California Men’s Centers, San Diego

I've seen better from Carolyn Hax.

To see the anti-father bias in both the girl's mother and in Carolyn's response to it, just switch out the sexes. Had the dad been writing in about the mom, what would Carolyn or indeed any other columnist been likely to reply? It exposes the deep suspicion of fathers in our society even by the mothers of their children and the generalized and accepted distrust of men in general. No wonder so many men these days eschew fatherhood or association even with their own children. More even than the misandrist and anti-father court system, it is the attitudes of society in general that allow such things to exist that so well-discourage men from paternity at every turn, never-mind the arguments around human overpopulation or the unaffordability of having children these days.

Except:

From the letter:
'Please help. My 6-year-old has all of a sudden started saying she doesn't want to be around her daddy (my husband). She hates when I leave the house without her and cries before and after he takes her anywhere himself. She used to adore him. My husband is clueless about what brought on this change and so am I.'
...
From the reply:
'Ask your pediatrician, immediately. I would say to ask your 6-year-old directly -- she's certainly old enough to speak for herself -- but you have to be so careful not to put words in a child's mouth that I feel more comfortable steering you to a pro. Also, the more serious the problem is, the more likely she'll struggle to make sense of it enough to put it into words, and/or the more frightened she'll be that telling the truth will get her in trouble.
...
A dad with nothing to hide will presumably support, encourage and participate in this process, both for his daughter's benefit and for his own.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'Last Easter, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, a 31-year-old mom with a $30,000-a-year job as a medical assistant, announced to her family that she had converted to Islam. A few months later, she began posting to Facebook forums whose headings included "STOP caLLing MUSLIMS TERRORISTS!"

On Sept. 11, she suddenly left Leadville, Colo., a small town in the Rocky Mountains, with her 6-year-old son for Denver, then for New York, to meet and marry an Algerian man she connected with online, her family says. Paulin-Ramirez, who is 5-foot-11 and blonde, phoned her mother and stepfather in Leadville, providing them with an address in Waterford, Ireland, they say.

Now, she is in the custody of the Irish police, along with three other individuals, arrested as part of an investigation into a conspiracy to commit murder, according to officials familiar with the case. The nature of the authorities' suspicions about Paulin-Ramirez couldn't be determined on Friday.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'ORLANDO, Fla. – The ambulance crew that responded after golfer Tiger Woods crashed his SUV would not allow his wife to ride with him to the hospital because they thought it was a case of domestic violence, documents released Friday by the Florida Highway Patrol show.

But a police officer who responded said he didn't know where the crew got that information because he never heard it from anyone at the scene.

The reports also show that Woods' wife, Elin, turned over two bottles of pain pills to troopers after the Nov. 27 crash outside the couple's suburban Orlando home.

Tiger Woods crashed his sport utility vehicle into a fire hydrant at 2:30 a.m., and officers found him lying in the street. The SUV had a broken window and the couple told investigators Elin Woods had broken it with a golf club so she could unlock a door and pull him out.'

Story here.

'An Adelaide woman has pleaded not guilty to murdering her husband by setting him alight at their Unley home in 2008.

Rajini Narayan, 45, wept in Adelaide Magistrates Court as she denied a charge of murder and another of arson.

It has been alleged she poured methylated spirits on her husband's genitals and ignited it, because of an alleged affair.

Narayan also pleaded not guilty to endangering the lives of her three children who were at home.

She will face the Supreme Court in April.'

If it gets any more ridiculous, I will be forced to fall off my chair. Read the inanity here. Excerpt:

'Kim Moldofsky can feel guilt over just about anything — her children, stray cats, her work, her husband. “I am easily guilted,” she told me, laughing.

Meanwhile, her husband, Brad, 41, remains blissfully guilt-free. “He is kind and caring but he can be more detached,” said Moldofsky, a 41-year-old “mom blogger” and social media strategist near Chicago. “Sometimes I want him to get caught up in the emotion.”

So, apparently, does a team of Spanish psychological researchers. In a reversal of Professor Henry Higgins’ plaintive cry “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?,” it suggested that when it comes to guilt, men should be more like women.

Men are guilt-deficient, suggests the study, which was published in a recent issue of The Spanish Journal of Psychology. We lack “interpersonal sensitivity,” while women suffer from destructive guilt largely imposed by society.

