Vermischtes vom 22. November 2016

1. Dinge, die nur im "Patriarchat" funktionieren: Der Oberste Gerichtshof Österreichs lässt einen Mann eine knappe halbe Million Euro zahlen, damit sich seine Expartnerin im Scheidungsprozess gegen ihn gut vertreten lassen kann.



2.

Kleine Kinder, kranke Eltern? Viele Beschäftigte wollen ihre Arbeitszeit verkürzen. Doch eine Studie zeigt: Gerade Männer machen sich damit bei Vorgesetzen und Kollegen unbeliebt.

Hier erfährt man mehr.



3. Asemann hat herausgefunden, wie sich der Hass der Gender-Feministinnen auf Männer erklären lässt.



4. Wie die NBC News berichten, sind nicht mal im Islamischen Staat Frauen bessere Menschen:

Battle-hardened militants were far from the most terrifying thing for many women living under their harsh rule in the ISIS-conquered city of Mosul.

"I was much more afraid of women," said Umm Fatma, referring to female members of the terror organization's morality police, known as the Hisbah.

"The women would beat you for the smallest thing — how you looked or how you wore your headscarf, " the 28-year-old mother of three who arrived at the Khazer Camp last week told NBC News. "They used whips and metal sticks."

Restricted in where they could go and what they could wear while in Mosul, refugees described living in fear of the Khansaa Brigade, the all-female ISIS Hisbah units who patrolled the streets tasked with enforcing an extreme version of Shariah law.

Umm Azma, a 31-year-old mother of eight, said the female morality police favored a torture tool known as "the biter" — metal prongs designed to clip chunks of flesh as punishment for women who violated strict ISIS' dress codes.

"They used this on my neighbor who was cleaning in front of her house without the headscarf," said Umm Azma, gesturing to her own upper arm to illustrate where the tool had been used. "Then they took her away for lashings. She never came back."

5. Das liberale Magazin Reason entdeckt einen positiven Aspekt in der Präsidentschaft Donald Trumps. Ein lesenswerter Artikel.

Die andere Seite ist natürlich nicht besser. Die Rechtsradikalen der USA begrüßen Trump bereits mit dem Hitlergruß und dem Pegida-Schlagwort der "Lügenpresse": hier im Video. Eine Sektion der gezeigten Bewegung gibt es auch in Deutschland.



6. An der Universität Toronto fand dieser Tage eine hitzige Debatte darüber statt, ob Meinungsfreiheit heutzutage noch zeitgemäß sein kann. Konkreter geht es darum, ob sich ein bestimmter Professor, Jordan Peterson, weigern darf, statt Wörtern wie "er" und "sie" geschlechtsneutrale Neuschöpfungen zu verwenden. Petersons Eindruck nach ist diese Weigerung dem jüngst in Kanada verabschiedeten Canadian Human Rights Code sowie dem Criminal Code untersagt, wogegen er mit Youtube-Videos protestierte. Als Reaktion auf dieses Proteste erhielt er zwei Abmahnungen durch seine Universität.

Professor Mary Bryson, from the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, said scientists have no way of accurately looking at gender in the absence of sexism and misogyny.

"We can’t actually reach conclusions about what we take to be gender differences," Bryson said. "A lot of what we’ve been hearing here is hate propaganda."

Peterson said that kind of "social justice warrior" thinking is behind the Ontario Human Rights Code and the new federal law Bill C-16, that protects gender identity and expression.

The laws make it very dangerous to speak one’s mind on gender issues, and has stifled free speech on university campuses, he said.

One lawyer he consulted told him that the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal is a "kangaroo court" that should be abolished, Peterson said.

"Here’s what this top lawyer told me – if I’m taken in front of the human rights tribunal it will cost me $250,000, I will pay the legal costs for my opponents and I will lose," Peterson quoted. "He said,’Go back to your safe little life and shut your mouth.’"

