His latest work strokes a broad, acerbic brush over the white supremacists of the Mason-Dixon line, the NRA and Tea Party stalwarts of the Bible Belt, the men's rights activists of cyberspace and the high school spree shooters of parental nightmares. The common feature, he argues, is their shared belief that certain degrees of status, privilege and social advantage, perceived to be their natural or god-given rights, have been snatched away by sudden social change. The resulting anger is targeted not at a globalised neoliberal economic system that has declared ordinary people expendable – irrespective of their race, class or gender – but immigration, civil rights and feminism. In a sense Kimmel is describing the irrational emotional fallout of the economic gender revolution detailed in books like Stiffed and The End of Men.

The thesis can only really be made to work by means of tortuous logic which excludes all expressions of violence and anger from non-whites, non-males or those, like Anders Breivik, who were forged in a very different cultural furnace. Kimmel also glosses over alternative explanations, most notably in his case studies of high school spree shooters, which quite clearly point to aggressive bullying and emotional abuse as the principal cause of the switch being flipped to overload.

Nonetheless there is more than a jingling ring of truth to his argument. When one looks at the horrific abuse meted out to feminist campaigners such as Caroline Criado-Perez for having the temerity to ask that a woman should feature on British banknotes, to Laura Bates for fighting back against street harassment and everyday sexism, or to Anita Sarkeesian for highlighting sexist tropes in video games, it is hard to see it as anything but aggrieved entitlement. The hate campaigns seem firmly rooted in outrage that uppity girls should be intruding upon men's inalienable right to behave how they like, harass who they want, control culture as they wish and shape society in their own image. Like: "You'll prise Lara Croft's skimpy shorts from my cold, dead hands."

It is easy, and indeed essential, to condemn such misogynistic hate campaigns. However if those attitudes are at least partially stoked by very real and profound economic and social changes that have left some men feeling disempowered, marginalised, maligned and neglected, is it enough to simply demand that they suck it up and deal with it? I'm not sure.

OH MY GOD, SWEDEN. Staaaaaaahhp!!! Fresh on the heels of codifying their new gender-neutral pronoun, those plucky Swedes are getting even more proactive in their attempts to turn mommies into people. Unafraid to incorporate feminist thought (i.e. basic fucking equality) into official policy—can you imagine!?—some Swedish movie theaters are introducing a new rating system based on feminist theory's beloved Bechdel Test. Consumers will now be able to select what entertainment they consume based on how successfully it treats women like human beings.

In case you're not familiar with the Bechdel Test, it's a kind of yardstick of female humanity, originally designed to assess whether or not a film treats its female characters like people or props, or even bothers with women at all. It's very simple. When you watch a movie, ask yourself: Does this film contain two or more female characters...who have names...and have a conversation with one another...about something other than a man? You'll be surprised at how many of your favorite films fail.

Clearly, with this step, Sweden isn't going to magically eradicate gender bias in movies, but spreading awareness about shallow female characterization is the first step toward alleviating that problem. The best way to change destructive, oppressive behaviors isn't to MAKE BEING A MAN ILLEGAL, it's to incrementally change people's minds through, you know, letting them know about stuff. Nothing scary. Nothing complicated. It'll be okay, little alpha male.

“Carrie is largely about how women find their own channels of power, but also what men fear about women and women’s sexuality. Writing the book in 1973 and only three years out of college, I was fully aware of what Women’s Liberation implied for me and others of my sex. Carrie is woman feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight at the end of the book.”
—Stephen King, Danse Macabre
Most feminist criticism of Stephen King’s Carrie has focused on the male fear of powerful women that the author said inspired the film, with the anti-Carrie camp finding her death at the end to signify the defeat of the “monstrous feminine” and therefore a triumph of sexism. But Stephen King’s honesty about what inspired his 1973 book notwithstanding, Carrie is as much an articulation of a feminist nightmare as it is of a patriarchal one, with neither party coming out on top.
The rise of Second Wave feminism in the ’70s posed serious threats to the patriarchal order—as well it should have. But even for those who think change is not only necessary but good, change can be pretty scary. This, with a hat tip to the universality of being bullied, is one of the reasons Carrie scares everyone.
While men in the ’70s felt threatened by the unprecedented numbers of women standing up for themselves and attempting such radical social changes as being recognized as equal under the law, women themselves must have felt some anxiety that the obstacles to fully realizing themselves might be too big to conquer. The story therefore resonates with men in terms of the fear of (metaphorical) castration prompted by changing gender roles, and with women in terms of the fear that no matter how powerful we become, social forces are still so aligned against us that fighting back might destroy not just the patriarchy but ourselves.

Donna Ferrato started out photographing pleasure. She ended up confronting pain.

While following the story of sexual adventurers, she stood stunned in the bathroom doorway of a New Jersey mansion while a man screamed at his wife. As he pulled back his right arm, Ms. Ferrato raised her camera and took a picture. As he slapped his wife in the face, she closed her eyes — and took another frame.




