Gail Dines in Ms on Hugh Hefner and Playboy:

“I am a feminist,” boasted Hugh Hefner, the iconic founder of Playboy.  But the first two episodes of a new the documentary series that premiered January 24 on A&E, Secrets of Playboy, showed what feminists always knew: Hefner was a vile misogynist. 

A feminist misogynist.

Feminism was never about presenting women as sex objects or, as Hefner and his magazine called them, “Playmates.” Nor would feminism ask “Bunnies,” dressed in hypersexualized costumes, to serve drinks to men in Playboy Clubs. And now, as many saw the other night on television, we have irrefutable proof that Hefner’s empire was built on the horrific abuse of women. 

Playmates, forsooth. … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Pliny the in Between on Prone to psychological and medical contagions.

The error we’ve made, I believe, is thinking that the emergence of more mainstream secularism was the same thing as a reduction in religious thinking. Unfortunately that turns out not to be the case. There has been no wholesale rewiring of the Mark 1 human brain. We simply have replaced the repetitive indoctrination that religions provided with that provided by asshats on social media. The programming is the same.

For a time, public education provided enough immersion in enlightenment thinking that our cognitive biases were directed at productive social issues, which is one of the reasons reactionaries targeted that system for destruction. The Inquisition … Read the rest

Valerie Tarico tells us how the Progressive Champions have trashed a local Planned Parenthood:

Planned Parenthood in Seattle recently fired a CEO who has been a hero of the reproductive health and rights sector for the last forty years. It’s not hard to find public examples of the Left eating our own to the detriment of real change (here, here, here, here). But when it comes to reproductive health and rights, this is one of the most stark examples of form over substance that I have witnessed. And given the expected evisceration of Roe v Wade, it couldn’t come at a worse time.

Chris Charbonneau was terminated abruptly under a cloud of implied racism

What is and what is not disgusting, Twitter Activist version.

This is disgusting. You're disgusting. I hope your son grows up to be a better man than you.

I'll enjoy reporting your tweets, and hopefully there are enough to get your account suspended. Fingers crossed!

— Hugh McIntyre (@PopBangHugh) January 27, 2022

https://twitter.com/PopBangHugh/status/1486793177541615621

Update: Oh wait there’s more – on the very same day. I guess January 27 was call people disgusting day in his world – “disgusting” for knowing that men aren’t women, and saying so.

Hi Linda! I'm spending a few minutes reporting your tweets as hate speech, as they're absolutely vile. With any luck, Twitter will see them all at once and remove you entirely.

Nobody needs

When the police drop by to check up on your thinking:

Nicola Murray was left “shocked and panicky” when detectives arrived at her door after an online announcement by Brodie’s Trust [which she founded] that it would no longer refer women to Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC).

Talking to the officers, Murray, from Stanley, near Perth, was taken aback when she said they told her: “We need to speak to you to ascertain what your thinking was behind making your statement.”

Murray, 43, founded Brodie’s Trust in 2018 to support women from all over the world “who’ve suffered pregnancy loss through domestic violence or forced termination” by directing victims to local services for help.

It’s the inverse of support … Read the rest

At Inside Higher Ed Angie Kirk, an English professor and former college athlete, explains what fair competitive sports policy would look like:

In the past year, legislators in several states have introduced or passed bills that would ban persons who are biologically male from competing on women’s sports teams…These bills are in contradiction to President Biden’s executive order regarding athletics, which overturned Trump-era policies prohibiting genetically male individuals from competing on women’s teams, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s recent policy change allowing each sport to make its own rules.

It’s pathetic that Trump is right about this and Biden is wrong, but that’s where we are. (No, no, exclaim the Folx Brigade, it’s YOU that’s wrong. No YOU, … Read the rest

The Times of India reports:

New Delhi: A woman was allegedly sexually assaulted and paraded in the Shahdara area of the national capital on Wednesday.

The woman was attacked by a group of people who chopped off her hair, tore her clothes, blackened her face and then paraded her in the streets with a garland of slippers.

The accused are said to be illicit liquor sellers in the area. It has been alleged that the woman was also gang-raped.

