Why don't we just hang all men

It seems that my hero, Brett Favre, is in some trouble. It seems that while he was playing for the New York Jets, he sent voice mails to a buxom in-house “reporter” named Jenn Sterger, and what she “believes” are pics of his man package. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has ordered an investigation, although it is curious that there has been no suggestion that there will be punishment meted out for Jets players and coaches involved in the alleged sexual harassment of Ines Sainz; perhaps this is because she is actually a legitimate sports reporter for a Mexican television station. Sainz, as I have pointed out in a previous blog, dresses the way she does because it is fairly common practice (at least among the Latin American Euro-elites) in that culture; she was not trying to provoke Jets players. The same cannot be said of Sterger, however. In the current American unisex culture, in the post 1960s “free love” and mini-skirt age, prancing around in skimpy outfits is designed to provoke a response (but only from the “right” people, of course). Sterger’s eye-popping bosom (artificially-enhanced) in a bikini top at a Florida State football game led Brent Musberger to exclaim "1,500 red-blooded American males just decided to apply to Florida State."

Playboy soon came calling, and Sterger obliged by putting her birthday suit on display. Count on the Jets to help her parlay her form into a job as a “reporter,” and from there on to cable television, where skimpily-clad young women are the order of the day. Don’t mistake me; I have no issue with semi-nudity on television—it certainly is less dull that than all these Barbie Doll TV actresses who “won’t do nudity” in films. But most of these women are talentless, whining bores. Sterger has her own show on Versus; by all accounts it is awful, which might explain the sudden need to bring all this Favre stuff up two years after it allegedly occurred.

I have no doubt that Favre, the lonely country boy in the Big City (certainly not Green Bay) saw this pleasing-to-the-eye in-house female reporter, and who might want to “chill” with him and maybe even talk about football (after all, she was a team “reporter”). Favre (assuming that’s his voice) sounded like an uncomfortable Hillbilly on the call—almost apologetic—insisting that this wasn’t a “set-up”—meaning, we can assume, not for sex. Sterger hasn’t made that claim; in fact earlier she stated that she and her friends found the voice mails highly amusing, and she derided Favre as being an “old man.” Sounds like the classic description of a “victim.”

The pics that Sterger provided (isn’t it amazing how she is trying to “distance” herself from her greed and self-promotion by passing this stuff through a “third party?”) that she “thinks” are of Favre’s man package, have been treated by the media in general as established “fact.” The media must do this to justify in delving in sleaze for ratings, but it is wrong in assuming that most people are not annoyed by all this dirt-dealing; the fact is that it is only holier-than-thou media types and the fanatical few that only sounds like millions that turns greedy victimizers into “victims.”

Sexism is an increasing problem in this country, except that it isn’t exactly what feminists and their media supporters claim it is. I’ve already discussed part of it in previous post. Another aspect is the way crime is reported on the news and portrayed on television. A murder victim is typically considered newsworthy if that person happens to be a white female, the more attractive the better. On crime shows, the vast majority of murder victims are white females. Is this an expression of reality, or an assumption that white female victims have more “appeal” than male victims? Appealing to whom? The white female audience that is repeatedly told on one hand that they are “superior” to men, and the other that they are perpetual victims. There is a “war against women,” or so say activist pundits. It is a “given” fact.

But does reality match the “facts?” According to the 2010 Statistical Abstract and Department of Justice crime statistics, nearly 80 percent of all murder victims are male. Although white and black male victims are roughly equal in raw numbers, black males are much more likely to be murder victims: 37.59 per 100,000 compared to 4.63 per 100,000 white males. Black females have a 5.62 per 100,000 rate compared to 1.61 per 100,000 for white females. The disparity indicated by these figure should be staggering. Blacks are nearly seven times more likely than whites to be a murder victim, and black males 23 times more likely than white females. What does this tell us? It tells us that the media—both news and “entertainment”—prefer the cheap emotional manipulation rather than confront the real disparities and iniquities in this country.

But it’s no good to fight this, especially with people like attorney Gloria Allred around. Allred recently accused anyone who was not a feminist to be a “bigot,” although her recent proclivity toward targeting black male athletes makes one wonder who the “bigot” really is. I recall back in 1991, feminist Eleanor Smeal had the audacity to claim that media coverage of the Pamela Smart murder case (Smart persuaded her teenage “lover” to murder her husband) was evidence of “racism against white women,” which, if nothing else, shows how self-obsessed these people are. Allred—whatever moral high ground she might have claimed in the past—is now nothing more than a sleazy shakedown operator—just like her clients. One of her recent “victims” of the prevailing “patriarchy,” porn star Devon James (or whatever she’s calling herself these days), claims to have a tape of herself in flagrant flagrante with Tiger Woods; none of the “mainstream” porn production companies, surprisingly, would touch this, so James set-up her own. But there may be a glitch; her former manager claims that James and her porn “actor” husband approached her with the idea of a video with a Tiger lookalike, but refused to participate. After a judge threw-out James’ paternity suit against Woods, her own mother called her a “pathological liar.”

