Every parent of a four-year-old learns to dread the question 'why?'  "Why did the cat have kittens?"  "Because animals want to have babies, just like your mommy and I wanted to have you and your sister."  "But why?"  Depending on how much the parent wants to take on, the answer can be about biology, romance, survival of the species or any of a number of other topics, but each will reliably be followed by "but why?"

As frustrating as all that is for the parent, the child's quest for answers frustrates him too.  His desire for certainty, for the answer, for the hard, irreducible essence beyond which there is no question "why?", inevitably goes unsatisfied.  It may be his first experience with ambiguity, uncertainty, the vast ocean of gray into which each seemingly black and white issue dissolves.  His desire for the simple is frustrated by the eternal rejoinder, "it's not that simple."

So, while this study gives us valuable information about why girls are doing better in secondary education than are boys, my inner four-year-old wishes its author, psychologist Judith Kleinfeld, had asked a few more 'whys?' (Gender Issues, 26/2009)

It's far from a definitive study; it's more like a work that should stimulate more research.  Perhaps it will.  Kleinfeld asked 99 high school seniors questions about their plans for the future and about their attitudes toward education and each other, and their answers are interesting.  By significant, sometimes alarming margins, girls expected to go to college and boys did not.  Not only that, but girls seemed to relish the opportunity to attend college, while even boys who intended to go seemed to be doing so more out of sense of fullfilling parental expectations than desire for higher education.

Into the bargain, girls' ideas about the future were more concrete, more realistic, more planned than were boys'.  Girls had clear ideas about what courses of study they wanted to pursue and what careers those might lead to.  They tended to care less about making a lot of money and more about contributing to the good of society in some way.

Boys were far more vague and unrealistic.  They often had no plans, or not sensible ones.  If they thought about working, their understanding of what they could earn or what it takes to live bore little resemblance to the real world.  Some thought that earning the minimum wage of $7.15 per hour was fine.  Some relied on fantasies of becoming a movie or music producer.  Many believed that it is common for a person with only a high school education to strike it rich in some endeavor or other.

But why?  Why was there such a difference between boys and girls?  The study suggests a bit of an answer - the difference in how girls and boys experience school.  Simply put, school is structured more to appeal to girls than to boys. 

When asked if they liked going to school, 54% of the young women expressed strong enjoyment compared to just 21% of the young men, while 26% of the young men expressed strong dislike of school compared to only 8% of the young women (x2 =11.895, p =.003)... Young men made such comments as, “I’m pretty much going to high school just so I can graduate” or “School is a chore. You gotta do stuff you don’t like doing.”  Several young men complained that vocational classes were no longer available, and classes like shop used to provide a bright spot in their boring school day.

There's been a fair amount written about the different ways the sexes respond to given learning environments. 

According to this view, the structure of schooling is not compatible with the learning styles of many boys.  Boys do far better in classrooms which allow activity, encourage competition, and structure the day in short chunks.

Experiments with single-sex classrooms with teaching methods tailored to each have met with some success, but rigorous evaluation of the results of those experiments is lacking.

Among working class students, Kleinfeld found that parents tend to encourage academic engagement of girls more than boys.

Among working class young men, parents were less apt to “push college” as the path to a desirable future. While 76% of female students with working class parents mentioned family encouragement to go to college, the same was true for only 41% of young men from similar families (x2 =6.506, p=.039). Indeed, 18% of the young men from working class families reported negative family pressure.

But why? 

Kleinfeld also asked questions about students' attitudes about each other.  Both girls and boys considered boys to be 'lazy,' unable to plan ahead and easily distracted or subject to peer pressure.  Both girls and boys tended to see girls as the opposite of boys in each of those categories.  Kleinfeld clearly doesn't believe that girls and boys actually are as they describe themselves, but reports their perceptions as "folk theories."

So why do boys and girls view each other in those ways?

To the educators' view that school structure isn't conducive to boys' learning, I'd like to suggest another possibility - family structure.  We know for certain that single parent families tend to produce children who do less well in school across a range of behaviors than do children of intact, two-parent families.  But both boys and girls show the adverse effects of single parentage, so how could that explain the gender gap in educational attitudes and achievement?

An interesting trend visible in research on standardized test scores may suggest the answer.  Boys tend to do better in science and math than do girls, but only slightly.  On tests of reading and writing, though, girls far outstrip boys by their senior year in high school.  But when measured at the fourth and eighth grade levels, the gender gap in literacy is far narrower.  In other words, girls distance themselves from boys in reading and writing between the ninth and twelfth grades.  What I'd like to point out is that those are also the years in which boys tend to need their fathers the most.  The absence of a father plus the reliance on peers to provide masculine role models may go a long way toward explaining the separation of boys from the educational process in high school.

