The Sunday Times recently ran a story about a pyramid scheme that has tricked thousands of women out of their money in Great Britain. The pyramid scheme uses semi-feminist rhetoric about women’s empowerment to sell its get rich quick message.

According to the Times the scheme originated with a 57-year-old businesswoman named Theresa Hammer who joined a group known as Women Empowering Women, which apparently had its start in the United States. Literature for the WEW scheme claims,

It is the belief of the WEW gifting groups that there is plenty for everyone. When we are open tot give, receive and encourage each other, emotional and financial benefits will follow.

We are literally creating a new economic experience. The old belief of having to work hard for anything worthwhile in life is now changing and shifting with this process … the process is strong and continues to grow stronger with each participant, created through the wisdom of Women Empowering Women.

Of course what is really going on is that money is simply changing hands without any productive work taking place in a scheme that is unsustainable and quickly burns out — but not before thousands of people lose everything they put into the scheme.

It wouldn’t be a feminist-tinged pyramid scheme, however, if there wasn’t a blame-the-men angle to it. The Times reports that it contacted friends of Hamer who claimed she was getting a raw deal from her critics,

They denied, however, that she had made money out of other people’s misfortune. Her intentions and actions had been entirely charitable, they said, but the WEW ideal had been hijacked by men who had transformed it into money-making schemes. They also denied that Hamer, now in America again, had fled there with funds made by exploiting other women.

The really shocking thing about this is that more than 80 years after Charles Ponzi invented the pyramid scheme and pulled off one of the biggest con jobs in history, all con artists need to do is dust off the scam, add a twist such as “women empowering women,” and people will still fall head over heels to give their money away.

Source:

Crackdown on feminist pyramid scheme. Tom Robbins and Rachel Dobson, The Sunday Times (UK), July 29, 2001.

The legal fight in the wake of Aftab Islam’s savage 1999 assault on his wife recently produced yet another landmark legal ruling when the New York State Supreme Court ruled that his assault on his wife was so shocking that Islam forfeited his entire $17 million fortune as part of a court-ordered divorce settlement.

In April 1999, Aftab’s wife, Havell, told him that she wanted a divorce. On April 22, 1999, while Havell slept, he violently attacked her in front of the couple’s children with a pair of dumbbells. As New York Supreme Court Justice Jacqueline Silbermann described the attack,

The husband violently attack his wife with a barbell, causing her teeth and portions of her jaw to fly across the room and bloodying her until her features were unrecognizable. In addition, he continued his murderous assault in front of three of his young children. … as a result of this crime, the wife suffered unspeakable pain, humiliation and fear, and continues to suffer to this day, as do the children.

Havell required 26 separate surgeries to repair the damage from the assault. Aftab was sentenced to eight years in jail after he plead guilty to assault charges.

Aftab’s prosecution created the first controversial divorce-related note. While the court essentially gave the couple’s entire fortune to Havell, it did set aside $400,000 (later reduced to $215,000) for Aftab to pay for defense lawyers. Some feminist groups perceived that as requiring the victim to pay for her attacker’s defense lawyers.

Meanwhile, Aftab’s lawyers contended that since New York law typically calls for a 50-50 split of assets in long-term marriages, the awarding of all but a small percentage of the family fortune to Havell was an abuse of discretion. The New York Supreme Court found otherwise, saying that the attack was so “shocking and egregious” that the lower court had been justified in awarding the bulk of the communal property to Havell.

Source:

Divorce attack has $8M price tag. Dareh Gregorian, New York Post, July 26, 2001.

Wife Must Pay for Batterer’s Criminal Defense. Rita Henley Jensen, Women’s ENews, September 4, 2000.

N.Y.C. banker pleads guilty to attacking wife. India Abroad, August 18, 2000.

At the beginning of July the Massachusetts state Parole Board gave Gerald Amirault new hope that his long nightmare might be finally coming to a close, after it recommended commuting his sentence.

Amirault was a victim of the 1980s hysteria that claimed Satanic cults were responsible for widespread sexual abuse of children. Amirault was convicted in 1986 of molesting and raping eight children at the Fells Acre Day Care Center, which his family owned.

About 40 children from the day care center claimed they had been grossly sexually abused — including having been sexually penetrated with knives. The problem was that there was no corroborating physical evidence for these claims — none of the children who claimed to be violated with knives, for example, ever showed any sort of injury.

