Saturday, September 09, 2006

Two new disenfranchised fathers

Two new blogs from disenfranchised fathers, both victims of ex wives who manipulated the system to criminalize them and separate them from their children. Read them and learn what can be done in the name of the "best interest of the children".

Will Hayes at Dad's Story and JQ75 at Domestic Relations Disaster.

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Sex doesn't sell, male cooperation causes wars and men are smarter than women anyway, so nyah!

It's no surprise to anyone that magazines for men tend to be full of photos of scantily clad women, which, of course are well known as nothing but an annoying distraction from the articles for which we buy the magazines, but it's always been a source of quiet amusement that so too are the magazines for women full of such photos, in amongst the articles about the neurosis-du-jour. Failing access to dad's Playboy collection, many a spotty young man has fallen back on perusing the knickers and well-filled bras in mom's comics laid out so conveniently on the coffee table. I confess I've often wondered why (not the spotty young man's interest! the presence of the salacious pics in the first place), but always ended up shrugging my shoulders and assuming it had something to do with the same sort logic that drove women to read about their neuroses all the time. (*)

Of course, some dastardly man's gotta be at the bottom of this, hasn't he?

At least, that's what MSNBC says, reporting (female reporter) on a study (female lead author) which investigated the reactions of 100 college-aged women to female models finding that "the more seductive the model, the more it left the women bored and uninterested". Uh oh, something's not right. In which case, why are women's magazines full of pictures of models? One of the authors of the study (male, this time) said "that the results also illuminate a gap between the male executives who are marketing the magazines and the consumers". You see? I told you it was our fault.

In which case, I still have to ask why magazines that are so proud to market themselves as produced by women for women are still full of pictures of naked and near-naked women and still manage to be successful?

Another study cited in the same article seems to show that women can only distinguish two types of beauty: "wholesome" and "sexy-sensual" despite a sample selected from a range declared to be of 6 distinct types. That sounds like a sort of color-blindness. I confess I don't really know what to make of it. Any ideas anyone?

(*) Could it be that women are as confused about their identity as we
are? (Come on folks, there's got to be at least one comment in that
line or do I have to go all out balls-to-the-wall misogynistic to get
some action around here?)


    --------

Also, MSNBC report that "men bond together and cooperate well in the face of adversity to protect their interests more than women".  Now, before you get a nice warm feeling about a positive aspect of being a man, this is of course interpreted to "explain why war is almost exclusively a male business" and "makes them particularly able to engage in wars".  Sigh.  This is deduced from experiments with students involving money in which the men were found to be more likely to invest in group ventures when told they're in competition with other, unnamed groups, whereas women acted no more cooperatively when they knew they were in competition as a group than when they did not.  In other words, when the group is under threat, the men do more to protect the group than do the women, but to distract us from an example of male inter-cooperation, we're told how aggressive we are and more likely to try to beat the crap out of eachother.

But we can finish on a small male victory in the war between the sexes in which we all know that women are completely unwilling participates and at an innate and unfair disadvantage because they're all so peace-loving and cooperative and want us all, men and women, just to get on with each other.  It turns out that teenage boys are smarter than their female contemporaries.  Really, no kidding, paper available on-line


(Oh, and to prove my male blood-lust, I've been waging war over the pros and cons of gun-ownership at Dr. Helen's.  Am I a sucker for punishment, or what?)



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Wednesday, September 06, 2006

20/20 cruises the titty bars

It used to be that stripping and prostitution were considered pretty much at the same level of society, i.e. just a step above bag lady or drug addict. These days, it appears to be an appropriate, er, career choice for single mothers and "students". 20/20, for want of anything better to do, has been hanging around titty bars (quality establishments only, please) and is legitimizing this by describing the career pros and cons of taking your clothes off for a paying audience.

To their astonishment, they have discovered that "their stories were echoed not just by other dancers, but by women throughout the work force." Uh-uh, I'm sure it's just exactly the same as waitressing, or working as a bank teller, or doctor in a hospital. They do manage to make it sound like any other career, sort of. The girls whine about lack of mentoring, they have to buy their own health insurance and pensions, they complain about overheads. They have to talk to the customers and persuade them to purchase the wares. And they are "customers" and "clients" not actual men as if to recognize that your talking about sexually motivated interaction between MEN and the WOMEN that they're paying to undress and writhe for them is slightly icky, getting too close to honest recognition of the mutual exploitation that is going on.

