors. But --
contrary to feminist dogma -- she isn't any more honest, either. She is
truly equal to men.
(Source: "Beleaguered Benazir Bhutto: Corruption Charges Grow Sharper
Against Premier Reelected Vowing to Rid Pakistan's Politics of Graft" By
Kenneth J. Cooper and Kamran Khan, Washington Post Foreign Service, Monday,
August 19 1996; Page A10, The Washington Post.)
==========
WOMEN ARE MORE ARTISTIC AND SENSITIVE
We've been told that women are more sensitive, more moral, more
artistic.
That's when we remember a sensitive, moral art project that took place
at the University of Maryland in 1993. Students in the "Contemporary Issues
in Feminist Art" class took the names of men at random from a campus phone
book. They then put up posters listing these men by name under the heading
that said: "Notice: These Men are Potential Rapists."
Well, we might not know art, but we know what we *don't* like. And
that includes smearing the names of innocent people, fomenting stereotypes,
and engaging in hatemongering and fearmongering.
However, the art must have been more to the taste of University of
Maryland officials. The students were not called to account for their
smear. On today's campus, some forms of hate speech are entirely
acceptable.
The "potential rapists" lists also shows how divided feminism is over
stereotypes and man-bashing. Some feminists condemn the list -- of course,
not strongly enough to require the university to respond. (Feminists had
more important things to devote their energies to. When four male students
at Cornell used campus computers to *privately* circulate a list of
offensive jokes, feminists demanded the men be punished. They were.)
Other feminists are far more ambivalent about the UM "potential
rapists" list. Some criticize it as "bad for feminism." They skip over the
matter of smearing innocent men, then focus on how the issue might be bad
for *women!*
And some feminists ardently support the "potential rapists" list and
the sentiments behind it.
In fact, while searching for the background on the "potential rapists"
list, we inadvertently set off a long-running Usenet discussion featuring
one feminist who absolutely and unequivocally defends the list.
The feminist said: "The girls did good... the quality of their effort
is not measured by its common reception, but by its truth and its endurance.
... The fact is women have reason to fear males any place and at any time.
... The women who posted that list of potential rapists were making a valid
statement."
Then this feminist, who uses a male name on the Internet, went into a
sort of free-association word-salad of images apparently about rape: "as for
what the art was illustrative of; any male can be a rapist, a friend, a
father, a thug in any guise... walk down a street not knowing who, open the
door not knowing who, lay in a hospital bed unconscious, no matter where,
when, and by anyone male..."
Many people objected to this feminist's views, trying to get the
feminist to acknowledge a problem with smearing innocent men, or to
acknowledge that a similar list would be unacceptable if it said that all
Arabs are potential terrorists, all Hispanics are potential illegal aliens,
all blacks are potential drug dealers, and so on. The feminist rejected
such arguments as "irrelevant."
The feminist also dismissed moral objections to the list. When someone
replied, "The question is whether it is an effective statement or ethical
statement," the feminist blithely replied: "effective or ethical are matters
for another discussion."
So you can smear innocent men, and the ethics of it are for "another
discussion."
The feminist saw nothing wrong with taking the fact that some men rape
and then labeling all men "potential rapists." "If you disagree, do try to
present something other than 'because some of a set are does not mean that
all of that set are.'" In other words, the feminist doesn't care if it is an
invalid stereotype. One person replied that because some marbles are blue
does not mean that all marbles are blue. That makes sense to us. But not
to the feminist, who adamantly rejected the argument.
Trying to take the discussion to a higher level of prevention, one man
suggested that we "work on methods of identifying assailants before they
assault." To this, another feminist replied that it's no problem to identify
assailants: "Easy, young men, especially jocks, especially drinking jocks."
Oh, so identifying potential rapists is easy -- just identify "young
men."
So, let's also work on methods for identifying potential stereotypers:
Easy. Feminists. Especially self-righteous feminists.
==========
A FEMINIST CONDEMNS MALE-BASHING . . . WELL, SORT OF
Feminists say they would make better politicians because they are more
moral than men, and not as bigoted. Of course, last issues we told you
about the diversity director at the Social Security Administration who led
off a diversity seminar with a man-bashing joke, so that sort of blows that
idea all to hell. But that was then, this is
now. So we'd like to show you how one feminist recently condemned
man-bashing -- sort of.
It started with a Usenet posting called "male-bashing continues: How
do you react?" One man asked other men for their reactions: "I'm going very
tired of the continuous male-bashing that goes on in our society. Everyone
is so nice and supportive of females, and if you say one uncomplimentary
thing about them everyone thinks you're a ‘pig,' yet men are continually
ridiculed, told how worthless they are, laughed at, etc.
"I'm very curious how other men feel about this. ... Do you notice it?
Do you ignore it? Do you think it's funny? Does it hurt you? Does it make
you feel less worthy than women?"
So a feminist responded to him. Watch how she proceeds to do the
following:
Step 1) Make some pro forma comments that bashing men is not good.
Step 2) Establish women's perpetual victimhood.
Step 3) Blame men for male-bashing, rather than admitting that some
women can aspire to bigotry entirely on their own.
Step 4) Reverse her initial condemnation of man-bashing by concluding
that bashing men is a good thing because it teaches them how it feels.
Here's what the feminist said:
"Denigrating any one group of people because they are representative
of that group is almost always a form of bigotry, even when it is done in
the name of humor."
(Step One accomplished. Pro forma condemnation of bashing is made --
and in just one sentence. (Note how she didn't actual say that bashing MEN
is bad, just that bashing "any one group ...")
(The feminist will now ignore the poster's concerns about male-bashing
and commence Step Two:)
"When I was a little girl my mother took my sister and I to a town by
the sea called Cape May, New Jersey. One day we were shopping and I saw
some post cards depicting girls in itty bitty bikinis; next to them was
some post cards of older women who were very heavy; they too were wearing
bathing suits, but the message on those cards was loud and clear. If you're
a young woman you have something worth while, but as you age you are
valueless; I didn't see the same type of cards depicting older men."
(Step Two complete, with a bit of animosity thrown in: "I didn't see
the same type of cards depicting older men." Ever notice how many feminists
just can't sit still when a man mentions being a target in modern gender
warfare? The feminist has to jump in and establish her place as the real
victim.)
(Now, begin Step Three of blaming men for male-bashing.)
"Yes, putting men down may be a form of bigotry and it may also be a
form of comic relief to women who have felt subjugated and put down as a
gender for centuries ..."
(Here at Per's MANifesto, we bet those women who felt that way for
*centuries* sure didn't look good in bathing suits, either. But let her
continue:)
"I mean, "Why buy the COW if you can get the milk for free", and "God
gave women sex organs so that men would talk to them". There is no easy
answer to your question because if female bashing is wrong and goes
unanswered one has to question the value of male bashing as another form of
retort."
(Note the language "if female bashing is wrong" then maybe
male-bashing is appropriate.)
"I don't believe that two wrongs make a right (triteness lives) but I
do believe that once in a while, one has to "fight fire with fire"; "
(So two wrongs *do* make a right if a feminist does it. Now prepare
for Step Four, in which a feminist declares the benefits of bashing men.)
"if nothing else, the men who feel bashed now know what it feels like
to be disparaged. If you really believe that the male gender is suffering
the slings and arrows of "male bashing" in some vacuum, think again."
There you have it: from saying that "Denigrating any one group of
people ... is almost always a form of bigotry" to defending man-bashing as a
"form of retort" to "fight fire with fire" and let men "know what it feels
like."
We certainly are glad for moral feminists like this.
They engage in gender stereotypes, bashing and hatred -- but only for
moral, upstanding reasons.
==========
SO NICELY THEY SETTLE THEIR DISPUTES
Feminists say that women make better leaders because they are by
nature more cooperative and nurturing, less aggressive and combative. Women
will settle their disputes nicely, so the feminists say.
So it's interesting to look at a recent dustup in New York state
between a couple of high-ranking women in the GOP, as reported June 5 in the
New York Daily News:
"Open warfare erupted between Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey Ross and
(Governor George) Pataki administration yesterday as both sides traded
accusations of betrayal and deceit.
"Escalating an embarrassing Republican feud, McCaughey Ross used a
radio talk show to accuse unnamed Pataki aides of ‘McCarthyism' for
allegedly targeting her with a series of political shots.
"‘This is the strategy that Joe McCarthy used to discredit his
political adversaries.' McCaughey Ross said on WABC's ‘Lionel' show, blaming
the Pataki administration for leaking allegations that she abused her state
police detail and mounting other attacks.
"‘He would leak anonymous rumors that they had done something wrong
but never actually provide any concrete charges ... and never give the
accused person an opportunity to prove his innocence. It's un-American,'
she said.
"The Pataki administration fired back even as she spoke. State Parks
Commissioner Bernadette Castro called the radio show and angrily accused
McCaughey Ross of ‘slandering' the administration.
"‘You're not loyal to the governor,' Castro charged, as she and
McCaughey interrupted each other with accusations. ‘You're not loyal to the
Republican Party.'
"... The extraordinary public sniping created new embarrassment for
the Pataki administration ..."
Well! We're certainly glad no men were involved here.
Otherwise it might have gotten nasty.
==========
MOTHERS GIVE YOU THE BUSINESS
A feminist recently told us that fathers perpetuate violence by
passing it on to their sons.
Never mind that our prisons are full of men who grew up without
fathers.
Never mind that street gangs are full of young men who don't have a
father at home.
Never mind that growing up without a father is, for boys, linked to
higher rates of crime, violence, school dropouts and drug use.
According to the feminist, it's fathers who perpetuate the violence.
No wonder, then, that so many feminists are trying to make sure these
brutal,primitive beasts known as "men" don't have anything to do with their
children.
You couldn't get away with trying to promote a similar stereotype
about mothers. Motherhood is sacred.
Be careful if you try to take a crack at Mother.
And be careful if you take crack *from* Mother.
That's the lesson to be learned from the story of Rayful Edmond III,
who became one of the biggest cocaine distributors in the United States.
And he couldn't have done it without mom.
Edmond got his start in drug dealing by holding money for his mother,
Constance "Bootsie" Perry, as she sold illegal pills on the streets of
Washington, D.C.
Later, his father also gave him additional training in the drug business.
But now he has been sentenced to prison for life. And at the
Lewisburg, Pa., federal penitentiary he met Dixon Dario Trujillo-Blanco and
his brother, Osvaldo. The three men are now are accused of running a drug
ring from the prison. They hit it off very well because they have something
in common: they all got involved in crime and the drug trade because of dear
old mom.
Authorities say Rayful Edmond's mother played more of a supporting
role in his rise to drug kingpin. Not so for the Trujillo-Blanco brothers.
Their mother was a hands-on businesswoman, known for her violence and her
deep involvement in the drug business.
The Trujillo-Blanco brothers were introduced to the drug trade by
their own mother, Griselda Blanco, who became known at the "Godmother of
Cocaine" for her connections with the notorious and violent Medellin cocaine
cartel.
Griselda Blanco was a self-made woman, starting out small, as a
pickpocket, and working her way up.
The Washington Post says: "Blanco, who allegedly killed two of her
four husbands, turned to her top financial adviser and her favorite hit man
to instruct her sons on the distribution and killing ends of her business,
(says) Richard Smitten, who wrote a book on Blanco called ‘The Godmother.'"
"Bob Palombo, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent who investigated
the Blanco organization, said in an interview last week that Griselda Blanco
was responsible for much of the drug-related violence in South Florida
during the 1980s. She is credited with perfecting the motorcycle
assassination, a popular tactic among South Florida's "cocaine cowboys." And
she once had a part interest in a Colombian factory that manufactured
girdles and bras with compartments to hide cocaine."
They say that behind every successful man is a woman.
Obviously these women knew how to get their sons cracking.
----
(Source: "For Jailed Kingpins, A Cocaine Kinship: Feds Say Friendship
Begot Partnership For D.C. Dealer, Colombian Brothers, by Toni Locy, The
Washington Post, Monday, August 19 1996; Page A01)
==========
NUTRITION LEADER FEEDS US A LINE
Ellen Haas hasn't reached the same pinnacles of success as Benazir
Bhutto. Haas is merely Undersecretary for the Department of Labor. But even
from a relatively lesser post, a woman can start thinking big. She can
become a mover and shaker.
Well, it appears Haas is *moving* a lot of government money to her
friends -- and *shaking* us down in the process.
For the second time in less than half a year, the watchdog General
Accounting Office has accused Haas of violating ethics regulations and
federal procurement laws and engaging in "a pattern of poor management."
Maybe we should call this "poor womanagement." Don't want to use
sexist language.
Despite two such GAO rulings in five months, Haas merely says that
"mistakes" were made and refuses to step down.
Her political allies say the accusations are motivated by politics.
We buy that. People usually don't turn in allies. A politically motivated
charged has to be looked at carefully, but it's not necessarily unfounded.
