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Feminism

Bit barrel scraping isn’t it?

Multiple women have accused Jared Leto of impropriety, with some calling the 53-year-old actor and musician’s behavior “predatory, terrifying and unacceptable”.

In a new report by Air Mail on Saturday, nine women have come forward to accuse Leto of engaging in inappropriate behavior over the years, including flirting with teenagers.

Film star smiles at 18 year old. Jail ‘im.

OK, OK, chats up 16 year olds. And?

This week in whinge maintenance

One of my pet theories is that – for wimmins, of course – there’s a certain basic amount of whingeing that is going to happen. If the cave bears don’t get us then it’ll be the colour of the cave walls, if we’ve got houses and cars and shops and choices then it’ll be the crunchiness of the spring onions. Denounced, as vehemently, considered exactly as important, as those damn cave bears.

I have not yet checked this theory with my wife. But today’s example:

You be the judge: should my husband stop slapping food on my plate so artlessly?

There’re 700 million in this world still wondering whether there’s going to be any food today. QED.

This is possible, obviously

Tho’ an alternative explanation does present itself:

Why is there such a generational divide in views on sex and gender in Britain?
Susanna Rustin
A majority of my age group agreed with a recent supreme court ruling – among 18- to 24-year-olds, the reverse was true. I believe the key lies in our respective life stages

The alternative being that the young are ignorant know nothings yet to grow up – they’re young, see?

Blame or praise here?

Corporate America has fallen out of love with Pride month – and it’s because of Donald Trump.

Businesses that used to smother their merchandise in rainbow flags for the month of June have dramatically scaled back this year, many wary of provoking an investigation by the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, Pride events across the US are facing budget shortfalls as corporate sponsors duck out.

Or even are we talking about a preference cascade here? The little lad stands up and talks about the Emperror’s tailoring. Suddenly everyone agrees. Could be the The Don is the trigger here, rather than the mob enforcer?

Bit late to the game

Periods are “not inherently feminine”, according to Britain’s biggest toiletry supplier.

Bunzl, the major distribution company, said “not all people who menstruate are women” in a campaign designed to stop the stigma of talking about periods.

But then as Parkinson, Peters, Townsend, pointed out bureaucracy is bureaucracy even if it happens to be in a large corporate – not the speediest nor most responsive of things.

Fairly strong claim

Roughly 80% of stay-at-home parents are mothers: cultural traditions that encourage women, and not men, to sacrifice their careers for caregiving, along with persistent wage inequalities that make women, on the whole, lower earners than their male partners, both incentivize women, and not men, to drop out of the workforce and stay home when they have children.

Differences in reaction to ickle ones are based purely upon culture and nothing more?

That would be…..odd. For such differences do seem to occur in many a species – maybe even all. True, not all – and yes, let’s mention the seahorse – have the biddy doing the childcare but there is often that sexual difference in who does.

So why is it that in humans it’s always the culture, never anything innate?

Allow me to translate Rhiannon for you

Modern parenting rejects abusive ways of punishing children. Will England listen?
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

Older relatives might roll their eyes at this generation’s approach, but it is overdue in a country where smacking is still legal

I think smacking children is a bad idea. Therefore everyone else must do so too.

Little is as fascist as a liberal on the moral warpath….

There is actually a reason for this, you know?

But a review of the data by the Guardian found that women were significantly under-represented. Both sexes were included in most trials (90%), but male-only trials (6.1%) were nearly twice as common as female-only studies (3.7%). Pregnant and breastfeeding women were especially under-represented – involved in just 1.1% and 0.6% of trials respectively.

Two in fact. One is that testing on the foetus – or suckling babbie – is somewhat frowned upon. The other is that there are fairly wild hormone and other physical swings here making a baseline somewhat difficult.

But patriarchy, right?

So, Aye, by Gum

In reality, men never actually have had it all. They want a fairer balance between work and fatherhood and need to be part of the conversation. A lack of dad-friendly policies and a failing economy is crushing dreams of fatherhood.

