Tag Archives: Feminist

Commentary

How feminist groups skewed the Obama stimulus towards women’s jobs

29 Comments
Christina Hoff Sommers

This Weekly Standard article is by Christina Hoff Sommers, an equity feminist who doesn’t much care for third-wave (gender) feminists. (H/T Ari)

Excerpt:

A “man-cession.” That’s what some economists are starting to call it. Of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by men. Mark Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan, characterizes the recession as a “downturn” for women but a “catastrophe” for men.

Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis because they predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007. Women, by contrast, are a majority in recession-resistant fields such as education and health care, which gained 588,000 jobs during the same period. Rescuing hundreds of thousands of unemployed crane operators, welders, production line managers, and machine setters was never going to be easy. But the concerted opposition of several powerful women’s groups has made it all but impossible. Consider what just happened with the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Last November, President-elect Obama addressed the devastation in the construction and manufacturing industries by proposing an ambitious New Deal-like program to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. He called for a two-year “shovel ready” stimulus program to modernize roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, public transportation, and dams and made reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy the goal of the legislation that would become the recovery act.

Women’s groups were appalled. Grids? Dams? Opinion pieces immediately appeared in major newspapers with titles like “Where are the New Jobs for Women?” and “The Macho Stimulus Plan.” A group of “notable feminist economists” circulated a petition that quickly garnered more than 600 signatures, calling on the president-elect to add projects in health, child care, education, and social services and to “institute apprenticeships” to train women for “at least one third” of the infrastructure jobs. At the same time, more than 1,000 feminist historians signed an open letter urging Obama not to favor a “heavily male-dominated field” like construction: “We need to rebuild not only concrete and steel bridges but also human bridges.” As soon as these groups became aware of each other, they formed an anti-stimulus plan action group called WEAVE — Women’s Equality Adds Value to the Economy.

The National Organization for Women (NOW), the Feminist Majority, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and the National Women’s Law Center soon joined the battle against the supposedly sexist bailout of men’s jobs. At the suggestion of a staffer to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, NOW president Kim Gandy canvassed for a female equivalent of the “testosterone-laden ‘shovel-ready’ ” terminology. (“Apron-ready” was broached but rejected.) Christina Romer, the highly regarded economist President Obama chose to chair his Council of Economic Advisers, would later say of her entrance on the political stage, “The very first email I got . . . was from a women’s group saying ‘We don’t want this stimulus package to just create jobs for burly men.’ ”

[…]Our incoming president did what many sensible men do when confronted by a chorus of female complaint: He changed his plan. He added health, education, and other human infrastructure components to the proposal. And he tasked Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, Joseph Biden’s chief economist, with preparing an extraordinary report that calculated not only the number of jobs the plan would likely create, but the gender composition of the various employment sectors and the division of largess between women and men.

Romer and Bernstein delivered “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan” on January 10. They estimated that “the total number of created jobs likely to go to women is roughly 42 percent.” Lest anyone miss the point, they added that since women had held only 20 percent of the jobs lost in the recession, the stimulus package now “skews job creation somewhat towards women.”

Read the whole thing.

And ask yourself – how do men feel when women don’t want them to have their traditional roles? How do MEN feel about it, not how do women feel. And what will men do when they cannot find jobs? Will they marry? Will they have children? There seems to be an outcry about global warming and recycling these days amongst women. Where is the outcry about men being discriminated against by schools dominated by female teachers? Where is the outcry among women when the number of incoming female college students is 60%? Or when the vast majority of jobs lost in the recession are lost by men?

Or do women prefer to not know the causes of the decline of men, and just to blame men without understanding the way the world really is, and the forces in play? I don’t think that men are very happy to be blamed for a situation orchestrated by feminists. And when men aren’t happy, men don’t engage. They don’t do what women expect. They retreat. They withdraw. Women cannot just act selfishly all their lives and expect men and children to just continue to please them as if they were robots – men and children are people, too.

Commentary

The dark side of the birth control pill

3 Comments

This story is from New York Magazine. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

The Pill changed the world. These days, women’s twenties are as free and fabulous as they can be, a time of boundless freedom and experimentation, of easily trying on and discarding identities, careers, partners. The Pill, which is the most popular form of contraception in the U.S., is still the symbol of that freedom. As a young woman, you feel chic throwing that light plastic pack of dainty pills into your handbag, its retro pastel-colored wheel design or neat snap-to-close box sandwiched between lipstick and cell phone, keys and compact. It’s easy to believe the assurances of the guests at the Pierre gala that the Pill holds the answers to empowerment and career success, to say nothing of sexual liberation—the ability to have sex in the same way that guys always have, without guilt, fear, or strings attached. The Pill is part of what makes one a modern woman, conferring adulthood and cool with the swipe of a doctor’s pen.

