Matt O’Connor, who has tickets for one event, was told police were trying to ban him from entering the Games and going within 100m of any venue or the torch relay.
Mr O’Connor, who lives 15m from the flame’s route in Andover, Hampshire, said: ‘There is absolutely no way on God’s earth I’m going to be restricted from attending.’
The restrictions are expected to be confirmed in Westminster magistrates’ court on Monday.
Fathers4Justice campaigns to ‘ensure fathers play a fundamental role in the parenting of their children after parents separate’ and is known for scaling buildings dressed as superheroes as a means of protest.
It says it ceased its direct action campaign in June 2008 but continued campaigning through direct talks with successive governments up until June 2011.
Two mothers chaperoning a high school prom in Manitou Springs, Colo., allegedly sprayed Lysol on students for dancing dirty, calling the teen girls “sluts” and “whores.”
About eight students were hit with the disinfectant spray, Manitou Springs police told the Daily News. The spray got in some students’ eyes and mouths, and they had to leave the prom, said police.
A female teen that was at the April 21 dance is pressing charges against the chaperones.
Rebekah Brooks, one of the most powerful feminists in the world, has been charged with perverting the course of justice over the phone hacking investigation, and now faces a possible 18 years in prison. Rebekah Brooks used her position within News Corp to run campaigns against domestic violence (against women) despite being arrested for beating her husband, and the infamous News of the World ‘Name and Shame’ campaign which illegally published the names and addresses of every sex offender in the UK and incited violence against them.
Rebekah Brooks and her husband, Charlie, have been charged with perverting the course of justice as part of the phone hacking inquiry.
She was arrested on 13 March as part of the Met Police’s Operation Weeting.
In a statement, they accused the CPS of “posturing” and said: “We deplore this weak and unjust decision.”
The couple will become the first suspects to be charged in an inquiry lasting 18 months and involving 185 police officers and staff.
Under her, journalists for the News of the World hacked into the phones of numerous celebrities in order to gain scoops and boost the newspaper’s profits, including a missing 13 year old schoolgirl later found murdered, as well as the parents of a little girl whose murder was the catalyst for the name and shame campaign.
My previous post seems to have caused a stir at r/mensrights, with some (apparently MRAs) questioning my claim that it was namely ‘feminists’ who handed out white feathers to males wearing civilian clothing (including children).
Well I was a little bit imprecise and perhaps unwarranted in describing the girls who handed out feathers to the 16 year old boy as ‘femnists’. Of course, I have no idea if those girls were feminists, and neither I am claiming categorically that their actions implied or entailed that they were feminists.
I should also point out that in the two chapters of ‘The Second Sexism’ that I have so far read, the author David Benatar makes clear that he is not an ‘anti-feminist’, and carefully distinguishes between different types of feminism (and even I, like him, support true ‘egalitarian feminism’, although I clearly have less faith than him that it even barely exists in practice).
However, it is known amongst many online men’s rights activists that the suffragettes played a major part in the shameful white feather campaigns of the First World War. I have read accounts of this online and in books (even feminist books) many times. But it seems that many or most of the subscribers to r/mensrights are not aware of this historical fact.
Just a cursory look online will provide numerous links to information regarding the role that early feminists did play in the scandalous campaigns to shame men into fighting in world war 1 – including disabled men, conscientious objectors, men working in vital industries, and even underage boys.
I haven’t got time to post much material tonight, but I will add to this during the week. Readers are also invited to post any links they find themselves in the comments section.
Her supporters handed the white feather to every young man they encountered wearing civilian dress and bobbed up at Hyde Park meetings with placards: “Intern Them All”.
The justification for political involvement and military force was framed in gender specific imagery with sexually violent overtones. “Playing on the allegorical representation of Liberty as a woman, Allied artists repeatedly depicted a female Belgium stripped to the waist, bound and violated . . .” (Gullace, Sexual Violence 16). It was this kind of propagandized imagery that stimulated and popularized the war effort. Many of the very same negative characterizations (of men) which had been waged in the “sex war” by the suffragists were now employed to depict the “Teuton barbarian” in the fight against German aggression. The oppressors of both British women (in the fight for equality) and Belgium (in the fight for liberation) were characterized in a sexually aggressive manner. It was this kind of war propaganda, combined with an already fully mobilized feminine consciousness, that both ignited the imaginations of and guided the actions of the “White Feather Brigade.”
Shaming men into political or military action is not unique to the tactics used by the women of wartime Britain. The idea carries all the way back to ancient times and is evidenced by the comical yet poignant depiction put forth by Aristophanes in Lysistrata. In World War I alone, both a women’s contingent in Russia and in the United States utilized the same tactics to sway men into military service. It is the timing and momentum of “The White Feather Brigade” and the anti-masculine sentiment which was attached to the “feathering” that ties this wartime activity to the feminist movement.
