The Year the West Erased Women

It's Ayaan Hirsi Ali, at UnHerd, "Progressives care more about semantics than emancipation."

How Feminism Got Hijacked

From Zoe Strimpel, at Bari Weiss's Common Sense, "The movement that once declared 'I am woman, hear me roar' can no longer define what a woman is. What happened?":

“Pregnant people at much higher risk of breakthrough Covid,” The Washington Post recently declared. This was in keeping with the newspaper’s official new language policy: “If we say pregnant women, we exclude those who are transgender and nonbinary.”

“I’m not a biologist,” Ketanji Brown Jackson, the next Supreme Court justice and a formerly pregnant person herself, told her Senate inquisitors while trying to explain why she couldn’t define “woman.”

“It’s a very contested space at the moment,” explained Australian Health Secretary Brendan Murphy—a nephrologist, a doctor of medicine—when he was asked the same question at a hearing in Melbourne. “We’re happy to provide our working definition.”

The meaning of “woman,” the Labor Party’s Anneliese Dodds, in Britain, observed, “depended on context.” (Never mind that Dodds oversees the party’s women’s agenda.)

“I think people get themselves down rabbit holes on this one,” Labor’s Yvette Cooper added the next day, March 8, International Women’s Day. She declined to follow suit.

What were normal people—those who did not have any trouble defining woman, those who found talk of “pregnant people” and “contested spaces” and “rabbit holes” baffling—to make of this obvious discomfort with “women”? Jackson, Dodds and Cooper—and, no doubt, every individual formerly or currently capable of becoming pregnant on the masthead at The Washington Post—would call themselves feminists. Champions of women’s rights. (So, too, one imagines, would Dr. Murphy.) Once upon a time, it was women like them who proudly declared, I am woman, hear me roar. It was women like them who stood up for women and womanhood.

But now these exemplars of female empowerment—educated, sophisticated, wielding enormous influence—seemed to have forgotten what “woman” meant. Or whether it was okay to say “woman.” Or whether “woman” was a dirty word.

It wasn’t simply about language. It was about how we think about and treat women. For nearly 2,500 years—from Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” to Seneca Falls to Anita Hill to #MeToo—women had been fighting, clawing their way out of an ancient, deeply repressive, often violent misogyny. But now that they were finally on the cusp of the Promised Land, they were turning their backs on all that progress. They were erasing themselves.

How we got from there to here is the story of an unbelievable hijacking. Two, actually.

It was only five decades ago, in the 1970s, that women—mostly white, middle-class and from places like New York, Boston and north London, and fed up with being sidelined by their comrades on the left—forged a new movement. They called it Women’s Liberation.

At the start, Women’s Liberation was seen as the domain of women with money—like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and, in the United Kingdom, Germaine Greer and Rosie Boycott. But soon it became the movement of everyday mothers, daughters, wives, working women, poor women, and women regularly beaten up by their boyfriends and husbands.

They embodied a politics of action: protesting, writing, lobbying, setting up shelters. They formed sprawling, nationwide organizations like the National Organization of Women, the National Abortion Campaign and the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

And at the center of their politics was an awareness of their physicality, a keen understanding that the challenges women faced were bound up with the bodies they had been born into. Exploitation at home and at work, the threat of sexual violence, unequal pay—all that was a function of their sex. Nothing better summed up the ethos of Women’s Liberation than “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” which was published in 1973 by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Every feminist had a copy or had read one. It sold something like four million copies. It was a bible. That’s because “Our Bodies, Ourselves” rejected the old, Puritan discomforts with female sexuality that, feminists argued, had prevented women from realizing themselves, and empowered women by educating them about their own bodies.

By the 1980s, women had won several key victories. Equal pay was the law (if not always the reality). No-fault divorce was widespread. Abortion was safe and legal. Women were now going to college, getting mortgages, playing competitive sports and having casual sex. In the United States, they were running for president, and they were getting elected to the House and Senate in record numbers. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher was prime minister.

