One of the more bizarre sub-plots from the bizarre story that is the faked balloon voyage of Falcon Heene is the YouTube video in which Falcon and his brothers claimed to be “not pussified.”

It’s a lovely video about how three young boys aren’t being “pussified,” and also, how they hate gay people. Hard to see how a family where dad has his children opine about how much they don’t want to be girls could go wrong, and so surprising that there have been, at the very least, allegations of domestic abuse against Richard Heene, the boys’ father.

Now obviously, this video is all about hating on the soi disant “feminizing” of American men, but it was the title of it — “Not Pussified” — that caught my eye. Because that links Heene back to one of the great moments in blog history.

Those of you who are newer denizens of the blogosphere may not be familiar with what is perhaps the ur-Men’s Rights screed, Kim duToit’s “The Pussification of the Western Male.” It is glorious in its awfulness, and I still hold to my initial response that it is the worst thing I have ever read, an opinion shared by many.

I don’t know that Heene read du Toit’s screed, but it seems pretty likely. At the very least, he picked up the word pussified from one du Toit’s readers, and then cheerfully passed it along to his sons. And that says something — for du Toit’s ideals are, to be blunt, awful.

The essay really should be read by anyone seeking to understand the mind of someone like Richard Heene, although I caution that it should not be read without a vomit bag by one’s side. It can’t be summarized, but here are a few choice passages:

We have become a nation of women.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. There was a time when men put their signatures to a document, knowing full well that this single act would result in their execution if captured, and in the forfeiture of their property to the State. Their wives and children would be turned out by the soldiers, and their farms and businesses most probably given to someone who didn’t sign the document.

[Several other examples of manly manliness deleted]

There was even a time when a President of the United States threatened to punch a man in the face and kick him in the balls, because the man had the temerity to say bad things about the President’s daughter’s singing.

We’re not like that anymore.

Quick interjection — du Toit is from South Africa. Yes, he now lives in America; still, I can’t help reading this and thinking, “who are you calling ‘we?’”

Now, little boys in grade school are suspended for playing cowboys and Indians, cops and crooks, and all the other familiar variations of “good guy vs. bad guy” that helped them learn, at an early age, what it was like to have decent men hunt you down, because you were a lawbreaker.

Now, men are taught that violence is bad—that when a thief breaks into your house, or threatens you in the street, that the proper way to deal with this is to “give him what he wants”, instead of taking a horsewhip to the rascal or shooting him dead where he stands.

[Several paragraphs of "proof" that modern men are weaklings deleted]

And finally, our President, who happens to have been a qualified fighter pilot, lands on an aircraft carrier wearing a flight suit, and is immediately dismissed with words like “swaggering”, “macho” and the favorite epithet of Euro girly-men, “cowboy”. Of course he was bound to get that reaction—and most especially from the Press in Europe, because the process of male pussification Over There is almost complete.

How did we get to this?

Remember, this was back in 2003, when our President was at his apex of manliness. Still, it says something that du Toit was swooning at the Mission Accomplished landing, doesn’t it?

In the first instance, what we have to understand is that America is first and foremost, a culture dominated by one figure: Mother. It wasn’t always so: there was a time when it was Father who ruled the home, worked at his job, and voted.

But in the twentieth century, women became more and more involved in the body politic, and in industry, and in the media—and mostly, this has not been a good thing. When women got the vote, it was inevitable that government was going to become more powerful, more intrusive, and more “protective” (ie. more coddling), because women are hard-wired to treasure security more than uncertainty and danger. It was therefore inevitable that their feminine influence on politics was going to emphasize (lowercase “s”) social security.

Yes, ladies — it’s your fault! Your fault that men no longer fight duels! Your fault that we no longer engage in fisticuffs, or drink until our livers explode! Blast you, and your belief that maybe it’s okay if drunken bar fights are not a daily occurrence in one’s life!

Kim du Toit whines for several more paragraphs about how television commercials show men as big doofuses, and therefore women are castrating bitches who deserve to be lonely (no, seriously: “What this guy is going to do is smile ruefully, finish his cereal, and then go and fuck his secretary, who doesn’t try to cut his balls off on a daily basis. Then, when the affair is discovered, people are going to rally around the castrating bitch called his wife, and call him all sorts of names. He’ll lose custody of his kids, and they will be brought up by our ultimate modern-day figure of sympathy: The Single Mom. You know what? Some women deserve to be single moms.”) and ranting about Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (”A bunch of homosexuals trying to “improve” ordinary men into something “better” [ie. more acceptable to women]: changing the guy’s clothes, his home decor, his music—for fuck’s sake, what kind of girly-man would allow these simpering butt-bandits to change his life around?”) and embracing misandry (”Yes, the men are, by and large, slobs. Big fucking deal. Last time I looked, that’s normal. Men are slobs, and that only changes when women try to civilize them by marriage. That’s the natural order of things.”) Oh, and also supporting sports like dog- and cock-fighting. And claiming that George W. Bush is a real man who doesn’t have to prove it. And making racist statements. And then comes perhaps the most asinine four paragraphs ever written in the English language.

Speaking of rap music, do you want to know why more White boys buy that crap than Black boys do? You know why rape is such a problem on college campuses? Why binge drinking is a problem among college freshmen?

It’s a reaction: a reaction against being pussified. And I understand it, completely. Young males are aggressive, they do fight amongst themselves, they are destructive, and all this does happen for a purpose.

Because only the strong men propagate.

And women know it. You want to know why I know this to be true? Because powerful men still attract women. Women, even liberal women, swooned over George Bush in a naval aviator’s uniform. Donald Trump still gets access to some of the most beautiful pussy available, despite looking like a medieval gargoyle. Donald Rumsfeld, if he wanted to, could fuck 90% of all women over 50 if he wanted to, and a goodly portion of younger ones too.

This is what Kim du Toit called for: the manliness of Donald Rumsfeld, and the condoning of rape — for rape is understandable, given how mean women are. And only the strong propagate — those strong enough to take by force what is not given.

That is what manhood is to men like this. Compare with the “pussification” seen by sneering troglodytes like Heene and du Toit: men taking responsibility for themselves. Choosing to think before acting, talk before fighting. Picking up the floor, maybe washing the dishes. Cleaning ourselves. Not putting our children heedlessly into harm’s way. Behaving, in short, like civilized human beings are supposed to.

It does not surprise me that a man who would raise his sons to declare that they weren’t going to be pussified would be the same kind of man who would beat his wife. Would be the same kind of man who would use his children to get ahead. Would be the same kind of man who would commit several felonies, and lie to the police, in a vain effort to get on television. It doesn’t surprise me at all, because the kind of man du Toit praised, and the kind of man Heene claimed to be, is at heart a narcissist, far more interested in himself than anyone else in the world, far more willing to risk himself and his family than to change course and admit fault. If the pussification of the Western male means fewer men like Heene and du Toit, then all I can say is that we can’t get pussified fast enough.

There are a lot of off-topic comments in this thread. Or rather, there were. But I’m now moving them to this thread. Or, rather, I will. If the plug-in I downloaded works.

UPDATE: I think it worked!

I’m really hesitant to post this, because it is so ugly and so disturbing. But… here’s a list of some of the worst quotes I’ve seen from (people I think are) MRAs and anti-feminists, commenting on George Sodini, the woman-hating racist who shot 12 women, 3 of whom died, in a health club earlier this week. There’s a bunch of quotes here, but I’m sure I could have found 2 or 3 times as many if I hadn’t gotten sick of reading.

By no means do I suggest that the quotes in this post represent the most common, centrist views in the MRA, anti-feminist and “pick up artist” communities. In most of the forums where I read these quotes, I did see occasional disagreements with the kind of thing I’m quoting — although all too often, not — and of course many condemned Sodini. And, obviously, I’ve cherry-picked the most offensive comments, not the most typical comments.

Nonetheless, most of these views are, in a way, accepted within those communities. No one is shocked to see these views posted; no one is banned or modded for posting these views; and the disagreements are, in many cases, rare and mild, if they come at all. In other words, the most vilely misogynistic garbage, even to the point of sympathizing with murder, is part of the spectrum of ordinary opinion, within these movements. And that’s both a cause for concern, and illustrates what’s so fucked about about the “men’s rights” movement and community.

MRAs aside, though, I think that George Sodini had a lot in common with attitudes in our society generally. As Amanda says, Sodini’s blog was full of absolutely typical “nice guy ™” bitterness and entitlement. Mass violence is what’s unusual about Sodini, not his sense of entitlement to sex with attractive women, nor his resentful misogyny. That sense of frustrated entitlement, I suspect, motivates most mass shooters like Sodini (which is probably why nearly all of them are white men — no one else in our society feels so entitled).

For more on anti-feminist reactions to Sodini, see Amanda, Elizabitchez, Lisa at PunkAssBlog, and Jezabel.

Quotes under the fold. Trigger warning.

Read the rest of this entry »

[Shorter Amp: Eugene Kanin famously found that 41%, or perhaps 50%, of rapes reported to police are false. Kanin's study is both badly designed and unverifiable; more reliable studies have found that between 2% and 8% of rapes reported to police are false reports.]

In a new (sort of) post on on Ifeminists, Wendy McElroy¹ suggests that false rape reports are common, relying heavily on Eugene Kanin’s famous study of false rape allegations. This study is commonly cited by MRAs and anti-feminists. McElroy writes:

How prevalent is the false reporting of sexual assault? Estimates vary widely.

According to much-cited feminist statistics, two percent of all reports are false. Susan Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will (1975), for example, claims that false accusations in New York City dropped to that level after police departments began using policewomen to interview alleged victims. Elsewhere, the two percent figure appears without citation or with a vague attribution to “FBI” sources.

According to a study conducted by Eugene Kanin of Purdue University, the correct figure may rise to the 40 percent range. Kanin examined 109 rape complaints registered in a Midwestern city from 1978 to 1987. Of these, 45 were ultimately classified by the police as “false.” Also based on police records, Kanin determined that 50 percent of the rapes reported at two major universities were “false.”

Studies and statistics often vary and for legitimate reasons. For example, they may examine different populations. But such a dramatic variance — two percent to 50 percent — raises the question of whether political interests are at work.

Tellingly, McElroy doesn’t go on to question whether Kanin — or the police whose records Kanin reported — might have “political interests” or biases. If McElroy applied her argument honestly, her “dramatic variance” logic would necessarily raise suspicions of both statistics. Instead, her skepticism (in this article, at least) is reserved solely for feminists.

I think the 2% statistic deserves skepticism and criticism; it’s popularity among feminists is an example of what I meant when I wrote “Within feminism, there’s sometimes too little skepticism regarding statistics and news stories which emphasize harms against women. We’ve created a culture which does a rotten job of self-correction.”

That said, the 2% statistic is not wildly out of line with some other reported statistics. Quoting an article in St. John’s Law Review:²

To illustrate, when the Portland, Oregon police department examined the 431 complaints of completed or attempted sexual assault in 1990, 1.6% were determined to be false. This was in comparison with a rate of 2.6% for false reports of stolen vehicles.

Similarly, Sgt. Joanne Archambault of the Sex Crimes Division of the San Diego Police Department routinely evaluated the rate of false reports over several years and found them to be around 4%.

More recently, the FBI reported an unfounded rate of 5.4% for forcible rapes (quoted in a newspaper article, via Abyss2Hope). However, because “unfounded” does not mean “false,” the actual “false” number would be lower than 5.4%. Quoting the Oregon sexual assault task force report (pdf link):

It is critical to bear in mind that a report determined to be unfounded is not synonymous with a false allegation or report. This distinction is important enough that it is worth repeating – a report that has been unfounded is not the same as a false report (or false allegation).

The FBI definition of unfounded specifically refers to cases that are found to be false or baseless. [...] Typically a baseless report is the result of a mistake of law – the reporter believed that they were the victim of a crime when based on the state criminal code they were not.

Even Eugene Kanin has written “unfounded rape can and does mean many things, with false allegation being only one of them, and sometimes the least of them.” (Pdf source.)

So how common are false rape reports? No one can say for certain. However, after conducting a review of the (extremely limited) available research, a recent report by The National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women concluded:³

When more methodologically rigorous research has been conducted, estimates for the percentage of false reports begin to converge around 2-8%.

So what about Kanin’s report, which found that over 40% of rapes reported to police are false? I wouldn’t suggest that Kanin has a political agenda — but I do think his methodology (which consists of tabulating police data from an unidentified small town) was overly credulous.

First of all, it’s important to realize that Kanin has kept secret what police force he was studying. This may have been necessary to gain access to police records, but it also means no other researcher has ever had the chance to verify Kanin’s findings and claims. There is no indication that Kanin attempted to interview any of the alleged false rape accusers to get their perspective, or in any way attempted to independently verify anything he was told by police. Kanin also implies that the recanters were told they’d be charged with filing false reports, but does not report the outcome of those charges.

In other words, Kanin’s study consists of Kanin uncritically reporting the claims of a single police force in a small, unidentified city, without those claims having been checked or verified in any way whatsoever.

