The bookstore chain Barnes and Noble issued a rather belated apology to Dr. Omar Amin, 73, of Scottsdale, after he was thrown out of a children’s book section in Arizona. He was told that men are not allowed to be in the children’s section unless they are accompanied by a minor. That’s right. He was told that as a man he was viewed as a danger if reading alone in the section.
Amin was shopping for books for his grandchildren at his neighborhood bookstore when a female customer complained that a man was seen reading alone in the section. Barnes & Noble employee Todd Voris reported explained that men are viewed as potential child abusers if they are alone in the section.
What is fascinating is that the company responded to the incident by publicly supporting the decision to throw Amin out — insisting that Voris “acted appropriately.” What followed was days of criticism of the company.
Finally, yesterday the company did a complete 180 turn and denounced the decision as wrong and unacceptable. Now, Barnes & Noble vice president Mark Bottini maintains that “[i]t is not our policy to ask customers to leave any section of our stores without justification. We value Dr. Amin as a customer and look forward to welcoming him in any of our stores.”
Once again, I am amazed by the ineptitude of major corporations in such controversies. The company had to have deliberated on the first response and decision to embrace the policy. Then it abandoned that position and denounced the very act that it previously called appropriate.
There is something perverse in our society that the image of an elderly man reading in a children’s section is enough to send a woman to the front desk to report a suspected child molester.
Source: Daily Mail
To Marilyn Grashow,
Please read what I wrote above concerning my experience in a B&N. If this had happened to your daughter or daughter-in-law while she shopped with your grandkids, what would you think then?
You seem very litigious. That’s a weapon of the left these days? Baby Boomers are all about themselves.
Malisha, undoubtedly you are correct,
All of these women, doctors, nurses, lawyers, researches, are unaware of what is brought into emergency rooms, and they are impaired harem queens.
Thank you for your enlightenment and geometric logic, babe.
Also this:
Until this story broke, I didn’t realize that I had put myself at great risk during all those evenings I stood alone in the children’s section at Border’s chuckling at Richard Scarry books to give assorted nieces and nephews or looking in vain for the sadly out-of-print “The Little Mailman of Bayberry Lane.” Fortunately, Border’s was closed before I could be arrested and forced to register as a sex offender. How pathetic have we become?
It used to be that the sexually perverse individual was too ashamed to practice his or her sickness in a public venue. Now with liberal and progressive ideas and “rights” being pursued and pushed on citizens, the sick and sexually perverse have less fear about flaunting their actions in public places. It is true, and I dare say, many of you progressives will not admit it. You seem to think your rights trump protection of innocents.
As a mother, I can honestly say I was ready and willing to do the weirdo man in the B&N harm if he messed at all with my children. . . if he exposed his parts to my children, if he touched them. . . I was prepared to do him physical harm.
Innocent grandpas would have nothing to fear in shopping for their grandkids alone IF the rest of our sick society actually made a stand aganist protecting the “rights” of the sexually perverse. With progressivism, no one can be trusted when it comes to our children. . . because, some progressive will tell you that “such” and “such” was born this way and can’t help it – and the sicko is actually the victim.
A mother should not ignore her instincts completely. She should use them with reason and rationale. But she should not ignore them. Motherhood has proven this to me.
