I’m simply speechless after reading this account in a recent column by John Leo, You can’t make this up:

Now sit, Ingvar, sit. Young women in Sweden, Germany, and Australia have a new cause: They want men to sit down while urinating. This demand comes partly from concerns about hygiene?avoiding the splash factor?but, as Jasper Gerard reports in the English Spectator, “more crucially because a man standing up to urinate is deemed to be triumphing in his masculinity, and by extension, degrading women.” One argument is that if women can’t do it, then men shouldn’t either. Another is that standing upright while relieving oneself is “a nasty macho gesture,” suggestive of male violence. A feminist group at Stockholm University is campaigning to ban all urinals from campus, and one Swedish elementary school has already removed them. In Australia, an Internet survey shows that 17 percent of those polled think men ought to sit, while 70 percent believe they should be allowed to stand. Some Swedish women are pressuring their men to take a stand, so to speak. Yola, a 25-year-old Swedish trainee psychiatrist, says she dumps boyfriends who insist on standing. “What else can I do?” said her new boyfriend, Ingvar, who sits.

The BBC recently reported on a controversy over a state-run religious foundation in Turkey which published a booklet that advises men on the proper way to beat their wives.

The BBC reported that,

The booklet, published by the Poius Foundation, which is part of the government’s Relgious Affairs Directorate, says men can beat their wives as long as they do not strike the face and only beat them moderately.

Source:

Row over Turkey’s wife-beating book. The BBC, August 10, 2000.

John Leo wrote an op-ed piece a few weeks ago (Anti-male bias increasingly pervades our culture) claiming that increasingly there is an anti-male bias present in popular culture. He repeats a couple of well-known incidents, most notably the brief controversy over an American Greetings Cards ad campaign which featured a greeting card that read on the outside, “Men are always whining about how we are suffocating them,” and then the punch line on the inside goes, “Personally, I think if can her them whining you’re not pressing hard enough on the pillow.”

Switch the gender on the card and you’ve got an instant boycott by the National Organization for Women, but at the time American Greeting Cards saw nothing wrong with the message of the card, noting that “we’ve heard no protests from consumers who are buying and using this card.”

While these sorts of things are a bit annoying, I tend to think some of the reaction to the male bashing cards, calendars, etc. is an overreaction. Yes, the feminists are complete hypocrites on this issue, but on the other hand there are more important things to worry about. Near the end of his column, however, Leo highlights a disturbing case of the kind that does deserve more attention.

Barbara Wilder-Smith, a teacher and research in the Boston area, was recently quoted in several newspapers on how deeply anti-male attitudes have affected the schools. When she made “Boys Are Good” T-shirts for boys in her class, all 10 of the female student teachers under her supervision objected to the message. (One, she said, was wearing a button saying “So many men, so little intelligence.”)

“My son can’t even wear the shirt out in his back yard,” she said. “People see it and object strongly and shout things.” On the other hand, she says, nobody objects when the girls wear shirts that say “Girls Rule”…

That is extremely bizarre, but very typical of the attitudes from radical feminists in academia. This reminds me of an online forum my wife and I participated in that included feminist college students. After a particularly heated debate over some issue, one of the feminist decided to insult my then-pregnant wife with the worst insult she could come up with at the moment — “I hope have a boy!”

It turned out we had a very bright, beautiful daughter, but I would hope that whether they are boys or girls all children in schools are treated with the utmost respect and as individuals, rather than being singled out for special treatment and disdain because they are members of a politically incorrect sex. Unfortunately this sort of equality now seems entirely at odds with the feminist desire to ghettoize people by sex.

A woman in Florida is alive today because her father had the foresight to buy her a gun for personal protection.

Twenty-eight year old Maria Pittaras awoke to find her neighbor, Robert Metz, wearing a mask and holding a knife to her throat. She grabbed a gun she kept on her nightstand and shot him, killing him instantly.

Mitz had apparently recently begin suffering from manic depression and according to relatives and friends been sliding quickly into mental illness. Some unidentified associates speculated in newspaper reports that it was his illness that led to the attack.

Incredibly, though, there were neighbors who didn’t feel Pittaras’ shooting of Metz was justified. One of Pittaras’ neighbors, Maruice Strong, told the Tampa Tribune,

Why would a married man with kids pick that particular house? There has to be more to it than anyone is saying. He was the nicest guy in the world and wouldn’t hurt anyone. Maybe he was just trying to scare her.

Sure, he was just trying to scare her and why not just go ahead and charge her with a crime. Bizarre. But not nearly as bizarre as all of the gun control advocates who want to make sure women like Pittaras are unarmed and unable to defend themselves.

Source:

Ill man shot dead attacking neighbor. Candace J. Samolinski, The Tampa Tribune, August 9, 2000.

Reuters news services reported earlier in the month that a 23-day old girl bled to death in Niger after a her clitoris and part of her vagina were removed by a traditional healer as part of a female genital mutilation requested by the parents. The baby girl died in the village of Dungass in an area where genital mutilation is common.

In Niger, genital mutilation is currently legal, although a new law will soon go into effect outlawing the practice; the new law provides for up to 3 years in jail, with 10-20 year sentences if the victim dies.

Unfortunately the law wasn’t in place soon enough to save this little girl. For more information about the horrific practice of female genital mutilation, visit Rising Daughters Aware and ForwardUSA.Org.

Source:

Baby girl in Niger dies after genital mutilation. Reuters, August 4, 2000.

Over the past couple months there have been numerous stories about how women are intimidated from using computers and related technologies. Studies, almost always based on anecdotes, attempting to show the web and Internet industries are still all-male bastions are a dime a dozen.

Unfortunately for those claims, a new study highlights the reality — more women use the web than men. The study, by Media Metrix and Jupiter Communications, found that during the first quarter of 2000, 50.4 percent of U.S. web users were women and girls. Moreover, the number of female web users is growing faster than the general population of web users. While the number of total Web users grew by 22.4 percent during 1999, the survey of 55,000 Americans found that the number of female users grew by 34.9 percent.

The age breakdown is fascinating as well. The conventional feminist wisdom is that young teenage girls are turned off by male-oriented computer games and male computer culture and give up using computers. But last year the number of girls 12-17 who used the web increased by a whopping 125 percent.

Aside from the data about the high level of female users, the other interesting fact was that the heavily funded sites geared toward women, such as Oxygen.Com, don’t draw the sort of heavy female audience that they had hoped. Instead the list of most visited web sites for women reads a lot like the most visited sites for men, with AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! web sites at the top of popularity (which is not surprising given how vapid and dumbed down sites such as Oxygen.Com tend to be).

Source:

The Web: It’s a Women’s Thing. Reuters August 9, 2000.

Some states in Australia have laws making it illegal for women to get pregnant via in vitro procedures. One woman challenged Victoria’s anti-in vitro law as unconstitutional, and an Australian Court agreed with her saying the ban violated Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act. Australian Prime Minister John Howard reacted as any good statist would — he immediately vowed to amend the Sex Discrimination Act to specifically prohibit single women from using in vitro fertilization.

Howard told the Associated Press,

This issue involves overwhelmingly, in the opinion of the government, the right of children in our society to have the expectation, other things being equal, of the affection and the care of both a mother and a father.

While it may be true that, everything being equal, a child is better off in a two parent household, to then deduce from that a moral principle that it is always wrong for a single woman to have a child and raise it on her own is absurd. For some government officials, ethicists and others always feel the need to insert their own peculiar views about the family into personal, private reproductive decisions.

If a single woman can afford in vitro fertilization and wants to have a child on her own, more power to her.

Source:

Canberra moves to block single women’s access to in vitro fertilization from the Associated Press