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In August, 2021, a new, shirtless figure appeared on Instagram and TikTok. With a great shaggy beard and muscles the approximate size and color of ripe pumpkins, he was part cowboy, part Conan the Barbarian. Im Brian Johnson, he said in his third Instagram video. My family and tribe call me Liver King. He is the owner of Ancestral Supplementswhich sells desiccated organ meat in capsule formand a walking marketing campaign.

Within eight months, the Liver King had amassed a million and a half followers on Instagram and nearly three million on TikTok. He was mellow at first, but he embraced the new persona, growing crasser and more meme-worthy, and less clothed. (On a podcast in March, 2022, he said that the Liver King broke out of his cage, and he fucking ate Brian Johnson.) Most of his videos centered on eating meat, lifting heavy stuff, and doing punishing, unorthodox workouts. His body, he said, was all natural, the product not of steroids but of exercise and eating animals.

The Liver Kings premise, a familiar one by now, is that we are mismatched with the modern world and that many of our problems can be solved by reconnecting with long-lost ways. He insists on nine ancestral tenets. These include reasonable suggestions like sleep, move, and bond, but, as he once explained, if I tell you all nine, you dont remember anything. Instead, he boiled his recommendations down to one: I say, Eat liver, because liver is king. The best-selling, stand-alone product on ancestralsupplements.com is Grassfed Beef Liver.

The craze for eating the way our ancestors did is nothing new; it has been more than two decades since the exercise physiologist Loren Cordain published The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat (2001), helping launch a billion-dollar industry. But the Liver King, along with a crew of other meatfluencers, has pushed paleo to an extreme of carnivory. They maintain that humans evolved to kill animals similar in size and constitution to domesticated cattle, to devour their organs (often raw), and to eat vegetables only in the most desperate of circumstances.

Forget the leaves and fibrous tubers, were going hunting! Paul Saladino (IG followers: 1.6M) writes in The Carnivore Code, the closest thing the new movement has to a manifesto. He asserts that this approach appears to be exactly what our ancestors did. (Saladino co-owns a supplement company, Heart & Soil, with the Liver King.) According to The Carnivore Code, plants are poisonthey dont want to be eaten, and have, as a result, evolved defensive chemicals designed to disrupt your digestion. Likewise, in The Carnivore Diet, Shawn Baker (IG followers: 319K) says that the most efficient way proto-humans got protein and calories was to take down a big, fatty, energy-filled megafaunal animal. They may have nibbled on the occasional fruit or nut, he admits, but the time and energy needed to get the same payoff would have been greater by at least an order of magnitude. The Liver King himself came up with the pithiest tagline: Why eat vegetables when you can eat testicles?

The notion of the meat-loving ancestor has a history. In the nineteen-fifties, the anatomist Raymond Dart, famous for discovering the first authentic fossil of an early African hominin, advanced what became known as the killer ape theory. Hunting, Dart thought, made us human. Our furry forebears climbed down from the trees to gorge on the more attractive fleshy food that lay in the vast savannahs of the southern plains, he wrote in the book Adventures with the Missing Link (1959). Elsewhere, he described the earliest hominins as confirmed killers: carnivorous creatures that seized their quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of victims and greedily devouring livid writhing flesh.

The killer-ape theory seeped into the mainstream. In 1955, Dart, then based at the University of the Witwatersrand, met the playwright Robert Ardrey, who was in South Africa for a reporting trip. Like a convert seeing the holy truth, Ardrey came away transformed. He was convinced that the predatory transition not only made us human but also explained what he described as mans bloody history, his eternal aggression, his irrational, self-destroying inexorable pursuit of death for deaths sake. Ardrey was inspired to write the Nature of Man series, a set of books about human nature and evolution, published between 1961 and 1976. Time later named African Genesis, the first in the series, the most notable nonfiction book of the sixties. It was cited as an influence on Stanley Kubricks film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), whose opening sequence showed primate violence as a turning point in the development of our species.