In the wake of all these breakthroughs, the movement began to lose steam. It contracted, then it splintered, and a vacuum opened up. Academics took over—hijacked—the cause. There was an obvious irony: It was women’s liberationists who had successfully made women a topic worthy of academic scholarship. But now that the feminist professoriat had the luxury of not worrying about the very concrete issues the older feminists had fought for, feminist professors spent their days reflecting on their feminism—exploring, reimagining and rejecting old orthodoxies.

“As soon as the academics got hold of feminism, they ruined it,” said Kathleen Stock, a feminist philosophy professor formerly of the University of Sussex and the author of “Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism.” “It should be and is a grassroots movement about women and their interests. Academics just took it away from them.”

It wasn’t just that these academics took it upon themselves to develop fiendishly complex theories about women, dressed up in a fiendishly complex language. It was that this hyper-intellectualized feminism, by embracing this hyper-intellectualized language, excluded most women. It transformed feminism from activism to theory, from the concrete to the abstract, from a movement that sought to liberate women from the discriminations imposed on them by their sex to a school of thought that was less interested in sex than gender...

Still more.

 

Not a 'Kitchen Table Issue,' Jen Psaki? (VIDEO)

From Abigail Shrier, "Actually, Our Kids Are All We're Thinking About":

Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki accused Republican lawmakers of “engaging in a disturbing, cynical trend of attacking vulnerable transgender kids,” and exploiting them. “Instead of focusing on critical kitchen table issues like the economy, COVID, or addressing the country’s mental health crisis,” she said, “Republican lawmakers are currently debating legislation that, among many things, would target transgender youth with tactics that threaten to put pediatricians in prison if they provide medically necessary, life-saving care for the kids they serve.”

Life-saving care? Surely she must mean insulin or antibiotics?

No, she means “gender affirming care” that devilish euphemism for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and experimental surgeries whose benefits are unproven, but whose risks—permanent sexual dysfunction, infertility, cardiac event and endometrial cancer are a few—ought to nudge any doctor toward soul searching. As I’ve written many times, these treatments are often recklessly administered, of questionable benefit to children, and attended by forbidding risks.

For these reasons, in the last two years, national gender clinics in France, the UK, Sweden and Finland have all reevaluated or curtailed their use. But as Psaki made clear, any legislator who tries to follow suit will face double-barreled legal opposition from the current Administration. Psaki said:

Legislators who are contemplating these discriminatory bills have been put on notice by the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services that laws and policies preventing care that health care professionals recommend for transgender minors may violate the Constitution and federal law. To be clear, every major medical association agrees that gender-affirming health care for transgender kids is a best practice and potentially life-saving.

There is, in fact, no proof that “affirmative care” improves the mental health of gender dysphoric youth long-term—much less that its interventions are “life-saving.” An outstanding recent paper in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy is only the latest to expose the poor empirical basis for these treatments with minors. It’s a must-read paper for any policy maker, parent, or psychologist grappling with this fraught question.

The authors state, as if with a sigh: “The evidence underlying the practice of pediatric gender transition is widely recognized to be of very low quality.”

Activists often exaggerate the suicide risk to gender dysphoric minors—as well as the mental health efficacy of these treatments—in order to coerce parents into acceding to the interventions. But as the authors point out: “The ‘transition or suicide’ narrative falsely implies that transition will prevent suicides. [N]either hormones nor surgeries have been shown to reduce suicidality in the long-term.”

That the Biden administration would peddle an activist talking point with no solid factual basis signals how desperate it is to please the radical flank of its supporters. That is too bad. Leaders who mollycoddle the activists quietly corrupting nearly every institution of American life fool themselves that they are merely paying a tax. They don’t realize it’s a ransom, and that those who demand it will never be satisfied until they have despoiled every American institution. And much worse in this case: they encourage irreversible harm to children.

In an address chock-a-block with fictions, perhaps Psaki’s most surprising was the notion that unlike the “economy, COVID” and the “country’s mental health crisis,” the risks gender activists now pose to our children is not a “kitchen table issue.” It is - she means - the sort of thing that excites Twitter, not normal Americans.

