Female Supremacy Articles - Page 24
"Women's town" to put men in their place
Reuters
Thu Apr 26, 2007
BEIJING - Chinese tourism authorities are seeking investment to build a novel concept attraction -- the world's first "women's town," where men get punished for disobedience, an official said Thursday.
The 2.3-square-km Longshuihu village in the Shuangqiao district of Chongqing municipality, also known as "women's town," was based on the local traditional concept of "women rule and men obey," a tourism official told Reuters.
"Traditional women dominate and men have to be obedient in the areas of Sichuan province and Chongqing, and now we are using it as an idea to attract tourists and boost tourism," the official, surname Li, said by telephone.
The tourism bureau planned to invest between 200 million yuan ($26 million) and 300 million yuan in infrastructure, roads and buildings, Li said.
"We welcome investors from overseas and nationwide to invest in our project," he added.
The motto of the new town would be "women never make mistakes, and men can never refuse women's requests," Chinese media have reported.
When tour groups enter the town, female tourists would play the dominant role when shopping or choosing a place to stay, and a disobedient man would be punished by "kneeling on an uneven board" or washing dishes in restaurant, media reports said.
The project, begun in the end of 2005, was expected to take three to five years to finish.
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Get Whipped (Literally and Figuratively) in “Women’s Town” China
From dreamlogic.net
Tourism official Li Jigang is hoping to secure funding for a very unique tourist trap. “Women’s Town” will exist in an 2.3 km² (0.9 mi²) area presently known for it’s heavy truck manufacturing, a far cry from femininity. In the Shuangqiao district in Chongqing China, the tiny village’s mantra will decree “women rule, men obey”, and they want to bank on it, asking for investments of $26+ million (U.S. dollars) to help build up their roads and infrastructure. Some say the feminist theme is based on the classic Chinese tale The Monkey King (shouldn’t that be Monkey Queen?) but it must not be the story I’m thinking of about with the Taoism and the Buddhism and the mountain.
Their proposed slogan is “women never make mistakes, and men can never refuse women’s requests” which will be placed on a poster or plaque at the town’s entrance. Female tourists will lead the man by choosing activities and lodging. Villagers will punish men who show disobedience by making them kneel on “an uneven wooden board”, wash dishes in a restaurant or be spanked, all in fun of course.
Another game entitled the “Love Whip” with all-girl judges, captains and a Court who will quiz the dudes on his beloved’s faves and you can guess what happens when he proffers an incorrect answer. This is because in Women’s Town, “man can only feel soft power through this kind of tender punishment”.
The project began in 2005 and could be completed either next year or be extended to 2010.
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Male-female gap 'bad for society'
Manawatu Standard
Tuesday, 22 May 2007
New Zealand now has one of the largest gaps in the world between male and female achievers, with men coming out the losers, according to Massey University's pro vice-chancellor in education, James Chapman.
The disparity was now so great that New Zealand rated with "quite poor and impoverished countries" that, in spite of male dominance in their societies, showed little in terms of male educational achievements.
Professor Chapman's remarks followed a Massey University College of Education graduation in which only 15 of the 158 graduates were men.
"There has been a quite significant decline in the interest of males in primary school teaching and particularly in the early childhood field. It is not quite so evident in the secondary school area."
Professor Chapman said that from his viewpoint, sitting on stage at the graduation on Thursday, the disparity was "absolutely marked" as woman after woman passed by to collect degrees.
"Right there it was so visible as they crossed the stage. This is a real problem, a hidden problem, in trends in New Zealand education that is going to have a major impact downstream."
In the absence of detailed research into why this was happening, observers were left to speculate, he said. There were probably many factors involved, but one of the main ones was the gradual "feminisation" of education in New Zealand, in terms of policies as well as teacher gender. "In the long term this is not healthy for boys, but also not for girls either."
Research was needed to determine whether the feminine dominance of the education system was deterring men from entering the profession, he said.
Another factor was the effect of a number of high-profile cases of males associating inappropriately with young children. Research was needed into the suggestion that fears of being demonised had turned good men away from the profession.
"If this is so, it would be very sad for boys and girls, who both need strong male role models. Some do not have one at home and if they don't have one at school either, it is a double whammy."
Professor Chapman said it was evident on Thursday that there were many high quality women graduates coming into education.
They were also moving into other professions, but there was a need for balance.
He suggested that perhaps the drive to find equal opportunities for women had gone too far and there was a need to pull back a bit to restore that balance.
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Moms manage money better than dads
It appears that moms are better money managers than dads.
Fifty percent of those who answered an Ameriprise Financial survey said their mothers were more influential about teaching money management skills. Only 38 percent credited their fathers. The other 12 percent said they didn't know.
Analysts believe that women's financial skills have sharpened because more women are entering the work force and living longer, which requires them to make more financial planning decisions.