So women need support, while men need fixing. “This study highlights the need for educational practices and socializing agents to reduce the tendency towards anxious-aggressive guilt in women, and to promote interpersonal sensitivity in men,” write the authors of the study, which was led by Dr. Itziar Extebarria of the Unversity of the Basque Country in Spain.
...
“Empathy is wonderful,” she continued. “We can share emotions. We can feel someone else’s pain. But that comes at a cost, and that cost is the higher preponderance of anxiety and depressive disorders” in women.

On the other hand, men generally feel guilt less intensely, partly because we have a huge testosterone payload. It makes us take more chances, be more a little more callous about our actions, not spend time worrying about our decisions once they’re made. This is good, argued Sommers*. “Men may be more stoical and that may be adaptive for society. We need to have 25-30 year old men not ruminating” but building, sometimes even fighting.'

("...sometimes even fighting." Well, can't say I agree with her on that.)

Anyway, this is like saying that to make life easier for people who are bound to wheelchairs, everyone else who can walk should likewise be bound to them. Then things would be much better for everyone.

I think Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. wrote a novel that had this as a theme-- that society would in future find ways to hobble individuals based on their strengths so as to "even out" society. Those who were physically strong would have weights attached to their limbs to make them less capable of doing things, so that they were more like "everyone else". People with high IQs would have higher standards to pass to get the same jobs or would be forced to take IQ-inhibiting drugs, etc., to make them "more like other people" in the brains department, etc., etc.

Can't remember the name, but this story reminds me of that book.

---
*That's Christina Hoff Sommers they are referring to.

Sixteen-year-old girl pleads guilty to manslaughter. Presumably, if the perp had been male, 18 years for murder would not have been too much. Excerpt:

'Facing life in prison if her case went to trial, a 16-year-old girl admits she shot a man in the head after some sort of fight last June on Conkey Avenue.

Jessica Arnold was supposed to go on trial next week. The victim was Lamont Smith.

This morning, Arnold pled guilty to first-degree manslaughter. The reason being, her lawyer said, they didn't want to take the risk of going to trial. Arnold would have been tried as an adult on charges of murder and she could have faced up to life in prison if convicted.

On June 13, 2009, Arnold shot and killed 33-year-old Lamont Smith on Conkey Avenue during an argument. Arnold's attorney says there was a crowd, and that she fired in self-defense but prosecutors say that's not the case.

Arnold's attorney talked to News 10NBC about his client accepting 18 years in prison. Arnold's attorney Andre Vitale spoke with her family after the court appearance. Defense attorney Andre Vitale said, “That's such a huge number, especially for a 16-year-old girl. She's going to spend almost as long in state prison as she has alive. And it's really tough to resolve the case in that way but I really think that she has a chance after 15 years to get out and to really move on with her life.”'

Story here. Admittedly, this is just one city, and one that has been under great educational distress for some time. But it does reflect the larger trend: girls are beating boys solidly in terms of graduation, and not by a mere couple of percentage points but by solid margins. They are also clobbering boys in terms of grade performance as well, but this is hardly news. And yet feminists still insist there is no boys' education crisis. Excerpt:

'The state education department released graduation rates this week for all high schools and school districts across New York.

Rochester's four-year graduation rate dropped from 52-percent to 46-percent. News 10 NBC wanted to know how the numbers break down for male students and female students.

The city school district today released those numbers. Fifty-two-percent of girls graduate on time while only 39-percent of boys graduate on time.

Dropout numbers are also revealing. According to state figures for the 2008-09 school year, more male students dropped out than female students. Twenty-nine-percent of girls dropped out, while 35-percent of boys did.

Rochester Mayor Bob Duffy is seeking approval in Albany for a City Hall takeover of city schools. City Hall contributes $119-million annually in property tax revenue to the schools. He has a plan to keep boys and girls in school to graduate. "I think first of all you have to meet them where they're at. And one of the things, making sure they are in school," said Duffy.'

39/52 = .75. Boys this past year in Rochester graduated from high school at 75% the rate of girls. For every 4 girls graduating, 3 boys are doing the same.

