Male support groups set up at universities.

What do people think?

[My first impression is that they will mostly pointless self-pitying competitive circle jerks, but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise :).]

And today brings another entirely ridiculous post on Harry's Place about Pennyred (I don't want to link there, since yesterday links there were taking people to a malware site).

Pennyred wrote a long and interesting rebuttal to the first post on her blog. At one point she said that calling her a "silly cow" was sexist. HP contributor Marcus did not respond to her other points but decided to write a post about how working class northern people use silly cow all the time, and that only middle class liberals get offended about things like that.

What a bizarre argument. Why on earth is the use of certain language not sexist just because northerners supposedly use it? That is very strange. I believe that thinking that foreigners should go away and stop taking our jobs is a belief that is held by some working class people. Am I wrong to disagree with them because I'm middle class? Is it not racist because they're working class?

But I guess HP have always made these ridiculous arguments. As frightened mentioned on the comments to my previous post they argued years ago that being anti-war was wrong because anti-war activists eat Brushetta or something.

I haven't read Harry's Place for years. But coming back to it, I am so surprised that people who see themselves as being champions of reason make such unthinking, irrational arguments.

ETA: Perhaps HP are being anti-marxist false consciousness when they make arguments like this. Perhaps they think that the notion that the working classes have bad ideas due to false consciousness is patronising, and something that Bruschetta eating liberals think. Therefore saying that any language working class people use is good is a response to that? Maybe? It would be a ridiculously irrational response, but it might explain it.

I have to admit that I rather like this Tanya Gold article on prostitution. I'm impressed that she links to actual research (click here - link is broken on the Guardian), since journalists rarely do that.* And I'm also glad to see an article on prostitution that doesn't make it look glamourous and exciting.

I haven't quite decided what I think about it, and I probably disagree with Gold about legalisation, but I'm glad to see that someone (who isn't Julie Bindel) is making the argument that being a "happy hooker" is actually pretty damn uncommon.

*I will admit, I haven't had time to check to quality of the research - feel free to tell me if it's not very good.

ETA: Pennyred wrote a response to the article here!

Harry's Place attack Pennyred in quite an unpleasant and horribly personal way.

The bloggers at HP see themselves as being champions of reason, but for some reason they think that attacking someone's upbringing and personality is an effective argument against an article they wrote. Whatever Pennyred's upbringing, they should argue against her article if her ideas are wrong, and they should explain why those ideas are wrong.

I used to be attacked a lot for being a middle class lefty student, and I always found those arguments to be unbelievably ridiculous - tell me why my arguments are wrong rather than attacking and belittling me because of my perceived upbringing.

ETA: I've broken the first link since it seems to go to somewhere firefox thinks is a malware site! Go to the Harry's place website, and look for the article "Penny Dreadful" if you want to read it.

I know I've posted a similar poll before, but my flist has probably changed since then :).

Poll #1482222
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 54

Would you call yourself a feminist?

David Howarth is standing down. That is bad news. I'm not a exactly a lib dem supporter, but he was an excellent MP.

Holy Fuck. Tories plan to privatise royal mail in its entirety.

*reads comments to post from earlier*

God it's so strange that so many of you grew up thinking that you were going to die in a nuclear attack. I'm only about a decade younger than many of you, and I didn't have that experience at all.

A question mostly for those of you who are a bit older than me - before the end of the cold war, were you very worried about the nuclear bomb threat?

What do those of you who are my age think about the issue?