In Psaki’s worldview, then, Americans are not shaking their heads at their talented daughters, wondering if they ought to bother helping them train in a sport. Nor does she think Americans are desperately worried about what radical teachers are pushing on their kids at school—from racial essentialism and division to phony gender science about their bodies and identities.

But in the real world, Americans are very, very worried about these things. I’ve been privileged with a special window into their terror: an inbox full of thousands of desperate parents who write me daily of their teen daughters caught in the grips of a sudden transgender epiphany. And Ms. Psaki, I can promise you this: given the widespread availability of medical gender treatments, on demand, without therapist oversight and often without requiring parental consent - that is not merely one of that family’s concerns. It is all that family is thinking about. Every minute of every day—dear God, how can I save my little girl from doing harm to herself?

America has essentially become an unlocked medicine cabinet for gender medicine seekers as young as 15. As a result, any family with a kid who announces she is trans —whether encouraged by peers or social media or an activist educator, or accompanied by serious mental health co-morbidities—is hurled into crisis. The only thing parents know for certain is that a quick medical transition will be encouraged by virtually every adult she encounters. Far less certain is whether the family can do anything to stop it...

Still more.

 

Boston School Has Transgender Explain to 4 and 5-Year-Olds That Sometimes Babies Are Assigned the Wrong Sex

At AoSHQ, "David French: Republicans Are 'Against Free Speech' Because They're Instructing Government Employees What They Can Teach Kindergarteners."

'There are many reasons the Democratic Party shouldn't be allowed near power, and this issue has quickly vaulted itself to the top of the list...'

At the Washington Examiner, "Transgender policies poll poorly as Democrats and liberals make them top priority."

A Generation of American Men Give Up on College: ‘I Just Feel Lost’

This isn't new, though indeed folks don't talk about it on campus, at all (at least at my college, and I surmise others, most others, in fact). 

Props to WSJ for the excellent reporting here. 

ICYMI, Christina Hoff Sommers has written on this stuff, here: The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men.

And from the article:

The number of men enrolled in college this year trails women by record highs, part of a nationwide education gap. Nobody wants to talk about it. https://t.co/RzPzSDIDPd

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) September 8, 2021

Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.

This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.

No reversal is in sight. Women increased their lead over men in college applications for the 2021-22 school year—3,805,978 to 2,815,810—by nearly a percentage point compared with the previous academic year, according to Common Application, a nonprofit that transmits applications to more than 900 schools. Women make up 49% of the college-age population in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau.

“Men are falling behind remarkably fast,” said Thomas Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, which aims to improve educational opportunities for low-income, first-generation and disabled college students.

American colleges, which are embroiled in debates over racial and gender equality, and working on ways to reduce sexual assault and harassment of women on campus, have yet to reach a consensus on what might slow the retreat of men from higher education. Some schools are quietly trying programs to enroll more men, but there is scant campus support for spending resources to boost male attendance and retention.

The gender enrollment disparity among nonprofit colleges is widest at private four-year schools, where the proportion of women during the 2020-21 school year grew to an average of 61%, a record high, Clearinghouse data show. Some of the schools extend offers to a higher percentage of male applicants, trying to get a closer balance of men and women.

“Is there a thumb on the scale for boys? Absolutely,” said Jennifer Delahunty, a college enrollment consultant who previously led the admissions offices at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore. “The question is, is that right or wrong?”

Ms. Delahunty said this kind of tacit affirmative action for boys has become “higher education’s dirty little secret,” practiced but not publicly acknowledged by many private universities where the gender balance has gone off-kilter.

“It’s unfortunate that we’re not giving this issue air and sun so that we can start to address it,” she said.

At Baylor University, where the undergraduate student body is 60% female, the admission rate for men last year was 7 percentage points higher than for women. Every student has to meet Baylor’s admission standards to earn admission, said Jessica King Gereghty, the school’s assistant vice president of enrollment strategy and innovation. Classes, however, are shaped to balance several variables, including gender, she said.

Ms. Gereghty said she found that girls more closely attended to their college applications than boys, for instance making sure transcripts are delivered. Baylor created a “males and moms communication campaign” a few years ago to keep high-school boys on track, she said.