Unfortunately, Kleinfeld didn't ask her high-schoolers about family structure.

What's clear for the time being is that the problems of boys and young men aren't confined to the fact that 57% of college students are women and only 43% are men.  That's part of the problem, but it's as much a symptom as a cause.  The problem of boys in education starts long before college, and it likely extends far beyond the bounds of campus to include single-mother families and a popular culture that encourages the notion of men as stupid and lazy.

What's also clear is that it's not going to change any time soon.  That's because no one seems to have any intention of addressing the problem.  Former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch accurately reflected the zeitgeist among educators several years ago when she asked sarcastically, "When will it be fair?  When women are 60% or 75% of college enrollments?  Perhaps it will be fair when there are no men at all."

Kleinfeld finds that,

At this point, few college officials are troubled about the gender gap at their institutions. When the gap reaches 60-40 in favor of women, some say, they will begin to consider it a problem (Vickers, 2006).

In other words, neither educators nor governmental officials perceive a problem.  To them, the status quo is acceptable.  The fact of schools failing boys, of boys failing in school and of the radical gender disparities in countless areas of education are simply not cause for alarm or even much discussion among elites charged with making educational policy.

To which I must ask "why?" 

Meanwhile, a single brave women's shelter in Wales has changed its name and started accepting men.  Read about it here (BBC, 2/4/10).  If my math is correct, that brings to 13 the number of DV shelters serving men in the United Kingdom.  At last count there were 500 for women.

Beginning in April, De Gwynedd Women's Aid will become De Gwynedd Domestic Abuse Service and start providing services for men.  A spokesperson said that between April and December of last year, 33 male victims of DV had contacted them.  That's true despite the fact that their name and website made it plain that they offered no services to men.  That's also true despite the essentially ubiquitous message in popular culture that men aren't victims of DV.  And it is further true despite the fact that men are less likely to identify themselves as victims of DV as are women.  As De Gwynedd's Elwen Roberts said,

"When we began women's aid in the 70s very few women initially came forward, and it will be interesting to see over the years how big this problem is..." 

"I don't think anyone has done any research into this, especially here in rural Wales."

Well, actually there's an enormous amount of research that's been done over the last 35 years into domestic violence done by women against men.  And it's strange to say the least that a person who holds a prominent position in the DV industry of Wales could be totally ignorant of it.  Still, it's refreshing to hear a DV advocate say things like

"We've noticed that more men are coming to us for help, and we decided that we would open the service out to anyone who is suffering domestic violence,"

and

"at the end of the day, any domestic abuse is unacceptable."

Somewhat more ominous is the fact that staff at the shelter will have to be retrained to deal with male victims.  I'd like to know just what that "retraining" will consist of.  To date, women's DV shelters have hewed close to the party line that DV is a political issue of power between individuals that promotes patriarchal dominance in society at large.  That's an ideologically consistent view whose only flaw is that it contradicts known facts. 

In truth, DV is overwhelmingly a psychological phenomenon that manifests itself in the behavior of people who experienced DV in childhood.  As the recent study of DV in Scotland shows, serious repeated DV exists in a very small percentage of couples.  Any reasonable effort to confront DV would identify and concentrate therapeutic measures on them.  But the DV industry doggedly resists that obvious approach.  I'm not at all confident that "retraining" by ideologically-based advocates has much chance of succeeding.

It's noteworthy that De Gwynedd's decision to serve male victims apparently means that it can no longer be part of the larger organization Welsh Women's Aid.  I'm not sure what the consequences of that are, but whatever the case, De Gwynedd is now on its own.  On that topic, the CEO of Welsh Women's Aid made this telling remark:

However, all Women's Aid groups are autonomous organisations, and WWA recognise their right to move away from the feminist ethos of the movement, and make the decision to open their services up to men,"

In 1971, Erin Pizzey started the first DV shelter in the U.K.  She took all comers and has written extensively about her experience.  She had plenty of men seeking shelter from abusive wives and partners, and came to realize that many of the women she was sheltering were themselves perpetrators of DV.  But because she understood women to be violent and that men required DV services, Pizzey was drummed out of the movement amid a hail of anonymous death threats.  

Today's feminist DV advocates seem more subdued - no death threats for Elwen Roberts - but the result is the same.  The "feminist ethos" still denies that men can be victims, and women perpetrators, of domestic violence.

Thanks to Malcolm for the heads-up.  
 

We've often noted how the terms "domestic violence" and "violence against women" have expanded to the point where they can be used against practically any man. In divorce and custody cases, unscrupulous female litigants often get men thrown out of their own homes on domestic violence restraining orders based simply on alleged "verbal abuse" or on the woman claiming she feels afraid.

