Assertive little girls are leaders to be celebrated. Assertive little boys are rapists to be medicated. #SnipsSnailsPuppydogTails #banbossy
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 11, 2014
If we're going to stop labeling little girls "bossy", can we stop labeling little boys with finger guns "psychotic latent mass murderers"?
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 11, 2014
A slew of major corporations and celebrities have lined up behind the banning of bossy.
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There nothing wrong, and much good, at encouraging young girls to lead. But this campaign has a strong victimization narrative. This teaches young girls that they are victims and need the emotional protections that little boys don't. At best that is a mixed message.
And why now?
Why have the word police suddenly descended on us to shape our speech? Can't boys and men be bossy too? Has there been some epidemic of bossy such that now is the time to act.
A follower on Twitter made the connection to prepping the battlefield for Hillary:
"Why could we not expel a student based on an allegation?" That astonishing question was posed at a conference on how colleges respond to sexual assault issues by Amanda Childress, Sexual Assault Awareness Program coordinator at Dartmouth. According to Inside Higher Ed, Childress continued: "It seems to me that we value fair and equitable processes more than we value the safety of our students. And higher education is not a right. Safety is a right. Higher education is a privilege." Give Childress credit for candor--even the campus spokespersons for increasing the number of guilty findings in campus tribunals usually aren't so bald in their disdain for basic principles of due process. Childress' jarring remarks coincided with news that Dartmouth had promoted her, and given her additional power over the college's sexual assault policies. Last Friday, the college announced that Childress will head the newly-created Center for Community Action and Prevention, which Childress said would "be the focal point on campus for Dartmouth's sexual assault and violence prevention initiatives" and "drive the College's mobilization efforts around preventing sexual violence and increasing the safety and well-being of all members of our community." (All members, it seems, except students facing unsubstantiated allegations of sexual assault.) Incredibly, Dartmouth theater professor Paul Hackett suggested that despite Childress' appointment, the college isn't going far enough on the issue.
'What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," says Camille Paglia. This self-described "notorious Amazon feminist" isn't telling anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can't Have It All. No, her indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead. And that's just 20 minutes of our three-hour conversation..... Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins as early as kindergarten. "Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys," she says, pointing to the most obvious example: the way many schools have cut recess. "They're making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters." She is not the first to make this argument, as Ms. Paglia readily notes. Fellow feminist Christina Hoff Sommers has written about the "war against boys" for more than a decade. The notion was once met with derision, but now data back it up: Almost one in five high-school-age boys has been diagnosed with ADHD, boys get worse grades than girls and are less likely to go to college....
Pro Blogger Tip: When you're dead tired, out of ideas, almost everyone else at the blog is away or shopping...
I was 15 years old when my mother and I were robbed at gunpoint. It was 1982.... I don’t own a gun but I know plenty of educated black women who do. These are working- and middle-class women, some of them single and some with families, and statistics support what I see. According to a National Shooting Sports Foundation report, 78.6 percent of retailers reported an increase in the number of women buying guns in 2012. Although a 2013 Pew research report reveals that gun ownership remains overwhelmingly white and male, black women made up the fastest growing purchasers of concealed handguns in Texas between the years 2007 and 2012. J. Victoria Sanders, a black Texan and journalist, reported this trend in a 2011 article detailing the increased marketing of guns to women and Sanders’ own journey toward gun ownership. This movement toward guns seems a rational decision for black women when you consider some of our experiences. Historically, black women have been left unprotected as a matter of law and custom, our bodies designated as commodities, used as “de mule uh de world” as Zora Neale Hurston wrote, and as sites for sexual violence and mockery. In an analysis of 2011 data, the Violence Policy Center reported that black women are murdered at rates three times that of white women and these murders usually involve a gun used by someone that the woman knows. Given these realities, some of us are pragmatic about self-defense. Even when we identify as feminist, as I do, we remain uncommitted to anti-gun feminism that erases our specific experience....
Eric devoured the sandwich as if it were a five-star meal, diving in with large, eager bites. “Babes, this is delicious!” he exclaimed. As he finished that last bite, he made an unexpected declaration of how much he loved me and that sandwich: “Honey, you’re 300 sandwiches away from an engagement ring!” .... Today, I’ve made and blogged about 176 sandwiches. Over the months, my creations have grown more complex — lobster rolls, bánh mìs, pulled pork. No matter what’s on the menu, Eric smiles and says thank you. He’s just happy I cook for him at all. “You women read all these magazines to get advice on how to keep a man, and it’s so easy,” he says. “We’re not complex. Just do something nice for us. Like make a sandwich.”Read the whole thing. It's a great love story. And watch the video at the bottom of this post, it's love to which the sandwiches really are mere observers. But someone had to go and ruin it. Via Jim Treacher:
Really creepy story about how Harvard Business School treated women like children to help them succeed at Harvard Business School. https://twitter.com/CHSommers/status/376495408308318208 The social engineering experiment went so far as to teach the best and the brightest how to raise their hands with confidence: Women at Harvard did fine...
Via @RightInAcademia, 22 Stats That Prove That There Is Something Seriously Wrong With Young Men In America: When are we finally going to admit that we have a very serious problem with this generation of young men in America? We have failed them so dramatically that it...
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