When asked the best way to describe their mother's approach to managing money, 55 percent of respondents said they viewed their mothers as "savers," 15 percent described their mothers as "investors" and 24 percent viewed their mothers as "spenders."
Breaking the statistics down by gender, 74 percent of the men surveyed said their mother was a good financial role model, while 68 percent of women said they saw their mother the same way.
Meanwhile, respondents were divided in terms of whether their mothers or fathers gave better advice about money.
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The prospect of all-female conception
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
published: 13 April 2007
Women might soon be able to produce sperm in a development that could allow lesbian couples to have their own biological daughters, according to a pioneering study published today.
Scientists are seeking ethical permission to produce synthetic sperm cells from a woman's bone marrow tissue after showing that it possible to produce rudimentary sperm cells from male bone-marrow tissue.
The researchers said they had already produced early sperm cells from bone-marrow tissue taken from men. They believe the findings show that it may be possible to restore fertility to men who cannot naturally produce their own sperm.
But the results also raise the prospect of being able to take bone-marrow tissue from women and coaxing the stem cells within the female tissue to develop into sperm cells, said Professor Karim Nayernia of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
Creating sperm from women would mean they would only be able to produce daughters because the Y chromosome of male sperm would still be needed to produce sons. The latest research brings the prospect of female-only conception a step closer.
"Theoretically is it possible," Professor Nayernia said. "The problem is whether the sperm cells are functional or not. I don't think there is an ethical barrier, so long as it's safe. We are in the process of applying for ethical approval. We are preparing now to apply to use the existing bone marrow stem cell bank here in Newcastle. We need permission from the patient who supplied the bone marrow, the ethics committee and the hospital itself."
If sperm cells can be developed from female bone-marrow tissue they will be matured in the laboratory and tested for their ability to penetrate the outer "shell" of a hamster's egg - a standard fertility test for sperm.
"We want to test the functionality of any male and female sperm that is made by this way," Professor Nayernia said. But he said there was no intention at this stage to produce female sperm that would be used to fertilise a human egg, a move that would require the approval of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.
The immediate aim is to see if female bone marrow can be lured into developing into the stem cells that can make sperm cells. The ultimate aim is to discover if these secondary stem cells can then be made into other useful tissues of the body, he said.
The latest findings, published in the journal Reproduction: Gamete Biology, show that male bone marrow can be used to make the early "spermatagonial" stem cells that normally mature into fully developed sperm cells.
"Our next goal is to see if we can get the spermatagonial stem cells to progress to mature sperm in the laboratory and this should take around three to five years of experiments," Professor Nayernia said.
Last year, Professor Nayernia led scientists at the University of Gottingen in Germany who became the first to produce viable artificial sperm from mouse embryonic stem cells, which were used to produce seven live offspring.
His latest work on stem cells derived from human bone marrow suggests that it could be possible to develop the techniques to help men who cannot produce their own sperm naturally.
"We're very excited about this discovery, particularly as our earlier work in mice suggests that we could develop this work even further," Professor Nayernia said.
Whether the scientists will ever be able to develop the techniques to help real patients - male or female - will depend on future legislation that the Government is preparing as a replacement to the existing Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act.
A White Paper on genetics suggested that artificial gametes produced from the ordinary "somatic" tissue of the body may be banned from being used to fertilise human eggs by in vitro fertilisation.
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I'll tell you why women are running out of men to marry
By Boris Johnson
The Daily Telegraph
01/02/2007
I was half asleep in the front seat the other day, coming back from some exhausting tour of an educational establishment, and in the back seat were two twenty-something female graduates. They were talking about men, so I tried to focus, while keeping my eyes cunningly half closed.
One of them made the eternal feminine complaint. "All men are useless these days," she said. "Yeah," said the other. "The trouble is that they haven't risen to the challenge of feminism. They don't understand that we need them to be more masculine, and instead they have just copped out."
I am afraid that, at this point, I copped out myself, and slid into unconsciousness. But before I went under I thought, hmmm, this is interesting; and I think back to that conversation as I read that women continue their astonishing dominance of university admissions.
Look at those girls go! Women now make up 57 per cent of university entrants, and they outnumber men in every subject — including maths and engineering. This thing is huge, and it is happening at every level, and no one seems to be thinking about the consequences.
Most trainee barristers and two thirds of medical students are now women — compared with 29 per cent women in the early 1990s. If current trends continue, most doctors will be female by 2012. It is ludicrous for the Equal Opportunities Commission to keep droning on about "glass ceilings" at the top of corporate Britain , or in the judiciary, when you think how fast this transformation has been.
It is a stunning fact — the biggest social revolution of our lifetime — that far more women than men are now receiving what is in theory an elite academic education. When I was at university 20 years ago, the figures were almost exactly the other way round, with the ratio 60:40 in favour of males. Far more female graduates are coming out of our universities than male graduates — and, in 30 years' time, when these people reach the peak of their careers, the entire management structure of Britain will have been transformed and feminised.