Mandatory arrest policies lead police to arrest people on domestic violence calls that involve little or no discernible domestic violence, and the primary aggressor laws of two dozen states instruct police to arrest the man even when the man wasn't the aggressor. Men can be portrayed as domestic abusers in family court over alleged "emotional abuse."

Two recent examples of this highlight the willingness of leading feminists and their sympathizers to cite practically anything as an example of "violence against women."

Recently the National Organization for Women launched a highly-publicized effort to get CBS to pull an anti-abortion Super Bowl ad that former Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow and his mother Pam did on behalf of the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family. CBS ran the ad anyway, though it ended up having little to do with abortion. Instead, it was what the Los Angeles Times called a "lighthearted take on a mother-son relationship." According to the Times:

In the ad, Pam Tebow holds a baby photo of Tim, now 22.

"I call him my miracle baby," she says. "He almost didn't make it into this world. . . . you know, with all our family's been through, we have to be tough."

Suddenly, she appears to be tackled and flies off-screen.

"Timmy!" she scolds, popping back up. "I'm trying to tell our story here!"

Tim joins her and apologizes. "You still worry about me, Mom?"

"Well, yeah," says Pam Tebow. "You're not nearly as tough as I am."

The tagline, "Celebrate Family. Celebrate Life," directs viewers to the website of the sponsor, Focus on the Family, the Colorado-based evangelical Christian organization...

Believe it or not, NOW president Terry O'Neill actually says that this playful mother-son ad glorified violence against women:

I am blown away at the celebration of the violence against women in it. That's what comes across to me even more strongly than the anti-abortion message. I myself am a survivor of domestic violence, and I don't find it charming. I think CBS should be ashamed of itself.

To write a Letter to the Editor about this, write to letters@latimes.com.

The other example concerns liberal TV host Keith Olbermann's reporting on Republican Scott Brown's recent upset victory in the Massachusetts Senate race. Olbermann called Brown a string of uncomplimentary things, culminating in alleging that Brown is a "supporter of violence against women." The evidence? Some idiot in the crowd at one of Brown's rallies made a dumb remark, a remark which Brown clearly did not hear, and because Brown did not condemn the remark, that means he's a "supporter of violence against women." Olbermann also called Brown "sexist."

Fellow liberal TV host Jon Stewart appropriately criticized Olbermann for this and Olbermann, to his credit, said to Stewart, "You know what, you're right. I have been a little over the top lately. Point taken. Sorry." However, he didn't apologize to Brown, and he didn't specifically retract this inflammatory accusation.

“The families that judges see in family court are already fractured, but still capable of inflicting pain on one another and often use the courts to do so...They make navigating the family law system so difficult that even a highly functional person becomes stressed.” --- Honorable Donna Petre, Sacramento Bee, 2000

Family law takes up more court calendar time than any other form of law in California, yet it receives the least amount of funding. Moreover, the public's trust and confidence in the family court system is lower than that of any other area of law the judicial system handles.

The Elkins Family Law Task Force is conducting a comprehensive review of family law proceedings and will recommend to the Judicial Council of California proposals that increase access to justice for all family law litigants.

The Elkins Family Law Task Force recently issued its draft recommendations and Fathers & Families submitted its official comments in response. Our comments, which were submitted by F & F Board Member Elizabeth Barton, PhD of the University of California at Irvine, are here.

Fathers & Families' legislative representative Michael Robinson appeared at the Task Force's two-day meeting February 1 & 2, 2010 in the Judicial Council Conference Center of the Administrative Office of the Courts in San Francisco. Below is Robinson's statement to the Task Force.

Madam Chair and Distinguish Members of the Task Force: I am Michael Robinson and I’ve worked as a legislative advocate and policy consultant in Sacramento since the late 1990s. I am here today on behalf of Fathers & Families (F&F), a national organization based in Boston which has offices in Los Angeles and Sacramento.

Before I get started, I want to thank Chief Justice Ronald George for calling for the formation of this Task Force and I also want to thank all Task Force members for the due diligence that has led to the many well-considered recommendations.

To this end, in general principle F&F agrees with the draft recommendations the Task Force has made so far. We are concerned, however, that many of the draft recommendations are lacking in substantive detail. Nevertheless, we will withhold further opinion until we see the final report, which we hope will contain more detailed and specific language that will become actual legislative draft proposals.

Our comments to the Task Force were submitted by the deadline along with a cover letter by Elizabeth Barton, PhD from the University of California at Irvine, who is a member of Fathers & Families’ Board.