As Ardrey and Kubrick popularized the killer ape, anthropologists started to review the evidence. In 1966, at a meeting remembered in anthropological lore as the beginning of hunter-gatherer studies, seventy-five experts assembled in Chicago to synthesize our knowledge about foraging peoples. More than ninety-nine per cent of human history was spent without agriculture, the organizers figured, so it was worth documenting that way of life before it disappeared altogether. The symposiumand an associated volume that appeared two years later, both titled Man the Hunterexemplified an obsession with hunting, meat-eating, and maleness. Man was meant to cover all humans; hunter was shorthand for anyone who subsisted on wild food. The book devoted an entire section to the role of hunting in human evolution. Hunting is the master behavior pattern of the human species, a chapter began. It is the organizing activity which integrated the morphological, physiological, genetic, and intellectual aspects of the individual human organisms and of the population who compose our single species.

The meeting also revealed problems with the meat-centric story. Dart had asserted that all prehistoric men and the most primitive of living human beings are hunters, i.e., flesh eaters. But contributors to Man the Hunter showed how one-sided this perspective was. The anthropologist Richard Lee reported that the !Kung, one of the so-called Bushman people of Southern Africa, got two-thirds of their calories from plants. Nor were they an exception. When he compared fifty-eight foraging societies from around the world, Lee found that half got the majority of their calories from plant foods; another eighteen relied mostly on fishing. Only elevenless than a fifthrelied on hunting as their primary means of subsistence, and all but one were limited to either the highest or the lowest latitudes, far beyond our African homeland.

Since the publication of Man the Hunter, scientists have incorporated genomic as well as new archeological and paleontological methods into the study of diets from deep history. The details differ and its easy to get lost in the weeds, but the overarching message from each is clear: we evolved as opportunistic omnivores, Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, writes in his recent book, Burn. It includes a takedown of paleo-style tropes, including carnivory. Humans eat whatevers available, which is almost always a mix of plants and animals (and honey).

Pontzer shows just how far the consensus has shifted. Dart had insisted that Australopithecus, an early group of human ancestors, gulped down blood and guts, and yet scratch patterns on their molars suggest that they were lovers of tubers. Our more recent forebears ate plants, too, including ones vilified by paleo advocates. Consider Neanderthal diets, which Rebecca Wragg Sykes covers in vivid detail in Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. Neanderthals certainly ate big beasts; sites are filled with the bones of butchered bison and red deerthere are even indications that they took down mammoths. Yet Neanderthals living in warm, wet environs had tooth-wear patterns similar to those of agricultural peoples who eat lots of fibrous plants. Further evidence has come from investigating Neanderthals dental calculusthat is, from probing their plaque. Shortly before he died, an individual known as Shanidar 3 consumed dates, a lentil-like plant, and an unidentified tuber or root. The remains of two adults found in Belgium had traces of grasses and water-lily-root starches, suggesting that they had foraged for plant food. A sample from El Sidrn, in Spain, had no large-mammal DNA, but it turned up matches for pine, mushroom, and moss. Scattered morsels of prehistoric diets reveal an enduring taste for veggies.

No controlled studies have been published that validate the extravagant health claims made for the carnivore diet, but the meatfluencers are undeterred. In The Carnivore Diet, Shawn Baker lists eczema, depression, and fibromyalgia as ailments that seem to respond positively to the carnivore diet. The psychologist Jordan Peterson claims that a regimen of beef, salt, and water sharpened his thinking, cleared up his psoriasis, and eliminated his gum disease; his daughter, Mikhaila Peterson, insists that the same diet, supplemented with lamb, bison, and the occasional vodka or bourbon, cured her arthritis. In The Complete Carnivore Diet for Beginners: Your Practical Guide to an All-Meat Lifestyle, by Judy Cho (IG followers: 99.8K), carnivory is presented as a powerful remedy, with potential for alleviating depression, inflammation, eating disorders, and autoimmune issues.

Living off flesh alone is not easy, though, and Cho lays out suggestions for how to survive. Too much lean protein can cause problems, so make sure at least seventy per cent of your calories come from fat. Too little mastication can lead to constipation, so try to chew each piece of meat twenty to thirty times. Carnivores tend to have messed-up thirst cues, so drink more often than might feel natural. If you dont like meat, stop snacking until youre so hungry that it becomes appealing. To ease the transition, Cho offers various weeklong meal plans, along with helpful tables of permissible items and their nutritional statistics.