And GAO investigators have shown evidence indicating that Haas steers
government contracts to cronies and political allies.
For example: According to The Washington Post, "the GAO said Haas
violated federal ethics standards by allowing Susan Shreve, a close friend
of 15 years, to receive a $25,000 contract from USDA to write a children's
book on nutrition."
Haas personally reviewed the book. The author has been paid $11,250
and planned to sell the government 25,000 copies for $50,000.
But another official stopped the lucrative deal after noting that the
department could have free access to the book after a year and print the
book itself.
The GAO also cited Haas for careless management of a $173,000 contract
that mushroomed into a $2.3 million contract, and also for committing nearly
half a million dollars so the department could use two cartoon characters
from "The Lion King."
Maybe Haas could star in her own movie.
Call it "The Good Old Girls Club."
-----
(Reference: "‘Team Nutrition' Leader Again Dines on Crow: Agriculture
Official Admits Contract ‘Mistakes'" By Bill McAllister, The Washington
Post, Thursday, September 19 1996; Page A29.)
==========
COSMOWATCH
Cosmopolitan is a leading women's magazine. Its articles and
attitudes run counter to feminist claims that women are oppressed by "the
beauty trap," that women are less lustful, unfaithful and materialistic than
men, that women are just somehow nicer. Cosmo far outsells Ms. Magazine.
And the "Cosmo girl" knows darn well she can get what she wants by selling
her sexuality or playing hardball at the office. So what attitudes are women
buying when they pick up Cosmo? Here's some items from the October issue:
Articles:
-- Men *Love* Mysterious Women -- Seven Ways to Become One.
-- What Women Can Learn From Men at Work: Strategies *they* use can
earn titles, money, perks for *you!*
-- Keep *Your* Job -- Even if Nobody *Else* Does
-- In Hollywood, Even Friends Are Professional: These hangers-on have
perfected the art of cozying up!
-- The Glam (Sexy Too!) World of Political Volunteers: Want to meet
some *good* men? Mingle with Hollywood's Hottest? It's *possible* if you
join ...
-- Getting Out of a Psychologically Abusive Relationship. (Among the
"abuse" topics it covers are being in a relation with someone who
criticizes, withholds love, wants you to change, or wants more. If this is
abuse, then the number of abused men just skyrocketed. The article
recommends: "don't trust your lover too much," and says that "the most
important question in any relationship (is) ‘How does this man make
me feel?'")
-- He Might Sit Up and Notice if You ...
(This is a list of ways to get a man's attention. They include:)
... Shine a flashlight in his eyes whenever he stops listening.
... Tell him you have a crush on the doorman.
... Take lessons at a pistol-firing range.
... Shave your pubic hair or have it waxed into the shape of a heart.
... Call him the wrong name while making love.
... Read aloud from an article on penile implants.
... Run over his favorite guitar.
... Ask for a divorce.
Cartoon:
Two women in a bar. One says: "His work keeps him away from home most
of the time. I like that in a husband."
==========
HUMOR
Per's MANifesto newsletter announces:
THE HONEST FEMINIST CONTEST
Diogenes took his lamp and went looking for an honest man.
Now it's the feminists' turn.
We're picking up our flashlight and going in search of an honest
feminist. And believe me, we're bringing extra batteries.
In keeping with the theme of this month's MANifesto, we're looking for
this high moral character that feminists say they bring to public life.
We're looking for a feminist who will admit it is gender discrimination when
a man is denied a job because he is a man. In other words, she's so honest
she won't try to claim that discrimination is equality.*
We're looking for a feminist who will admit that she doesn't call for
equality when it's to her disadvantage. If the courts are biased in her
favor in a child custody dispute, she'll admit that she's not going to
demand equality and a level playing field.
We're looking for a feminist so honest that she'll admit that
protecting only female workers from offensive language is a special
protection and not equality.
We're looking for a feminist who will admit that it's censorship to
censor offensive speech.
We're looking for a feminist who will admit that censoring only the
offensive speech of men is not the equality they claim to support.
We're looking for a feminist who'll admit that women living an average
of seven years longer than men does NOT mean that women's health is being
"shortchanged."
We're looking for a feminist who will admit that the feminist rallying
cry of "all men are potential rapists" is an anti-male stereotype. She
won't try to play semantics or abstract word games in order to ignore the
hate message those words can convey.
We're looking for a feminist who will admit that feminism bears
responsibility for the innocent lives that have been destroyed by fads,
pseudo-science and hysteria promoted by feminism. She'll admit that
feminism has destroyed innocent people by promoting hysteria over "Satanic
cults" in day care centers, in promoting the false accusations arising from
the so-called "Recovered Memory Therapy," in trumped-up rape charges based
on the idea that it's "date rape" if a woman regrets having sex after
the fact, and so on.
And we're looking for feminists who will admit that movies portraying
men as scum and justifying just about any female revenge against them are
man-bashing movies.
So we're calling on all MANifesto readers. Pick up your flashlights
and go looking for an honest feminist. If you find one, nominate her for
the Per's MANifesto Honest Feminist Contest.
The grand prize for the best entry is ... taa-daaa ... well, there
ain't one.
At least we're honest.
And the deadline is ... well, there ain't one, either.
We figure you'll need lots of time.
Message your entries to PerAddress@gnn.com with the subject line
"Honest Feminist Contest."
And one good thing about looking for an honest feminist.
It's not likely to take up much bandwidth.
(*The fine print: It doesn't count if she basically admits a point and
then fudges it all to heck. In other words, she can't admit it's
discrimination to deny a man a job because he's a man and then fudge it all
over the place by claim this discrimination brings about equality. Fudging
is not honest. No points for fudging.)
==========
YOU MIGHT BE A MALE FEMINIST IF ...
... you've ever gone to a "Take Back The Night" march with a condom in
your wallet.
... you're willing to sacrifice jobs, safety, security, rights,
promotions and pay raises -- of any other man except you.
... you've ever told her that "all men are potential rapists" hoping
that she'll be afraid to date anyone but you.
... you've posted anonymously: "submissive male seeks strong woman for
instruction in discipline ..."
... you hope your ability to quote chapter and verse from "The Beauty
Trap" will impress the really hot babes.
... you hope that your staunch support for Affirmative Action and
hiring quotas means that they'll never be applied against YOU.
... you set up a "safe and nurturing environment," a support group, or
a retreat to shelter "strong women."
... you think that violence is always wrong -- and you'll shoot any
man who disagrees.
` ... you think at embracing and preaching anti-male stereotypes means
you'll be exempt from them.
... you believe that a man yelling at a woman constitutes domestic
violence, while a woman stabbing a man is a firm stand against domestic
violence.
And here are some from "mew."
... you think that the woman who fired you can't be sexist because
women have no power in today's society.
... you admonish your children to "look before you leap" but you feel
guilty for leaving the toilet seat up.
... you set out the trash for the garbagemen before going to work to
meet with a chairperson.
... you've ever referred to _yourself_ as "draftsperson",
"chairperson", etc.
... you think of your newborn son as a potential rapist.
... you think it's normal genetics that so many first-born children
bear no resemblance to their fathers.
... you agree with the widow next door that women's health issues are
underfunded.
And Aric contributes these:
... you think it unfair that women have to pay more for clothes,
especially since they live longer so they have to buy more.
... you feel women should band together to "take back the net"
starting with the elimination of male-oppressive sexual jargon like "hard
drive" and "motherboard".
... being vilified for things that you never ever did seems natural
and right to you.
Got any of your own? E-mail them with the subject line "You Might Be
A Male Feminist If ..." to PerAddress@gnn.com. If we get more, we'll run
them in future issues.
==========
POW SAYS DEAD MEN ARE HEALTHIER
Dead men are healthier than most women, says a new study released by
the Propaganda Organization for Women (POW).
"We've long known that women are being shortchanged on health care,"
says Colleen Hyphenated-Lastname, president of POW. "Now this report proves
it."
"Statistics show that women live about seven years longer than men,"
she said. "Thus women live long enough to suffer a variety of ailments that
men never have to suffer. Consider the scourge of osteoporosis -- the
brittle-bone disease that occurs in older people. Most victims of this
disease are women. That's because they live long enough to get it. Men
don't live as long as women, so they don't suffer as much osteoporosis.
Obviously, if fewer men are suffering from this insidious and debilitating
disease, then men are healthier than women."
"Also, we have found that many widows have a tough time getting by on
the pensions of their late husbands. These widows cannot always afford the
finest health care. This causes them to suffer from a variety of ailments
their late husbands are not forced to endure."
"Some people ask us -- ‘what should be done about men dying earlier
than women?' We say that obviously it means we have to put more money into
improving the health of women. After all, it doesn't make any sense to
spend our scarce health-care dollars on dead people."
"Some backlashers point out that men have higher rates of depression,
alcoholism and drug abuse. ‘Isn't that a health issue?' they say. We don't
think so. After all, many of the men who have alcoholism or addictions will
go on to commit suicide. Once you're dead, obviously you aren't suffering
from a disease anymore."
"Meanwhile there are all these living women who suffer from
depression. It is our job to help the living."
"Also, suicide is a personal choice. This is one area in which
feminists will defend a man's right to choose."
"We also found that dead men are healthier in one other key area. In
strict, laboratory conditions, we scanned the brain waves of a random
sampling of dead men. For a control group, we then scanned the brain waves
of a random sampling of members of our feminist group."
"The dead men scored higher in every respect."
=============================
MANifesto is a monthly newsletter containing news and opinion for people
interested in gender equality and gender stereotypes. If you would like to
have MANifesto e-mailed to you, message "subscribe MANifesto" to
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(If you subscribed but did not get the latest issue, please send the
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You can find MANifesto on the Usenet each month in the following
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(MANifesto is copyright 1996 by Per. Please feel free to copy,
forward, repost, fax and otherwise distribute MANifesto. If you excerpt any
section, please excerpt it in its entirety.)
=============================
man-bashing and anti-male stereotypes. September 1996.
WELCOME, READERS, to an issue of MANifesto where we take a look at the moral
leadership that we can expect from women as they guide us across the bridge
to the future and into the 21st Century. For example, there is a move on
today to make sure that the position of Secretary General of the United
Nations will go to a woman next. (After all, she could hardly be less
effective than Boutros Boutros-Ghali.) So it will be interesting to see if
the powers that be decide they're going to hire some woman -- any woman --
no matter what. Remember what happened when Bill Clinton decided he
absolutely had to have a female Attorney General. What an exciting thought
for us all! Just think -- maybe someone in charge of U.N. troops can do for
the world what Janet Reno did for Waco, Texas.
Feminists have told us that putting women in charge will make for a
more peaceful, honest and civilized world. We salute these forward-looking
sentiments by taking a gander at the great moral stances taken by women and
feminists everywhere.
MANifesto is now on the Web, at
http://members.gnn.com/peraddress/manifest.htm
With a link to The POW Page! -- a collection of favorite satire featuring
Colleen Hyphenated-Lastname and the Propaganda Organization for Women.
INDEX: NEWS AND VIEWS
I. DEDICATION: CAROL MOSELEY-BRAUN
II. A FEMINIST DEFENDS FREE SPEECH . . . WELL, SORT OF
III. WOMEN CLEAN UP POLITICS . . . (WELL, AT LEAST THEY CLEAN UP)
IV. SO NICELY THEY SETTLE THEIR DISPUTES
V. WOMEN ARE MORE ARTISTIC AND SENSITIVE
VI. A FEMINIST CONDEMNS MALE-BASHING . . . WELL, SORT OF
VII. MOTHERS GIVE YOU THE BUSINESS
VIII. NUTRITION LEADER FEEDS US A LINE
IX. COSMOWATCH
HUMOR:
THE HONEST FEMINIST CONTEST
YOU MIGHT BE A MALE FEMINIST IF . . .
POW SAYS DEAD MEN ARE HEALTHIER
==========
DEDICATION: CAROL MOSELEY-BRAUN
We'd like to dedicate this issue about feminist ethics to Senator
Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois.
1992 was dubbed the "Year of the Woman," and Moseley-Braun was a big
part of it. For one thing, she defeated a man to win her Senate seat. And
not just any male senator, but one who actually dared to question Anita
Hill's claims of sexual harassment. Women were mad. They wanted to oust
that male senator and replace him with someone with a bit more sensitivity
to the oppressed. When Moseley-Braun won, it was called a major feminist
victory, part of the drive to take power out of the hands of corrupt and
greedy men and give it to the disenfranchised and downtrodden.
So how has Senator Moseley-Braun advanced those principles?
Well, she has become a close ally, supporter and apologist for one of
the most brutal dictators on Earth.
General Sani Abacha rules Nigeria with an iron fist. He executes and
tortures dissidents, smashes the free press, oppresses people of color, and
loots the nation's wealth for every dime he can extort from it.
Just the type of person a moral, forward-looking feminist would want
to support.