Over the last nearly 10 years I often recall two very fitting quotes by the Hon. Donna Petre that appeared in the Sacramento Bee in 2000 after she had received her award for implementing a case managing process in her court. The quotes are:

“The families that judge see in family court are already fractured, but still capable of inflicting pain on one another and often use the courts to do so.”

And:

“They make navigating the family law system so difficult that even a highly functional person becomes stressed.”

It is encouraging that some of the Task Force’s recommendations place a stronger emphasis in this area of case management, including improving case data tracking.

Other recommendations go to improving mediation, ADR, and parent resources to help reduce conflict. We believe that the more that is done to reduce parental conflict at the outset, the less unproductive adversarial litigation we’ll have in custody and parenting time cases.

In 2006, I played a major role in Dymally's AB 402. This bill codified collaborative practice into the family codes. We believe that many of the principles that govern collaborative practice substantially help reduce conflict. They produce a positive outcome in a non-adversarial manner for all parties including the children. Encouraging mentoring of collaborative practice for practitioners and making parties aware of this process will help.

We also believe that better parental education is necessary on the harmful effects that high conflict has on children, and that parental education on this subject should be a part of all mediation orientations.

In our recommendations on the issue of custody mediation, we submitted two additional documents that we feel should be a guiding principle for all parents, mediators and the court from the start of a custody/parenting time case. The first I’d like to mention is “A Child's Bill of Rights” that was written by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and the second is “A Parents' Bill of Rights” that was written by Dr. Frank Leek. I’ve also included them with my prepared comments.

We are concerned that the recommendations do not include anything on enforcing custody/parenting time orders. We hope the Task Force also considers this issue.

On the recommendation to enforce perjury, we certainly agree that there is a need to take this issue seriously, and it is long overdue. One area is the problem of false allegations to obtain TROs and DVPOs. There are also problems with evidence standards. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems that not a day goes by that we don't hear some version of the old bumper sticker "There's no Excuse for Domestic Violence."  We have 'zero tolerance' laws on DV, constant calls for renewed vigilance and opposition to DV, marches, candlelight vigils and anguished hand-wringing by public figures.  All of which might make the untutored believe that we actually oppose domestic violence.  But we don't.

At best we oppose the half of it that's done by men to women.  When women commit DV, all of a sudden excuses crop up; she had no choice, she was drunk, off her meds, on her meds, her husband had an affair, whatever.  Just a few days ago, Glenn spearheaded an Action Alert about an article in Psychology Today in which the author lauded Texas murderer Clara Harris for running over her husband multiple times with her car while his daughter sat beside her imploring her to stop.  He'd had an extra-marital affair, and, well, what's a wife to do?  Needless to say, the same excuses are seldom or never available to men.

Mostly, we prefer the pretense that women don't commit DV.  Indeed, a multi-billion dollar industry has grown up around that very concept.  VAWA alone funds countless shelters that serve only women.  The literally hundreds of studies of DV done over 35 years which conclude that men and women commit DV equally have been a minor inconvenience for the "all victims women/all perps men" industry. 

But those studies in turn have created their own subset of the same industry.  Their job seems to be to so change the definition of 'domestic violence' that the the pretense can be maintained.  So what began as a pretty straightforward concept - physical violence by one partner against another - has morphed time and again.  Physical violence quickly gave way to emotional or psychological infractions; 'violence' subtlely evolved into 'abuse;' 'abuse' came to involve things as prosaic as a husband asking his wife to spend less and the infamous "failure to give gifts or compliments."  More recently still, we've come to learn that it's not violence that's important as much as its "context" or "motivation."  We'll surely spend the next decade figuring out what those concepts mean, and once we do we'll learn that once again, the definition of DV (or whatever we're calling it then) has changed.

So the crowd that's desperate to avoid admitting the obvious - that women commit as much DV as do men - like to keep those goalposts moving.

When it comes to avoiding the fact of women's DV, it's amazing what can be accomplished with just a little inventiveness and chutzpah.  As London, Ontario Police Chief, Murray Faulkner discovered, when a woman commits a particularly heinous act of DV, it's possible to just pretend it didn't happen.  In this case, London police officers, Kelly Johnson and David Lucio had been having an affair (CBC, 6/8/07).  When he attempted to break it off, she shot him to death and then committed suicide in early June, 2007.  But as the "Domestic Violence Quarterly Report" for London for the April - June quarter of that year shows, the murder was never recorded as a DV incident.  Simple as that.

And of course when all else fails and a woman is actually charged with a crime stemming from a DV incident, there's always the old standby - leniency by the judge.  Earlier this week I reported on two judges, one Canadian and one American who candidly admitted in sentencing female defendants in DV cases, that, if a man had done the same thing, they'd have given him a far harsher sentence.