Contrast that to this description of a genuinely rigorous study conducted by the British Government:³

The largest and most rigorous study that is currently available in this area is the third one commissioned by the British Home Office (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan, 2005). The analysis was based on the 2,643 sexual assault cases (where the outcome was known) that were reported to British police over a 15-year period of time. Of these, 8% were classified by the police department as false reports. Yet the researchers noted that some of these classifications were based simply on the personal judgments of the police investigators, based on the victim’s mental illness, inconsistent statements, drinking or drug use. These classifications were thus made in violation of the explicit policies of their own police agencies. The researchers therefore supplemented the information contained in the police files by collecting many different types of additional data, including: reports from forensic examiners, questionnaires completed by police investigators, interviews with victims and victim service providers, and content analyses of the statements made by victims and witnesses. They then proceeded to evaluate each case using the official criteria for establishing a false allegation, which was that there must be either “a clear and credible admission by the complainant”⁴ or “strong evidential grounds” (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan, 2005). On the basis of this analysis, the percentage of false reports dropped to 2.5%.

Kanin (quoted by Marcella Chester) describes how the police relied on by his study determined that a case was false:

In fact, agency policy forbids police officers to use their discretion in deciding whether to officially acknowledge a rape complaint, regardless how suspect that complaint may be. Second, the declaration of a false allegation follows a highly institutionalized procedure. The investigation of all rape complaints always involves a serious offer to polygraph the complainants and the suspects. Additionally, for a declaration of false charge to be made, the complainant must admit that no rape had occurred. She is the sole agent who can say that the rape charge is false. The police department will not declare a rape charge as false when the complainant, for whatever reason, fails to pursue the charge or cooperate on the case, regardless how much doubt the police may have regarding the validity of the charge. In short, these cases are declared false only because the complainant admitted they are false.

However, as the sexual assault task force for the State of Oregon (pdf link) wrote (emphasis theirs):

Victim Recantation is a retraction or withdrawal of a reported sexual assault. Recantations are routinely used by victims to disengage the criminal justice system and are therefore not, by themselves, indicative of a false report.

If over 40% of women reporting rape recant — even though multiple, more rigorous studies have found false rape reports are usually 2%-8% of all reports — that could indicate a police culture which gives rape victims an extremely strong reason to want to “disengage the criminal justice system,” even if they’re threatened with a fine or a short jail stay. And, as we will see, routinely pressuring all reported rape victims to take a lie detector test is a sign of a police department with a strong bias against taking rape reports seriously.

Jody Raphael, of the DePaul University College of Law, wrote:⁵

[Kanin's study] is frequently cited on web sites devoted to debunking the prevalence of rape. During this ten year period, the police department followed policy (now deemed unlawful by the U.S. Congress for police departments receiving federal funds) that required polygraphing complainants and suspects as a condition of investigating rape reports. Kanin’s department only declared a complaint false when the victim recanted and admitted it was.

In his published journal article, Kanin (1994) admitted that “A possible objection to these recantations concerns their validity….rather than proceed with the real charge of rape, the argument goes, these women withdrew their accusations to avoid the trauma of police investigation.”

And indeed, the Kanin study has been criticized for the department’s use of polygraph testing in every case, a process that has been rejected by many police departments because of its intimidating impact on victims. The International Association of Chiefs of Police disapproves of requiring polygraph tests during rape investigations because “victims often feel confused and ashamed, and experience a great deal of self-blame because of something they did or did not do in relation to the sexual assault. These feelings may compromise the reliability of the results of such interrogation techniques. The use of these interrogation techniques can also compound these feelings and prolong the trauma of a sexual assault” (Lisak, 2007, p.6).

Given the popularity of Kanin’s study, especially in light of the collapse of the Duke University lacrosse players prosecution, David Lisak (2007), an associate professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, cautions that this particular police department employed a common procedure in which officers’ inherent suspicion of rape victims results in a confrontational approach towards the victim that would likely result in an extraordinarily high number of victim recantations. Lisak also points out that Kanin’s is not a research study, because it only puts forth the opinions of the police officers without any further investigation on his part.

Kanin (1994) himself cautioned against the generalizability of his findings…

Sally Baird, in a letter to the editor, also cites Lisak’s article, writing:

Prof. Kanin’s study was examined in the article “False Allegations of Rape: A Critique of Kanin” by Dr. David Lisak in the September/October 2007 issue of the Sexual Assault Report. Dr. Lisak is an associate professor of psychology and director of the Men’s Sexual Trauma Research Project at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Dr. Lisak says that “Kanin’s 1994 article on false allegations is a provocative opinion piece, but it is not a scientific study of the issue of false reporting of rape. It certainly should never be used to assert a scientific foundation for the frequency of false allegations.”

He makes the point that Kanin “simply reiterates the opinions of the police officers who concluded that the cases in question were ‘false allegations.’” After citing an International Association of Chiefs of Police manual (Investigating Sexual Assaults, www.theiacp.org/documents/pdfs/RCD/Inves… p. 13), which states that polygraph tests for sexual assault victims are contradicted in the investigation process and that their use is “based on the misperception that a significant percentage of sexual assault reports are false,” Lisak then observes that “It is noteworthy that the police department from which Kanin derived his data used or threatened to use the polygraph in every case… The fact that it was the standard procedure of this department provides a window on the biases of the officers who conducted the rape investigations, biases that were then echoed in Kanin’s unchallenged reporting of their findings.”

For more reading, I’d highly recommend:

Abyss2Hope is far and away the best blog on this subject: Here, here, here, here and here, for starters. And see as well, Date Rape Is Real Rape.

Successfully Investigating Acquaintance Sexual Assault: A National Training Manual for Law Enforcement includes an excellent chapter on the question of false rape allegations (pdf link).

False Reports: Moving Beyond the Issue to Successfully Investigate and Prosecute Non-Stranger Sexual Assault (pdf Link).

1. If McElroy’s post feels a little stale, that’s probably because it’s a Kobe-related column she wrote six years ago, with paragraphs strategically deleted. (back)
2. Hecht-Schafran, L. (1993). Writing and reading about rape: A primer. St. John’s Law Review, 66, 979-1045. Due to the age of those studies, I haven’t read the primary sources, or even the secondary source, which was quoted to me in an email from Kimberly A. Lonsway, co-editor of Sexual Assault Report. (back)
3. Quoted from “False Reports: Moving Beyond the Issue to Successfully Investigate and Prosecute Non-Stranger Sexual Assault,” by Kimberly Lonsway, Joanne Archambault, David Lisak. (Pdf link.) (back) (back)
4. I’m a bit skeptical of accepting an “admission by the complainant” as proof of a false rape report, for reasons described elsewhere in this post. In this case, it would depend on what their criteria for “clear and credible” are. (back)
5. Violence Against Women, Vol. 14, No. 3, 370-375 (2008). Pdf link. (back)

In a couple of posts in January, I touched on the topic of “male-bashing.”

“Male-bashing” is an inaccurate phrase, since — as Hugo says — words are not fists. (And see this post by Mandolin, as well.)

But in general, I understand the phrase “male-bashing” to mean not literal bashing¹, but “unfair criticism of men, rooted in prejudice against men.”

Well, unfairness and prejudice — how could I defend that? Really, I can’t. I don’t believe that anyone should be judged or treated differently based on what’s between their legs.² There have been times when I’ve encountered outright anti-male bigotry on feminist boards, both directly and indirectly (such as women who agreed with a man in argument having their positions dismissed as “male-coddling,” which is sexist against both sexes).

That’s prejudiced, and it sucks. No doubt about that, at least in my (male) mind. On the occasions I encounter stuff like that, sometimes I object, and sometimes I roll my eyes and mutter under my breathe about picking battles.

But I still think that male-bashing — or, rather, the intellectual space for male-bashing — is necessary.

Mainly because what male-bashing is, is contested territory. If a feminist scholar says that rape is extreme behavior, but part of the spectrum of normal male behavior, is that male-bashing? That’s pretty clearly what Christina Hoff Sommers insinuated when, seeking to discredit Mary Koss’ rape prevalence research, she wrote (emphasis Sommers’):

In 1982, Mary Koss, then a professor of psychology at Kent State University in Ohio, published an article on rape in which she expressed the orthodox gender feminist view that “rape represents an extreme behavior but one that is on a continuum with normal male behavior within the culture” (my emphasis). Some well-placed feminist activists were impressed by her.

So is Koss’ statement anti-male? Apparently Sommers thinks so, but I don’t know why. Koss isn’t saying all men are rapists; she’s not saying that for men to rape is normal; she’s saying that there is a continuum of male sexual behavior, and rape is an extreme on that continuum.³ You might disagree with that, but should the very thought be off-bounds for those of us who want to avoid being bigoted against any sex? I don’t think so.

Similarly, I’ve more than once seen critics of feminism suggest that being critical of masculinity is anti-male. From my perspective, nothing in this world is more harmful to men than cultural norms of masculinity, and nothing more profoundly anti-male than the idea that the ideals of “masculinity” should not be criticized or changed (or, preferably, done away with). Every person who is against challenging the idea of masculinity, is in favor of boys being beaten and bullied in schoolyards; is in favor of men going off to stupid wars where they can be shot and blown up, mainly by other men also trying to be masculine; etc, etc. But for other people, my entire line of thinking is somehow “anti-male.”

Historically, the idea that women needed the vote — (”What are you saying, that men don’t vote in the best interests of their families?”) — was once considered anti-male. I’ve more than once been told that thinking that men and women should be equally represented in government, was anti-male and sexist, because I was claiming that male politicians can’t represent women. (I do think an individual male politician can represent women. I’m not sure a governing body that’s 85% male can adequately represent a population that’s 51% female). I’ve also been told, again and again, that my belief that children of lesbian couples turn out fine without a father is anti-male (never mind that I’d say the same thing about motherless children of gay male couples).

The intellectual freedom to be anti-male is necessary, because today’s common sense was yesterday’s anti-male screed, and today’s screed tomorrow’s common sense. It would be bad for both women and men if all of feminism’s good ideas were dropped because they were labeled anti-male.

* * *

There’s another reason, which I believe but am having difficulty articulating: I think that when fighting an entrenched, unjust system, radical ideas are valuable as a “shock to the system.” (Credit to Mandolin, who discussed this with me in IM a while ago, for influencing my thinking on this.) There is a value in fiery rhetoric; there is a value in saying “fuck all that shit.”

1. Of course, some men are literally bashed, but this is usually called “violence” or “abuse,” not bashing. (back)
2. I can think of a few very narrow exceptions to this, in cases that either have to do with genuine physical differences, such as having urinals in men’s restrooms but not women’s, or that are intended to mitigate the effects of already-existing sexism, such as affirmative action. (back)
3. In context, Koss’ paper (published in The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology) argued that a spectrum approach is a more useful way of categorizing “sexual aggression/sexual victimization” than a typological approach, which says a “subject is either a rapist, a rape victim, or a control subject. Recently, several writers have suggested that a dimensional view of rape be adopted. In this framework, rape represents an extreme behavior but one that is on a continuum with normal male behavior within the culture.” (back)

In a speech, self-described “conservative feminist” Christina Hoff Sommers said:

Let me turn to my second major objection to contemporary feminism: its reckless disregard for the truth. In doing research for my books, I looked carefully at some standard feminist claims about women and violence, depression, eating disorders, pay equity and education. What I found is that most –- not all —- but most of the victim statistics are, at best, misleading –- at worst, completely inaccurate. [...]

I partly agree with Sommers: Too many feminists — including those we rely on to get facts right (such as academics and published writers) — have been careless about fact-checking their claims. Critiquing a textbook on domestic violence, Sommers writes:

Zorza also informs readers that “Between 20 and 35 percent of women seeking medical care in emergency room in America are there because of domestic violence.” This claim is ubiquitous in the feminist canon. But is it false. There are two legitimate studies on emergency room admissions: one by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and another by the Centers for Disease Control. The results of both indicate that domestic violence is a serious problem, but that it is far down on the list of reasons women go to emergency rooms. Approximately one half of one percent of women in emergency rooms are there seeking treatment for injuries from domestic violence.

Sommers cites a second recent textbook, The Penguin Atlas Of Women In The World, which repeats the same error. And she’s right — it is an error. (Although, as I’ll show in a future post, Sommers’ counter-claims are just as false.)

I think this is the strongest of Sommers’ claims. Sommers is right to say that “false assertions, hyperbole and crying wolf undermine the credibility and effectiveness of feminism in general.” And many errors could easily be avoided if authors just checked primary sources — something that professional writers and academics should do routinely.

Within feminism, there’s sometimes too little skepticism regarding statistics and news stories which emphasize harms against women. We’ve created a culture which does a rotten job of self-correction.

But although she has a point, Sommers is still substantially wrong, for two reasons. First, Sommers conflates unambiguous errors of fact — which will inevitably happen sometimes, especially in a movement the size of modern-day feminism — with well-reasoned disagreements. And secondly, Sommers’ own work is full of errors, and at times actually deceptive.

In her lecture, Sommers writes:

Some of you are probably thinking –- the literature on feminism is vast and complex –- there are bound to be some mistakes. So what? But I and other investigators have not found “some mistakes.” What we have found is a large body of blatantly false information. The Domestic Violence Law textbook and the Penguin Atlas of Women in the World are not the exception. They are the rule.

So here’s Sommers’ argument:

1) Feminist writers sometimes repeat “blatantly false information.”

2) This errors are the rule, not the exception. This is documented in the works of Christina Hoff Sommers and “other investigators.”

3) Therefore, feminism, as a rule, consists of “a large body of blatantly false information.”