…

A source privy to the investigation told IANS that the victim woman has been living in Shahdara area for the past few years. The woman is married and has a child. A man who used to live in her

Carol Tavris at Skeptic (the Shermer one):

American culture is prone to psychological and medical contagions. An idea catches fire, seeming to be a plausible and important explanation of a familiar problem — depression, anxiety, eating disorders, sexual dissatisfaction. The idea outruns evidence. Experts emerge to treat people suffering from the problem, exploiting the most credulous. They open clinics. They give prestigious lectures and write books. They make fortunes. They blur the diverse possible origins of a person’s difficulties, attributing them all to the latest explanation.

Throughout the 1980s, the hot explanation was childhood sexual abuse: you have an eating disorder? Your father (or grandfather, or uncle, or close family friend) probably molested you. You don’t remember that? You repressed

Lia Thomas continues to troll the women he is bullying.

Sharing a locker room with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has become a point of contention for some of her University of Pennsylvania teammates, who feel uncomfortable changing in the private space with someone undergoing gender transition, the DailyMail.com can reveal.

‘It’s definitely awkward because Lia still has male body parts and is still attracted to women,’ one swimmer on the team told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview.

In other words he’s forcing them to see his erections.

‘Multiple swimmers have raised it, multiple different times,’ the UPenn swimmer said. ‘But we were basically told that we could not ostracize Lia by not having her in the locker room and

This is the wrong question:

America’s hottest city is nearly unlivable in summer. Can cooling technologies save it?

America’s hottest city shouldn’t be a city at all, because it’s in a desert. We shouldn’t be expanding cities in deserts as global warming gets worse, we should be shrinking them. It’s stupid to squander resources on cities that are doomed by global warming.

Phoenix, the capital of Arizona, is accustomed to a hot desert climate, but day and night temperatures have been rising due to global heating and the city’s unchecked development, which has created a sprawling urban heat island.

It’s the unchecked development that’s the problem. The development needs to be checked, starting yesterday.

“Phoenix is already unlivable in

Big Sibling is reading your mail.

A teacher and mother-of-three has been questioned under caution by Merseyside Police for sending a letter to Girlguiding UK raising safeguarding concerns.

Ok then, I guess if anyone has any safeguarding concerns about Girlguides UK, she’d better keep them to herself. Sorry girls! You’re on your own.

Her story begins in November 2021 when it emerged that Girlguiding UK had appointed a local commissioner called Monica Sulley, a role that involves overseeing Rainbows, Brownies, Guides and Rangers in Southwell, Nottinghamshire. 

Sulley is a trans woman who posts photos of himself on Instagram…

…wearing dominatrix clothing, one of which was captioned “Now behave yourselves or Mistress will have to punish you #mistress.” She

O rilly?

Donald Trump has only $93 million in cash left, according to Forbes. His properties are all indebted.

The Trumps could potentially owe $100 to $300 million or more in back taxes, restitution, and penalties — and that’s just in the NY AG civil case alone.

— Tristan Snell (@TristanSnell) January 27, 2022

Who’s this guy? He’s a former Assistant DA for New York state, who prosecuted Trump “university.” He’s probably not just making this up.

Trump’s cash crunch helps explain why he needed to strong-arm the Republican National Committee into paying his legal fees for his criminal defense, $1.6 million and counting.

— Tristan Snell (@TristanSnell) January 27, 2022

I would like to watch him lose everything, and… Read the rest

Sarah Ditum reviews Laurie Penny’s new book in the Times.

“This is a story about the choice between feminism and fascism,” Laurie Penny announces in the first line of Sexual Revolution. That’s not true. Actually, it is a story about Laurie Penny, a 35-year-old manic pixie dream person (pronouns they/them) who blundered to public attention as an angry young woman blogging about feminism, went on to chronicle the Occupy movement, and has spent the following years maintaining a white-knuckle grip on whatever the latest trend for the online left happens to be.

Just as the online left itself has, which economically explains why it’s so horrible.