Here's another case (Fox8, 1/20/10).  In Cleveland, a 300-pound woman got into a fight with her 120-pound boyfriend.  Apparently it wasn't the first time, but it'll certainly be the last.  She resolved that and all future conflicts by the simple expedient of sitting on him, crushing the life out of him.  Her sentence for taking the life of her partner?  Three years probation and 100 hours of community service. 

The man's relatives were incredulous, and I guess I can see why.  It's probably their first experience with our "No Excuse for Domestic Violence" laws. 

Thanks to Brad for the heads-up on the Ontario case and thanks to Eric for the heads-up on the Cleveland one.

In terms of policy discussion and educational investments, the nation is addressing gender differences which barely exist but ignoring gender gaps which are substantial.  - Psychologist Judith Kleinfeld

This piece follows up on the recent one about the radical gender disparities in college enrollment and how feminists find that to be just dandy.  In that piece I dealt with the frank dishonesty and misandry of Kate Harding's piece in Salon.com.  But I didn't deal with anything like the breadth and depth of the problems facing boys and young men in our educational system.  Harding's piece was about the gap in college enrollment, so I confined myself to that. 

This paper by University of Alaska psychologist Judith Kleinfeld summarizes the social science findings about boys and girls in school (Gender Issues, 26/2009).  It also deals briefly with the intellectual discourse that's attended the changing gender patterns in American education over the past twenty or so years.  In a nutshell, Kleinfeld says that both boys and girls have problems in school, but boys problems are far wider-spread and far more serious than are girls'. 

During the 1990s, various women's groups like the American Association of University Women and the Women's Educational Equity Act Publishing Center published material that, as Christina Hoff Sommers shows in her book, The War Against Boys, was either shoddily researched or, in one notable case, seemingly not researched at all.  As but one example, Brookings Institution scholar and former Assistant Secretary of Education, Diane Ravitch called the AAUW report "just completely wrong."  Other work by Harvard's Carol Gilligan may never have been done at all.  Sommers describes in growing disbelief how, after many months of asking to actually see the research that Gilligan claimed to have done, it apparently vanished into the confines of a library at Harvard.  No one has ever seen it and apparently no one ever will.

Despite how bad "research" like this was, Kleinfeld and Sommers report that it drew not only national attention from the mainstream press, but vast sums of federal money as well.  Meanwhile, reputable research debunking the claims of Gilligan and the AAUW went largely unnoticed as did research showing that it is boys, far more than girls, who need help in school. 

Here are but a few examples of the areas in which girls are outstripping boys.  In grades, SAT scores and ACT scores, 12th grade girls do better than 12th grade boys in all areas except math and science in which they do almost as well.  Boys are about twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with ADHD, or mental or emotional problems.  Far more boys than girls drop out of high school, twice as many are suspended and three times as many are expelled.  Males aged 10-14 are three times as likely to commit suicide as are girls; 15-19 year old males are more than four times as likely and 20-24 year old males are six times as likely to cimmit suicide as are females.  Boys are less engaged with the process of school and more likely to exhibit conduct disorders than are girls.

So, in order to pretend that the only inequality in education is the ratio of boys to girls in college, Harding had to overlook those things plus a multitude of others.  Kleinfeld, however is not so reticent.

While some analysts argue that the fundamental issues are race and class, rather than sex, this is not the case. It is boys who are performing at strikingly lower levels in literacy. It is boys who have substantially higher dropout rates, placement in special education classes, disciplinary problems leading to suspension and expulsion, and far lower levels of school engagement and participation in postsecondary education. Black boys are particularly at risk.

While the educational problems of girls have led to numerous policy efforts to increase their achievement in areas where they are behind, such as achievement in mathematics and science at the top, the problems of boys have been largely ignored by federal agencies, foundations, and school districts. 

If Kate Harding has her way, they'll continue to be.  Harding, like so many others, doesn't even want to admit, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that there's a problem.  Gender equality anyone?

As many of you have noticed, lately we've been resolving some technical issues with the tags and the comments, and to do so we have removed both from the website.

Administering/moderating the site has always been time-consuming, and the respite from comments has underscored this. The blog is under continual spam assault, and many pieces of spam get through, particularly on the older blog posts. At the same time, many legitimate comments get caught in the spam blocker. Needless to say, deleting spam and removing legitimate comments from the spam blocker are a time-consuming drain on our staff.

At the same time, while most commenters are thoughtful and respectful, there's always a determined minority which seems to be incapable of complying with our posted blog rules. Policing this is also a drain on our staff.