In the midst of the Woods’ scandal Allred appeared before the news networks to explain why she represents women who knowingly enlist themselves in adultery. We all know, of course, that the women involved with Woods knew he was married, but there was a certain “wow” factor of having the attentions of a famous man, especially with one who has a lot of money to throw around. Allred ludicrously told the Today Show that Woods needed to “apologize” to James for “breaking her heart.” James, of course, was married herself, although it would take some thinking to determine what marriage means to porn performers still active in their trade. All this suggests that Allred further sullies the already sullied reputation of feminists, to whom distorting or inventing facts to suit their agenda is not a matter of embarrassment. Embarrassment or no, Allred told the Today Show and others that men needed to “pay’ for the mistakes, meaning, in her case, she wants to make them “suffer”—meaning ruining their lives and careers as best she can, and if she and her clients make a million bucks or so off of them, all the better. Allred really does like making men suffer for being men. You’d have to ask her why her hatred knows no limits; she claimed that she was raped by a “well-respected doctor” at gunpoint in Mexico in 1966, for which she provides no supporting evidence; on the other hand, she did abandon her first husband when she discovered he had bipolar disorder (I wonder what stories she has told their daughter to justify the abandonment); he later committed suicide, which I am sure didn’t then and still doesn’t trouble Allred (or her allies) the slightest bit.

But Allred is only one face of a culture of oppression and intolerance. We live in a society that not only tolerates but elevates such hollow bigots as Nevada senatorial candidate Sharron Angle, merely because women should be elevated. Now I am reading a post on ESPN’s website by a woman named Jemele Hill, who tells us that what Favre allegedly did was “much worse” than Tiger’s serial adulteries which were “consensual” affairs. Sterger has claimed that she received hundreds, maybe thousands, of text messages and pics from men—many of them athletes. On one local sports radio program, where the host and friends are having a hard time keeping a straight face with all the factors considered, the woman who does the traffic was sent out to conduct a “poll” to see if any of her female friends received pics of a man’s package. She reported that 18 out of 58 responded claimed to have received such donations, out of which 5 or 6 felt some measure of discomfort. We are left with wondering if Sterger, in her quest for another 15 minutes of fame to resurrect her lousy show on Versus, decided that the pics she actually kept for two years (as well as the voice mails?) could be useful, other than sources of amusement for her and her girlfriends. Beyond that, what did Favre do? He asked a woman he hadn’t met for a “date”—as if Sterger didn’t know who Favre was. Why don’t we just hang 90 percent of all males while we’re at it? Allred would certainly be up for that.

Black folks always handy for white folks in need

There was the recent story about a white woman named Bethany Storro, who was just sitting around in a park in Vancouver, Washington when some anonymous black woman walked up to her and splashed acid in her face, and ran off. It was all over the news. People were appalled at this racist act. Black woman envious of white woman’s beauty; well ha-ha, not beautiful anymore. People sent in donations to help buy Storro a new face; probably racist whites who live by such stories. Just like the story told by a woman who claimed that she had been raped by a local homeless man while her child was playing a few feet away (she needed rent money from her parents). Turns out that Storro had accidently washed her face with drain cleaner she found in the park restroom. And she had just had a face peel two weeks before the “attack.” $620 down the drain! What to do? Blame a black person; it works every time. Everyone will believe it. Black people all look the same, and the cops will never find the “right” person anyways, so no harm done. Her face only hurt a little anyways, and in fact she wasn't so beautiful in the before (in fact rather pudgy), so why not buy a new face? With all this money that people are sending her, why not? Or go on a shopping spree at Target, and buy lots of new clothes.

But not anymore, for the moment; Storro, having been exposed, is currently awaiting charges for second-degree theft for accepting donations based on making a false charge.

Naturally, people remember the original accusation, but probably missed the follow-up. When I first heard the accusation, my first reaction incredulity. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this tale. Dating at least back to the Scottsboro Boys case, white people seeking to explain shocking behavior (in the Scottsboro case, two white women riding in the same rail car with black men) have found it convenient to accuse blacks of heinous crimes that they assume everyone will believe, due to the prevailing stereotypes. In 1989 there was the infamous Charles Stuart case, whose pregnant wife was shot in a Boston neighborhood, and himself wounded. Stuart called police, claimed that a black man had carjacked them, drove them to a seedy neighborhood, robbed and shot them. Stuart even went so far as to identify the killer from a mugshot book. The killer was quickly apprehended, and the country was aflame from the heinous deed; even William Raspberry, an African-American columnist for the Boston Globe, felt guilt and shame that another black man could be capable of such an act.