The children were subjected to grossly inadequate interrogations, including being bribed with candy and other gifts to describe the alleged sexual encounters. The transcript of the interviews shows that whenever a child would try to say that some allegation didn’t happen or that one of the other children was lying, the interviewers would use leading questions to lead the children back to asserting the truth of the allegations.

What happened in the Amirault case was a tragic miscarriage of justice for which Gerald Amirault has already wasted 15 years of his life in jail. The governor should act quickly to set this wrong right again.

Source:

Massachusetts parole board votes to free convicted child molester. Leslie Miller, Associated Press, July 6, 2001.

Female Genital Mutilation has received a lot of attention over the past decade for very good reasons — the practice is abominable. Another dangerous form of genital mutilation doesn’t receive as much attention, however — traditional initiation rituals in some developing countries that often involve ritual circumcision under extremely unsanitary and dangerous conditions.

The Daily Telegraph (UK) recently reported that just in South Africa 20 boys died from various causes while undergoing such initiation rites. Several of the boys died from complications related to botched circumcisions. According to the Telegraph,

Some children have been dumped at local hospitals with advanced gangrene of the penis, leading the national health department to draw up guidelines for those who carry out circumcisions to learn the rudiments of surgical hygiene.

Other boys died from starvation, pneumonia and other problems related to the often-harsh conditions under which male initiation ceremonies are conducted. A major concern of health authorities is that often ritual circumcision ceremonies will circumcised many boys with a single knife, posing major risks of spreading disease.

This problem is hardly unique to South Africa. This practice is common throughout much of Africa and other parts of the developing world. So far, though, it hasn’t received the attention it deserves.

Sources:

Kenya’s unkindest cut. Muliro Telewa, The BBC, August 14, 200.

Coming of age in South Africa remains a deadly ordeal. Tim Butcher, The Daily Telegraph (UK), July 23, 2001.

The National Organization for Women recently released its second annual look at major television networks which included some bizarre choices. NOW ranked programs based on their gender composition and diversity, level of violence, sexual exploitation, and social responsibility. But their recommendations don’t exactly sound like standard feminist fare. As Lisa de Moraes noted in an article for The Washington Post

The best of the bunch is “Gillmore GIrls,” that family-friendly WB drama series about a hot, young, intelligent, size 0 single mom and her hot, even younger, super-intelligent, size 0 daughter and what a totally more-like-girlfriends relationship they have.

…

On the other hand, NOW’s No. 3 most feminist-friendly show this year is WB’s “Felicity,” a program whose ratings rise or fall depending on the hair length of the lead character — a hot, young, intelligent, size 0 college coed who’s biggest dilemma in life seems to be choosing between cute Noel and cute Benjamin.

One thing we can be very glad about is that nobody writes programs to fit NOW’s guidelines. For example, they give a show like The Weakest Link high marks for treating men and women the same, but then severely mark it down for its hosts “nasty demeanor.” Similarly, one of my favorite shows, Star Trek: Voyager gets high marks for having a diverse range of actors and a woman in charge, but gets marked down for being part of the “typically male world of action and violence.”

Any list that recommends “Felicity” while ignoring “Star Trek: Voyager” has some serious problems in my book. I suspect a show that met all of NOW’s criteria would be so boring that it would quickly get cancelled by network executives.

Sources:

NOW’s bewildering picks and pans. Lisa de Moraes, The Washington Post, July 2, 2001.

Watchout, Listen Up! Feminist Primetime Report, Update 2000-2001. National Organization for Women, July 2001.

Sports Illustrated‘s Rick Reilly was outraged last week at Venus Williams being shortchanged after winning Wimbeldon. While men’s champion Goran Ivanisevic walked away with a $705,109 purse while Williams received only $652,186 (as Reilly puts it, “she earned about a Lexus less.”

Reilly goes on to badmouth the mens’ tennis game which many people perceive as dull because of the incredible athleticism of the players. “The men hit 140-mph aces nobody can see, and then ask for a towel,” Reilly writes, “Everything is serve and towel, serve and towel.”

But that athleticism also explains, in part, the pay differential. It is a legacy of the period before the rise of the Williams sisters and today’s group of women’s tennis players when athletic conditioning was simply not a priority for female tennis players. Even today, almost all women’s professional tennis tournaments rely on 3-set matches rather than the men’s more demanding 5-set matches.

At Wimbeldon, for example, Ivanisevic played 28 sets of tennis while Williams played only 14. While Ivanisevic was compensated about $25,000 per set, Williams earned more than $46,000 per set of tennis she played.

