chuckbrown

... Or, yes, Virginia, there are double standards in this life. I thought the following article was a great example of the double standards involving men & women. Unfortunately, this one may be intruding into the legal sphere. __________________________________________________ Why Can’t They “Just Get Along”? V-Day meets P-Day on campus. By Christina Hoff Sommers Warning:The following contains adult (in this case, collegiate) language, along with gratuitous references to male and female genitalia. College administrators have been enthusiastic supporters Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues and schools across the nation celebrate “V-Day” (short for Vagina Day) every year. But when the College Republicans at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island rained on the celebrations of V-Day by inaugurating Penis Day and staging a satire called The Penis Monologues, the official reaction was horror. Two participating students, Monique Stuart and Andy Mainiero, have just received sharp letters of reprimand and have been placed on probation by the Office of Judicial Affairs. The costume of the P-Day “mascot” — a friendly looking “penis” named Testaclese, has been confiscated and is under lock and key in the office of the assistant dean of student affairs, John King. The P-Day satirists are the first to admit that their initiative is tasteless and crude. But they rightly point out that V-Day is far more extreme. They are shocked that the administration has come down hard on their good-natured spoof, when all along it has been completely accommodating to the in-your-face vulgarity of the vagina activists. V-Day has now replaced Valentine’s Day on more than 500 college campuses (including Catholic ones). The high point of the day is a performance of Ensler’s raunchy play, which consists of various women talking in graphic, and I mean graphic, terms about their intimate anatomy. The play is poisonously anti-male. Its only romantic scene, if you can call it that, takes place when a 24-year-old woman seduces a young girl (in the original version she was 13 years old, but in a more recent version is played as a 16-year-old.) The woman invites the girl into her car, takes her to her house, plies her with vodka, and seduces her. What might seem like a scene from a public-service kidnapping-prevention video shown to schoolchildren becomes, in Ensler’s play “a kind of heaven.” The week before V-Day, the Roger Williams campus was plastered with flyers emblazoned with slogans such as “My Vagina is Flirty” and “My Vagina is Huggable.” There was a widely publicized “orgasm workshop.” On the day of the play, the V-warriors sold lollipops in the in the shape of–-guess what? Last year, the student union was flooded with questionnaires asking unsuspecting students questions like “What does your Vagina smell like?” None of this offended the administration or elicited any reprimands, probations, or confiscations. The campus conservatives artfully (in the college sense of "artful") mimicked the V-Day campaign. They papered the school with flyers that said, “My penis is majestic” and “My penis is hilarious.” The caption on one handout read, “My Penis is studious.” It showed Testaclese reclining on a couch reading Michael Barone’s Hard America, Soft America. “Testaclese” tipped the scales when he approached the university Provost, Edward J. Kavanagh, outside the student union. Apparently taking him/it for a giant mushroom, Provost Kavanagh cheerfully greeted him. But when Testaclese presented him with an honorary award as a campus “Penis Warrior,” the stunned official realized that it was no mushroom. After this incident, which was recorded on videotape, the promoters of P-Day were ordered to cease circulating their flyers and to keep Testaclese off campus grounds. Mindful of how school officers had never once protested any of the antics of Vagina warriors, the P-warriors did not comply. The Testaclese costume was then confiscated and formal charges followed. It is easy to understand why school officials would not want a six-foot phallus wandering around campus; nor why they would ask students not to paper the college with posters describing all the things it likes to do. But that is just the sort of thing the vagina warriors have been doing, year after year, on hundreds of campuses. In fact, P-Day at Roger Williams was mild by comparison. Wesleyan College hosted a “C***” workshop; Penn State held a “C***”-fest. At Arizona State, students displayed a 40-foot inflatable plastic vagina. It was not confiscated and no one was ever threatened with probation. Unhappily, P-Day may be the only effective means of countering V-Day with all its c-fests, graphic lollipops, intrusive questionnaires, outsized effigies of vaginas and its thematic anti-male play. The prospect of public readings from P-Monologues on campuses around the country just might be the reductio ad absurdum that could drive the vagina warriors to the bargaining table. The student activists opposed to V-Day will gladly cancel P-Day the moment the V-warriors abandon their vagina–fests. But for the short term, college administrators should brace themselves. The rebels at Roger Williams are talking about a Free Testaclese Fund. And word is spreading to other campuses. P-Day and Testaclese will be back next year. And not just in Rhode Island. — Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She is the co-author of One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Undermines Self-Reliance, just out from St. Martin’s Press. http://nationalreview.com/comment/sommers200505020808.asp

The French don't have this problem for pretty much this reason. Well, the drinking young part anyway.