Moseley-Braun won office largely because women were offended over what
they saw as harsh treatment for Anita Hill. So Moseley-Braun now chums up to
a man who does things a bit tougher than finding hairs on his Coke can.
While many nations are calling for international sanctions against
Abacha, Moseley-Braun has been speaking out in his defense. She's about the
only one to do so, especially in Congress. The State Department was not
pleased to learn that Moseley-Braun had made a secret trip to Nigeria on
business that she has not quite yet clarified.
Those looking for answers to Moseley-Braun's affections for a brutal
tyrant might want to take a look at her former fiancé, Kgosie Matthews. He
was her campaign manager and also shared a condo with her.
He also was a paid agent of the Nigerian government.
But if you're a feminist, you might not want to look too hard at Mr.
Matthews. Some of Moseley-Braun's staff accused him of sexual harassment.
Moseley-Braun ran for office by exploiting the rage and national
publicity over the Anita Hill sexual harassment case. Then sexual
harassment charges started hitting a bit closer to home. Sort of like a
candidate running on a law-and-order platform by day and hanging out with
felons and grifters by night.
The national rage focused on the Anita Hill case seemed to skip right
over the sexual harassment accusations against Matthews. But if feminists
were moved to so much anger by the charges Anita Hill made, why did they
have so little outrage over the accusations against Matthews? Or, for that
matter, the accusations made by Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones?
Well, here we can see that stringent feminist morality at work. The
rule of thumb: if the accusation involves someone we like, it doesn't count.
==========
A FEMINIST DEFENDS FREE SPEECH ... WELL, SORT OF
There were a lot of people who strongly condemned the Republicans
because pro-abortion speakers were not given time to state their views
during the GOP national convention.
One of them was outspoken feminist Bella Abzug. (See, we can be
charitable. We referred to her only as "outspoken.")
Ms. Abzug accused the convention of "muzzling some of their guys who
didn't agree with them about abortion."
Well, let syndicated columnist Nat Hentoff tell you what happened
next: "A reporter for the New York Post asked her what she thought of her
own party's refusal to allow Robert Casey, governor of Pennsylvania from
1987 to 1995, to speak at her convention. After all, Al Gore had promised on
ABC-TV: "We don't have a gag rule the way the other party does."
"So what?" said Abzug, the tribune of free speech, about the gagging
of Casey. "It's not required to have someone speak who has a position in
contrast to the majority of the party." Casey is pro-life, so he had to be
silenced."
Abzug defended free speech -- for her views only. She did not extend
those rights to others.
That's sort of like defending "equality for women."
-----
(Source: "The Democrats' Tiny Tent: The Siberian exile of a former
governor with one of the party's most effective records," By Nat Hentoff,
The Washington Post, Wednesday, September 4 1996; Page A15.)
==========
WOMEN CLEAN UP POLITICS ... (WELL, AT LEAST THEY CLEAN UP)
Benazir Bhutto -- seeking another term as prime minister of Pakistan
-- ran on an anti-corruption campaign. Since winning in 1993, she hasn't
done much toward cleaning up the government. But a luxurious estate she
reportedly bought in England indicates that at least she *is* cleaning up.
Pakistan has long had a reputation for corrupt governmental and
business practices. In a recent survey, business executives ranked Pakistan
as the second most corrupt, behind Nigeria. But on the campaign trail,
Bhutto said, "I will not compromise on political corruption of any member of
the ruling coalition."
But Bhutto has appointed several cabinet members who have been accused
of financial crimes. When Bhutto was out of power, she accused the
Saifullah family of being a "plunderer" of the nation's wealth. But when
she came back to power, she appointed a powerful member of the family to her
cabinet. "Then last month, her government exempted a cement company
co-owned by the Saifullah family from $400 million in excise taxes,
disregarding the objections of the national tax collection agency."
Her critics say it's a pattern of Bhutto treating her allies to some
lucrative business deals. Obviously there's some partisan sniping going on
here, with charges being hurled by people whose hands aren't particularly
clean either. But there certainly have been an unusual number of shady
associates for someone who ran so loudly on an anti-corruption platform.
For example, there's Mohammad Nawaz Khokhar, who used to be a fierce
critic of Bhutto. He has been arrested on charges of fraud, embezzlement
and official corruption. But he was released from jail, and a day later he
switched his allegiance to Bhutto's party and was named science and
technology minister. The charges against him then were dropped.
Then there's Munawwer Hussain Manj, arrested on charges of being a
major trafficker of hashish and heroin. He was named to a parliamentary
committee that oversees anti-drug operations.
When Pakistan recently permitted private ownership of TV and FM radio
stations, it granted a national TV monopoly and favorable FM deals, without
bids and without announcements they were available. They went -- free of
fees -- to someone who was an important aide to Bhutto and a high school
classmate of her husband.
But, according to Britain's Sunday Express paper, she's not sitting
out the deals herself. The paper reported that Bhutto and her husband had
bought a $3.9 million mansion in the English countryside near London -- a
335-acre estate with a private landing strip and indoor swimming pool.
Loads of antiques, carved furniture and other household items were
reportedly shipped from Bhutto's private seaside residence in Karachi to
London.
Bhutto denies that she bought the estate.
So what's going on with Pakistan's economy in the meantime? Bhutto's
latest budget calls for a $1 billion tax increase, and the International
Monetary Fund is pressing her to impose even greater fiscal austerity.
Bhutto probably isn't any more corrupt than any of her predecessors. But --
contrary to feminist dogma -- she isn't any more honest, either. She is
truly equal to men.
(Source: "Beleaguered Benazir Bhutto: Corruption Charges Grow Sharper
Against Premier Reelected Vowing to Rid Pakistan's Politics of Graft" By
Kenneth J. Cooper and Kamran Khan, Washington Post Foreign Service, Monday,
August 19 1996; Page A10, The Washington Post.)
==========
WOMEN ARE MORE ARTISTIC AND SENSITIVE
We've been told that women are more sensitive, more moral, more
artistic.
That's when we remember a sensitive, moral art project that took place
at the University of Maryland in 1993. Students in the "Contemporary Issues
in Feminist Art" class took the names of men at random from a campus phone
book. They then put up posters listing these men by name under the heading
that said: "Notice: These Men are Potential Rapists."
Well, we might not know art, but we know what we *don't* like. And
that includes smearing the names of innocent people, fomenting stereotypes,
and engaging in hatemongering and fearmongering.
However, the art must have been more to the taste of University of
Maryland officials. The students were not called to account for their
smear. On today's campus, some forms of hate speech are entirely
acceptable.
The "potential rapists" lists also shows how divided feminism is over
stereotypes and man-bashing. Some feminists condemn the list -- of course,
not strongly enough to require the university to respond. (Feminists had
more important things to devote their energies to. When four male students
at Cornell used campus computers to *privately* circulate a list of
offensive jokes, feminists demanded the men be punished. They were.)
Other feminists are far more ambivalent about the UM "potential
rapists" list. Some criticize it as "bad for feminism." They skip over the
matter of smearing innocent men, then focus on how the issue might be bad
for *women!*
And some feminists ardently support the "potential rapists" list and
the sentiments behind it.
In fact, while searching for the background on the "potential rapists"
list, we inadvertently set off a long-running Usenet discussion featuring
one feminist who absolutely and unequivocally defends the list.
The feminist said: "The girls did good... the quality of their effort
is not measured by its common reception, but by its truth and its endurance.
... The fact is women have reason to fear males any place and at any time.
... The women who posted that list of potential rapists were making a valid
statement."
Then this feminist, who uses a male name on the Internet, went into a
sort of free-association word-salad of images apparently about rape: "as for
what the art was illustrative of; any male can be a rapist, a friend, a
father, a thug in any guise... walk down a street not knowing who, open the
door not knowing who, lay in a hospital bed unconscious, no matter where,
when, and by anyone male..."
Many people objected to this feminist's views, trying to get the
feminist to acknowledge a problem with smearing innocent men, or to
acknowledge that a similar list would be unacceptable if it said that all
Arabs are potential terrorists, all Hispanics are potential illegal aliens,
all blacks are potential drug dealers, and so on. The feminist rejected
such arguments as "irrelevant."
The feminist also dismissed moral objections to the list. When someone
replied, "The question is whether it is an effective statement or ethical
statement," the feminist blithely replied: "effective or ethical are matters
for another discussion."
So you can smear innocent men, and the ethics of it are for "another
discussion."
The feminist saw nothing wrong with taking the fact that some men rape
and then labeling all men "potential rapists." "If you disagree, do try to
present something other than 'because some of a set are does not mean that
all of that set are.'" In other words, the feminist doesn't care if it is an
invalid stereotype. One person replied that because some marbles are blue
does not mean that all marbles are blue. That makes sense to us. But not
to the feminist, who adamantly rejected the argument.
Trying to take the discussion to a higher level of prevention, one man
suggested that we "work on methods of identifying assailants before they
assault." To this, another feminist replied that it's no problem to identify
assailants: "Easy, young men, especially jocks, especially drinking jocks."
Oh, so identifying potential rapists is easy -- just identify "young
men."
So, let's also work on methods for identifying potential stereotypers:
Easy. Feminists. Especially self-righteous feminists.
==========
A FEMINIST CONDEMNS MALE-BASHING . . . WELL, SORT OF
Feminists say they would make better politicians because they are more
moral than men, and not as bigoted. Of course, last issues we told you
about the diversity director at the Social Security Administration who led
off a diversity seminar with a man-bashing joke, so that sort of blows that
idea all to hell. But that was then, this is
now. So we'd like to show you how one feminist recently condemned
man-bashing -- sort of.
It started with a Usenet posting called "male-bashing continues: How
do you react?" One man asked other men for their reactions: "I'm going very
tired of the continuous male-bashing that goes on in our society. Everyone
is so nice and supportive of females, and if you say one uncomplimentary
thing about them everyone thinks you're a ‘pig,' yet men are continually
ridiculed, told how worthless they are, laughed at, etc.
"I'm very curious how other men feel about this. ... Do you notice it?
Do you ignore it? Do you think it's funny? Does it hurt you? Does it make
you feel less worthy than women?"
So a feminist responded to him. Watch how she proceeds to do the
following:
Step 1) Make some pro forma comments that bashing men is not good.
Step 2) Establish women's perpetual victimhood.
Step 3) Blame men for male-bashing, rather than admitting that some
women can aspire to bigotry entirely on their own.
Step 4) Reverse her initial condemnation of man-bashing by concluding
that bashing men is a good thing because it teaches them how it feels.
Here's what the feminist said:
"Denigrating any one group of people because they are representative
of that group is almost always a form of bigotry, even when it is done in
the name of humor."
(Step One accomplished. Pro forma condemnation of bashing is made --
and in just one sentence. (Note how she didn't actual say that bashing MEN
is bad, just that bashing "any one group ...")
(The feminist will now ignore the poster's concerns about male-bashing
and commence Step Two:)
"When I was a little girl my mother took my sister and I to a town by
the sea called Cape May, New Jersey. One day we were shopping and I saw
some post cards depicting girls in itty bitty bikinis; next to them was
some post cards of older women who were very heavy; they too were wearing
bathing suits, but the message on those cards was loud and clear. If you're
a young woman you have something worth while, but as you age you are
valueless; I didn't see the same type of cards depicting older men."
(Step Two complete, with a bit of animosity thrown in: "I didn't see
the same type of cards depicting older men." Ever notice how many feminists
just can't sit still when a man mentions being a target in modern gender
warfare? The feminist has to jump in and establish her place as the real
victim.)
(Now, begin Step Three of blaming men for male-bashing.)
"Yes, putting men down may be a form of bigotry and it may also be a
form of comic relief to women who have felt subjugated and put down as a
gender for centuries ..."
(Here at Per's MANifesto, we bet those women who felt that way for
*centuries* sure didn't look good in bathing suits, either. But let her
continue:)
"I mean, "Why buy the COW if you can get the milk for free", and "God
gave women sex organs so that men would talk to them". There is no easy
answer to your question because if female bashing is wrong and goes
unanswered one has to question the value of male bashing as another form of
retort."
(Note the language "if female bashing is wrong" then maybe
male-bashing is appropriate.)
"I don't believe that two wrongs make a right (triteness lives) but I
do believe that once in a while, one has to "fight fire with fire"; "
(So two wrongs *do* make a right if a feminist does it. Now prepare
for Step Four, in which a feminist declares the benefits of bashing men.)
"if nothing else, the men who feel bashed now know what it feels like
to be disparaged. If you really believe that the male gender is suffering
the slings and arrows of "male bashing" in some vacuum, think again."
There you have it: from saying that "Denigrating any one group of
people ... is almost always a form of bigotry" to defending man-bashing as a
"form of retort" to "fight fire with fire" and let men "know what it feels
like."
We certainly are glad for moral feminists like this.
They engage in gender stereotypes, bashing and hatred -- but only for
moral, upstanding reasons.