[…]The fact is that the Pill, while giving women control of their bodies for the first time in history, allowed them to forget about the biological realities of being female until it was, in some cases, too late. It changed the narrative of women’s lives, so that it was much easier to put off having children until all the fun had been had (or financial pressures lessened). Until the past couple of decades, even most die-hard feminists were still married at 25 and pregnant by 28, so they never had to deal with fertility problems, since a tiny percentage of women experience problems conceiving before the age of 28. Now many New York women have shifted their attempts at conception back about ten years. And the experience of trying to get pregnant at that age amounts to a new stage in women’s lives, a kind of second adolescence. For many, this passage into childbearing—a Gail Sheehy–esque one, with its own secrets and rituals—is as fraught a time as the one before was carefree.

Suddenly, one anxiety—Am I pregnant?—is replaced by another: Can I get pregnant? The days of gobbling down the Pill and running out to CVS at 3 a.m. for a pregnancy test recede in the distance, replaced by a new set of obsessions. The Pill didn’t create the field of infertility medicine, but it turned it into an enormous industry. Inadvertently, indirectly, infertility has become the Pill’s primary side effect.

I remember that this topic came up in Miriam Grossman’s first book, where she was explaining how women spend the best years of their lives pursue degrees and money, and they have no idea how their fertility declines with age! It’s really sad. Speaking as a man, I actually looked into how age would affect my ability to have children when I was in my late 20s.  It’s sad that older women in the feminists movement think nothing of foisting all of these lies on younger women – and sadder still that younger women mostly don’t understand how they are affected by these lies.

Articles like this really scratch where I itch as a person. Ever since I was a child, I always wanted to know how to live the next phase of my life – what would happen next, and how could I be ready. This is what’s behind some of the decisions I’ve made that have protected me from danger. I actually spend a lot of time fretting about fretting about inflation and old age and so on, making plans and carrying them out. Part of it is learning about what I should value as a man – what will fulfill me. So often we don’t pay attention to the traits conveyed by our distinct sex and think that we can undo our nature with drugs, and speculative blind-faith believing and so on – wishful thinking and hoping. But that’s just foolishness. The world is the way it is and we are the way we are. God has made us all with certain desires and needs, and some of them are fairly fixed based on our sex.

News

MUST-READ: What is causing the epidemic of gang rapes in Europe?

18 Comments

ECM notified me about two posts over at Robert Stacy McCain’s blog.

Here’s is the first article, linked in McCain’s first post.

Excerpt from the article:

At home, Abid Saddique and Mohammed Liaqat, both of whom were married with young children, were considered clean, upstanding family men as well as devout Muslims.

But once they left their front door and their wives behind, they turned into vodka-swilling, cocaine-binging paedophiles who spent every available moment randomly targeting young girls on the street, befriending them, and then horrifically abusing them.

The 28-year-olds were at the head of a 13-strong gang who would film the assaults on their mobile telephones.

For over 18 months, dressed “sharply” in designer western clothes, wearing jewellery and sporting short haircuts, the pair cruised the streets of Derby in a silver BMW 5 series with blacked-out windows, approaching girls at random and with a bottle of vodka and plastic cups hidden under the front seats.

An undercover investigation by Derbyshire Police, dubbed Operation Retriever, was split into three trials which have run since February at Leicester Crown Court and can only now be reported.

The victims, aged between 12-18, ranged from girls in care to a 14-year-old A-grade student from a strong, middle-class home. They were predominantly girls with a troubled background.

[…]In one incident, Saddique, who was convicted of 14 of the 29 charges he faced, was accused of engaging in sexual activity with a 12-year-old in Derby’s picturesque Darley Park, while his accomplice Liaqat, who was convicted of 10 crimes of the 18 charges he faced, had sex with a 14-year-old in the BMW.

Another time, a 14-year-old girl was filmed having sex with three of the gang in a hotel room as cheers ring out.

The group faced 75 charges between them relating to twenty six girls, but police believe there are many more victims who have not come forward.

Yesterday, Saddique and Liaqat – who since legal proceedings have begun had grown long beards and now wear Islamic dress – were convicted of charges of sexual assault and sexual activity with a child, bringing the trials to a close.

This year they had already been convicted of a series of other offences including rape, sexual assault, sexual activity with a child, false imprisonment and making child pornography.

[…]“They were very confident in their approaches. They clearly thought of themselves as attractive young men, they had a car, they had some money and they would be quite aggressive when they would start their charm offensive.