I find this bizarre considering what just happened to myself and my five young children this mid-morning in a Barnes & Noble children’s section. When we arrived, there was a man, about age 50 to 55 looking at picture books in the section. He seemed to be watching my children, and while I had my hawkeye out to make my children were safe, the man seemed to be watching my 9 and 11 year old boys. When the man realized I was watching him, he went out of the children’s section and entered the teen section where he continued browsing. After a few minutes, he came BACK to the kids’ section and gravitated to a corner where he could not be seen as easily from where I was standing. He seemed to be watching my 9 year old. I kept watching but was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt in my mind that he might be a grandparent or just interested in children’s books (I know I am even though I am an adult). When the man realized I kept positioning myself to watch all my children as well as him, he seemed a little nervous. He walked towards me and tried to start a conversation that he was searching for a children’s version of an Ernest Hemingway book. He said the store didn’t seemed well-staffed and maybe since I “worked with children” (he didn’t realize I was a mother of all the children) I might know. I politely referred him to the kids’ classics section. He went over there and kind of rummaged around, pointing out a book “A Sailor’s Dog” (a little golden look book) and telling me that it was a good book but not what he was looking for. I tried to curtail the conversation politely by telling him he might check with customer service. He said, “I would, and I know Cherry working at the desk, but she looks busy. I don’t want to bother her.” He stood around a few minutes longer saying the odd statement here and there. I made a comment that the store might do better in the next weeks in regards to staffing considering kids are now getting out of school. He perked up and started asking me about schools being out and seemed excited about that. He said something randomly about having been in McDonald’s (which our McDonald’s in this area have indeed been plagued by pedophiles in the play areas exposing themselves and masturbating while watching children play). I got a weird vibe, but I continued to be polite. Finally, he left, rambled around the teen section again and then I saw him approach the customer service. He knew I was watching him. Oddly enough, he came back to the children’s section to tell me they didn’t have the book, had just sold the last copy two weeks ago. He did not purchase another book in the children’s area, but he started trying to find out more about my children. He kept trying to figure out whether I was a daycare worker and such. It was bizarre.
I’m sorry that an innocent man might be accused in such a scenario. It’s kind of like nursing mothers getting kicked out of restaurants or off planes, etc. It doesn’t seem fair at all. But considering how many children are being molested, abused and subjected to perversity of sick individuals, I see no problem with an individual such as myself letting management know that something is weird or amiss in their store. I certainly called the Barnes & Noble when I arrived home after I thought about the weirdness of what happened. I let them know that I wasn’t accusing the man, but they would do well to keep their children’s section staffed at all times when children or families are in the section.
Hi, Bron, yes of course you are correct about the dynamics of my ex-husband’s family; I was just providing a tiny snapshot of what was going on in the “cannot deal with nasty realities” world at that point in time, in open sight.
The worse part about my father-in-law’s suicide was this story:
The week before my father-in-law’s suicide. I used to wake up with the baby about 3 X per night (infant, very hungry, very loud!) and before returning to sleep I would go to the kitchen for a drink of water. There would be my father-in-law, at the table, writing on yellow lined paper, in Russian, with a pencil, laboriously. “Natan Yakovlovich,” I would say, “Vuss Schreibst?” [My brutal Yiddish trying to ask what he was writing. “Gornish, gornish,” he would respond. [Nothing, nothing.]
Finally I insisted. He said he was writing a “little story.” I pursued the matter. THE LITTLE STORY OF HIS LIFE.
After his death — no suicide note — I told my husband that we had to fine his “little story” and read it! I was obsessed that we had to find it. Finally, I persuaded my brother-in-law to ask my mother-in-law where the story might be.
SHE SAID THAT HE HAD ASKED HER TO READ IT THE DAY BEFORE HE DIED; SHE HAD READ A PAGE OR TWO AND SAID IT WAS BAD — “PLOCHA” IN RUSSIAN — AND SO HE HAD TORN IT UP AND THROWN IT AWAY!!
The garbage had already been collected.
I don’t know when I felt more shocked and horrified. She said that with a straight face, without tears or gnashing of teeth or wringing of hands, about a week after the death of her husband, and then she turned and went back into the kitchen to continue whatever she had been doing.
I have chills now, all over again.
My ex-husband could not extricate himself from the evil of his family of origin. From certain levels of evil, there is no exit.
If anyone has been in a B&N lately, they have taken away the arm chairs. Poor guy was probably just looking for a comfortable place to sit.
gENE h:
So who used it in the 18th century? Site something that shows your contention to be correct.
From what I have read about the origin of the word you are only partially right.
I havent accepted any ideology wholesale, I have spent 30 years reading and watching. Probably longer. I think neocons are only slightly more destructive than liberals (the 20th century style).
But anyway believe what you want and live in your tiny little box.
Bron,
1) Given your penchant for quoting Rand and von Mises propaganda as scholarship, I’m pretty sure that your definition of “scholarship” is as made up as your definition for most political science terms, Bron.