It turned out, of course, that Stuart had shot his own wife, because he was afraid that there would be financial hardship in the household if she quit her job to care for the child (as if killing her would put her back to work). Stuart then shot himself, called his brother to fetch the gun and a few personal items to make it look like a robbery. The brother, panged by guilt, turned himself over to the police and confessed what really happened. Charles Stuart, realizing the game was up, drowned himself. And then there was poor Susan Smith, a South Carolina woman who was forced out of her car by another evil black man, who for no apparent reason decided he wanted to kidnap two white boys. It was instant national news. Outpourings of grief, outrage and sympathy everywhere. But an intensive hunt for the car turned-up nothing, and there was a good reason for that: Smith had allowed the vehicle to roll into a lake with her sons still inside, where they drowned. Smith confessed that she was infatuated with a local man with money who wasn’t interested in having kids. Although the media quickly jumped on the usual psychological “syndromes” that women peculiarly suffer from to explain her actions, Smith is not due for parole until 2024.

Many people felt “betrayed” by the alleged victims after the truth came out. Why “betrayed?” It is as if they actually wanted to believe these heinous stories. Why? Because these stories about blacks (and Latinos as well) committing such crimes “confirms” their own beliefs and prejudices? It justifies their bigotry? It eases their minds when segregation and discrimination is the order of the day?

Dreaming of a different world

What kind of world would it be if George Bush had not been “elected” president? Bush himself knew that many people thought his election was illegitimate. That is why after the U.S. Supreme Court essentially handed him the crown (Justice Sandra Day O’Connor would later say that she would not retire so long as a Democrat was president, so now she could retire with peace of mind), he would claim that he “heard” the American People, and he would not pursue his controversial $1.3 trillion tax cut that benefited almost exclusively the wealthiest Americans. We’ve heard this kind of talk before, of course; Republicans always claim that they have “heard” the People. The problem is they that they are listening to a very small minority that has a very large amount of bucks; in the 2001, it turned out that the rich and the powerful were heard with more clarity than “The People.” The Republicans listened to the corporate dog whistle and passed the massive tax cuts for the rich anyways—through budget reconciliation, because Democrats still claimed to “hear” the rest of the People. Today, of course, the Republicans still claim to hear the people—except that instead from backrooms, the rich and powerful are channeling their propaganda through Tea Party types.

Anyways, continuing the dream that Bush was not president. We would not have the massive budget deficits we are seeing now, not just because there would be no massive tax cuts for the rich, but because there would be considerable less warfare to pay for. Would 9-11 have occurred under an Al Gore presidency? We know that the Clinton administration warned the Bush people about a possible attack on U.S. soil by Al-Qaeda operatives. We also know that at least a month before the attack, the FBI warned the Bush people about possible attacks using jetliners as suicide bombs. We also know that the Bush administration essentially ignored these warnings as baseless (we think). If a Gore administration had acted on these warnings, it is certainly within the realm of reason that steps would have been taken to take more seriously reports from FBI field agents who reported suspicious activity by several of the terrorists who would eventually be involved in the 9-11 attacks. We also know, of course, that the Bush administration—intent on starting another war in Iraq—deliberately ratcheted-up the language of belligerence from the start, no doubt further inciting the terrorists.

Furthermore, it seems more likely that any “war”—if in fact the attack was successfully carried out—would have been limited to attacks on Al-Qaeda positions in Afghanistan and perhaps more serious attempts to take-out Bin Laden and his cohorts whatever means necessary, rather than waiting on the Taliban to “give-up” Bin Laden, which the Bush administration knew would not occur, but gave them an excuse to get their feet on the battleground. Even if a Gore administration had decided to put boots on the ground, we can presume that all resources necessary would have been deployed to the task, rather than faking it, and then becoming bogged down in Iraq. We can also presume that this war would have been a rather less expensive one to fight.

Since Gore is into “green,” we could also expect, without the problem of massive budget deficits created by massive tax cuts for the rich and a two-front war, that the country would have taken more concrete efforts at finding ways to offset the country’s dependence on foreign oil. There also wouldn’t have been the attempt to fleece the elderly and further enrich drug companies with the Medicare Part D program, which obliged the government to subsidize drug companies’ inflated prices. What about the economy? Instead of gutting HUD funding for affordable housing and pitching the “affordable” home loan myth, people who otherwise did not have the means would not be finding their life’s work lost in toxic mortgages—and financial institutions would not have needed bailouts. There would have been less willingness by oversight bodies to allow the financial gambling that the Bush administration allowed to occur. The recession would still have occurred—but certainly not on the scale as experienced now, and the government would have had the means to provide relief without breaking the bank. And not least, we wouldn't have had an administration that deliberately tried to enhance racial divisions and created an atmosphere conducive to hate for cynical political gain.

This is of course hindsight, but looking back, there is almost nothing that the Bush administration did that did not contribute to the tribulations the country faces today.

Are American Jews an oppressed "minority?"