Speaking as an ardent feminist, I expect that this will have many wonderful results: a culture that is more feng shui and emotionally literate and altogether nicer, and an economy that benefits from unleashing the phenomenal energy and talents of British women who are — if GCSEs, A-levels and university entrance results mean anything — currently giving the male sex a good old intellectual thrashing.
Obviously a Neanderthal corner of my heart worries about some aspects of the coming feminisation. Will we all become even more namby-pamby, elf-n-safety-conscious, regulation-prone and generally incapable of beating the Australians at anything than we already are? Hmm? And even if the feminist revolution is good and unstoppable (and it is both), we should perhaps consider some of the downsides — and the most interesting is that greater equality between the sexes is actually leading to greater division between the classes. Here's how.
Since the emergence of our species, it has been a brutally sexist feature of romance that women on the whole — and I stress on the whole — will want to mate/procreate with men who are either on a par with themselves, or their superior, in socio-economic and intellectual attainment. A recent study shows that if a man's IQ rises by 16 points, his chances of marrying increase by 35 per cent; if a woman's IQ rises by 16 points, her chances of getting hitched decline by the same amount.
Now look at those university entrance figures again, feed in that basic human prejudice, and some recent social phenomena become intelligible. If you have a sudden surge in the number of highly educated women — more women than men — then it is not surprising that you have a fair few Bridget Jones-type characters who are having a tough job finding Mr Darcy. It is a gloomy truth that 40 per cent of female graduates born in 1970 are likely to enter their forties childless.
As a result of the same instinct — female desire to procreate with their intellectual equals — the huge increase in female university enrolments is leading to a rise in what the sociologists call assortative mating. A snappier word for it is homogamy. The more middle-class graduates we create, the more they seem to settle down with other middle-class graduates, very largely because of the feminine romantic imperative already described. The result is that the expansion of university education has actually been accompanied by a decline in social mobility, and that is because these massive enrolments have been overwhelmingly middle-class.
It is one of the sad failures of this Government that relatively few bright children from poor backgrounds have been encouraged to go to university, partly because of weaknesses in primary and secondary education, partly because of the withdrawal of the ladder of opportunity provided by academic selection. Once they have failed to go to university, the boom in the number of middle-class female students only intensifies their disadvantages.
Let's put it bluntly: nice female middle-class graduates are either becoming permanent Bridget Joneses, or marrying nice male graduates, and they seem on the whole to be turning up their nice graduate noses at male non-graduates. And when the nice middle-class graduate couples get together, they have the double income to buy the houses and push the prices up — and make life even tougher for the non-graduates.
The result is that we have widening social divisions, and two particularly miserable groups: the female graduates who think men are all useless because they can't find a graduate husband and the male non-graduates who feel increasingly trampled on by the feminist revolution, and resentful of all these hoity-toity female graduates who won't give them the time of day.
What is the answer, my friends? I don't know. We could try fiscal incentives for heterogamy. We could have plotlines in soap operas, in which double first girls regularly marry illiterate brickies.
But the only long-term solution for the "uselessness" of young men, as complained of by my twenty something colleagues, is to get serious with the education of males in primary schools. And if the Equal Opportunities Commission wants to say something sensible for a change, it should start campaigning for more male teachers.
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Why girls do so much better than boys
Andrew Cunningham
Published: 08 February 2007
More inde-pendent schools are going co-ed, with the number of single-sex schools shrinking. Yet the league tables are still dominated by girls-only schools, and the gap between boys and girls at GCSE remains huge. Last summer, only 51 per cent of boys gained five good GCSE passes, as opposed to 61 per cent of girls. So it's not surprising that the Government has recently conceded that boys and girls may learn better separately in state secondary schools, too.
After my first term in a top girls' school, I now understand why girls' results are so good. For 15 years, I taught mainly boys. I was used to their sluggish ways. Then I started teaching English at North London
Collegiate School. I couldn't believe the difference. The main challenge in teaching boys is trying to shake them out of their torpor. Here, the girls are keen to learn and they make huge demands of their teachers.
Most refreshing is the climate of academic achievement. In some co-ed independent schools, the games culture - where hockey is more important than Hamlet - can rule; teachers have to overcome an "uncool to work" ethos. Indeed, the laddish anti-learning culture is one main reason why the Government thinks boys fall so far behind. At one boarding school I taught at, the boys hung out a huge banner on Speech Day, proclaiming that "Absolute Zero Effort is Cool". Silly boys would make sucking-up sounds if a keen pupil put his hand up in class. At North London Collegiate, there's a forest of hands when a question is asked.