Among the messages to mothers in the campaign, Ms. Gereghty said: “ ‘At the dinner table tonight, mom, we need you to talk about getting your high school transcripts in.’ ”

Race and gender can’t be considered in admission decisions at California’s public universities. The proportion of male undergraduates at UCLA fell to 41% in the fall semester of 2020 from 45% in fall 2013. Over the same period, undergraduate enrollment expanded by nearly 3,000 students. Of those spots, nine out of 10 went to women.

“We do not see male applicants being less competitive than female applicants,” UCLA Vice Provost Youlonda Copeland-Morgan said, but fewer men apply.

The college gender gap cuts across race, geography and economic background. For the most part, white men—once the predominant group on American campuses—no longer hold a statistical edge in enrollment rates, said Mr. Mortenson, of the Pell Institute. Enrollment rates for poor and working-class white men are lower than those of young Black, Latino and Asian men from the same economic backgrounds, according to an analysis of census data by the Pell Institute for the Journal.

No college wants to tackle the issue under the glare of gender politics, said Ms. Delahunty, the enrollment consultant. The conventional view on campuses, she said, is that “men make more money, men hold higher positions, why should we give them a little shove from high school to college?”

Yet the stakes are too high to ignore, she said. “If you care about our society, one, and, two, if you care about women, you have to care about the boys, too. If you have equally educated numbers of men and women that just makes a better society, and it makes it better for women.”

The pandemic accelerated the trend. Nearly 700,000 fewer students were enrolled in colleges in spring 2021 compared with spring 2019, a Journal analysis found, with 78% fewer men.

The decline in male enrollment during the 2020-21 academic year was highest at two-year community colleges. Family finances are believed to be one cause. Millions of women left jobs to stay home with children when schools closed in the pandemic. Many turned to their sons for help, and some young men quit school to work, said Colleen Coffey, executive director of the College Planning Collaborative at Framingham State University in Massachusetts, a program to keep students in school.

“The guys felt they needed to step in quickly,” Ms. Coffey said.

It isn’t clear how many will return to school after the pandemic...

I don't trust this Framingham study. 

I'm at community college. I've been teaching online since March 17th last year. I suspect just as many women have been working outside the home to support their families as have men.

Who know, though? I'd have to see the data.

Either way, boys and young men are indeed getting screwed. Gender identity theory, and whatever other brain dead ideological abominations, have left men high and dry. 

Still more.

Felicia Sonmez Sues Washington Post for Gender Discrimination

Ironically, she herself covers sexual harassment and other gender-based forms of discrimination.

At Fox News, "Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez sues the paper and top editors including Marty Baron: Sonmez claims 'economic loss, humiliation, embarrassment' and 'mental and emotional distress' from paper."

The Equality Act Makes Women Unequal

It's Inez Feltscher Stepman, who's a very classy babe, at WSJ, "H.R. 5 Erases ‘Sex’ as a Legal Category, with Dire Consequences":

All people are created equal, but Congress is considering a bill that would make some people more equal than others.

H.R. 5, styled the Equality Act, would redefine “sex” under federal civil-rights laws to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” overriding basic biology along with millennia of tradition.

This isn’t only a question of semantics. Nor is it merely an attempt to prohibit employment discrimination against sexual minorities. A 2020 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court already does that.

The Equality Act would go much further by making it illegal to distinguish “identity” from biology and thereby prioritize transgender people over women. By erasing sex as a distinct legal category, the measure threatens to open up female-only spaces and opportunities designed to increase representation for girls to biological men, which can endanger the safety of women and girls.

The Equality Act would threaten the existence of women’s prisons, public-school girls’ locker rooms, and women’s and girls’ sports teams. It would limit freedom of speech, freedom of association, accurate data collection, and scientific inquiry. It would threaten the rights of physicians who doubt the wisdom of performing life-changing, reproduction-limiting procedures, and parents who seek to protect their minor children from such treatment...

The thing is, of course, none of this is a surprise. China Joe's minions, and his far-left Democrat congressional enablers, don't care about the rights of women. They care about power, and they care about ramming unpopular policies down the throats of Americans, all the while pushing massive distractions, like the bogus threat of "white supremacist domestic terrorism," which in turn, justifies the continued deployment of thousands of National Guard troops in D.C., hunkered down behind barricades and barbed wire.

