Feminist Friday
Big news out of Saudi Arabia this week: not only has King Abdullah overturned a court ruling sentencing a woman from Jeddah to ten lashes for driving, but Saudi women will soon be allowed to vote. Each of these big announcements should be taken with a grain of salt—Saudi Arabia is still the only nation in the world which prohibits women from driving and women will not actually be voting until 2015. However, these are great developments towards gender equality and are certainly more heartening than the magnanimous ruling his majesty allowing women to work in lingerie shops.
UPenn bioethicist Arthur Caplan bet Michele Bachmann $10,000 that she couldn’t point to a single case of the HPV vaccine Gardasil leading to mental retardation, as she claimed in the Republican debate on September 12. Stop the presses: she didn’t respond. The statute of limitations on the bet has now apparently passed, but that hasn’t stopped Bachmann from backpedaling furiously, maintaining that she neither “made that claim, nor did [she] make that statement.”
For everyone that’s ever bemoaned the lack of a Men’s Studies department on university campuses, transferring to Arizona State may be your answer.
The Men’s Rights Movement Group declares that “women have NEVER been systematically oppressed…it is offensive to suggest that men have systematically oppressed women and everyone is offended by it.” The group hopes to present an alternative to what they term feminist party-line dogma and to change the system of female privilege in our society. A list of the rights which only women enjoy, provided by the group, is below.
Excuse me, What “Patriarchy”???
• Men and Fathers face the harshest discrimination in family courts. [17] [18]
• Epidemic of false accusations are near half of all rape cases. False accusations on men from sexual harassment to rape to child molestation. [12] [13]
• Violence Against Women Act profiles men and demands that they be arrested in all domestic violence disputes. [11]
• 4 out of 5 Suicides are male (18 out of 23 more accurately) [10]
• Misandry and abuse and denigration of men is widespread across media, while at the same time media is extra sensitive to stay up to date with each and every feminist demand for favorable and correct portrayal of women in media. [23] [24] [25] [26] [27]
• College enrollment and gradation of males is declining and has been for decades. [5] [4] [3]
• Male fertility has been on the decline for at least a century. [8]
• No men’s shelters. [10]
• Men have no reproductive rights and are often victims of paternity fraud. [15] [16]
• Most homeless people are men. [14]
• Men’s unemployment rate is 3 times as high as female. [17]
• 80% of wealth is spent by women [10]
• Women handle 75 percent of family finances. 43 percent of those with assets over $500,000 are women. [10]
• 99% of combats deaths are male [10]
• 94% of industrial deaths male [10]
• 76% of homicides are male [10]
• Women receive custody in 84% of child custody cases. [10]
• 204 out of 205 people wrongly convicted exonerated by DNA (evidence have been men (via the innocence project) . [10]
• In America there are over 270 women’s commissions but only one for men in New Hampshire. [10]
• There are over 700 women studies programs in colleges and universities but but no one teaching mens or male studies from a masculinist perspective. [10]
• Men are over half the victims of domestic violence but in over 90% of domestic violence disputes men are the ones arrested. [19] [11]
• Breast cancer funding is a national icon of funding but Prostate cancer is totally ignored while the death rates are roughly equal. [10]
• The wage gap now favor’s women in their twenties. [20] [28]
• Men die 5 years earlier than women but no compensation is made to them for this via social security or otherwise. [10]
• A entire branch of the UN is dedicated to women, nothing for men. [1]
• There is much discussion on the status of women in society, none for men. [22]
• There are billions of dollars of tax money going into women’s issues and none for men. [21] [22]
• There are branches of US Federal government dedicated to the interests of women such as health, but none for men. [2]
• Masculinity and male emotions are hardly tolerated in society.
• Global society is becoming more and more gynocentric.
• Gender warfare rages on with hardly any participation of men.
• Men are blamed for all social and world problems
• Most of civilization is but a shopping mall for women to go shopping.
“Right to shelter from abusive partners”; can’t you just taste the female privilege? Still, I wish this group all the best in upending the deeply-entrenched matriarchy tainting modern society.