Don’t stop thinkin’ about the ’90s
Buzzfeed has a long, interesting interview
with Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says Bill Clinton raped her in
an Arkansas hotel room almost 40 years ago. Maybe this case has always
bugged you too, because we are supposed to believe women when it comes
to rape. (For the record, I don’t “always” believe women. I think some
women are messed up, and some women lie.)
Why did Juanita Broaddrick change her story? ask people who otherwise
would automatically answer “rape survivors do that sometimes.” (When
Paula Jones’s lawyers came knocking, she told them that nothing had
happened, she says, because she wanted it to go away.)
Why is Juanita Broaddrick so cozy with all the rightwingers? they
ask. (Because she hates Hillary Clinton, because she believes that she
tried to silence her.)
And … that’s pretty much all the “I don’t believe Juanita” crowd has.
Her friends found her with bruised lips, crying, right after the rape
allegedly occurred. That’s what we call “contemporaneous evidence” when
we believe women.
Here are a few quick thinkerings, which you may or may not disagree with, quite loudly!
I can absolutely see Bill Clinton doing
this (then, not now) and not even thinking of it as rape, but thinking
of it as dominant, alpha sex. I can see a LOT of men doing that during
that time period, before we started telling them in the ’80s, “hey, that
is rape, do not do that.” I can see YOUR NICE GRANDPA doing that, back
then.
In the Buzzfeed piece, Broaddrick’s
precocious 13-year-old grandson — who sounds like a really sweet young
man — has learned this year about his grandmother’s “complicated” past,
thanks to overheard conversations and gaps filled in by Google. He says
to force sex on a woman means you are an “evil” person. I don’t think
this is true. I think you can do something horrible, realize later that
it is horrible, be ashamed forever and try to keep it secret and never
do it again. (Especially if you’re, say, a teenager whose impulse control is still years away from being properly developed.)
“Rape is about power, not sex.” For
those for whom it’s about power, those are the serial rapist guys, and
they hate women and want to punish us. But I don’t think that’s in every
case. I think good men can rape, and be sorry, and not do it again.
This is very bad feminism.
While I (sort of? am leaning toward?)
believe Juanita Broaddrick, her characterization of Hillary Clinton
sounds irrational, maybe induced from PTSD:
Soon after, Broaddrick says, she ran into Hillary Clinton
at a political rally Broaddrick had promised friends she would attend.
Hillary shook her hand and thanked her for everything she had done for
Bill. To Broaddrick, the gesture felt like a threat to stay silent. As
attorney general and later governor, Bill Clinton was “the main person
that regulated my business and my income,” Broaddrick said. “After she
said what she did to me, I just thought, I will keep quiet.”
There is simply no reason Hillary Clinton would have known
jackshit about it; Bill Clinton was always lying to her, and she loved
him, and she kept believing him when it was long past silly to do so.
“Honey, I raped that nice lady” isn’t a thing he would have opened up to
her about, and “thanks so much for the campaigning you did for my
husband” just doesn’t sound like a threat in any possible universe.
Just because Broaddrick seems irrational about Hillary Clinton’s response doesn’t make her irrational about the rest.
To sum up, I think Bill Clinton could
very well have raped Juanita Broaddrick; that it doesn’t make him an
evil man, or irredeemable (I’m Catholic; we’re all forgiven, if we’re
sorry, and Broaddrick says Bill Clinton personally called her up to
apologize). It doesn’t even necessarily make him a bad feminist — you
know, later, once he stops doing that.
I don’t necessarily believe the woman who says Donald Trump raped her when she was a 13-year-old girl. (I’m pretty sure he did rape his wife though, seeing as how she said so under oath.)
It doesn’t seem in character — to me — that he would threaten to have
her disappeared. It seems a lot more Trumpy that he’d send her off with a
“good girl” and a smack on the ass, assuming she’d be grateful to have
hosted Trump’s magnificent schlong.
After eight years of media scrutiny and gossip, the Swedish Crown Princess finally got her prince.
Victoria's decision to marry Daniel Westling, her former fitness trainer, was controversial in itself.
The future queen fell in love with a commoner from a small town, and rumour has it that her father, King Carl Gustaf XVI, initially opposed the marriage because Westling was not "good enough".
But as the engagement was announced and preparations for the June 19 wedding finally went ahead, it was the planned layout of the wedding ceremony that caused a media storm.