I must confess that I was never much impressed with Rick Sanchez’s shtick on CNN. A bit of excitable bluster here, a suggestion of being malinformed there trying to bloat something out of nothing, and not being very good at small talk. So Sanchez, apparently angry that he was being shuffled to an inferior post, which may have been warranted, went-off in a radio interview claiming anti-Latino bias. The funny thing is, if a white person were to point out that this bias existed (and let’s face it—CNN has few minorities on the payroll—although more than “liberal” MSNBC), everyone would be nodding in agreement, if they be honest. But Sanchez had the temerity to voice the opinion himself; minorities are not allowed to talk about discrimination, or else they’ll be accused of “racism.” Note that every time Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton open their mouths about alleged racial discrimination, the knee-jerk reaction of many whites is denial and claims of black racism.

However, if Sanchez had simply clammed-up after making the racism accusation, he might still have a job. But Jon Stewart’s poking fun at him on “The Daily Show” may have been “proof” to Sanchez that this kind of talk that was occurring behind his back, leading to his “demotion.” He started talking about Jews, and that is a no-no. Accuse Jews of discrimination (especially if they work for your boss—or are your boss) then what happens to you is what happened to Sanchez: you get fired. Frankly, I found Sanchez’s resorting to attacking Jews to be reactionary, ill-informed, idiotic but most of all foolish ; there may well be large percentage of people of Jewish persuasion in positions of authority in the media, but I must observe that it has done little to” liberalize” it or make the news programs more about news than entertainment—like CNN; even “The Daily Show” really isn’t about news, it’s about making fun of newsmakers. Sanchez’s mistake was forgetting that Stewart really doesn’t have much of a conscience, and thus shouldn't be taken seriously--unlike Stephen Colbert, who I will credit with having somewhat of a moral center the bears examination.

This attacking Jews is bad business, because the fact is that many Jews do live in the past—in fact in another country, where the Holocaust did occurred. But the Jews were not victims of this country’s version of the Holocaust: the destruction of 90 percent of the Native American population in the first three centuries of European exploitation. Jews were also not slaves in this country (new archeological evidence suggests that they were not even slaves in Egypt). They were not interned, like the Japanese. They were not spoken of as pests and vermin as Latinos are in this country today, or being deported even when they have their birth certificates on their persons. Jews were transgressed upon by “gentlemen’s agreements” that barred them from exclusive country clubs and residential areas. But they were not prevented from pursuing careers and making a lot of money. While many Jews were heavily involved in the civil rights struggle, throughout much of the 20th Century, “white” and “Jew” were synonymous with those shopkeepers who were perceived as exploiting inner city black neighborhoods; I found it extremely hypocritical for Jewish leaders to denounce civil rights leader Julian Bond when he made this point. Rather than examine the truth of the matter, Jewish leaders merely claimed that Bond was a “racist.” White (supposedly mostly Jewish) shopkeepers were targeted in riots in Detroit and Los Angeles, and were duly critiqued; on the other hand, as Jewish scholar Jonathan Schorsch observed, speaking of black/Jewish relations by Jewish writers and researchers was permissible only if “subjectivity did not threaten certain conceptions of Jewish passivity and disempowerment." Meaning that speaking of discrimination against blacks by Jews was not to be countenanced.

For racial minorities who continue to be made to feel the substantive effects of racism, resort to talk about remembering the Holocaust should be as much about how racist propaganda and stereotyping is used to dehumanize people and justify discrimination, not just about killing a lot of people (I mean, this is America). Sanchez found himself in additional hot water when the interviewer, Pete Dominick, posed the question “Are not Jews minorities too?” His first response was to find this bogus, before backtracking. But it is a bogus comparison. Jews can be labeled a religious minority, but not a racial minority; that was an anti-Semitic myth. Jews are, at least those in this country, Caucasian. Hardly anyone has Barbara Streisand’s enormous proboscis, so it is impossible to distinguish Jews from any other white American. Even Jerry Falwell or Osama Bin Laden couldn’t tell the difference unless you told them. To compare the issues that Jews confront in this country to that of black and Latinos is to diminish the harsh reality that the latter confront in this society.

CNN never allowed Sanchez to redeem himself by apologizing for his comments on the air, which suggest it was looking for an excuse to fire Sanchez anyways. But you can bet your bottom dollar that CNN commentators will continue to make outrageous claims of sexism without substantiating evidence, and no one will ever be fired over it or be forced to apologize for it. CNN will also not be required to explain why it broadcasts so many negative images of Latinos that help create an atmosphere of hate. Some groups are simply more “relevant,” and powerful, than others.

While the country fries, corporations are swimming in money

It sure took the New York Times long enough to figure out what many of us have been talking about for some time now: That instead of using bail-out money and low-interest loans to restart the economy, large corporations are treading water at best, saving the money for replacement equipment and cutting jobs, for their next big acquisition and cutting jobs, stockpiling the money so that upper-echelon managers can safely parachute away and cutting jobs, making sure shareholders get a beefy dividend and cutting jobs, or generally not doing anything at all and cutting jobs. One thing they are not doing at the moment is creating new jobs. Why? Because maximizing profits is still the number one goal in life. Nothing else matters, even the survival of the country. The domestic economy will not improve unless these corporations start using the $1.6 trillion they have stockpiled for job creation; if the vast disparity in wages was managed in a more equitable manner, this alone could create jobs. But if there are fewer people with money to spend, the economy will not restart. If corporations do not hire, people will fear for their own jobs, and save more in this vicious cycle. More people will be on unemployment, raising government deficits. For corporations in a global economic environment, American consumers don’t matter as much to American corporations as they used to; there are always customers elsewhere. Ironically (or not) small businesses that need the money to invest and hire new employees have been stopped at the door when seeking the same loans.