Fathers & Families is working hard to build affiliates, increase funding, and expand the scope of our organization. That agenda, together with efforts to pass our extensive legislative slate while simultaneously defending against harmful bills, require us to re-budget our time. Largely as a time-saving measure, we've decided to leave the comments off the website.

However, we still want to provide our thoughtful readers with a platform for their views, and have thus created a new Letters to the Editor section. This section will provide readers the opportunity to publish letters as blog posts or as parts of blog posts on the site. To submit a Letter to the Editor, please click here.

Sincerely,

Glenn Sacks, MA
Robert Franklin, Esq.

The right to food is, first of all, a basic human right enshrined in international law.  It establishes principles that govern decisionmaking and implementation processes, namely participation, non-discrimination, transparency and empowerment. It also provides a legal framework – based on the concepts of rights and obligations – and mechanisms for increased accountability and the rule of law. - The State of Food Insecurity in the World, 2009; United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Noting that women's control over disaster resources is empowering, they also urged increased decision-making power. - United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for the Advancement of Women.

I wrote recently about the United Nations World Food Program's decision to distribute food only to the women of Haiti.  The WFP is in charge of coordinating food distribution efforts among various organizations in the Caribbean nation that was severely damaged by an earthquake and aftershocks.  Its policy, according to its spokesman there, Marcus Prior, is to give food coupons only to women who will then redeem them for rice which they will presumably distribute to men.  What happens to men who don't have a female relative from whom to obtain food remains an unanswered question.

In my first piece on the blatantly misandric attack on the health and lives of Haiti's male population, I mentioned that, beyond its radical sexism, the WFP's policy places men's wellbeing, not in their own hands, but in those of women.  The extreme power imbalance created by placing, at a time of crisis, total control of so valuable a resource as food in the hands of a single sex is clearly a political act.

Now it turns out that might be the whole point.  This document is from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for the Advancement of Women.  It seems to be minutes from an email meeting of some members of that organization.  Some of them, like Sarah Henshaw are also employed by the WFP.  Their email exchange is all about the opportunity for women's empowerment presented by natural disasters.  As moderator Elaine Enarson exclaims, "Disasters can be great liberators!"

And all agree.  Read on.

Participants this week were guardedly optimistic (at best!) about the potential for significantly disrupting and transforming gender relations following natural disasters.

The possibilities for change were not in question. Most would certainly agree with Bahattin Aksit's observation from Turkey that "as physical and social space collapse" during disasters, "there is an opportunity for transforming gender roles and maintaining them in the post-disaster period."

Now, of course the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for the Advancement of Women is not the same as the World Food Programme, even though they seem to have overlapping employment or at least interests.  But when you read the DAW document, it's hard to escape the fact that what the participants are talking so enthusiastically about is precisely what the WFP is doing in Haiti - using a natural disaster to empower women at the expense of men.

I won't go too far off on the tangent of the cultural imperialism involved in elites from wealthy nations unilaterally deciding to "empower" women by risking the health and lives of men.  Did Haitian men vote for this policy?  For that matter, did Haitian women?  Is it just barely possible that if they had been asked, Haitian women would have declined the opportunity to use the catastrophe to feather their own nests?  We'll never know, because the authorities at the United Nations World Food Programme didn't give them the opportunity, knowing as they believe they do, better than Haitians themselves what's in their best interests.  The history of cultural imperialism is little but a long list of just such assumptions by the wealthy and powerful about their subjects.

Interestingly enough, this practice of using natural disasters to favor women over men has been going on for a long time, and with predictable results.  Here's Sarah Henshaw reporting on her experience of the crisis in Nicaragua following Hurricane Mitch  in 1998.  There the issues were both food and housing.  As now, the WFP was giving food to women, not men.  Into the bargain, men were heavily involved in building houses which, when finished, had titles vested in women alone!  As a final indignity, the men who were building the houses were paid in food, except they weren't.  The food, you recall, was given to the women, not the men.  Not surprisingly, the men weren't happy with the arrangement and "started permanently disappearing (not sending money home)..."  Gee, I wonder why. 

Read it for yourself.

As I began a project rebuilding houses for families affected by Hurricane Mitch I worked primarily with women. . . I had spoken to the American Red Cross and Save the Children USA, who had told me that they were putting their houses in the name of the women. They were also, like WFP, giving food assistance directly to women. . . Tensions began to rise, as the men had nothing to do except build houses. Building houses was fine, but finding a job to sustain the family after the aid had gone was close to impossible. Houses became symbols of the men's ability to provide for the family. . . After Hurricane Mitch many men worked on rehabilitation and received food aid in exchange for their work. Yet, in many cases, women went to pick up the family rations from distribution points and cooked the family meals. Many men spoke of their "payment" being given to women and couldn't understand why. . . Women's names were going to appear on the titles, and they were going to be considered the owners of the houses. As I understood that many men did not stay year around, and knew that all of the women had worked on building the houses, it seemed good to give the houses to women. Yet, once the titles were handed over and signed, men started permanently disappearing (not sending money home) and two women showed signs of violence. 