Victoria asked to be escorted to the altar by her father, contradicting the Swedish tradition of couples entering the church together.
In the country that prides itself as being one of the absolute front runners in the field of gender equality, the move was interpreted as much more than a ceremonial act.
'Altargate'
Critics referred to the Anglo-Saxon practise as "sexist" and a "backlash for feminism", and the row, dubbed Altargate, started.
"The old Swedish tradition, when couple goes in together, has an important meaning," Annika Borg, an outspoken priest of the Swedish Church, wrote in the daily Dagens Nyheter.
"The woman [has the legal right] to make her own decisions and stands beside her future husband of her own free will.
"Bride handover builds on an attitude towards women which takes us several centuries back. As a role model the Crown Princess should consider this."
Helle Klein, columnist
"Bride handover has its roots in a completely different mindset. It's about a woman's [right of self-determination] being left over from her father to the man."
The Royal Court defended Victoria's decision, saying the royal ceremony should not be seen as an ordinary wedding.
"It's the wish of the Crown Princess," Nina Eldh, a spokeswoman, told reporters.
"It's not a father who gives away the daughter to another man. It is the King of Sweden leading the heir to the nation's throne to the altar – and to the man who has been accepted."
Nine bishops wrote a letter to the bridal couple, asking them to change their mind.
Helle Klein, an editorial writer for the tabloid Aftonbladet, urged the Archbishop to intervene.
"Bride handover builds on an attitude towards women which takes us several centuries back. As a role model the Crown Princess should consider this," she wrote.
"Archbishop Anders Wejryd must prevent that the Hollywood idea about the wedding becomes the expression of the Swedish Church. Say no, for the sake of the women, the church and the Swedish culture!"
'New phenomenon'
Wejryd said he had adviced the couple to walk down the aisle together, but said it was up to the couple to decide what they wanted to do.
"Being given away is a new phenomenon which occasionally occurs in the Church of Sweden. I usually advise against it, as our marriage ceremony is so clear on the subject of the spouse's equality," he said in a statement.
When Victoria's parents, King Carl Gustaf and Queen Silvia, married in 1976 they followed Swedish tradition and walked together.
As some bloggers pointed out, the situation would have been very different had it not been for the decision taken three years after Victoria was born - to make the Act of Succession gender-neutral.
In 1980, Sweden became the first country to allow the throne to be passed to the first-born child, whether male or female.
This meant that her younger brother, Carl Philip, was snubbed of his Crown Prince title just seven months after he was born.
As the debate dragged on in media and on blogs, the King told the tabloid Aftonbladet that it was an "unnecessarily long debate".
But a week before the wedding, the Royal Court finally announced a compromise, citing the design of the church as the decisive factor. Victoria and her groom would meet halfway to the altar.
And in front of about 1,000 guests, including royalties from around the world, the current head of state led his daughter to the steps to the altar where she met Westling on Saturday.
The couple then proceeded together up the stairs and to the altar, where they both said "yes".
SANA'A, Yemen (CNN) -- It is midday and girls are flooding out of school, but Nujood Ali is not among them.
We find her at the family's two-room house in an impoverished suburb of the city where Nujood is angry, combative and yelling. Tension surrounds the home like a noose.
After much arguing with family members, Nujood finally grabs her veil and agrees to sit down with CNN. Her presence is grudging, although CNN had got permission in advance to see how the girl who rocked a nation by demanding a divorce was shaping up.
Nujood is very different from the girl we first met nearly two years ago. Then, there was no doubt the 10-year-old was every inch a child. She was the very portrait of innocence: A shy smile, a playful nature and a whimsical giggle.
That picture was very much at odds with the brutal story of abuse she endured as a child bride who fought for a divorce and is now still fighting. Watch Nujood tell her story to CNN on World's Untold Stories »
Nujood says she remains relieved and gratified that her act of defiance -- which led to appearances at awards shows and on TV -- had paid off.
The story was supposed to end with the divorce and an innocent but determined girl allowed to fully embrace the childhood she fought so hard to keep.
Instead, there has been no fairytale ending for Nujood.
There was, though, a stunning transformation. Nujood went from being a victim and child bride to a portrait of courage and triumph. Her inspirational story was told and re-told around the world, but at home all was not well.
In the fall of 2008 Nujood was recognized as Glamour Magazine's Woman of the Year, alongside some of the world's most impressive women. She even attended the ceremony in New York and was applauded by women from Hillary Clinton to Nicole Kidman.
