SelwynDuke.com

Lena Dunham, UVA, and False Rape Accusations

By Selwyn Duke    

Rape is a horrific crime. A false accusation of rape is also a horrific crime. Both can alter your life, tragically — and perhaps forever.

Rape has also figured prominently in the news recently, the big story being embattled comedian Bill Cosby, who has found himself accused of the crime by multiple women. But accompanying this headline-grabber are two more high-profile rape stories, both, it appears, involving questionable allegations.

When curiously famous Lena Dunham (shown) alleged in her recently published memoir Not That Kind of Girl that she was raped by a “campus Republican” while a student at Oberlin College, the blogosphere was aflutter with incredulity. And it now appears the skepticism was warranted, with an in-depth Breitbart investigation finding that Dunham’s claim “collapses under scrutiny.”

Read the rest here.

Liberals Tell Men to Keep Their Legs Together

By Selwyn Duke

New York City is becoming (in)famous for no’s. No smoking, no bake sales, no salt, no French fries, no large sodas, no butter in schools, no non-girly toy guns. And now we can add a new no-no to the list:

No “man-spreading.”

This refers to the habit some men have of sitting with their legs splayed out on city subways. And now the Metropolitan Transit Authority is launching a PSA shaming campaign — funded with tax money — to try to eliminate this widening problem.

This effort is accompanied by the usual leftist-values-laden, politically correct indignation. Writing at Time magazine on Wednesday, Brian Moylan opens with an obligatory misandrist line about how there “are lots of things that men do that are crazy” before calling man-spreading “the most visual manifestation of patriarchal privilege” and opining that this “is why it is especially angering.”

Read the rest here.

2014 Election: Blacks, Hispanics, Young and Women Still Reliably Liberal

By Selwyn Duke

The best predictor of future voting patterns is past voting patterns, to use a twist on a famous maxim. This is probably even truer of groups than individuals, and, despite some wishful thinking to the contrary, this election cycle was no exception. As to this, Silvio Canto at American Thinker recently asked “What Happened to ‘Demographics’?” in a piece in which he says that “people of color…don’t automatically vote Democrat.” Perhaps this means they manually vote Democrat, but, whatever the case, this person “of no color” is here to tell you three things:

Obama: Just Say No to Stay-at-home Moms

By Selwyn Duke

“And that’s not a choice we want Americans to make.” So said pro-choice president Barack Obama, speaking Friday on women and the economy at Rhode Island College in Providence. And some would say his remark was anything but providential, as the choice he referenced was that of mothers staying at home with their children.

To place Obama’s remark in context, he was advocating increased government pre-school so women could remain in the workforce and said:

Read the rest here.

Are Women Finally Trading Uncle Sam for Big Daddy?

By Selwyn Duke

The Drudge headline the other day read, “Poll Shock: Women Want Republicans!” The story is that for the first time in I don’t know how long, likely women voters want the GOP to control Congress, albeit by the slim margin of 44 to 42 percent. Last month the numbers were 47-40 in the Democrats’ favor.

Yes, this is just one poll. And, yes, smart money might still pick the Democrats to carry women in November. Nonetheless, this unique result does reflect something: the unique time in which we live.

Before getting to that, let’s place the poll in further perspective. Women have long been so solid a liberal constituency that the dichotomy between their and men’s voting habits even has a name: the “gender gap” (in non-Leftspeak language, the “sex gap”). How significant is this political difference? As pundit Ann Coulter pointed out during the G.W. Bush years, “In every presidential election since 1950 — except Goldwater in '64 — the Republican would have won, if only the men had voted.” Even the GOP’s banner election year of 2010, where they assumed control of the House in grand style, did not buck this trend; contrary to popular myth, women still went Democrat that year, 49 to 48 percent. Add to this that the recent poll showing the Republican shift is not from a conservative organization but is Associated Press-GfK handiwork, and you have something worthy of pause for thought. And what does it really mean?