Some meatfluencers stress that human beings are animals and maintain that, if allowed to eat according to our animal instincts, we will favor a meaty menu. But the biologists David Raubenheimer and StephenJ. Simpson have been investigating animal alimentation for more than thirty years, and their new book, Eat Like the Animals, suggests that the meatfluencers have it all wrong. The authors started collaborating at Oxford, studying the eating preferences of locusts (grasshoppers, basically). First, they found that locusts preferred a certain ratio of carbohydrates to protein. When forced to live on foods higher in carbs and lower in protein, the insects ate a lot, becoming obese, and took longer to molt to adulthood. Conversely, when put on the insect version of the Atkins diet, they ate far fewer calories and were less likely to make it to adulthood. Second, they found that locusts with a decent food selection always ended up with near-identical ratios of protein and carbohydrates. Its as if, regardless of whether we were offered meat and pasta, or egg and bread, or beans and rice, or fish and potatoes, we always consumed the exact same balance of protein and carbs. The critters somehow track which nutrients are in which foods.

These findings arent limited to insects. Raubenheimer and Simpson have since determined that the pattern is widespread across the animal kingdom, from beetles to baboons. And they have found that protein-loaded diets dont just age animals; they kill them faster. Our sexy, lean mice who ate high-protein, low-carb diets were the shortest lived of all, they wrote of research published in 2014. They made great-looking middle-aged corpses.

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Is an All-Meat Diet What Nature Intended? - The New Yorker

If you live in California, New England, or a certain corner of the internet where Christian Reformed pastor Paul VanderKlay posts long, deep think pieces on the big questions of life, you might have heard of Estuary. Its a place where things get stirred up and people who might have been alienated from Christians are finding themselves in fascinating conversations with them.

CrossPoint Church, a large, multilingual Christian Reformed congregation in Chino, Calif., is home to the Inland Empire Estuary meetup group. Meeting since 2021, this group is part of a growing number of groups that use the Estuary model to facilitate two-hour conversations on big questions the group chooses at each session.

Many Estuary groups meet in person; some meet online by video conference. The Chino group was started by John Vandonk, a former CRC pastor who is one of roughly 26,400 subscribers to Paul VanderKlays YouTube channel. VanderKlay is pastor of Living Stones CRC in Sacramento, Calif. Responding at first to things he found interesting about psychologist, author, and speaker Jordan Peterson, VanderKlay started a thinking out loud YouTube channel in 2009. He hosts conversations and commentaries on cultural happenings, movements in the CRC, and the intellectual explorations of people like the controversial Peterson, Awakening From the Meaning Crisis lecturer John Vervaeke, and The Symbolic World commentator Jonathan Pageau. Vandonk encouraged VanderKlay to find a way to extend and improve on the disjointed and disembodied conversations comment sections on social media are known for. Together they developed Estuary to be a place and a way to have those conversations.

In addition to meetup groups24 are currently listed on estuaryhub.comthere have been conferences: in September 2022 in Thunder Bay, Ont., and in May 2023 in Chino, Calif. And Pleasant Street CRC in Whitinsville, Mass., hosted VanderKlay for a sample Estuary meeting Aug. 2.

The name Estuary was chosen because of the imagery it projects. In geography an estuary is where rivers meet the ocean. It is a sometimes chaotic space where mighty currents may encounter crashing waves, where floods may change the boundaries, where the water is neither fresh nor salt, but something in between, where shifting currents may alter the wetlands, the CrossPoint website explains. Vandonk said Estuary is a place for the exchange of ideas, where questions are encouraged, where judgment is not tolerated, and where finding answers is secondary to the journey. The discussion groups use specific protocols to ensure that their conversations are fruitful, nonjudgmental, and well-run.

Vandonk said its common for a group to include a wide variety of viewpoints, backgrounds, and religions. He recalled a meeting earlier this year where there was an atheist, a few Christians, a Muslim, and a Jew all participating in the same conversation.

The discussions we have are rooted around the bigger idea of what it is to be human; these are questions that every person of every tribe and religion is trying to answer, Vandonk said.