==========
SO NICELY THEY SETTLE THEIR DISPUTES
Feminists say that women make better leaders because they are by
nature more cooperative and nurturing, less aggressive and combative. Women
will settle their disputes nicely, so the feminists say.
So it's interesting to look at a recent dustup in New York state
between a couple of high-ranking women in the GOP, as reported June 5 in the
New York Daily News:
"Open warfare erupted between Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey Ross and
(Governor George) Pataki administration yesterday as both sides traded
accusations of betrayal and deceit.
"Escalating an embarrassing Republican feud, McCaughey Ross used a
radio talk show to accuse unnamed Pataki aides of ‘McCarthyism' for
allegedly targeting her with a series of political shots.
"‘This is the strategy that Joe McCarthy used to discredit his
political adversaries.' McCaughey Ross said on WABC's ‘Lionel' show, blaming
the Pataki administration for leaking allegations that she abused her state
police detail and mounting other attacks.
"‘He would leak anonymous rumors that they had done something wrong
but never actually provide any concrete charges ... and never give the
accused person an opportunity to prove his innocence. It's un-American,'
she said.
"The Pataki administration fired back even as she spoke. State Parks
Commissioner Bernadette Castro called the radio show and angrily accused
McCaughey Ross of ‘slandering' the administration.
"‘You're not loyal to the governor,' Castro charged, as she and
McCaughey interrupted each other with accusations. ‘You're not loyal to the
Republican Party.'
"... The extraordinary public sniping created new embarrassment for
the Pataki administration ..."
Well! We're certainly glad no men were involved here.
Otherwise it might have gotten nasty.
==========
MOTHERS GIVE YOU THE BUSINESS
A feminist recently told us that fathers perpetuate violence by
passing it on to their sons.
Never mind that our prisons are full of men who grew up without
fathers.
Never mind that street gangs are full of young men who don't have a
father at home.
Never mind that growing up without a father is, for boys, linked to
higher rates of crime, violence, school dropouts and drug use.
According to the feminist, it's fathers who perpetuate the violence.
No wonder, then, that so many feminists are trying to make sure these
brutal,primitive beasts known as "men" don't have anything to do with their
children.
You couldn't get away with trying to promote a similar stereotype
about mothers. Motherhood is sacred.
Be careful if you try to take a crack at Mother.
And be careful if you take crack *from* Mother.
That's the lesson to be learned from the story of Rayful Edmond III,
who became one of the biggest cocaine distributors in the United States.
And he couldn't have done it without mom.
Edmond got his start in drug dealing by holding money for his mother,
Constance "Bootsie" Perry, as she sold illegal pills on the streets of
Washington, D.C.
Later, his father also gave him additional training in the drug business.
But now he has been sentenced to prison for life. And at the
Lewisburg, Pa., federal penitentiary he met Dixon Dario Trujillo-Blanco and
his brother, Osvaldo. The three men are now are accused of running a drug
ring from the prison. They hit it off very well because they have something
in common: they all got involved in crime and the drug trade because of dear
old mom.
Authorities say Rayful Edmond's mother played more of a supporting
role in his rise to drug kingpin. Not so for the Trujillo-Blanco brothers.
Their mother was a hands-on businesswoman, known for her violence and her
deep involvement in the drug business.
The Trujillo-Blanco brothers were introduced to the drug trade by
their own mother, Griselda Blanco, who became known at the "Godmother of
Cocaine" for her connections with the notorious and violent Medellin cocaine
cartel.
Griselda Blanco was a self-made woman, starting out small, as a
pickpocket, and working her way up.
The Washington Post says: "Blanco, who allegedly killed two of her
four husbands, turned to her top financial adviser and her favorite hit man
to instruct her sons on the distribution and killing ends of her business,
(says) Richard Smitten, who wrote a book on Blanco called ‘The Godmother.'"
"Bob Palombo, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent who investigated
the Blanco organization, said in an interview last week that Griselda Blanco
was responsible for much of the drug-related violence in South Florida
during the 1980s. She is credited with perfecting the motorcycle
assassination, a popular tactic among South Florida's "cocaine cowboys." And
she once had a part interest in a Colombian factory that manufactured
girdles and bras with compartments to hide cocaine."
They say that behind every successful man is a woman.
Obviously these women knew how to get their sons cracking.
----
(Source: "For Jailed Kingpins, A Cocaine Kinship: Feds Say Friendship
Begot Partnership For D.C. Dealer, Colombian Brothers, by Toni Locy, The
Washington Post, Monday, August 19 1996; Page A01)
==========
NUTRITION LEADER FEEDS US A LINE
Ellen Haas hasn't reached the same pinnacles of success as Benazir
Bhutto. Haas is merely Undersecretary for the Department of Labor. But even
from a relatively lesser post, a woman can start thinking big. She can
become a mover and shaker.
Well, it appears Haas is *moving* a lot of government money to her
friends -- and *shaking* us down in the process.
For the second time in less than half a year, the watchdog General
Accounting Office has accused Haas of violating ethics regulations and
federal procurement laws and engaging in "a pattern of poor management."
Maybe we should call this "poor womanagement." Don't want to use
sexist language.
Despite two such GAO rulings in five months, Haas merely says that
"mistakes" were made and refuses to step down.
Her political allies say the accusations are motivated by politics.
We buy that. People usually don't turn in allies. A politically motivated
charged has to be looked at carefully, but it's not necessarily unfounded.
And GAO investigators have shown evidence indicating that Haas steers
government contracts to cronies and political allies.
For example: According to The Washington Post, "the GAO said Haas
violated federal ethics standards by allowing Susan Shreve, a close friend
of 15 years, to receive a $25,000 contract from USDA to write a children's
book on nutrition."
Haas personally reviewed the book. The author has been paid $11,250
and planned to sell the government 25,000 copies for $50,000.
But another official stopped the lucrative deal after noting that the
department could have free access to the book after a year and print the
book itself.
The GAO also cited Haas for careless management of a $173,000 contract
that mushroomed into a $2.3 million contract, and also for committing nearly
half a million dollars so the department could use two cartoon characters
from "The Lion King."
Maybe Haas could star in her own movie.
Call it "The Good Old Girls Club."
-----
(Reference: "‘Team Nutrition' Leader Again Dines on Crow: Agriculture
Official Admits Contract ‘Mistakes'" By Bill McAllister, The Washington
Post, Thursday, September 19 1996; Page A29.)
==========
COSMOWATCH
Cosmopolitan is a leading women's magazine. Its articles and
attitudes run counter to feminist claims that women are oppressed by "the
beauty trap," that women are less lustful, unfaithful and materialistic than
men, that women are just somehow nicer. Cosmo far outsells Ms. Magazine.
And the "Cosmo girl" knows darn well she can get what she wants by selling
her sexuality or playing hardball at the office. So what attitudes are women
buying when they pick up Cosmo? Here's some items from the October issue:
Articles:
-- Men *Love* Mysterious Women -- Seven Ways to Become One.
-- What Women Can Learn From Men at Work: Strategies *they* use can
earn titles, money, perks for *you!*
-- Keep *Your* Job -- Even if Nobody *Else* Does
-- In Hollywood, Even Friends Are Professional: These hangers-on have
perfected the art of cozying up!
-- The Glam (Sexy Too!) World of Political Volunteers: Want to meet
some *good* men? Mingle with Hollywood's Hottest? It's *possible* if you
join ...
-- Getting Out of a Psychologically Abusive Relationship. (Among the
"abuse" topics it covers are being in a relation with someone who
criticizes, withholds love, wants you to change, or wants more. If this is
abuse, then the number of abused men just skyrocketed. The article
recommends: "don't trust your lover too much," and says that "the most
important question in any relationship (is) ‘How does this man make
me feel?'")
-- He Might Sit Up and Notice if You ...
(This is a list of ways to get a man's attention. They include:)
... Shine a flashlight in his eyes whenever he stops listening.
... Tell him you have a crush on the doorman.
... Take lessons at a pistol-firing range.
... Shave your pubic hair or have it waxed into the shape of a heart.
... Call him the wrong name while making love.
... Read aloud from an article on penile implants.
... Run over his favorite guitar.
... Ask for a divorce.
Cartoon:
Two women in a bar. One says: "His work keeps him away from home most
of the time. I like that in a husband."
==========
HUMOR
Per's MANifesto newsletter announces:
THE HONEST FEMINIST CONTEST
Diogenes took his lamp and went looking for an honest man.
Now it's the feminists' turn.
We're picking up our flashlight and going in search of an honest
feminist. And believe me, we're bringing extra batteries.
In keeping with the theme of this month's MANifesto, we're looking for
this high moral character that feminists say they bring to public life.
We're looking for a feminist who will admit it is gender discrimination when
a man is denied a job because he is a man. In other words, she's so honest
she won't try to claim that discrimination is equality.*
We're looking for a feminist who will admit that she doesn't call for
equality when it's to her disadvantage. If the courts are biased in her
favor in a child custody dispute, she'll admit that she's not going to
demand equality and a level playing field.
We're looking for a feminist so honest that she'll admit that
protecting only female workers from offensive language is a special
protection and not equality.
We're looking for a feminist who will admit that it's censorship to
censor offensive speech.
We're looking for a feminist who will admit that censoring only the
offensive speech of men is not the equality they claim to support.
We're looking for a feminist who'll admit that women living an average
of seven years longer than men does NOT mean that women's health is being
"shortchanged."
We're looking for a feminist who will admit that the feminist rallying
cry of "all men are potential rapists" is an anti-male stereotype. She
won't try to play semantics or abstract word games in order to ignore the
hate message those words can convey.
We're looking for a feminist who will admit that feminism bears
responsibility for the innocent lives that have been destroyed by fads,
pseudo-science and hysteria promoted by feminism. She'll admit that
feminism has destroyed innocent people by promoting hysteria over "Satanic
cults" in day care centers, in promoting the false accusations arising from
the so-called "Recovered Memory Therapy," in trumped-up rape charges based
on the idea that it's "date rape" if a woman regrets having sex after
the fact, and so on.
And we're looking for feminists who will admit that movies portraying
men as scum and justifying just about any female revenge against them are
man-bashing movies.
So we're calling on all MANifesto readers. Pick up your flashlights
and go looking for an honest feminist. If you find one, nominate her for
the Per's MANifesto Honest Feminist Contest.
The grand prize for the best entry is ... taa-daaa ... well, there
ain't one.
At least we're honest.
And the deadline is ... well, there ain't one, either.
We figure you'll need lots of time.
Message your entries to PerAddress@gnn.com with the subject line
"Honest Feminist Contest."
And one good thing about looking for an honest feminist.
It's not likely to take up much bandwidth.
(*The fine print: It doesn't count if she basically admits a point and
then fudges it all to heck. In other words, she can't admit it's
discrimination to deny a man a job because he's a man and then fudge it all
over the place by claim this discrimination brings about equality. Fudging
is not honest. No points for fudging.)
==========
YOU MIGHT BE A MALE FEMINIST IF ...
... you've ever gone to a "Take Back The Night" march with a condom in
your wallet.
... you're willing to sacrifice jobs, safety, security, rights,
promotions and pay raises -- of any other man except you.
... you've ever told her that "all men are potential rapists" hoping
that she'll be afraid to date anyone but you.
... you've posted anonymously: "submissive male seeks strong woman for
instruction in discipline ..."
... you hope your ability to quote chapter and verse from "The Beauty
Trap" will impress the really hot babes.
... you hope that your staunch support for Affirmative Action and
hiring quotas means that they'll never be applied against YOU.
... you set up a "safe and nurturing environment," a support group, or
a retreat to shelter "strong women."
... you think that violence is always wrong -- and you'll shoot any
man who disagrees.
` ... you think at embracing and preaching anti-male stereotypes means
you'll be exempt from them.
... you believe that a man yelling at a woman constitutes domestic
violence, while a woman stabbing a man is a firm stand against domestic
violence.
And here are some from "mew."
... you think that the woman who fired you can't be sexist because
women have no power in today's society.
... you admonish your children to "look before you leap" but you feel
guilty for leaving the toilet seat up.
... you set out the trash for the garbagemen before going to work to
meet with a chairperson.
... you've ever referred to _yourself_ as "draftsperson",
"chairperson", etc.
... you think of your newborn son as a potential rapist.
... you think it's normal genetics that so many first-born children
bear no resemblance to their fathers.
... you agree with the widow next door that women's health issues are
underfunded.
And Aric contributes these:
... you think it unfair that women have to pay more for clothes,
especially since they live longer so they have to buy more.
... you feel women should band together to "take back the net"
starting with the elimination of male-oppressive sexual jargon like "hard
drive" and "motherboard".
... being vilified for things that you never ever did seems natural
and right to you.
Got any of your own? E-mail them with the subject line "You Might Be
A Male Feminist If ..." to PerAddress@gnn.com. If we get more, we'll run
them in future issues.
==========
POW SAYS DEAD MEN ARE HEALTHIER
Dead men are healthier than most women, says a new study released by
the Propaganda Organization for Women (POW).