Notice the tone of Henshaw's statement above and that of many of the contributors to the DAW piece.  There's an unmistakable air of perplexity.  They seem to have such a hard time grasping why men might not share their enthusiasm for being denied food or being left off title to houses they'd built.  Reading their remarks is like reading the words of space aliens who are patiently, but unsuccessfully trying to fathom the minds of human beings. 

This is an ongoing scandal.  Apparently taking advantage of natural disasters to empower women at the expense of men is the policy not only of the WFP but of at least some non-governmental organizations.  As ever, we in the West know what's best for the rest of the world.  From Catholicism for the Aztecs to smallpox for the Mandan to opium for the Chinese, the "other" peoples of the planet will do well to adopt our ways.  After all, who wouldn't want to be like us?

Thanks to Pat for the heads-up.

Periodically feminists seem to feel a need to justify the radical gender inequality of our colleges and universities.  This article seems to take the recent claim that the gender imbalance in undergraduate admissions has "leveled off" at 43% male/57% female as, if not cause for rejoicing, then at least perfectly acceptable (Salon.com, 1/26/10).  If author Kate Harding has any quibble with that ratio, she doesn't let her readers in on it.

There was a time, of course, when feminists railed against gender inequality in a wide variety of areas, and rightly so.  What possible reason could there be for inequalities based on sex in education, the workplace, academia, government, etc.?  And they had a good point; there was no legitimate reason.

But the instant the shoe gets onto the other foot, the principle of gender equality vanishes from feminist discourse.  Funny how that happens.  Indeed, when it comes to the radical gender equality in education, feminists tie themselves in rhetorical knots justifying the very thing they were screaming about just 30 years ago.  The attempt at justification of the education gender gap by Sara Mead in 2006 still stands as one of the weakest ever.  She actually made the argument that there were more young men in college then than there had been in 1970, so college enrollment was increasing for everyone.  As I wrote last March,

Maybe someone should let her in on the fact that the population of the U.S. has increased since 1970.  Her claim is like saying John McCain is more popular than George Washington because more people voted for him.  As a function of the overall population, male college enrollment has remained utterly unchanged.  About one man goes to college for every 50 people in the general population.  That was true in 1970 and it's true now.  Somehow to Mead that constitutes improvement.

By contrast, in 1970 one woman attended college for every 67 people.  Now it's one woman for every 34 people.  In short, men's college enrollment has remained the same while women's has doubled.  In 1970, there were about 4.2 million men and 3.1 million women in college.  Now there are about 6.3 million men and 8.8 million women.

So it's no surprise that Harding abandons that line of attack entirely and beats a strategic retreat to the redoubt so favored by the intellectually dishonest - the strawman.  Well, strawmen, actually.  They are (a) men are soon to be "redundant" generally and (b) men will be "squeezed out" of higher education altogether.  Having identified those as the problems, she then knocks them aside and thereby "proves" (to her satisfaction if to no one else's) that 57% of college enrollees being women is just fine.

But given the fact that those arguments are absurd, what about the real issue?  Well, she prefers not to discuss it.  What she likes better are the opinions of one Daniel de Vise who opined in the Washington Post that since there once were barriers to women's college enrollment, it's now OK for there to be barriers to men's.  To which some of us respond with a drop-jawed "huh?"  It's the case of the vanishing principle again; now you see it, now you don't.  Once feminists pretended to care about gender equality, but when that principle could conceivably benefit men, all of a sudden they're not.  There's a word for that - hypocrisy.

And as is so often the case, hypocrisy comes clad in intellectual dishonesty.  Few hypocrites, after all, openly admit the fact and anyone who expects Kate Harding to be anything like that honest or courageous will be invariably disappointed.  So her last line of defense is to try to switch focus to certain unnamed colleges in Washington State which may or may not be attempting to lure a greater number of male students.  Even if they are, how that balances the nationwide gender inequality in college enrollment, Harding doesn't explain.

As bad as so much feminist writing is, it's been a while since I've seen anything that bears so little resemblance to reality as this piece (Toronto Star, 2/3/10).  It's so incoherent and at odds with known facts that it's actually hard to describe.  It reminds me of the stuff you used to read in the 1970s.

