The New Hampshire Commission on the Status of Men

When we look around the world today one thing I note is the proliferation of organizations that have emerged to serve the needs of women. We are told that the reason such organizations focus on providing services for women, is because women are disadvantaged and they need help. While the argument is presented that men do not need such support because we have it so damn good, and yes we do have advantages but there are inherent hazards to masculinity. ( men die on average six years earlier than women, and commit 80% of all suicides)

There is no doubt that in certain areas women are still disadvantaged, particularly in third world countries, however the great strides that have been made for women in the west are directly related to the massive number of programs with this aim. I am grateful for many of the advances that feminism has stimulated in society, however its now time for men to be given the chance to reconceptualise themselves.

I came across an interesting summary of this imbalance and have summarised some of the main points. To read the complete version click here. In Australia men contribute about 70% of the total tax dollars collected. Yet women's programs receive over $5billion in funding while funding for specific male initiatives attracted only about $10million. Thus in regard to gender spending, it would seem that women get over 99 per cent of the funding and men get less than 1 per cent.

A google search is an interesting way to highlight the discrepancy when it comes to services for men. I just did a search for the term "office of the status of women" and received over 52,000 hits. A similar search for the term "office of the status of men" produced 8 hits.

Up until recently I was under the impression that no such office had ever been created for men. So you can imagine my surprise when I came upon the New Hampshire Commission on the Status of Men. This is a wonderful achievement, however, the fact that they seem to be the only one of their kind in the Western world (please feel free to correct me), is of concern. We need an office of this kind in every country in the world to reverse the pervasive discrimination that is damaging the lives of millions of men.


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The Vagina Monologues - Lesbian pedophilia?

Eve Ensler seems to think that pedophilia can be a liberating experience. In her work the Vagina Monologues Ensler recounts the story of a 13 year old girl who is sexually abused by an adult female. After widespread public criticism she changed the age of the girl to 16.

Below is a direct quote from the play, where the sexual molestation of this young girl is presented as a liberating experience.

"Afterwards the gorgeous lady teaches me everything about my Coochi Snorcher [vagina]. She makes me play with myself in front of her and she teaches me all the different ways to give myself pleasure. She’s very thorough. She tells me to always know how to give myself pleasure so I’ll never need to rely on a man. In the morning I am worried that I’ve become a butch because I’m so in love with her. She laughs, but I never see her again. I realize later she was my surprising, unexpected and politically incorrect salvation. She transformed my sorry-ass Coochi Snorcher and raised it into a kind of heaven."

Later on in the script Ensler has the young girl reflecting on her experiences.

"Now people say it was a kind of rape ... Well, I say if it was rape, it was a good rape then, a rape that turned my sorry-ass coochi snorcher into a kind of heaven."

Now I don't know about you but I find this kind of talk to be absolutely disgusting and Ensler is promulgating some foul ideas. I find the double standard here to be mind blowing, I mean if any man was caught expressing such ideas about young girls he would hounded, attacked and most likely imprisoned. But when Ensler does it she is applauded, sponsored and held up as a beacon of hope for women the world over. What a load of shit!

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Is Germaine Greer a pedophile?

Germaine Greer is an expert at being offensive, if she is not sniping at the recently deceased (Steve Irwin), the not so recently passed away (Princess Diana) she is lusting after pre-pubescent boys. When discussing her book the "Beautiful Boy" she has been quoted as saying, "I suppose some will call me a pedophile".

She goes on to describe the book as being, "full of pictures of "ravishing" pre-adult boys with hairless chests, wide-apart legs and slim waists"

"I know that the only people who are supposed to like looking at pictures of boys are a subgroup of gay men," she wrote last year in London's Daily Telegraph. "Well, I'd like to reclaim for women the right to appreciate the short-lived beauty of boys, real boys, not simpering 30-year-olds with shaved chests."

This quote strikes me as not only deeply disturbing but it also seems to imply that she might as we speak be lusting after some poor boy, to be abused at her depraved hands.

If a man was seen to be making similar statements he would be condemned by the public and no reputable publisher would even consider producing a book that encourages men to seduce young girls.

Yet here is Greer promoting pedophilia, but because she is a woman talking about abusing boys it is acceptable, this is bloody outrageous.

Avoiding Kids: How Men Cope With Being Cast as Predators

The following article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on the 6th of September 2007. I have reprinted the article in its entirety.

Avoiding Kids: How Men Cope With Being Cast as Predators
By Jeff Zaslow - jeffrey.zaslow@wsj.com

These days, if Rian Romoli accidentally bumps into a child, he quickly raises his hands above his shoulders. "I don't want to give even the slightest indication that any inadvertent touching occurred," says Mr. Romoli, an economist in La Cañada Flintridge, Calif.

