The Atlantic: The Understudied Female Sexual Predator

Two years ago, Lara Stemple, Director of UCLA’s Health and Human Rights Law Project, came upon a statistic that surprised her: In incidents of sexual violence reported to the National Crime Victimization Survey, 38 percent of victims were men––a figure much higher than in prior surveys. Intrigued, she began to investigate: Was sexual violence against men more common than previously thought? [...]

In “When Men Are Raped,” the journalist Hanna Rosin summarized the peer-reviewed results that Stemple published with co-author Ilan Meyer in the American Journal of Public Health. “For some kinds of victimization, men and women have roughly equal experiences,” Rosin wrote. “Stemple is a longtime feminist who fully understands that men have historically used sexual violence to subjugate women and that in most countries they still do. As she sees it, feminism has fought long and hard to fight rape myths—that if a woman gets raped it’s somehow her fault, that she welcomed it in some way. But the same conversation needs to happen for men.” [...]

Among adults who reported sexual contact with prison staff, including some contact that prisoners call “willing” but that is often coercive and always illegal, 80 percent reported only female perpetrators. Among juveniles, the same figure is 89.3 percent. Queer men and women were two to three times more likely to report abuse. “The disproportionate abuse by female staff members does not occur because women are more often staffing facilities,” the authors write. “Men outnumber women by a ratio of three to one in positions requiring direct contact with inmates.” [...]

Stereotypes about women “include the notion that women are nurturing, submissive helpmates to men,” they write. “The idea that women can be sexually manipulative, dominant, and even violent runs counter to these stereotypes. Yet studies have documented female-perpetrated acts that span a wide spectrum of sexual abuse.”

They argue that female perpetration is downplayed among professionals in mental health, social work, public health, and law, with harmful results for male and female victims, in part due to these “stereotypical understandings of women as sexually harmless,” even as ongoing “heterosexism can render lesbian and bisexual victims of female-perpetrated sexual victimization invisible to professionals.”

Jakub Marian: Percentage of pupils learning French by country in Europe

French was and to a certain degree still is one of the most influential languages in the world. It is one of the official languages of the UN, EU, NATO, OECD, and other important organizations, so it shouldn’t be surprising that it is one of the most widely studied foreign languages in the world, with over 150 million non-native speakers.

The following map (based on data by Eurostat from 2012) shows the percentages of pupils in general (non-vocational) upper secondary education who learn French in European countries: [...]

Finally, readers not familiar with the linguistic situation in Europe may be surprised by the isolated large percentage in Romania. This is caused by the fact that Romanian, just like French, is a Romance language, so French is the easiest major world language for Romanians to learn. French is also likely studied by a majority of pupils in Moldova, where Romanian is the most common native language, but Eurostat unfortunately does not provide any data for Moldova.

read the article 

VICE: Photos of the Homes Polish Immigrants Left Behind

There are currently 9.5 million Poles living in the United States, and many of them have their roots in the beautiful, but historically poorer, mountain region of Podhale. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, a number of Polish highlanders emigrated to America. But they hoped to come back one day and use the favorable exchange rate to build spacious mansions. However, various circumstances—be it better social care for the elderly, or their children not wanting to leave the place they'd been born for a land they barely knew—kept many of them in the US. So many of these mansions were left unfinished.

Warsaw-based photographer Natalia Dołgowska was born in Zakopane, which is Podhale's biggest town. Last year, she traveled back to her home region to photograph the empty buildings that belong to Podhale immigrants in America, as well as photos of their new lives, which they mailed to relatives back home. "I realized that all my childhood, I've been feeling close to America. Growing up, I always envied my friends who had family there—their plastic Christmas trees, their bubble gum, and their flashy sneakers," Natalia said to VICE Poland.

see the photographs 

Al Jazeera: The young Muslims finding love via an app

For the past four weeks, she has been using Muzmatch, a smartphone app for Muslims to meet potential marriage partners. But unlike well-established dating apps, such as Tinder and Hinge, Muzmatch specifically caters to Muslims searching for a spouse - giving young Muslims greater influence in finding the right mate. [...]

Dating is often prohibited in Muslim families. Traditionally, family members are often directly involved in seeking and vetting possible partners - and the couple's respective families often meet to approve the marriage. [...]

The app markets itself solely to Muslims seeking marriage. It claims to have more than 120,000 users across 123 countries, about two-and-a-half years after launching. About two thirds of users are men. The UK, its home country, is its biggest market, followed by the US, Canada, Pakistan and Australia, but it also caters to singles in Indonesia, India, Morocco, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia, among others. [...]

Muzmatch's religious parameters, which members can check off, include the sect of Islam and things such as how often they pray. A wali, or guardian, can be nominated as a third-party moderator to monitor chats within the app, and photos can be made private.

Education levels are also delineated, and the app is conscientiously aspirational. Mocked-up promotional material presents two Yale graduates using its messaging service - Muzmatch says about 71 percent of its users are university-educated.

read the article 

Nautilus Magazine: How the Western Diet Has Derailed Our Evolution

A group of Italian microbiologists had compared the intestinal microbes of young villagers in Burkina Faso with those of children in Florence, Italy. The villagers, who subsisted on a diet of mostly millet and sorghum, harbored far more microbial diversity than the Florentines, who ate a variant of the refined, Western diet. Where the Florentine microbial community was adapted to protein, fats, and simple sugars, the Burkina Faso microbiome was oriented toward degrading the complex plant carbohydrates we call fiber. [...]

“It was the most different human microbiota composition we’d ever seen,” Sonnenburg told me. To his mind it carried a profound message: The Western microbiome, the community of microbes scientists thought of as “normal” and “healthy,” the one they used as a baseline against which to compare “diseased” microbiomes, might be considerably different than the community that prevailed during most of human evolution. [...]

Many who study the microbiome suspect that we are experiencing an extinction spasm within that parallels the extinction crisis gripping the planet. Numerous factors are implicated in these disappearances. Antibiotics, available after World War II, can work like napalm, indiscriminately flattening our internal ecosystems. Modern sanitary amenities, which began in the late 19th century, may limit sharing of disease- and health-promoting microbes alike. Today’s houses in today’s cities seal us away from many of the soil, plant, and animal microbes that rained down on us during our evolution, possibly limiting an important source of novelty. [...]

The problem with the fiber hypothesis, however, has always been twofold. People who eat plenty of fiber seem to have a lower risk of many diseases, including heart disease and diabetes. But when scientists have fed fiber to volunteers, they haven’t historically observed much benefit. And this underscores the real mystery: By what mechanism does fiber improve health?

read the article