"We've long known that women are being shortchanged on health care,"
says Colleen Hyphenated-Lastname, president of POW. "Now this report proves
it."
"Statistics show that women live about seven years longer than men,"
she said. "Thus women live long enough to suffer a variety of ailments that
men never have to suffer. Consider the scourge of osteoporosis -- the
brittle-bone disease that occurs in older people. Most victims of this
disease are women. That's because they live long enough to get it. Men
don't live as long as women, so they don't suffer as much osteoporosis.
Obviously, if fewer men are suffering from this insidious and debilitating
disease, then men are healthier than women."
"Also, we have found that many widows have a tough time getting by on
the pensions of their late husbands. These widows cannot always afford the
finest health care. This causes them to suffer from a variety of ailments
their late husbands are not forced to endure."
"Some people ask us -- ‘what should be done about men dying earlier
than women?' We say that obviously it means we have to put more money into
improving the health of women. After all, it doesn't make any sense to
spend our scarce health-care dollars on dead people."
"Some backlashers point out that men have higher rates of depression,
alcoholism and drug abuse. ‘Isn't that a health issue?' they say. We don't
think so. After all, many of the men who have alcoholism or addictions will
go on to commit suicide. Once you're dead, obviously you aren't suffering
from a disease anymore."
"Meanwhile there are all these living women who suffer from
depression. It is our job to help the living."
"Also, suicide is a personal choice. This is one area in which
feminists will defend a man's right to choose."
"We also found that dead men are healthier in one other key area. In
strict, laboratory conditions, we scanned the brain waves of a random
sampling of dead men. For a control group, we then scanned the brain waves
of a random sampling of members of our feminist group."
"The dead men scored higher in every respect."
=============================
MANifesto is a monthly newsletter containing news and opinion for people
interested in gender equality and gender stereotypes. If you would like to
have MANifesto e-mailed to you, message "subscribe MANifesto" to
PerAddress@gnn.com. You also can send your comments, questions,
suggestions, and castration threats to this address.
(If you subscribed but did not get the latest issue, please send the
message again and be patient as we perfect our mass-mailing skills.)
You can find MANifesto on the Usenet each month in the following
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(MANifesto is copyright 1996 by Per. Please feel free to copy,
forward, repost, fax and otherwise distribute MANifesto. If you excerpt any
section, please excerpt it in its entirety.)
=============================
Per's MANifesto October 1998
Per's MANifesto: A newsletter of news and opinion on
man-bashing, anti-male stereotypes and other great moral principles.
October, 1998.
WELCOME, READERS, as we peddle you an issue we'll entitle
"LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE." Guess that makes us a *spokes*person.
Hahaha. Ahem.
Anyway, this issue takes a look at that recent report that
claims that men prefer "anorexic" women to overweight ones. More on
the White House scandal: should he be ousted? A report on girl
bullies. And did you know that U.S. law mandates different rights for
people based on the sex of a parent? Read on and enjoy!
MANifesto is available on the web at
http://idt.net/~per2/manifest.htm
INDEX:
LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE
FAT CHANCE
BULLY FOR THEM
GOOD FOR THE GOOSE
IF YOU ARE A FATHER, ARE YOU A PARENT?
==========
LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE
The feminists have a slogan: a woman needs a man like a fish
needs a bicycle.
When women decide they no longer need the man they married and
head for the door, they usually take the kids with them.
That means they're making the decision for the children, too:
children need a father like a fish needs a bicycle.
Well, actually, children need fathers a bit more than that.
Especially boys.
A new study shows that boys who grow up fatherless are twice
as likely to land in jail.
The study tracked 6,000 males aged 14 to 22 from 1979 to 1993.
Boys whose fathers were absent from the home had double the odds of
being incarcerated. That held true even when other factors such as
race, income, parents' education and urban residence were held
constant. In each category, at each level of family income, in each
neighborhood, good or bad, the boys who grew up without fathers were
twice as likely to go to jail.
Fatherlessness was the greatest predictor of a boy having
trouble with the law.
Feminists might ask, "What patriarchal, dads-rights,
female-oppressing backlashers wrote this report?" Well, the study was
done by a couple of "patriarchs" named Cynthia Harper at the
University of Pennsylvania and Sara S. McLanahan of Princeton
University. They presented their study to a meeting of the American
Sociological Association on August 21 of this year.
We know that feminists love to blame male problems on
"testosterone" and "male ego." And they've gotten a lot of men out
there to do the same. But those qualities, in the form of a loving
father, involved the prevention rather than the cause of many
problems. The rise in crime among young males is directly tied to the
feminist divorce revolution.
It's no secret that feminists from Simone de Beauvoir to Betty
Friedan to Hillary Rodham Clinton have compared the family to slavery
and prison and declared that the family oppresses women. Feminists
launched an assault on the family. Now that many of the casualties of
that assault are boys and young men, they blame the victims. They seem
to think there must be something the matter with males if they turn
out badly merely because their families were destroyed.
And we know that many feminists are going to blame this
problem on "deadbeat dads" who don't pay child support. But, for
starters, the study showed that child support payments did not seem to
make a difference in a boy's odds of going to jail. Hint to feminists:
stop thinking about money so much and start thinking about humanity.
Feminists are supposed to be so much more sensitive to the plight of
the needy and the powerless. They should start acting that way when it
comes to our children.
But there's something else about "deadbeat dads." The
newspapers rarely admit it, but a lot of men who stop paying child
support have been denied child visitation. They have spiteful ex-wives
who thwart their efforts to have a relationship with their kids, while
the ex-wives still demand money for their purses.
But the next time you hear the phrase "deadbeat dad," reflect
on this. You never heard that term before the feminist divorce
revolution. Deadbeat dads are a product of the feminist era in which
"women need men like a fish needs a bicycle."
So what happens when mom walks out the door on her feminist
crusade of empowerment and starts shacking up with some other guy? The
study found that boys who grow up with a stepfather in the home are at
even higher risk for going to jail. Their odds are about triple that
of boys who live with both natural parents.
We don't blame any women for getting out of a marriage or
relationship with an unfit or abusive partner. But the divorce
explosion over the last several decades has been fueled by a lot of
women who were not in abusive marriages, but marriages that had hit
rough spots, or even marriages that had become boring to them. They
had been told by feminists that virtually everything is "oppression"
of women, and they heard the feminist slogan that they should "have it
all."
That slogan involves some particularly ugly sentiments when
feminists decide to "have it all" no matter who else gets hurt.
Feminists want to be able to instantly end their commitment to
marriage, but they don't want the ex-husband's commitment to them to
end -- ever. They want to break up the home for any reason, including
the most selfish reasons, and then assume that they will automatically
receive monthly payments to continue their lifestyles. They want to
move in with a new boyfriend no matter how that boyfriend treats their
children. They want to deny their children a chance to have a
relationship with their father while demanding the father finance this
whole selfish mess.
They want "to have it all," and they want someone else to foot
the bill.
(Source: "Boys With Absentee Dads Twice as Likely to Be
Jailed: Stepfathers Don't Help, Study Finds," Reuters, The Washington
Post, Friday, August 21, 1998; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-08/21/097l-082198-idx.html)
==========
FAT CHANCE
The latest bit of man-bashing research we've seen is a U.S.
study that purports to show that young men would rather date an
anorexic woman than one who is obese. The impression the study leaves
hanging in the air is that men are shallow, sex-driven beasts whose
interest in women is only skin deep.
But of course you knew that already, right?
The study was reported in the journal "Woman and Health" by
Jeffrey Sobal and co-author Mark Bursztyn. Mr. Sobal is a "nutritional
sociologist" (we're not kidding) at Cornell University. Good old
Cornell. That's the place that once punished four male students for
circulating a list of tasteless jokes, then took no action against
feminists who sent them death threats. Good old Cornell, where freedom
of speech blows in the political wind.
So what's wrong with Mr. Sobal's purported study? The
vagueness of the term "anorexic." It has been tossed around to mean
"thinner than average," or even "wanting to be thinner than average."
We've seen some fairly curvaceous models like Elle Macpherson
described as "anorexic" when clearly they are no such thing.
Yo, researchers. Check the pinups and nude photographs that
men are looking at. Take a gander at all that stuff on the Internet.
Do you see even a single men's magazine or website that features women
who are genuinely anorexic? Maybe you missed it that the overwhelming
majority of men are recoiling in horror at how thin Calista Flockhart
of TV's "Ally McBeal" has become.
Yo, readers. In all the worthless spam you've had land in your
mailbox, have you ever seen one that promised "Hot Anorexic Action"?
How about, "Our Girls Have Thighs Smaller Than Their Kneebones"? Or
even, "Two-Way Anorexic Swinging. Or Maybe It's Three, They're So Thin
It's Easy To Miss One Of 'Em."
We suppose that a smutty anorexic website would be rated III.
Those are Xs that got really thin.
Except for one thing: you don't see smutty anorexic websites.
Or men's magazines.
What you might see, however, are fashion magazines aimed at
women. The models in such magazines usually are far, far thinner that
the average male prefers. And it's the women who are buying these
magazines and supporting the look.
Here is a challenge to every last feminist who claims that
it's men who want "anorexic" women. Send us the URL of any porno
website that advertises its models as anorexic, and we'll print it
next issue. If feminists are correct that virtually 110% of all men
are lusting after anorexic women, the Internet should be awash in
these sites. So name just one. After all, you can't do a web search
for "brussels sprouts" without getting hits for a porn site in
Belgium. So it should be real easy to find anorexia sites -- if
they're out there.
But back to Mr. Sobal's study. This survey was widely reported
in the news media as showing that men didn't want to date someone with
anorexia nervosa or bulimia. Oddly enough, Mr. Sobal found the exact
same thing about women. It was men who got the negative headlines,
though. Curious.
Furthermore, the researchers "said their findings show that
when it comes to dating, looks are still more important than
substantive factors like intelligence and personality -- at least to
young men."
Booooo, men. Such cads!
But we wonder if Mr. Sobal would like to survey women on
whether they would prefer rich men to men of average income. Would
they prefer men who hold lots of power and status, or average guys?
Would they marry a man shorter than them, or one who made less money?
Maybe women define "personality" as "having $10 million."
Remember Anne Nicole Smith -- a Playboy centerfold and
certainly no anorexic. She married an ancient, liver-spotted
millionaire who had to go down the wedding aisle in a wheelchair.
You certainly can't accuse her of being obsessed with looks
when she married a dude who looked like death warmed over. We suppose
she just loved his intelligence and personality.
We'd like to see the news media run the equivalent of Mr.
Sobal's study, examining all the shallow things that women want. But
you know what the odds of that are. Fat chance.
Mr. Sobal also opines: "We are still a weight-obsessed
society." But as we've stated in the January 1998 issue of Per's
MANifesto, the leading cause of death among women in the U.S. is heart
disease, which is directly related to being overweight. Excess weight
contributes to higher cholesterol, higher blood pressure, and other
unhealthful conditions. It's being too heavy that is killing women,
not being too thin.
Kudos to the Reuters news agency when it covered Mr. Sobal's
study. It added something that Mr. Sobal didn't tell you: "... about
55 percent of adult Americans, or 97 million adults, are overweight or
obese, according to government standards issued in June." "Weight
obsessed"? It sounds as though we could stand a little more of it.
If men prefer slimmer women to obese women, they are
preferring women who are healthier and who have a chance to live
longer. Therefore feminists accuse men of starving women to death. If
men preferred heavy women, would feminists shut up? Not a chance.
They'd say we're fattening women to death.
By now you should grasp the first principle of feminism:
whatever men do, it's evil. If they do the opposite, that's evil, too.
Mr. Sobal's survey said men and women both avoid
relationships with someone who has an eating disorder, but men would
rather date a woman with anorexia or bulimia than one who is badly
overweight. "Though eating disorders are stigmatized, obesity is much
more so,'' he says.
Hello, Mr. Sobal. Didn't you notice that being badly
overweight involves an eating disorder? You see, food has calories,
Mr. Sobal, and the body will store extra calories as fat. Eating
extremely excessive amounts of food results in excessive amounts of
fat.
We're always glad to help out a nutritional sociologist.
Especially one from Cornell.
(Source: "Men avoid dating obese women?" Reuters, August 17
1998.)
==========
BULLY FOR THEM
Someone once said that "he who becomes a beast gives up the
pain of being human."
We could add: "she who becomes a feminist does likewise."
As girls leave their "traditional" roles, incidents of
violence, violent crime, and anti-social acts such as bullying also
increase. Feminists have long blamed violent behavior on testosterone:
they have tried to paint it as a male thing. You know: women good, men
bad. But as more and more females take up the stressful roles that men
have always had to bear, they start lashing out in increasing numbers.
Let's take a look at just one aspect of this form of
"progress:" bullying.
A recent study in a British journal reported that bullying by
girls is on the increase while efforts to stop it are lagging.
