I've Always Wondered What This "Rape Culture" Is.

The principal's "no buns, bellies, breasts" rule had stoked the destructive flames of rape culture. 

Hmm ok then. Apparently it's "rape culture" for schools to tell female pupils not to expose their breasts in class while not giving similar warnings to the males.

When I went to school I can't recall ever seeing boys deliberately dressing to expose their bodies but maybe that's just my sexist memory.

Sometimes It's Hard To Be A Woman.

Take a look at the Guardian's page of columnists, which features all the regular writers along with their latest columns.

If you break down the demographics there are 12 males and 8 females.

Of the dozen males the topics covered varies from sport to conspiracy theories to the economy. There is quite a substantial range of topics. In contrast the eight female writers cover a slightly different range of subjects:

• Hadley Freeman complains about the unfair burdens women in show business have to put up with.
• Barbara Ellen says about the sexist treatment of Andy Murray's mum and the unfair burdens that women in sport endure.
•  Zoe Williams writes about the royal family- while noting that "that squeamishness around discussing the female pudenda is rooted in a deeper hatred of women"

So three of the eight writing about how hard it is to be a woman.

On the front page of the Guardian's Comment Is Free section there are ten articles by women, including the one by Hadley Freeman. Others include:

•  Rhiannon Cosslett on the unfair burdens of a female royal.
• Ellie Cosgrave on sexual assault (an admittedly more serious issue than the other).
•  Nancy Cohen on women voters and the "Tsunami of anti-woman legislation".

Two of the other pieces are by ethnic minority women talking about the unfair burdens of being black.

So out of 17 different female writers, 6 are writing about sexism and 2 about racism. It seems that almost half the output of female columnists is self obsessed identity politics.

Priorities

Just listening to report on the merger of Scottish police forces into the awfully named "Police Scotland". The BBC reporter said "Priorities for the new force include promoting more women and reducing violent crime".

Well I'm glad that reducing crime is up there I suppose...

The Lib Dems- Wasting Police Time

This is a transparent attempt to kick the matter to the other side of the Eastleigh by-election:

Nick Clegg says a Scotland Yard investigation into allegations that Lib Dem peer Lord Rennard sexually harassed women must be allowed to run its course.

Several women have accused the former party chief executive of inappropriately touching and propositioning female party workers, which he strenuously denies.

Police announced on Monday that they will meet with party officials to discuss the allegations.

If Lord Rennard is guilty of what he is accused of- propositioning women who worked for him and stroking their leg etc- then it is a case of sexual harassment and the women in question are entitled to some redress from the party that failed to discipline him.

But it seems extraordinarily unlikely that any crime has been committed- an unwanted pat on the knee is unpleasant but it doesn't make him Jimmy Savile.

All referring it to the police does is give the party an excuse not to discuss the matter before the polls close in Eastleigh.

Is That A Communist Manifesto In Your Pocket Or Are You Just Pleased To See Me.

Disputes among the far left are tedious to outsiders at the best of times so I largely ignored the story about the Socialist Workers Party's infighting over allegations that senior members used their positions to sexually exploit women in the party.

Until I realised that one of the men accused of doing so is Martin Smith, who also leads the Unite Against Fascism front group. So can I just point out this post by myself from 2009 pointing out the uncanny resemblance between Martin Smith and a younger "anti fascist" activist.

I was joking at the time but who knows, maybe I was right.

Shades Of Gray.

As a committed anti-sexist I applaud Sky Sports for the decisiveness in sacking Andy Gray over sexist comment he made about the female assistant referee Sian Massey.

The embarrassment suffered by Massey should not be tolerated, however she wouldn't have had to endure that had she been in kitchen.

Food for thought.

Exclusive Interview With "Big Brother Burma" Champion Aung San Suu Kyi.

Whilst John Simpson and the BBC World Service are claiming to have the first interviews with freed Burmese democracy campaigner and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize; Aung San Suu Kyi. This sites special correspondent actually beat them to it. Unfortunately he was also working for Nuts at the time of the interview but it is very revealing nonetheless:

Nuts: You've been under house arrest since 1990, during which time your husband died. So you must be gagging for it by now.

ASSK: I am interested only in bring freedom to the Burmese people and if your readers want to support.....

Nuts: Talking of "support", we have to say you've got a magnificent pair of breasts, did you always wear a bra?

ASSK: That's not what I'm here to discuss. Do you not have any questions about democracy, freedom or my house arrest?

Nuts: OK love, keep your knickers on. We have loads of questions about that stuff.

ASSK: Ok thank you.