"Butterfly" said "I had to make money, good money fast" in the wake of her divorce (I guess he was already broke or something and real work beneath her), and "spends all day with her children, then leaves them with a baby sitter when she heads to work at night." "Nicole" is a real feminist dream, she used to be a marine, then became a Penthouse model and got into stripping that way - started out competing with men, ended up exploiting and and being exploited by them. She's pleased that she goes to work after she's tucked her son into bed and gets home in time to feed him breakfast. I wonder what he tells his friends when they ask him what his mom does for a living. "Rachel", "Dawn" and "Stephanie" all told 20/20 they're students. I wonder if their classmates come in for a beer and a chat over lecture notes once in a while.

20/20 themselves come across as terminally naive. "After watching dancers give lap dances it's easy to guess what the customer is thinking about." Uh, no kidding, why do you think he's there in the first place? I think they've bought into the fantasy the clubs are peddling - that the beautiful women are really just these terrific girls, home-town honeys who are working for an honest living or to put themselves through college and need their "customers" to give them just enough money to support their families or pay the college fees. In fact, the whole thing is a pretty good commercial for these clubs and a lead-in for the girls to convince the "clientele" of their pure, virginal motivations.

Who are the best marks? "Jennifer" looks for the "vulerable ones" - "You want to look at the guy who probably doesn't get that much love or affection or whatever. And then you try to fulfill that need, you know? You try to make them feel better about themselves — smarter, stronger, whatever." Aw, isn't that sweet? Of course, the girls "are compensated for that." Yes, well, the lonely ones would be the ones most likely to cough up for a little company, but that's always been true in any walk of life. But is there any context in which it is permissible for a man to size up a woman for her vulerability with an intent to take money from her? I am intrigued by the euphemism "compensated" as opposed to "paid".

20/20 wants us to go away remembering that these poor creatures "work in a world full of scorn and moral condemnation" but "have each made a choice about what is best for themselves and their families" and "They show up each night because it's their job." Wow, but how the world has changed.

Overall, 20/20 appear to have done an excellent job of sanitizing the whole affair, gently bringing into your living room just enough of the dark side of life to titilate you but not so much as to give you any discomfort. There are no seedy dives any more with raddled drug-addicts trying desperately to squeeze a few bucks out of the groping drunk in the corner, only beautiful moms and students with Penthouse spreads on their resumes and vulnerable, lonely clients who follow all the rules. Puh-lease.

Who knows, maybe drug-pushing and pimping for single dads will be next on 20/20's career specials.



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Tuesday, September 05, 2006

DV on Men, tasteless feminists, why there's less sexual harrassment and Punch is a puppet, for goodness sakes!

MediaRADAR is serializing the chapter on domestic violence from Warren Farrel's book "Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say". In this chapter, he writes "When he fails to leave, it is not called 'Battered Man Syndrome'; it is called comedy". To me, this is the crux of it, we think that a woman beating a man is funny - kick him in the balls, knock him flat with a frying pan, or, more likely in today's Hollywood, go for an all-out frontal karate attack with spinning kicks and punches, and this is supposed to amuse us. Good God, it actually does amuse us if movie theatre audiences are anything to go by. We haven't grown out of the Skimmington, we've extended and refined it.

The reality is that the physical damage is usually something less significant than the humiliation. And the humiliation isn't even public. To the man sitting at work the morning after, nursing one bruise or another, it isn't the pain that hurts most, it's the memory of the attack. The confusion. The lack of a framework in which to identify a solution. It isn't even that he couldn't fight back, it is the knowledge that it didn't even occur to him. It wasn't cowardice, he doesn't think, it was the knowledge that he had to put up with it, let it play out, and lick his wounds later. It's the guilt, formless and sourceless, because he doesn't know if he did something to deserve it. Probably, he thinks he did, perhaps he thinks the punishment was excessive, but who is he to argue (that'll just make it worse)? Besides, everywhere he looks, it's men that get punished, not women, it's men that are the acceptable targets of casual violence, day in day out, all over the place.