Read my posts from the beginning. There was no suggestion of double legal standards. In fact, in a later post I specifically indicated I wasn't referring to a different legal distinction between men and women. You're reading what you want to read into the post. Not the first time you've done that. There are social double standards between men and women. Why do you think men hold doors open for women and not vice versa? My opinion was the guy filing the charges was a pussy. Now, if there was something more involved, like the lady was a stalker, that's a different matter.

Couldn't agree more.

Differences are not necessarily inequalities. My whole purpose of posting in the first place had more to do with how men conduct themselves and not with how women are treated. Men and women are different, and I'd expect a man to act differently than a woman in certain situations, but that's just my opinion & I'm sticking to it.

You mean the pages don't stick together?

oh really? read what you wrote below... I'm not on a high hoarse, thank you very much. Don't accuse me of self-righteous triumphalism when you don't know me. The fact is that you're perpetuating an unfaire double-standard. It DOES exist, as you have said, which shows us you are master at stating the obvious, but it SHOULDN'T exist. If a male high school teacher comes onto a young girl, he's a pervert. If it's a female teacher coming on to a young boy, it's looked at as a huge score and an episode of getting lucky, of becoming a man, for the boy. Why would he be a sissy for filing charges? He should just let it go, like you said you would do? Sex offenders, what this woman was, aren't just men. And what they do is criminal. It should be stopped. Nowhere in that quote do I object to her being convicted. I stated what I would do, and that was not file charges. There are no statements in my post where I objected to the conviction. I said I wouldn't have pressed charges. That's all, and that's my right. Your high horse has obviously blinded your vision of the quote. I disagree that the double standard shouldn't exist. It's actually quite nice to hold the door for a woman. By the way, your analogy of male and female school teachers isn't quite apropo. Female school teachers spend time in jail for doing it with young male students. As well they should. Children are a different matter.

I didn't say the crimes should be treated differently. If one files a charge the case should be prosecuted irrespective of gender, and it obviously was because she was convicted. I never expressed any objection to her being convicted of the crime. Her conduct obviously met the elements of the statute. I said that the guy was a sissy for filing charges. Please read what was posted before you get on your high horse. Dude.

You're right, if an unknown woman entered my house and did that, I'd have a different take on things. I'd probably call the cops because there's a bigger problem. I'm not talking about biological or legal differences. There were no biological or legal distinctions here. My point was about social differences, which there are many between men and women.

No, she's a girl. Let's put you in the scene. Would you call the cops if a you awoke and a woman was attempting to perform a sex act on you? Would it matter if she was beautiful or ugly, or if you were married or single? Like it or not, there are differences between men and women.

more shitty double standards... c'mon people, wake up!!! let's take kennedy's example a little further... say it's your SISTER who wakes up to find some guy performing sex acts on her w/o her permission. what are YOU going to do? You'll probably want to rip off various parts of his anatomy. But if the genders are reversed and it's your brother in that position, you'll just tease him and call him a sissy... Let's get one thing straight. I have no problem with a woman calling the cops if she found a guy doing that to her. She's well within her rights, and I would definitely not cast any aspersions on her for doing so. Would I call the cops and put somebody through the criminal justice system because they did that to me? No. Even if I didn't want the BJ. For the same reason, I wouldn't call the cops if a woman slapped me. Why? The harm done to me doesn't justify the harm that the criminal justice system will do to them. Again, it's different story for a woman. Double standards? Life is full of double standards. Men and women are different in case you hadn't noticed. And women, in certain instances, like the double standard (as well they should). Get used to it. Edited cause my fingers are faster than my brain.

The Ice cream joke was about how DZ's look like on sectionals....Get one and have a look But you are correct about some pilots have no clue...Just like every other bias it is mostly due to ignorance. If I had a good aerobatic plane...I'd quit jumping. I know what they look like. I was also referring to people who merely learn to fly so they can go get a $100 ice cream cone (or hamburger or taco....). A double entendre, you know. I would have thought you'd have picked up on that. I'm with you on the aerobatic plane & quitting jumping. `

My take is that pilots who only fly for expensive ice cream cones tend to be intimidated by jumpers, and, therefore, are not very friendly. Pilots who live and breathe flying identify with jumpers much more, even if they don't jump; they understand our mutual love of being in the air. We have lots of aerobatic pilots who practice at my DZ. Everyone of them loves being around jumpers. They even throw us a party once a year because we vacate the airport to allow them to hold an annual competition. I will say that flying a Sukhoi through aerobatic manuevers is a bigger rush than skydiving.