The conversations are not purposely centered on spiritual or religious topics, but VanderKlay and Vandonk each said the discussions theyve participated in usually turn in that direction because thats where the deep truths of what it is to be human lie.

Vandonk said he doesnt like to put too many labels on what Estuary is because then it limits what it can become. Estuaryhub.com offers this definition: Estuary is a place where people come for conversation. Honest conversation. Not ideological warfare, memes, and trolling, but mutually respectful attempts to understand one another, and to learn to appreciate different perspectives and viewpoints. Estuary is a place where different ideas and ideologies meet. Where participants allow themselves to be exposed to new ways of thinking, where listening may be as important as talking, where being open to feedback will force you to hear yourself think.

Although most Estuary groups on the Estuary Hub are in the U.S., there are some in Canada, Australia, Germany, and Greece, and new groups are popping up all the time. Many of the groups use Meetup, an online events calendar, to keep track of their gatherings. Leaders are encouraged to follow the protocols for conducting conversations so every group is run in a similar way. Leaders attend an online group to be introduced to the process, which Vandonk said is designed to ensure that the conversation does not become a debate about who is right or wrong and instead encourages mutual understanding and respect.

Spreading The Word

In August of 2022, VanderKlay and Vandonk took the Estuary concept on tour. They spent some time in Germany, introducing the conversation model in a festival format. It was an introduction for the uninitiated and encouragement for those who were already participating in online and in-person gatherings. VanderKlays online presence drew many interested people to the festival. Im somewhat of a celebrity, he said, albeit only in one specific corner of the vastness that is the internet. It is a great pleasure to meet people face to face after having shared many conversations with them via comment sections and forums.

After the trip, Vandonk, VanderKlay, and other festival speakers talked about their experiences on VanderKlays podcast.

A month later, several Estuary leaders and subscribers gathered in Thunder Bay, Ont., for a four-day event on Consciousness and Conscience. That successful conference sparked plans for an event this past May in Chino, The Quest for a Spiritual Home, which featured lectures, a tour of a Greek Orthodox church, and an afternoon of paintball. One of the conference attendees, Moises Pacheco, pastor at Grace in Garfield CRC in Chicago, Ill., said, The lectures and the panel discussions were really insightful. Having a couple of Protestants, an Orthodox artist, and a non-Christian cognitive scientist all talking about a spiritual home and seeing similar things and giving common language for it to (speak to) people from all over is something important.

Pacheco said that while many of the talks can be viewed online, the way most conference attendees usually consume content, the embodied nature of the conference gave the opportunity to do some things that are likely not common in an academic conference or even a religious conference with this level of intellectualism.

Vandonk said that many attendees expressed gratitude for the opportunity to meet people from different walks of life, different religions, and different backgrounds all coming together in an effort to broaden their understanding. Pacheco shared how one evening he, a Protestant pastor, ended up on stage singing Leaning on the Everlasting Arms with a Sikh man who seemed to know the song better than I did.

Nothing Quite Like It

VanderKlay and Vandonk share a passion for Estuary, believing there is nothing else like it around today. In a world of cancel culture, groupthink, and binary thinking, VanderKlay said, a space for the free exchange of ideas and experiences with fellow humans is a cool breeze on a hot day, a gentle rain falling on a parched landscape.

Lon Wagner, pastor of discipleship at CrossPoint CRC in Chino, called Estuary a ministry of the church, but not for the church, recognizing it instead as a place for people to ask questions and explore in ways they might not be comfortable doing or able to do in regular Sunday morning services.

VanderKlay would love to see every church have an Estuary group. In a YouTube video describing his vision, he said churches have a long history of hosting various kinds of not-specifically-religious groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, other recovery groups, or community groups, and theyd benefit from welcoming the spectrum of people Estuary groups attract.

Churches are too insular. Churches dont know whats going on in the hearts and minds of the people around them too often, VanderKlay said. Churches need these kinds of credible conversations that are on the edge.