Probably, he knows there isn't a solution, he just has to endure it. Leave? And what about the kids? He's already been told she'll make sure he never sees them again if he doesn't get his act together, whatever that was supposed to mean, and he knows enough of what goes on in family courts to know she'd probably be allowed to do that. Not to mention the financial cleaning out. Best just to let it slide, endure it, cluck over her poor bruised fist she complained about this morning and not say anything about the knuckle-shaped welts on his ribs. Most people he knew, if they knew what was going through his head, would just think he was whining anyway. He got himself into this mess, he's got to be a man and if not control it then survive it.

It isn't the fucking embarrassment, that can usually be avoided, it's the presumption of guilt and lack of any options.

----

To change the direction a little, but still to remain on the topic of attitudes towards men suffering injury and, in this case, death - I see that the Guardian (UK) is fully participating in the game of alienating the Australian public from their stuck up British cousins by nailing one of their most famous sons the day after he's killed. Yes, who else but Germaine Greer would show sufficient lack of taste to not only speak extensively ill of the dead Steve Irwin, but also demonstrate once again that the British care more for animals than people. Only an idiot would be unable to see the inevitable irony that Irwin would sooner or later suffer something unpleasant if not tragic in the course of his undoubtedly risky adventures, but that didn't stop us watching and enjoying his shows even if we did cluck over the foolishness of it all. But to have the appalling bad taste to crow over the man's death could only come from a whinging pom feminist(*). Doubtless she thinks this is just more of her own proud notoriety. Someone please show her the door. (Actually, come to think of it, let her keep it up, dig that hole Ger!)

(*) Yes, I know she's an Aussie, but her tripe was published in a British rag and she lives in the UK now and I wouldn't blame Australia for disowning her and revoking her passport.

And to another perhaps comparitively trivial item, in California, one Wendy Bliss thinks that the decrease in sexual harrassment claims between 1997 and 2005 is a result of the increase in sexual harrassment training. Of course, the same item reports that average damages awards have risen from US$141,000 in 1994 to US$1 million now, so I can think of at least two more factors to account for the decline in the number of claims - 1) companies are now terrified and much more likely to fire the man, who can't fight back, at the slightest hint of an accusation (or even just voicing politically incorrect thought) and 2) lawyers will prefer the clear cut cases that a jury is likely to award the bigger chunk of cash.

Finally, today's entry in the silly science stakes comes from the ever reliable BBC who want us to believe that Mr Punch of Punch & Judy fame is always in a bad mood and beating people up because he has a medical condition called acromegaly. Would someone please tell Auntie Beeb that Punch is a goddamned puppet?




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MediaRADAR is serializing the chapter on domestic violence from Warren Farrel's book "Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say". In this chapter, he writes "When he fails to leave, it is not called 'Battered Man Syndrome'; it is called comedy". To me, this is the crux of it, we think that a woman beating a man is funny - kick him in the balls, knock him flat with a frying pan, or, more likely in today's Hollywood, go for an all-out frontal karate attack with spinning kicks and punches, and this is supposed to amuse us. Good God, it actually does amuse us if movie theatre audiences are anything to go by. We haven't grown out of the Skimmington, we've extended and refined it.

The reality is that the physical damage is usually something less significant than the humiliation. And the humiliation isn't even public. To the man sitting at work the morning after, nursing one bruise or another, it isn't the pain that hurts most, it's the memory of the attack. The confusion. The lack of a framework in which to identify a solution. It isn't even that he couldn't fight back, it is the knowledge that it didn't even occur to him. It wasn't cowardice, he doesn't think, it was the knowledge that he had to put up with it, let it play out, and lick his wounds later. It's the guilt, formless and sourceless, because he doesn't know if he did something to deserve it. Probably, he thinks he did, perhaps he thinks the punishment was excessive, but who is he to argue (that'll just make it worse)? Besides, everywhere he looks, it's men that get punished, not women, it's men that are the acceptable targets of casual violence, day in day out, all over the place.