Nuts. You were kept in your house for years at a time.

ASSK: Yes..

Nuts: How long was it before you thought "why bother getting dressed, I can hang around naked all day watching Jeremy Kyle"?

ASSK: I never behaved like that.

Nuts: Yeah right!

ASSK: Don't you have any questions about the situation here?

Nuts: Alright, there have been a lot of female leaders from South and South East Asia- Benazir Bhutto, Corazin Aquino, Indira Gandhi. Which one would you snog if you had the chance.

ASSK: None of them....

 Nuts: Really?

ASSK: Yes really.

Nuts: Ironically, you've been released just months after the last series of Big Brother, don't you think you would have been awesome at that?

ASSK: Ha ha, I'm sure I would but let's talk about the Junta....

Nuts: I'd like to see what you've got up your junta! Geddit. Back to Big Brother. It's our Big Brother Big Boobs edition this week, so which contestant had the best boobs in your view, Jade Goody is ineligible?

ASSK: I don't care about Big Brother or boobs or Jade Goody or .....

Nuts: Did you really say you don't care about Jade Goody?

ASSK: Yes.

Nuts: That's very insensitive, don't you know the poor woman is dead. I'm actually shocked that you could be so hurtful.

ASSK: Sorry I didn't know she was dead or who she was.

Nuts: Yeah right, have you been locked in a darkened room for the last 10 years or something? This interview is over, get out!

Housework Disgrace

Leaving 18% of the housework undone isn't really on:

Wives and partners STILL do 82 per cent of housework

WTF!

I'm sure if anyone else wrote this then Yasmin Alibhai Brown would be calling for their head*:

I did try to sit through the Blair show. An unfortunate combination of Asiatic high emotion and feminine fragility made me feeble.

Via.

* Assuming her Asiatic emotions overwhelmed he feminine fragility of course.

I Didn't Even Know Virgin Operated In China

Is it me or do the air hostesses in the Chinese version of that Virgin ad seem less welcoming than in the original?:




Via Mick Hartley.

Polly & Harriet Go Fact Finding.

I see that Polly Toynbee, Harriet Harman and assorted other left wing women are going off to Ghana to learn about women's equality. Whilst I will never begrudge using taxpayer's money to send those two off to Timbuktu I can't help wondering whether Ghana is an obvious choice of destination to learn about women's equality. It seems like going to Bhutan to learn about coastal erosion.

Luckily the World Values Survey which I referred to in my previous post allows us to compare Ghanaian and British attitudes towards gender equality and it doesn't cost taxpayers a penny.

Question: Do you agree or disagree with the following statements? When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women

Great Britain: Agree- 16.2%, Disagree- 76.1%
Ghana: Agree- 53.6, Disagree- 37.4%

Okay Polly, Harriet, you know what you have to do in these hard economic times, resign so that a man can have your jobs. Of course that's just one variable, the folk wisdom of the Ghanaians is far more enlightened than that of our capitialistic patriarchal society, we need to look at some more questions:

If a woman wants to have a child as a single parent but she doesn't want to have a stable relationship with a man, do you approve or disapprove?

GB: Approve- 33.5%, Disapprove- 34.7%, Depends- 31.7%
Ghana: Approve- 6.2%, Disapprove- 92.0%, Depends- 1.2%

I sure hope Polly and Harriet are learning from the vibrant cultural traditions of Ghana. I'm not even going to dwell on the results for " On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do", because I'm sure that if Ghana had Gordon Brown then their result would be closer to our 20% than their 77%.

(via Mr Eugenides)

Labour To White Male Voters- You're Scum.

You have to hand it to Harriet Harperson, with a government that is deeply unpopular and struggling to maintain it's traditional bedrock support of white working class men most ministers would go out of their way to avoid antagonising them further. Not Harriet though:

Equality Minister Harriet Harman has defended controversial plans to encourage firms to discriminate in favour of female and ethnic minorities job candidates.

The new Equalities Bill is also expected to force employers to disclose salary structures in a bid to make the pay gap between men and women more transparent.

Responding to criticism that the plans could discriminate against white men, Ms Harman said "you don't get progress if there isn't a bit of a push forward".

And sure enough the voters will give Labour a bit of a push forwards, over the cliff of electoral oblivion, in 2010. It goes without saying that no serious study of the 'gender pay gap' has concluded that it is caused by evil sexist employers, but facts don't actually matter.

Update: Anonymous in the comments raises the question, is Harperson a BNP mole?