McCain adds this from the UK Telegraph:

A SCHOOLGIRL, who was in the care of the city council when she fell victim to a gang of Derby perverts, had been groomed and sexually abused by another man only months earlier, the Telegraph can reveal.

The youngster was placed in a children’s home by Derby City Council for her own protection after police arrested Ansar Hussain, who targeted her when she was just 13.

But despite being under the supervision of social workers, she fell into the clutches of evil Abid Mohammed Saddique and Mohammed Romaan Liaqat – the ringleaders of a gang who raped and abused 27 girls.

And this from This is Derbyshire:

“[T]hey knew the difference between a girl that goes home to her family at the end of the night and a girl that doesn’t. I didn’t have anyone to protect me or look after me and thought they were going to look after and care for me.”

Most of the victims came from broken homes.

And here’s the second post by McCain.

Excerpt:

In a “serious case report,” the Derbyshire board examined issues involved in the cases of two girls (identified as YP1 and YP2) who had been under care of local authorities and were victimized by the Liaqat-Saddique gang. The board also incorporated findings of a multi-agency review in the cases of 25 other victims of the gang.

“Issues of culture, ethnicity and identity were a feature both in relation to the victims and the alleged perpetrators,” the Derbyshire board reported. The two girls “were confused about their identity and sense of belonging. They both had a poor self image and had difficulty making friends and fitting in.”

These issues were “a critical factor in making [the girls] easy targets for abusers,” according to the board report. “Questions have been raised for this review as to whether the ethnic background and culture of the perpetrators had any bearing on their decision to take part in this activity, and also whether the ethnic origin of the victims was significant in making them targets for abuse.”

And he links this Times of India article.

Excerpt:

Five British-born Pakistanis have been jailed for abusing white girls as young as 12.

The ‘sexual predators’ preyed on their victims over several months and threatened them with violence if they refused their advances.

One of the men branded his victim a “white b***h” when she resisted, while a second smirked, “I’ve used you and abused you.”

The men attacked the four girls in play areas, parks and in the back of their cars, Sheffield Crown Court heard. . . .

The five, Umar Razaq, 24, Razwan Razaq, 30, Zafran Ramzan, 21, Adil Hussain, 20, and Mohsin Khan, 21, were found guilty of a string of sexually related offences against the girls, one aged 12, two aged 13 and one aged 16.

Stacy adds:

Reid also cited another case in the Manchester area, where a 14-year-old runaway was a “sex slave” for an Asian gang. Nine men ages 25 to 33 – Asad Hassan, Mohammed Basharat, Mohammed Khan, Ahmed Noorzai, Mohammed Anwar Safi, Aftab Khan, Abid Khaliq, Mohammed Atif and Najibullah Safi — were convicted in that case.

According to Reid, “there is a controversial, but relevant, cultural issue. Asian men of Pakistani heritage often believe white girls have low morals compared with Muslim girls.” She quoted testimony in the Derbyshire case, when Saddique told the court: “These are girls I did not respect and these are girls who are just ­partying and taking drugs and we had consensual sex.”

[…]Last year, three men from the Keighley area – Mohammed Zackriya, 21, Mohammed Taj, 37, Mohammed Shabir, 36 — were convicted of sexually exploiting a 14-year-old.

Now I’m going to try to explain some factors that may be causing these events.

Why is this happening?

My hypothesis is two-fold.

  1. Feminism (which explains why the women were fatherless and vulnerable)
  2. Cultural relativism (which explains why the evil men were not challenged on their evil views)

Both of these have no stronger expression than in the United Kingdom, or perhaps in other European nations, which is why the problem is happening there more than here.

Feminism

As I’ve documented many times before by citing feminist scholars, the goal of third-wave (gender) feminism is the destruction of marriage because of the “unequal” male/female roles inherent in marriage. Third-wave feminists pushed early sex education, recreational pre-marital sex and taxpayer-funded abortion as a way to de-couple sex from marriage. As I documented elsewhere by citing research, pre-marital sex reduces the stability of marriages, and the effect is increased depending on the number of pre-marital sex partners. Feminists deal with the marital instability they introduced by legislating no-fault divorce, punitive divorce courts, domestic violence laws that don’t recognize violence by women against men, bigger social programs, more welfare, taxpayer-funded abortions, taxpayer-funded day care, taxpayer-funded IVF, and taxpayer-funded public schools as a way of substituting government for fathers and marriage. The result is a 40% out-of-wedlock birth rate (72% in inner-cities) and boys and girls raised without fathers.