The claim is that corporations are waiting until after elections to see if the “climate” is more “business-friendly”—meaning, of course if more Republicans populate Congress. Unless voters retrieve their senses on election day, that will certainly happen. The health care and financial reform bills will at best be the only significant “change” we will have seen from this administration, and frankly we were lucky to get that given the way conservative Democrats blocked anything of greater substance. And we may not even have that if Republicans gain majorities in both chambers. Only Obama will have the ability to keep Republicans and their corporate allies from running amuck and building another “bubble” that people will mistake for growth but in reality is merely the precursor for another bust that reveals that the interest of business is not to build a structurally sound domestic economy, but to outsource and cut jobs in order to maximize profits and personal bank accounts—while the average American will continue to suffer low wages and job insecurity. When the next bust comes, companies will again blackmail the federal government for bailout money, and their Republican backers will again accuse Democrats of wasting taxpayer money to gain political advantage (even though TARP has in fact not in end cost taxpayers anything—and has even made a profit), and of course demand that more tax cuts for business, more deregulation, and expect that clouding voters’ minds to the truth of their crimes. Even now, Karl Rove’s “non-profit” Crossroads GPA campaign organization claims on its website that the Obama administration is “cutting the supply of investment capital” to businesses. The reality is that financial entities have been loaning large companies massive funds; the question is what do they intend to do with the money. What appears to be happening is that companies are “investing” in their own profit margins and pocket books.

Citizens United case already bearing its rotten fruit

The can of worms that we all expected to be opened after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case, allowing virtually unlimited campaign spending, has occurred. Campaign finance watchdogs are calling for the IRS to investigate the non-profit status of two so-called “issues” organizations, the Crossroads GPS and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Federal Elections Commission is supposed to oversee the legality of these organizations campaign activities, but has been too far politicized itself to do anything. In order to receive tax-exempt status, such organizations must be “non-partisan” and claim no political affiliation or directly support or oppose a particular candidate. But count on Karl Rove (who should be in prison, but apparently has a lot of dirt on a lot people), the principle backer of Crossroads, to thread the needle as finely as possible, hoping that no one will notice. Crossroads is classified as a “social welfare” organization under the federal tax code, which is patently absurd on its face. The organization’s website might suggest “social welfare” for corporations, but otherwise it is nothing more or less than a transparent front group targeting the administration and Democratic lawmakers. Its blatant partisanship is clear enough from its word-for-word parroting of the same right-wing talking points and bald-faced lies and deceptions we’ve heard ad nauseum over the past two years, and its cross-country attack ads on exclusively Democratic candidates merely reinforces the point.

Meanwhile, it was revealed that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is not only accepting “contributions” from foreign companies to help influence elections in this country, but is actively soliciting those contributions. The legality of the Chamber’s activities is a subject of debate, but the total lack of ethics in the matter appalls the mind. The watchdog group StopTheChamber is calling for the Justice Department to “shut down” this “criminal organization once and for all.” As with all right-wing organizations, when it comes to maintaining power and influence, the law is merely an inconvenience to be skirted, or ignored.

U.S. tax laws state that organizations like Crossroads GPS and the Chamber cannot be political or participate or intervene in political campaigns if they desire to be classified as untaxed nonprofits that can spend unlimited funds and keep donors’ identities private. This is the can of worms that the Supreme Court has opened. All these groups have to say is that they only run “issues” ads, and they can do whatever they like without any oversight whatever. Both of these organizations are so blatantly partisan—and the Chamber has been so since its creation—and have such potent resources to draw on, that unless they are reigned-in now, the U.S. electoral process (thanks to the blatantly extreme right majority on the Supreme Court) will make a typical Italian or Third World election look like the very model impartiality and honesty.

Piling on

The Justice Department is reportedly readying a report on alleged discrimination against girls in college admissions, to determine if boys are benefiting from “favoritism” in violation of Title IX. How can this be, you ask? Girls constitute an increasing majority of college students—as much as a 60-40 split—so why is the Justice Department wasting its time on an apparently frivolous and self-serving accusation? Good question. Until the report is released, we won’t know what colleges and what persons were involved in bringing forth these allegations, although it won't be a surprise if it is feminist activists from the American Association for University Women—responsible for the shockingly distorted and utterly devoid of fact 1992 report “How Schools Shortchanged Girls,” which led to a variety of changes that merely led to more overt challenges to boys’ already eroding ability to find a place in an academic environment geared to over-state girls’ “strengths.” The AAUW was, of course, also shamelessly responsible for the now discredited and completely disreputable “study” which claimed that one-in-three college women are raped.

