I found myself in the all too familiar position of being a graduate struggling for meaningful work in my field. But a job opportunity arose which allowed me to move to London. On moving there I left an existing job to try and raise my own small business, while working low paid jobs to keep ends meeting. However, despite a strong start, it coincided with the recession and work became scarce. A spiral developed and living arrangements became very difficult: rising rent and cost of living, added to deteriorating health. And it was at this point I started to take notice of the MRA movement. The idea that men were unworthy deadbeats if they had little money, success or a stable career played on my mind. MRAs claimed that women wanted equality, while still demanding the perks of what I now realise are patriarchal gender roles. Women still expected men to pick up the bill, to be the breadwinner, to provide and pay for their lifestyle: to still be chivalrous. I equated that to my situation, and wrongly blamed feminism for feeling like a failure. I became annoyed that my situation was preventing me from succeeding. I became blinded and bitter and blamed things that were never to blame for my situation. I would eventually come to realise that if there was any blaming to be done, it was of patriarchal gender roles. Nothing else.

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But Then I Discovered Feminism – Real Feminism

So what was it that changed my beliefs so dramatically? What was the catalyst for the sudden change and realisation? Well, not an awful lot has changed in my life if honest; aside from moving back up North. I’m not a millionaire (actually, I’m still pretty much skint!), I don’t have a great career or business and my life isn’t suddenly wonderfully full of happiness!

But something did change in me. I started to reassess my life and why things weren’t great. I didn’t understand the hatred of anti-feminists or MRAs any more than I actually understood feminism itself. So I decided to start asking questions, start reading and begin to understand. I read blogs, websites, books. I asked questions on social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter. I must have come across as such a privileged fool at first, thinking he knows more about feminism then feminists! Although I wanted to learn, it was difficult for me to acknowledge privilege and recognise patriarchy. Luckily, they were patient!
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My Understanding of White Privilege Helped Me to Understand Male Privilege

The biggest catalyst of all however came when I read about male privilege. It struck a deep chord with me. As I said earlier, I am of mixed race: white and Asian. I grew up in a very white-dominated area of the country and I’ve always experienced casual racism, right from my very first days at school to recent occurrences. It was pretty bad at the beginning, but I had always considered myself fairly lucky. I had great friends around me, and I’d always considered abuse as galvanising. However, my friends were all white English, so in some circumstances, it was difficult for them to understand what racism meant to me. I’d always been aware of a white privilege (even if I didn’t refer to it as that), buts it’s difficult to explain it to some, as many are in denial. The idea that having a slur against a white person is equal to a racial slur against a non-white person is absurd (we’ve recently witnessed white privilege being denied in court, as a footballer claiming being called “an English c***” is just as abusive as his calling a fellow black player a “black c***”. Laughable, at best.), but deniers of white privilege use that argument. Maybe it is because they are uncomfortable with acknowledging that privilege.

I was 12 hours into a summer vacation in Palm Springs when my phone hummed to life, buzzing twice next to me in the dark of my hotel room. I squinted at the screen. It was 5:30 a.m., and a friend was texting me from the opposite coast. "Amanda, this twitter account. Freaking out over here," she wrote. "There is a twitter account that seems to have been set up for the purpose of making death threats to you."

I dragged myself out of bed and opened my laptop. A few hours earlier, someone going by the username "headlessfemalepig" had sent me seven tweets. "I see you are physically not very attractive. Figured," the first said. Then: "You suck a lot of drunk and drug f****** guys c****." As a female journalist who writes about sex (among other things), none of this feedback was particularly out of the ordinary. But this guy took it to another level: "I am 36 years old, I did 12 years for 'manslaughter', I killed a woman, like you, who decided to make fun of guys c****." And then: "Happy to say we live in the same state. Im looking you up, and when I find you, im going to rape you and remove your head." There was more, but the final tweet summed it up: "You are going to die and I am the one who is going to kill you. I promise you this."