“Fascism” is nothing but a placeholder here for “things Laurie Penny thinks

Suzanne Moore on Laurie Penny’s attempt to claim oppression by Julie Bindel:

I do find it bizarre how an actual lesbian, à la Bindel, can be criticised by a person (I won’t use the offensive word woman) in a heterosexual marriage to a bloke for putting down “LGBTQ authors”. (I don’t know if said bloke is self-identified as a bloke, and care even less.) Penny plays as ever to their American audience; Bindel doesn’t play this game at all. She doesn’t have the time; she has actual feminism to do. 

…

I do realise it is very “bio-essentialist” of me to refer to myself being the mother of an actual young person, because the Penny persona depends on being

The Times on the police abuse of Jennifer Swayne:

Jennifer Swayne, 53, was detained for more than 12 hours after placing posters around Newport that made claims about trans women in prisons and said “humans never change sex” and that men in dresses should stay out of women’s spaces.

She accused Gwent police of operating “like the Stasi” after they raided her home and took a book of essays on “the theory and practice of transgendering children”. Edited by Dr Heather Brunskell-Evans, an academic previously no-platformed by university students, the book contends that politics rather than science accounts for the rise in the number of transgender children. Swayne said that police did not say why they took the book,

The BBC also did a sloppy lazy story yesterday on how the Newport police abused a woman for putting stickers on lampposts. Some of the wording is identical to that of the trainee reporter for the South Wales Argus; I don’t know if one copied the other (or which came first) or they both drew from another source. Anyway it’s bad and insidious crap.

A 53-year-old woman has been arrested after stickers were placed around a city “directed towards the transgender community”.

A sloppy lazy unsupported claim right in the lede. Who says that’s how the stickers were “directed”? Why say that in the lede when in fact the stickers don’t mention “the transgender community”? Why tilt the story … Read the rest

A guy in India has set out to persuade men to stop treating women’s bodies as swear-words.

The speaker, Sunil Jaglan, begins with a question, “Raise your hand if you have used cuss words that name mother’s, sister’s or women’s intimate body parts?”

People smile sheepishly, looking around for moral support before awkwardly raising their hands, “Everyone here has used gaali, sir, this is normal,” says one man.

…

“But, is it right?” asks Jaglan.

To this, the women shout: “Of course not! Why target us or our body in your slurs? Why don’t people understand when they use misogynist profanities they actually target their own mothers and sisters? Is this what we are teaching our kids?”

Yes, … Read the rest

It’s not pro-life, it’s anti-women. The pregnancy is everything, the woman whose pregnancy it is is nothing.

The family of a Polish woman who died on Tuesday after doctors refused to perform an abortion when the foetus’s heart stopped beating have accused the government of having “blood on their hands”.

The woman, identified only as Agnieszka T, was said to have been in the first trimester of a twin pregnancy when she was admitted to the Blessed Virgin Mary hospital in Częstochowa on 21 December. Her death comes a year after Poland introduced one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe.

Don’t go to hospitals named The Blessed Virgin Mary if you can possibly help it. Try … Read the rest

Just as you can’t “cut ties” with the Supreme Court.

Basic law primer

You cannot, by statute “cut ties” with the EHRC

It was established by statute to ensure your compliance with the act.

You might as well say you’re “cutting ties” with the charity commission.

Enjoy your childish tantrum.
We will enjoy them being adults.

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) January 27, 2022

It’s very Trumpy to say you’re cutting ties with a supervisory board you can’t cut ties with.

Libby Brooks at the Guardian has more:

The UK’s equalities watchdog has written to the Scottish government asking it to pause plans to simplify the legal requirements for gender recognition.

LGBT+ equality campaigners hit back at the unexpected

More indignation.

Statement: LGBT Foundation to sever all ties with the EHRC – Our response to EHRC statements on upcoming LGBTQ+ legislation. https://t.co/1Ho11f5cEp pic.twitter.com/7Dqy08MLFt

— LGBT Foundation (@LGBTfdn) January 26, 2022

These organizations don’t seem to have paused to ask themselves what human rights are, ever at any time. The result is that they end up sounding like small children who think they have a “right” to all the ice cream they want right now this second.

Rights aren’t simple. They’re not a matter of just “I want this therefore I have a right to it.” They have to be judged on the basis of their impact on other people. They’re a balancing act. The T+ people seem to think … Read the rest