The subject being investigated, of course, should have been “Are boys being discriminated against in college admissions?” But the wider question is “Are boys being discriminated against in general in the education system?” Yes, boys are dropping out of high school at higher rates and less likely to be admitted to college, so there may be a problem worth investigating, states a Seattle Times editorial; but we shouldn’t do anything that will “hurt girls,” and this has been the general refrain from those who deign to perceive a problem but don’t really want to do anything about it—doubtless either fearful of a gender politics backlash, or outspokenly desiring such an outcome. While nit-picking anti-affirmative action statutes opposed to under-represented racial minority admissions have been passed in allegedly blue states like Washington and California, the country seems loath to take-on the loud and sometimes frenzied gender activists, even merely to address the disparity issue. As I noted in an earlier post, some gender activists applaud the disparity, since it “proves” that women are “superior.” Yet, as I noted, there doesn’t seem to be any Einsteins, Beethovens, Newtons or even Bill Gateses coming out of this new crop of “superior” beings. Even Linda Buck’s Nobel Prize for her cancer research is now being questioned after two of her research papers were withdrawn for being based on fraudulent data.

Although Christina Hoff Sommers’ Atlantic Monthly article “The War Against Boys” was published in 2000, the situation seems even worse now for boys than it did then. How did we get to this point? Sommers’ placed the ongoing propaganda of victimology at the feet of Carol Gilligan, a Harvard professor in gender studies, which more appropriately should be referred to as “women as victims studies” since Gilligan and her ilk have never shown any understanding (or desire to understand) the problems confronting males in this society. In a “ground-breaking” 1982 book entitled “A Different Voice,” Gilligan claimed that "As the river of a girl's life flows into the sea of Western culture, she is in danger of drowning or disappearing”—and schools were the principle culprit. Gilligan was merely expressing her own opinion as one of the “oppressed,” so the need for actual data to back-up her claim was completely unnecessary. It was a given “fact.” Thus “girls in crisis” became a “national emergency” once the media got a hold of the story—emphasis on “story.” Media types like Anna Quindlen—for whom I feel a great deal of contempt—ignored the reality of their own success and made female victimology all the rage; in an op-ed, Quindlen even implied that she felt a degree of dismay over even the possibility that her own sons might be more successful than her daughter, blaming it on a “patriarchal” society dismissive of women.

Gilligan was followed by other feminist writers who made increasingly horrific claims without offering any empirical data that could be peer-reviewed. For example, repeated efforts to obtain the data upon which Gilligan claimed to base her findings in "Voice" on have not only not materialized, if it does in fact exist it would likely stand-up to close inspection as well as a twig in a bonfire. The aforementioned AAUW study was not at the time questioned, but since then its research methods have been criticized and discredited as “politics dressed up as science.” Other, less politicized and biased reports, concluded that the exact opposite of what the academic feminists were claiming was occurring: That boys were increasingly falling behind in almost every area of the educational environment, and that school was a much more demoralizing experience for them than for girls.

But the damage had been done. And continues to be done. The effect of the AAUW “studies” persuaded government agencies to pour money into programs to reverse the non-existent “gap” in academic achievement and “nurturing” environment between girls and boys, and merely extended the one that did exist, as yet unrecognized in the cloud of female victimology. What to do? Gilligan would claim that boys needed to get closer to their mothers and discover their “feminine” side, which was contrary to studies with harder evidence that concluded that boys in fatherless households were more susceptible to failure (the one exception being households where single mothers were able to provide a stable environment). Increasing evidence that flatly contradicted and criticized the AAUW’s findings was greeted by the then president of the Association with the accusation that “reducing the problems of our children to this petty 'who is worse off, boys or girls?’ gets us nowhere.” In this scenario, only boys are going “nowhere,” but this is just fine with the gender activists; as the Seattle Times stated, no “solution” that “hurts” girls should be countenanced. But those that hurt boys do, apparently, have a “legitimate” purpose. Take for instance the fact that while girls have higher GPAs, boys have slightly higher SAT scores. GPAs are thus given greater weight in college admissions (which also often includes the requirement of an “essay” in which girls and their verbal skills are more likely to “excel” in), but this isn’t the only problem. While girls’ higher GPAs are cited as “evidence” that they are “smarter” than boys, higher SAT scores by boys are cited as just more “evidence” that girls are “discriminated” against. The hypocrisy boggles the mind.

Much of the effort to legitimize diminishing boys in favor of girls involve “demasculinizing” boys, and failing that, punishing them for exhibiting “masculine” traits that allegedly “inhibit” girls. 90 percent of elementary school teachers are female, and so not surprisingly the process starts at an early age. Girls at an early age have a higher aptitude for reading and writing than boys; but like in dumbed-down math, teaching language ignores the fact that young boys are more restless than girls. Boys early reading skills were improved when teaching language phonetically, where one learns by breaking down the sounds that letters or groups of letters make to form words; but this system was apparently regarded as “unfair” to girls, and most schools no longer use it. A 2006 complaint to the Office of Civil Rights by a male high school student claimed that teachers in his school showed outward favoritism toward girls; boys are too “unruly” and do not sit quietly and behave like zombies. Girls who decorate their homework with feathers and sprinkles are given “extra credit.” Boys are far more frequently punished for the same transgressions that girls are guilty of, like showing up late for class. Why wouldn’t this lead to a decrease in motivation to learn if for boys, school is a “hostile” environment?