Probably, he knows there isn't a solution, he just has to endure it. Leave? And what about the kids? He's already been told she'll make sure he never sees them again if he doesn't get his act together, whatever that was supposed to mean, and he knows enough of what goes on in family courts to know she'd probably be allowed to do that. Not to mention the financial cleaning out. Best just to let it slide, endure it, cluck over her poor bruised fist she complained about this morning and not say anything about the knuckle-shaped welts on his ribs. Most people he knew, if they knew what was going through his head, would just think he was whining anyway. He got himself into this mess, he's got to be a man and if not control it then survive it.

It isn't the fucking embarrassment, that can usually be avoided, it's the presumption of guilt and lack of any options.

----

To change the direction a little, but still to remain on the topic of attitudes towards men suffering injury and, in this case, death - I see that the Guardian (UK) is fully participating in the game of alienating the Australian public from their stuck up British cousins by nailing one of their most famous sons the day after he's killed. Yes, who else but Germaine Greer would show sufficient lack of taste to not only speak extensively ill of the dead Steve Irwin, but also demonstrate once again that the British care more for animals than people. Only an idiot would be unable to see the inevitable irony that Irwin would sooner or later suffer something unpleasant if not tragic in the course of his undoubtedly risky adventures, but that didn't stop us watching and enjoying his shows even if we did cluck over the foolishness of it all. But to have the appalling bad taste to crow over the man's death could only come from a whinging pom feminist(*). Doubtless she thinks this is just more of her own proud notoriety. Someone please show her the door. (Actually, come to think of it, let her keep it up, dig that hole Ger!)

(*) Yes, I know she's an Aussie, but her tripe was published in a British rag and she lives in the UK now and I wouldn't blame Australia for disowning her and revoking her passport.

And to another perhaps comparitively trivial item, in California, one Wendy Bliss thinks that the decrease in sexual harrassment claims between 1997 and 2005 is a result of the increase in sexual harrassment training. Of course, the same item reports that average damages awards have risen from US$141,000 in 1994 to US$1 million now, so I can think of at least two more factors to account for the decline in the number of claims - 1) companies are now terrified and much more likely to fire the man, who can't fight back, at the slightest hint of an accusation (or even just voicing politically incorrect thought) and 2) lawyers will prefer the clear cut cases that a jury is likely to award the bigger chunk of cash.

Finally, today's entry in the silly science stakes comes from the ever reliable BBC who want us to believe that Mr Punch of Punch & Judy fame is always in a bad mood and beating people up because he has a medical condition called acromegaly. Would someone please tell Auntie Beeb that Punch is a goddamned puppet?




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Monday, September 04, 2006

Feminists faking orgasms, a catfight, not shaving, and rock music for brains

The news out of Britain today is just terrific. In the Observer, get this, we have a feminist arguing for women to be nice to men. Good lord. Whatever next? But really, Fay Weldon offers the following advice to women not getting off from getting laid: "If you are happy and generous-minded, you will fake it and then leap out of bed and pour him champagne, telling him, 'You are so clever' or however you express enthusiasm". Personally, behavior like that from a bed partner would make me deeply suspicious. "Clever"? I have been declared at least reasonably capable in bed (really, at least once!), but "clever"? As for the leaping out of bed, she oughtn't be capable of "leaping" anywhere at that point if anything has been done at least reasonably right, don't you think? Besides, the champagne ought to be in easy reach without any kind of leaping, oughtn't it?

But then there's the question of faking it. Ms. Weldon goes on: "Faking is kind to male partners ... Otherwise they too may become anxious and so less able to perform. Do yourself and him a favour, sister: fake it." Ah, so it comes down to the fragile male ego from which so many women are so convinced we all suffer intolerably. Of
course, every woman I ever met has had a universally and infinitely durable ego and no performance anxiety of any sort in any realm.

Now, I don't know if I've ever observed a fake orgasm, although I've had my suspicions (and I know of at least one woman who would happily and for the simple fun of it, claim that she faked every single one just to try and puncture my oh-so-fragile ego, but I know better, hehe), but either way, I don't much like it. It's just dishonest. One learns from one's mistakes. If one thing doesn't work, try another. We're too tired now? Well, there's always tomorrow. But why fake it. Who needs that?

