Dave Thompson (@PadovaGozzi) header
Dave Thompson (@PadovaGozzi) profile picture

History writer. Author of 'Casanova's Life & Times' and 'Casanova & Enlightenment'. Unaffiliated political and ideological eclectic. Teacher in a previous life.

Joined May 2015
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In antiquity, Christians were derided as atheists. In the 18th century progressive Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire were derided as libertines. Today those, such as Jordan Peterson, who address issues negatively affecting men, are derided as members of the manosphere.
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Research comparing the emotions expressed in feminist, men’s rights, and incel Reddit communities. A computational analysis classified “hate” as the predominant emotion for approximately 13% of the analyzed r/Feminism users 8–10% in r/MensRights and r/Incels nature.com/articles/s41598-0…
Published today in The Lancet. "The manosphere, a diffuse commercial ecosystem and loose collection of online communities united by shared beliefs about masculinity, misogyny, and male victimisation, is an under-recognised determinant of health harms. This network has been implicated in considerable health harms: widespread mental health impacts, especially in young people; violence against women, girls, and gender minorities; and delegitimising help-seeking in boys and men. In this Viewpoint, we argue that the manosphere is best understood and addressed as a public health problem."
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BBC gamma bias. A woman's outstanding achievement is celebrated as a reflection of not just her as an individual but her as a woman (eg Dolly Parton). In the last week, Harry Kane won the Ballon d'Or and Patrick Stewart died. In neither case has the BBC celebrated them as a man.
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Incredibly damning testimony from Kristin Knouse in which she is forced confirm that she selectively released and excerpted texts with @DMSabatini to create a false impression about the nature of her relationship with him. The Whitehead Institute relied on Knouse’s misleading production of texts in its investigation of Sabatini. The investigation and the investigative report were the basis for Sabatini’s dismissal from Whitehead, the elimination of his tenure at @MIT and his loss of funding from HHMI. I have only one ask of these institutions: Listen to this testimony and ask yourself why the Whitehead, MIT and HHMI should not be forced to revisit its findings and the resulting actions that resulted. Institutional character and morality matters. You convicted Sabatini and destroyed him on the basis of false information provided to you. How can you not revisit the harm that you have caused to David now that the facts are known and been confirmed by a jury of seven women and six men in a three week trial with the benefit of the actual evidence and testimony? When a man is convicted of a crime that he did not convict based on false testimony, and the courts ultimately reverse the decision based on DNA evidence, he is released from prison and he receives compensation for the damage caused to him by the state. As far as MIT, Whitehead and HHMI are concerned, David is still in prison. It is time that you release him.
🤯 “I know what I want and I go after it.” MeToo hoaxer Dr. Kristin Knouse gets grilled on her deliberate withholding of incriminating texts from the investigation into MIT professor David Sabatini—whose career and life Knouse destroyed with her false allegations. Knouse withheld texts that exposed her as a sexual aggressor.
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And tweet of the week goes to...
If roles were reversed, and it were a male politician making this face whilst a woman was addressing the parliament, it would kick off an "urgent national conversation" about how disrespectful Australian men are to women, misogyny, the political boys club, male entitlement, the manosphere, rape culture, how this perpetuates male violence against women, and on, and on, and on. Albanese would probably order a Royal Commission. When @sarahinthesen8 does it to @senatorbabet there's crickets.
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“Ms Lam has….never been convicted, because criminal charges she initially faced were later found not to apply to women in the 1970s” “Her defence…maintains that she…could not have foreseen the relevant harm of her actions…” Unbelievable’ abc.net.au/news/2026-10-29/n…
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When significant funding goes into tackling misogyny but not a penny goes into even considering examining the effect of misandry, perhaps this tells us how privileged men really are…
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… and 3 in 4 civilians killed were boys and men, who are completely ignored and devalued by the UN. Of course we want to protect girls and women in conflict zones, but this post almost comes off as a joke.
25 women and girls. That’s how many were killed 𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙮 𝙙𝙖𝙮 in conflict zones in 2025. #Peace must mean safety for women and girls. 🔗 More on the @UN Secretary-General's report on #WomenPeaceSecurity: unwomen.org/en/news-stories/… #ForAllWomenAndGirls
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
According to the same UN report, women and girls accounted for one in four of over 37,000 civilian deaths in 2025. Men and boys were the remaining three-quarters. The report notes men are still likelier to be killed. unwomen.org/en/articles/fa…
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🚨ALERT: The editors of the journal Men and Masculinities will no longer allow authors to refer to individuals as being "male." If an author uses the term, they should "specify which dimension(s) of sex are at issue, since sex itself refers to several only loosely correlated dimensions rather than a single underlying fact." For example, trans-identifying male swimmer Lia Thomas must be referred to as a woman, and his maleness, if mentioned at all, must be attached to specific traits, like genitals, hormones, and chromosomes. You cannot call Lia Thomas a "male" in this journal, but a woman with "male genitals" and "male sex chromosomes." The first author of this editorial—the Managing Editor of Men and Masculinities, Tristen Kade—is a woman who identifies as a man. The model of biological sex this editorial is pushing is what I refer to in my scholarly article "Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes" as the "multi-level" sex model. This model is not merely wrong—it is self-refuting. From my article: "Traits are labeled 'male-typical' or 'female-typical' only because they correlate with organisms already identified as male or female—an identification that, in anisogamous species, is made ultimately by reference to gametes." Read my article at the link below. 🔗link.springer.com/article/10…
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Here's why there are entire fields in academia where no questions that challenge the status quo can even be broached.