Update: I've just watched the BBC news coverage of the story, basically they declared with zero evidence that ethnic minorities and women need help in the workplace and are being discriminated against. For balance they said that critics of the law had accused the government of 'political correctness', which is no doubt true but is hardly the central criticism is it? It's an old BBC trick to present the left's case as being factual and evidence based but to present the right as basing their positions on emotive gut reactions.

Competitive Victimhood.

On the subject of the Democratic primary.....

The archetypal New York Times headline it is said would be "World to end- women, minorities hardest hit". Well it seems that the 'blacks' versus 'women' victimhood competition that the Clinton-Obama fight embodies is manna from heaven for them and their columnist Maureen Dowd:

With Obama saying the hour is upon us to elect a black man and Hillary saying the hour is upon us to elect a woman, the Democratic primary has become the ultimate nightmare of liberal identity politics. All the victimizations go tripping over each other and colliding, a competition of historical guilts.

People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?

As it turns out, making history is actually a way of being imprisoned by history. It’s all about the past. Will America’s racial past be expunged or America’s sexist past be expunged?

Leaving aside whether "America sexist past"* is in urgent need of expunging for a moment the next question is whether it makes any sense whatsoever.

If I understand it correctly in order to expunge the guilt of America's past racism against black slaves and their descendants who were heavily discriminated against up until the 1960s, Americans should vote for a guy who was conceived by a middle class Kenyan father and a white mother in 1961 and then raised in one of the most racially tolerant societies on the planet, Hawaii.

In order to expunge America's sexist past they should vote for the woman whose career has essentially depended on her being married to Bill Clinton, and in order to do this has stayed married to him even as he has conducted affairs with and sexually harassed his female subordinates. By Dowd's logic Pakistan must have really put sexism behind it when they elected Benazir Bhutto all those years ago.

This no doubt makes perfect sense to some Diversity Studies professor out there somewhere but it's baffling me.

* Does anyone really believe that the USA's past was especially sexist? Sure women had fewer rights than men until the 20th century and that is deeply regrettable but by any reasonable comparison to other societies the USA fares pretty well.

Dynasties & Feminism.

Rona Huq looks at the electoral success of female politicians in the sub-continent and asks why asian women aren't as successful in politics in Britain. The'Asian' part of the equation is pretty straightforward, it's because er we aren't in Asia. Next week I'll solve the enduring mystery of why Slovakian politics is dominated by Slovakians.

The reason for the success of women in rising to the top in the political systems of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka is not because women are held in such high regard compared to over here but because their politics is highly dynastic and being part of a famous family is more important than being male or female, this also applies to South East Asia. A quick look at the Wikipedia entries for the various female members of the front benches of the three main parties reveals that almost none of them can really be said to have inherited their status from their fathers or husbands, although god only knows how Harriet Harman has managed to get promoted. If women rose to the top in the same way that they do in south Asia then we would currently be led by Cherie Blair.

Stereotypes Debunked.

Apprenticeships courses in areas such as hairdressing are not just for girls, and providers must do more to tackle gender stereotyping, Ofsted has said.

Ofsted are quite right to challenge this insidious stereotype, after all gay men are equally good at it.

Bindelpalooza Part Two: Lunatics Running The Asylum

In her latest missive about rape (again) she urges the government to implement a publicity campaign to inform potential jurors about what rape is. However there is another snippet in the article that might explain why the conviction rate for reported rapes is so low:

I coordinated a scheme in West Yorkshire in conjunction with the CPS, to deliver specialist training to prosecutors in all aspects of sexual assault

I'm not being flippant, but I suspect that a lot of jurors harbour concerns that prosecutors are pursuing cases that should not go to court in order to advance political ideologies. When the CPS are send staff on training courses that are conducted by a cliched man hating feminist whose published work reveals that she more or less believes that any accusation should equal a conviction then that exemplifies those concerns. In fact Bindel has enthusiastically defended obviously malicious false accusers and appears to believe that no amount of evidence can prove that an accusation was false. In fact almost any description by her of a case that has featured in the news will invariably leave out any information that puts it into some kind of context. This isn't so bad for a newspaper columnist but for someone who has advised the CPS it is unacceptable. In a jury system, when the prosecution is suspected of not being interested in justice, the juries will be more reluctant to convict.

Bindelpalooza Part One- Men Off The Streets.

Julie Bindal, author of such classic Comment is Free pieces such as "Why I Hate Men" and "An End To Gender" has been on a role this week treating us to no fewer than two articles on Wednesday plus one at the weekend.