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What Is 'Estuary' All About, and Is It Coming to a Church Near You? - The Banner

Its been a while since I watched Bill Mahers show on HBO, Real Time. There were times when many of Mahers opinions and views coincided with mine; while at others we were totally opposite. Which is fine with me. Mahers television personality is very strong: a comedian who enjoys making people laugh and generating controversy and being proud of it, like when Donald Trump sued him for $5 million because Maher made a joke that had to do with the possibility of Trump being the son of an orangutan. On the show, it doesnt matter the guest or the panel, the most important voice is that of old Bill. And that exhausted and bored me. But when over a year ago he announced that he would do a podcast, well, I got curious and so I began to see this surreal world called Club Random every single week.

Why? Because I wanted to prove something the only way possible: I once heard someone say that you only knew someone when they were drunk and after watching many episodes of Club Random, I can say that I know Bill Maher and he is a complete idiot.

A few months ago, in June, I read an article published in Mens Journal (obviously, Venezuelans favorite magazine) that said: Bill Maher rewrites the rules of podcasting the way he did on television in this series of one on one, hour long conversations with a wide variety of unexpected guests in the undisclosed location called Club Random. And I was like: this couldnt be for real. I later understood that it was part of an advertising campaign between Mens Journal and Bill Maher. But it doesnt matter. I am going to deconstruct and destroy this announcement.

The problem with Club Random is that no matter whos the guest, its always the same. It doesnt matter if its Carrot Top or the man who knows everything about anything you ask him and if he doesnt know it, he invents it (Jordan Peterson). The tone of the show and even the topics, conversations, always end up pointing to the same things.And this happens because by the time the podcast filming begins, Bill Maher is already high and nearly drunk. Meaning its almost impossible for any guest to express their ideas without Bill interrupting them.

Even a talking machine like Quentin Tarantino couldnt handle Mahers boring, goofy interruptions. So forget about Real Times sharp Bill Maher. From the first minute of Club Random, Bill Maher is wasted. And theres no way hes sharp, funny, or shows a higher level of intelligence thanBingo! An orangutan. And right from scratch, everything goes downhill.

Now lets go with what Mens Journal claims:

1. Bill Maher rewrites the rules of podcasting the way he did on television. I didnt know there were rules in podcasts because precisely the idea of making a podcast is not to have rules and to speak and do whatever you want. And when it comes to television, I have never seen something like: And if you want to make a television show you must apply the following rules created by the great Bill Maher.

2. Hour-long conversations with a wide variety of unexpected guests. True, the podcast lasts an hour or a little more. unexpected guests? Here I think its hard to believe Richard Dreyfuss or Ice Cube will appear out of nowhere, without warning. and Bill reacts: Oh, I didnt expect you, but welcome to this hour when I wont let you talk but instead will enjoy smoking and drinking and laughing at my own jokes!

3. Undisclosed location called Club Random. Well, I dont know if the Mens Journal reporter had ever seen an episode of Club Random, but he doesnt know that in each of the episodes, Bill takes pride in Club Random being the basement bar of his obscenely huge property. So about the secret location thingwhatever.

Bill Maher has been effusive and passionate about the legalization of marijuana and glorifies himself by announcing that he is a great pothead. So I also wanted to see how big Maher was while he was high. Lets just say: this guy should never smoke even a chocolate cigarette ever again in his life. Why? He turns disrespectful, egomaniacal, slow, confused and lacking topics of conversation that have nothing to do with Screw the Woke and the COVID vaccine. He couldnt be more random and lost than this. Hes a far cry from Tommy Chongs supe powers when it comes to weed. And unfortunately the chance of what could have been great conversations with very interesting people has been lost.

Of course, there are always funny moments, like the episode with Woody Harrelson that I stopped watching because neither of them simply understood what the other was saying. But if I recommend any episode, its the one with Bella Thorne, who actually has her own brand of weed. And I recommend this episode for the following: here we see Maher trying to make sexual comments, which he does every time he interviews a young woman, but in front of a Bella who puts him in his place by making him look like a slimy old man. And what I find most important and valuable: Bella showed him to his face that she is the true pothead champion: funny, articulate, shameless but always smart. Bravo to Bella, who wrote a real new rule: never try to beat me by smoking weed, Bill Maher!