My fingers paused over the keyboard. I felt disoriented and terrified. Then embarrassed for being scared, and, finally, pissed. On the one hand, it seemed unlikely that I'd soon be defiled and decapitated at the hands of a serial rapist-murderer. On the other hand, headlessfemalepig was clearly a deranged individual with a bizarre fixation on me. I picked up my phone and dialed 911.

Two hours later, a Palm Springs police officer lumbered up the steps to my hotel room, paused on the outdoor threshold, and began questioning me in a steady clip. I wheeled through the relevant background information: I am a journalist; I live in Los Angeles; sometimes, people don't like what I write about women, relationships, or sexuality; this was not the first time that someone had responded to my work by threatening to rape and kill me. The cop anchored his hands on his belt, looked me in the eye, and said, "What is Twitter?"

Video Transcription of
“A Call to Men” with Tony Porter1
I grew up in New York City, between Harlem and the Bronx. Growing up as a boy, we were taught that men had to be tough, had to be strong, had to be courageous, dominating -- no pain, no emotions, with the exception of anger -- and definitely no fear; that men are in charge, which means women are not; that men lead, and you should just follow and do what we say; that men are superior; women are inferior; that men are strong; women are weak; that women are of less value, property of men, and objects, particularly sexual objects.

I've later come to know that to be the collective socialization of men, better known as the "man box." See this man box has in it all the ingredients of how we define what it means to be a man. Now I also want to say, without a doubt, there are some wonderful, wonderful, absolutely wonderful things about being a man.

But at the same time, there's some stuff that's just straight up twisted, and we really need to begin to challenge, look at it and really get in the process of deconstructing,
redefining, what we come to know as manhood.

This is my two at home, Kendall and Jay. They're 11 and 12. Kendall's 15 months older than Jay. There was a period of time when my wife -- her name is Tammie -- and I, we just got real busy and whip, bam, boom: Kendall and Jay.

The hashtag #lifeofamuslimfeminist began trending on Twitter Friday, and provided a “snippet of how badass, ruthless and honest, Muslim women” are.

Twitter user, @YxxngHippie, started the hashtag #lifeofamuslimfeminist to discuss the difficulties and complexities of being a Muslim feminist.

Within hours, the hashtag #lifeofamuslimfeminist blew up on Twitter with several Muslim women contributing.

Their personal and brutally honest tweets provided a compelling perspective on Muslim feminism.

Here are some of the most insightful tweets from the trend:

"The X-Men are hated, feared and despised collectively by humanity for no other reason than that they are mutants," Chris Claremont, a longtime X-Men writer once said. "So what we have here, intended or not, is a book that is about racism, bigotry and prejudice."

In many stories, those themes are underlined and circled using language from the real world. The X-Men's leader, Charles Xavier, and Magneto, his nemesis, are on opposite sides of an ideological debate over whether they should try to integrate with humans or not. They're referred to by writers and fans explicitly as analogs to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. In the first second X-Men movie, a teenager revealed that he was a mutant to his parents in a scene that was framed as a kind of coming out. ("Have you ever tried...not being a mutant?" his mother asks.)

But an artist named Orion Martin noted that the X-Men comics have skirted around the depiction of the people on the receiving end of much real-life discrimination: the main lineup in the X-Men team has been mostly straight, white dudes. Martin nodded to the work of Neil Shyminsky, an academic who's written about the X-Men's complicated relationship with real-life racism:

[He] argues persuasively that playing out civil rights-related struggles with an all-white cast allows the white male audience of the comics to appropriate the struggles of marginalized peoples ... "While its stated mission is to promote the acceptance of minorities of all kinds, X-Men has not only failed to adequately redress issues of inequality – it actually reinforces inequality."

For so long as Dr. Boyd is President and a single person, she shall not be allowed to cohabitate in the President’s residence with any person with whom she has a romantic relation.
Boyd signed the contract and has no issue with the clause. However, Washington DC based attorney, Raymond Cotton, who has worked on over three hundred college President contracts, believes the wording to be unconstitutional. Cotton argues that the contract violates the President’s right to privacy. He argues:

I don’t know of any state that has the right to invade someone’s residence even if the state owns that residence. To convey that residence and dictate what kind of romantic relationship you can have in that facility – I mean, she’s not in prison.
It is not clear whether the University has ever required a male President to abide by a similar clause or whether this is an example of Alabama State University officials trying to impose a different standard for single women than it would for men. Regardless of the motive behind the clause it is an unusual level of interference in the personal life of any individual, much less a university President hired to improve the school’s image.