One who doesn't like getting a hummer from a woman. What a sissy.

What Bigun said. If you're not ready for rough, off-DZ landings, you're not ready to come back. Edited to add: My personal experience is a cleanly broken fib (as in broken off) and a shattered tib. I was in a cast for 8 weeks and did PT like hell, including running at full speed over rough ground at night. When I felt comfortable doing that, I knew I was ready to come back. I jumped 7 months to the day after my injury.

? They're accountable for their official acts as judges, irrespective of whether someone thinks they're interpreting or creating law.

I have read them. Along with all of the other opinions. The judge found credible medical testimony that Terri Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state. There was no medical evidence indicating otherwise. And please don't cite Cheshire (or whatever his name is). He has no credibility in the psychiatric community and wouldn't qualify as a medical expert on persistent vegetative states. The original judges fact findings were reviewed and the appellate court judges didn't overturn them because there was no evidence that the judge was wrong. That's the way our legal system works. A judge who sees and hears the witness at trial is deemed to be the best person to evaluate the witnesses credibililty. Appeals courts will only overturn a judge's factual findings if they were obviously wrong. They weren't obviously wrong because they were supported by competent medical evidence which wasn't contradicted.

More rights for the people and fewer restrictions from the government - a conservative's nightmare. I gotta admit Kallend, that one made me laugh. Very good.

I don't agree. The Schivo case got to where is was "because" of a judge(s). And for DeLay, I think you confuse retribution and accountability. In our legal system judges and juries (but not elected representatives) decide lawsuits. The Schiavo case was a lawsuit filed by her parents, so a judge had to decide the case. That's the way our legal system works, and has worked for 200+ years. You just don't like the judges' decisions. Well, guess what, there's always going to be a loser in a lawsuit. Have you even read any of the judges' opinions? If so, tell me where you believe their legal analysis was flawed. By the way, the law Congress passed left it up to the "judges" to decide the case. They decided it, but since it wasn't the "right" decision DeLay had to go around harrummphhing about activist judges. Was DeLay demanding retribution or accountability? If the former, he's as low as I said. If the later, how are judges not accountable? State court judges certainly are accountable to the voters who elect them. As for Federal judges, they're accountable to Congress for malfeasance in office, not because somebody doesn't like their decisions.

Exactly. Some states (like PA) will recognize a waiver only if the person is 18+. Obviously, NC recognizes 16 as the age a person can enter into legally binding contracts.

Even if his comments weren't intended to mean physical harm (which I don't believe they were), those comments were completely beneath the dignity of a member of our representative government. DeLay threatened retaliation against other public officials who, in good faith, exercised their duties. Anybody who has any knowledge of the law knows that the courts couldn't intervene in the Schiavo case based on several hundred years of Anglo-American jurisprudential doctrine. Congressional intervention in that case was disgusting. You talk about activist judges? I find it interesting that those same politicians who are against activist judges also rail against federal intervention in state matters. They were pretty quick to abandon their principles when it served a supposedly politically expedient purpose. DeLay was throwing a hissy fit and made a spectacle of himself because the courts didn't kowtow to his whim. He even apologized for it.

I don't think that's because of Reid's ethics problems, but if it is I'll gladly stand corrected. They're all pigs at the trough. Sorry, I didn't mean to insult pigs.

The last I heard neither Pelosi nor Reid were subject to an ethics committee investigation, while one's just waiting to start on DeLay. The media doesn't pick who the ethics committee investigates. Edited for gramer.

I don't know about that. The Wall Street Journal did a pretty good hatchet job on him in today's paper showing that his trips on average are 60% more expensive that other members' trips. Hardly a liberal rag. The fact is that DeLay is the one in the spotlight, and trying to say everyone does it, isn't that great of a defense to the middle of the roaders (those outside the D and R bases). He's much better off coming clean and saying mistakes were made and he won't make them again. The fact is that he's been slammed 3 times by a bipartisan ethics committee. The vast left wing conspiracy defense won't work & it'll be interesting to see if he survives his congressional seat. Edited to add: According to the USA Today, DeLay has been admonished by the ethics committe 5 times since 1997.

Crack kills.