The trick here is in point 2. Sommers wants us to believe that her critiques of feminism, as well as those by “other investigators,” are filled with examples of feminists making unambiguous factual errors. But that’s not true. In Sommer’s book Who Stole Feminism?, Sommers does catch feminists making some unambiguous errors, but most of the book is taken up by subjective political disagreements, not by fact-checking.

In order to accept that Sommers’ work demonstrates that a “reckless disregard for truth” is the “rule,” “not the exception,” we’d have to accept that anytime a feminist disagrees with Christina Hoff Sommers — because such disagreements take up most of Sommers’ work — that is evidence of a reckless disregard for the truth. But of course, it’s no such thing.

So what do I mean when I say subjective political disagreements? By “subjective political disagreements,” I mean questions that reasonable, honest people, basing their opinion on well-founded evidence, can disagree with Christina Hoff Sommers on.

I will focus on one example: the rape prevalence research of Mary Koss. Koss’ research is probably the single example that “conservative feminists” and their allies have used most often to “prove” feminist dishonesty, ¹ starting in the early 1990s in books like Sommers’ own Who Stole Feminism?, and continuing to this day (Heather MacDonald published an attack on Koss’ research just last year). According to the Independent Woman’s Forum,² Koss’ research is the “number one feminist myth” in America.

So what was Koss’ rape research? In the 1980s, Koss pioneered a new approach to surveying populations about their past experiences with rape. Where previous surveys measured rape prevalence by asking respondents a single, sometimes hilariously vague question (”Has anybody ever attacked you in any other way?”), Koss asked a series of comparatively specific questions (”Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man threatened or used some degree of a physical force (twisting your arm, holding you down, etc.) to make you?”) about respondents’ experiences.

Koss’ study of “hidden rape” proved three important facts, which feminists and criminologists had long suspected: that rape happened much more frequently than official numbers indicated; that most rapes aren’t committed by strangers; and that most rapes are never reported to police or other authorities.

Koss’ study, in the decades since, has led two parallel lives. In one life — a life lived in books funded by right-wing foundations, anti-feminist websites, and the like — Koss’ work is an enduring symbol of feminist dishonesty and deception, and is considered a discredited joke, trotted out for rehashed debunkings every couple of years.

In another life, however — a life lived among academic experts — Koss’ work has been amazingly successful. Decades later, her work is respectfully cited in peer-reviewed studies — a few years ago I found that just two of Koss’ articles had been cited over six hundred times.³

Although subsequent research has arguably improved on Koss’ 1980s work, her insight — that rape victims are more likely to recount their experiences in response to a series of behaviorally-specific questions — is accepted by virtually all published rape prevalence researchers. And Koss’ central findings (described above) have been replicated in study after study, including two major studies conducted by the Federal government.

By ordinary academic standards, a frequently-cited study which has been replicated multiple times is solid work. That’s not to say that Koss’ study was perfect — no study ever is — but citations plus replication is the gold standard.

Of course, reasonable people can sometimes disagree with professional researchers, and Sommers and other “investigators” are entitled to their opinions.⁴ But Sommers’ position on Koss’ research isn’t that reasonable people can disagree. Instead, she and other “investigators” have repeatedly used Koss’ research as their major example of feminist lying, even though Koss’ results are widely accepted by experts and have been replicated over and over.

This is the central dishonesty of Sommers’ thesis: She claims her work shows that feminists “as a rule” have “reckless disregard for the truth,” but most of her book concerns matters that an honest person could easily disagree with Christina Hoff Sommers about.⁵

Sommers has to frame all her disagreements with mainstream feminism as feminist lying, because that is the basis of her case against feminism. If she admits that reasonable, honest feminists can disagree with Christina Hoff Sommers, she loses her claim that modern feminism consists of “a large body of blatantly false information… at best, misleading –- at worst, completely inaccurate.”

* * *

Earlier this post, I said that “Sommers’ own work is full of errors, and at times actually deceptive.” In my next post in this series, I’ll back that statement up, using her discussion of emergency room admissions as my example.

This post appears both at “Alas, a Blog” and at “Blog By Barry.” To facilitate intra-feminist dialog, the comments at “Alas” are only open to feminists, while the comments at “Blog By Barry” are open to all.

1. Think I’m exaggerating? Here is an incomplete list of books which rehash the “conservative feminist” arguments against Koss’ research: The Morning After by Katie Roiphe; The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism by Carrie Lukas; Dead End Feminism by Elisabeth Badinter; Lip Service by Kate Fillion; Tax-funded Politics by James T. Bennett; A Nation of Victims by Charles J. Sykes; Moral Panic: Biopolitics Rising by John Feteke; The New Victorians: A Young Woman’s Challenge to the Old Feminist Order‎ by Rene Denfeld; The Myth of Male Power by Warren Farrell; Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men? by Warren Farrell, Steven Svoboda, & James P. Sterba. It’s likely there are additional books I’m unaware of, not to mention dozens of articles and hundreds of website. (back)
2. A Sommers-influenced “conservative feminist” think tank. (back)
3. In Who Stole Feminism, Sommers claims that Koss’s work is frequently cited by activists but “not so much by established scholars in the field of rape research.” It would in fact be hard to name a scholar of rape prevalence who has been cited more often in the professional literature. (back)
4. To delve into the details of the debate, including detailed responses to the arguments most often brought up by Sommers and other “investigators,” see my past posts about the Koss controversy. (back)
5. It’s not just rape prevalence research; I could make similar arguments for how Who Stole Feminism? treats topics like domestic violence, education, the wage gap, etc…. (back)

I was thrown off my horse by strep throat, but I am planning to continue my series responding to Christina Hoff Sommers.

First, however: Over at The Y Files, columnist Cathy Young responds to part two of my series.

Cathy begins, I think, by misunderstanding what I meant when I said “If man-hating is so pervasive in contemporary feminism, why don’t men in feminism encounter it more?” Cathy responds:

Barry says he hasn’t seen any male-hating attitudes from feminists except for a few people on the Ms. boards way, way back. I’m guessing the late Andrea Dworkin, famous for such aperçus as, “Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman,” or “Male sexuality, drunk on its intrinsic contempt for all life, but especially for women’s lives…”, does not qualify? ¹

But — like David Cohen, who I quoted — I was talking about the feminists I’ve directly interacted with. (Was this really so unclear in context, Cathy?) Alas, I never met Andrea Dworkin.

To be sure, there are some stunning anti-male quotes from Dworkin and a few others — quotes I’ve often seen recycled by critics of feminism. (Some of these quotes are out of context or fabricated, but some are real.) Are they representative of day-to-day feminism, of most feminists, or of current feminism? Not in my experience.

But this brings up something I’ve wondered about for quite a while. When I read MRAs, as well as “conservative feminists” like Christina Hoff Sommers, a narrative history of feminism tends to emerge, which goes something like this: Once upon a time there were the suffragettes, who were libertarian or conservative and they were Good. Then came the second wave feminists in the 60s and 70s, who fought for equal pay and the like, and they were Good. But in the 1980s came the Evil “gender feminists” or “victim feminists,” who turned feminism into man-hating victimology, and feminism has been Bad ever since.

But curiously enough, when reading Sommers and others, it quickly becomes apparent that most of their examples are from 60s and 70s feminism. And so Sommers makes a big deal of the word “ovulars,” a term from the 1960s that no one but Sommers herself uses nowadays. Dworkin, Young’s example, peaked in influence and prominence in the 70s, became a hugely controversial figure within feminism in the 80s, and pretty much faded from prominence after that. Most of the feminists I see quoted as proof of how awful and man-hating feminists are (Robin Morgan, Germaine Greer , Marilyn French, etc) came into prominence in the 60s and 70s.

60s and 70s feminism was, frankly, a lot wilder, and a lot more unrestrained. This has its good side (I’m a fan of some of Firestone’s wilder digressions), but also a negative side, in the unrestrained anti-male sexism of some feminist leaders. But it’s interesting that the peak of anti-male sexism in feminism — which I’d say was when Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol — happened before many of today’s feminists had even been born. Yet according to the conservative feminist narrative, feminism now is much worse than feminism then.

It’s a new century, but conservative feminists and MRAs are still nattering on about what Robin Morgan said in the 70s, or about the super bowl Sunday controversy from over a quarter century ago. Let me ask you this, Cathy: take stock of what feminists have been doing and saying this century. Do you really think that Andrea Dworkin saying “Male sexuality, drunk on its intrinsic contempt for all life” is typical of current-day feminism?

* * *

Cathy also defends the relevance of The Vagina Monologues, which, I’ll remind readers, was the one and only example Sommers gave in her lecture to support her argument that feminist believe that “men are beasts.” I don’t find anything Cathy comes up with persuasive. Yes, The Vagina Monlogues are very popular, but it’s still fiction, and it’s still just one example. No honest person can claim with a straight face that a single work of fiction proves anything about feminism in general.

Analyzing pop culture is valuable; but to discuss a general trend in pop culture, one must analyze multiple works, and show that a pattern actually exists. Otherwise, all you have is cherry-picking — Sommers’ stock in trade.

So what is feminist pop culture? It’s Vagina Monologues, sure (and nothing wrong with that; not the greatest work of literature, but it’s funny and sexy and it’s raised tons of money for good causes); but it’s also Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the songs of Ani Defranco and the comedy of Wanda Sykes and a dozen other things. I think looking at all these things would produce a more complex, but more honest, picture of feminism than Sommers’.

When I suggested Sommers should be able to provide a couple of quotes from current, prominent feminists saying “men are beasts,” Cathy says I set the bar too high. Maybe, although I’d accept quotes that amount to the same thing (such as the Dworkin quotes Cathy recycled). But if I raise the bar too high, Cathy digs a trench and drops the bar in.

Here’s where I’d set the bar: Current feminists, please. Multiple quotes from this century. Quotes from actually published, known feminists, not students quoted in some student paper or something said in the comments section of a blog. And if you’re going to claim that these quotes represent current feminism, then the quotes should be from a representative variety of current feminism: not only white feminists, and not only radical feminists, and not only academic feminists. (Or, if the only quotes you can find are from a particular sub-group of feminists, say so, rather than falsely claiming that this represents all of current feminism.)

Is that a high bar? I’d say it’s a reasonable bar, given the extreme and far-reaching claims made by Sommers. If Sommers can’t provide reasonable evidence for her claims, then it’s up to her to moderate her claims, not up to me to lower the bar.

(Cross-posted at Blog by Barry.)

1. The first quote is from Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics, 1976. The second quote is from “The Night and Danger,” a speech Dworkin delivered in 1979. The text of the speech is reprinted in her book “Letters From A War Zone,” and is available online here. (back)

Christina Hoff Sommers criticizes feminist professors for using the made-up word "ovulars" -- but in the last quarter-century, practically the only person who's used the word is... Christina Hoff Sommers.

Feminist Law Professors has posted the text of a lecture by Christina Hoff Sommers, entitled "What’s Wrong and What’s Right with Contemporary Feminism?" ((There's also a video, here. I'll mostly be critiquing the text version, which is easier to quote.)) Despite the title -- which is, Sommers notes, a softening from her original title, "Reject Contemporary Feminism" -- Sommers has almost nothing positive to say about contemporary feminism. The lecture (which can be read here, in pdf format) is 23 pages long, of which a page and a half is what's "right with" feminism; the rest is what's wrong. (In Sommers' opinion, anyway.)

This is the first of a planned series of blog posts responding to Sommers' lecture. In some posts I'll be directly criticizing her arguments; in other cases, I'll use her arguments as a springboard for thoughts of my own. I actually agree with a couple of her criticisms of contemporary feminism, and I'll note those areas of agreement as I go along. By and large, however, Sommers' arguments fall apart under examination.

Sommers opens with a funny anecdote about her dad, which I won't discuss here, but David reprints it on his blog.

I think Sommers -- who quit academia years ago to work for a right-wing think tank -- may suffer from spending too much time talking to people who agree with her. (This is a very common flaw among both feminists and non-feminists). This lecture was originally written for the Federalist society; I doubt that they blinked at all upon being told that it is her "bias toward logic, reason, and fairness that has put me at odds with the feminist establishment." Nor would they have been bothered by her expression of pity for boys with feminist mothers. But if she's sincere about wanting to have respectful dialog with mainstream feminists, snarky comments like that are counterproductive.

On to the critique.

* * *

Sommers uses the timeworn technique of quoting something silly-sounding an academic once said, and using this to generalize about the whole of "contemporary feminism." For instance, to show that "feminism was being hijacked by gender war eccentrics in the universities," Sommers writes:

To give one quick example, one of my colleagues in feminist philosophy referred to her seminars as "ovulars." She rejected the masculinist “seminar” because the root of that word is associated with, well, the very essence of male power. It is actually very funny when you think about it. But this woman was not kidding.

That does sound eccentric (and frankly silly, if it wasn't tongue in cheek). But is this a substantive critique of feminism, or just a cheap shot? If you flip to Sommers' endnotes, you'll find a citation to a use of "ovulars" by Professor Joyce Trebilcot 25 years ago. Googling shows that the word has hardly spread to common usage -- Google knows of only 300 times the word has been used on English language webpages.

But isn't 300 a lot? No, not really. For comparison, "heterocentric," a feminist neologism feminist academics actually use, is found 14,000 times. And 130 of the 300 usages of the word "ovular" are times when Christina Hoff Sommers used the term. If any contemporary feminist is using the term, it's not the feminists Sommers criticizes; it's Sommers herself.