Feminism claims that men have no distinctive role as protector/provider/moral and spiritual leader. As a result, women influenced by feminism shun chivalry, and bypass men who excel in the traditional roles and who would make good husbands and fathers, and prefer to have the drama of “hook-ups” with “bad boys”, which their girl friends heartily approve of – based on pop culture standards. Male chastity, skill in defending Christianity with logic and evidence, knowledge of social/fiscal/foreign policy, a good resume, and a good portfolio mean nothing – because it’s the government’s job to provide/protect and teach morality/religion to children.

Good men, seeing that goodness is getting them nowhere sexually, will drop goodness like a hot potato and begin to act like bad boys. Naturally, these bad boys are not able to shoulder the burdens of the roles of husband and father, because they were never evaluated or selected to fill those roles. Men have no roles on feminism – so feminists have no way to tell one man from another except based on the most shallow soap-opera/Hollywood-celebrity level of “hotness”, “confidence” (appearance of confidence, not substance), and “chemistry”. Having to choose a man based on qualifications, and having to follow rules for courting, seems to many women to be too “strict” – by which they mean that reason and evidence should not be allowed to override their emotions and the expectations of their peer group.

Instead of preparing themselves morally for their role in the marriage, and testing men for the role they will play in the marriage, women instead amuse themselves with self-centered fashionable and entertaining causes/hobbies like yoga, vegetarianism, fiction and biographies, Dancing with the Stars, People magazine, animal rights alarmism, and climate change alarmism. Thus, their choice of man is going to be made based on selfishness and whimsy, not on the merits. But marrying a lazy, ignorant, cowardly man makes the marital stability situation even worse. Marriages don’t survive if neither the man or the woman is tested and selected for making self-sacrificial commitments to other people.

The real victims of marital instability are the innocent children of the selfish feminists. As a result, boys grow up without fathers, which increases their tendency to be poor students, poor workers and sexually aggressive, and girls grow up without fathers, which drastically lowers the age at which they have sex.

Cultural relativism

Cultural relativism is the idea that is very popular on the secular left that all cultures are basically equal. This is what is taught in public schools where the achievements of Western Civilization are minimized, especially with respect to the United States, while the practices of other cultures are lionized. This is done because of the liberal belief that wars are caused by disagreements. The way to remove disagreements (according to the left) is by bashing down what is really good (Western Civilization) and lifting up what is evil, so that every view becomes equally valid. Specific evils from other cultures, like burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands, are rationalized as either not being evil at all, or by being the fault of the good nations. The goal of the left is to make sure that no one is able to judge anything as right or wrong, so that no one will feel bad about being judged.

Cultural relativism also causes left-wing parties to open Western countries up to massive immigration by unskilled immigrants, or by the unskilled family members of skilled immigrants. The goal of the left here is to tilt the voting away from Western ideas like the rule of law, capitalism, property rights, personal responsibility, religious liberty, monogamy, etc. No attempt to teach the superiority of Western values and beliefs is made in the public schools, so that you can have unskilled immigrants collecting welfare as they protest the very society in which they are protected and supported by taxpayer dollars.

As a result, immigrant communities that are not assimilated through education in civics, economics, and American history can actually import the very cultural beliefs and practices that hold their countries back from liberty, prosperity and security. In fact, in the UK, they actually have a parallel system of sharia law. In Canada, polygamous marriages, with multiple spouses collecting welfare, is normal. Cultural relativism is a major plank of left-wing parties like the Democrats.

It’s very important to understand that the ways that men and women interact in these other countries is not the standard used in the West. Although the left has attacked the values of chastity, modesty and courting that were the staples of Western Civilization, many believing Jews and Christians still believe in modesty and chastity today. The Bible forbids fornication (pre-marital sex) and that standard is one of the major reasons why we have these elaborate courting rituals and this focus on love and marriage, although you would never know it by watching Hollywood movies that glorify emotion-based relationships that lead to pre-marital sex. It turns out that the left and the Islamic radicals are actually united in their denial of the ways of courting that are found in Western literature and art – both oppose chastity, both oppose chivalry, and both oppose the sanctity of marriage.

Conclusion

It’s interesting to note that the majority of young unmarried women support parties on the political left like the Democrats, who push feminism and cultural relativism. They are doing this to themselves, and often criticizing any man who dares to point out what the impact of their vote really is. Voting is not about feeling good, it’s about doing good.

Commenters – please keep it short and contest specific claims that I made, and link to evidence to support your challenge. I will just dig up evidence as needed to support my claims when you contest them, because I don’t want to copy everything from previous posts.