While college seems less susceptible to the negative effects of gender politicking, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t occur in the classroom. When I thought I wanted to go to graduate school (because I couldn’t find a decent job) I enrolled in what is now Sacramento State University. I was in a media class taught by a proudly (and loudly) feminist professor; she liked to talk about Madonna and how she was the greatest cultural force since Shakespeare. One day she was talking about sexist images in the media or something, and I observed out of the blue that I couldn’t help but observe that there were an awful lot of white female instructors in this school and an awful few minority instructors, and all this talk about sexism/victimization was relative. After class, one of the students threatened me with physical violence because I had the temerity to disturb the instructor’s reverie in her cloud of victimology.

All this contributes to an environment where boys are at a disadvantage—and contrary to the claims of gender activists, this does have far-reaching negative implications for the nation as a whole. As I noted in an earlier blog, 60 percent of students receiving bachelor’s and Master’s degrees are women, but as the number of females in colleges and universities has increased dramatically, there is an equally dramatic shift away from “hard” sciences like engineering, the physical sciences and mathematics toward “soft” sciences like behavioral and biological sciences. While the “soft” sciences may be more in tune with an economy that is increasingly devolving into customer service and marketing instead of manufacturing, it bespeaks of the loss of competitiveness in actually creating things the U.S. has sustained in the past several decades. It is better to “speak well” and look pretty rather than speaking in incomprehensible technical terms required for jobs that now only exist in another language. Almost all high-ticket consumer goods (with the bare exception of automobiles) and electronics are manufactured overseas, and it is only naturally that innovations and advancements in this area are almost exclusively occurring overseas as well. Only feminists like Hanna Rosin (“The End of Men”) can have the stupidity of believing that this is “progress.”

Education is not the only arena where female victimology has gone to illogical extremes in this country. There is yet another report out bemoaning that that women earn only 81 percent of what men do. This latest “crisis” naturally does not take into account factors that not only mitigate but suggest a reversal in trends. For example, white women hold the plurality of jobs in this country, (and women a majority of the jobs in general); their unemployment rate is the lowest of any demographic. In fact, the unemployment rate of black males is four times higher than white women’s, and this is probably on the low side: the incarceration rate of black males (who presumably did not have jobs in any case) and those who have simply “disappeared” indicates a disparity of closer to 10 times. Given the changing nature of the workplace, with more low-pay jobs that require communication and physically-aesthetic “skills” replacing higher-paying manufacturing jobs, the fact that women are more likely to be hired for these types of jobs at least initially would send the wage percentage to the lower-end.

The fact that more women have college degrees accounts for a recent study that suggests that in 147 of the 150 largest cities in the country, young women earn 8 percent more than their male counterparts, and in some locations the disparity is as much as 20 percent. What this means is that older males making large amounts of money may skew the numbers now, but in time they will be replaced by women who are favored in the current economic dynamic, and who make more money. There is no “crisis”—or if there is one, it isn’t the one feminists and gender activists claim is occurring. In many jobs, women are put in higher-paying “supervisory” positions for entirely arbitrary reasons; for example, one vendor for the airline I work for deploys women as “supervisors”—presumably because they cannot be discomfited with being out in the weather doing “hard” work running transfer bags.

Outright and blatant discrimination in favor of (white) women cannot be discounted as “sexist” talk, either. I experienced this myself about twenty years ago when I was living in Sacramento. I was working through a temp agency, and one day I was sent to a small business that engaged in advertisement piece work, simple stuff. At the end of the day, the supervisor called us all together, and started counting heads, beginning with the white women; when he finished counting all of them, he informed the rest of us that he didn’t require our services. I mused to myself that he had just picked-out his “harem.” While the rest of us–a dozen minorities and two older white men–were waiting for the supervisor to sign our time cards, I mulled over what had just transpired, and after I was done mulling I blurted out “You know, we need the work, too.” The reaction to this was a mix of fear, horror and amusement–the latter mostly on my part. The supervisor’s expression suggested that he had just witnessed an ape talk, while the other temps, mouths agape, seemed bizarrely perturbed that anyone should be permitted the temerity to have an opinion about an ethically-challenged employer whose discriminatory actions effected them materially.

