Group items tagged

McGill professor of Social Work Myriam Denov, who did her Phd thesis on female sex offenders, notes, as recently as 1984, a study proclaimed that “pedophilia does not exist at all in women.”

According to a 2004 U.S. Department of Education mass study of university students, 57% of students reporting child sexual abuse cited a male offender, and 42% reported a female offender. Interestingly, 65% of the survivors of female abuse who opened up to a therapist, doctor or other professional were not believed on their first disclosure. Overall, 86% of those who tried to tell anyone at all about their experience were not believed.

According to a 1996 report from the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (NCCAN), about 25% of child sexual abuse is committed by women, but that figure may be low, because survivors are far more conflicted and shamed in admitting abuse by their mothers than by fathers.

The idea that young people take a decade to grow up, in the meantime inhabiting a space called “young adulthood,” is rather new in American culture.  A bit older is the idea of “adolescence,” the idea that there is a stage between childhood and (young) adulthood that is characterized by immaturity and capriciousness: the teenage years.  Before these ideas were invented, children were expected to take on adult roles as soon as they were able, apprenticing their parents and transitioning to adulthood with puberty.  Shifts in ideas about life stages is a wonderful example of the social constructedness of age.

Documenting the rise of the notion of adolescence, Philip Cohen searched Google Books for the term, tracing its rise at the turn of the 20th century till today:

but what about what we’ve learned in the last century about neurological and cognitive development? Obviously institutions have risen up to shape children into adult workers/citizens in a complex society instead of simply implementing them as unpaid farmhands on homesteads, but isn’t there something to be said for the existence of adolescence as a recognizable phase in late childhood?

sensitivity is nothing else but the presence which is attentive to the world and to itself. The reward for these spontaneous qualities issues from the fact that they make significances and goals appear in the world. They discover reasons for existing. They confirm us in the pride and joy of our destiny as man.

those unable to fully inhabit their freedom attempt to make it more manageable by committing themselves to choices and causes not entirely their own, often resulting in deformities like bigotry and violence

[The sub-man] is afraid of engaging himself in a project as he is afraid of being disengaged and thereby of being in a state of danger before the future, in the midst of its possibilities. He is thereby led to take refuge in the ready-made values of the serious world. He will proclaim certain opinions; he will take shelter behind a label; and to hide his indifference he will readily abandon himself to verbal outbursts or even physical violence. One day, a monarchist, the next day, an anarchist, he is more readily anti-semitic, anti-clerical, or anti-republican.

Ms Rahfhat's husband, Ezatullah Rafhat, thinks having a son is a symbol of prestige and honour. "Whoever came [to our house] would say: 'Oh, we're sorry for you not having a son.' So we thought it would be a good idea to disguise our daughter, as she wanted this too."

The tradition has existed in Afghanistan for centuries. According to Daud Rawish, a sociologist in Kabul, it may have started when Afghans had to fight their invaders and for this women needed to be disguised as men. But Qazi Sayed Mohammad Sami, head of the Balkh Human Rights Commission, calls it a breach of human rights. "We cannot change someone's gender for a while. You cannot change a girl to a boy for a short period of time. It's against humanity," he says. The tradition has had a damaging effect on some girls who feel they have missed out on essential childhood memories as well as losing their identity. For others it has been good experiencing freedoms they would never have had if they had lived as girls. But for many the key question is: will there be a day when Afghan girls get as much freedom and respect as boys?

Feminism has much to answer for denigrating men and encouraging women to seek independence whatever the cost to their families.

while she has taken care of daughters all over the world and is hugely revered for her public work and service, my childhood tells a very different story. I came very low down in her priorities  -  after work, political integrity, self-fulfilment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel. My mother would always do what she wanted  -  for example taking off to Greece for two months in the summer, leaving me with relatives when I was a teenager. Is that independent, or just plain selfish?