Articles by Men’s Rights Activists Discussing the White Feather Campaign :
In 1914 despite widespread pro war propaganda, male enthusiasm for shipping off to go get slaughtered in foreign battlefields was low. To overcome the reluctance of young men to get themselves killed or maimed for the benefit of a few hereditary elites and royals, Admiral Charles Fitzgerald began organizing a groups of women to help “convince” the men of Britain to enlist.
Using public humiliation, the objective of these groups was to shame civilian men into joining the armed services. “This aim was to be accomplished by public humiliation — the women handing out white feathers to any man who did not wear a uniform. The feathers were intended as a badge of disgrace, branding the men who received them as cowards, the primary effect of which as to render them as unsuitable in the eyes of women. “The Order of the White Feather” and their recruiting methods quickly spread across Britain. Women of all backgrounds contributed their influence to the war effort.”
“(Gullace, “White Feathers” 178) The zeal and the scope of this gendered phenomenon was paralleled only by the contemporaneous movement for suffrage — a movement which, right before the war, had reached a radical pitch. It is in the radical nature of “The White Feather Brigade” — the confrontational method which was employed by these women toward men — that a tactical tie is evidenced between the pro-suffrage and pro-enlistment movements. It is in the motives and movements of Emmeline Pankhurst that an ideological connection is discovered between the feminine pro-war demonstration of the “White Feather Girls” and the Suffragists.”
Part 3 of ManWomanMyth’s war segment of his excellent series of YouTube videos on the myth of equality :
Not relating to the feminist role, but this clip from a news report brings the white feather campaign to life :
Currently reading ‘The Second Sexism‘, the important new men’s rights book that uses philosophical analysis to argue that males are experiencing disadvantages in society that are the result of sexism. I’ll write a review sometime soon, but the couple of chapters I’ve read thus far have left me impressed. Here, the author David Benatar is discussing the discriminatory pressure on males to enlist and fight in war :
One particularly graphic example of this is the campaign, during the First World War, of British women distributing white feathers – a symbol of cowardice – to young men who were not in uniform. These were distributed even to adolescent boys who were technically too young to register. One boy, Frederick Broome, who had succeeded in enlisting at age 15, fought in battle, was returned to England in a febrile state and then discharged at the insistence of his father, who produced his birth certificate to convince the authorities. Then, while walking over a bridge in town, then age 16, young Frederick was accosted by four girls who gave him three white feathers. He later recalled as follows :
“I felt very humiliated. I finished the walk over the bridge and there on the other side was the Thirty-seventh London Territorial Association of the Royal Field Artillery. I walked straight in and re-joined the army.”
Note that I have not sought the author’s permission to quote the above passage – I assume he will have no objections to me highlighting a small sample of his work on a men’s rights advocacy site.
The quoted quote from the boy soldier is taken from (according to the author’s notes) ‘We Will Not Fight‘, by Will Ellsworth-Jones.
In the notes section, David Benatar also reveals that the feminist icon Virginia Wooff dismissed, against all the evidence, the claim that white feathers were handed out during World War I in any great numbers. She apparently attributed the belief to ‘male hysteria’.
You can read an interview with David Benatar on the subject of his book here in the Pink Paper.
**UPDATE : I have added a follow-up to this article which deals with the historical relationship between feminism and the white feather campaigns, something which redditors seem to be having a hard time believing :
Todd Solendz is an independent director with a rare understanding of the dark similarities and shared irrationalities between the supposedly polarized camps in the American ‘Culture Wars’. After achieving a cult following big enough to threaten a breakthrough into the mainstream after the likes of ‘Welcome to the Doll House’, and ‘Happiness’, Palindromes received a more lukewarm response from critics and fans – perhaps because their liberal sensibilities were turned a little too far in the direction of outright uneasiness. Through the themes of abortion and paedohysteria, Palindromes mocks the assumptions and hypocrisies of both the liberal left and the religious right. Both are essentially grounded in ‘the right to choose’ and both are equally absurd.
The storyline is of the journey of a 13 year old girl named Aviva (spell it backwards), a girl who dreams of having children but is forced to have an abortion by her parents which renders her infertile. After running away from home, she is picked up by a ‘reformed’ sex offender named Earl (portrayed sympathetically), who abandons her after anal sex in a hotel. She is then found and taken in by an evangelical Christian couple and their family of handicapped foster children. There she meets Earl again, who is being prepared by the family to assassinate the abortionist who, co-incidentally, had operated on her….