The study is reported in the British Medical Journal, in an
issue released the last week of September/first week of October. It
"concluded that while bullying intervention strategies introduced in
schools during the past few years have been effective with boys, they
have been less successful with girls who bully. This snapshot study of
900 pupils aged 11 to 17 in two secondary schools found that bullying
by girls was proportionately higher than it was three years ago."
Part of the problem in dealing with girls' bullying is that
boy's bullying tends to be more overt while girls' tends to be more
subtle.
Peter Smith, professor of psychology at Goldsmiths College,
noted that "If a boy bullies, he tends to hit out or take something
from another child so you can see it happening and therefore there's
usually an objective answer; but with girls it's more to do with the
systematic and hurtful spreading of nasty stories and social
exclusion, which is harder to identify and therefore harder to deal
with."
Michelle Elliott of Kidscape, which operates a help line for
young people, "agrees that girls have always bullied in a more covert
and elusive manner but believes that increasingly they are also
becoming physically violent. Kidscape's help line has reported a huge
increase of girl bullying over the last two years ... with the younger
women reporting violence on an alarming scale, such as broken bones,
black eyes and even having their heads shaved."
"But if girls are behaving more like boys, why then aren't
anti-bullying strategies being just as effective with them? Elliott
believes it's because 'we're not adequately addressing the problem
with girls. We assume it's all verbal, so while prevention policies
have been successful in encouraging boys to be more gentle, we haven't
been reaching out to girls in the same way.' "
In other words, we've always assumed that girls' bullying is
somehow nicer, or at least not as much of a problem. And just like in
every other area of life, our tactics with the girls has always been
gentler. We whip boys and wonder why they turn out angry. We counsel
girls and wonder why they turn out better.
In liberating girls from passive roles, experts say the
pendulum has swung too far. Girls "don't seem to be able to find the
balance between being up front and being in-your-face," Eliot says.
We're not surprised at all by that. In movies and popular
entertainment, feminism has put on a low brow and taken the low road.
Torching an ex-boyfriend's car is acceptable if he hurt your feelings
("Waiting to Exhale"). Gunning down men is a form of liberation
("Thelma and Louise"). Revenge is a sacrament ("The First Wives
Club"). Hostility as a basic outlook is promoted, while constraint is
seen as unliberated, oppressive. If you aren't out there smacking
someone around or laying a trap for them, then you just aren't
liberated.
And while feminists celebrate the increase in girls in
cyberspace, keep one thing in mind: it gives them just another way to
bully. The tactics of exclusion and harassment work just as well, or
even better, on the net.
From The Age, Melbourne, Australia: "A survey of 180 students
at a Melbourne girls' school has found that while traditional forms of
indirect bullying such as verbal abuse, name-calling and spreading
rumors are still the most popular forms of harassment, more girls are
turning to technology to bully and 'freeze' out their classmates."
Findings of the survey by psychologists Ms Jenny Ricketts and
Ms Joan Beckwith were presented at the Australian Psychological
Society's conference in Melbourne. "Ms Ricketts said social exclusion
through technology was becoming an increasingly prevalent and worrying
practice in girls' schools. This form of bullying includes making
prank phone calls, sending sarcastic or abusive e-mails or excluding
others from an e-mail network.
"Ms Ricketts said while all forms of bullying were harmful,
social exclusion bullying among girls was of particular concern.
"The survey of year 7 to 12 students found that 86per cent of
girls had experienced some form of bullying at the school. Of these,
13per cent said the bullying had persisted for several months or
more."
While we're on the topic, let us tell you about Municipal
Judge Joan Comparet-Cassani in Long Beach, California.
She was presiding over a sentencing hearing for a convicted
thief, Ronnie Hawkins. Hawkins kept interrupting her. She got tired of
it.
So she ordered the bailiff to activate the remote-control stun
belt wired around Hawkins' waist. Hawkins was not threatening anyone.
He was not trying to escape. He was already shackled and chained. He
just wouldn't be quiet.
So Hawkins was slammed with 50,000 volts of electricity above
his left kidney. The attack lasted for eight seconds.
Stephen Yagman, a lawyer representing Hawkins in a civil
rights suit against Ms. Comparet-Cassani and the Los Angeles County
Sheriff's Department, says: "I think only a depraved or sadistic
person would ever use an instrument of torture like the stun belt for
simply refusing to be quiet."
(Sources: "Deadlier than the male: New research suggests that
bullying by girls is on the increase. So why haven't recent
initiatives worked?" Marina Cantacuzino, The Guardian, Wednesday
October 7, 1998.
http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/10/7/25820.html
"New-age bullies use cyberspace to harass peers," by Carolyn
Jones, The Age, Melbourne, Australia, October 6, 1998
http://www.theage.com.au/daily/981006/news/news15.html
(Source: "Stun Belts Spur Civil Rights Talk," By Minerva
Canto, Associated Press Writer, Thursday, August 6, 1998.)
==========
GOOD FOR THE GOOSE
We all know about the White House sex scandal, so let's get
down to business.
A report on his sexual misconduct says he violated standards
for continuing in his job, and that he "clearly showed poor judgment
and lack of discretion." He has two women on record making sexual
harassment accusations against him. After an investigation, a report
recommended that he be removed from office.
Should he be?
He already has been.
He is John Hicks, former U.S. ambassador to Eritrea and a
career foreign service officer. He was nominated by Bill Clinton.
Hicks' resignation was demanded and received in 1997 after two women
made accusations of sexual harassment. Their accusations remain
unproven, he-said/she-said affairs. But Mr. Hicks is out.
In any other administration, Mr. Hicks might have gotten a
fair chance. He might have been presumed, under the American law he
represents abroad, to be considered innocent until proven guilty. But
not in the administration of William Jefferson Clinton. Mr. Clinton
depends far too much on the support of feminists, who bail him out
time and again when his own zipper problems once more become the
nightly news. Male feminists like Bill Clinton will always sacrifice
other men in order to stay in good with feminists.
We know what feminists and Clinton supporters will say: the
accusations against Clinton are politically motivated. But *every*
sexual harassment accusation is politically motivated. It all depends
on whether the woman likes the man, or the offer. Basic corporate
policy on sexual harassment says that if she feels harassed, then she
was. It's not what you do that causes the crime. It's how she feels.
If she likes you, or if she likes Clinton, it's not harassment.
Feminists will respond that Clinton's case is special because
it involves political enemies. Hey, there are "political" enemies
anytime people are competing for a promotion, a raise, or a job. Women
have made sexual harassment claims in order to eliminate rivals or to
strike first if they were about to be fired for poor performance. The
former happened at Miller Brewing Company and was detailed in the July
1997 MANifesto. The latter happened at Oracle Corp. and was detailed
in the same issue.
All sexual harassment accusations are political. Most of all,
feminism's responses to such accusations are political. If the
accusation is against a political foe, feminists hector us with
accusations that we "tolerate" abuse until the accused is punished. If
the accusation is against a big corporation where feminists can
picture lots of affirmative action and special "diversity" promotions,
they hammer the company. If the accusation is against someone who
kicks a lot of taxpayer money their way, they say: "Harassment? What
harassment?"
Ambassador Hicks was terminated based on only two unproven
accusations, while Clinton is still in office. It goes to show that
what is good for the goose is not good for the gander.
As for Clinton, he's always good for the occasional goose.
(Source: "U.S. Envoy to Eritrea Quit After Sex Misconduct
Probe," Associated Press report, the Washington Post, October 31,
1998, page A10.)
==========
IF YOU ARE A FATHER, ARE YOU A PARENT?
Consider this question. You're a dad. Are you a parent?
The question might seem self evident. But when it comes to the
law, it isn't necessarily so.
U.S. law defines parenthood entirely differently for women and
men. If a child is born out of wedlock to an American woman, the child
automatically has U.S. citizenship. If a child is born out of wedlock
to an American man, the child does not have automatic citizenship. In
fact, the child would have to go through several extra steps -- and
complete them before a deadline -- in order to have the same rights as
a child who gets it automatically because of his or her mother.
This fact was highlighted recently by a Supreme Court case
involving Lorelyn Penero Miller. She was born out of wedlock to a
Filipino mother and an American serviceman. Had she been born out of
wedlock to an American service*woman,* citizenship would have been
automatic. The court, in a split opinion, turned down her bid. It let
stand the law that discriminates against children based on the sex of
their parent.
Feminists who say they are striving for "equality" in the
military might want to look into this.
At the root, of course, is the prejudice that children belong
with the mother and that the father is detachable and expendable.
Take a gander at what the Washington Post said about this
case: "The larger question, of course, is the extent to which our
society must be gender-blind even on those subjects -- such as
parenthood -- in which men and women are very different."
All right, Washington Post. Try referring to areas "in which
men and women are very different" in relationship to combat fitness,
the ability and willingness to work, artistic and literary talent, and
so on. Moral of the story: it's always permissible to say that men and
women are different if women benefit from the claim. Anything else is
"sexism."
The Post also goes on: "Does the recognition that motherhood
and fatherhood are not identical necessarily flow from and reinforce
stereotypes, or is it a nod to reality?"
Let's try this another way: "Does the recognition that boys'
and girls' math scores have never been equal flow from stereotypes, or
is it a nod to reality?"
Go ahead and print such a statement, Post. When the feminists
are done with you, we'll lay flowers at the crater where your office
once was.
Feminists launched their movement claiming that they believed
in equality. But as it shakes out, "equality" means that feminists
acquired access to traditional male roles while retaining all
traditional female privileges such as child custody. Feminists get to
enter traditionally male areas and still shut men out of traditionally
female areas. If you think we're exaggerating, take a look down
Florida way.
Robert Young raised his two daughters while his wife worked as
a senior partner in a Miami law firm. Young lead one daughter's
Brownie troop and coached another's soccer team. He stayed at home and
cared for them while his wife, Alice Hector, was out having it all.
Young had worked as an architect in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
But when Hector got the job with a Miami law firm, he gave up his
career and followed her there. Then she decided to leave him after 14
years.
She breaks up the home. And, in usual fashion, she's rewarded
with the kids. The court gave her custody. Fathers and men in general
are expendable.
Except that Young didn't see it that way. He had raised the
kids. He had stayed home. He had given up his job.
So he filed an appeal, and won.
The court decided that, as the primary caregiver, the children
would be better off with him.
We have been in several discussions with feminists who swear
that they believe the primary caregiver ought to get the children.
Problem is, one of their criteria for being named primary caregiver is
the possession of ovaries. No matter what a man does, these feminists
will always find some way to define the woman as the primary
caregiver. This way, they're sticking by their "principles" -- it's
just that their principles shift to suit the moment. One feminist once
claimed that dropping the kids off at daycare qualifies a woman as the
primary caregiver. Come again? Dumping your kids on someone else to
raise makes you a primary caregiver?
But as for Mr. Young, he may have won his appeal, but his wife
still has the kids. She asked for another hearing, and they are with
her while it is pending.
This case made for some interesting bias in the Washington
Post. It said: "The case has advocates of working mothers and
supporters of fathers' rights questioning whether a working mother
must choose between career and children if she wants to maintain
primary custody or whether a father has the same nurturing ability as
a mother."
Dear Post: We bet that this case did NOT have supporters of
fathers' rights questioning whether a father has the same nurturing
ability as a mother. We hope this was just an unintentional slip due
to poor word choice. But if this was a slip, it says something about
the culture of the Post that no one caught it or fixed it. No one
reflected on how fathers would feel about this.
As for the ex-wife, Hector, she's playing victim. Her
husband's case "sets the cause of working women back a generation,"
says Hector. What generation would that be, Ms. Hector? Your mother's
generation did not think it was entitled to work full time and still
have the prerogatives of a full-time parent. That came along with
feminists who insisted that women should "have it all."
It is typical of feminists that they think a woman should be
able to take any traditionally "male" position away from a man while
maintaining any traditionally "female" position for their own. For
feminists, equality is a one-way street. Equality does not apply to
men. Equality, at least in the working definition, means that
feminists get whatever they want.
The kicker is that Hector was the one who filed for divorce.
As we said earlier in this issue, there are many women who assume they
can walk away from a marriage and it's automatic that they take the
kids with them, no matter what.
Guess what a feminist lawyer had to say about this case.
First, just a recap. Man stays home with kids. Woman wants
divorce. Woman assumes she gets custody. Court awards her custody
right off the bat. Man has to go back to court to seek custody. While
the case is pending, the children are with the mother, who still works
full time.
Okay, so what does the feminist lawyer say? That this case is
about bias against women!
We hope you didn't have a mouthful of coffee while reading
that one.
But, says Nancy Chang, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief
supporting Hector: "The court may have been too ready to assume that
the father's contributions outweighed the mother's. It's a form of
gender bias."
Oh sure, Ms. Chang. Courts have been known for assuming that
the father's contributions outweigh the mother's.
On Mars, maybe.