That said, the writer, Antonia Zerbisias, seems to think that men's rights activists are making policy for Prime Minister Stephen Harper.  Would that we were!  At least the headline says that we "drive" Harper's policies.  Her evidence?  None that I can see.  Actually, the extent of what she offers on that score is the assertion that MRAs "have much in common with the TheoCons in Harper's caucus and inner circle."  Even if that's true, and she makes no effort to prove the claim, how the fact that MRAs "have much in common" with a certain group of Harper's advisors comes to mean we "drive" his policies is anyone's guess.

Likewise, from her description of Maurice Vellacott, you'd never know that he's, you know, a member of the Canadian Parliament, duly elected by the people of Saskatchewan.  To Zerbisias, he's just a bundle of all the things she doesn't like - religious, pro-life and opposed to gay marriage.  And therefore, she feels free to attack Vellacott's shared parenting bill (C-422).

Or maybe that's not what she's doing.  After all, her description of C-422 bears not the slightest resemblance to the bill itself or what it attempts to do.  Here is the entirety of her description of Bill C-422: according to Zerbisias, it  

would amend the Divorce Act to automatically award, regardless of history, "equal parenting" to warring couples.

Men's rights activists like the bill according to her because, 

they can continue to exercise control over their ex-wives and children.

Now, read the bill linked to above.  What it actually does, not that Zerbisias has the slightest interest, is to (a) try to get divorcing parents to cooperate with each other on child care post-divorce, (b) establish the presumption of equally shared parenting or, in the alternative, maximal childcare by each parent, (c) maintain the best interests of the child as the standard for whether the presumption is rebutted or not and (d) specifically state that the physical and emotional safety and wellbeing of the child are paramount in the court's decision regarding parenting time.

It also does other things like dealing with cases in which one parent wants to move away from the area in which the other parent lives, thereby making equal parenting difficult.

So what Zerbisias said about automatically awarding equal parenting regardless of history is frankly untrue.  The most casual reading of the text of the bill shows it to be false.

Meanwhile, her other claim is just loony; it doesn't even make sense.  Yes, I suppose allowing a father to actually see his children does in some way diminish his ex-wife's total control, but that's true now in any case in which a father establishes a right to custody or access.  Those too, I must conclude, constitute an exercise of "control" over ex-wives and children in Zerbisias's weird world.

But Zerbisias isn't finished.  Astonishing as all those previous assertions are, as utterly unsupported by the least fact, nothing compares to this one:

[T]hanks to feminists fighting for shared parenting rights, men are now being awarded joint custody in almost half of all cases.

Let's see.  It's tough to get so many things so wrong in so few words.  I mean honestly "feminists fighting for shared parenting rights"?  Excuse me.  Like when?  In truth, feminists have consistently opposed every effort by fathers' rights advocates in every court and legislature I know about.  They're doing it now in Australia, Canada, California and countless other states and nations. 

For the past year I've been writing about feminists and the rest of the anti-dad crowd doing their best to roll back the shared parenting reforms in Australia.  That's true despite the fact that a large majority of parents said the reforms were "working well" in a government-instigated study just released.

Only last August I wrote a piece on the whitepaper opposing equally shared parenting by Canadian feminist organization, the National Association of Women and the Law.

And if feminists are so amenable to shared parenting, how is it that the feminist Zerbisias is writing this article?  As one person said in the movie Fargo, "You're sayin'.  What are you sayin'?"

And then there's her claim that men get joint custody in almost half of all cases.  That's far from true.  In the United States, men get primary custody in about 16% of cases according to the U.S. Census Bureau.  In Canada, it's even worse, coming in at 9-10% according to StatsCan. 

The weasel word of course is "joint."  Joint custody is what we see so much of, but anyone who seriously believes that "joint" connotes "equal" is in for a rude surprise.  "Joint" custody means that one parent has physical custody (the custodial, or primary parent) and legal custody while the other parent (the non-custodial parent) has legal custody.  In other words, the "joint custody" that Zerbisias wants us to be so enthusiastic about is the standard-issue custody/visitation arrangement that gives the custodial parent (usually the mother) almost total control over parenting time and decision-making and turns the non-custodial parent (usually the dad) into an entertainer, a Disneyland parent. 

That arrangement has been tried and it's failed.  It's failed children mostly, but it's failed fathers and mothers too.  It's failed any society that has a stake in happy children growing up to be responsible, productive adults.  If Zerbisias cared to abandon her political stance for a bit and actually do some reading on the many ills our current way of doing divorce has foisted on us, she'd know that we've got to change.  Equally shared parenting is the best we can do for children, fathers and even the mothers Zerbisias claims to care about.

Actually, now that I think about it, you've got to like Zerbisias's piece.  When your opponents are as bent out of shape as she is, you know you've got them on the run.  I mean that seriously; if this is the best opponents of shared parenting can come up with, fathers' rights are on a downhill slope.