Feminists make better wives: study

 

A majority of college-age respondents agreed with such statements as "Most men would probably not want to date a feminist" and "Romance depends, in part, on men being allowed to be in charge."

This was alarming to Rudman, who is old enough to remember the heyday of the women's rights movement in the 1970s. Continued efforts to achieve gender equality could be seriously hurt, she reasoned, if women (and men) think it comes at the expense of love.

So, with the help of graduate student Julie Phelan, she set about trying to determine if there was any truth to the notion that feminists are more likely than traditional women to have crummy relationships.

The results, appearing in the online edition of the peer-reviewed journal Sex Roles, show that for both women and men there was a benefit to having a feminist partner. Feminist women were also more likely than others to be in a romantic relationship.

"If you're a woman paired with a male feminist," said Rudman, "you have a healthier relationship across the board" - better in terms of relationship quality, equality, stability and sexual satisfaction.

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Gus: couldn't agree more...

but then, the notion of equality in the sexes is under attack from some religiousness.... not only in the Catholic and Anglican churches.

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Channel 4 cleared of fakery
By Jonathan Brown
Published: 20 November 2007

Channel 4 was yesterday cleared of faking the views of Muslim preachers in an undercover documentary examining alleged Islamic extremism in Britain.

The broadcaster accused West Midlands Police, which had reported it to Ofcom after its criminal investigation into the Dispatches programme collapsed earlier this year, of giving "legitimacy" to those preaching a message of hate.

In its findings, the media regulator said there was no evidence that Channel 4 or the documentary makers Hardcash Productions had misled the audience with the documentary broadcast in January. It said: "'Undercover Mosque' was a legitimate investigation, uncovering matters of important public interest."

Excerpts from preachers and teachers included such comments as: "Allah created the woman deficient", and "by the age of 10, it becomes an obligation on us to force her (young girls) to wear hijab and if she doesn't ... we hit her".

Ofcom also rejected the 364 viewers' complaints, which it said appeared to be part of a campaign.

The shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, said it was inappropriate for the police to scrutinise editorial decisions and risked deterring investigative journalism. West Midlands Police said it feared the documentary could undermine community cohesion.

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Gus: community cohesion with preaching like: "Allah created the woman deficient", and "by the age of 10, it becomes an obligation on us to force her (young girls) to wear hijab and if she doesn't ... we hit her" is a bit rich.

It is our judicial duty to let people have whatever religious idiosycracy they wish as long as these do not contravene the law, peace, justice, equality, freedom and decency. A statement like the one above and its enforcement should have no place in a modern scientific society, especially ours. On many fronts, the Muslim religion is rejecting, brainwashing, harsh, unenlightened, restrictive and its use in extremism is dangerous. It is our duty to make sure Muslims learn acceptance, reject the strict dogma and evolve their beliefs to accommodate others in a relative universe. 

 

I know I already mentioned this one but it is still worth posting again and again... especially in relation to my blog above...

Saudi rape victim punishment 'reprehensible'

Saudis defend rape victim's thrashing

The US State Department today voiced its "astonishment" at the sentencing of a Saudi victim of rape to 200 lashes and six months in jail but stopped short of calling for it to be changed.

"I think when you look at the crime and the fact that now the victim is punished, I think that causes a fair degree of surprise and astonishment," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.

"But it is within the power of the Saudi government to take a look at the verdict and change it," he said, referring to the case of the 19-year-old woman whose punishment was ordered by a court today after the woman was gang-raped.

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Gus: see toon at top... And the US stopped short of asking the law to be changed... See there's oil in the pipeline...

Get rid of John Howard, the supporter of illegal wars and murders for oil... 

Germaine Greer’s task in her ingenious new book, “Shakespeare’s Wife,” is to expose the construction of this fantasy, tracing its evolution from early biographers like Thomas de Quincey through the work of respected modern scholars like Stephen Greenblatt. “The Shakespeare wallahs,” she writes, “have succeeded in creating a Bard in their own likeness, that is to say, incapable of relating to women.”

After sifting through records of lives that ran parallel to the young Shakespeares’, Greer contends that in their time and place there was nothing unusual in a baby’s being born six months after a marriage. She also demonstrates that an unmarried woman in her mid-20s would not have been considered exceptional or desperate. Ann Hathaway, Greer argues, was likely to be literate, and given the relative standing of their families in Warwickshire, she may very well have been considered a more desirable match than her husband.

Though generally appreciative, several Shakespeare scholars have found Greer’s approach “stridently ... combative” and full of “scattergun assaults.” But for those accustomed to Greer’s feminist provocations, “Shakespeare’s Wife” will seem extremely sober and restrained.