Liberal pro-choicers and Christian pro-lifers alike share the conviction that human individuals have the power to choose who to be and how to act. For the Christian, individuals have the power to choose between good and evil. God has granted us the power to define our very souls and to be granted everlasting heaven or hell. Homosexuals can be ‘saved’. Even ‘child molesters’, like the character Earl, can be born again.
For the liberal on the other hand, the only thing constraining choice is that of unfavourable power relationships. Society may determine the choices that women want to make i.e. wishing to have children, or deny them the choice at all.
Solondz presents the journey of Aviva as a darkly grim fairytale that reveals a different kind of truth about human nature – people don’t change. People may have a need to categorise themselves and others differently through the various stages and events of life, but it is all artificial and illusory. To illustrate this, Aviva is played by 7 different actresses, including a 30 stone black woman.
The need to believe in free will, the ability to change and to control one’s destiny is fundamental to almost all creeds and dogmas and indeed across the American political spectrum and to the American dream itself. It is essential to our notions of morality, to praise and blame, reward and punishment, to who we are and to what we may become.
But there is no free will. In the end we finish up the same people we were at the beginning. Despite her many weird experiences, at the end of her journey Aviva is a lot older and wiser, but still the same individual she was at the beginning, still needing love and acceptance, and still needing to fulfil those needs through having children.
In the end we are the same collection of cells, the same genetic blueprint for life and potential that we were as a fetes, a fetes that Avivas mother describes as ‘just a tumour’. The same human fetus that is somehow imagined by Christians to be a unique human soul (even those that ‘lack fingers and toes, brains and hearts’) and yet has its uniqueness defined by a power of choice it does not yet have, if it ever will.
The film ends with Aviva returning to her parents who hold a party to celebrate her homecoming. Now played by 42 year old actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, the 13 year old Aviva is asked if she wants to invite her cousin Mark Weiner to the party – he has been (falsely) accused of child molestation by his own sister (both characters featured in Solondz’s ‘Welcome to the Dollhouse’). She is adamant that he be invited. When she meets him at the party, Mark delivers one of the most depressing speeches in cinematic history :
Josefina Vazquez Mota, who is bidding to become Mexico’s first female president, said the assistant’s dress was “not in keeping with the seriousness of the debate”.
Electoral Commission member Lorenzo Cordova said it was deplorable that a stellar event in the electoral process should have been overshadowed by an “outrageous stereotype”.
It was the first TV debate ahead of July’s poll pitting the four presidential hopefuls against each other.
Meanwhile, for those looking for intelligent articles on male sexuality and the future of the sex war, head off now to AvoiceforMen and read :
Well, whaddya know? Looks like the boffins are finally catching up with sexual trade union theory, as well as basic common sense. No, really, cultural marxism explains everything about feminism (sarcasm).
Sexual competition affects women more than men in raising jealousy and envy in a work environment, according to a recent study.
The study of analyzing the differences between men and women in feeling jealous and envious was published in the journal Revista de Psicología Sociai by a group of researchers from universities in Valencia, Spain, Groningen, Netherlands, and Palermo, Argentina. Women are more likely to feel jealous and envy in a sexual competition than men, while social skills provoked men and women equally.
“Women with a high level of intrasexual competition are more jealous if the rival is more attractive and more envious if the rival is more powerful and dominating. They did not get any results in men, as no rival characteristics that provoke jealousy or envy predicted intrasexual competition,” co-author Rosario Zurriaga at University of Valencia told Servico de Información y Noticias Científicas (SINC).
Intrasexual competition, as the study defined, is a competition between same sex people trying to keep access to the opposite sex. The group of researchers distributed questionnaires to around 200 people and chose 114 as the sample for the exploratory study. The sample was 50 percent men and 50 percent women, and they had an average age of 36 years and spent 11 years in their current employment.
The studied defined jealously as “a threat or loss of success in a relationship due to interference from a rival and implies a loss or threat of loss of what they had” and envy as “a response to another person who has success, skills, or qualities that they desire and involves a lack in comparison to the envied person”.
Sexual competition made women feel jealous and envious more so than men. Rival’s social skills, however, provoked both men and women equally.
“Our research intends to clarify the role of emotions like envy and jealousy at work. These feelings have not been studied in working contexts and can cause stress in workers and negatively affect the quality of working life,” said the researcher.
“This is one of the first studies that examines rivals’ characteristics in this environment and contributes to a better understanding of conflicts and problems that can occur in working relationships,” they said.
The study implied that in order to prevent the negative effects, they should modify aspects such as the perception of threat, loss, or comparison with others at work.