The attempt to control the private lives of women needs to stop. This applies whether it involves lawmakers requiring women to undergo trans-vaginal ultrasounds to obtain an abortion, media personalities and police officers subjecting women to victim blaming when they are raped, or a public university dictating who a single woman can share her bed with at her own residence. Alabama State University officials should reevaluate the “no sleeping with anybody in your home” clause and recognize that it has no place in their employment contract.

The Julian Assange extradition case has put Sweden's relatively high incidence of rape under the spotlight. But can such statistics be reliably compared from one country to another?

Which two countries are the kidnapping capitals of the world?

Australia and Canada.

Official figures from the United Nations show that there were 17 kidnaps per 100,000 people in Australia in 2010 and 12.7 in Canada.

That compares with only 0.6 in Colombia and 1.1 in Mexico.

So why haven't we heard any of these horror stories? Are people being grabbed off the street in Sydney and Toronto, while the world turns a blind eye?

No, the high numbers of kidnapping cases in these two countries are explained by the fact that parental disputes over child custody are included in the figures.

If one parent takes a child for the weekend, and the other parent objects and calls the police, the incident will be recorded as a kidnapping, according to Enrico Bisogno, a statistician with the United Nations.

Comparing crime rates across countries is fraught with difficulties - this is well known among criminologists and statisticians, less so among journalists and commentators.

Sweden has the highest rape rate in Europe, author Naomi Wolf said on the BBC's Newsnight programme recently. She was commenting on the case of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who is fighting extradition from the UK to Sweden over rape and sexual assault allegations that he denies.

Image: Paul Faith/PA Wire
A RAPIST who was shot seven times in the legs and genitals in a paramilitary attack in Belfast last month has lost his genitals, after surgeons were unable to save them.
Darren Murdoch was wounded after masked men broke into a house he was staying in, in Ardoyne on the northside of the city, on November 15 and fired at his groin, abdomen and legs, striking him seven times.
The Irish News reports that though surgeons were able to save his legs, which were severely damaged, they were unable to salvage his penis and testicles. Murdoch will require permanent medical treatment for the rest of his life as a result.
Óglaigh na hÉireann, a splinter group from the continuity IRA, has claimed responsibility for the attack, with a spokesman saying the wounds were “punishment befitting of the crime”.
Local MLA Alban Maginness of the SDLP condemned the shooting as “animalistic”, while Community Restorative Justice said it was “barbaric” but ultimately “ineffective”.
Murdoch was jailed for ten years in 2002 after confessing to raping a 30-year-old woman in her home on St Stephen’s Day, 2001. He served eight years and remains on the sex offenders’ register for life.

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israel's cultural and financial capital unveiled a memorial Friday honoring gays and lesbians persecuted by the Nazis, the first specific recognition in Israel for non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Tucked away in a Tel Aviv park, a concrete, triangle-shaped plaque details the plight of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people under Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. It resembles the pink triangles Nazis forced gays to wear in concentration camps during World War II and states in English, Hebrew and German: "In memory of those persecuted by the Nazi regime for their sexual orientation and gender identity."

The landmark joins similar memorials in Amsterdam, Berlin, San Francisco and Sydney dedicated to gay victims of the Holocaust. While Israel has scores of monuments for the genocide, the Tel Aviv memorial is the first that deals universally with Jewish and non-Jewish victims alike and highlights the Jewish state's rise as one of the world's most progressive countries for gay rights.

"I think in Israel today it is very important to show that a human being is a human being is a human being," Mayor Ron Huldai said at the dedication ceremony, where a rainbow flag waved alongside Israel's blue-and-white flag. "It shows that we are not only caring for ourselves but for everybody who suffered. These are our values — to see everyone as a human being."