(Most of the other usages are irrelevant to this discussion: references to a radical lesbian photography collective from 1979, right-wingers making fun of feminism, medical discussions, a women's center newsletter from 1974 (pdf link). I found only one instance of the word being used by feminist academics to refer to classes taught: an experimental UK program called "Ovular" which existed for a couple of years and offered "seminars".)

"Ovulars" is a term that was used by a handful of feminists in the 1970s, and by a single feminist professor in the 1980s. I'm not aware of a single relevant use of the term that's less than 20 years old. So it's obviously unfair and illogical to use "ovular" is an "example" of what's wrong with "contemporary feminism." ((To be sure, Sommers did say this was just "one quick example." But I assume that she wouldn't have chosen such a lousy example, if her other examples are all much better.))

This dispute is not, in and of itself, an important question. But I've spent this post discussing it because "ovulars" is an excellent illustration of three consistent flaws in Sommers' criticism:

1. Cherry-picking wildly unrepresentative examples.
2. No acknowledgment of differences between 1970s/1980s feminism and contemporary feminism.
3. Important context (in this case, that her example is a quarter-century old) is either omitted or buried in endnotes.

These flaws came up again and again in Sommers' book Who Stole Feminism, and they are unfortunately present in this lecture, as well.

(Hmmn. Over 700 words, and I'm only as far as page 2 of her lecture. I'll try to pick up the pace.)

To facilitate intra-feminist discussion, comments on this post on "Alas, a Blog" are limited to feminist and feminist allies only. However, the cross-post at "Blog By Barry" is open to feminists and non-feminists.

[This is the third post in a series, criticizing the recent campaign by anti-feminist Glenn Sacks against The Family Place. I'd like to remind readers that "Alas, a Blog" will match any contributions you make to The Family Place this week (up to $800 total), so please donate, and then let me know in comments or by using the form!]

This post continues the interview with Paige Flink, the executive director of The Family Place. The Family Place, a Dallas-based group providing shelter and services to victims of domestic violence, was the subject of a recent campaign by men’s rights activists, led by Glenn Sacks.

Once again, thanks to Ms. Flink for being nice enough to talk with me.

Did Glenn Sacks, or any other men’s rights activist, contact you about these ads prior to beginning their campaign?

No. They started blasting before I ever heard from him.

Did Glenn Sacks directly call or write you once his campaign had begun?

He did call me later, kinda the way I remember it happening, our bus ads had been up for about three weeks, the Dallas news ran an article about it. He [talked about the ads] on a Sunday radio show, and then on Monday DART was deluged with emails. Then I got a call from him the following week. He called saying, and I’m paraphrasing, “I have a way for you to get yourself out of this mess you’ve gotten yourself into.” I did not return his phone call.¹

Why didn’t you return his call?

Well, I didn’t return his call.. at that point, we were being attacked. It wasn’t a conversation I had started, and I didn’t feel like my point of view would make any difference.

Does The Family Place provide services to male victims of domestic violence?

Yes we do. We do. Of course, there’s a huge difference in the number. On an average year we’ll shelter between 700 and 900 women and children, and we’ll council 8-20 men who are victims.

We do not shelter men in the facility, but we do provide hotel vouchers. We have a suite we can use. Most of the men who have come to us have been men in same-sex relationships, so we work with the Dallas Resource Center, which provides services for gays and lesbians. And when they come with kids we help them too; we have sheltered men with children.

Would you consider bus ads designed to reach out to male victims of violence?

We would certainly consider it. This was our 30th anniversary and we had been saving money for a campaign, and we targeted women specifically because our experience has been that when women think about what their children are witnessing, they are more likely to take action. We are ultimately trying to prevent murders, and women are the most likely victims of murder in these situations.

It was a small campaign, but we wanted it to be memorable.

Would you have been open to, for example, the idea of Glenn and his audience raising funds to help pay for an ad campaign reaching out to abused men?

Sure. My experience has not been that with these father’s rights groups, but if a father’s rights group had contacted us and said we want to help raise money to provide counseling services and to provide shelter, that would have been incredible. But that’s never happened.

How would you respond to a men’s rights activist who said “men aren’t using the services because there hasn’t been enough outreach to men”?

I would talk about the reality of the person who seems harmed the most, and with limited funds, we have to serve the people who are in the most danger. The lethality in family violence of a women who’s being harmed by a man is greater. We don’t have unlimited funds, and the most vulnerable are the women who have children. The women in our shelter usually come because their children have become a target. That is the very specific response we were targeting in our campaign.

We weren’t trying to make a big point about “sexism” and all of those other things — that wasn’t the point. We had a very specific point we were trying to make: There is a cycle of violence. We want to reach the people who most need our help. We want to reach them before they get murdered.

What advice would you give a men’s rights activist who is sincerely concerned about male victims of domestic violence?

I would say, get together another group of men and raise the money to provide the services for the people you say are needing them. And go out there and say “we are the new men’s shelter, and we are here to serve men who have been victims of family violence and sexual violence in their homes.” Do it just the way the women’s shelters stared 30 years ago.

Then show when you open the doors — when The Family Place opened the doors in 1978, it was full, because so many people needed help. Then show the numbers, go back to your donors, and say “I had to turn away 100 men because I lacked the funding.” Everything that happened with shelters for women, happened because of the demand.

Don’t put me down because I’m trying to help somebody. Go out there and help somebody.

Instead of bashing women’s organizations, stand up and help somebody yourself. That’s what I’d say.

1. Glenn, on his own blog and in “Alas” comments, recalls his voicemail message differently: “in my voice mail I did commend her for the good work that her organization does on behalf of abused women.” (back)

[This is the second post in a series, criticizing the recent campaign by anti-feminist Glenn Sacks against The Family Place. I'd like to remind readers that "Alas, a Blog" will match any contributions you make to The Family Place this week (up to $800 total), so please donate, and then let me know in comments or through this form.]

Prominent right-wingers Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin recently praised Glenn Sacks’ campaign against The Family Place, a domestic violence shelter that provides help to both female and male victims of intimate violence. Reynolds said:

They didn’t try to get anybody fired but they contacted them and asked them, “Did you realize that your money is supporting these ads? Is this what you want to do?”

They made a very big point of being very polite about it and not making any threats. They did get some action and did it without trying to get anybody fired or booted from their jobs or doing anything vicious.

Because there’s nothing vicious about attempting to cut off the funding of a domestic violence shelter.

I suspect that Reynolds learned this from Glenn Sacks’ site, where Glenn claimed this “achievement” for his campaign:

A sub-group of our protesters who I selected called over 50 of The Family Place’s financial contributors to express our concerns about the ads. Most contributors said they sympathized with us, and many told us they thought the ads and the subsequent protest were an embarrassment to The Family Place. Many contacted Family Place Executive Director Paige Flink with their concerns.

Several of The Family Place’s financial contributors withdrew or reduced the financial gifts they planned for the end-of-the-year giving season.

Like Roy Eduso in The Village Voice, and the blogger at Glenn’s Cult (warning: that link makes an annoying noise), I was concerned when I read this; I’d hate for the anti-feminists to succeed in depriving abused women and men of desparately needed support and services.

Fortunately, according to Paige Flink, Glenn vastly exaggerated the effects of his campaign. Unfortunately, contrary to what Glenn Reynolds (and, probably, Glenn Sacks himself) believes, the calls made to The Family Place’s volunteers and donors due to Glenn’s campaign were anything but polite.

Ms. Flink was kind enough to talk to me on the phone. Glenn Sacks declined to make any “on the record” comments to me.

Can you tell me how long you’ve been at The Family Place?

I have been on staff at The Family Place for seventeen years, and I was a volunteer for three years prior to that.

Is it a difficult job?

It is hard work, but when you see success… It’s unbelievable the families that we help. Even if they’re only in the shelter for 45 days, the difference is incredible. If we help them get a job, or go to school, it really improves their life for years to come. It’s awesome.

Plus I see bad things happen to women and it just makes me mad. The oppression is true, it’s real.

Glenn Sacks claimed his activists convinced some regular Family Place supporters to withhold donations. Have you seen any evidence of that from your end?

The only thing I know for sure is I got an email from a man who said he’d never give again, because of this. He once gave $25, in 2003.

It’s possible that [Sacks] convinced somebody besides that one donor.

Have you heard from any of your donors who had been contacted by Glenn’s campaign?

Yes. They were horrified.

What were they horrified about?

They were horrified that they were contacted. Not about the ad campaign. Horrified that someone from outside the state of Texas would call and say “don’t give money to The Family Place.” There was one of my board members who received 25 calls from the same woman.

What did the people calling them say?

It was… they were paraphrasing, so I don’t know exactly. They were told that you should not support The Family Place. This is a terrible campaign, they’re not a good organization, you should not support The Family Place, and we’re asking you to stop donating to The Family Place.

Some of the vile language and verbal abuse we took on the phone was horrific. The kinds of things they said to our staff about what they’re going to do to them was awful. I’ve had some “you’re going to go to hell, you’re a fat lesbian luring women into those shelters so you can prey on them.”

If I reply back to a victim I really am cautious in how I speak to her, because how do I know it’s a victim? We screen our clients on the phone, but…

I didn’t know there was this atmosphere out there of people who would say… horrible things to people they don’t know. They’d write in all caps like they were screaming and yelling. This is not a world that I’m used to. And the people would would say verbatim what he had said, like they’d drank the kool-aid… It was just amazing. It lasted a very short window of time. It was not much more than 10 days and then it fell off.

Did the campaign succeed in doing damage to The Family Place?

No, as a matter of fact, what he did was make us even more visible, in venues where we wouldn’t necessarily have been visible. We are not an AM radio organization. So even though some of it was negative… For example, he was on one of the radio stations here, and a huge organization, a very conservative group, emailed the radio station saying we support The Family Place. So just the name of The Family Place being out there might, in a perverse way, help, because we might reach someone who needs our services.

So I’m still thinking the campaign was very successful. When Glenn went on CNN, we got so many positive phone calls to our hotline that night, saying go for it, don’t back down, don’t let him do that to you.

I want to make sure it’s clear that we had a 60 day contract on those buses. It is not true that we took down our ads down. That’s not true. It was always going to end on November 30 — that was all the money we had.

I feel very strongly that the donors in this community understand what we’re doing in the family place. We have a lot of credibility. So I feel like our donors are going to stand beside us. It’s a shame that we’ve had to take anything away from the mission of this organization to even waste time in defending what we’re doing. It’s been a drain on time … it isn’t productive.

How much time did you have to spend dealing with this controversy?

I don’t know… hours, I had to spend hours. Thinking about the right strategy and how to respond and how to stay true to the message of The Family Place. If it’s five hours then it’s five hours too many.

We have a page on our website that we did make gender-neutral in response.

I’d like to thank Ms. Flink for talking with me.

My next post in this series will feature more from my interview with Paige Flink, including her advice to men’s rights activists who want to help male victims of violence. In the meanwhile, don’t forget to donate to The Family Place! Even very low donations are worthwhile, and remember, this week they’ll be doubled.

Via Womanist Musings: Men’s rights advocate Glenn Sacks has gotten some press for protesting these ads, which were created by The Family Place and were displayed on buses in Dallas through November 30:

(Image description: The image shows a boy, perhaps 5-7 years old. The boy is wearing a striped shirt and smiling at the viewer. The text of the ad says “When I grow up, I will beat my wife. Men who witnessed domestic violence as children are twice as likely to abuse their wives. Break the cycle of domestic violence.” The first letter of the text is a child’s wooden block toy with the letter “W” carved on its surface. The ad also includes contact information for The Family Place.)

(Image description: The image shows a girl, perhaps 4-7 years old. The girl is wearing a pink dress and a toy princess crown. The text of the ad says “One day my husband will kill me. Girls who grow up in households with domestic violence are more likely to end up with abusive partners. Break the cycle of domestic violence.” The first letter of the text is an illuminated letter “O” in the style of an illuminated manuscript or a children’s fairy tale book with old-fashioned illustrations. The ad also includes contact information for The Family Place.)

From the Dallas News:

“The calls [for help and support] are coming more than we can handle,” Paige Flink, executive director of the nonprofit, told me yesterday. “That’s what we intended to happen.”

What Ms. Flink didn’t intend is happening just as quickly – an international backlash caused by a Los Angeles-based “men’s and fathers’ issues columnist,” Glenn Sacks, who blogs for the Massachusetts-based Fathers & Families nonprofit advocacy group.

Mr. Sacks is spearheading a campaign to get DART and The Family Place to yank the ads, saying they stereotype men as batterers and women as just victims of domestic violence.

“I think it’s over the top,” Mr. Sacks said in a phone interview. “And I think it is insulting.”

The Family Place created three ads,¹ all depicting female victim / male abuser situations. I wish they had done a fourth ad showing a boy child as a future victim. Men are a minority of victims of intimate violence, but “minority” doesn’t mean “nonexistent.” There are male victims of intimate violence who require assistance, and there seems to be virtually no outreach to abused men. (The Family Place provides assistance to both female and male victims of violence.)

But the best evidence we have indicates that most intimate violence — and in particular, the most severe and harmful cases — are typically cases of men abusing women. Given that context, it’s ridiculous that Glenn objects to the depiction of women suffering from male abusers. It’s notable that Glenn didn’t work to have a new ad added to the campaign, reaching out to male victims of abuse; that’s a goal I could support. Instead, he campaigned to have these ads removed. Whatever his intent, what Glenn’s demands called for wasn’t inclusion of male victims, but the erasure of female victims and male perpetrators.