As one of Young's lawyers, Barbara Green, put it: "If a trial
court had done to a stay-at-home wife what they did to Mr. Young, it
would have been reversed in a second without any protest." We agree
with that. What feminists are mad about is that a man just got equal
rights.
Ms. Chang is with a New York group that bills itself as the
Center for Constitutional Rights. Apparently feminists think that
women have a Constitutional right to have it all. Or that she has a
Constitutional right to child custody.
We bet we could shock Ms. Chang to the soul with an amazing
revelation -- something she probably never thought of: namely, that
men have rights under the Constitution, too.
There. We'll leave her alone for a bit to recover from that
bombshell.
(Sources: "Mothers, Fathers, and Citizens," Monday, April 27,
1998; Washington Post, Page A16.)
("In Miami, New Issues Of Custody Case Tests Gender, Caregiver
Roles," By Rachel La Corte, Associated Press, Tuesday, August 18,
1998; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-08/18/053l-081898-idx.html.)
=============================
THE FINE PRINT
Per's MANifesto is a monthly newsletter containing news and opinion
for people interested in gender equality and gender stereotypes.
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Each month's current issue of Per's MANifesto is on the web at
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And the Per's MANifesto Home Page is at
http://idt.net/~per2/index.htm featuring links to back issues.
With a link to The POW Page! -- a collection of favorite satire
featuring Colleen Hyphenated-Lastname and the Propaganda Organization
for Women.
You can find Per's MANifesto on the Usenet each month in
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(MANifesto is copyright 1998by Per. Please feel free to copy,
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excerpt any section, please excerpt it in its entirety.)
==========
man-bashing, anti-male stereotypes and other great moral principles.
October, 1998.
WELCOME, READERS, as we peddle you an issue we'll entitle
"LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE." Guess that makes us a *spokes*person.
Hahaha. Ahem.
Anyway, this issue takes a look at that recent report that
claims that men prefer "anorexic" women to overweight ones. More on
the White House scandal: should he be ousted? A report on girl
bullies. And did you know that U.S. law mandates different rights for
people based on the sex of a parent? Read on and enjoy!
MANifesto is available on the web at
http://idt.net/~per2/manifest.htm
INDEX:
LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE
FAT CHANCE
BULLY FOR THEM
GOOD FOR THE GOOSE
IF YOU ARE A FATHER, ARE YOU A PARENT?
==========
LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE
The feminists have a slogan: a woman needs a man like a fish
needs a bicycle.
When women decide they no longer need the man they married and
head for the door, they usually take the kids with them.
That means they're making the decision for the children, too:
children need a father like a fish needs a bicycle.
Well, actually, children need fathers a bit more than that.
Especially boys.
A new study shows that boys who grow up fatherless are twice
as likely to land in jail.
The study tracked 6,000 males aged 14 to 22 from 1979 to 1993.
Boys whose fathers were absent from the home had double the odds of
being incarcerated. That held true even when other factors such as
race, income, parents' education and urban residence were held
constant. In each category, at each level of family income, in each
neighborhood, good or bad, the boys who grew up without fathers were
twice as likely to go to jail.
Fatherlessness was the greatest predictor of a boy having
trouble with the law.
Feminists might ask, "What patriarchal, dads-rights,
female-oppressing backlashers wrote this report?" Well, the study was
done by a couple of "patriarchs" named Cynthia Harper at the
University of Pennsylvania and Sara S. McLanahan of Princeton
University. They presented their study to a meeting of the American
Sociological Association on August 21 of this year.
We know that feminists love to blame male problems on
"testosterone" and "male ego." And they've gotten a lot of men out
there to do the same. But those qualities, in the form of a loving
father, involved the prevention rather than the cause of many
problems. The rise in crime among young males is directly tied to the
feminist divorce revolution.
It's no secret that feminists from Simone de Beauvoir to Betty
Friedan to Hillary Rodham Clinton have compared the family to slavery
and prison and declared that the family oppresses women. Feminists
launched an assault on the family. Now that many of the casualties of
that assault are boys and young men, they blame the victims. They seem
to think there must be something the matter with males if they turn
out badly merely because their families were destroyed.
And we know that many feminists are going to blame this
problem on "deadbeat dads" who don't pay child support. But, for
starters, the study showed that child support payments did not seem to
make a difference in a boy's odds of going to jail. Hint to feminists:
stop thinking about money so much and start thinking about humanity.
Feminists are supposed to be so much more sensitive to the plight of
the needy and the powerless. They should start acting that way when it
comes to our children.
But there's something else about "deadbeat dads." The
newspapers rarely admit it, but a lot of men who stop paying child
support have been denied child visitation. They have spiteful ex-wives
who thwart their efforts to have a relationship with their kids, while
the ex-wives still demand money for their purses.
But the next time you hear the phrase "deadbeat dad," reflect
on this. You never heard that term before the feminist divorce
revolution. Deadbeat dads are a product of the feminist era in which
"women need men like a fish needs a bicycle."
So what happens when mom walks out the door on her feminist
crusade of empowerment and starts shacking up with some other guy? The
study found that boys who grow up with a stepfather in the home are at
even higher risk for going to jail. Their odds are about triple that
of boys who live with both natural parents.
We don't blame any women for getting out of a marriage or
relationship with an unfit or abusive partner. But the divorce
explosion over the last several decades has been fueled by a lot of
women who were not in abusive marriages, but marriages that had hit
rough spots, or even marriages that had become boring to them. They
had been told by feminists that virtually everything is "oppression"
of women, and they heard the feminist slogan that they should "have it
all."
That slogan involves some particularly ugly sentiments when
feminists decide to "have it all" no matter who else gets hurt.
Feminists want to be able to instantly end their commitment to
marriage, but they don't want the ex-husband's commitment to them to
end -- ever. They want to break up the home for any reason, including
the most selfish reasons, and then assume that they will automatically
receive monthly payments to continue their lifestyles. They want to
move in with a new boyfriend no matter how that boyfriend treats their
children. They want to deny their children a chance to have a
relationship with their father while demanding the father finance this
whole selfish mess.
They want "to have it all," and they want someone else to foot
the bill.
(Source: "Boys With Absentee Dads Twice as Likely to Be
Jailed: Stepfathers Don't Help, Study Finds," Reuters, The Washington
Post, Friday, August 21, 1998; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-08/21/097l-082198-idx.html)
==========
FAT CHANCE
The latest bit of man-bashing research we've seen is a U.S.
study that purports to show that young men would rather date an
anorexic woman than one who is obese. The impression the study leaves
hanging in the air is that men are shallow, sex-driven beasts whose
interest in women is only skin deep.
But of course you knew that already, right?
The study was reported in the journal "Woman and Health" by
Jeffrey Sobal and co-author Mark Bursztyn. Mr. Sobal is a "nutritional
sociologist" (we're not kidding) at Cornell University. Good old
Cornell. That's the place that once punished four male students for
circulating a list of tasteless jokes, then took no action against
feminists who sent them death threats. Good old Cornell, where freedom
of speech blows in the political wind.
So what's wrong with Mr. Sobal's purported study? The
vagueness of the term "anorexic." It has been tossed around to mean
"thinner than average," or even "wanting to be thinner than average."
We've seen some fairly curvaceous models like Elle Macpherson
described as "anorexic" when clearly they are no such thing.
Yo, researchers. Check the pinups and nude photographs that
men are looking at. Take a gander at all that stuff on the Internet.
Do you see even a single men's magazine or website that features women
who are genuinely anorexic? Maybe you missed it that the overwhelming
majority of men are recoiling in horror at how thin Calista Flockhart
of TV's "Ally McBeal" has become.
Yo, readers. In all the worthless spam you've had land in your
mailbox, have you ever seen one that promised "Hot Anorexic Action"?
How about, "Our Girls Have Thighs Smaller Than Their Kneebones"? Or
even, "Two-Way Anorexic Swinging. Or Maybe It's Three, They're So Thin
It's Easy To Miss One Of 'Em."
We suppose that a smutty anorexic website would be rated III.
Those are Xs that got really thin.
Except for one thing: you don't see smutty anorexic websites.
Or men's magazines.
What you might see, however, are fashion magazines aimed at
women. The models in such magazines usually are far, far thinner that
the average male prefers. And it's the women who are buying these
magazines and supporting the look.
Here is a challenge to every last feminist who claims that
it's men who want "anorexic" women. Send us the URL of any porno
website that advertises its models as anorexic, and we'll print it
next issue. If feminists are correct that virtually 110% of all men
are lusting after anorexic women, the Internet should be awash in
these sites. So name just one. After all, you can't do a web search
for "brussels sprouts" without getting hits for a porn site in
Belgium. So it should be real easy to find anorexia sites -- if
they're out there.
But back to Mr. Sobal's study. This survey was widely reported
in the news media as showing that men didn't want to date someone with
anorexia nervosa or bulimia. Oddly enough, Mr. Sobal found the exact
same thing about women. It was men who got the negative headlines,
though. Curious.
Furthermore, the researchers "said their findings show that
when it comes to dating, looks are still more important than
substantive factors like intelligence and personality -- at least to
young men."
Booooo, men. Such cads!
But we wonder if Mr. Sobal would like to survey women on
whether they would prefer rich men to men of average income. Would
they prefer men who hold lots of power and status, or average guys?
Would they marry a man shorter than them, or one who made less money?
Maybe women define "personality" as "having $10 million."
Remember Anne Nicole Smith -- a Playboy centerfold and
certainly no anorexic. She married an ancient, liver-spotted
millionaire who had to go down the wedding aisle in a wheelchair.
You certainly can't accuse her of being obsessed with looks
when she married a dude who looked like death warmed over. We suppose
she just loved his intelligence and personality.
We'd like to see the news media run the equivalent of Mr.
Sobal's study, examining all the shallow things that women want. But
you know what the odds of that are. Fat chance.
Mr. Sobal also opines: "We are still a weight-obsessed
society." But as we've stated in the January 1998 issue of Per's
MANifesto, the leading cause of death among women in the U.S. is heart
disease, which is directly related to being overweight. Excess weight
contributes to higher cholesterol, higher blood pressure, and other
unhealthful conditions. It's being too heavy that is killing women,
not being too thin.
Kudos to the Reuters news agency when it covered Mr. Sobal's
study. It added something that Mr. Sobal didn't tell you: "... about
55 percent of adult Americans, or 97 million adults, are overweight or
obese, according to government standards issued in June." "Weight
obsessed"? It sounds as though we could stand a little more of it.
If men prefer slimmer women to obese women, they are
preferring women who are healthier and who have a chance to live
longer. Therefore feminists accuse men of starving women to death. If
men preferred heavy women, would feminists shut up? Not a chance.
They'd say we're fattening women to death.
By now you should grasp the first principle of feminism:
whatever men do, it's evil. If they do the opposite, that's evil, too.
Mr. Sobal's survey said men and women both avoid
relationships with someone who has an eating disorder, but men would
rather date a woman with anorexia or bulimia than one who is badly
overweight. "Though eating disorders are stigmatized, obesity is much
more so,'' he says.
Hello, Mr. Sobal. Didn't you notice that being badly
overweight involves an eating disorder? You see, food has calories,
Mr. Sobal, and the body will store extra calories as fat. Eating
extremely excessive amounts of food results in excessive amounts of
fat.
We're always glad to help out a nutritional sociologist.
Especially one from Cornell.
(Source: "Men avoid dating obese women?" Reuters, August 17
1998.)
==========
BULLY FOR THEM
Someone once said that "he who becomes a beast gives up the
pain of being human."
We could add: "she who becomes a feminist does likewise."
As girls leave their "traditional" roles, incidents of
violence, violent crime, and anti-social acts such as bullying also
increase. Feminists have long blamed violent behavior on testosterone:
they have tried to paint it as a male thing. You know: women good, men
bad. But as more and more females take up the stressful roles that men
have always had to bear, they start lashing out in increasing numbers.
Let's take a look at just one aspect of this form of
"progress:" bullying.
A recent study in a British journal reported that bullying by
girls is on the increase while efforts to stop it are lagging.
The study is reported in the British Medical Journal, in an
issue released the last week of September/first week of October. It
"concluded that while bullying intervention strategies introduced in
schools during the past few years have been effective with boys, they
have been less successful with girls who bully. This snapshot study of
900 pupils aged 11 to 17 in two secondary schools found that bullying
by girls was proportionately higher than it was three years ago."
Part of the problem in dealing with girls' bullying is that
boy's bullying tends to be more overt while girls' tends to be more
subtle.
Peter Smith, professor of psychology at Goldsmiths College,
noted that "If a boy bullies, he tends to hit out or take something
from another child so you can see it happening and therefore there's
usually an objective answer; but with girls it's more to do with the
systematic and hurtful spreading of nasty stories and social
exclusion, which is harder to identify and therefore harder to deal
with."
