Viel Lob für neue Gleichstellungsbeauftragte – News vom 3. Oktober 2017

1. Heute beginnen wir mit einem Blick in die norddeutsche Provinz, nämlich den schleswig-holsteinischen Landkreis Stormarn, der an Hamburg grenzt. Dort gibt es viel Lob für die neue Gleichstellungsbeauftragte Dr. Sophie Ollbrich – offenbar weil sie genau das tut, wofür Monika Ebeling in Goslar vor einigen Jahren noch öffentlich gesteinigt und aus dem Amt geprügelt wurde. Angemessen könnte ich den Artikel eigentlich nur im Volltext zitieren; lesen Sie ihn daher bitte im verlinkten Original. Dasselbe gilt für die folgenden beiden Artikel.



2. Auf "Xing" ist gestern ein Gastbeitrag von Ludger Pütz erschienen: "Kuckucksmütter können Verantwortung tragen". Der Beitrag kann auf "Xing" kommentiert und diskutiert werden.



3. "Linke Parteien haben ein Problem mit Frauen" konstatiert Claudia Blumer im Schweizer Tages-Anzeiger. "Grund dafür ist das Dilemma des linken Mannes."



4. Jede Falschbeschuldigung sexueller Gewalt ist entsetzlich, aber heuzutage kann man sich wohl nur über die vergleichsweise wenigen Fälle freuen, bei denen die Täterin wenigstens zur Rechenschaft gezogen wird: Eine Kanadierin wurde jetzt zu 24.000 Dollar Schmerzensgeld verurteilt.



5. Das Magazin "The Atlantic" beschäftigt sich mit der sogenannten Jungenkrise mit einem ungewohnten Schwerpunkt, nämlich mit Blick auf den Nahen Osten. Ein Auszug:

At the University of Jordan, the country’s largest university, women outnumber men by a ratio of two to one — and earn higher grades in math, engineering, computer-information systems, and a range of other subjects.

(...) It’s part of a pattern that is creeping across the globe: Wherever girls have access to school, they seem to eventually do better than boys. In 2015, teenage girls outperformed boys on a sophisticated reading test in 69 countries — every place in which the test was administered. In America, girls are more likely to take Advanced Placement tests, to graduate from high school, and to go to college, and women continue their education over a year longer than men. These are all glaring disparities in a world that values higher-order skills more than ever before. Natasha Ridge, the executive director of the Sheikh Saud bin Saqr Al Qasimi Foundation for Policy Research in the United Arab Emirates, has studied gender and education around the world. In the United Kingdom and the United States, Ridge believes she can draw a dotted line between the failure of boys to thrive in school and votes for Brexit and for Donald Trump. Disengaged boys grow up to become disillusioned men, Ridge says, left out of the progress they see around them.

(...) And the implications are universally terrible. All over the world, poorly educated men are more likely to be unemployed, to have physical- and mental-health problems, to commit acts of violence against their families, and to go to prison. They are less likely to marry but quite likely to father children.

(...) Boys also reported worse relationships with their male teachers. Only 40 percent of male students interviewed said they believed their teachers cared about how well they did in school—compared with 74 percent of girls. These results are bolstered by another recent USAID-funded study, which has not been made public but was shared with The Atlantic by RTI International, which helped conduct the research: Teams of education experts observed different classrooms around the country and found that male teachers in all-boys schools were more likely to belittle or punish students for getting the wrong answer. And boys were much more likely than girls to complain about their male teachers’ tendencies to beat students and shout at them.

Meanwhile, in the larger, 2014 study, male teachers were three times as likely as female teachers to say they were dissatisfied with teaching. Teachers do not earn a lot of money in Jordan, but men are still expected to be the primary breadwinners in families. So male teachers are more likely to work second or third jobs as tutors or even taxi drivers in order to augment their small salaries. One Jordanian student told me about a male biology teacher he’d had who was so exhausted by his two other jobs that he used to close the blinds in first period and go to sleep.

6. Den Tod des "Playboy"-Begründers Hugh Hefner dient in einem Interview mit der Professorin für Geistes- und Medienwissenschaft Camille Paglia als Aufhänger, um über die Situation der Geschlechter und den Einfluss des Feminismus auf die Sexualität zu sprechen. Ein Auszug:

Camille Paglia: The unhappy truth is that the more the sexes have blended, the less each sex is interested in the other. So we're now in a period of sexual boredom and inertia, complaint and dissatisfaction, which is one of the main reasons young men have gone over to pornography. Porn has become a necessary escape by the sexual imagination from the banality of our everyday lives, where the sexes are now routinely mixed in the workplace.