It's really sickening, in fact. But if it's not this piece of legislation, it'll be one of the literally dozens of "executive orders" that will come back to bite Biden in the butt. The border crisis, to take yet another example, just can't be swept away now as "all Trump's fault." The far-left radicals in power, again, have no clue about how devastating their policies are, and they frankly do not care.

The 2022 midterms will be a real reckoning, I'd put money on it. Former President Trump is expected to speak at CPAC this weekend and it's gonna be hella lit. The left is doing everything they can to damage Trump, and that's to say nothing of the 74 million patriots who voted for him, including the larger (and getting larger) number of ethnic minorities (especially in Florida and Texas) who pulled the lever for the red ticket.

I'm not enjoying politics much right now, and I teach this stuff for a living. But it's gonna be pure schadenfreude when the voters' hammer comes down on the heads of idiot Dems in less than two years from now. 

There's more from the beautiful Ms. Stepman, at the link.

Elizabeth Rowe, Star Flutist at Boston Symphony, Files Suit Over Pay Equity

I played trumpet and French horn in junior high school, in both the concert and marching bands.

My dad, I'm sure, would have loved it had I ended up a jazz virtuoso, but that wasn't to be, heh.

In any case, the Boston symphony has an interesting argument about how oboe-ists are essentially unique, and deserve a higher pay level regardless of sex. On the other hand, if modern society is genuine about erasing gender inequality, shouldn't first chairs be paid the same, regardless of the instrument and regardless of the gender.

At WaPo, "A star flutist is paid $64,451 less than her male counterpart. So she’s suing":

A star flutist is paid $64,451 less than her male counterpart. So she’s suing.

Elizabeth Rowe’s case against the Boston Symphony Orchestra could change how orchestras pay men and women. https://t.co/ajHJpOQxl2 pic.twitter.com/BDQRxAX0IC

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) December 11, 2018

BOSTON — On a winter day 14 years ago, the Boston Symphony Orchestra announced that it had finally found a new principal flutist. The search had not been easy. Two hundred fifty-one players had applied, 59 were called to Symphony Hall to audition, and when it was over, only one remained.

Elizabeth Rowe, just 29, had landed in one of the country’s “big five” orchestras. And as a principal, she occupied a special seat, the classical musical equivalent of cracking the Yankees’ starting rotation.

“If I could have a dream job, this was it,” Rowe says.

To win the slot, Rowe had taken part in the BSO’s blind auditions, playing her flute onstage behind a brown, 33-foot polyester screen. That way, the orchestra’s 12-member selection committee couldn’t see her and it wouldn’t matter whether she were a man or a woman, black or white. But after Rowe had the job, something important changed. That’s when she believes being a woman hurt her in one key way.

In July, Rowe, 44, filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against the BSO seeking $200,000 in back pay. Her lawsuit came after years of appealing privately to management about the roughly $70,000 less a year she is paid than John Ferrillo, 63, the orchestra’s principal oboist. Rowe contends that she should make an equal salary and that her gender is the reason she doesn’t.

The BSO, in a statement, defended its pay structure, saying that the flute and oboe are not comparable, in part because the oboe is more difficult to play and there is a larger pool of flutists. Gender, the statement says, “is not one of the factors in the compensation process at the Boston Symphony Orchestra.”

This week, Rowe will enter mediation with the BSO aimed at resolving the conflict before it goes to court.

Speaking publicly for the first time about the lawsuit, Rowe says her case has far-reaching implications. Her lawsuit will be the first against an orchestra to test Massachusetts’s new equal-pay law, its outcome potentially affecting women across the U.S. workforce who are paid less than their male colleagues.

“Money is the one thing that we can look to to measure people’s value in an organization,” Rowe says. “You look at the number of women that graduate from conservatories and then you look at the number of women in the top leadership positions in orchestras, and it’s not 50-50 still. Women need to see equality, and they need to see fairness in order to believe that that’s possible.”