Michelle Elliott of Kidscape, which operates a help line for
young people, "agrees that girls have always bullied in a more covert
and elusive manner but believes that increasingly they are also
becoming physically violent. Kidscape's help line has reported a huge
increase of girl bullying over the last two years ... with the younger
women reporting violence on an alarming scale, such as broken bones,
black eyes and even having their heads shaved."
"But if girls are behaving more like boys, why then aren't
anti-bullying strategies being just as effective with them? Elliott
believes it's because 'we're not adequately addressing the problem
with girls. We assume it's all verbal, so while prevention policies
have been successful in encouraging boys to be more gentle, we haven't
been reaching out to girls in the same way.' "
In other words, we've always assumed that girls' bullying is
somehow nicer, or at least not as much of a problem. And just like in
every other area of life, our tactics with the girls has always been
gentler. We whip boys and wonder why they turn out angry. We counsel
girls and wonder why they turn out better.
In liberating girls from passive roles, experts say the
pendulum has swung too far. Girls "don't seem to be able to find the
balance between being up front and being in-your-face," Eliot says.
We're not surprised at all by that. In movies and popular
entertainment, feminism has put on a low brow and taken the low road.
Torching an ex-boyfriend's car is acceptable if he hurt your feelings
("Waiting to Exhale"). Gunning down men is a form of liberation
("Thelma and Louise"). Revenge is a sacrament ("The First Wives
Club"). Hostility as a basic outlook is promoted, while constraint is
seen as unliberated, oppressive. If you aren't out there smacking
someone around or laying a trap for them, then you just aren't
liberated.
And while feminists celebrate the increase in girls in
cyberspace, keep one thing in mind: it gives them just another way to
bully. The tactics of exclusion and harassment work just as well, or
even better, on the net.
From The Age, Melbourne, Australia: "A survey of 180 students
at a Melbourne girls' school has found that while traditional forms of
indirect bullying such as verbal abuse, name-calling and spreading
rumors are still the most popular forms of harassment, more girls are
turning to technology to bully and 'freeze' out their classmates."
Findings of the survey by psychologists Ms Jenny Ricketts and
Ms Joan Beckwith were presented at the Australian Psychological
Society's conference in Melbourne. "Ms Ricketts said social exclusion
through technology was becoming an increasingly prevalent and worrying
practice in girls' schools. This form of bullying includes making
prank phone calls, sending sarcastic or abusive e-mails or excluding
others from an e-mail network.
"Ms Ricketts said while all forms of bullying were harmful,
social exclusion bullying among girls was of particular concern.
"The survey of year 7 to 12 students found that 86per cent of
girls had experienced some form of bullying at the school. Of these,
13per cent said the bullying had persisted for several months or
more."
While we're on the topic, let us tell you about Municipal
Judge Joan Comparet-Cassani in Long Beach, California.
She was presiding over a sentencing hearing for a convicted
thief, Ronnie Hawkins. Hawkins kept interrupting her. She got tired of
it.
So she ordered the bailiff to activate the remote-control stun
belt wired around Hawkins' waist. Hawkins was not threatening anyone.
He was not trying to escape. He was already shackled and chained. He
just wouldn't be quiet.
So Hawkins was slammed with 50,000 volts of electricity above
his left kidney. The attack lasted for eight seconds.
Stephen Yagman, a lawyer representing Hawkins in a civil
rights suit against Ms. Comparet-Cassani and the Los Angeles County
Sheriff's Department, says: "I think only a depraved or sadistic
person would ever use an instrument of torture like the stun belt for
simply refusing to be quiet."
(Sources: "Deadlier than the male: New research suggests that
bullying by girls is on the increase. So why haven't recent
initiatives worked?" Marina Cantacuzino, The Guardian, Wednesday
October 7, 1998.
http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/10/7/25820.html
"New-age bullies use cyberspace to harass peers," by Carolyn
Jones, The Age, Melbourne, Australia, October 6, 1998
http://www.theage.com.au/daily/981006/news/news15.html
(Source: "Stun Belts Spur Civil Rights Talk," By Minerva
Canto, Associated Press Writer, Thursday, August 6, 1998.)
==========
GOOD FOR THE GOOSE
We all know about the White House sex scandal, so let's get
down to business.
A report on his sexual misconduct says he violated standards
for continuing in his job, and that he "clearly showed poor judgment
and lack of discretion." He has two women on record making sexual
harassment accusations against him. After an investigation, a report
recommended that he be removed from office.
Should he be?
He already has been.
He is John Hicks, former U.S. ambassador to Eritrea and a
career foreign service officer. He was nominated by Bill Clinton.
Hicks' resignation was demanded and received in 1997 after two women
made accusations of sexual harassment. Their accusations remain
unproven, he-said/she-said affairs. But Mr. Hicks is out.
In any other administration, Mr. Hicks might have gotten a
fair chance. He might have been presumed, under the American law he
represents abroad, to be considered innocent until proven guilty. But
not in the administration of William Jefferson Clinton. Mr. Clinton
depends far too much on the support of feminists, who bail him out
time and again when his own zipper problems once more become the
nightly news. Male feminists like Bill Clinton will always sacrifice
other men in order to stay in good with feminists.
We know what feminists and Clinton supporters will say: the
accusations against Clinton are politically motivated. But *every*
sexual harassment accusation is politically motivated. It all depends
on whether the woman likes the man, or the offer. Basic corporate
policy on sexual harassment says that if she feels harassed, then she
was. It's not what you do that causes the crime. It's how she feels.
If she likes you, or if she likes Clinton, it's not harassment.
Feminists will respond that Clinton's case is special because
it involves political enemies. Hey, there are "political" enemies
anytime people are competing for a promotion, a raise, or a job. Women
have made sexual harassment claims in order to eliminate rivals or to
strike first if they were about to be fired for poor performance. The
former happened at Miller Brewing Company and was detailed in the July
1997 MANifesto. The latter happened at Oracle Corp. and was detailed
in the same issue.
All sexual harassment accusations are political. Most of all,
feminism's responses to such accusations are political. If the
accusation is against a political foe, feminists hector us with
accusations that we "tolerate" abuse until the accused is punished. If
the accusation is against a big corporation where feminists can
picture lots of affirmative action and special "diversity" promotions,
they hammer the company. If the accusation is against someone who
kicks a lot of taxpayer money their way, they say: "Harassment? What
harassment?"
Ambassador Hicks was terminated based on only two unproven
accusations, while Clinton is still in office. It goes to show that
what is good for the goose is not good for the gander.
As for Clinton, he's always good for the occasional goose.
(Source: "U.S. Envoy to Eritrea Quit After Sex Misconduct
Probe," Associated Press report, the Washington Post, October 31,
1998, page A10.)
==========
IF YOU ARE A FATHER, ARE YOU A PARENT?
Consider this question. You're a dad. Are you a parent?
The question might seem self evident. But when it comes to the
law, it isn't necessarily so.
U.S. law defines parenthood entirely differently for women and
men. If a child is born out of wedlock to an American woman, the child
automatically has U.S. citizenship. If a child is born out of wedlock
to an American man, the child does not have automatic citizenship. In
fact, the child would have to go through several extra steps -- and
complete them before a deadline -- in order to have the same rights as
a child who gets it automatically because of his or her mother.
This fact was highlighted recently by a Supreme Court case
involving Lorelyn Penero Miller. She was born out of wedlock to a
Filipino mother and an American serviceman. Had she been born out of
wedlock to an American service*woman,* citizenship would have been
automatic. The court, in a split opinion, turned down her bid. It let
stand the law that discriminates against children based on the sex of
their parent.
Feminists who say they are striving for "equality" in the
military might want to look into this.
At the root, of course, is the prejudice that children belong
with the mother and that the father is detachable and expendable.
Take a gander at what the Washington Post said about this
case: "The larger question, of course, is the extent to which our
society must be gender-blind even on those subjects -- such as
parenthood -- in which men and women are very different."
All right, Washington Post. Try referring to areas "in which
men and women are very different" in relationship to combat fitness,
the ability and willingness to work, artistic and literary talent, and
so on. Moral of the story: it's always permissible to say that men and
women are different if women benefit from the claim. Anything else is
"sexism."
The Post also goes on: "Does the recognition that motherhood
and fatherhood are not identical necessarily flow from and reinforce
stereotypes, or is it a nod to reality?"
Let's try this another way: "Does the recognition that boys'
and girls' math scores have never been equal flow from stereotypes, or
is it a nod to reality?"
Go ahead and print such a statement, Post. When the feminists
are done with you, we'll lay flowers at the crater where your office
once was.
Feminists launched their movement claiming that they believed
in equality. But as it shakes out, "equality" means that feminists
acquired access to traditional male roles while retaining all
traditional female privileges such as child custody. Feminists get to
enter traditionally male areas and still shut men out of traditionally
female areas. If you think we're exaggerating, take a look down
Florida way.
Robert Young raised his two daughters while his wife worked as
a senior partner in a Miami law firm. Young lead one daughter's
Brownie troop and coached another's soccer team. He stayed at home and
cared for them while his wife, Alice Hector, was out having it all.
Young had worked as an architect in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
But when Hector got the job with a Miami law firm, he gave up his
career and followed her there. Then she decided to leave him after 14
years.
She breaks up the home. And, in usual fashion, she's rewarded
with the kids. The court gave her custody. Fathers and men in general
are expendable.
Except that Young didn't see it that way. He had raised the
kids. He had stayed home. He had given up his job.
So he filed an appeal, and won.
The court decided that, as the primary caregiver, the children
would be better off with him.
We have been in several discussions with feminists who swear
that they believe the primary caregiver ought to get the children.
Problem is, one of their criteria for being named primary caregiver is
the possession of ovaries. No matter what a man does, these feminists
will always find some way to define the woman as the primary
caregiver. This way, they're sticking by their "principles" -- it's
just that their principles shift to suit the moment. One feminist once
claimed that dropping the kids off at daycare qualifies a woman as the
primary caregiver. Come again? Dumping your kids on someone else to
raise makes you a primary caregiver?
But as for Mr. Young, he may have won his appeal, but his wife
still has the kids. She asked for another hearing, and they are with
her while it is pending.
This case made for some interesting bias in the Washington
Post. It said: "The case has advocates of working mothers and
supporters of fathers' rights questioning whether a working mother
must choose between career and children if she wants to maintain
primary custody or whether a father has the same nurturing ability as
a mother."
Dear Post: We bet that this case did NOT have supporters of
fathers' rights questioning whether a father has the same nurturing
ability as a mother. We hope this was just an unintentional slip due
to poor word choice. But if this was a slip, it says something about
the culture of the Post that no one caught it or fixed it. No one
reflected on how fathers would feel about this.
As for the ex-wife, Hector, she's playing victim. Her
husband's case "sets the cause of working women back a generation,"
says Hector. What generation would that be, Ms. Hector? Your mother's
generation did not think it was entitled to work full time and still
have the prerogatives of a full-time parent. That came along with
feminists who insisted that women should "have it all."
It is typical of feminists that they think a woman should be
able to take any traditionally "male" position away from a man while
maintaining any traditionally "female" position for their own. For
feminists, equality is a one-way street. Equality does not apply to
men. Equality, at least in the working definition, means that
feminists get whatever they want.
The kicker is that Hector was the one who filed for divorce.
As we said earlier in this issue, there are many women who assume they
can walk away from a marriage and it's automatic that they take the
kids with them, no matter what.
Guess what a feminist lawyer had to say about this case.
First, just a recap. Man stays home with kids. Woman wants
divorce. Woman assumes she gets custody. Court awards her custody
right off the bat. Man has to go back to court to seek custody. While
the case is pending, the children are with the mother, who still works
full time.
Okay, so what does the feminist lawyer say? That this case is
about bias against women!
We hope you didn't have a mouthful of coffee while reading
that one.
But, says Nancy Chang, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief
supporting Hector: "The court may have been too ready to assume that
the father's contributions outweighed the mother's. It's a form of
gender bias."
Oh sure, Ms. Chang. Courts have been known for assuming that
the father's contributions outweigh the mother's.
On Mars, maybe.
As one of Young's lawyers, Barbara Green, put it: "If a trial
court had done to a stay-at-home wife what they did to Mr. Young, it
would have been reversed in a second without any protest." We agree
with that. What feminists are mad about is that a man just got equal
rights.
Ms. Chang is with a New York group that bills itself as the
Center for Constitutional Rights. Apparently feminists think that
women have a Constitutional right to have it all. Or that she has a
Constitutional right to child custody.
We bet we could shock Ms. Chang to the soul with an amazing
revelation -- something she probably never thought of: namely, that
men have rights under the Constitution, too.
There. We'll leave her alone for a bit to recover from that
bombshell.
(Sources: "Mothers, Fathers, and Citizens," Monday, April 27,
1998; Washington Post, Page A16.)
("In Miami, New Issues Of Custody Case Tests Gender, Caregiver
Roles," By Rachel La Corte, Associated Press, Tuesday, August 18,
1998; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-08/18/053l-081898-idx.html.)
=============================
THE FINE PRINT
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