Indeed what you say agrees with what friends and relatives in Brazil tell me (a cousin who is now living in São Paulo together with his girlfriend -- they now have a daughter -- told me a month or so ago, "yesterday I came home first, so I was the one to go get our daughter from the babá (the neighbor who takes care of their daughter after school for them) and cook dinner... can you imagine a machão nordestino like my father doing that?" (his father was a military engineer who would never have been caught near a stove even if his life depended on it).

Maybe I'm a little too critical of Brazilians. My time at school and in the university wasn't good relationship-wise, and I was actually positively impressed when I came to America and saw people actually thinking seriously about stuff like equality and how to treat 'different' people -- as opposed to Brazil, where "everything ends in pizza" and we usually don't take ourselves seriously. Yes, there is a good side to this "light-mindedness" -- what you called the "welcoming, adjustable" side of Brazilians. But there is also the side that doesn't want to face problems because "o que é isso rapaz, também não é assim, relaxa, leva na brincadeira, deixa pra lá, hoje tem jogo do Brasil, festa na casa da Ângela, rá-rá-rá, é tudo piada, isso não dá em nada, todo mundo quer levar vantagem..."

"Veado" ('deer' = 'fag'; I never met anyone who could actually explain the connection between 'deer' and 'homosexuals', except by suggesting that a deer looks naturally gay; do you think so?) is still everybody's favorite curse, ahn? In America, probably the gays would have reclaimed it as they did with 'gay' and 'queer'. In Brazil... I don't know. Somehow it would feel ridiculous if someone tried to do that. I can see all the Brazilian-style jokes starting the moment the gay movement tried to reclaim "veado". They'd say: "mas que veadagem essa dos gays, heim? gente cheia de frescura..." ;-)

Oh, don't pay attention to Stinks. He's one of the resident grouches. He's never happy with anything. I suppose he thinks it's irony; he thinks he's parodying Mr American-who-thinks-other-people-are-inferior.

I'll bet they have, hOtrOd.

Boys, on the other hand...

I have laughed at my share of not-so-funny jokes from men and women... just out of politeness. I didn't have to, but I didn't want the other person to feel bad either.

As long as "you don't have to" isn't taken to mean "you must not"... I agree.

If you've missed men sexualizing the issue of boys being sexually abused by women -- you know, the 'of course he liked it' part (remember that South Park episode, with everybody saying "nice!..." at the idea that Ike had been molested by his teacher?) -- then you're living in a different planet...

After all, women can't be child molesters, and if they molest children, they must be doing so at the behest of men, or because "it's more complicated than that."

Did you read that in Mr William's post?

Oh well. I guess you're allowed to be hypocritical. After all, you're just 'makinbg fun'. A joke--right? Hahaha.

I think it's important to make the distinction between some guy who molests his kids or step-kids and puts the pictures on the internet from a confused middle school teacher who sleeps with her students.

Sure, but Ms William's post is not about that. It's about sexual abuse of all kinds. Please, if you want to make your claim seem more convincing, add statistics. And discuss the ones she links to. If in your experience women are not pedophiles, that's OK. I don't know any who aren't either. But then again, I don't know any men who are murderers, and yet they're out there.

It seems to me, as the article suggests, that the main reasons why we would know less about female pedophiles than about male ones is (a) boys are less likely to report (the age-old stereotypes are that it wouldn't be 'manly' to report, and especially boys seem to still be very sensitive to what is 'manly'; besides he should 'have liked it' -- which is the male version of the 'but she enjoyed it!' argument used in date rapes), and (b) cultural stereotypes would make it less likely that a woman would be seen as guilty of such an abuse.

In fact, in a recent letter thread, I had myself asked for more stats on how frequent sexual abuse of children by women was. I had never heard much about it, and it struck be as common-sensical not to expect it. I'm glad to see data about it coming up here. We (at least I) need to re-evaluate current expectations.

I'm not surpised either.

I'm not surprised that your first post is to complain about someone disagreeing with a Broadsheet post, rather than to again complain about how Broadsheet is sooo feminist and anti-male.

Why am I not surprised? (Hint: the word is "knee-jerk".)

I've had the same thought -- and note that even though I disagreed with Ms Harding I at least read what she wrote and didn't go off on a different topic.

There's some interesting research to be done on the extent to which letter thread comments here at Broadsheet are about, not the post itself, but something the commenter thought the post would say (given his/her views of 'what Broadsheet is all about').

she's a local hero round here - before this happened.

Just want to point this out.

That doesn't jibe well with your first post.

Nice parody. :-)

No, obviously, he didn't.

Talk about knee-jerk antifemtards...

did you actually read Ms Harding's post? Specifically, what she said about Ms Munley and Mr Todd? I mean, did you miss the point about whether or not a lady marksman is still a "man-bites-dog" story?

And I thought only hOtrOd had problems with reading comprehension.