Fatherhood

A Hidden Crime: Domestic Violence Against Men Is a Growing Problem

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Domestic violence is not gender specific

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And yet, more than 200 survey-based studies show that domestic violence is just as likely to strike men as women. In fact, the overwhelming mass of evidence indicates that half of all domestic violence cases involve an exchange of blows and the remaining 50% is evenly split between men and women who are brutalized by their partners.

Part of the reason that this problem is widely ignored lies in the notion that battered males are weak or unmanly. A good example of this is the Barry Williams case: Recently, the former Brady Bunch star sought a restraining order against his live-in girlfriend, who had hit him, stolen $29,000 from his bank account, attempted to kick and stab him and had repeatedly threatened his life.

It is hard to imagine a media outlet mocking a battered woman, but E! online took the opportunity to poke fun at Williams, comparing the event to various Brady Bunch episodes. Similarly, when Saturday Night Live ran a segment in which a frightened Tiger Woods was repeatedly brutalized by his wife, the show was roundly attacked — for being insensitive to musical guest Rihanna, herself a victim of domestic violence.

Read more HERE

Fatherhood

Shared Parenting

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Parents are presumed equal during the marriage. What changed in the equality equation once the marriage ends? Children need and want both parents in their lives, not as visitors, but as active and equal participants. That’s why shared parenting is best for children.

Read more HERE

Fatherhood

The Patriarchy is DEAD

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Congratulations to all of the radical feminists. You win! (for now)

More broadly, I am convinced that if feminism is to have a positive future, it must reinvent itself as a gender equity movement advocating for both sexes and against all sexism. Focusing solely on female disadvantage was perfectly understandable when, whatever paternalistic benefits women might have enjoyed and whatever burdens men might have suffered, women were the ones lacking the basic rights of adult citizens. But today, there is simply no moral or rational justification for any fair-minded feminist to ignore (for instance) the more lenient treatment of female offenders in the justice system or the anti-father biases in family courts. The concept of feminism as equality of the sexes is increasingly on a collision course with feminism as a movement championing women.

In its present form — as a secular cult that should call itself the Sisters of Perpetual Grievance — feminism is far more a part of the problem than part of the solution. It clings to women’s wrongs and turns women’s rights into narcissistic entitlement. It is far too easily prone to bashing men while painting women as insultingly helpless and downplaying their human capacity for cruelty. (The notion that abuse and dominance would not exist without patriarchy is not only naively utopian but utterly sexist.) It is also deeply irrelevant to most women, only 5 percent of whom consider themselves “strong feminists,” even though 82 percent believe that men and women should be social, political, and economic equals.

Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/09/23/yes_patriarchy_is_dead_the_feminists_prove_it_120031.html#ixzz2g2VIp3hg
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Family

Reality Check: Boys are languishing academically, while girls are soaring

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An excerpt from: How to Make School Better for Boys
CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS

In the U.S., a powerful network of women’s groups works ceaselessly to protect and promote what it sees as female interest. But there is no counterpart working for boys—they are on their own. This contrasts dramatically with constructive, problem-solving approach of education leaders and government officials in Great Britain, Canada, and Australia. The British have their parliamentary “toolkit of effective practices” for educating boys—while Americans have the National Women’s Law Center’s Tools of the Trade: Using the Law to Address Sex Segregation in High School Career and Technical Education.

The reluctance to face up to the boy gap is evident at every level of government. In Washington, President Obama established a White House Council on Women and Girls shortly after taking office in 2009, declaring: “When our daughters don’t have the same education and career opportunities as our sons, that affects…our economy and our future as a nation.” On the other hand, the proposal for a Council for Boys and Men from a bi-partisan group of academics and political leaders has now been languishing in Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s office for two years.

Similarly, in Maine, the Portland Press Herald ran an alarming story about the educational deficits of boys—reporting that high school girls outnumber boys by almost a 2-1 ratio in top-10 senior rankings, that men earn about 38 percent of the bachelor’s degrees awarded by Maine’s public universities, and that boys both rich and poor had fallen seriously behind their sisters. But the director of Women’s Studies at the University of Southern Maine, Susan Feiner, expressed frustration over the sudden concern for boys. “It is kind of ironic that a couple of years into a disparity between male and female attendance in college it becomes ‘Oh my God, we really need to look at this. The world is going to end.’”

Feiner’s complaint is understandable but seriously misguided. It was wrong to ignore women’s educational needs for so long, and cause for celebration when we turned our attention to meeting those needs. But turning the tables and neglecting boys is not the answer. Why not be fair to both? Great Britain, Australia, and Canada are Western democracies just as committed to gender equality as we are. Yet they are seriously addressing their boy gap. If they can do it, so can we.

Family

War on Boys

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From The National Review Online. Read more HERE

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What’s the war on boys?

CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS: It’s more like a war of attrition. No one wakes up in the morning thinking, “What horrible thing can I do to boys today?” But boys and young men have been massively neglected. Women in the U.S. today earn 62 percent of associate’s degrees, 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 60 percent of master’s degrees, and 52 percent of doctorates. When an education-policy analyst looked at current trends in higher education he quipped, only half in jest, “The last male will graduate from college in 2068.”

There was an immense and much-celebrated effort to strengthen girls in areas where they languished behind boys. The Title IX anti-discrimination law has been used to close the sports gap. In the mid-Nineties, Congress passed the Gender Equity Act, categorizing girls as an “under-served population” on par with other discriminated-against minorities. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to improve girls’ achievement in sports, math, and science. Today, it is boys who need help. But so far Congress and the Department of Education have looked the other way.

LOPEZ: This has been a theme of yours for a while. Has it gotten better or worse?

SOMMERS: Simon & Schuster asked me to update and revise the 2000 edition of The War Against Boys precisely because the plight of boys is worsening. A recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research documents a remarkable trend among high-achieving students: In the 1980s, nearly the same number of top male and female high-school students said they planned to pursue a postgraduate degree. By the 2000s, 27 percent of girls expressed that ambition, compared with 16 percent of boys. But it’s the declining social and educational prospects of working-class and poor white, Latino, and African-American young men that is most dismaying. A 2011 Brookings Institution study describes how millions of poorly educated young men have been “unhitched from the engine of growth.” As the United States moves toward a knowledge-based economy, school achievement has become the cornerstone of lifelong success. Young women are adapting; young men are not.