First up is "Fighting Fear", Bindel writes:

One of my friends, who has been involved in the women's liberation movement for as long as I have, sneered at me when I asked her if she was coming on this Saturday's Reclaim the Night march through London. The inference was that she had something better to do. Well there is nothing better I can think of to do on Saturday. If you are planning to watch X Factor instead of marching alongside your sisters, chanting fabulous slogans such as "men off the streets," and "yes means yes, and no means no," consider this....

Well I can think of a few things better to do on a Saturday, gardening, shopping, reading, raping, going out for dinner or watching a film for example.

Despite four decades of campaigning against domestic violence, over 100 women are still killed every year by current and former partners.

In fairness she is the only writer at the Guardian who writes about the murder rate, but 100 murders out of around 22 million adult women ( that's a guesstimate) isn't exactly an epidemic. Obviously any number of murders is too high but this is just scaremongering.

Male violence towards women and children - yes, male - is pandemic. We must force them to change - to stop raping, killing and abusing us.

Oh do I have to?

. When I march on Saturday, I will be doing so for women everywhere...

That's awfully good of her, there hardly seems any point anyone else turning up.

...because sexual violence is the only thing in the world that affects all women

A big claim which she then expands on:

let me ask you (women) something. Can you honestly say, hand on heart, that you have never feared rape? Have you never modified your behaviour, even just a little, for fear of being attacked? Remember that time you took a minicab home, alone and drunk? Did you feel relieved the next day that nothing bad happened to you? Or when you walked through a park late at night alone?

I'm pretty sure that everyone modifies their behaviour slightly to avoid being a victim of crime. I'm not entirely convinced however that the small number of men who do carry out sexual assaults on women are going to be dissuaded by a coven of femiloons denouncing the entire male sex as guilty. Maybe I'm wrong and if only more people had attended last year then the Ipswich murderer would have paused for thought and been shamed into not murdering women by the guilt felt for making women feel unsafe.

It is of course true that men commit the majority of crimes and the vast majority of violent or sexual crimes. However Bindal appears to be have made the logical fallacy (or phallusy) that because most crimes are committed men that this means that most men commit these crimes.

Bigmouth Strikes Again.

Cherie Blair writes in the Guardian that:

Even in the UK, where there has been huge progress, women in full-time work still take home 83p for every pound that men get paid and the glass ceiling at the top is as unbreakable as ever.

And, importantly, these barriers and discrimination are not an accidental byproduct of gender. They exist simply because of it.

So if Cherie had been a man she would have taken £120 482 from a children's cancer charity for a 10 minute speech instead of a measly £100 000?

Yet More Women & Prison

There seem to have been a steady trickle of arguments for the abolition of prison for women in recent months, here's another. This is not something I agree with if it means treating men and women differently for the same offence although there are some offfences that women are disproportionately likely to commit, compared to their small total contribution to crime levels, which should not result in custodial sentences. Television license evasion springs to mind as a prime example. David Wilson points out the high level of suicide for female prisoners compared to male prisoners, women make up 6% of the prison population but 12.5% of prison suicides. This despite the fact that men are more likely to commit suicide in general.

It is something worth being looked at, I suspect that a higher proportion of women than men who commit crime are in need of psychiatric help for the simple reason that serious crime is so much rarer for women that it is a more extreme form of behaviour. Individual inmates from groups (defined by sex, race, income or education level) with low incarceration rates are more likely to be disturbed than individuals from groups with high incarceration rates, because criminality is a more deviant behaviour from the cultural norms for the former group so the mentally unstable will make up a higher proportion of inmates from those groups.

In short women should not be treated differently from men in the criminal justice system however more attention paid to the mental stability of all prisoners could benefit female offenders to a greater extent than male offenders.

Polygamy & Freedom Of Religion.

A polygamous Mormon off shoot, in Canada is currently being investigated for child abuse. The allegations against the leaders of the group in Bountiful, British Columbia include the sexual exploitation of women and girls, something which seems to occur whenever polygamy is instituted. In theory it might seem straight forward to prosecute those responsible but that is without considering the baleful effect of Canada's 'fundamental rights', including the right to religious freedom. The fundamental point about 'rights' is that they are legal trump cards which if produced supercede all other considerations, so if the leaders of the sect in Bountiful are prosecuted the authorities fear that they might win their case because freedom of religion would trump the other issues involved, this would effectively legalise polygamy.

This sort of conflict is inevitable when something is made a 'right' because the concept of rights removes the need to account for the conflicting interests of other parties. Incidentally no one literally believes in complete freedom of religion, at least not the freedom of religious expression, otherwise you'd have to accept the right to practise human sacrifice if the adherents of a religion really believed it.