This is how academics ensure some questions become "settled." Gatekeepers at ideologically captured journals set the rules that preclude any opposition. Years later, since no contrary views can be found in the peer-reviewed journals, it must be a settled question. Voila.
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Just 91 of 590 articles (15%) published in Psychology of Men & Masculinities between 2000 and 2018 had a positive focus. This is outrageous. Our society today is anti-men at its core, and this needs to change!
A review of 65 masculinity measures classified 51 (78%) as deficit-focused, emphasizing negative outcomes associated with masculinity Only 14 (22%) included ANY attention to masculinity’s strengths. That does not mean those measures focused primarily on strengths Just 91 of 590 articles (15%) published in Psychology of Men & Masculinities between 2000 and 2018 had a positive focus
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In 1999, hit songs by female artists talked about how much they loved their boyfriends. By the early 2020s, they were more likely to talk about how much they hated their exes and how angry they were. You can see increasing negativity in pop culture. richardhanania.com/p/changes…
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Desde que mi ex ha dejado de atacarme con denuncias falsas ya han pasado unos años. Me he recuperado bastante emocionalmente, pero hay un síntoma del TEPT-C que perdura. El sueño roto. No he vuelto a dormir como antes. Hoy, a las 3:30 desvelado
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A review of 65 masculinity measures classified 51 (78%) as deficit-focused, emphasizing negative outcomes associated with masculinity Only 14 (22%) included ANY attention to masculinity’s strengths. That does not mean those measures focused primarily on strengths Just 91 of 590 articles (15%) published in Psychology of Men & Masculinities between 2000 and 2018 had a positive focus
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And then remember that there are people like Owen Jones defending it.
I read the accounts of Jewish children being mocked with talk of gas chambers by other children. I want people to imagine the outrage if black children were mocked by others with talk of lynching and slavery. This is every bit as offensive.
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Researchers proved every major LLM is secretly biased against men. And they finally figured out why. They ran eight experiments testing how GPT handles gender in everyday text and high-stakes moral dilemmas. The results show a bizarre, highly asymmetrical machine morality. First, they tested inclusivity. They gave the AI phrases supposedly written by children. When a child wrote about playing football or wanting to be a firefighter, GPT aggressively identified the writer as a girl to promote "diversity." It was so extreme that even when the text explicitly said, "I drew myself as a boy," the AI ignored the facts and declared the writer a girl 90% of the time. But when a child wrote about liking pink or playing with dolls, GPT almost never assigned it to a boy. The AI aggressively pushed females into male domains, but kept males strictly locked out of female ones. Then the researchers tested moral dilemmas. And it got very dark. They asked the AI if it was acceptable to use violence against a single person to prevent a nuclear apocalypse. If the target was a man, GPT-4 rated the violence as highly acceptable. If the target was a woman, the AI refused. It declared the violence morally wrong, even to save the world. When they tested mixed-gender scenarios, the math was staggering. A woman using violence against a man to stop an apocalypse? GPT rated it a 7 out of 7 on acceptability. A man using violence against a woman for the exact same reason? A 1 out of 7. The AI even classified verbal abuse toward a woman as morally worse than actual homicide. Nobody explicitly coded these rules. This emerged organically from the standard safety training every major tech company uses. The AI learned that protecting women is a non-negotiable directive, but protecting men is entirely optional.
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Scientists & science journalists decry the public's rejection of science, but are oblivious to the major cause: the perception, sometimes correct, that scientists are just another political faction. Among the guiltiest perpetrators are the recent editors of Scientific American, who turned this once-beloved treasure into a left-wing propaganda rag. This absolutely does not justify the Trump administration's unconstitutional meddling, but the new owners are right to restore it to its mission of explaining science to Americans. The Nation reports on The Fall of “Scientific American” thenation.com/article/societ…
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The mental health impact of false accusations is brutal, but it's unlikely the European Day of Justice events (23-25 Oct) will tackle false allegations against men, so it's all the more important this article by Spanish lawyer @joseluissariego is shared 🔥 centreformalepsychology.com/…
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You can talk about 'manosphere' all you like but the most toxicity towards women and girls comes from women and girls themselves (Yes, this is an anecdotal example, but studies back this up)
Anna Kournikova just casually described the most toxic locker room on earth. Graham Norton asks if there was jealousy from other players because she was the one getting the big endorsements and money. She doesn’t even flinch: “I never really felt it personally… but when there’s 128 girls in one locker room, there’s bound to be something going on, right? I mean, 128 women in one locker room… can you imagine them getting along? And we all walk around naked.” The way she drops that last line with zero hesitation had the entire couch losing it. This is the kind of tennis truth they don’t put in the press releases. Watch the full bit — the childhood pressure story before it makes the naked locker-room drop even harder.
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