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Gus: Often people ask me why I "migrated" to Australia. Most people think of this country as bereft of artistic value — especially in the written world — apart from a few quaint authors such as Henry Lawson and painters such as Brett Whiteley. No-one was soaring high in the philosophical stakes apart from AFL professional players showing that life was a big jump. So what was the attraction of leaving a solid philosophy-based language for a language "of grocers" (no offence here, just mentioning the way some Europeans and some English leaders/erudite described the lingo)?...

But in Australia, there were a few giants in the literary world, including Germaine Greer and Patrick White — which can be considered giants amongst giants... To me as well, an English fellow, Desmond Morris, also was (and still is) a giant of humanity studies and of some artistic endeavours. Having lived in England in the early sixties, the weather and the chimney stacks of Sheffield did nothing for me. But Shakespeare was the great philosopher who managed to express the human condition — without the dryness of preaching — by using the common soap, as in TV soap and soap opera.

So, more in search of sunny adventure on the other side of the earth than any other reason (which there were a few), I migrated to a country that spoke English, that had a good weather, (despite the droughts and floods), that had easy people to live with — and a prospect where anything was possible and anything has been possible. I soon was introduced to the cartoon strips Barry Mckenzie.

Carmen Callil, the founder of publishing house Virago, has resigned as judge of the Man Booker International Prize in protest at the decision to give the biennial award to the American novelist Philip Roth.

In an unusually frank – or even unseemly – insight into the judging process, Callil told the Guardian she had decided to resign when it became apparent that Rick Gekoski and Justin Cartwright were set on Roth, whose work she doesn't admire.

"He goes on and on about the same subject in every single book," said Callil. "It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe."

She added: "I don't rate him as a writer at all. I made it clear that I wouldn't have put him on the longlist, so I was amazed when he stayed there. He was the only one I didn't admire – all the others were fine.

"Roth goes to the core of their [Cartwright and Gekoski's] beings. But he certainly doesn't go to the core of mine ... Emperor's clothes: in 20 years' time will anyone read him?"

Justin Cartwright clearly does not agree: writing in the Guardian in March, he praised Roth, saying: "All of his novels demonstrate an extraordinary, lively and witty prose… There is no question, Philip Roth is one of the great writers of our era."

That the panel was split along gender lines is no accident: Australian-born Callil founded a feminist publishing house; Roth's novels are intensely male – from the constantly masturbating Portnoy in Portnoy's Complaint to Roth's literary alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman, his focus is always masculine.

Read more: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/79156,people,news,booker-judge-carmen-callil-resigns-over-philip-roth-victory#ixzz1MnsJICVC
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Australian feminism is very special indeed... And since arriving in this country I have supported it, including understanding that person at top being the subject of the cartoon... Equality of the sexes is paramount to me... This is why I will fight the idiosyncracies of religions — from muslim to christian — as they inscribe in their dogma the submissiveness of women to the power of men.
Long live atheism with equal acceptance and no submissiveness.

A writer, if they are doing their work properly, rubs against the grain of conventional thinking. Writers are often outcasts, heretics and marginalised. Once upon a time writers’ festivals celebrated them, and with them the values of intellectual freedom and freedom of debate. Writing that mattered wasn’t seen as being about being reassured, comforted, deceived and cosseted in our own opinions. Rather it was, as Kafka put it, the axe that smashes the frozen sea within.

But the Brisbane Writers festival, with its decision to drop Germaine Greer and Bob Carr as invited guests, appears to be a cryogenic chamber where the sea can stay perennially frozen, prejudices perfectly preserved forever, unchallenged, unquestioned, uninformed and unformed.

The BWF has form here. When social media lit up around the world following Lionel Shriver’s keynote address at its festival in 2016, the BWF took the unprecedented action of, according to the New York Times, publicly disavowing Shriver’s remarks, effectively abandoning her as a writer, and publicly attacking her for not “speaking to her brief” as if she were a silk hired by the BWF to prosecute an argument.

Anyone who has appeared at a writers’ festival knows organisers are grateful if a writer turns up on time and sober. Anything beyond this minimum is decreed a winning appearance. No one has ever suggested to me that I must stay to a brief or risk punishment.

Shriver’s speech was attacked on the basis of a fiery blog, later republished by the Guardian, by Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who had by her own admission only heard a third of the speech before walking out. Social media lit up predictably enraged, not at Shriver’s speech, which wasn’t publicly available for several days, but Abdel-Magied’s characterisation of it as laying the foundation “for prejudice, for hate, for genocide”. When the speech finally appeared, also in the Guardian, it was hard to see how it did such a thing, and even critics conceded it was far more nuanced than it had been attacked as on social media. By then though it was too late.

For Shriver, the talk was about the damage identity politics could do to writing. For her critics it was about belittling the movement against cultural appropriation. Whichever position you took, the debate was important. Shriver had done what you would think a festival would long for all its guests to do.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jul/29/i-didnt-want-to-write-th...

 

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