Glenn assumes it’s an insult to fathers for domestic violence awareness ads to even implicitly talk about male violence against women. But why should fathers be insulted? The ads don’t claim, or even imply, that all fathers are abusers.

It doesn’t appear that Glenn attempted — or even considered — a more productive approach before he began grandstanding. Before demanding that the Dallas buses take down ads that might genuinely help raise awareness of domestic violence against women — and might even save a life — Glenn could have instead have contacted The Family Place and offered to help raise funds to help pay for a fourth ad intended to reach out to male victims of intimate violence. Instead, Glenn and other men’s rights advocates (MRAs for short) specifically attacked The Family Place’s funding:

A sub-group of our protesters who I selected called over 50 of The Family Place’s financial contributors to express our concerns about the ads. [...] Several of The Family Place’s financial contributors withdrew or reduced the financial gifts they planned for the end-of-the-year giving season. I don’t say this with pleasure–I would have preferred that The Family Place do the right thing from the beginning rather than lose the funding.

Actions talk louder than words, Glenn. You specifically targeted The Family Place’s funding (although, as we’ll see in a future post, you didn’t succeed). This “I don’t say this with pleasure” plea is the worse sort of responsibility-dodging.

Glenn could have acted constructively. Glenn could have at least suggested that his readers give some money to The Family Place to make up for the funding damage Glenn claims they’ve caused. Instead, Glenn suggests his readers give money to Glenn, so that Glenn can organize more swell protests like this in the future.

That Glenn never attempted a constructive approach is telling. It’s typical of MRAs, most of whom are passionate about attacking feminism, and attacking people working to help victims of abuse and rape, but indifferent to helping male victims. Imagine if all the energy and time MRAs have put into bashing, hating, and attacking feminists for the last twenty years could be taken back and instead invested into building institutions that could help male victims of rape and abuse. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

This is the first in a short series of posts about the anti-feminist attack on The Family Place. Future posts will include never-before-published quotes from The Family Place’s Paige Flink, an examination of Glenn Sack’s statistical claims, more on how a constructive MRA movement would act, and explaining why Glenn’s protest actually didn’t accomplish much.

By the way, after talking to Paige Flink, I was very impressed by The Family Place. For decades, they’ve done good work to help victims of violence, regardless of sex. They should be encouraged and supported, not protested.

To donate to The Family Place, click here. Please let me know in comments or via email if you’ve donated to The Family Place because of what you’ve read on “Alas.” At the end of the week, “Alas” will match contributions made by “Alas” readers.² So in a way, your contribution this week is worth double.

1. One ad I didn’t reproduce at the top of this post, since Glenn isn’t protesting that one. All three ads can be seen on this page at The Family Place’s website. (back)
2. Up to a maximum total of $800. (back)

MRA Robert Franklin writes:

New Teen Violence Report is 468 Pages Long–but the Word ‘Father’ Is Nowhere to be Found

[...] The report is 468 pages long, and as far as I can tell, the word “father” is nowhere to be found in it.

Wow, that is pretty surprising. Especially since it took me under a minute to find this in the report:

Absent Fathers

The vast majority of single parents in Canada are women, and there has been much speculation about the propensity of youth from lone-parent homes led by women to be involved in violence. Although the research and literature points to a strong correlation between violence involving youth and teenage parents, the findings are equivocal on the correlation between violence involving youth and the absence of a father generally.

Despite the lack of solid evidence, an increased presence of fathers, and particularly Black fathers, is often cited as a force….

While it is logical to work to have fathers be responsible parents, we cannot conclude that their absence from the home is, on its own, a source of the immediate risk factors for violence involving youth.

Apparently “as far as I can tell” doesn’t include a simple text search. Or skimming the headers.

UPDATE: Not long after I posted this, Robert’s post disappeared.

UPDATE 2 (Nov. 28): The post has reappeared, updated and corrected. For the record, I actually have no objection to people editing and revising their posts, as long as significant changes are noted (as they are in this case).

Poor Prof. Alexander McPherson. A professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California at Irvine, McPherson was recently denied his academic freedom.

How, you ask, did that happen? Was he told what he had to teach in the classroom? Harrangued about work he’s published? Told that his public support for John McCain was going to get him fired? No, nothing so benign. McPherson was told that he had to attend a mandatory sexual harassment seminar along with all other employees of UC Irvine.

Clearly, he is all about sticking it to the man:

Four years ago, the governor signed Assembly Bill 1825 into law, requiring all California employers with more than 50 people to provide sexual harassment training for each of their employees. The University of California raised no objection and submitted to its authority.

But I didn’t. I am a professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at UC Irvine, and I have consistently refused, on principle, to participate in the sexual harassment training that the state and my employers seem to think is so important.

Because when your employer tells you that you are required to attend a seminar as a condition of your employment, that’s completely optional, as many unemployed people can tell you.

For a while, it didn’t seem to matter much that I had refused. I (and fellow scofflaws) were periodically notified that we were not in compliance, and we were advised to get with the program like everybody else. Then the university began warning me that my supervisory responsibilities would be taken away if I did not promptly comply.

Last month, the university finally followed through, sending me a letter announcing that my laboratory and the students I oversaw were to be immediately turned over to other university officials and faculty. I continued to refuse to take sexual harassment training, and do so now.

Now, at this point, everyone who’s ever been employed by anyone is pretty much saying to themselves, “Well, duh.” I mean, all of us have been shepherded into pointless meetings on everything from ergonomics to the new 401(k) plan to why our health plan costs just jumped 43,000 percent. And when they’re mandatory, you go. You may grumble that you have better things to do; sometimes those better things are work, and sometimes it’s talking fantasy football, but whatever. You go, because the entity that’s paying you for your time has decided that for this particular hour, this is how you are going to use your time.

In this case, it’s not even McPherson’s employer saying this; it’s the people of California, through their duly elected representatives. And McPherson isn’t even part of an independent company that could argue their rights to promote harassment in the workplace are being infringed; McPherson works for the State of California. He is out of legs, arms, and any other body parts to stand on, and should probably just go to the damn seminar.

But he’s taking a bold, brave stand:

am not normally confrontational, so I sought to find a means to resolve the conflict. I proposed the following: I would take the training if the university would provide me with a brief, written statement absolving me of any suspicion, guilt or complicity regarding sexual harassment. I wanted any possible stigma removed. “Fulfilling this requirement,” said the statement I asked them to approve, “in no way implies, suggests or indicates that the university currently has any reason to believe that Professor McPherson has ever sexually harassed any student or any person under his supervision during his 30-year career with the University of California.”

The university, however, declined to provide me with any such statement, which poses the question: Why not? It is a completely innocuous, unobjectionable statement that they should have been willing to write for any faculty member whose record is as free of stain as is my own. The immediate reply of the administration was that if I didn’t comply with the law, I would be placed on unpaid leave.

Well, yeah. If my boss asks me to come to a meeting, and I tell her that I will, but only if she signs a statement saying the company does not know anything about me stealing a gross of paper clips, my guess is that not only won’t she sign, but she’ll ask me why it’s so important that I sign — and begin auditing the supply cabinet.

I’m not saying that McPherson has in fact been harassing students. But it is weird how he wants administrative cover about it, especially since he hasn’t been brought into this seminar because he’s harassing students. Indeed, he’s in the same basic seminar that every single middle-sized and bigger employer in California is running. It doesn’t get any less selective than that.

So why is it he’s so concerned that he’s somehow been singled out? And why is he so afraid to go?

So why am I am being so inflexible on this issue? Why not simply take the training and be done with it?

Yeah, that’s what I asked.

There are several reasons.

First of all, I believe the training is a disgraceful sham. As far as I can tell from my colleagues, it is worthless, a childish piece of theater, an insult to anyone with a respectable IQ, primarily designed to relieve the university of liability in the case of lawsuits. I have not been shown any evidence that this training will discourage a harasser or aid in alerting the faculty to the presence of harassment.

And he should know, because…er, he just knows it won’t be helpful. Especially since he hasn’t been through the training, and knows nothing about it. And he’s going to stand firm on this by demanding that his employer defy the law of his state, because he doesn’t like it.

Guess what, binky? There are all sorts of laws of questionable value out there, from the laws criminalizing marijuana to the recently passed repeal of basic human rights for gay and lesbian couples. If you don’t like them, though, you work to change the law. You can disobey the law too — but you can’t be surprised when it turns out that the punishments the law spelled out are applied to you.

What’s more, the state, acting through the university, is trying to coerce and bully me into doing something I find repugnant and offensive. I find it offensive not only because of the insinuations it carries and the potential stigma it implies, but also because I am being required to do it for political reasons. The fact is that there is a vocal political/cultural interest group promoting this silliness as part of a politically correct agenda that I don’t particularly agree with.

Shorter Alexander McPherson: the world was better when you could tell a freshman that her tits looked nice, and that she could guarantee herself an A if she’d just do one little thing for him.

I’m sorry, Professor, if that seems like I’m stigmatizing you. But you’re the one who’s so afraid of being told what normal adults should know — that demeaning and disrespecting people because of their gender is wrong — that you won’t even be in the same room as someone saying so. The “politically correct” argument against sexual harassment is simply that sexual harassment is wrong. If you disagree with that message, the implication is obvious. At the very least, you don’t see anything wrong with sexual harassment.

The imposition of training that has a political cast violates my academic freedom and my rights as a tenured professor. The university has already nullified my right to supervise my laboratory and the students I teach. It has threatened my livelihood and, ultimately, my position at the university. This for failing to submit to mock training in sexual harassment, a requirement that was never a condition of my employment at the University of California 30 years ago, nor when I came to UCI 11 years ago.

And therefore, nothing can ever change.

Look, Professor, things have changed a lot in 30 years. In 1978, it was still considered perfectly appropriate for the boys’ club to leer at women in the workplace. And some of the men who came of age at that time — i.e., you — never grew up past that point.

That’s why we have seminars like this — to let you know that 2008 is not 1978, and these things aren’t okay. Are sexual harassment seminars perfect? Of course not. But they’re taking a strong stand that says women in the workplace — and in your case, the workplace is also a school — deserve equal respect and dignity, that they should not be treated worse because of their gender.

So what’s wrong with that? Even if you think the seminar’s hokey at times, why don’t you agree with its basic premise — that women are equal?

The question contains the answer, of course.

Interestingly, I have received many letters of encouragement — about 25% of them from women. The comments have been rich with words like “demeaning,” “oppressive,” “politically driven” and “indoctrination.” Other phrases included “unctuous twaddle” and “sanctimonious half-wits.”

I’m not surprised that some women are praising this — like Dr. Helen, who naturally loves this column, there are always some who are willing to throw others under the bus to be the “good kind of girl.”

But I’m sorry, I’ve been through sexual harassment seminars. And while they were at time eye-rollingly earnest, I’ve never seen them as demeaning. I don’t harass women, though — and frankly, view it as important that I not do so inadvertently. I view that as important because I know too many of my fellow men have harassed women in the workplace for decades before I got there, and that only by my being willing to work to undo their sins can men like me help to level the playing field.

McPherson closes with a line that shows that for all his education, he has no clue what he’s talking about:

Sexual harassment is a politically charged issue. The people of California have granted no authority to the state to impose narrow political and cultural opinions on individual citizens.

Except they have; you even cited the exact bill, Assembly Bill 1825, which was passed by the duly elected representatives of the citizens of  the state, and signed into law by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The people of California have given that authority to the state, and said that they do in fact want the state to be tolerant of women’s rights in the workplace. Perhaps that will change some day; given that California, as we all know, has a pretty viable initiative and referendum system, McPherson could be working to get this bill’s repeal on the ballot.

But of course, such an attempt would fail, because we don’t think that women are second-class citizens, at least not so much as we once did. And while there are far too many holdovers, most of us don’t see much wrong with asking people to learn to work with others in a respectful manner. There’s a word for people who do: sexists. Which is exactly what McPherson is. And exactly why it’s good for the students at UC Irvine that he’s losing his supervisory position over this. Because I wouldn’t want my daughter working with a sexist professor. Indeed, I don’t want anyone’s daughter — or anyone’s son — working with him. Any man who would put hatred of women at such a great level of import is a person all of us are better off ignoring.

(Scott, Jill, and Megan have more.)

Robert Franklin, a co-blogger at Glenn Sacks’ blog, complains that mothers who kill their own children get treated more sympathetically than fathers:

Her behavior, according to the story was “a cry for help.” If a father had murdered his toddlers, would we say he was crying out for help? I’ve never seen it and I frankly don’t expect to.

So this story falls into the familiar pattern – when women behave badly, we seek to understand why; when men behave badly, we judge and condemn them. One approach is love and understanding; the other is condemnation. The difference is based on the sex of the bad actor.

I’ve seen this complaint made by many MRAs, and I was initially inclined to agree with it — after all, all else being equal, there’s no reason to have any more sympathy for female than male criminals. Plus, I fully believe that the media is sexist. And maybe the media’s sexism is biasing their coverage of filicides. But there’s another reason for the imbalance Franklin notices: mothers and fathers murder for very different reasons.