Read the rest here.

The Rise of the Professional Slut

By Selwyn Duke

“There was a time when you knew who the bad girls were,” someone close to me once said. “Now you know who the good girls are.”

And I hear that all three of them are beside themselves over today’s state of affairs.

“Lena Dunham: I Was Raped By a ‘Campus Republican,’” the headline reads, introducing the “Girls” star’s story about an alleged sexual assault at the hands of a “mustachioed” conservative undergrad while a student at Ohio’s Oberlin College nearly a decade ago. It’s perhaps a fanciful story, the kind you might expect to read in the National Enquirer or The Sun right after “I Was Impregnated by a Space Alien” and “Loch Ness Monster Found Living in Central Park Lake.” I mean, really, are we supposed to believe this?

That there was a Republican at Oberlin College?

Equal Work? Government Has No Idea What That is

By Selwyn Duke

“Equal pay for equal work!” the mantra goes. “Women get only 73 cents on a man’s dollar!” These are oft-heard slogans, and we may well hear them again during the fall campaign with the War on Women afoot. Now, going beyond the rhetoric, it’s not widely known but nonetheless true that the intersex pay gap is attributable to different career choices men and women make: women tend to choose less lucrative fields (e.g., soft sciences instead of hard ones), work shorter hours even when “full time,” are more likely to value personal fulfillment and job flexibility over money, are more inclined to take time off, generally have less job tenure and more often decline promotions. But while I’ve examined these factors at length in the past, the topic today is something more fundamental. This is that there would be a problem with even a well-intended equal-pay-for-equal-work scheme:

Hardly anyone knows what equal work is.

And the government hasn’t the foggiest idea.

Michelle Obama Criticizes America at UN for Treatment of Women

By Selwyn Duke

In a recent address to a United Nations education event, First Lady Michelle Obama decided to shine the light on a certain nation’s treatment of women. No, it wasn’t Saudi Arabia where females aren’t allowed to drive, or the Congo where rape is brutal and systematic. It was the United States.

Here’s the relevant portion of the First Lady’s speech of September 24: “[W]omen here are still woefully underrepresented in our government and in the senior ranks of our corporations. We still struggle with violence against women and harmful cultural norms that tell women how they’re supposed to look and act.”

Now, it’s not just that singling out the United States for such criticism in our rough-hewn world is a bit like maligning a neighbor who wouldn’t buy his wife a new mink while ignoring the wife-beater across the street; it’s that, critics might point out, what’s explicit and implicit in M. Obama’s criticism is very much the opposite of the truth.

Read the rest here.

Liberal BBC Asks, “Is Sport Sexist?” While Promoting Inequality

By Selwyn Duke

It long ago became clear to me that, despite all the pretense, protesting and politicking, no one who has ever seriously thought about equality actually believes in it. When making this case, one could point to how Eric Holder’s DOJ is currently suing the Pennsylvania State Police for treating women equally (how dare they!), but there’s perhaps no better example than a recent BBC writer who asks, “Is sport sexist?”

The author, Aimee Lewis, poses the question because there are still sports where the women’s categories don’t precisely correspond to the men’s; for example, she mentions how women gymnasts and swimmers don’t always compete in the same kinds of events, the no-contact rule in women’s lacrosse and how in tennis, “While men play five sets at Grand Slams, women can only compete over three sets.”

Now, the last example well illustrates the convoluted thinking underpinning much of the equality movement. Is the correct way of framing this that “women can only compete over three sets”?

Or it is that men must compete over five?

Women More Likely to Commit Domestic Violence, Studies Show

By Selwyn Duke

Football player Ray Rice’s video-captured February attack on his then-fiancée has once again brought domestic violence into the public’s consciousness.

Or has it?

Critics would say that while it has placed a spotlight on violence against women, that isn’t at all synonymous with “domestic violence.”

Because studies show that most domestic violence may actually be violence against men.

Read the rest here.