OK.

So, the argument is we need more hands on fathers, more time off for them, more involvement from them, in order to raise the fertility rate.

It’s a plan.

So, are fathers more hand on now that 100 years ago? Is the fertility rate higher or lower?

Ah…….

The modern business world

I have a Gender Recognition Certificate which clearly states that my acquired gender is female. I have no intention of using men’s facilities. I will not comply.”

Ms Cusdin runs Global Butterflies with her trans partner Rachel Reese, who co-founded the group in 2015.

Global Butterflies provides training on trans issues in the workplace but has attracted controversy for running workshops that inform participants there are more than 150 genders, encourage staff to pull colleagues up for using the wrong pronouns and warn that staring could be considered transphobic.

It’s the power skirts in HR who hire such companies.

Why?

Oh dear, we’ve some work to do here, no?

Doctors have branded the Supreme Court transgender ruling as “scientifically illiterate”.

The British Medical Association’s (BMA) resident doctors – previously called junior doctors – have voted to “condemn” the judgment, which ruled that trans women were not legally women.

The doctors passed a motion at a conference on Saturday criticising the ruling as “biologically nonsensical”.

The doctors claimed a binary divide between sex and gender “has no basis in science or medicine while being actively harmful to transgender and gender-diverse people”, according to a motion seen by The Times.

Who has a prostate and who has a cervix is a different quetion from who presents in lippie and a dress. If even the doctors aren’t making that distinction…..

The implication is…..

“Masculine” investors do worse than women who take a “feminine” approach, researchers have found.

A study from Mannheim Business School in Germany found that both male and female investors have a tendency to back companies that match their shopping habits.

It leads to differences in typical investment baskets for men and women, with male money managers more likely to invest in car companies and women favouring healthcare, among others.

The returns from buying masculine product producers are – slightly – below those from feminine.

OK, that means that masculine products are produced in more competitive markets than feminine.

In turn that means men are better at shopping than women.

Are they really

Trans people are seeking asylum abroad amid fears for their safety after last week’s Supreme Court judgment, a Labour peer has claimed.

Lord Cashman said friends were looking to leave Britain after the country’s highest court ruled that transgender women are not legally women.

Don’t believe you for a moment.

Especially as that’s not what the court ruled anyway. Rather, that in the Equalities Act the sex based meaning of women was used, not gender. If, in other laws, some other definition is used – as, say it is about GRCs – then that’s fine too.

Is this Guardian column copied from Jezebel?

Pronatalist activist Simone Collins, whose spectacled face you may have seen online, said she and her husband, Malcolm, have sent the White House multiple draft executive orders to encourage childbearing, including one that would give a “National Medal of Motherhood” to mothers with six or more children. Tying procreation to nationalism is disturbing on several levels, with the biggest being that Nazi Germany handed out similar medals.

According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Nazi leaders introduced a medal called the Honor Cross of the German Mother in 1938 to celebrate reproduction and increase the population of the Third Reich. Only so-called “Aryan” and “genetically healthy” couples could receive these medals and women were awarded a bronze for four children, a silver for six children, and a gold for eight children.

And:

One proposal by activists would limit a large proportion of the prestigious Fulbright grants to scholars with children – a criterion that would exclude many early career female researchers, who often find, as ambitious women in most fields do, that raising young children is incompatible with doing the kind of rigorous and demanding work that can earn them a fancy award. For their part, the Collinses proposed that the federal government should award a “National Medal of Motherhood” to women who birth six or more children. The award reminds one of the “Ehrenkreuz der Deutschen Mutter,” or the Cross of Honor of the German Mother, a Nazi prize given to mothers of four or more children. That medal took the form of a blue cross with a swastika in the center.

Oh My.

And, of course, the same Motherhood medals were also handed out by the Soviets. But no self-respecting American leftie is going to mention that, are they?

Err, yes?