When I was beaten up at school  -  accused of being a snob because I had lighter skin than my black classmates  -  I always told my mother that everything was fine, that I had won the fight. I didn't want to worry her. But the truth was I was very lonely and, with my mother's knowledge, started having sex at 13. I guess it was a relief for my mother as it meant I was less demanding. And she felt that being sexually active was empowering for me because it meant I was in control of my body.

the idea that it's better for a cash-strapped parent of a young child to put the kid in a bottom-end day care program and work a low-wage job than to get financial support from the government to stay home with the kid. And it's certainly true that this kind of work-promotion strategy is better for economic growth. Both the low-wage job and the low-end day care center count as part of GDP for the purpose of measuring "the economy," whereas the labor done by full-time parents and homemakers does not. But from a social welfare perspective, the relevant issue isn't whether child care is performed as market- or non-market labor — it's whether it's performed well. At some places, it is performed well. But at others, it isn't. And programs that induce parents to be indiscriminate about child care quality — whether through the carrot of subsidized care or through the stick of benefit cutoffs — can have troubling consequences for children's long-term well-being. By contrast, research into simple cash handouts to poor families pretty consistently shows positive impacts on children and family life. Politicians looking for a quick boost to GDP or to avoid the stigma of welfare will prefer to focus on child care, but the challenge of actually delivering quality better than what parents equipped with extra resources can figure out for themselves is extremely difficult.

One of our favorite ways to do this is by attributing others' behavior to some sort of internal, stable predisposition.

So we're particularly fond of turning to biology to explain human nature. Take apparent gender differences in how we think and act.

There are compelling explanations for behavior out there that we overlook in our rush to explain each other in internal terms. Sometimes the easy answers for what we observe have nothing to do with biology at all. Sometimes they're as straightforward as video games.

Barnes & Noble recently took an unusual step — the bookstore chain required the magazine Dossier wrap its new issue in opaque plastic before agreeing to stock it. The problem with the cover? Nudity. More specifically, the nude torso of the famously androgynous male model Andrej Pejic. Barnes & Noble was concerned customers would mistake Pejic for a shirtless woman.

"I've been talking to all my friends who work in magazines, and nobody I know has ever heard of anything like this happening. Especially with a guy. Guys are shirtless on magazine covers all the time."

Dossier asked if the stores realized that Pejic is, in fact, a man. The response, relayed via Dossier's distributor, was that the stores were aware of this fact but were still insisting on the opaque covering because "the model is young and it could be deemed as a naked female."

despite the decades of abuse that gay patients have received from therapists and psychiatrists – despite the electro-convulsive therapy used until the 1980s, despite the chemical castrations, the aversion therapy (where pain is inflicted to dissuade same-sex fantasies) and despite the recent rise in fundamentalist talking therapy – no one has ever been held to account.

in April 2009. I heard that a conference was taking place in London for therapists and psychiatrists who wanted to learn how to convert their patients to heterosexuality. Homosexuality was removed from psychiatry's glossary of mental illnesses in 1973. How then could anyone treat something healthy? I went along to find out, posing as someone looking to be "cured". Two people agreed to treat me. The first was a psychiatrist – we'll come to him later. The second was Lesley Pilkington.

She set about trying to find the childhood "wounds" that she believes led to my homosexuality. But she found none. "There was no sexual abuse?" she pressed."No.""I think there is something there . . . you've allowed things to be done to you." She then prayed: "Father, we give you permission to bring to the surface some of the things that have happened over the years." I asked who could have committed this abuse – a member of my family? "Yes, very likely," she replied.

Siblings say gay brother 'broken' by experimental therapy The article received less attention than our other Rekers stories, but we thought it was more important. Entitled "Before Hiring a Rentboy, Rekers Tried To Spank The Gay Away," it explained how Rekers had attempted to cure a 5-year-old boy of exaggerated feminine behavior with an increasingly aggressive regimen of psychological and physical rewards and punishment, first in a lab, and then in the boy's home.

Details about therapy's reward and punishment system Rekers later said the treatment worked and declared the boy, whom he dubbed "Kraig," "had a normal male sexual identity." Though Rekers conducted similar experimental therapy on more than 60 children during the same period, it was the experimental therapy on Kraig that earned Rekers his doctorate. Moreover, it became foundational research for those who think gay people can become "ex-gay" -- taught or counseled to become straight. In 2009, Kraig's case was still being cited as proof that homosexuality can be prevented. We wanted to know: Who was Kraig? What had become of him, and of the many children like him?

