Misogyny () is the hatred of women. Misogyny comes from Greek misogunia (μισογυνία) from misos (μῖσος, hatred) and gynē (γυνή, woman). It is not to be confused with the term misandry, the hatred of men or boys.

Definitions

According to sociologist Allan G. Johnson, "misogyny is a cultural attitude of hatred for females because they are female." Johnson argues that:

Michael Flood defines misogyny as the hatred of women and notes:

Usage

Misogyny is sometimes confused with the similar looking word, misogamy (μισογαμία), which means hatred of marriage, hence the following error.

An example of correct use, from the same period is:

A clearer example of the sense, also from the same era but using the noun misogynist, is provided by Thackeray.

Occasionally writers play on the similarity between misogyny and miscegeny (mixed-race marriage).

Greek literature

In his book City of Sokrates: An Introduction to Alassical Athens, J.W. Roberts argues that older than tragedy and comedy was a misogynistic tradition in Greek literature, reaching back at least as far as Hesiod.

Misogyny comes into English from the ancient Greek word, misogunia (), which survives in two passages.

The earlier, longer and more complete passage comes from a stoic philosopher called Antipater of Tarsus in a moral tract known as On Marriage (c. 150 BC). Antipater argues that marriage is the foundation of the state, and considers it to be based on divine (polytheistic) decree. Antipater uses misogunia to describe Euripides' usual writing—tēn misogunian en tō graphein (τὴν μισογυνίαν ἐν τῷ γράφειν "the misogyny in the writing").

The other surviving use of the original Greek word is by Chrysippus, in a fragment from On affections, quoted by Galen in Hippocrates on Affections. Here, misogyny is the first in a short list of three "disaffections"—women (misogunian), wine (misoinian, μισοινίαν) and humanity (misanthrōpian, μισανθρωπίαν).

Chrysippus' point is more abstract than Antipater's, and Galen quotes the passage as an example of an opinion contrary to his own. What is clear, however, is that he groups hatred of women with hatred of humanity generally, and even hatred of wine. "It was the prevailing medical opinion of his day that wine strengthens body and soul alike."

So, as with his fellow stoic, Antipater, misogyny is viewed negatively, a disease, a dislike of something that is good. It is this issue of conflicted or alternating emotions that was philosophically contentious to the ancient writers. Ricardo Salles suggests the general stoic view was that, "A man may not only alternate between philogyny and misogyny, philanthropy and misanthropy, but be prompted to each by the other."

Misogynist is also found in the Greek—misogunēs ()—in Deipnosophistae (above) and in Plutarch's Parallel Lives, where it is used as the title of Heracles in the history of Phocion.

It was also the title of a play by Menander, which we know of from book seven (concerning Alexandria) of Strabo's 17 volume Geography, and quotations of Menander by Clement of Alexandria and Stobaeus that relate to marriage.

Menander also wrote a play called Misoumenos (Μισούμενος) or The Man (She) Hated. Another Greek play with a similar name, Misogunos (Μισόγυνος) or Woman-hater, is reported by Cicero (in Latin) and attributed to Atilius.

Marcus Tullius Cicero reports that Greek philosophers considered misogyny to be caused by gynophobia, a fear of women. The context is worth quoting in full, because it deals directly with matters already discussed in this article.

The more common form of this general word for woman hating is misogunaios (). Allied with Venus in honourable positions Saturn makes his subjects haters of women, lovers of antiquity, solitary, unpleasant to meet, unambitious, hating the beautiful, ... — Ptolemy, 'Of the Quality of the Soul', 2nd century. I will prove to you that this wonderful teacher, this woman-hater, is not satisfied with ordinary enjoyments during the night. — Alciphron, 'Thais to Euthyedmus', 2nd century.

The word is also found in Vettius Valens' Anthology and Damascius' Principles.

In summary, Greek literature considered misogyny to be a disease, an anti-social condition, in that it ran contrary to their perceptions of the value of women as wives, and of the family as the foundation of society. These points are widely noted in the secondary literature.

Traditional feminist theorists paint many different attitudes as misogyny. According to feminists, in its most overt expression, a misogynist will openly hate all women simply because they are female.

In feminist theory, other forms of misogyny may be less overt. Some alleged misogynists may simply be prejudiced against all women, or may hate women who do not fall into one or more acceptable categories. Subscribers to one model claim that some misogynists think in terms of the mother/whore dichotomy, where they hold that women can only be "mothers" or "whores." Another variant model is the one alleging that certain men think in terms of a virgin/whore dichotomy, in which women who do not adhere to an Abrahamic standard of moral purity are considered "whores".