“Filicide” means the murder of a child by her or his own parent. And all the research agrees: paternal filicide (murder of kids by fathers) typically has very different motivations from maternal filicide (murder of kids by mothers). The typical father-killer is a longtime abuser, and is motivated by a desire to control his family, or by jealousy because he believes (rightly or wrongly) that his wife is cheating on him or leaving him. (He is, however, sane, in the legal sense that he has an understanding of right and wrong.) The typical mother-killer is committing neonaticide in a context of postpartum depression, denial, and social isolation; or, if she’s killing an older child, she’s doing so out of a deranged belief that the child is better off dead.

Is it unfair that our society looks down on revenge-killings of children, more than we look down on killings done in postpartum madness? Maybe. But that’s not an argument that Franklin makes. And it’s usual in our society to find killings done by people who understand right and wrong more reprehensible, and deserving of a greater level of condemnation.

Research published in The Journal of Family Violence found:¹

The data on motives indicated major differences between the two groups of offenders: Men were more likely to kill their children as a means of reprisal against their spouse, whereas women were more likely to kill their children for altruistic reasons.

(”Altruistic”? How can murder be “altruistic”? Well, obviously it’s not genuine altruism: but the killers believe the murders to be altruistic.)²

Let’s take sex away from this. Which is more sympathetic — a parent who kills a child because the parent has come unhinged from reality; or a parent who kills a child for revenge on a cheating or divorcing spouse? Is it really unjust if the latter parent gets treated more harshly by the press, and by the courts?

In an article in The Guardian, Jack Levin, a professor at Northeastern University, profiles men who kill their famililes:

“He doesn’t hate his children, but he often hates his wife and blames her for his miserable life. He feels an overwhelming sense of his own powerlessness. He wants to execute revenge and the motive is almost always to ‘get even’.” [...]

In the majority of cases, if the perpetrator fails in his own suicide, as in the Hogan and Hall cases, they almost always plead some form of insanity.

But Levin rejected this: “These are executions. They are never spontaneous. They are well planned and selective. They are not carried out in the heat of the moment or in a fit of rage. They are very methodical and it is often planned out for a long time. There are certain people the killer blames for his problems. If a friend came along, he wouldn’t kill him or her. He kills his children to get even with his wife because he blames her and he hates her. The killer feels he has lost control. Annihilating his family is a way of regaining control. It is a methodical, selective murder by a rational, loving father. That’s why it is so terrifying.”

This is a case in which reality is not sex-neutral. Although there are individual exceptions, if you read about a filicide in which a parent is going mad from social isolation and depression and kills their infant, odds are overwhelming that that parent is the mother. If you read about a filicide in which a parent kills their infant because they’re trying to control the other parent, or get revenge because the other parent wants a divorce, odds are overwhelming that parent is the father.

That said, I’m not arguing that sexism has nothing to do with it — actually, sexism has a lot to do with the differences in how mothers and father murder. Writing in Child Abuse Review, Ania Wilczynski argues that sexist social conditioning accounts for the difference in how women and men commit filicide:³

Marked sex differences were also apparent in filicide motivation. While men tend to predominate in the retaliating, jealousy and discipline categories of filicide, women tend to be found in the unwanted child, altruistic and psychotic categories…. The literature reports comparable results on both these findings.

The gender differences in filicide motivation indicate that an understanding of the social construction of masculinity and femininity may be crucial to an adequate understanding of filicide. Men are socialized to be unemotional, aggressive, dominant and sexually possessive. Therefore their filicides tend to most commonly involve retaliation, jealousy and discipline. Conversely, social norms encourage women to be passive, nurturant and self-sacrificing. Hence women’s filicides tend to be found in the altruistic, psychotic and neonaticide categories. Thus, while filicide is often seen as an aberrant and inexplicable act committed by someone who is either evil or mentally deranged, it is important to place the crime in its social context and to see that it represents in extreme form the playing out of traditional gender roles.

MRAs like Robert Franklin might do more good if they concentrated on fighting the sexist model of masculinity that harms nearly all men, but also leads a tiny minority of men to feel that they have to murder to maintain control of their families. If men felt less need to be “aggressive” and “dominant,” fewer men would be murdering their families. To this end, we should be looking at changing the culture of violence and bullying that too many boys are raised in, and too many adults (of both sexes) accept or encourage.

Men who commit felicide have very often been abused themselves, when they were children. Obviously, our society needs to do more to fight child abuse. But it would also be worthwhile to try and provide counseling and services to adult survivors of child abuse. Men are frequently socialized to avoid admitting when we need help, so outreach programs for male survivors of child abuse are also extremely necessary.

What about reducing felicide among mothers? The lowest-hanging fruit here is neonaticide, the murder of very young infants by their mothers. Mothers who commit neonaticide are usually poor, usually teenaged, usually socially isolated, and are often in denial about having been pregnant. Increased sex education, and increased availability of free prenatal care — including confidential care for minors — would be good steps to take. I’d also speculate that it would help if society was more accepting of teenage pregnancy, so that pregnant girls might feel less desperate and isolated.

UPDATE: Welcome, Glenn Sacks dot com readers!

If you’re interested in having your comments approved here, use conventional English, and a mild and respectful tone. Comments with a sneery attitude, WITH SENTENCES WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS, or a general “you feminists are such stupid bigots” attitude will be deleted.

1. Léveillée S, Marleau JD, Dubé M (2007) Filicide: a comparison by sex and presence or absence. of self-destructive behaviour. Journal of Family Violence v22 n5 p287-295. Link. (back)
2. From Psychiatric News: “In ‘altruistic’ filicide a parent—almost always a mother in this category—kills her child or children as an extension of a suicide attempt. ‘These mothers see their children as an extension of themselves,’ he said. ‘They do not want to leave a child motherless in a ‘cruel’ world as seen through their depressed eyes.’ In a second type of altruistic filicide a child is killed to end his or her real or imagined suffering. ‘These mothers may project their own unacceptable symptoms onto the child,’ he said.” (back)
3. Wilczynski, Ania (2005). “Child Killing By Parents: A Motivational Model.” Child Abuse Review v4 365-370. Pdf link. (back)

In mid-October, the California Court of Appeals ruled¹ that California cannot legally fund women-only shelters.² I didn’t see anything about it in the feminist blogosphere until yesterday, when Renee posted about the case.

In California, it is generally illegal for the government to discriminate based on sex.³ The California statutes funding domestic violence shelters, however, contained language defining “domestic violence” as something that only happens to women,⁴, and some funding apparently went to women-only services.

This was legal (before this court ruling) because of this provision of California law:

No person in the State of California shall, on the basis of race, national origin, ethnic group identification, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, color, or disability, be unlawfully denied full and equal access to the benefits of, or be unlawfully subjected to discrimination under, any program or
activity that is conducted, operated, or administered by the state or by any state agency, is funded directly by the state, or receives any financial assistance from the state. [...]

This article shall not be interpreted in a manner that would adversely affect lawful programs which benefit the disabled, the aged, minorities, and women.

The plaintiffs, a group including men who said they had been abused, and a teenage girl who claimed her father had been abused by her mother, sued. The appeals court found in their favor, writing:

The greater need for services by female victims of domestic violence does not provide a compelling state interest in a gender classification. As Connerly makes clear, equal protection is not concerned with numbers. “In applying the strict scrutiny test, it must be remembered that the rights created by the equal protection clause are not group rights; they are personal rights guaranteed to the individual.” (Connerly, supra, 92 Cal.App.4th at p. 35.) Arguing that a group of people (here male victims of domestic violence) is too small in number to be afforded equal protection is simply arguing “that the right to equal protection should hinge on ‘administrative convenience.’” (Molar v. Gates (1979) 98 Cal.App.3d 1, 18.) Administrative convenience is an inadequate state interest under a strict scrutiny analysis. (Id. at p. 17.) Plaintiffs and defendants agree domestic violence is a serious problem for both women and men, and programs funded under Health and Safety Code section 124250 and Penal Code section 13823.15 offer a variety of services, primarily shelter but also counseling and other support services. Defendants fail to show a compelling state interest in providing funding only to those programs that provide these services to women only.

Even if there were a compelling state interest, defendants do not show the classification is necessary, rather than convenient, and no gender-neutral alternative is available. Most of the programs funded by DHS and all of the programs funded by OES offer services on a gender-neutral basis, showing the classification is not necessary.[...]

The gender classifications in Health and Safety Code section 124250 and Penal Code section 13823.15, that provide state funding of domestic violence programs that offer services only to women and their children, but not to men, violate equal protection.

Nothing in either statute evinces a legislative intent to restrict funding to programs that assist only women. Indeed, all of the programs funded under Penal Code section 13823.15 and the vast majority, 85 percent, of the programs funded under Health and Safety Code section 124250 provide services on a gender-neutral basis. Accordingly, both Health and Safety Code section 124250 and Penal Code section 13823.15 are reformed to provide funding for services to victims of domestic violence, regardless of gender.

In reforming the statutes that provide funding for domestic violence programs to be gender-neutral, we do not require that such programs offer identical services to men and women. Given the noted disparity in the number of women needing services and the greater severity of their injuries, it may be appropriate to provide more and different services to battered women and their children. For example, a program might offer shelter for women, but only hotel vouchers for a smaller number of men.

Overall, I agree with this decision. Five quick points:

1. Equal protection and treatment by the law, regardless of gender (race, gender identity, etc), is a principle I support.

2. It makes sense that the law makes an exception for beneficial programs like affirmative action, which could not exist without the exception. However, services for victims of intimate violence seem to fall into a different category, because it is possible for shelters to provide services to both women and men. Indeed, the vast majority of publicly-funded DV services in California served both female and male victims, even before this lawsuit.⁵

3. This ruling will have very little practical effect on anything. As the court noted, the large majority of publicly-funded DV services in California are already gender-neutral.

4. Although I approve of equal protection, and of this ruling, it’s frustrating that the MRA movement — which is so much more dedicated to attacking feminism than to helping men — ever gets what it wants. Many or most DV services were initially created by feminist work and activism; MRAs have done none of the hard work involved in creating this network. Nor is the MRA movement fundraising to enable DV programs affected by this ruling to add services for men without reducing services for women, or lobbying to increase funding for DV shelters. In short, the MRA movement is a leech movement; MRAs sue to change systems feminists (mostly women) have built, but they don’t contribute positively to those systems.

This is, I think, part of what Renee was talking about in her post on Woods v. Shewry.

But when I look at the bigger picture, MRAs are irrelevant. It’s not the fault of male victims who need help that MRAs are leeches, and the worthlessness of the MRA movement can’t justify denying services to someone because of their sex.

5. The appeals court also ruled on a program which allows children under age six to be raised by mothers in prison, if the mothers are sentenced to 3 years or less. The program is available only to primary caretakers, and only if it is determined that staying with the mother is in the child’s best interest. The program is available only to mothers.

The appeals court allowed the program to stand, because the plaintiffs couldn’t find a single real-life example of a father who would have qualified for this program, if only he were female. I would have preferred the appeals court to order that the program be made available to fathers, should one who qualifies ever turn up.

1. The case is “Woods v Shewry”; a pdf file of the court’s decision is here (back)
2. I first read about the case via Glenn Sacks and Feminist Critics. (back)
3. Although, thanks to proposition 8, it now seems that it is legal for the government to discriminate based on sex when it comes to same-sex marriage. (back)
4. From the statute in question:”‘Domestic violence’ means the infliction or threat of physical harm against past or present adult or adolescent female intimate partners, and shall include physical, sexual, and psychological abuse against the woman, and is part of a pattern of assaultive, coercive, and controlling behaviors directed at achieving compliance from or control over, that woman.” (back)
5. The appeals court noted that the plaintiffs weren’t able to provide compelling evidence that any California services discriminate against men; the only evidence of discrimination against men was a statement by a defense witness: “The only evidence that some state-funded programs discriminate against men is the declaration of Dr. Susann Steinberg that 85 percent of agencies funded by DHS provide services to men, from which we presume the other 15 percent do not.” (back)

Pity the Nice Guy™. Please. His world is all topsy-turvy. All he wants is to know exactly what all women want, so that he can have sex with them. But it turns out that different women want different things. Some women believe firmly in traditional gender roles, while others are believers in egalitarianism. Some women are all about hooking up, others want a commitment. And this means that a Nice Guy™ is completely unable to get it right on every single date. Quelle horreur!

The latest bit of Nice Guy™ wankery comes courtesy of Kay S. Hymowitz, writing in City Journal, who explains that the rules just don’t matter anymore, and that’s just terrible for the menz. She had written a previous article arguing that today’s men are too childish (which is another stupid stereotype for another day), and men wrote in to say nuh-uh, it’s all girls’ fault:

It would be easy enough to hold up some of the callow ranting that the piece inspired as proof positive of the child-man’s existence. But the truth is that my correspondents’ objections gave me pause. Their argument, in effect, was that the SYM is putting off traditional markers of adulthood—one wife, two kids, three bathrooms—not because he’s immature but because he’s angry. He’s angry because he thinks that young women are dishonest, self-involved, slutty, manipulative, shallow, controlling, and gold-digging. He’s angry because he thinks that the culture disses all things male. He’s angry because he thinks that marriage these days is a raw deal for men.

Here’s Jeff from Middleburg, Florida: “I am not going to hitch my wagon to a woman . . . who is more into her abs, thighs, triceps, and plastic surgery. A woman who seems to have forgotten that she did graduate high school and that it’s time to act accordingly.” Jeff, meet another of my respondents, Alex: “Maybe we turn to video games not because we are trying to run away from the responsibilities of a ‘grown-up life’ but because they are a better companion than some disease-ridden bar tramp who is only after money and a free ride.” Care for one more? This is from Dean in California: “Men are finally waking up to the ever-present fact that traditional marriage, or a committed relationship, with its accompanying socially imposed requirements of being wallets with legs for women, is an empty and meaningless drudgery.” You can find the same themes posted throughout websites like AmericanWomenSuck, NoMarriage, MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), and Eternal Bachelor (“Give modern women the husband they deserve. None”).