So when Reilly and others complain that the ratings for women’s tennis is higher than men’s tennis, he forgets that there are far more hours of men’s tennis to broadcast than women’s tennis.

That being said, however, as John McEnroe has already predicted, women’s salaries in tennis are likely to eclipse men’s salaries soon based largely on the dictates of the market — women’s tennis is a better product at the moment and women’s compensation has been increasing accordingly.

On top of that, the women tennis players are cleaning up when it comes to endorsement deals. Williams recently signed a five-year, $40 million endorsement deal with Reebok. Compare that to men’s superstar Andre Agassi who was only able to wrangle $10 million, 10-year deal from Nike a few years back.

Source:

Disadvantage, Women. Rick Reilly, Sports Illustrated, July 10, 2001.

Beauty and the Bucks: Do Looks Lure Endorsement Dollars in Women’s Tennis? Catherine Valenti, ABCNews.Com, July 13, 2001.

A few years ago, the National Organization for Women published an essay by author Jennifer Coburn attacking the Independent Women’s Forum. The article, Don’t cry for feminism: It’s still alive, dismissed feminist critiques such as “Christina Hoff-Sommers [who] say they are more in touch with the needs of today’s woman than feminists,” citing NOW’s much-inflated claim that it has 250,000 members. Coburn suggested that “Anti-feminist women should also return any credit cards, checks, property deeds, savings accounts, money market accounts, mutual funds and investments in their name. They can have them all back, mind you — just as soon as they get their husbands’ written permission.”

But a recent poll by Gallup contradicts this message — feminism is, in fact, dead. While NOW continues to rail about the “anti-feminist” administration of George W. Bush, only 25 percent of women in the Gallup poll said that they are feminists. This applied equally to older and younger women, with only 26 percent of younger women identifying themselves as feminists compared with 24 percent for women over 50.

But these women who say they aren’t feminists are hardly conservative traditionalists either. Over two-thirds said disagreed with the statement that men and women have equal job opportunities in the United States. Thirty-seven percent said they are dissatisfied with society’s treatment of women. So why the disdain for the feminism label?

I’d guess that it is because the term “feminism” in the United States today largely means the sort of ideology that groups like NOW push. In fact, this seems to be the way that NOW wants it as they consistently any woman who has a slight different ideological approach to women’s freedom — such as Christina Hoff Sommers — is quickly labeled an anti-feminist, faux feminist, or some similarly derogatory term.

The problem with this approach is that it is self-destructive. The result of NOW and other groups’ ideological rigidity and exclusionary views has not been to create a powerful women’s movement, but rather to fracture and divide individuals and groups who would otherwise form a united front to defend women’s rights.

This is part of the reason why NOW and other feminist groups are losing substantial ground to anti-abortion groups. While NOW is busy deciding who is and is not ideologically correct enough to count as a feminist (and unleashing blistering attacks against those who don’t get to join the club), anti-abortion groups are making important headway by building coalitions that are effectively chipping away at abortion in the United States.

Apparently NOW is happier to be the self-appointed vanguard of a failing movement rather than just one voice in a more robust, effective movement.

Sources:

Women See Room for Improvement in Job Equity. Lydia Saad, Gallup Poll News Service, June 29, 2001.

Don’t cry for feminism: It’s still alive. Jennifer Coburn, National Organization for Women web site, August 24, 1997.

Last week two of the most prominent anti-gun groups, the Million Mom March and the Brady Campaign/Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence announced they would merge effective October 1. The groups tried to spin the event as two large groups coming together, but the reality is that the MMM was forced to close its national office recently due to lack of funds and the organization has never come close to the grass roots level of participation it thought it would inspire.

But leaving the gun issue aside, what surprised me in news coverage of the merger was an odd comment made by MMM founder Donna Dees-Thomases who said at a press conference announcing the merger, “If we moms can push 9 pound babies through our bodies, some of them with heads as big as bowling balls,surely we can push legislation through the halls of Congress.”

I fail to see the connection between the two examples. I’ve never seen a group of men with NRA hold a press conference and say, “If we can ejaculate hundreds of million of sperm at a time, surely we can push legislation through Congress.”

It is very odd to see liberal, presumably feminist-oriented women, falling back on a standard motherhood and apple pie routine to push a political agenda.

Source:

Two leading gun control groups merge in U.S. Reuters, June 28, 2001.