The term misogynist is frequently used in a looser sense as a term of derision to describe anyone who holds a distasteful view about women as a group. Therefore, someone like Schopenhauer who proposes naturalistic reasons for various behaviors common to women is often regarded as a misogynist. As another, particularly striking example, man who is considered by many including himself to be "a great lover of women," is often regarded as being misogynist. Examples of this type of man would be Giacomo Casanova and Don Juan, who were both reputed for their many libertine affairs with women.

In feminist theory, misogyny is a negative attitude towards women as a group, and so need not fully determine a misogynist's attitude towards each individual woman. The fact that someone holds misogynist views may not prevent him or her from having positive relationships with some women.

Conversely, simply having negative relationships with some women does not necessarily mean someone holds misogynistic views. The term, like most negative descriptions of attitudes, is used as an epithet and applied to a wide variety of behaviors and attitudes - often as a personal attack.

As with other terms, the more antipathetic one's position is in regards to misogyny, the larger the number of misogynists and the greater variety of attitudes and behaviors who fall into one's perception of "misogynist". This is, of course, the subject of much controversy and debate with opinions ranging widely as to the extent and breadth of misogyny in society.

Feminist theorist Marilyn Frye alleges that misogyny is phallogocentric and homoerotic at its root. In Politics of Reality, Frye analyzes the alleged misogyny characteristic of the fiction and Christian apologetics of C.S. Lewis. Frye argues that such misogyny privileges the masculine as a subject of erotic attention. She compares the alleged misogyny characteristic of Lewis' ideal of gender relations to underground male prostitution rings, which allegedly share the quality of men seeking to dominate subjects seen as less likely to take on submissive roles by a patriarchal society, but in both cases doing so as a theatrical mockery of women.

Michael Flood, an Australian sociologist at the University of Wollongong, has argued that "misandry lacks the systemic, transhistoric, institutionalized, and legislated antipathy of misogyny."

Mythology

In Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice, Jack Holland sees evidence of misogyny in the mythology of the ancient world. In Greek mythology according to Hesiod, the human race had already existed before the creation of women — a peaceful, autonomous existence as a companion to the gods.

When Prometheus decides to steal the secret of fire from the gods, Zeus becomes infuriated and decides to punish humankind with an "evil thing for their delight" — Pandora, the first woman, who carried a jar (usually described — incorrectly — as a box) she was told to never open.

Epimetheus (the brother of Prometheus) is overwhelmed by her beauty, disregards Prometheus' warnings about her, and marries her. Pandora cannot resist peeking into the jar, and by opening it all evil is unleashed into the world — labour, sickness, old age, and death.

These examples of misogyny in Greek myths contradict the claims made by many that Greek literature looked down upon misogyny. It could mean that the notion of misogyny that was ridiculed by Greek literature is not the same as the modern concept of misogyny.

J. Holland also sees evidence of misogyny in the Christian view on the Fall of Man based on the Book Genesis, which according to Christian interpretation brought tragedy and death into the world by a woman. (See also Original Sin.)

Religion

rides astride the Serpent on a capital in Laach Abbey church, 13th century]]

Buddhism

In his book The Power of Denial: Buddhism, Purity, and Gender, professor Bernard Faure of Columbia University argued generally that "Buddhism is paradoxically neither as sexist nor as egalitarian as is usually thought." He remarked, "Many feminist scholars have emphasized the misogynistic (or at least androcentric) nature of Buddhism." He emphasised that Buddhism morally exalts its male monks while the mothers and wives of the monks also have important roles. He wrote as well:

Christianity

Katharine M. Rogers in The Troublesome Helpmate alleges Christianity to be misogynistic, listing what she says as specific examples from the New Testament letters of the Christian apostle Paul of Tarsus. She argues that the legacy of Christian misogyny was consolidated by the so-called "Fathers" of the Church, like Tertullian, who thought a woman was not only "the gateway of the devil" but also "a temple built over a sewer." Rogers states:

The verse Galatians 3:28 has attracted much attention during the modern gender role debate. It says:

David M. Scholer, a Biblical scholar at Fuller Theological Seminary, stated that the verse Gal 3:28 is "the fundamental Pauline theological basis for the inclusion of women and men as equal and mutual partners in all of the ministries of the church." In his book Equality in Christ? Galatians 3.28 and the Gender Dispute, Richard Hove argues that while Galatians 3:28 means that that sex does not affect salvation, "there remains a pattern of in which the wife is to emulate the church's submission to Christ (Eph 5:21-33) and the husband is to emulate Christ's love for the church."