Ah, yes, the mating call of the MRA: “Women suck and they just want our money and they totally suck and they’re slutty and icky and dirty and I really hate them because they don’t want to be with me.” You’d think, at some point, that these men would be happy that they’d figured out that women were all evil whorebags, and be satisfied with being single. I mean, if women really are as universally evil as the MRAs claim, why would men want to be with them?

Now, I would tend to think that this level of anger comes from a deap-seated hatred of women, one with roots probably going back to childhood. Through self-examination, these men might be able to overcome these problems. But Hymowitz knows better. These men are really upset that women aren’t all on the same page:

The reason for all this anger, I submit, is that the dating and mating scene is in chaos. SYMs of the postfeminist era are moving around in a Babel of miscues, cross-purposes, and half-conscious, contradictory female expectations that are alternately proudly egalitarian and coyly traditional. And because middle-class men and women are putting off marriage well into their twenties and thirties as they pursue Ph.D.s, J.D.s, or their first $50,000 salaries, the opportunities for heartbreak and humiliation are legion. Under these harsh conditions, young men are looking for a new framework for understanding what (or, as they might put it, WTF) women want. So far, their answer is unlikely to satisfy anyone—either women or, in the long run, themselves.

Ah, yes. What do women want? Let me ask a different question: what do men want? Well, it depends, you might say. Some men want a family. Some want sex. Some want an equal. Some are looking for a homemaker. Some are looking for someone to snuggle with on a cold winter’s night, and some are looking for someone to cuckold them while they hide in the closet and take pictures. If there are 150 million American men, there are 250 million different things that those men want.

And the same goes for women. There is no one thing that “women want.” Different women want different things. Some are looking for a friend and companion that will be with them as they build careers. Some are looking for a potential father. Some are looking for a night of commitment-free sex. Some are looking for a threesome. Some are looking for all of the above, or none of the above. And many women — and many men — aren’t sure exactly what they’re looking for.

Confusing? Yes, it is. Welcome to the 21st century. Two hundred years ago, it was easy — everyone was supposed to want the exact same thing. Of course, many women and many men were deeply unhappy then.

Now, men and women have probably been a mystery to one another since the time human beings were in trees; one reason people developed so many rules around courtship was that they needed some way to bridge the Great Sexual Divide

The older I get, the more I believe that women and men are a mystery to each other only because we are constantly told from birth that women and men are a mystery to each other, who speak different languages and are unable to actually communicate. It turns out that men and women are a lot alike. There may be minor differences, but nothing that can’t be figured out by asking questions. Indeed, much of the trouble in relationships could be solved by teaching our children that if they have questions about that boy or girl they’re interested in dating, the best thing to do is just bite the bullet and go ask them. And that if they get asked an honest question, then give an honest answer. Instead, we teach boys and girls that they have to deal with girls and boys through an elaborate system of games and deception. It’s a wonder any relationships work at all.

By the early twentieth century, things had evolved so that in the United States, at any rate, a man knew the following: he was supposed to call for a date; he was supposed to pick up his date; he was supposed to take his date out, say, to a dance, a movie, or an ice-cream joint; if the date went well, he was supposed to call for another one; and at some point, if the relationship seemed charged enough—or if the woman got pregnant—he was supposed to ask her to marry him. Sure, these rules could end in a midlife crisis and an unhealthy fondness for gin, but their advantage was that anyone with an emotional IQ over 70 could follow them.

Today, though, there is no standard scenario for meeting and mating, or even relating. For one thing, men face a situation—and I’m not exaggerating here—new to human history. Never before have men wooed women who are, at least theoretically, their equals—socially, professionally, and sexually.

By the time men reach their twenties, they have years of experience with women as equal competitors in school, on soccer fields, and even in bed. Small wonder if they initially assume that the women they meet are after the same things they are: financial independence, career success, toned triceps, and sex.

And you know, there are a lot of women who are into those things. And a lot of women who aren’t. A lot of men aren’t, too — for example, I don’t even know where my triceps are, and I assume they probably aren’t toned. And if a woman wanted to date me, but was insistent that my triceps were toned…well, it wouldn’t work out. Because I tone my triceps for no earthly being.

But then, when an SYM walks into a bar and sees an attractive woman, it turns out to be nothing like that. The woman may be hoping for a hookup, but she may also be looking for a husband, a co-parent, a sperm donor, a relationship, a threesome, or a temporary place to live. She may want one thing in November and another by Christmas. “I’ve gone through phases in my life where I bounce between serial monogamy, Very Serious Relationships and extremely casual sex,” writes Megan Carpentier on Jezebel, a popular website for young women. “I’ve slept next to guys on the first date, had sex on the first date, allowed no more than a cheek kiss, dispensed with the date-concept altogether after kissing the guy on the way to his car, fucked a couple of close friends and, more rarely, slept with a guy I didn’t care if I ever saw again.” Okay, wonders the ordinary guy with only middling psychic powers, which is it tonight?

Well, here’s a way to find out, guy with middling psychic powers: ask the girl. She’ll tell you.

Or maybe she won’t, but then you’ll know that she’s just looking to play games. And you’ll have to decide whether you want to play along.

Now, maybe the woman gives you an answer you don’t like. Maybe you want a relationship, and she just wants sex. You know what you do then? Thank her for her time, and move along. Because there’s another woman out there who does want a relationship, and you’re looking for her. And there’s another man out there who’s just looking for sex, and you’re getting in his way.

In fact, young men face a bewildering multiplicity of female expectations and desire. Some women are comfortable asking, “What’s your name again?” when they look across the pillow in the morning. But plenty of others are looking for Mr. Darcy. In her interviews with 100 unmarried, college-educated young men and women, Jillian Straus, author of Unhooked Generation, discovered that a lot of women had “personal scripts”—explicit ideas about how a guy should act, such as walking his date home or helping her on with her coat. Straus describes a 26-year-old journalist named Lisa fixed up for a date with a 29-year-old social worker. When he arrives at her door, she’s delighted to see that he’s as good-looking as advertised. But when they walk to his car, he makes his first mistake: he fails to open the car door for her. Mistake Number Two comes a moment later: “So, what would you like to do?” he asks. “Her idea of a date is that the man plans the evening and takes the woman out,” Straus explains. But how was the hapless social worker supposed to know that? In fact, Doesn’t-Open-the-Car-Door Guy might well have been chewed out by a female colleague for reaching for the office door the previous week.

Please. You know what you do when you go out on a first date with a woman who’s really upset that you didn’t open the car for her (or did, wev)? You don’t go out on a second date with her. The reverse is true, too. First dates aren’t binding, long-term contracts. They’re a chance to meet someone and decide if they’re right for you. If you find a person whose idea of a relationship is different than yours, then you’ve probably found a person you don’t want to build a relationship with.

I don’t believe in relationships where the man is supposed to be the guy in charge, and so I’m going to avoid them. If I meet a woman who expects me to plan every date, she’s going to be disappointed in me, and I’m going to be disappointed in her, so why would I be upset that she didn’t want to date me again? If she and I are so incompatible, I don’t want to waste my time dating her again, either.

The cultural muddle is at its greatest when the dinner check arrives. The question of who grabs it is a subject of endless discussion on the hundreds of Internet dating sites. The general consensus among women is that a guy should pay on a first date: they see it as a way for him to demonstrate interest. Many men agree, but others find the presumption confusing. Aren’t the sexes equal? In fact, at this stage in their lives, women may well be in a better position to pick up the tab: according to a 2005 study by Queens College demographer Andrew Beveridge, college-educated women working full-time are earning more than their male counterparts in a number of cities, including New York, Chicago, Boston, and Minneapolis.

This is a bit of a muddle, but only because we’re processing through the change from the era when men worked and women didn’t to an era where everyone’s equal, and that means that the bill question isn’t cut-and-dried. But again, so what? My ex-wife wasn’t overly impressed that we split the bill on our first date (I was being egalitarian, and I was also poor), but it wasn’t a deal-breaker for her, because she understood that it’s not cut-and-dried. She didn’t let a minor faux pas become bigger than it was.

By and large, I think moving to a he-or-she-who-asks-pays rule is probably good, but it will take time to work itself out. And until it does, everyone should be patient and let it work itself out. And women and men alike can show patience in that process — and those that can’t might not be worth another go-round.

Sure, girls can—and do—ask guys out for dinner and pick up the check without missing a beat. But that doesn’t clarify matters, men complain. Women can take a Chinese-menu approach to gender roles. They can be all “Let me pay for the movie tickets” on Friday night and “A single rose? That’s it?” on Valentine’s Day. This isn’t equality, say the male-contents; it’s a ratification of female privilege and, worse, caprice. “Women seemingly have decided that they want it all (and deserve it, too),” Kevin from Ann Arbor writes. “They want to compete equally, and have the privileges of their mother’s generation. They want the executive position, AND the ability to stay home with children and come back into the workplace at or beyond the position at which they left. They want the bad boy and the metrosexual.”

Well…I want to be able to stay home with my daughter and come back at the position I left. You see, being able to be with your kids isn’t simply something women want, it’s something parents want. You make choices and sacrifices, but wanting the best outcome isn’t the end of the world.

Again, though, look at all the theys in the above sentence, all the painting of women as a monolithic entity. But they aren’t. Some women want to pay for movie tickets and melt at a single rose for Valentine’s Day. Some women want the executive position and really hope their husband will stay home with the kids. Different women want different things.

This attraction to bad boys is by far guys’ biggest complaint about contemporary women.

No it isn’t. Not remotely. It’s Nice Guys’™ biggest complaint about contemporary women. The “bad boy” exists primarily in the fevered imagination of Nice Guys™ everywhere, primarily defined as the guy the girl I’d like to be dating is dating.

Young men grew up hearing from their mothers, their teachers, and Oprah that women wanted sensitive, kind, thoughtful, intelligent men who were in touch with their feminine sides, who shared their feelings, who enjoyed watching Ally McBeal rather than Beavis and Butt-Head. Yeah, right, sneer a lot of veterans of the scene. Women don’t want Ashley Wilkes; they’re hot for Rhett Butler, for macho men with tight abs and an emotional range to match.

Yes, some are. Other women are most certainly attracted to sensitive men. Other women are looking for a mixture of the two extremes — a sensitive man who can also be assertive when he needs to be.

According to a “Recovering Nice Guy” writing on Craigslist, the female preference for jerks and “assholes,” as they’re also widely known, lies behind women’s age-old lament, “What happened to all the nice guys?” His answer: “You did. You ignored the nice guy. You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy.” Women, he says, are actually not attracted to men who hold doors for them, give them hinted-for Christmas gifts, or listen to their sorrows. Such a man, our Recovering Nice Guy continues, probably “came to realize that, if he wanted a woman like you, he’d have to act more like the boyfriend that you had. He probably cleaned up his look, started making some money, and generally acted like more of an asshole than he ever wanted to be.”

Yes, I remember, we’ve dealt with this asshole before. And that’s what he is — an asshole. Because only an asshole could write, “You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy,” and not realize that he was betraying a completely facile and stereotypical idea of What Women and Men are Supposed to Want. Men want sex, women want emotional intimacy. If you’re a guy, and you’re a friend to a girl, she owes you sex. That’s the payback. Never is it noted that the guy might have received emotional intimacy from his female friend — what guy feels emotion? No, he wanted sex, and didn’t get it, and now he’s gonna whine about it.

There’s a ton more to the article — it goes on and on an on, talking about the Seduction Community and Darwinist Dating and how women really want to marry a rich guy, before coming to the obvious conclusion:

Nevertheless, you might ask, are there really so many dating Darwinists on the prowl? Is dating really hell, as the website would have it, for the majority of contemporary SYMs and Fs? Probably not. It’s a safe bet that for all the confusions and humiliations of dating, most men will still try to be nice guys who say “please” and avoid asking a woman about her sexual history until, say, the third date. And if the past is any guide, most of them, even the most masterly PUAs, will eventually find themselves coaching Little League on weekends. In a national survey of young, heterosexual men, the National Marriage Project, a research organization at Rutgers University, found that the majority of single subjects hoped to marry and have kids someday.

Um…yeah. You see, as most of us who live here in the real world know, dating isn’t particularly hellish. There are awkward moments and bad dates and people you don’t want to see again, but there are funny stories and entertaining anecdotes and every so often, a person you really, really are glad you met. Equality hasn’t ended dating, it’s just made it more chaotic and free. And while it may take a bit more time to find the person who fits with you, in the end you’re more likely to. And that makes all the difference.

(H/T Jezebel)

In the comments of the Daisy Bond post I linked yesterday, there’s an interesting exchange between Daisy and Daran of “Feminist Critics” about the definition of “feminist.” In her post, Daisy wrote:

At the end of the day, if you’re opposed to sexism — if you believe men and women should be equal, that the gender system is unjust, that our freedoms, both legal and cultural, should not be dependent on our genitals, chromosomes, or our gender presentation, that every person has a sovereign right to reproductive justice — then you’re a feminist in my book, regardless of how you choose to use or not use make-up and handcuffs.