Christie Blatchford schildert die Debatte in ihrem Artikel Wenn es in dieser Debatte um Meinungsfreiheit geht, ist die Schlacht verloren für die kanadische National Post:

The format consisted of a two-against-one setup, Peterson against two other professors — lawyer Brenda Cossman, who is the director of sexual diversity studies at the university, and the University of British Columbia’s Dr. Mary Bryson, a professor in language and literacy and in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice.

She began by immediately denouncing Peterson, comparing him to the late Philippe Rushton (...), another psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario who made controversial links between the brain sizes of the three major races and concluded that Orientals (Asians, as they would now be called) were smarter than Whites and Whites smarter than Blacks.

In her opening written statement, Bryson quoted from David Suzuki’s opening remarks at the 1989 debate between the two men: "I do not want to be here. I do not want to dignify this man and his ideas in public debate."

She continued throughout to refer to Peterson as "this man" who was making "knowledge claims as a professor" without "peer-reviewed scholarship", at one point declared that "the goal of reducing inequality" has "always been the fundamental goal of education" and in her closing remarks suggested the U of T ought to consider "an apology for any damages to the right of safety and the right to humanity on the part of trans and gender-diverse people at the university."

Cossman began by congratulating "all those faculty and students who are boycotting today’s event" and pronouncing absence as "also a very important form of speech." (I presume she similarly applauds all those Americans who boycotted the recent election that saw Donald Trump become the president-elect.) She offered no comparable show of respect to the students who actually made the effort to show up, mislabelled tickets in hand, and packed the lecture hall.

Both women also quickly claimed the patent on compassion.

As Cossman said once, "Why does all this matter? Because people matter ... This at the end of the day is about people. It’s about trans and gender and non-binary people. These are our children, our siblings, our nieces, our nephews, these are our friends, our neighbours, our colleagues, our lawyers, our carpenters, our teachers. How bloody hard is it to simply treat these people with respect and dignity? Because all human rights are about is respect and dignity. Throwing a little kindness on the top, that would be even better."

Bryson, similarly, hinted that Peterson, like Rushton had been in Suzuki’s view, was “either grossly ignorant or deliberately mischievous” and said, "Surely, the deliberate production of ignorance concerning a precarious minority group constitutes evidence of the most unethical abnegation of the responsibility of academics to contribute to human well-being, collective intelligence, flourishing and the survival of planetary life."

Ja, es geht immer noch darum, ob jemand bestraft werden sollte, der keine geschlechtsneutralen Kunstwörter verwendet. Das gilt einigen vollen Ernstes als Menschheitsverbrechen, das gefährdet, dass auf unserem Planeten Leben weiterhin möglich ist. Christie Blatchford bezeichnet diese Ausführungen in ihrem Artikel nicht zu Unrecht als "nearly magnificent nonsense".

Allerdings ist es nicht Dr. Bryson, sondern der Genderktitiker Professor Peterson, der sich jetzt darauf gefasst machen muss, dass ihm die Ontario Psychological Association seine klinische Lizenz entzieht.



7. Ein hübscher Vergleich: So unterschiedlich feierte Google den Tag der Frau und den Tag des Mannes. Das Leben im Patriarchat muss für Frauen kaum noch zu ertragen sein.



8. Die Irish Times berichtet über eine Männerkonferenz am Internationalen Tag des Mannes, in der einer für Europa insgesamt geltenden Konvention vorgeworfen wurde, Männer zu Bürgern zweiter Klasse zu machen:

Efforts to ratify a European convention on domestic violence must be resisted as part of a "highly biased and harmful narrative" in Ireland that places women above men, a conference on Saturday heard.

Last year, Ireland signed the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, commonly referred to as the Istanbul Convention, and set in motion steps toward its full ratification.

Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald had said the move represented an "important milestone" for campaigners.

"Violence against women is a societal problem and the Istanbul Convention is an important instrument in tackling that problem," she said.

However, on International Men’s Day on Saturday, the document was heavily criticised and dismissed as a symptom of a wider "narrative" imbalance in Ireland that placed women’s issues above those of men.