Of course, if the choice is between faking it and making a scene because you didn't get off, I'd rather you weren't in my bed in the first place.

These issues aside, Ms. Weldon's advice gets the predictable short shrift from the more common variety of feminist. Apparently, she's an old fart whose ideas are not relevent to the modenr woman. Hmmm. Bitchy.

Of course, if we want more bitchiness, we can check out Hastings where a lesbian teacher is accused of fondling the daughter of a woman who she says was her ex-lover. Someone's lying, and whoever it is, the claws are well and truly out. Cat fight, anyone?

Next, on the male side of the street, we've got the BBC's usual pathetic idea of science reporting encapsulated in an item trumpetting a link between shaving less and having strokes. Huh? Yes, that's right, if you shave less than once a day, the BBC thinks you're more likely to have a stroke. I expect that this is some feminized twit's idea of "News for Men"(TM). Before reading on down the article I tried my best to imagine how dragging, or rather not dragging a blade across my face could possibly influence the integrity of the blood vessels inside my skull.

Momentarily distracted by the thought that not shaving tends to be better for the blood vessels on the outside of my head, I ask myself: when do I not shave? When I can't be bothered, but wouldn't that make me more relaxed and therefore less likely to pop a vein at the general antagonism of the world? Then we read that men who need to shave less have less testosterone, although any possible suggestion of cause, effect and intervening mechanism is left to our imaginations as we further learn that men who shave less frequently are more likely to smoke. Yes, well, that's bleeding obvious isn't it? As is the tendency to have angina and do manual work and be less likely to be married and more likely to have a heart attack and contract lung cancer. All this for not shaving.

But the extra chance at lung cancer & heart attack is actually caused by the smoking. Duh. Even so, not shaving still means that you're 30% more likely to die from any cause. This, of course, is a distinctly odd thing to say because everyone that I know, shaver or not, is 100% more likely to die from something sooner or later.

As ever "follow the money" is a good way to figure out what's really going on, and the lead, er, researcher says he still doesn't know why the correlation, but he hopes to carry our further research. I.e., he wants more funds. I wonder if he's angling for a grant from Bic.

Finally The Times tells us that rock music is good for our brains. My immediate mental vision was a slightly eye-watering mix of leather jackets, long hair, IQ tests and slurred "yeah, well, iss obvious innit". But no, apparently, for a sum total of sixteen Scottish "volunteers", listening to classical music or rock allows for better performance in memory tests than does listening to static noise or silence. Again, following the money, The Times points out that "The Mozart Effect" has "spawned a multi-million-pound industry in classical music CDs designed to boost children’s intelligence." Perhaps we'll see the Red Hot Chili Peppers' next album with a sticker propounding its intellectual merits alongside the parental advisory.

And this is just Monday...


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Friday, September 01, 2006

What could possibly go wrong?

The lunatics have taken over the asylum and you couldn't make this up. If you thought false allegations were already a serious epidemic, you ain't seen nuthin' yet. To everyone living in Ohio: run, don't walk, run for the border...

"An Ohio legislative panel yesterday rubber-stamped an unprecedented process that would allow sex offenders to be publicly identified and tracked even if they've never been charged with a crime."

"Rubber stamped" brings to mind bureaucrats doing things they're not really thinking about, just as long as the piece of paper went through the right process. They also missed out the word "alleged" in front of "sex offenders", but if a sex offender hasn't been charged with a crime, is she or he still a sex offender?

"
A recently enacted law allows county prosecutors, the state attorney general, or, as a last resort, alleged victims to ask judges to civilly declare someone to be a sex offender even when there has been no criminal verdict or successful lawsuit."

"T
he person's name, address, and photograph would be placed on a new Internet database and the person would be subjected to the same registration and community notification requirements and restrictions on where he could live."

Note the deft insertion of a gender-specific pronoun.

"A civilly declared offender, however, could petition the court to have the person's name removed from the new list after six years"

I am reminded of the book Wild Swans describing what it was like to live through China's Cultural Revolution where denunciation was a national sport and lives destroyed at the word of a neighbor with an axe to grind.



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