And the overall numbers are abysmal. Forty-six percent. It's unfathomable to me. I grew up in a small town where people were expected, generally, just to make it out of high school. The graduation rate was nonetheless solidly above 90%, closer to 95%, consistently across years. And you could count on two hands and two feet the number of people with degrees beyond high school in that town, population 5,000. Nonetheless, the H.S. graduation rates were that high. (I'll tell you what, too, people were very slow to get divorced when I was growing up, and despite the fact that sounds like I am referring to 1867, it was not that long ago; it was the 1970s and early '80s. You could safely assume any kid in your school had mom and dad, both living under the same roof.) Now look at what things have come to. These numbers are consistent with what I'd expect to see from a second-world country.

Story here. Excerpt:

'When it comes to gaining access to their kids, a growing number of divorced fathers say they've been stymied by a police and court system that reflexively views women as believable and men as violent.

It's an emotional topic that dismays many of those who work in the field of domestic violence.

But a growing number of men's groups -- and a private member's bill (C-422) that would amend the Divorce Act by instructing judges to grant equal shared parenting except in proven cases of abuse -- are advancing this view.

One man I spoke to, for instance, says his ex-wife falsely accused him of slamming a van door on her leg. And even though that assault charge was later withdrawn by the Crown attorney, the man says the allegations damaged his reputation during proceedings with a family court judge who restricted his access to his kids.

It's those kinds of situations that the fledgling London Equal Parenting Committee will explore during "an evening of awareness in relation to domestic violence" Thursday at Crouch Library.'

Full Article here. Excerpt:

'A common complaint by women is that "men are not connected to their feelings"
...So, today I am going to talk about my own feelings as a men regarding feminism, in a language that women are able to understand.
...
As most of my peers, I have dreamed about the day where I would become an adult, and my time will come to have my own beloved wife and adorable children. I could not wait to have my own family. It was something that I perceived as a natural stage in my development as a human being.
...
But as I was growing up, things began to change. The newspapers and the TV were suddenly filled with all kinds of weird stories about poor women being battered and abused by their husbands. The Israeli government started making all kinds of weird laws against men, who were suddenly portrayed as the "Enemies of Society". At some point one would feel the need to apologize for having being born with a penis. Divorce rates were on the rise. Israeli courts began to make all those bad policies against men, imposing impossible child support amounts on them, not allowing them to see their children, etc. False Domestic violence and Rape accusations became the new trend. Worst of all, the perception of family in the Israeli society has changed. Families weakened a great deal, and the trust between men and women deteriorated.

When I grew up, I realized that the Israeli family is not what it used to be. I have known some men whose life has been completely destroyed by the Israeli family courts. Their children were taken away from them, the ex-wife interfered with visitation rights, one of them has even been put on a criminal charges because his ex filled false domestic violence allegations against him. All were financially ruined.
...
On the way, I gradually began to lose trust in the whole governmental systems in my country. The government itself, the police, the courts, the welfare systems, are all feminist secret agents now, imposing their evil agenda. The love I felt to my country began depreciating. How can I love such an evil country, that takes away my most basic right, to have a family of my own?

So this is my story. This is how I lost my dream to have a family of my own, and the country that I loved. So no wonder than I am angry. Feminism has brought a social disaster on us. Feminism is destroying families, and the social fabric as a result. So there you go. I was personally hurt and I am angry, just like any other person in my situation would have been.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'A 33-year-old Burbank middle school teacher accused of having sex with a teenage male student over a six-month period last year was charged on Tuesday with unlawful sex with a minor, MyFoxLA.com reported.

Amy Victoria Beck, a teacher at David Starr Jordan Middle School, appeared in Burbank Superior Court Wednesday. She did not enter a plea and her arraignment was scheduled for March 25.
...
She did not make bail and remains in the custody of the Burbank Police Department.

If convicted, Beck faces up to seven years in state prison, officials said.
...
Police interviewed the boy "and confirmed that the acts did occur" between March and September of last year, the sergeant said.

The boy was 14 at the time the alleged sexual activity began, and he is now 15, Quesada said. His name was not released.

Beck had taught English and Social Science at the school for ten years, according to The Burbank Leader. She resigned on Friday.

"She’s a well-respected and loved teacher," Principal Sharon Cuseo told the paper. "We’re all shocked."'