KC Johnson, author of Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case has a good piece in “Minding the Campus” on sexual assault claims on campus (via the Advice Goddess):

As university after university follows the OCR’s mandate to lower the threshold for evaluating campus sexual assault claims–and thereby to increase the likelihood of convictions from false accusations–it’s worth keeping in mind cases in which even the pre-”Dear Colleague” procedure broke down. Caleb Warner’s is one such case; William McCormick’s is another.

It was easy enough to accuse men of sexual assault on campus before colleges started following the OCR’s mandate to lower the threshold for evaluating campus assaults. I wonder how many more young men will be accused falsely because of this new mandate and how many more men will avoid college altogether when the stakes get too high?

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A reader (thanks!) sent me a link to a CNN story on Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan’s new book The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It. The article discusses how porn and video games are ruining a generation of guys:

Is the overuse of video games and pervasiveness of online porn causing the demise of guys?

Increasingly, researchers say yes, as young men become hooked on arousal, sacrificing their schoolwork and relationships in the pursuit of getting a tech-based buzz.

Every compulsive gambler, alcoholic or drug addict will tell you that they want increasingly more of a game or drink or drug in order to get the same quality of buzz.

Video game and porn addictions are different. They are “arousal addictions,” where the attraction is in the novelty, the variety or the surprise factor of the content. Sameness is soon habituated; newness heightens excitement. In traditional drug arousal, conversely, addicts want more of the same cocaine or heroin or favorite food.

The consequences could be dramatic: The excessive use of video games and online porn in pursuit of the next thing is creating a generation of risk-averse guys who are unable (and unwilling) to navigate the complexities and risks inherent to real-life relationships, school and employment.

Apparently, all this porn and video gaming is making guy unable to commit or do well in school:

Such new brains are also totally out of sync in traditional school classes, which are analog, static and interactively passive. Academics are based on applying past lessons to future problems, on planning, on delaying gratifications, on work coming before play and on long-term goal-setting.

Guys are also totally out of sync in romantic relationships, which tend to build gradually and subtly, and require interaction, sharing, developing trust and suppression of lust at least until “the time is right.”

Yep, it’s the guys fault and their brains are just screwed up from the gaming and porn-watching. School didn’t used to be so static, but now that it’s geared for the passive and inert, maybe it’s just boring and guys aren’t connecting. Instead, they are connecting to something that gives them more control and satisfaction. Besides, if they do say something “lustful” at school, they might be expelled for sexual harrassment. At least gaming and porn won’t bore you to death or  get you in legal trouble (yet).

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John Hawkins at RWN interviews Stacy McCain About Brett Kimberlin.

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Vox Day on Scalzi’s post on “white male privilege”:  A failure in condescension.

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I have a post up at the PJM Tatler on Uncle Tims and why they put down other men. You can read it and respond there (or here if you want);

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In an interesting article at the Guardian about a new book coming out in the UK on the bias against men, there is this (via Instapundit):

The American men’s rights author Warren Farrell calls it “the glass cellar”. There might be a glass ceiling for women, Farrell once told the Observer, but “of the 25 professions ranked lowest [in the US], 24 of them are 85-100% male. That’s things like roofer, welder, garbage collector, sewer maintenance – jobs with very little security, little pay and few people want them.”

Do Benatar and Farrell have a point? A handful of statistics seems to bear out their thesis. Not only are men more likely to be conscripted into military service, to be the victims of violence, and to lose custody of their children in the event of a divorce, but tests conducted in 2009 by the programme for international student assessment, carried out by the OECD thinktank, showed that boys lag a year behind girls at reading in every industrialised country.

Are men the new “Second Sex”? It seems like in a lot of ways, the answer is “yes.”

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Susan Gregory Thomas, author of In Spite of Everything: A Memoir has an interesting article in the WSJ entitled “Are Dads the New Moms?”:

Though losing ground as husbands and providers, men are finding a new role—as rock-solid fathers….

Even as men have made great strides as fathers, however, they can find themselves rudderless as spouses. “We’re getting a new cultural script for a ‘new dad’ but not for a ‘new husband,’ ” says W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project. “That married people with children now often refer to themselves as a ‘stay-at-home mom’ or ‘stay-at-home dad’ instead of as ‘wife’ or ‘husband’ signals that we now prioritize parenthood over marriage itself.”

As men try to be better dads, they are running into the familiar difficulty of balancing kids, career and marriage—a problem that women have been trying to manage since the 1970s. With men as with women, it is marriage itself that often gets short shrift.

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This is a comment over at CNBC in response to an article on how the divorce rate is falling due to two-income couples:

Suzanne Doyle-Morris, author of “Female Breadwinners: How They Make Relationships Work”  believes improved education levels and later-in-life marriages are the biggest factors in the divorce decline.

Bringing Home More Bacon

And that gives Doyle-Morris optimism for the ability of couples where women aren’t just in the workforce, but out-earning their husbands, to stay married.

In relationships where one partner earned at least 60 percent of the household income, women were the bigger earner only about 4 percent of the time in 1969, she says; now, women are the big earner in 25 percent to 30 percent of those relationships.

“Couples will become increasingly comfortable with ebbing and flowing economically in the relationship — a woman who says, ‘I’m supporting him now as he goes back for an MBA, because he supported me when I started my business,’” Doyle-Morris says. “Resentful males — and resentful females — will decrease with time.”

But the key in to why divorce is lower might be the following:

And many marriages that might have ended in divorce are not occurring in the first place. Nearly 90 percent of men born from 1940 to 1944 got married by age 35; that rate fell 14 percentage points for the group born between 1965 and 1969.

The rate for men getting married is even lower now. Though I doubt this the main reason men don’t get married, I wonder how many more marriages would occur if women started picking up the check more often?

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The Wall Street Journal: The XX Factor: What’s Holding Women Back?

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I have a post at the PJ Tatler about how the men in Julia’s life will fare in the Obama regime.

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