Speaking at the "Who Cares About Men?" event organised by Men’s Voices Ireland, Andy Hinds, a theatre director and writer, said plans for its ratification without any public discourse was a sign of enduring inequality.

"All this to me was the most glaring demonstration of how one highly biased and harmful narrative had taken hold of our country and of most societies in the west," he said.

"This narrative is the one telling us there is something inherently wrong, dysfunctional that needs to be changed about being a man, about masculinity. That tells us it’s ok to say more or less any negative thing you want about men but it is not at all ok to say anything negative regarding women."

Mr Hinds said men must make their voices heard and the Convention’s ratification resisted.

This view is central to the founding of Men’s Voices Ireland, an organisation which emerged in 2014 to discuss, it said, "matters of urgent concern" for the male gender that receive little or no attention.

"In particular they were alarmed that steps were afoot to sign and ratify the Istanbul Convention without the slightest attempt to explain and discuss the document in any forum," the group said in its biography.

"It was clear that the absence of a male advocacy group with a broad brief was a fundamental obstacle in making any progress and that legislation damaging to men could be railroaded through with no opposition."

Mr Hinds told Saturday’s meeting of up to 50 people in Dublin that the Convention’s articles were skewed heavily toward female interests.

On the area of domestic violence, he said: "This is the strand telling us that domestic violence is primarily and overwhelmingly something that happens to women. It is something that is done primarily by men. And that any domestic violence perpetrated by women is so rare and minor that is can justifiably and completely be cut out of the conversation. If [the Convention] is ratified, I, all men here today, and all males in Ireland will be downgraded to the status of second class citizens."

In September, Minister Fitzgerald told the Dáil that Ireland was fully supportive of the Convention and there was a commitment in the programme for partnership Government to implement it. Work has commenced on implementing 18 legislative and administrative actions to enable this, she said.

9. Die Post. Ein FDP-Mitglied unter meinen Lesern schreibt mir:

Hallo Herr Hoffmann,

ich teile Ihr Urteil zur Berichterstattung zum internationalen Männertag auch nach dem Revidieren nicht. Im Gegenteil: Ich bin begeistert!

Das mag aber daran liegen, dass ich im Schwobaländle (Schwabenländle für Hochdeutsch Sprechende) lebe. Scheinbar ist man hier ausnahmsweise dem Zeitgeist voraus. Nicht nur die Rems-Zeitung sondern sowohl die Stuttgarter Nachrichten als auch die Stuttgarter Zeitung haben den Internationalen Männertag aufgegriffen. Sie haben ihn nicht nur auf die Titelseite gehoben, sondern es war auch Hauptthema der Wochenendbeilage. Dabei ist ein bewegender und inhaltlich breiter Artikel entstanden, in dem auch Sie zitiert werden: "Wer heute das allgemeine Glaubensbekenntnis vom Unterdrückergeschlecht Mann und dem Opfer Frau infrage stellt, bricht ein Tabu, das mit Klauen und Zähnen verteidigt wird."

Mir haben diese Artikel am Wochenende Mut gemacht. Es zeigt, dass die Zeit reif ist, die Belange von Männern auf die politische Agenda zu setzen. Es mag wie ein winziger Bewegung eines Staubkorns aussehen, dass ich als Kreisvorsitzender einer Partei in der schwäbischen Provinz per Facebook dazu aufrufe. Für mich ist aber das öffentliche Bekenntnis wichtig, und viele bewegende Staubkörner machen auch eine Lawine aus.

Erleben wir gerade, dass die Männerrechtsbewegung von der breiten Masse erkannt wird? Werden wir vielleicht in ein paar Jahren zurückblicken und Brexit sowie die Trumpwahl als Tipping Point für die Anliegen von Männern bezeichnen? Beides hat mich nicht gefreut. Ich kann mir aber bildlich vorstellen, wie in einer Redaktionsbesprechung auf einmal kippte und auf einmal der Artikel des einen Redakteurs gedruckt wird, der er schon mehrfach versucht hat, drucken zu lassen. Bleiben Sie dran. Es bewegt sich.