2) Both sides of the political spectrum have been using the term “political correctness” since the 18th Century when it meant “in line with policy” and was a non-partisan political term. In the 70’s, some elements of the left co-opted the original meaning of the term and used it instead as synonymous with the idea of ideologically correct. In the 90’s, the right co-opted the original meaning of the term and used it instead as synonymous with the idea of excessive deference to certain positions and used it as a pejorative term in the on-going culture wars.
3) Other than the original meaning of the term, both ends of spectrum’s misuse and appropriation of the term is a fine example of something we see around here quite frequently from you, Bron: making up definitions to suit an ideological or propagandistic end. Which is simply wrong no matter who does it.
4) Both the left and the rights current usage of the term is ridiculous if one is an independent critical thinker not bound by the dogma of ideologies accepted wholesale.
Tony C:
Try again, that was pretty lame.
That is pretty typical for both you and Gene H although Gene at least throws in something from HuffPo or Wiki. Then you sanctimoniously declare yourself correct. Is that what currently passes for scholarship in academia?
What a crock of shit.
Malisha:
“When my father-in-law hung himself in the basement of our house, my then husband at first blamed his sister 80% and me 20% (which was insane of course) but then within a few days had it all worked out that it was 80/20 the OTHER WAY, and finally absolved his sister and laid it ALL on me.”
that is fascinating, your husband had not come to terms with the abuse he saw or he may have been so close to it he couldnt see it for what it was. The person pointing it out is always the bad guy/gal.
I think that is a pretty typical response from people in relationships of that nature, especially if they grew up in that environment from day one.
@Bron: Political Correctness started with politicians. It is a form of “spin,” and it did not start in the 1930’s, and it is not Marxist, and it really began in the late 1940’s around the time Truman desegregated the Armed Forces.
Of course, the idea that certain words convey connotations, that words have flavors and some are more pleasant than others, goes back so far it is lost in the mists of time. Shakespeare was a master of it, and poets of three thousand years ago also chose their words carefully. So you can waste the day pulling on threads if you want, but “political correctness” is about politicians being able to speak on sensitive subjects without appearing biased or offensive.
It is not limited to any party or ideology and does not spring from any party or ideology, it springs from the poetic wordsmith’s tradition of many thousands of years of choosing just the right word to strike just the right tone, as applied to political speech.
Woosty, that’s hilarious, I just had to go change my panties.
Anon, you have displayed almost every one of the misogynist banners and I’m not going back to collect them and put in cites because although you judge, you are NOT a judge, so we don’t have to pretend you can be convinced of anything.
For instance, you say: “I have never heard them call any of the non-feminist women ‘traitors, fools, brainwashed, or attention whores.’ You just did that right here. In this very thread. Just a few comments up above.
Sheesh Malisha, get a grip, get some self-awareness, get some dignity, get some intellectual honesty, honey, baby, really.”
Now of course, you threw in “honey, baby” because I threw in “hunk” because you think you’re cute, and this time YOU started it with “babe,” but see where you’re standing. You’re standing where YOU got strident because I said a mother did not dare complain about sexual abuse of her children.
Hmmm. A mother…did not dare complaint…about SEXUAL ABUSE…of her children.
Did you think that meant that a mother did not dare to make up a false story about sexual abuse of her children?
You went on the attack of all these mothers who make FALSE ALLEGATIONS about sexual abuse of their children.
And then you use that ridiculous quote above, saying that I have, in previous comments on “this very thread,” called non-feminist women traitors, fools, brainwashed, or attention whores.
No I did not. I called women who chose to help men go on the attack against mothers trying to protect their children by the use of PAS and FMS “harem queens” and basically I called those whom you might meet at PAS and FMS meetings impaired. Yes, impaired. Not because they are not feminist (who knows what their attitudes are towards feminism, after all) but because they run a foolish party line that it is bad bad mommies who make easily manipulated little children think somebody molested them when their hymens are torn in “butterfly configurations at six o’clock and 12 o’clock,” they have no anal wink, they lose bowel control at the age of 11, they have pelvic inflammatory disease at the age of eight, and they tell their therapists, “I don’t like it when daddy slimes me” at the age of six.