Ferrillo doesn’t just sit next to Rowe in the woodwind section. They’re musically joined at the hip, whether dancing across Debussy or the second movement of Beethoven’s Sixth. They’re also friends and mutual admirers.

They both know what it takes to earn a prominent spot in such a competitive field. Both attended music school, paid their own way to travel to auditions while in their 20s and dealt with rejection. It took Ferrillo 10 years and 22 tries to earn his first symphony position, as second oboe in the San Francisco Symphony in 1985.

But by the time the BSO approached Ferrillo to fill its oboe vacancy, he was a prized member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. In 2001, to lure him away, the BSO paid him twice what the orchestra’s rank-and-file make. The BSO and Ferrillo have a nondisclosure agreement in place, which prohibits disclosure of his salary. But the figure, now $314,600, became public as part of the BSO’s tax filing. (Nonprofit organizations are required to list the top five compensated employees earning more than $100,000.)

Coming into the BSO in 2004, Rowe had done her homework. She asked to be paid the same salary Ferrillo had negotiated. The orchestra turned her down. Rowe says management also would not make her “overscale” — the term for what all principals routinely receive over their base pay — a percentage of her base, which would allow her to avoid asking for a raise every year. Instead, the BSO offered her $750 a week over base the first year, $950 the second and $1,100 once she earned tenure.

Rowe accepted the offer but did not forget. Over the next 14 years, she says, she regularly asked to be paid the same as her male colleague.

For someone who considers herself a private person — Rowe doesn’t use social media or even have a website, as many professional musicians do — going public has been trying, she says. Even when she decided to sue, Rowe had hoped that only her bosses would know. Instead, a Boston Herald reporter stumbled upon the case and published an article. Even though the stress prompted her to ask a doctor for sleep medication, Rowe says, she has no regrets about filing her suit. She says the BSO gave her no other choice.

In her suit, Rowe alleges that the orchestra ignored her and retaliated when she continued to demand a raise, even pulling an invitation to be interviewed by Katie Couric for a National Geographic TV special on gender equality.

It is the orchestra’s argument — in a response filed with the court — that “the flute and the oboe are not comparable.” In the statement to The Washington Post, the BSO also said the oboe is “second only to the concertmaster (first chair violin) in its leadership role” and is “responsible for tuning the orchestra.” The limited pool of great oboists, the BSO said, “gives oboists more leverage when negotiating compensation.”

Although four other principal BSO players — all men — earn more than Rowe, the orchestra notes that she is paid more than nine other principals, of which only one, harpist Jessica Zhou, is a woman. Rowe has been given occasional raises, and her current salary is $250,149 a year...

Keep reading.

Professor Jordan B. Peterson Channel 4 Debate on Gender Equality (VIDEO)

Well, I had to watch the whole thing, considering how this interview generated considerable controversy.

I am surprised, relieved in a profound sense and impressed that channel 4 put this up uncut, enabled comments and, finally, left it online. Maybe there's hope yet. @cathynewman https://t.co/OqQtLqElc8

— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) January 19, 2018

https://t.co/4Bni5dSGI0

— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) January 22, 2018

The Jordan Peterson interview fallout will be that he's branded a 'controversial professor', while Cathy Newman will avoid being labelled a ‘controversial interviewer’, predicts Douglas Murray https://t.co/mUz94ujQR0

— The Spectator (@spectator) January 22, 2018

The Spectator piece is cached here, and check the search results on Twitter for "Jordan Peterson Cathy Newman" for more.

Don't Disagree with Google!

I didn't blog about this at the time, I guess because there's plenty of competition in the leftist anti-freedom agenda. But James Damore's case is especially troubling.

Here's his paper, "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber." (And at the Federalist, "Read the Google Memo That Everyone Is Freaking Out About.")

And at Prager U:

A Movie Critical of Female Genital Mutilation?

Well, if the film doesn't criticize Islam it's no good, although this is interesting nevertheless.

At Women and Hollywood, "Aja Naomi King Toplining Drama About Activist Who Fights Against Female Genital Mutilation."