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Don't Party With Bill Maher - Book and Film Globe

CANADA

Conducted by the Montreal, Quebec-based company Lger, a marketing and analytics company, the study surveyed 12,948 students in Albertas 26 public colleges and universities, and found that only 6% of students who have suffered sexual and gender-based violence (SG-BV) bring it to the attention of school authorities.

The main reasons victims gave for not accessing on-campus support are shame (9%), fear of retaliation by the perpetrator (7%), and not being believed, taken seriously or being gaslighted (14%).

At 74% the rate of SG-BV is highest among queer students who account for 638 of the students surveyed, which means that 472 of them have been victims of SG-BV since arriving on Albertas campuses. Around 93% of these students had been victimised before entering higher education.

Queer students also have the highest rates of sexual harassment: 71%. Two-thirds of students who identify as bisexual (1,380) or pansexual (265) are also survivors of SG-BV; between 59% and 65% of gay, lesbian, pansexual, two-spirited or questioning students, or 2,256 (14.4% of the 1,2948 students surveyed) also report being victims of SG-BV.

10% of all students, or 1,295, are victims of intimate partner violence; the percentage rises to 14% of lesbians and 15% of queer, pansexual and two-spirited people.

Awful, but not surprising

Generations of student leaders have been fighting for the provincial government to confront the pervasive impact of sexual violence within the post-secondary education system, says Chris Beasley, vice-president external of the University of Albertas Student Union.

So, when the results came out, they sickened me. They are awful, horrible. But they werent surprising. The data is reflective of the surveys weve run internally [at the University of Alberta in Edmonton], surveys that have been run in Ontario and other parts of Canada, he said.

According to Mary Jane James, CEO of the Sexual Assault Centre of Edmonton, the statistics in the report align not only with those from the University of Alberta (U of A) but also with international studies.

At first glance, it might appear that the studys finding that 86% of respondents agreed that consent was necessary before beginning sexual activity and 80% believed that you have to check in with sexual partners during sex to determine if they remain enthusiastic suggests that the existing consent training programmes run in Albertas colleges and universities are largely successful.

However, Beasley noted, it is important to look at what he called the negative.

The figures seem good. The report presents it as though 86% of people believe that consent during sexual activity is a good thing. But theres also the negative side. 14% do not agree with this and 20% do not agree with stopping to check in with their sexual partners if theyre physically or mentally unenthusiastic. These numbers are too high, said Beasley.

In Canadian law consent has a number of parameters, which are taught in the universities consent education programmes.

Consent cannot be given when intoxicated; it must be voluntary; it cannot be coerced. Consent is specific, that is, for specific acts and people; it cannot be given ahead of time. Consent is not the absence of no.

Rather, in the words of Consent 101: The (Sexual) Basics prepared by the Saskatoon (Saskatchewan) Sexual Assault and Information Centre and provided to University World News by Alexandra Ages, executive director of the Council of Alberta University Students: Consent must be enthusiastic. Consent is someone communicating yes with their words, tone and actions.

No easy answers

Beasley, James and Deborah Eerkes, the sexual violence response coordinator in the Office of the Provost at U of A and chair of the universitys working group responsible for the survey, told University Wolrd News just how difficult it is to explain how consent works to the last 14%-20% of 18- to 24-year-olds.

We have people at the university doing consent education. We have people at the sexual assault centre in Edmonton doing consent education. And the real struggle we have is that we have people coming to the training who already know consent is important, right? Were singing to the choir. We need to figure out how you bring in that other 14%. How do you get them interested, first of all, and second, convinced?

I dont have a good answer for you. I dont think we have one, before drawing attention to one of the key parts of what goes under the name of emotional intelligence, said Eerkes.

Consent is about making sure the other person is good with whats happening. If you have no empathy, if you cant muster that sort of care for another person, if you are more self-focused than other focused, then we are going to continue to have this problem, said Eerkes.

Campaigns against sexual harassment and sexual violence differ, Eerkes further explained, from the campaigns against smoking or drunk driving, which have pushed the percentage of Canadians who smoke down to 10% and drive impaired to 8%. These behaviours are easily detectable by people, which made making them socially unacceptable much easier.

