Haunted Castles and Male Anger

An article on Michelle Heimburger, a Yahoo employee, buying the old Frankin Castle in Cleveland. "...It's haunted. Something about a 19th-century owner hanging his daughter and butchering a servant girl in the place. 'Then there was that whole thing with maybe the Nazis who were machine-gunned down,' says Heimburger, adding that that was long ago."

PC Week: A campus window on enterprise IT's future
"What college students are using today is what our professional labor force entrants will expect to see in 2002. From that campus perspective, Java and the Macintosh have stopped looking like attractive but risky propositions and have started looking like sure things."

I was talking to a female friend last week. "You would have been proud of me," she tells me. "I'm arguing with this guy who's breaking up with me. Then he tries to walk away while I'm in the middle of saying something, and I shoved him back into his chair. I wasn't done with him! I still had something to say, and he was just trying to walk away from me!" Can you imagine if I acted like that toward a girl? I wouldn't be telling anyone, "You would have been proud of me."

I have an ex-girlfriend who's 5'2", likely under 100 pounds. It is okay for me to shove her if she slights me, if she pisses me off? Of course not. What if she's 5'9" (my height), or an inch or two taller? Say it's actually another guy instead. Is it okay to shove him, now? Why or why not? Does being male automatically justify physical coercion against you?

Two essays on male anger and the esteem in which the sexes hold (or fail to hold) each other, as viewed through the prisms of Lorena Bobbitt and Karla Faye Tucker:

DaveNet: Male Anger
"Everyone says over and over that it doesn't matter that [Tucker's] a woman, but we know it totally matters. Why is it more of a tragedy for the government to kill a human being just because the person is female? What does this say about our attitude, in general, about each of the genders? One deserves forgiveness, and the other deserves vengeance?"

DaveNet: Alan Ballew on Male Anger
"I contend that the situation you described of the party where a woman says 'Bobbit' and [the women laugh and the men cringe] is violence. Far more so than pornography could ever be construed as violence toward women... If someone had just talked about poking out a woman's eye, or chopping of a hand or, since we're talking about genitals, ripping off her labia and clitoris we would have a riot on our hands right now."