Clinical psychologist Margaret J. Rinck has written in Christian Men Who Hate Women that Christian social culture often allows misogynists to "misuse of the biblical ideal of submission". However, she argues this a distortion of "a healthy relationship of mutual submission" actually specified in Christian doctrine where "[l]ove is based on a deep, mutual respect as the guiding principle behind all decisions, actions, and plans".

Islam

The fourth chapter (or sura) of the Qur'an is called Women (An-Nisa). The 34th verse is a key verse in feminist criticism of Islam. The verse reads: "Men are the maintainers of women because Allah has made some of them to excel others and because they spend out of their property; the good women are therefore obedient, guarding the unseen as Allah has guarded; and (as to) those on whose part you fear desertion, admonish them, and leave them alone in the sleeping-places and beat them; then if they obey you, do not seek a way against them; surely Allah is High, Great."

Taj Hashmi discusses misogyny in relation to Muslim culture, and Bangladesh specifically, in the book Popular Islam and Misogyny: A Case Study of Bangladesh.

In a Washington Post article, Asra Q. Nomani discussed An-Nisa, 34 and stated that "Domestic violence is prevalent today in non-Muslim communities as well, but the apparent religious sanction in Islam makes the challenge especially difficult." She further wrote that although "Islamic historians agree that the prophet Muhammad never hit a woman, it is also clear that Muslim communities face a domestic violence problem." Nomani notes that in his book No god but God, University of Southern California professor Reza Aslan wrote that "misogynistic interpretation" has dogged An-Nisa, 34 because Koranic commentary "has been the exclusive domain of Muslim men." American author and commentator Robert Spencer has described Quran 4:34 as a "notorious verse commanding the beating of disobedient women" in FrontPage Magazine. He has argued that it promotes a demeaning culture of violence against women.

Sikhism

in the center, amongst other Sikh figures]]

Scholars William M. Reynolds and Julie A. Webber have written that Guru Nanak Dev, the founder of the Sikh faith tradition, was a "fighter for women's rights" that was "in no way misogynistic" in contrast to some of his contemporaries.

Philosophy

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Otto Weininger, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Socrates, Gautama Buddha, Plato, Aristotle and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel are alleged to be misogynists.

Weininger

The philosopher Otto Weininger freely admits his misogyny in his 1903 book Sex and Character, in which he characterizes the "woman" part of each individual as being essentially "nothing," and having no real existence, having no effective consciousness or rationality.

Schopenhauer

The notable philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer has been accused of misogyny for his essay "On Women" (Über die Weiber), in which he expressed his opposition to what he called "Teutonico-Christian stupidity" on female affairs. He claimed that "woman is by nature meant to obey." He also noted that "Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies."

Nietzsche

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is known for arguing that every higher form of civilization implied stricter controls on women (Beyond Good and Evil, 7:238); he frequently insulted women, like all the other groups of people. He is known for phrases such as "Women are less than shallow," and "Are you going to women? Do not forget the whip!" Whether or not this amounts to misogyny, whether his polemic statements against women are meant to be taken literally, and the exact nature of his opinions of women, are controversial.

Wittgenstein

The philosopher Wittgenstein was influenced by Weininger's views on women Wittgenstein enthusiastically recommended 'Sex and Character' to his peers and in the face of their criticism pointed out Weininger's greatness

Aristotle

Aristotle has also been accused of being a misogynist; He has written that women were inferior to men. For example, to cite Cynthia Freeland's catalogue: "Aristotle says that the courage of a man lies in commanding, a woman's lies in obeying; that "matter yearns for form, as the female for the male and the ugly for the beautiful;" that women have fewer teeth than men; that a female is an incomplete male or "as it were, a deformity": which contributes only matter and not form to the generation of offspring; that in general "a woman is perhaps an inferior being"; that female characters in a tragedy will be inappropriate if they are too brave or too clever"(Freeland 1994: 145-46)

Kant

Charlotte Witt wrote that Kant's and Aristotle's writings contained overt statements of sexism and racism. She found derogatory remarks about women in Kant's Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime.

Socrates

In the Routledge philosophy guidebook to Plato and the Republic, Nickolas Pappas describes the "problem of misogyny" and states

Hegel

Hegel's view of women has been said to be misogynist. Passages from Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right are frequently used used to illustrate Hegel's supposed misogyny:

Scientology

L. Ron Hubbard wrote the following passages in his 1965 book Scientology: A New Slant on Life: These have been criticized by Alan Scherstuhl of The Village Voice as expressions of hatred towards women. However, Baylor University professor Dr. J. Gordon Melton has written that Hubbard disregarded and abrogated much of his earlier views about women, which Melton views as merely echos of common prejudices at the time. Melton has also stated that the Church of Scientology welcomes both genders equally at all levels from leadership positions to auditing and so on since Scientologists view people as spiritual beings.