But the social pressure that we get for the public type of bad behaviour doesnt exist with intimate partner violence and other forms of sexual violence that are very, very private. One of the things out of the playbook [of sexual assault] is to isolate the person and get them away from everyone else, said Eerkes.

Beasley, who is 24 and remembers what was taught in his high school, says, in theory, Alberta has a decent amount of sex education in its high schools. But it can be hit or miss between different school boards or even within a school, he said, before adding that this is why Alberta needs a provincially run programme that leads to the prevention campaigns in colleges and universities.

You have students from all over Alberta, who may or may not have had good sex ed, that may or may not have focused on consent culture. Then you layer in students that come from out of the province, who, again, have different sex ed curriculums and different understandings of consent that may or may not have been taught, Beasley told University World News.

Then you layer in international students that will come from all over the world with different understandings of consent. And, so again, ensuring that we create a broad-based culture of consent here on campus starts day one.

One option Beasley was keen on is used at the University of Lethbridge (Alberta) where, before you can even sign up for class, you need to complete a module on consent and healthy relationships.

Having a programme like that can help move the needle on consent culture, he said.

A survivor-centered approach

Beasley, James and Eerkes stressed the importance of both campus police and sexual assault centres taking a victim (or survivor)-centered approach. This approach begins with the police or sexual assault centre crisis worker believing the report.

After a victim comes forward, said Beasley, you can take different routes. You can be more punitive [that is, press charges] or if, say, it was sexual assault by a classmate, you can be separated from that classmate or stay in the same class with them. Or, you can say, I want this noted on their record or I want something else to happen from a spectrum of consequences. Or you can come forward to the sexual assault centre and decide to do nothing or have counselling.

We are not to judge whether that particular act of harm is something that the person should be concerned about, said James.

Cultural change

The responses in the part of the survey on beliefs about sexual or gender-based violence underscore the depth of the problem facing sexual consent educators. Almost 30% are uncertain about whether False reports of sexual assaults are rare. One half disagrees with the statement that If an individual is drunk, they might sexually assault someone, even though Canadian courts do not accept that intoxication is a defence in a sexual assault case.

61% of respondents are unsure of whether People are too easily offended by sexual jokes or comments (in other words, depending on the situation, they might think offence was perfectly alright). Even more striking is the fact that 14% three out of every 20 students believe that there is nothing wrong with a sexual joke that makes someone feel uncomfortable.

The high tolerance of sexual jokes indicated to James that little has changed from when she started working in the late 1970s, when she and her female peers endured a range of inappropriate behaviour including being leered at and being subjected to sexual jokes.

We still have a certain demographic that says, It was just a joke. Were just having fun. Why do you have to be such a prude? Why are you taking it so seriously? But it is serious. Its very serious. We have to recognise that that kind of behaviour is not okay. We dont have to accept it and just move on, said James

When discussing the surveys question about jokes Beasley was quick to shut the door on right-wing ideologues like Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson.

To oppose this is not Cultural Marxism or ideological purity. That 14% of postsecondary students across Alberta think that that others have to accept being uncomfortable or taking offence is one more indication of why we need more cultural change and prevention of sexual harassment on our campuses, said Beasley.

Possible understatement

According to Statistics Canada approximately 4% of the population or 1 million people are LGBTQ2+. Canadian law forbids discrimination based on sexual orientation or expression. Same sex marriage has been legal in some provinces since 2003 and nationwide two years later. There have been a number of openly gay or lesbian politicians, including Kathleen Wynne, Ontarios premier from 20132018, who is married to a woman.

The high rates of sexual harassment and violence against the LGBTQ2+ community stand out. But, as high as they are, Beasley told University World News, the study may be understating them because the survey was self-reporting.

My guess is that the numbers are quite a bit higher. What were seeing is people who self-identify or self-report as having experienced sexual- or gender-based violence. When we look at questions of stigma, obviously that stigma applies quite heavily for folks that are femme (that is, present as feminine), but for different reasons, it also applies quite heavily for folks that are masc., said Beasley.

Queer men are subject to the generalised machismo culture and internalised sexism or strongman ideals that pervade our culture and, thus, Beasley said, like straight men, socialised in a way that would depress reporting.