On another occasion, I was twice sent to a workplace where when I arrived I was told at the receptionist’s desk that I was no longer needed. The agency expressed surprise at this, because the same supervisor kept calling them requesting a worker, and were told I was coming. The next time the agency was called to fill the position, I was told to just go meet the supervisor unannounced. The supervisor, who was a white female, was extremely hesitant to tell me that the position was still open, but being a minority person she apparently did not want to be accused of being racist. But sexist maybe. I often hear on the news stories about sexual harassment and hostile work environments for women; what I encountered was a shop filled exclusively by women (examining photographic negatives of motherboards for errors). Not only was the supervisor practicing gender discrimination, but did so because it allowed an atmosphere of where women could safely enunciate their unflattering views about men. Could I have complained? Should I have? Or better yet, who would have listened? Four months of it was enough for me.

Justification for apparent discrimination comes in the way of a claim I just heard on the radio made by some women’s symposium in Washington D.C.; the Campbell Soup company has seen a 15 percent rise in sales over the past few years, and it is directly contributable to the rise in female managers at the company. A company spokesperson said that for Campbell, hiring more female manager has been “mm-mm good.” But the website Investopedia.com last month had this to say: “Campbell Soups prospects look cold.” Its stock report observes that Campbell—which controls 80 percent of the soup market—has only seen an average of 1 percent sales increase per year over the past decade, and over the past year and half an effective decline in sales. Profit margins were maintained only through mass lay-offs and tax cuts. It seems likely that hiring more female managers had little impact on actual sales, but that didn’t stop a self-promoting group from stretching the truth to further their agenda.

Female victimology also affects men in other, more insidious ways. The month of October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The NFL forces players to wear pink ribbons, visors, armbands or cleats to observe the occasion. I’m sure players will say that it is not a big deal even though they know it is a cynical PR stunt, and it is clear that the NFL is only doing this to mend its tarnished image after unfortunate incidents perpetrated by a few players. But it is not uncommon for football players to end their careers permanently physically disabled, often with brain damage that doesn’t manifest itself for years; many wind-up in homeless shelters or on city streets. Do the same women who make breast cancer a political event give one solitary damn about these former players? Highly unlikely, knowing the self-obsessed nature of gender activism.

Some statistics: One in eight women will develop invasive breast cancer in their lifetimes, and it is responsible for 2.9 percent of all causes of mortality among women. A 2007 study revealed that $25,000 per death was spent on breast cancer research in 2006, while less than $2,000 per death was spent on lung cancer, the biggest killer among cancers. Since breast cancer has a 95 percent cure rate if caught early, at least we can say it is money well spent—and a clue to what can be done to combat other cancers if a similar level of research funding was available. Lung cancer, although it infects fewer women than breast or skin cancer, kills almost twice as many women as breast cancer each year. Colon cancer (depending on its location), by way of comparison has a 59 to 66 percent survival rate five years after detection, which suggests a much higher mortality rate per victim. While I’m sure that many men are just as concerned about breast health as women (but for different reasons, one may reason), the anecdotes that the media provides—of the young, attractive female—are contrary to the reality that the vast majority of breast cancer victims are women over 65 years of age.

On the other hand, I was listening to Coast-to-Coast where a guest was deriding the “overblown” concern about prostate cancer, since it “only” accounted for 3.6 percent of deaths among men; not that I was surprised by this claim, since C-to-C has a tendency to have guests who see conspiracies everywhere. Nevertheless it is somewhat ironic, since this death rate is higher than that of women who will die of breast cancer as a percent of all causes. Obviously, the fact that breast cancer is probably the most politicized illness in history has shielded it from such complaints. It is also, it seems to me, somewhat disturbing “advice” given that men in general seem less concerned with their health than women are to begin with; Bill Clinton, the very picture of health and vitality in his mid-fifties, succumbed to a heart attack, aided by his supposed addiction to McDonald’s burgers and fries. I’m sure many people remember how ghastly weak and shriveled he appeared after his surgery; many men are not even as “lucky” as he was to survive it.

There are other issues along these lines I could discuss—the media’s knee-jerk support of any claim of female victimization (the “war against women” shouts CNN’s hysterical shouter Jane Velez-Mitchell), Judge Sluggo squashing Mr. Bill like a bug in divorce and child custody courts everywhere while cleaning out his bank account, and the University of Washington’s call for male “volunteers” to help them deal with domestic violence. Is UW acknowledging the fact that unbiased studies suggest that fifty percent of domestic violence incidents are initiated by women? What planet do you think you are on? Pluto? Might as well be; Pluto isn’t even a planet anymore. No, UW wants to experiment on men with new anger management techniques to “help” them deal with their personal issues—and continue the pattern of only addressing half the problem, thus insuring that domestic violence (over-blown or not) continues to be a problem. Or I could discuss what it felt like being the only male in the audience listening to a visiting lecturer named Catherine MacKinnon, who I had never heard of; an instructor told me that I would learn something useful, which I have to admit I did. Like all heterosexual sex is rape.

I will end this conversation on this note: I once saw a YMCA television ad promoting a “self-esteem” camp—for girls. Isn’t that what the YWCA is for? Whatever happened to the place where a young man down on his luck could go? It is a pointless question, because nobody wants to answer a question they don’t want asked in the first place.