Articles tagged with "man"

Louis Theroux's latest documentary, Inside the Manosphere, dropped on Netflix on March 11th. In it, Theroux hangs around a few notable influencers to see what's really going on.

John Campbell is back with Season 2 of his TV show Under His Command, where he takes a second look at the controversial Destiny church in four 15 minute episodes. This time John's looking at the church's “Man Up” program and talking to ex-members of the church, mainly anonymously as these apostates are taking a risk by speaking up.

Some of you may be aware of the MENZ (Masculinist Evolution New Zealand) website that Katrina mentioned in her article. menz.org.nz is a men's rights website that claims to advocate for men, especially in cases of custody rights, sexual abuse allegations, etc. The strapline on the site describes their remit as:

It's been interesting to see the world's richest man going toe to toe with the world's most powerful man. Nope, actually, interesting isn't the right word. I'm not sure what you call it when you can't tear your eyes away from two influential grown men acting like spoiled children. Maybe disappointing? Like when you tell your child you're disappointed in them. Anyway, Trump's still not pressed the big red nuclear button, and we're already nearly an eighth of the way through his presidency, so maybe we'll survive this yet.

If you are like me, you would have thought that Men in Black (MIB) was a delightful fictional creation appearing in Marvel comic books, as well as several television series which have embedded Men in Black characters, e.g. Section 31 (in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Enterprise), and the Silence (in Doctor Who). And we must not forget the two comedic films starring Will Smith as Agent J, with Tommy Lee Jones as Agent K; Protecting the Earth from the Scum of the Universe.

It's Christmas, so in the spirit of the season, 'living man' Roger William (née Roger William Blake), of Ngatea Water Gardens, staged another of his cantankerous one-person (if he currently is a person; it's so hard to keep track) pantomimes in front of long-suffering Judge, Brett Crawley at the Hamilton District Court on the 20th of December.

A couple of years ago, I was visited by a pair of kind, young Mormon missionaries. We spent a good hour or more chatting about their faith. Of course, being in the middle of a pandemic, missionaries had been unable to do their usual overseas stint, so the lads I had been visited by had come from Hamilton - not the most exciting.

In just a few days a curious annual internet event will begin: No Nut November (NNN). For those not in the know, nutting is a colloquial term for a man ejaculating - and No Nut November is the idea that it's good for people to take time off from ejaculating during November. At places like Reddit's “NoFap” group (fapping is a slang word for masturbating), people talk through November about how well they're doing with the challenge, which has somehow morphed from being an internet joke to something that many young men are taking seriously.

Just a friendly reminder that the Covid pandemic is not over. We continue to see cases and an alarmingly high daily death rate, which had an all time high of 32 people dying one day last week.

A friend sent me an article about a paper published recently in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion called:

A new locally made diet pill has gone on sale in NZ, and will soon be available in the US as well. Its makers are promoting the product at the moment

Newshub published an article about an 80 year old picture showing a native american man holding something rectangular with flat edges. Although it conceivably looks like an iPhone 5, as the article concedes it's much more likely to be a mirror or blade.

One in 13 men will develop prostate cancer before the age of 75.

I'm a men's health promoter working out of Christchurch and have some reflections after reading the discussions about the Cartwright report.

Intersecting as it does sex, religion, blood, medicine and masculinity, circumcision is a subject that is hard to discuss rationally.

Two fortune tellers apparently failed to foresee the end of their alleged scam in Christchurch (The Press, January 29).

Dr Mann's essay in this issue will annoy some readers, but it belongs here because it deals with one of the key debates of our time.

The Mysterious Origins of Man showed earlier this year on TV3 as a "documentary". It is likely to be a contender for this year's Bent Spoon Award.

Walter C Clark, Chuck Bird and Nicky McLean criticise Hitting Home for not investigating women's violence towards men, that is, for not being another piece of research altogether. When biologists can produce papers about the hairs on the legs of one species of fruit-flies, this does not seem excessively specialised. One reason that that was not done is simply money. To have achieved the same accuracy would have required interviewing 2,000 women, doubling the cost.

One of the arguments presented in favour of this year's Bent Spoon award was that the NZ Skeptics increasingly provide an early warning system against strange notions from abroad. For example, Skeptical activities helped New Zealand develop some early immunity to the worst excesses of the "repressed memory" virus. While many members supported the Hitting Home award on similar grounds, some members may have wondered whether Hitting Home was no more than a local aberration and that we were seeing international demons where none existed.

We have made a big mistake. Hitting Home is careful, thorough, mainstream scientific research. It may be alarming, but it is not, as we said, "alarmist". It is a serious attempt to measure men's attitudes towards, and the extent of, their violence. It is social science, not "hard" science, but it has done its best to attach figures to subjective psychological statements. If it can be criticised, it is for accepting the men's reports of their own violence at face value, when the biggest problem associated with men's violence is men's denial. ("I just gave her a bit of a tap" -- and she spent three weeks in hospital.)

My feeling after having read the report is that when it was ready for the printer, the authors had in fact reached the point where they were about ready to consult with people experienced in such research, as a necessary preliminary to the main investigation. I would have suggested a smaller pilot sample. This should have disclosed the pitfalls that lay in wait for them. By taking such steps they could have avoided the traps that they later fell into.

This year's Bent Spoon Award has ruffled a few feathers. In a controversial decision, what the Skeptics described as an "alarmist" Justice Department report on domestic violence in New Zealand has received the award.

At the Skeptics Conference in Christchurch in 1989, Denis Dutton mentioned that women's magazines offered horoscopes but men's magazines did not. There were two significant exceptions: the feminist magazine Broadsheet did not, but the gay (and nominally lesbian) Pink Triangle did -- a particularly bland and space-wasting one:

In this talk a journalist reflects on the rise and fall of a media superstar.

And there was the perhaps inevitable clairvoyant, offering to point out the location of the gold for a share of the spoils (he eventually told Kelly that he was looking miles away tom the right place). Kelly had never placed his faith in clairvoyants and he was not likely to now, but he allowed himself to be convinced that this one, a young African man, should be allowed a trial. In the event, all they got out of it was a memorably hilarious day.

God forgot to make, and which, therefore,

The Creationists' tactics in getting their ideas accepted are not to promote their own (the biblical) version of creation but to attack the "orthodox" scientific view. A constant barrage of criticism of evolutionary theory and of geological theories on age and origin of the earth (and universe) is levelled with the aim of discrediting the theory or theories. Then, with a nimble leap sideways, it is concluded that "The Alternative" explanation is just as likely to be true, "the alternative" being of course the Genesis account. This ploy cleverly presents the biblical account as a viable alternative to an existing scientific theory thereby conferring upon the account the status of an "alternative scientific theory" and obscuring its real nature—that of a religious notion. This constant attack forces scientists into a defensive position—defending their theories by rebutting the creationist arguments.

The Spectator, 20 September 1986

No two American faith healers are exactly alike since they are competing in a crowded market place, but they do have enough features in common to make a general survey possible. This account of how 'big name' healers work is put together from reports by skeptics who have attended their meetings.