Eerkes also warned that while the study is a good indicator of the sexual health of Albertas campuses, the fact that it was voluntary creates an important weakness seen when comparing the percent of students who were victims of gender or sexual violence (50%) and those who admit to committing these acts (4%).

Theres a pretty serious mismatch here. My assumption is that those students who may have committed some forms of sexual violence would be less interested in responding to this survey, said Eerkes.

Its not about sex

The high rates of SG-BV, including 40% of straight students who reported having been sexually harassed, the 60% of questioning students who reported the same, or the 54% of asexual students who were victims of SG-BV, the 25% of bisexual and queer students who reported being stalked or the 15% of straight students who reported having been stalked, are not dealing with sexual situations, James emphasised. Rather, the harassers are asserting power.

At the end of the day sexual violence, sexual assault, rape is not about sex. Its about power and control; its about someone having power over another person, said James.

Sexual violence, perpetrated against straight students or members of marginalised sexual communities, as well as intimate partner violence in any community, has nothing to do with sexual gratification.

Its about someone who feels they have the right and the power to take advantage of someone else. This is a very hard thing to get people to understand because they want to think, Its just, you know, I got a little carried away with that person. I really didnt mean any harm. I just . . . I was just really needing to have sex. Well, what you really needed was to have power over a person you felt you could control. The sooner we can get our heads around that the better, said James.

A template to use elsewhere

Although the study focuses only on Alberta post-secondary students, Ages believes it can be a useful template internationally.

Sexual and gender-based violence is a global issue. Someone living elsewhere might very well have a different context of violence. But, they can look at this and say: Oh, yes. There is this community in Canada, and they conducted a survey which is going to help create a statistical picture of what the issue is, so that they can then work on solutions. Perhaps we can enact something similar and create a survey of our home to find out what are the areas that we need to work on to create policy solutions, said Ages.

There are a lot of different solutions to gender-based violence. We should all take the time to learn from one another and learn best practices so that we can find ways to end the crisis of sexual and gender-based violence.

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Report offers hope for moving the needle of consent culture - University World News

The job (if not the pay) was heavenly: each morning there'd be a pile of manuscripts waiting in the office for me to read: in the afternoon, I'd then try and distill the latest literary manuscript into just 300 words for a hardback, and 150 for a paperback (the two combined, for reference, is the precise length of this column).

It's one of those jobs that sounds easy in practice but hard to pull off in reality. As D. J. Taylor once said, 'Of all the minor literary arts, none is quite so delicate as the production of jacket copy.'

The blurb writer needs to reveal just enough about the story to entice the reader in, but not so much that you end up giving the plot away. When the book was brilliant, it was easy to gush praise: when it was less so, you had to choose your words more carefully.

My regular go-to term was 'absorbing', which might make the book sound unputdownable, but given you could use the same puff to praise a sponge, was my hint this novel was a bit of a damp squib.

Blurb writers rarely get their moment in the sun, but they've been blinking into the daylight this week following complaints from a number of book reviewers about how their words have been cut up and ended up on the book jacket.

The book in question was Beyond Order by controversial US thinker Jordan Peterson.

The back cover boasted praise from James Marriott in The Times, describing the book 'the most lucid and touching prose Peterson has written.'

Except that Marriott's original review had described one of the chapters as 'one of the most sensitive and lucid passages of prose' Peterson had written, which the the blurb writer had edited down to make the whole book sound brilliant.

In fact, Marriott had slated the book overall, describing it as 'repetitious, unvariegated, rhythmless, opaqueness and possessed of a suffocating sense of its own importance.'

I don't think I ever did anything quite as twisted as that, though I can empathise with the blurb writer reading a stash of bad reviews and struggling to find anything to put on the cover.

I remember writing a blurb for one book similarly slated the headline of one review simply read 'Trees died for this' but couldn't bring myself to repurpose that copy. I suspect I said the book was absorbing.

As George Eliot first wrote in The Mill on the Floss, don't judge a book by its cover!

Originally posted here:
Blurb writers in the spotlight due to latest Jordan Peterson book - Salisbury Journal