It's a battle to get boys to read, but most girls I now teach have read classics such as Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations, and much else. You see girls walking around school with Isabel Allende novels under their arms. And it's highly rewarding to be able to suggest some wider or holiday reading without the class falling about in amusement.
My Year 8 class is studying Jane Eyre. There's no way such a book would be on the agenda for 12-year-olds at a co-ed school. The boys would take one look at the number of pages (nearly 500) and switch off - and put the girls off in the process. In my experience, boys cannot cope with more demanding works. That's why short, snappy, basic books like Of Mice and Men and The Old Man and the Sea are the staple GCSE set texts at so many co-ed independents.
At such schools, you're doing well if you manage to drum in a few basic literary terms, such as simile. Not only do girls know exactly what similes and metaphors are, but they understand alliteration, assonance and sibilance as well. And no time is wasted in class. Even a 10-minute slot at the end of a form period, when you've finished discussing the day's business, can turn into a debate on topical or moral issues, with all the class keen to contribute.
Girls as young as 12 and 13 regularly speak at school debating societies, growing in intellectual confidence. I was amazed at the levels of interest at North London Collegiate's literary and dramatic society, where around 20 girls meet each week after school to discuss writers such as Sylvia Plath, TS Eliot and Thomas Hardy over tea and biscuits. It's civilised, and the standard of debate is very high.
Girls seem so much more creative. Every teacher at a co-ed school will know the sense of tedium when school shows or satirical sketches are staged for charity. The material is tired and weak, and the same jokes about the same pupils and teachers crop up each year. At North London Collegiate, not only do girls regularly take assemblies themselves, they even manage to turn them into amusing events, full of wit and originality. And the highlight at the end of the autumn term is a special version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas", wittily rewritten, with the whole school singing along.
Of course, there are downsides to teaching so many girls. They can react in unexpected ways - like the time my Year 7 class all went "Ahhh!" when they saw a squirrel outside the window. But the biggest benefit is that you're teaching enquiring minds with a mature approach to study. And that's why girls' schools should lead the league tables for some time to come.
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Liberia gets all-female peacekeeping force
By Will Ross
BBC News
01/31/2007
A unit of United Nations peacekeepers with a difference has arrived for work in Liberia - they are all women.
More than 100 female peacekeepers from India are there to work as an armed police unit to help stabilise Liberia which, after years of war, is trying to rebuild its own police force from scratch.
Stepping off the chartered plane in immaculate blue uniforms and berets, the 103 women were immediately on parade and probably bewildered by the media frenzy.
It is just a coincidence that the first all-female peacekeeping force is in Liberia, the first African country to elect a female president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.
Crime is high especially in Monrovia and the war has left a degree of violence simmering just below the surface.
Terrible reputation
But having served in turbulent areas, including parts of northern India, the commander Seema Dhundiya says they are well prepared.
"These girls are experienced and have been trained. They have worked in areas of India where there was insurgency. They will do a good job and the Liberian ladies will get motivated and inspired to come forward and join the regular police."
The UN mission in Liberia, which will cost around $750m this year, is helping rebuild the country's police force from scratch.
During the 14-year war, the police were involved in the fighting and were steeped in corruption. Having acquired a terrible reputation it is now hard to persuade women to consider the police as a career.
The aim is for 20% of the force to be women. But reaching 6% is currently a struggle, partly because of the police's image but also because of the low educational standards of many women.
The UN is now running a special educational programme for women wanting to join the force.
On the streets of Monrovia the arrival of the Indian women is popular. Patience Coleman has a job with an anti-poverty NGO and is not tempted to join the police but hopes the Indian women will encourage some Liberian women to consider it.
"It is important for us women to stand up and say we can do it. Women are more caring than men. They have a natural gift so you will get a more caring police force."
Sexual exploitation
Liberia has an alarming incidence of rape which goes unpunished. The deployment of more female police officers could encourage the women and young girls to report the crime.
In the past, the UN mission in Liberia has been tainted by accusations of sexual exploitation: food given to teenage refugees by UN peacekeepers in return for sex. But Joanna Foster, the gender adviser to the UN Mission says that there is less sexual exploitation when more women are employed.
"It limits the sexual exploitation that our people get involved in. In the groups that have a lot more women we get very little reporting of sexual exploitation."
Joanna Foster is also keen to send a message to those training the new Liberian military.
"I understand they are not training the women for combat but with these women coming from India they are going to be a fantastic role model. So I am going to take all of them to the ministry of defence to show them you can train women in combat."
Being half-Ghanaian and half-Indian, Ms Foster has some idea of the cultural challenge facing the Indian peacekeepers.
"Being pretty is a disadvantage here. Indian women are pretty so they are going to be whistled at and all sorts of things but they will have to take it in their stride."
But don't be deceived by the looks.
I saw an enthusiastic salute by one of the Indian peacekeepers almost knock a journalist's microphone half-way to Mumbai. Stand back - these women are serious.
