JamesH, my sons have never been push overs. Their answers to any debate or argument have never been conditional. You should have seen the heated debates here when Iraq was invaded! Two opposing camps in this household, but we still had dinner together.

Their bread is buttered on the side of them being true to themselves and their convictions. I'm expected to give a rational reason for my opinions and so do my children. One of my sons was part of his school's competitive debating team and he was an adjudicator, so quite capable.

A close friend of one of my sons was the victim of a rape and he's seen at close hand the emotional havoc of a once confident athlete. He doesn't get jokes re violence and women either. It wasn't my overbearing feminist leanings that did it.

Vanilla, I understand that you don't mind the ad. I do. I relate the violence to regular experience at work.

Vanilla,

here is another link saying basically what Hoff Sommers is saying;

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/whos_oppressing_who/

<Campaigning against men>

<I then turned my attention to the negative and far-ranging effects, of feminism on men. Misandry, which is the female equivalent of misogyny (misanthropy is a hatred of humankind), is now entrenched in our public discourse, our education system and social services. Misandry flies beneath most people’s radar, because we have become compliant in the acceptance of theories that have nothing to do with reality, and compliant in the speech codes that accompany that tendency.>

As to the knife block and the ad, I lots of different thoughts about both.

<Are you saying it's ok for men to object but not for women?> I do wish you wouldn't do that, because it is not what I am saying. As bloke when I try to complain I usually get told not to be so sensitive.

You are correct that the description of sociopathy could easily be applied to a group of men. I understand that a few of our politicans display these characteristics.

Yvonne: "I relate the violence to regular experience at work."

I do appreciate this and apologise for banging on and on about it — not quite sure why this issue has so much resonance for me, but it does.

Pelican: "I don't feel at loggerheads with you and always respect your opinions."

As I do yours! But that was exactly my point — we all seem to agree that a line in the sand needs to be drawn, but we all have wildly divergent but equally valid ideas about whether we should be down at the shoreline or up at the dunes.

James: "I do wish you wouldn't do that, because it is not what I am saying."

Point taken, and I'm sorry. I was being inflammatory. Cheers for the article — it was extremely interesting. Predictably enough, I heartily agree with some bits and disagree with others.

Firstly,

SJF you wrote that you regard Warren Farrell as odious. I have read his book "Women cant hear what men don't say" and in it he suggests that men learn the listening skills to hear the intent of what his partner is saying. Now to me that is not the work of an odious person.

Secondly,

Vanilla, I am glad that there are points in the article you agree and disagree with. What I would like to know is what are the points that you think are relevant or irrelevant.

You know you are a breath of fresh air and your hubby is a lucky bloke.

JamesH

‘SJF… I had asked you about previously about a author you regard as odious, Warren Farrell "please note that I have never classified any feminist author as being odious".

Haven’t you? Perhaps I failed to notice this while ploughing through your 100s of posts which portray feminists as the most evil creatures that ever walked the earth and as the greatest threat to manhood ever to materialise in the entire history of the world.

There are many, many reasons why I consider Warren Farrell to be odious. However, due to wording restrictions, I’ll stick to just one of them.

Wazza Fazza likes to claim (and his sycophantic followers never challenge this) that feminists and the media dropped him once he stopped writing sympathetically about women.

Not so. He fell rapidly from grace in the eyes of both feminists and the media after a sleazy interview he gave to Penthouse magazine in 1977, in which he rather stupidly upheld the virtues of ‘positive incest’:

‘Incest: the Last Taboo’, Penthouse, December 1977 http://www.argate.net/~liz/fathers/farrell5.htm

One of the more memorable clunkies from this article is this quote:

“… [M]illions of people who are now refraining from touching, holding, and genitally caressing their children, when that is really part of a caring, loving expression, are repressing the sexuality of a lot of children and themselves.”

85% of the daughters Farrell ‘surveyed’ in his incest research reported having ‘negative attitudes’ toward their experience, while 80% of the fathers felt either positive or neutral about it. Yet he explains this away as …

"Either men see these relationships differently, or I am getting SELECTIVE reporting from women," he said.’ [Caps mine]

Oh, dear! Poor old Wazza! He can’t understand why young girls don’t take kindly to being raped by their fathers. And Wazza doesn't like to view these fathers as perverts, they just 'see these relationships differently'!

And wouldn’t we love to know what ‘selective’ is supposed to mean in Farrell’s dirty old man’s imagination – methinks it’s just a euphemism for ‘lying’.

No wonder Gloria Steinhein stopped returning his calls.

Pelican

‘I get into trouble sometimes with strong views about stay at home mothers because I did it myself for a period of time much to the chagrin of some of my friends who implied it was letting the side down or for changing my name when I got married.’’

I stayed at home with my kids, too. I was a full-time mum for 10 years. When my twins were about 3 months, I was routinely asked: ‘When are you going back to work?’ At about 6 months, the question was: ‘Have you gone back to work yet?’ At 9 months, it was: ‘Haven’t you gone back to work yet?’

The experience made me realize that the undervaluing of the unpaid, stay-at-home role is a social construct – that both women and men internalize. This realisation also motivated me to join a women's activist group that was lobbying for the inclusion of unpaid work in the Census (which finally happened in 2006).

Feminism often moves in mysterious ways.