There is a tell-all book which is to be published in more than 20 languages, and the author says Nujood will receive a good portion of the royalties.
Nujood's strength was celebrated by complete strangers. But what did all the fame do for the one person it was meant to transform?
"There is no change at all since going on television. I hoped there was someone to help us, but we didn't find anyone to help us. It hasn't changed a thing. They said they were going to help me and no one has helped me. I wish I had never spoken to the media," Nujood says bitterly.
There was never going to be a fortune. Generous people have donated thousands so Nujood could go to a private school, but she refuses to attend, according to Shada Nasser, the human rights lawyer who took on the child's divorce case.
"I know Nujood was absent from the school. I spoke with her father and her family. And I ask them to control her and ask her to go every day to school. But they said, 'You know we don't have the money for the transportation. Don't have the money for the food,' " says Nasser.
She believes Nujood is being victimized by her own family because they believe Nujood's fame should bring them fortune.
Nujood's parents say they've received nothing, and in the meantime Nujood stews wondering out loud how everything turned out this way.
"I was happy I got divorced but I'm sad about the way it turned out after I went on television," she said adding that she feels like an outcast even among her family and friends.
Nujood was pulled out of school in early 2008 and married off by her own parents to a man she says was old and ugly. And yet, as a wife, Nujood was spared nothing.
"I didn't want to sleep with him but he forced me to, he hit me, insulted me" said Nujood. She said being married and living as a wife at such a young age was sheer torture.
Nujood described how she was beaten and raped and how, after just a few weeks of marriage, she turned to her family to try to escape the arrangement. But her parents told her they could not protect her, that she belonged to her husband now and had to accept her fate.
CNN tried to obtain comment from Nujood's husband and his family but they declined.
Nujood's parents, like many others in Yemen, struck a social bargain. More than half of all young Yemeni girls are married off before the age of 18, many times to older men, some with more than one wife.
It means the girls are no longer a financial or moral burden to their parents. But Nujood's parents say they did not expect Nujood's new husband to demand sex from his child bride.
To escape, Nujood hailed a taxi -- for the first time in her life -- to get across town to the central courthouse where she sat on a bench and demanded to see a judge.
After several hours, a judge finally went to see her. "And he asked me, 'what do you want' and I said 'I want a divorce' and he said 'you're married?' And I said 'yes.'" says Nujood.
Nujood's father and husband were arrested until the divorce hearing, and Nujood was put in the care of Nasser.
Indeed, it seems the judge had heard enough of the abuse to agree with Nujood that she should get her divorce.
But based on the principles of Shariah law, her husband was compensated, not prosecuted. Nujood was ordered to pay him more than $200 -- a huge amount in a country where the United Nations Development Programme says 15.7 percent of the population lives on less than $1 a day.
Khadije Al Salame is working to help Nujood get her life back. Now a Yemeni diplomat, 30 years ago she too was a child bride. But when she left her husband, she did not have to endure the publicity that now haunts Nujood.
She said: "It's good to talk about Nujood and to have her story come out, but the problem is it's too much pressure on her.
"She doesn't understand what's going on. She's a little girl and we have to understand as a media people that we should leave her alone now. If we really love Nujood then we should just let her go to school and continue with her life, because education is the most important thing for her."
To get her divorce, Nujood showed a character and strength not easily expressed by women in Yemen, let alone a 10-year-old child bride. But she will need to muster all that strength and more if she's to finally reclaim her life.
Nujood told us she thought the divorce would be the end of her struggle and she's still angry that it turned out to be just the beginning.
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Feminist organizations in the United States look for every opportunity to claim women are not equal here. They have quieted down considerably since January, even though nothing has changed, which shows their true colors. But, in any case - you would expect feminists to stand up for women who are forced to marry at young ages, forced to wear burquas, kept from schools, prevented from getting jobs, kept ignorant and pregnant, and yet we hear very little when American forces liberate countries and create an opportunity for women. You would think these women would rush to Afghanistan to help set up schools or education centers. You would think.
And you'd be wrong, because politics is more important to them then principle.
A record number of women are attending university, outnumbering men by a bigger margin than ever before, according to new research that says they could account for 70 per cent of student places across the UK by 2025.