Ted Wallis, a doctor in Austin, Texas, recently came upon a lost child in tears in a mall. His first instinct was to help, but he feared people might consider him a predator. He walked away. "Being male," he explains, "I am guilty until proven innocent."

In San Diego, retiree Ralph Castro says he won't allow himself to be alone with a child - even in an elevator.

Last month, I wrote about how our culture teaches children to fear men. Hundreds of men responded, many lamenting that they've now become fearful of children. They said they avert their eyes when kids are around, or think twice before holding even their own children's hands in public.

Frank McEnulty, a builder in Long Beach, Calif., was once a Boy Scout scoutmaster. "Today, I wouldn't do that job for anything," he says. "All it takes is for one kid to get ticked off at you for something and tell his parents you were acting weird on the campout."

It's true that men are far more likely than women to be sexual predators. (I dispute this fact and would suggest that it is closer to equal with the large discrpancies in traditional research being affected by massive underreporting of female abuse - GR KLEIN) But our society, while declining to profile by race or nationality when it comes to crime and terrorism, has become nonchalant about profiling men. Child advocates are advising parents never to hire male babysitters. Airlines are placing unaccompanied minors with female passengers.

Child-welfare groups say these precautions minimize risks. But men's rights activists argue that our societal focus on "bad guys" has led to an overconfidence in women. (Children who die of physical abuse are more often victims of female perpetrators, usually mothers, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.)

Though groups that cater to the young are working harder to identify predators, they also ask that risks be kept in perspective. Big Brothers Big Sisters of America does criminal background checks on each of its 250,000 volunteers, and has social workers assess them. Since 1990, the
group says, it has had fewer than 10 abuse allegations per year. More than 98% of the alleged abusers were male.

"If we wanted to make sure we never had a problem, one approach would be to just become Big Sisters - to say we won't serve boys," says Mack Koonce, the group's chief operating officer. But, of course, that would deny hundreds of thousands of boys contact with male mentors.

The Boy Scouts of America now has elaborate rules to prevent both abuse and false accusations. There are 1.2 million Scout leaders, and the organization kicks out about 175 of them a year over abuse allegations or for violating policies.

These policies can be intricate. For instance, four adult leaders are needed for each outing. If a sick child must go home, two adults drive him and two stay with the others, so no adult is ever alone with a Scout. "It's protection for the adults, as well as the children," says a Scouts spokesman.

The result of all this hyper-carefulness, however, is that men often feel like untouchables. In Cochranville, Pa., Ray Simpson, a bus driver, says that he used to have 30 kids stop at his house on Halloween. But after his divorce, with people knowing he was a man living alone, he had zero visitors. "I felt like crying at the end of the evening," he says.

At Houston Intercontinental Airport, businessman Mitch Reifel was having a meal with his 5-year-old daughter when a policeman showed up to question him. A passerby had reported his interactions with the child seemed "suspicious."

In Skokie, Ill., Steve Frederick says the director of his son's day-care center called him in to reprimand him for "inappropriately touching the children." "I was shocked," he says. "Whatever did she mean?" She was referring to him reading stories with his son and other kids on his lap. A
parent had panicked when her child mentioned sitting on a man's lap.

"Good parenting and good education demand that we let children take risks," says Mr. Frederick, a career coach. "We install playground equipment, putting them at risk of falls and broken bones. Why? We want them to challenge themselves and develop muscles and confidence.

"Likewise, while we don't want sexual predators to harm our kids, we do want our kids to develop healthy relationships with adults, both men and women. Instilling a fear of men is a profound disservice to everyone."

Employment

Dangerous work in Australia is performed overwhelmingly by men (ABS 2001). In one year alone there were 134,000 incidents of work-related fatalities and disabilities – not including work-related diseases. The overwhelming majority of these casualties were men.

While women are now in the Australian armed forces they do not take up active combat roles and during a war it is only men who are conscripted to fight. However, women have been killed in Iraq in the US Army but when we look at the total casualties in Iraq the female casualties comprise only 2.17% of the total.

Of the 25 worst jobs, as ranked by the Jobs Related Almanac based on a combination of salary, stress, security, and physical demands, 24 of them are predominantly, if not almost entirely, male, which might explain why men commit over 80% of all suicides. (Most of these statistics come from The Myth of Male Power by Warren Farrell.)

While average starting salaries for women continue to lag behind those of their male counterparts, females do have higher salaries in a number of areas including optometry (109.6 per cent of males’ salaries), pharmacy (104.9 per cent), biological sciences (102.6 per cent) and social work (102.4 per cent). However, it is important to note that males are over-represented in low income jobs with over 30 per cent of men aged 25 - 45 years earning less than $21,500 per year. The implication of this is that many men are not in a position to attract a spouse, marry and have kids.