Recently Rekers told CNN that it "would be inaccurate to assume" that Kirk Murphy's suicide was linked to the therapy. "But I do grieve for the parents now that you've told me that news," he said. "I think that's very sad." Even after his suicide, Kirk Murphy's case was still being used as a success story for a movement to treat "unwanted sexual attraction" -- a movement Kirk Murphy never elected to join, and whose use of his childhood story, Maris Murphy was sure, he would have abhorred.

It is correct and admirable to grant a child unconditional love even if he or she has trouble fitting into the two clubs — straight boys and straight girls — that arithmetically dominate all societies. But it is a species of lie — and a damaging one, at that — to pretend that those clubs are illusory. They do exist, as surely as I threw two very different parties for my daughter’s classmates last week; and thanks to biology, they begin forming before children can even process full sentences — let alone understand indoctrination about “gender exploration.”

Indeed, the very fact that “gender” is a word that falls so easily from the lips of the Footloose parents tells us a lot about their worldview. Sex is a biological reality and every human being is born with one. “Gender” is a recent theory-based locution and always has to do with a person’s Sexuality. Children know their sex but cannot possibly consider their gender because they are too young to appreciate what their sexuality is. The only way to explain gender to a child is to explain sexual desire, which no child wishes to know about. So the fact that Jazz writes a little family newspaper called The Gender Report tells you that he hears that word a lot, and that he is being fed a daily dose of theory he is too young to appreciate and that is clearly confusing him.

David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day, in which there appears a wonderful story about what it was like for Sedaris to be a gay fifth-grade student at a North Carolina school. Describing his efforts to hammer out his lisp in the speech therapy lab, Sedaris remembers life thusly: “None of the therapy students were girls. They were all boys like me who kept movie star scrapbooks and made their own curtains. ‘You don’t want to be doing that,’ the men in our families would say. ‘That’s a girl thing.’ Baking scones and cupcakes for the school janitors, watching Guiding Light with our mothers, collecting rose petals for use in a fragrant potpourri: anything worth doing turned out to be a girl thing. In order to enjoy ourselves, we learned to be duplicitous. Our stacks of Cosmopolitan were topped with an unread issue of Boy’s Life or Sports Illustrated, and our decoupage projects were concealed beneath the sporting equipment.” Sedaris has some painful memories of his childhood — alongside many funny ones. But his is not the usual cri de coeur from someone who considers himself to have been a victim of torment and discrimination. He is an extraordinarily self-aware writer who recognizes that there are very real and permanent differences between the school’s lispers (the “future homosexuals of America,” he calls them — a line no straight man would ever be allowed to write) and the majority of the school’s males, who worship fast cars and professional football; and that these differences cannot be erased or bridged merely with good intentions. In short, he recognizes that there is a boy’s club, and that he isn’t in it — not in its majority caucus anyway. Better to seize on that sobering realization than wallow in the myth that the world can be brought into one giant gender-free mélange if we all send our children out in feather boas.

Pop’s parents [see footnote], both 24, made a decision when their baby was born to keep Pop’s sex a secret.

Pop's wardrobe includes everything from dresses to trousers and Pop's hairstyle changes on a regular basis. And Pop usually decides how Pop is going to dress on a given morning.

In an interview with newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in March, the parents were quoted saying their decision was rooted in the feminist philosophy that gender is a social construction.

"Men wear a skirt just because they think they look cool," Yamamoto said. "Fashion-conscious males have tried on everything they can in men's style and the skirt is appealing as something new."

Prejudice against long-haired men and those with pierced ears disappeared after more men adopted those styles and people became used to them, he added.

"Since childhood, I have been wondering why men only have one option compared with women, who have both choices of wearing a skirt and a pair of trousers," Oshima said. "I believe skirts on men have been regarded as a taboo in a male-dominated society, as skirt wearers are treated the same way as women are treated and discriminated against.

In labor markets, one well-known cause of sex segregation is discrimination, which can occur openly and directly or through more subtle, systemic processes

Sociologists and economists have documented this cognitive bias and “statistical discrimination” through diverse experiments. It turns out that people’s beliefs about men’s and women’s different natures lead them to assess task performance accordingly, even in the absence of any actual performance differences.

But discrimination isn’t the whole story. It’s well-established that girls and young women often avoid mathematically-intensive fields in favor of pursuits regarded as more human-centered. Analyses of gender-differentiated choices are controversial among scholars because this line of inquiry seems to divert attention away from structural and cultural causes of inequalities in pay and status.