Yes, these are all cases that have gone into the emergency rooms and into the CPS departments and into courts and have come out proving time and time again that there is NO MOTHER who is immune to being called a “borderline personality disorder PAS FMS mother” if her child has been molested and our society does not want to see it and act on it. This is not about an elderly gentleman in the book store; this is about the world that we are living in, where these things — and equally shocking and even MORE shocking things happen every day in places like Baltimore where the cops kill a guy for having a one-car crash — do happen. Your ranting and your attending meetings of men AND WOMEN who think they should deal with real social problems that really hurt real children by making up some airy fairy psychobabble about “alienation” and reassuring themselves and each other that “if we all reinforce each other we’re right,” will never change that. And your blatant disrespect of feminists won’t change it; and your stoking up your own failing pride by making snide comments to me won’t either and I am not worried about those comments because, of course, I am considering the source.
anon
1, June 6, 2012 at 7:40 pm
Malisha you expressly compared this thread (and past threads) to when you talk to holocaust deniers.
You’ve done it before. You will do it again.
All while waving your panties around and screaming that’s not what you are doing.
——————————————————
anon, you are a very very very very very bad man. pervy even….
And if you had an ounce of understanding how science works, you would understand that evolution is not darwin, relativity is not einstein, and PAS is not gardner.
I am not sure how you can fixate on gardner and ignore all the other research done on PAS.
And even if you knockout the S of PAS, there is simple PA, which has no need for Gardner, who you brought up, and which is widely recognized in courtrooms across the land.
That is, for anyone trying to figure it out, PAS is Parental Alienation Syndrome, and admittedly strange psychological theory that says that a parent can induce mental illness in a child to alienate from the other parent. That theory is based on the claim that for a child to alienate from a good parent well within the range of normal parenting behaviors is indicative of a mental illness within that child.
I am not sure I believe it myself, because of the claim that one person can induce mental illness in another.
“You’re driving me crazy!”
But perhaps, perhaps a parent can do this to a child.
But ignore PAS and you are just left with plain old Parental Alienation, where one parent interferes with visitation, tells likes about the other parent, makes false allegations, and a host of other tactics.
And while PAS may or may not make it into the 2013 DSM, PA is already widely recognized as a real thing in courtrooms.
But modern feminists are furious about PAS. Check out Malisha’s rant above. Because modern feminists understand that truth and fairness is the last thing they want in a family law courtroom.
Hence the fixation on PAS, hence the attacks on the elderly doctor that committed suicide because this society has a hard time with letting the elderly in pain pass away, hence the demand that we treat all these other women that have founded PA and PAS organizations as useful idiot oppressed victims and not as rational agents able to come to their own conclusions about feminism and parental alienation.
Anyway, it’s too late for me, and not happening in my state, but more states are moving to a rebuttable presumption of joint shared custody over the harpy screams of the feminists.
So that’s good.
Oh and as with Mike, you are always cordially invited to point out my graphic misogyny that’s not a parody of something said in this thread, or of a standard cant of feminism.
“I have never heard them call any of the non-feminist women “traitors, fools, brainwashed, or attention whores.””
You just did that right here. In this very thread. Just a few comments up above.
Sheesh Malisha, get a grip, get some self-awareness, get some dignity, get some intellectual honesty, honey, baby, really.
Anon, you say, “Women that are skeptical about feminist claims are traitors, fools, brainwashed, oppressed, abused, weak, attention whores.
As I said, feminists hold women in very low regard.”
Let’s see. Women that [correction: who] are skeptical about feminist claims…
OK, which claims are they “skeptical” about?
About the claims that men have made more money for the same work than women have made?
About claims that men have devalued and disrespected women?
About claims that men are responsible for most domestic violence?
About claims that men have been the leaders in the court system you so despise?
About claims that men have dominated economically, politically and socially and that all the systems you bitterly denounce have been set up by them, INCLUDING MARRIAGE?
About claims that men have indulged in international criminal behaviors and even wars?