When we look at unemployment rates in Australia we can see that men make up 66.6% of all the people receiving Newstart allowance (uemployment benefit) and male participation rates in the workforce have continued to decline as traditional areas of male employment disappear.

There are many programs directed at increasing the female employment participation rate at the expense of meeting parental obligations. It is no wonder that the birth rate is so low, but is this really creating a better society? Ironically feminism has elevated the masculine traits to be the most sort after for both genders and hence no one wants to look after the kids, because such roles have very low status and pay.

Recent research completed by Rocio Garcia-Retamero, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin has identified that Women bosses are significantly more likely than men to discriminate against female employees.


The study found that when presented with applications for promotion, women were more likely than men to assess the female candidate as less qualified than the male one. The findings suggest that the “queen bee syndrome” of female rivalry in the workplace may be as important as sexism in holding back women’s careers.

Education

There has been a reduction in numbers of boys going to university and girls are outperforming boys once they get to university. Fifty years ago only 20% of university students were female, as of 2001 females comprised 55% of all tertiary students and more than half of all university staff.

“An NEA (2004) survey show that the number of male public school teachers now stands at a 40 year low. After two decades of decline, just 21 percent of the nation’s 3 million teachers are men. Male elementary school teachers are even more scarce.”

“According to the NEA’s research report, Status of the American Public School Teacher, the percentage of male elementary teachers has fallen from an all time high of 18 percent in 1981 to al all time low of 9 percent today. And while men represented half of the secondary teachers in 1986 today they make up 35 percent.”

“Why do you think this is? Would it have anything to do with the fact that some statistics show that more than 70% of sexual abuse charges against men are false”

In Australia in 1983 34% of all education students at university were men, while in 2000 this had dropped to 24%.

Pru Goward stated that, "the reason men don't take up teaching is not the absence of a scholarship when they’re 18, it’s the absence of decent pay when they’re older, and decent promotional opportunities, the fact that the profession’s seen as very girly, that young men don’t want to be seen as wusses, some men fear that they might be called homosexual, and of course there’s all those allegations of men interfering with small children."

Now I wonder how Pru's logic would be recieved by women who have entered politics, business, construction and engineerin such blokey professions I wonder if girls who enter these fields are concerned about being called lesbians?

When certain people in the education sector proposed affirmative action programs to get more men in teaching Pru Goward the federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner denied this was neccessary saying it is the quality and skill of the teacher that is most important. If we use this same logic we mighty say that there is no need to have an equal number of women in parliament because it should be about the skill and ability of the MP not their gender.

"The Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Pru Goward, is friends with the Prime Minister, but that hasn't stopped her accusing the Howard Government of social engineering today. Ms Goward is angry about the proposed men-only scholarships for primary school teacher training.

Only one in five primary schoolteachers is a man, and many schools have no male teachers. So the Federal Government is proposing a $2,000 scholarship to encourage men into the profession. Unlike Pru Goward, the Catholic Education Office in Sydney has welcomed the initiative."

A Man's Right to Choose

I am a very lucky man, I have a beautiful, healthy and happy little girl who I have a great relationship with. I am no longer with her mother but we share the parenting. Being a parent is a huge responsibility and one that you need to be fully committed to in order to build a positive relationship with your child. I believe that everyone (regardless of gender) should be able to decide when they are ready to be a parent.

If a woman decides that she doesn't want to have a child she can have an abortion. However, a man has no legal impact on this decision making process and he will be bound by the woman’s decision. I must say that I am not a big fan of abortion as I believe that we need to consider other options. (I can appreciate that there are certain circumstances ie when the baby is severely deformed or the mother's life is at risk) . However, there are other options to abortion (ie adoption) that should be promoted and actively supported by governments. (ie provide comprehensive financial support for pregnant women who might otherwise have an abortion, to offset job loss etc).

A man cannot decide to abort his parental rights, he must then commit to 16years of child support whether he wants to or not. We should be able to choose whether we want to be fathers, just as women can choose if they want to be mothers. But unlike women our choice will not be whether we kill the child or let it live, rather our choice will be between taking on the role of father or passing this role onto other men who are ready and willing (ie adoption).

Indeed abortion and birth control are two key processes that have enabled women to extend their education and take on careers, and are crucial to the feminist perspective. Without the ability to control their reproductive cycle they were confined by biology. Today the situation is reversed and it is men who have no choice when they will be parents.

In some countries if it is proven that you are not the father of the child via DNA, the "non-father" may still be required to keep paying child support.