I think this is a little loose in practice, because it’s easy for people to say they oppose sexism, think the sexes should be equal, etc — but at the same time oppose all substantive steps that could be taken to fight for gender justice.

Daran asked if he and his cohorts colleagues at “Feminist Critics” are feminists by this definition. Daisy responded in part:

Feminism is a movement. I think it’s self-evident that someone who is fundamentally opposed to a movement and who is working to end it cannot be a part of that movement. One can be highly critical of the movement and/or its actions and/or its members, but as soon as one is actually working against the movement or working to end it, one is obviously no longer a member of that movement, regardless on one’s opinions about the movement’s stated ideals.

Which is very apt, and probably answers my criticism above.

Of course, Daisy didn’t directly answer Daran’s question, but that’s because it’s unanswerable. There is no official roll of who is or isn’t a feminist; there’s only different people’s subjective opinions. If Daran, or Christina Hoff Sommers, or Sarah Palin, or whoever, thinks of themselves as feminists, then that’s fine — it’s a free country. (Freeish, anyhow.) But that doesn’t mean I have to believe they’re feminists.

(And, needless to say, there are plenty of feminists who don’t consider me any sort of feminist. Which is also fine.)

Ah, Mike Adams. You remember Mike Adams; he’s the UNC-Wilmington professor who singlehandedly devalues my friend’s brother’s college degree, the idiot who once argued that we should end abortion so women will stop having sex.Well, Mike Adams is back. Truthfully, he never went away, but he writes at Townhall, so his insanity is often obscured by all the other insanity over there. Today, Dr. Mike explains what we men need to do to be Real Men, not crappy, non-Mikelike men. It starts off almost, almost sane. But it goes wrong, quickly. And soon, it is amazingly, horribly wrong. But like a car wreck, you can’t turn away. And the ending gives the lie to any idea that Dr. Mike is worried about men at all.

A divorced friend of mine was complaining to me recently about the pool of women available to him here in the coastal Carolina region. His specific complaint was that too many (I think he said “all”) of the women were carrying too much baggage to have a successful relationship.

Here’s a friendly tip to all people who find “all” women/men/eunuchs/whatever to be carrying too much baggage/too angry/too distant/too revulsed to date. If everybody you meet is horribly wrong for you, then you need to take a look and see what the constant in those releationships is. I’ll give you a hint: it’s you.

I’m so tired of hearing “men” make this complaint that I’ve made it the subject of today’s column.

Hark! What’s this? Is Mike Adams — the Mike Adams who once compared feminists to Charles Manson — could he be about to defend women?

The thesis of my rebuttal is really simple: It is not entirely fair and accurate to say that most adult women are carrying a lot of “baggage” or have a lot of “issues.” (Remember when people used to have problems, not issues?). It is much more accurate to say that most adult women are profoundly wounded and scarred by the things that “men” have done to them when they were not really acting like men.

Well, sort of; he’s going to blame all women’s problems on men’s actions. And what actions are these? Well, let’s find out, shall we?

Real Men Do Not Go To Topless Bars. I wrote about this topic two years ago in a column called “I Had a Dream.” But, it is worth repeating that topless bars are little more than fronts for organized crime. This includes the punks who operate the strip club near UNC-Wilmington. These people take women with low self-esteem – often victims of sexual abuse – and get them hooked on cocaine that is sold in their club (again: an organized crime front). To the extent that “men” frequent these places, they fund the destruction of the life of someone’s daughter. This is a disgrace and no such “man” can even remotely be characterized as a Christian.

The topless bar was no place for a Christian, and I did not long remain one.

I kid, of course; I’m not a big fan of strip clubs. Indeed, that makes it sound like I’ve spent enough time in strip clubs to decide whether I’m a fan or not, but I haven’t — I’ve been to a grand total of zero strip clubs in my life, and am not in a hurry to change the number. The closest I’ve come is when some friends and I went to see “Crazy Girls” in Las Vegas — a decision we regretted before the show was over.

I’m kinda, sorta with Dr. Mike on this one. I don’t go to strip clubs for the reason he says — I don’t like contributing to enterprises that degrade and demean women. That said, if there was a hypothetical strip club where the entertainers were truly choosing to be there, I’d have no problem with it.

Of course, my decision to not go to strip clubs is based more on my belief that women are human beings than that women are pure vessels of virginity. This may not seem like a major distinction now, but it will be.

Real Men Do Not View Pornography. I recently asked an Obama supporter whether he ever viewed pornography on the internet. He said he did “occasionally.” I asked whether he would ever want his daughter to star in a porn flick. He said “never.” When I reminded him that the porn star has parents, too, he vowed to reconsider his continued viewing of internet pornography.

Something that “men” who view pornography do not realize is that it trains the mind to be sexually stimulated by seeing images of many different people nude and engaged in certain acts. Eventually, the viewer becomes unable to be stimulated by just one person. Thus, a “man” who views pornography is much more likely to hurt his wife by engaging in adultery. And when he’s caught, he’s much more likely to hurt his children with a painful divorce. Those who believe that porn affects only the viewer are simply uneducated, dishonest, or both. Where there is pornography, there is also co-lateral damage.

I love this one; of course an Obama supporter views pornography, the bastard. He probably masturbates too!

Look, as with the strip clubs, my view on pornography is centered around the fact that the porn industry is not pro-woman in any sense of the word. I’m a sentimental guy; I tend to think that sex should be fun for all participants, be it the man, the woman, the other man, or the other woman. I don’t get off on degradation. And so mainstream porn hasn’t ever held much allure to me, because, frankly, much of mainstream porn is about degradation.

That said, let’s draw a bright, shiny line here, because Dr. Mike seems to be confused about something: pornography does not prime people to be attracted to other people. Pornography is a function of people being attracted to other people. Lots of other people. If you’re a het guy or a lesbian girl, those people are going to be primarily women; if you’re a het girl or a gay guy, those people are going to be primarily men. If you’re bisexual, it’ll be everyone.

Not looking at pornography does not keep a man or woman from noticing an attractive woman or man who is not their spouse. Nothing will keep a sexually mature person from noticing attractive potential sexual partners. That’s not an excuse to cheat; if you’re in a committed, monogamous relationship, you don’t cheat because you don’t want to cheat, because you’ve accepted the trade-off of being with one person who you love deeply, rather than having many different partners with whom you have no strong connection. But that doesn’t mean you don’t notice people, or even fantasize about people from time to time. That’s not evil; that’s human.

Dr. Mike doesn’t understand humans. As you’ll see:

Real Men Do Not Have Sex With Women They Do Not Intend To Marry. I once read a survey indicating that the number of sex partners a woman has in a lifetime is only a fraction of the number of sex partners a man has in a lifetime. This can be explained by two factors: 1) men lie in an upward direction when asked how many people they’ve slept with and, 2) women lie in a downward direction when asked how many people they’ve slept with.

This becomes a problem later on in marriage when a woman is unable to forgive herself for having a lot of sex partners. This guilt is biologically, and not culturally, induced. And once a woman has lied about her past to a prospective husband, she cannot communicate with him about her guilt. The couple begins to have problems whose true origins are never addressed.

The only solution to this problem is for men to stop having sex with women they do not intend to marry. Men have it within their power to stop contaminating the future-wife pool. A little self-control can do a lot to strengthen a dying institution.

And here’s where things start to go very wrong indeed. First off, I love that Dr. Mike “read a study.” Well! That’s mighty specific there! I read a study that says Dr. Mike Adams is a huge douchebag. This can be explained by his douchebagginess. Second, I love that the concern is “contaminating the future-wife pool,” not, you know, being kind and decent to a fellow human being.

At any rate, yes, men do tend to brag about their number, while women tend to downplay theirs. Why? Well, Dr. Mike asserts that this is “biologically, and not culturally, induced.” His proof of this is (mumble mumble mumble). But of course, arguing that women have no cultural pressure to minimize the number of sex partners they have is complete and utter bullshit. When police officers are publicly slut-shaming high school girls over their MySpace pages, it’s pretty clear that we as a culture are sending really, really, really strong messages that a girl who likes it is a slut. Meanwhile, a boy who likes it is a stud. Golly, I just don’t know why it is that women then feel guilty if they’ve had sex with eight partners while their husbands have only had sex with four. I don’t know where the pressure for women to lie comes from. Must be biological, probably something hard-wired in the Madeitupital Lobe, where the Slutdometer is.

You know what would ease a woman’s guilt about having a lot of sex partners before marriage? We as a society could stop worrying about how many sex partners women have. If you’re dating a woman who’s purely virginal or had 150 partners, what do you care, if you’re the current one? Yes, it’s okay to care if suddenly you find you’re not the most recent one, at least if you’re in a monogamous relationship. But that’s true no matter what your girlfriend’s number is, or yours is.

Seriously, what do you care who she dated before she was with you? What should she care who you dated before you were with her? None of the parts wear out, folks. Indeed, evolution has made them extremely resilient.

And of course, there are boys and girls out there who are quite happy having sex with people they don’t intend to marry. There are boys and girls who settle down without guilt — or indeed, who never choose to settle down. But they never enter Dr. Mike’s brain.

And finally, the deep guilt the hypothetical woman felt about deceit might be valid — deceit, after all, is a cancer that destroys relationships. But that deceit need never have happened if she and her partner felt comfortable enough with themselves to accept each other as they are — and present themselves as they are. I’d much rather be in a relationship with a woman who had dozens of partners and was generally sanguine about it than a relationship with a woman just out of a divorce with the only man she’d ever been with — because the number isn’t important. And my number — which is low — isn’t important either, and doesn’t make me less or more of a real man. And only an idiot thinks otherwise.

Now, we’re about halfway through, and you may have noticed something: all of Dr. Mike’s arguments about being a “Real Man” are really about women. None of this is about telling the truth because it’s the right thing to do, or being careful about getting involved in relationships because they can scar your heart, and cause you to have trouble relating to others. No, Dr. Mike is all about telling men how they need to ignore their sex drive entirely and this will somehow make women happy.

It’s going to get worse, though.

Real Men Do Not Engage In Post-Marital Sex. Saying “I used to be married” is a pretty lame excuse for engaging in post-marital sex. And, if you have children, especially girls, there’s a really good reason to avoid it. Put simply, if you have young girls and you start having sex after marriage your girls will find out about it from your ex-wife. Of course, your ex-wife will have learned about it from your mutual friends.

There’s a good chance that your young daughters will still look up to you even after a nasty divorce. They may want to marry someone with many of your qualities. Don’t send the message that they need to sleep with such a man in order to get his attention.

Um…Dr. Mike? My sex life is none of my daughter’s business, and I’m not going to involve her in it. One can be discreet about having sex, after all, and frankly, I don’t want my daughter to have to think about my sex life ever.

But adults have sex. If my ex-wife ever starts dating, she and her boyfriend will at some point have sex. If I ever start dating, my girlfriend and I will at some point have sex. When my daughter’s an adult and dating, at some point she and her partner will have sex. Having sex with your partner is a practice that predates humans by hundreds of millions (if not billions) of years.  It’s pretty damn natural, and it’s something most humans really, really enjoy. Not all humans — some don’t care much for sex, and that’s fine for them. But most of us enjoy it quite a bit, and given the opportunity, most of us will engage in it.

And you know what? That’s okay. I’m okay with the idea that my daughter will some day have sex, even (gasp!) outside the bonds of holy matrimony, even for reasons other than procreation.

Sex is not evil. Running your children through a whipsaw series of paramours may be, but that’s true whether you’re all canoodling or simply coming over for dinner and nodding chastely across the table. It is emotional connections that play havoc with children and adults alike.

Finally, Dr. Mike brings home the stupid:

Real Men Never Relinquish the Role of Spiritual Head of the Household. God did not give the Ten Commandments to a woman. Nor did He send his only begotten daughter to save womankind. If your potential spouse has trouble understanding this, you need to reconsider your relationship. And once your children are grown, your leadership obligation continues. If your child has strayed spiritually – whether into paganism or atheism - it may or may not be the result of poor modeling on your behalf. Regardless, men have an obligation to fight for their children’s spiritual redemption. A man’s willingness to do so determines whether he leaves behind a legacy that glorifies God or one that glorifies Satan.

And here we go. Women are inferior — God didn’t choose them to give his commandments to. Men are in charge of their families. Paganism and atheism are evil. Not forcing your children into Christianity is leaving a legacy of evil. And make no mistake — your children are yours, not your wife’s, not themselves — they are your possessions, reflections of you. And what you do with them determines your legacy, not what you do yourself.

In short, real men are the boss. They stay the boss, even after divorce. They are the boss of their children, forever. And any woman who doesn’t accept that isn’t someone you should be dealing with. Only if you are an asshole willing to tell your wife and children what to believe and demand they believe it — fight for it, fight on behalf of Jesus against Satan — only then can you be a real man.

Dr. Mike leaves us with this teaser:

In a future installment, I will deal with the issue of “real women.” That installment will talk about the things women are doing to hurt other women. “Real Women” will include, among other things, a comprehensive discussion of fake boobies, why I don’t like them, and how they contribute to global warming.

Well, Dr. Mike certainly has his finger, ahem, on the pulse of what ails women. Given what an awesome job he did at explaining to me how I can never be a real man unless I force my daughter to choose Jesus no matter what my ex or my daughter thinks, I can’t wait to see what he thinks real women are supposed to be like.