She saw herself in the mirrors as she kept photographing. But when he hauled off to strike her again, Ms. Ferrato grabbed the man’s arm and told him to stop.

“I said: ‘What are you doing? You are really going to hurt her,’ ” she said. “He threw me down and said: ‘I’m not going to hurt her — she’s my wife. I know what my strength is but I have to teach her that she can’t lie to me.’ ”

That moment changed Ms. Ferrato’s life, leading to a decade photographing domestic violence and culminating in the book “Living With the Enemy.” Equally important, it set her on a long career as an advocate for battered women, helping to change how abuse is viewed and how it is handled by doctors and law enforcement officers.

The above quote is the one that got passed around after her interview, inciting a whole lot of criticism. But while this is the quote that TIME printed, if you watch the video of Kelly’s interview, you’ll see that it’s not her full statement. After citing the misconception that being a feminist means not “need[ing] anyone,” Kelly says:

“And I think that’s bad, because actually I don’t believe that’s what the word feminism stands for, but that’s how people kind of relate to that word.”

So TIME sensationalized the interview. No big surprise there. But what’s even more important about this statement is that Kelly clearly knows what she has just said about feminism isn’t true. But instead of claiming the label, she shies away from it precisely because of the misconception she has just identified. By acknowledging that lots of people have the wrong idea about feminism, and then backing away from word, Kelly reinforces all that misinformation.

I’m pretty sure Kelly Clarkson would be pissed if she found out she were getting a smaller cut of her record sales than the male musicians on her label. I’m pretty sure she’d be pissed if someone told her that a singing career isn’t appropriate for a woman.

In the past, we’ve celebrated celebs who aren’t afraid to use the “f word.” But for every proud feminist like Meryl Streep or Kerry Washington, there are famous women like Taylor Swift and Katy Perry saying really uninformed things about feminism.

A poll released last week by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reports that twenty-six percent of the American public continues to believe that “Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus.” Although the number has dropped from 31% in 2011, the ADL described it as “surprisingly large.”

For all of the surprise over the results of the poll, there’s no real mystery about the origins of this idea. The claim that Jews were responsible for Jesus’s death is in the New Testament.

In all four of the canonical gospels a (presumably) Jewish crowd calls for the death of Jesus, and Jewish authorities spearhead efforts to arrest and convict him. The Gospels of Matthew and John, in particular, emphasize the role that “the people” and “the Jews” played in orchestrating Jesus’s death. In Matthew, the Roman governor, Pilate, asks the people whom they want to see released: Jesus or a common criminal. When they call for the criminal, Pilate washes his hands of responsibility for the death of Jesus in a basin of water. The crowd responds in unison, “His blood be on our hands and on the hands of our children” (Matthew 25:27).

This is pretty damning stuff, but when it comes to anti-Jewish sentiment in the Gospels, it gets even worse. In John, “the Jews” are repeatedly identified as the opponents of Jesus. Not some group of Jews, not some fringe group, but “the Jews.” In John 8:44, Jesus even accuses “the Jews” of being “from [their] father the Devil.” In religious terms, there’s no worse form of slander.

A Dutch organization called Terre des Hommes has identified some 1,000 alleged child-sex predators by luring them in with a computer-animated prepubescent Philippine girl on Internet chat rooms. The online victimization of children, it would appear, is far worse than imagined.

The virtual girl, named Sweetie, was created by TDH Netherlands to notify the public — and police organizations — about how frequently children in developing countries are being victimized online.




For a period of 10 weeks, Sweetie existed only in Internet chat rooms, during which time the bot was approached by more than 20,000 online predators from 71 countries. That amounts to the distressing figure of 285 attempts per day.

The chats took place around the clock in order to cover several time zones. No hacking or back-channel methods were used during the operation — all the information was volunteered by the offenders; Sweetie never made first contact in the chat rooms, instead waiting for predators to initiate the conversation.

The requirement to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, one of the many controversial provisions of Texas’ abortion law, was voted to go into effect on Thursday, three days after being struck down by a federal judge. The ruling forced about a dozen abortion providers to discontinue the procedure, and many women to desperately seek alternatives.

A panel of judges at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled that the provision would go into effect, even as another lawsuit challenges the restrictions in a lower court. The restrictions have forced many women looking for an abortion to seek out clinics that would still perform one. “They’re calling from all over — Fort Worth, West Texas, all over Dallas, Oklahoma, everywhere,” Betty Pettigrew, director of Routh Street Women’s Clinic in Dallas, told Reuters.

At Whole Woman’s Health clinics throughout Texas, about 45 women were denied previously scheduled abortions, according to Amy Hagstrom Miller, chief executive officer and founder of the organization. “They were all in tears,” she told Reuters. If the organization can’t obtain admitting privileges, two of the four clinics will have to close down completely in a few weeks because 90 percent of their services are abortions.

“We specialize in abortion care because in most communities, there are plenty of family planning and ob-gyn services, and it’s really abortion care that’s underserved,” Miller said. The organization’s San Antonio clinic will only be able to open once or twice a month, because the only doctor with privileges lives out of state, and must fly in to perform the procedures.