While women in their 50s are dismissed as hags, bags or crones, men get to be silver foxes. Suddenly I realised why women try so hard to fend off signs of ageing

Slightly broad brush of course but true all the same. Female attractiveness is largely defined by apparent fertility. Male by resources.

But given that each passing year another 250k women have to find this out there will be no shortage of articles pointing out the age old truths….

Pretty much right, no?

Current guidance from the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) recommends forces ask suspects if they are “male”, “female” or “intersex”.

But it goes on to state that: “Using the term ‘gender’ as a substitute for the term ‘sex’ is not appropriate as gender is not a protected characteristic.

“Gender is a social construction relating to behaviours and attributes based on labels of masculinity and femininity.”

Tho’ that intersex box would remain unticked often. If it’s being used properly that is, and not for “non-binary”.

This is rather fun

For all the strides the body positivity movement has made over the past decade, including within the fashion industry, there have been signs that the thin ideal was always going to make a comeback. You can blame the “wellness” culture that idealises thinness, or the return of 90s fashion, and the “heroin chic” bodies that wore it. Blame the rise of weight-loss injections such as Ozempic, or the way fashion tends to swing back and forth. Or blame the demonisation of “wokeness” and diversity initiatives by conservatives. Or, blame it all, along with the fatphobia that never really went away, even though it pretended to. Models, activists and those of us who had hoped that fashion’s embrace of a range of sizes signified a genuine culture change are left wondering how it could have reversed so quickly. “I think you’re seeing the separation between people that were doing it because there was a movement at the time,” says Standley, “and the people who are truly passionate about it.”

So, fat birds were being used as models. Now they’re not.

Ho Hum.

But something a little deeper.

So, after decades of whining everyone agreed that no, it really is your genes, your hormones, the essential you, to be a tub of lard. It isn’t, in fact, that you just eat too much. Capitalism and the patriarchy perhaps, but deffo not lovely you.

And so celebration of the you. Or even, if we use a few whales then we can sell stuff to the population of whales out there.

Then some utter, utter, invents an injection which suppresses appetite. Anyone who gets the injection loses weight. So, err, in fact those rolls of bubblicious were in fact simply because you ate too much, weren’t they? Not genes, hormones, patriarchy or capitalism but doughnuts by the dozen.

At which point why celebrate? Why not just go back to pointing and jeering? And therefore….

Babs Bush was right the…..

Today marks Natalie Fleet’s first Mother’s Day as a grandmother – or nana, as she says. The Labour MP for Bolsover will spend the day in her constituency, surrounded by her children, her daughter’s newborn baby, her husband, mother and sister.

Fleet is only 40 years old. Her eldest daughter, now 24, was conceived when Fleet was a teenager after she was groomed by a much older man. “To have a child conceived at 15 felt as bad as it could get. Being a nana at 40 feels like I’ve won the jackpot,” Fleet says.

As Babs said (roughly) : Being able to hug an extra grandchild will be worth far more than any corporate presentation you just killed.

A statement of the blindingly obvious

Nigel Farage has said men will more readily sacrifice their family lives to be successful in their business careers than women, and that young men are being too “feminised” by modern society.

The Reform UK leader set out his view on gender balance in the workplace in a conversation with journalists in Westminster, saying women made “different life choices” when it came to work. He went on to suggest that Reform attracts men because they are more impulsive than their female counterparts.

Asked if the men who fill 80% of top jobs in business were all there based purely on merit, he said: “I think the truth is that in many cases women make very different life choices to men. If you look at business, men are prepared to sacrifice family lives in order to pursue a career and be successful in a way that fewer women are. Those women that do probably have more chance of reaching the top than the blokes.”

We can even go further. Some goodly portion of men seem to think that going to work more to provide more for their families is what the damn point is.

One of those interesting little statistics. Mothers earn less than non-mothers (about 9% and then greater, but smaller, amounts per child). Fathers earn more than non-fathers by about 8%. That’s after accounting for age etc. Those two numbers also explain all of the observed gender pay gap. We’re done that is.

Pops works harder to care for ‘is ickles. That’s the male reaction to family….

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