Aja Naomi King Toplining Drama About Activist Who Fights Against Female Genital Mutilation https://t.co/TSpB9kNN4A pic.twitter.com/kRYqehF1X1

— Women and Hollywood (@WomenaHollywood) October 26, 2017

'Start with the men in power who are bullies...'

Following-up from last night, "Mark Halperin Out at NBC, MSNBC, and HBO After Multiple Claims of Sexual Assault."

At Axios, "Post-Halperin, female media exec calls out 'the screamers'":

A well-known female veteran of the media business emailed me as new revelations were posted about Mark Halperin:

"If you are anxiously looking around your media organization wondering who the harassers are or were, start with the men in power who are bullies: who screamed at subordinates, berated them, seemed to take pleasure in humiliating them — often publicly. We all know them. We have all worked with them. There is clearly a correlation between that behavior and this. ... I would love to send a message to the screamers that their behavior will no longer be tolerated."

There's clearly a lot of screaming in tech, as well as in media and movies.

The excuse many men gave for not interfering with Harvey Weinstein was that "everybody knew" he was a bully and a jerk — but didn't realize he was also a serial assailant. Arianna Huffington, a board member at Uber, distilled the emerging ethos: "No brilliant jerks allowed."

Halperin's had been quite an empire. If you change the game once, it's pretty cool. Changing the game more than once? Very small club. And Halperin did it repeatedly: "The Note" at ABC ... "The Page" at TIME ... The "Game Change" franchise ... Showtime's "The Circus" series.

His comeuppance all came within 24 hours of CNN's story quoting five women as saying that he "sexually harassed women while he was in a powerful position at ABC News" (political director from 1997 to 2007)...

Keep reading.

Mark Halperin Out at NBC, MSNBC, and HBO After Multiple Claims of Sexual Assault

This is freakin' major.

At the Los Angeles Times, "MSNBC political analyst Mark Halperin losing book deal and TV jobs over sexual harassment claims":

#MeToo https://t.co/J4R5sj9wfG

— Emily Miller (@EmilyMiller) October 26, 2017

To be clear, I was NOT one of the victims in this story about Mark Halperin. I was ANOTHER junior ABC employee he attacked. #MeToo https://t.co/itV6HvEpA2

— Emily Miller (@EmilyMiller) October 26, 2017

Go back and watch the episode I was on of Morning Joe. This will explain why so many of you asked why he attacked me on live TV

— Emily Miller (@EmilyMiller) October 26, 2017

I did not report Halperin to ABC because I thought I was the only one, and I blamed myself, and I was embarrassed and I was scared of him.

— Emily Miller (@EmilyMiller) October 26, 2017

The multimedia career of political journalist and author Mark Halperin is on shaky ground after a report that he sexually harassed five women during his tenure at ABC News.

Just hours after the publication of the CNN report late Wednesday, Halperin was pulled from his contributor’s role at MSNBC and NBC News. Penguin Press canceled the publication of his next “Game Change” book about the 2016 presidential campaign, co-authored with John Heilemann. Plans for an HBO miniseries tied to the title were scrapped by the premium cable network, and the next season of the Showtime documentary series “The Circus,” in which Halperin co-stars, appears in doubt.

Five women who worked with Halperin when he was political director of ABC News in the early 2000s told CNN that he propositioned them or touched them inappropriately while on the job. Three women said Halperin pressed up against them while having an erection. None of the women complained to ABC’s human resources department about his behavior. The accusers spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity.

The accusations against Halperin join the growing maelstrom of sexual harassment and assault charges, which have rocked the careers and reputations of former Weinstein Co. co-Chairman Harvey Weinstein, former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly, screenwriter James Toback, and others. As more women come forward to allege years of bad behavior, the roiling national discussion of workplace harassment shows no signs of abating.

In a statement to CNN, Halperin acknowledged that he mistreated female employees at ABC News and issued an apology.

“During this period, I did pursue relationships with women that I worked with, including some junior to me,” said Halperin, 52. “I now understand from these accounts that my behavior was inappropriate and caused others pain. For that, I am deeply sorry and I apologize. Under the circumstances, I’m going to take a step back from my day-to-day work while I properly deal with this situation.”