With the sexes so bored with each other, all that's left are these feminist witch-hunts. That's where the energy is! And meanwhile, men are shrinking. I see men turning away from women and simply being content with the world of fantasy because women have become too thin-skinned, resentful and high-maintenance. (...)

Hollywood Reporter: Gloria Steinem has said that what Playboy doesn't know about women could fill a book. What do you think about that?

Camille Paglia: What Playboy doesn't know about well-educated, upper-middle-class women with bitter grievances against men could fill a book! I don't regard Gloria Steinem as an expert on any of the human appetites, sexuality being only one of them. Interviews with Steinem were documenting from the start how her refrigerator contained nothing but two bottles of carbonated water. Steinem's philosophy of life is extremely limited by her own childhood experiences. She came out of an admittedly unstable family background. I'm so tired of that animus of hers against men, which she's been cranking out now for decade after decade. I come from a completely different Italian-American background — very food-centric and appetite-centric. Steinem, with that fulsomely genteel WASP persona of hers, represents an attitude of malice and vindictiveness toward men that has not proved to be in the best interest of young women today.

Hollywood Reporter: So would you say that her other comment — that women reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual — is just an expression of her animus toward men?

Camille Paglia: Oh Lord, how many times is Gloria Steinem going to play the Nazi card? What she said about me in the 1990s was: "Her calling herself a feminist is sort of like a Nazi saying he's not anti-Semitic." That's the simplistic level of Steinem's thinking!

Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi, all of those relentlessly ideological feminists are people who have wandered away from traditional religion and made a certain rabid type of feminist rhetoric their religion. And their fanaticism has poisoned the public image of feminism and driven ordinary, mainstream citizens away from feminism. It's outrageous.

(...) The sizzle of sex seems gone. What Hefner's death forces us to recognize is that there is very little glamour and certainly no mystery or intrigue left to sex for most young people. Which means young women do not know how to become women. And sex has become just another physical urge that can be satisfied like putting coins into a Coke machine.

This may be one reason for the ferocious pressure by so many current feminists to reinforce the Stalinist mechanisms, the pernicious PC rules that have invaded colleges everywhere. Feminists want supervision and surveillance of dating life on campus to punish men if something goes wrong and the girl doesn't like what happened. I am very concerned that what young women are saying through this strident feminist rhetoric is that they feel incapable of conducting independent sex lives. They require adult intrusion and supervision and penalizing of men who go astray. But if feminism means anything, it should be encouraging young women to take control of every aspect of their sex lives, including their own impulses, conflicts and disappointments. That's what's tragic about all this. Young women don't seem to realize that in demanding adult inquiry into and adjudication of their sex lives, they are forfeiting their own freedom and agency. (...)

Hollywood Reporter: There is a big push/pull happening in the entertainment industry about female voices and representation around directors in Hollywood. Surely there's nothing wrong with that, right, in your opinion?

Camille Paglia: All this constant complaining by women in Hollywood, I really don't understand it. I'm disturbed by women acting as if the world owes them opportunities, when there are so many hugely rich women stars in movies and music who should be using their millions to fund the creation of production companies precisely for the kind of hiring that they want. All those wealthy performers with their multiple houses — how about selling one of them? And let them do whatever feminist projects they want and see if they can sell it to the general public.

Look at the way you had George Lucas and Steven Spielberg coming together when they had nothing — they were just young men with a dream, with a vision, and they made an enormously successful series of films with global impact. Look at how many young male billionaires dropped out of college, and you got the Apple computer and Facebook.

I blame women for their own lack of imagination. There was a period when there were so many really unique and memorable films by women. Lisa Cholodenko's High Art is an example. That's an amazing film. And what about Donna Deitch's Desert Hearts? A knock-out film with vivid characters and a wonderful sense of place. But I know how difficult it is to get the funding for films. It can be like a five-year process, and it saps people's creative energies. And it's kind of a double whammy — when women are able to produce movies that bring in big bucks on the international stage, that's when woman directors will get more chances. But women can certainly cut their teeth by making really important, low-budget films. I want to see them! Show us. Show us the quality of your mind and your work, okay? At a certain point, it's counterproductive when you're claiming that someone else always has to open doors for you.