About claims that men have led governments that have raped their own peoples?
Which claims are those women skeptical about?
By the way, the feminists I know do not criticize women the way you imagine. I have never heard them call any of the non-feminist women “traitors, fools, brainwashed, or attention whores.” Oppressed, abused and weak? I have heard them say that many of the non-feminist women are those things, but so are many of the feminist women.
Feminists SHOULD hold misogynists in low regard. I have not checked, really, to see if they hold female misogynists in low regard, never have discussed that with any of the feminists I know; it is an interesting question.
Many of the feminists hold ME in low regard because I don’t care much about any of the issues except mothers’ rights. They think attention should be focused on the economic issues, for the most part, at least among the New York and Miami crowd (back in the day when I was more active). They wanted mothers to be working mothers; I thought they needed to pay some attention to stay-home mothers, and they thought that would detract from their causes in the long run. OK, we can disagree. But if they did hold me in disregard, it didn’t matter much. I wrote an amicus brief that Gloria Steinem signed; a feminist lawyer prevented it from being heard by the New York Supreme Court Appellate Division, under false pretenses (saying she would have to file an extra brief if the amicus were accepted and considered, a spurious argument).
But I doubt if downright silly arguments will ever fly with the feminists I know, even those who disagree with me. They may not agree with me and they may think I’m a lightweight but they’re smart, perspicacious, and analytical and they do not suffer fools gladly. Not one of them would have believed that Richard Gardner stabbed himself six times in the neck.
Anon, I don’t assume you are “unaware of [your] pathology” because you’re a man. I don’t even assume you HAVE your pathology because you’re a man. I just put two and two together (your frequent forays into graphic misogyny, your protesting way too much, your touchiness and bitterness, your rants against feminists, your lack of humor, etc.) and figured you were more likely to be in the PAS and FMS camps than in any gatherings of non-resentful folks. And I brought up Richard Gardner for a very specific reason, Honey-Buns. I brought him up because he had lots of credentials and opined a lot and made a lot of money telling everybody what an expert he was on everything but essentially what he said was that the only reason a kid could ever object to a father’s conduct was if his mother put him up to it out of spite and malice and (this was actually almost the best part) sexual frustration. He admitted in writing that the reason it was always the women who committed PAS (how could they commit it if it was a mental illness, may I ask?) and not the men, was:
GET THIS:
When there was a divorce, the men would find new women very quickly but the women could not find new men. Therefore, the women were experiencing sexual frustration during and after divorce, and this sexual frustration made them turn bad you see, and made them (a) imagine that their ex-husbands were molesting their children and (b) made them want to hurt those ex-husbands, for the crime of leaving those women still yearning for their sexual favors.
Hmmmm.
That wasn’t the only idiotic thing the guy came up with. But all of his idiotic ideas together were not nearly as offensively shockingly foolish as the conclusion that he killed himself by stabbing himself six times and possibly scraping his forehead. And why? Because he was expecting to be sick when he aged, and because his FEET HURT. OK, he was a psychiatrist. Stabbed himself six times, did he? OK, there’s your chief top-of-the-line-expert-creator of the Parent Alienation Syndrome.
The reason he came up with this junk science, of course, was to try to lend credence to the idea that all allegations of sexual abuse against fathers were false. But he didn’t even SAY they were false. He ended up saying that even if they were true that didn’t matter. He claimed that one sign of a woman making up a false allegation against a man was the man DENYING IT.
Well doesn’t that kind of sound like “one piece of evidence of innocence of a crime is a plea of not guilty by the defendant”? Well, then, we’d hardly have a prima facie case of anything if the folks accused of breaking the law did not agree to the prosecution, would we?
PAS is junk science (and I say “science” only to be charitable); FMS is absurd on its face (who’s to say the accuser’s memory is falser than the defender’s memory?) and if you were a woman who was falsely accused, or a man who was falsely accused, my sympathy would be with you. IF, on the other hand, all I know is that you were ACCUSED (and that you find the PAS and FMS theories quite robust), I think I’ll withhold judgment on that piece of it.
So maybe you started it after all, Hunk.