Tag Archives: Misandry

Commentary

Christina Hoff Sommers explains feminist myth-making

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Christina Hoff Sommers
Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers

This story was sent to me by ECM, but I also saw posted at Dinocrat.com, Jennifer Roback Morse and Muddling Towards Maturity.

How reliable are the stories you read in women’s studies textbooks? Does violence against women really increase on Superbowl Sunday? Or is it just a ploy to create a made-up crisis to justify transferring wealth from taxpayers to feminists for research, social programs, etc.?

Excerpt:

One reason that feminist scholarship contains hard-to-kill falsehoods is that reasonable, evidence-backed criticism is regarded as a personal attack.

Lemon’s Domestic Violence Law is organized as a conventional law-school casebook — a collection of judicial opinions, statutes, and articles selected, edited, and commented upon by the author.

…in a selection by Joan Zorza, a domestic-violence expert, students read, “The March of Dimes found that women battered during pregnancy have more than twice the rate of miscarriages and give birth to more babies with more defects than women who may suffer from any immunizable illness or disease.” Not true. When I recently read Zorza’s assertion to Richard P. Leavitt, director of science information at the March of Dimes, he replied, “That is a total error on the part of the author. There was no such study.” The myth started in the early 1990s, he explained, and resurfaces every few years.

Zorza also informs readers that “between 20 and 35 percent of women seeking medical care in emergency rooms in America are there because of domestic violence.” Studies by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, indicate that the figure is closer to 1 percent.

Sommers is a Christian equality-feminist who writes against activist “gender” feminism. I have her first two books. She is a professional philosopher who understands men and tells the truth.

You can read more about what constitutes feminist research in this article by Rod Dreher.

Further study

My previous story on domestic violence showed that female-instigated DV is rising in Australia, and that rates of DV are similar in Canada and the UK.

Previously, I blogged about a new study that shows the importance of fathers to the development of children.

I also blogged about how government intrudes into the family and about the myth of “dead-beat Dads”. And about how the feminist state’s discrimination against male teachers is negatively impacting young men. And there is my series on how Democrat policies discourage marriage: Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here and Part 3 is here.

Dr. Linda Kelly Hill
Dr. Linda Kelly Hill

Here is a related research paper by Dr. Linda Kelly, a professor of Law at Indiana University School of Law.

News

Round-up of news on Obama’s economic policies

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Tax policies that destroy traditional families

New taxes on married couples with intact families to subsidize out-of-wedlock births. (This is basically an incentive to not marry, by the way)

Hans Bader at the CEI’s blog reports: (H/T ECM)

Not content with repealing welfare reform through the job-killing stimulus package, and proposing a massive marriage penalty in the tax code, Obama and his Congressional allies are now planning to make married and widowed taxpayers subsidize benefits for which they are not eligible, such as payments to households with out-of-wedlock births. For example, they are pushing a bill that will allow even households that receive tens of thousands of dollars a year in child support to demand food stamps.

…Intact families, and widows, usually have every dollar they make considered in whether they qualify for food stamps. But under the Obama-backed proposal, unwed mothers, and divorced mothers, would not, since the child-support dollars they receive would be arbitrarily excluded.

Stop and think about what sorts of incentives this creates. What kind of man would be stupid enough to consider getting married and being a father to his own children? This is how Democrats destroy the family with tax policies, so that women with children depend on the state, and the state can in turn influence the way children are raised by getting them into day care, pre-K and government-run schools.

The goal is to prevent parents from influencing their own children with benighted traditional beliefs about traditional religion and morality. According to Democrats, that is the job of qualified public school teachers using approved teaching materials designed by experts like Kevin Jennings. And besides, the more children are raised without fathers, the more government jobs are created to deal with the fallout.

And there’s more:

The Obama-backed bill also increases the federal matching funds states receive for maximizing their collection of child support payments, giving them an incentive to artificially jack up child support obligations in order to reap federal money (as many states did in the aftermath of the 1988 Family Support Act), even if that means forcing fathers who have never missed a payment to pay much more than the actual cost of raising a child. I have previously written about how court-ordered child support payments generally exceed the actual cost of raising a child under most existing state child-support guidelines.

Democrat women that I know (single/divorced women and single/divorced mothers) are so mystified as to why men are not lining up to marry them. Maybe they should be thinking about the policies that they actually voted in favor of – they are not husband-friendly or father-friendly.

Democrat women think that they can crush the last drop of liberty and autonomy out of a man, and still expect him to love, protect and provide for women and children. Inexplicable. They want the security of the state and they don’t realize how it decreases the number of men willing to make commitments.

Home sales will require government approval

The Democrats cap-and-trade bill will require you to fix your house up to be eco-friendly, before you will be allowed to sell it. What? Global warming isn’t going to solve itself, you know…. Oh, wait!

CNSNews reports on what we can expect. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

The 1,400-page cap-and-trade legislation pushed through by House Democrats contains a new federal policy that residential, commercial, and government buildings be retrofitted to increase energy efficiency, leaving it up to the states to figure out exactly how to do that.

This means that homeowners, for example, could be required to retrofit their homes to meet federal “green” guidelines in order to sell their homes, if the cap-and-trade bill becomes law.

This is the first time since these subprime mortgage bank bailouts started that I’ve ever been happy about renting.

New Republican cap-and-trade TV ad

Here’s the new ad put out by Republicans to educate the public about the cap-and-trade bill that just passed the house. (H/T ECM)

Now that’s a great ad.

Why Democrats voted for Obama

Because they don’t know anything about economics!

The second one is from Nice Deb.

News

Does Obama’s stimulus bill discriminate against men?

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Check out this story from Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

It turns out that the $800 billion stimulus bill (porkulus-1) was altered in order to discriminate against the blue-collar men who are losing the lion’s share of jobs in the Democrat-caused recession.

Excerpt:

Christina Hoff Sommers points out that “of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by 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.”

But when the Administration floated the concept of “an ambitious . . . stimulus program to modernize roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, public transportation, and dams” as a way of “reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy,” “Women’s groups were appalled,” asking “Where are the New Jobs for Women?” and denouncing what they called “The Macho Stimulus Plan.”

And what did Obama do in response to this feminist pressure?

The Obama Administration quickly knuckled under to this pressure, replacing its recovery package with an $800 billion stimulus package that instead “skews job creation somewhat towards women” by spending money instead on social services like welfare that are administered mostly by female employees.

“A recent Associated Press story reports: ‘Stimulus Funds Go to Social Programs Over ‘Shovel-ready’ Projects.’ A team of six AP reporters who have been tracking the funds find that the $300 billion sent to the states is being used mainly for health care, education, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and other social services.” Or, as another AP report put it, “Stimulus Aid Favors Welfare, Not Work, Programs.”

The stimulus package also repealed welfare reform…

Read the whole thing. I think this is very interesting given the fact that it was these blue-collar unions who helped to get Obama elected. If there is a silver-lining to Obama’s socialism, this has to be it.

I think the most interesting question to ask about this story is: do single women, who voted for Obama 60-35, expect to find husbands and fathers for their children? Or will they all marry the government?