By Thursday morning, Halperin, a paid contributor who regularly appears on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and other NBC News programs, was on leave indefinitely.

“We find the story and the allegations very troubling. Mark Halperin is leaving his role as a contributor until the questions around his past conduct are fully understood,” the cable network said in a statement.

The alleged incidents involving Halperin occurred when he was political director at ABC News from 1997 to 2007. An ABC News representative said, “Mark left ABC a decade ago and no complaints were filed during his tenure.”

But some women who worked with Halperin at ABC have commented on social media that there had been talk within the company at the time about his treatment of women.

Clarissa Ward, a senior international correspondent for CNN, tweeted out the Halperin story and said, “This was an open story when I was @ABC for years.”

Former ABC News staffer Emily Miller put a #MeToo hashtag on her tweet of the CNN story and said she too was harassed by Halperin. She then added: “To be clear, I was NOT one of the victims in this story about Mark Halperin. I was ANOTHER junior ABC employee he attacked.”

As of Thursday, there had been no sexual harassment complaints filed against Halperin at NBC, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment publicly. As an on-air contributor, Halperin does not have an office or work space in the network’s headquarters or newsroom.

Halperin has a multiyear contract with NBC, but such deals can typically be terminated in the event an on-air talent embarrasses the company.

Showtime Networks issued a statement that there had been no allegations of “untoward behavior” by Halperin during the production of “The Circus.” However, the premium cable network said it will “evaluate its options” on going forward with a second season of the program...

More.

Fox Renewed Bill O'Reilly After Cable Star Paid Out Sexual Harassment Claims in $32 Million Settlement

That's an enormous amount of money. Man, $32 million for settlement. How much was Fox paying the guy, sheesh.

At NYT:

Fox was trying to convince the public that its culture had changed. But they were determined to keep Bill O’Reilly. https://t.co/0ykzHam7Ik

— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 21, 2017

Jessica Mendoza's GMA Interview

She's in bare feet.

Why are kids being asked to pick ONE sport at such a young age? More injuries financial strain &burnout bc of it. My feature airs today @GMA pic.twitter.com/BsC66bG7iL

— Jessica Mendoza (@jessmendoza) September 1, 2017

@jessmendoza great piece on specialization in kids sports. 1% of high school grads get colleges sports scholarships. 🤔#justplay pic.twitter.com/I5IoZI18aM

— maggie livreri (@MaggieLivreri) September 1, 2017

It’s Not Just Google — All of Silicon Valley Has a Trust Problem Now

That's for sure.

At Instapundit, "MY USA TODAY COLUMN: It’s not just Google — all of Silicon Valley has a trust problem now. “When a gigantic corporation that controls our data and knows us intimately takes a controversial political stance, it ought to make us worry”."

Identity Politics, Equality and Marxism (VIDEO)

Here's the Roaming Millennial. She's a cool chick, lol.

Yes, social justice is cancer, and here's why. This video explains what social justice is & breaks down the problem with identity politics & the concept of justice vs. equality. Also SJWs are commies. Yeah.

Dana Loesch Decries Sexism Against Women Second Amendment Advocates (VIDEO)

On Stuart Varney's show this morning, at Fox Business Channel:

Gal Gadot Paid Just $300,000 for 'Wonder Woman'

Well, that does seem kinda low. But folks are comparing her's to Henry Cavill's $14 million payday for 2013's "Man of Steel."

It turns out, though, that Cavill's $14 million figure includes royalty payments and bonuses (or however you calculate the after-market residuals).

Gal Gadot's up-front $300,000 is before royalties and bonuses, and she's in contract renegotiations for her upcoming reprisals as Diana Prince (since "Wonder Wonder" performed spectacularly in theaters).

In any case, at London's Daily Mail and Vanity Fair:

Revealed: Gal Gadot made just $300k for Wonder Woman (while Henry Cavill raked in $14MILLION for Man of Steel) https://t.co/lLLDg2z8a5

— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) June 20, 2017

No, Wonder Woman is not making 46 times less than Superman https://t.co/tjXlXlFFST

— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) June 20, 2017