By Julie Henry, Education Correspondent The Telegraph 06 Jun 2009
Despite the mounting evidence of inequality, ministers and education quangos are doing little to address the problem because they are afraid of being accused of favouring boys, according to a major report by the Higher Education Policy Instititue.
Nearly half of young women, 49.2 per cent, are now enrolled in university, compared to just 37.8 per cent of men aged 17 to 30. The figure for white boys from deprived backgrounds is just 6.4 per cent. In 2008, 47,000 more women than men were accepted on to degree courses, up from 28,000 more in 2005.
The gender gap is now bigger than at any time since the 1970s, when men were dominant. "The gender inequality in university participation now is greater than the reverse inequality over 30 years ago, " said Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the institute and co-author of the report. "But there is a mindset generally that girls are the disadvantaged group not boys. While this might still be true of society as a whole, it is emphatically no longer true in higher education."
University participation rates for women exceeded that of men for the first time in 1992/93 and have increased since. The research also found that women have higher participation rates across all types of university, apart from Oxbridge, where the gender split is equal.
There are more women than men studying all subjects, other than technology, physical sciences, architecture, building and planning, maths and computer science and engineering.
Men are over-represented in subjects that can bring high salaries and if they gain graduate-level jobs, they are, on average, better paid. However women have higher rates in popular fields, such as medicine and law, that can also lead to lucrative careers.
Women gain more first class degrees, while men are more likely to drop out. If they do graduate, men are more likely to be unemployed or in non-graduate jobs.
According to researchers, the university gender gap can be explained in part by underachievement at school, particularly at GCSE.
The study said that the switch from O-levels to GCSEs in 1988 coincided with the start of an attainment gap where girls overtook their male counterparts. Features of the GCSE, such as coursework and the requirement in maths and science to write a narrative to explain a candidate's thinking, rather than just using short proofs, favoured girls.
"Nobody has found an alternative to the introduction of the GCSEs that could plausibly explain the scale, speed and timing of the opening of a large achievement gap, so though we cannot be sure, the introduction of the GCSEs is the most likely cause," the study concluded.
While the nature of the GCSE can explain some of the gap, the study said that the picture in the UK was typical across the developed world. In most countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), women have caught up and overtaken men in university attendance, pointing to increased opportunities for women generally.
But a recent OECD report into the gender gap, quoted in the study, said that the share of females in higher education enrolments in the UK could reach 70 per cent by 2025.
Despite evidence of a growing problem, a "sanguine attitude" prevailed in the UK, said Mr Bekhradnia. The study quoted one Department for Education and Skills document which said: "It could be argued that the widening gender gap does not matter if this advantage either disappears by the time the girl enters the labour market or if it helps to ensure greater equality for women in the labour market."
Similarly a briefing report from the Higher Education Funding Council for England called Boys in to Higher Education, said that while sex inequality was clearly an issue, nothing should be done to imply "we are seeking to reduce the participation of girls or women".
"These remarks reflect the unfamiliarity and nervousness of policy-makers about measures to increase participation by boys," said the study.
A spokesman for Universities UK said: "This is a problem that the sector has been seeking to address for a number of years. We need to look more closely at the reasons why higher numbers of men are withdrawing from the education system.
"This question is one best addressed earlier in the education process. It is widely recognised that the main obstacle to widening access to university is achievement at age 16. Girls' improved performance in examinations has translated into university places."
Phil Willis, the chairman of the universities select committee said there was a risk that the problem of the gender gap could be overplayed.
"Of greater concern are the general numbers applying to the economically vital science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects. There has been a 33 per cent increase in the number of undergraduates in recent years but only a 15 per cent rise in those studying STEM subjects."
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Ok feminazis, you have won. According to this study - 70% of students in University in 2025 will be women, which means ... well, we have to sort out the numbers -
50% are female, 50% are male (approximate)
100% of the students in college are male or female
70% will be female, 30% male.
These women who will be leaving college with degrees will go looking for a husband, AT SOME POINT - even the feminazis (mostly) do, at some point ... now, who will these college educated women get married to? The clerk at the gas station? How will that work out.
Feminazis have created this condition along with the educational system dominated by women - in an effort to create greater equality (which it isn't anyway) you will have women who will be unable to find a partner unless they look at 7-11's for potential mates.
The feminazis will say - women do not need to be married to be complete, and that bull is fine - set aside the getting married. How many university educated women want to date, even for one week, someone who has an IQ lower than their shoe size.
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