See also

Chauvinism

Honor killing

Misandry

Misogyny in hip hop culture

Object relations theory

Philogyny

Violence against women

Notes and references

Bibliography

Dictionary of sociology articles

Marshall, Gordon. 'Misogyny'. In Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Johnson, Allan G. 'Misogyny'. In Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology: A User's Guide to Sociological Language. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000.

Core references

Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975.

Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantacies of Feminine Evil. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. University of California, Berkeley, 1978.

Dworkin, Andrea. Woman Hating. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974.

Griffin, Susan. . :,.

Klein, Melanie. The Collected Writings of Melanie Klein. 4 volumes. London: Hogarth Press, 1975.

Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. New York: Doubleday, 1970.

Rich, Adrienne. :,.

Katharine M Rogers

Rogers, Katharine M. The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature. 1966.

Miscellaneous literature

Boteach, Shmuley. Hating Women: America's Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex. 2005.

Clack, Beverley. Misogyny in the Western Philosophical Tradition.

Ellmann, Mary. Thinking About Women. 1968.

Ferguson, Frances and R. Howard Bloch. Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. ISBN 978-0-520-06544-4

Forward, Susan, and Joan Torres. Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why. Bantam Books, 1986. ISBN 0-553-28037-6

Gilmore, David D. Misogyny: the Male Malady. 2001.

Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. 1974. University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Holland, Jack. Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice. 2006.

Kipnis, Laura. The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability. 2006. ISBN 0-375-42417-2

Morgan, Fidelis. A Misogynist's Source Book.

Patai, Daphne, and Noretta Koertge. Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies. 1995. ISBN 0-465-09827-4

Penelope, Julia. Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of our Fathers' Tongues. Toronto: Pergamon Press Canada, 1990.

Smith, Joan. Misogynies. 1989. Revised 1993.

World Health Organization Multi-country Study on Women's Health and Domestic Violence against Women* 2005.

External links

Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy

German

Hans Friedrich August von Arnim. Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (SVF, Old Stoic Fragments), 1903.

Greek

Volume 3.

Category:Discrimination Category:Gender Category:Misogyny Category:Sexual and gender prejudices Category:Hate

Birthname	Kenneth Joel Hotz
Birth date	May 03, 1967
Birth place	Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Resides	Los Angeles California
Years active	1989–present
Occupation	Actor, director, screenwriter, and producer
Website	http://www.kennyhotz.com

Kenneth Joel "Kenny" Hotz (born May 3, 1973) is an award winning Canadian writer, director, actor, producer and photographer. He is a former South Park consultant, creator/co-star of the Showcase and Comedy Central television show Kenny vs. Spenny and creator/co-writer of the FX series Testees.

Early life

Hotz was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1967. Kenny was sent to a film camp where he made his first film. He attended high school at Forest Hill Collegiate Institute. Hotz began making documentaries in 1989, and had the idea to develop a television show in which he and a friend competed in a series of challenges to prove who was the best, which eventually evolved into Kenny vs. Spenny. Upon graduating from Ryerson University's media arts program, Hotz became an accomplished filmmaker and photographer, and in 1991, he traveled around the world. In that year he went to cover the Gulf War

Hotz recently consulted on the animated series South Park, also writing the episodes "Follow That Egg!" and "Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow".

In 2008, He developed a sitcom called Testees for the Fox-owned FX that year, producing 13 shows centering on product testers in various markets. The show started airing in October 2008 on FX and the Canadian-owned Showcase cable channel.

Kenny is Jewish, as evidenced in one episode of Kenny vs. Spenny ("Who Can Eat the Most Meat?"). As he blends up a "meat smoothie," to which he adds pork, he notes that his "rabbi is going to be so pissed." He also pretends to sing in his local synagogue choir in "First to Stop Singing Loses" (against the rules of that particular competition) and he mentions it in the "Who Do Old People Like More" episode, where he believes it will help him win. He is fluent in Hebrew, as noted in "Who's the Better Jew". However, in an interview Kenny Hotz stated that he does not care about religion and considers himself an Atheist. Also evidenced in the episode "Who is the better Jew?" Kenny offers multiple examples of his Jewish heritage, such as his circumcised penis.

Kenny was recently embroiled in a controversy with the British Columbia Human Rights Commission for alleged hate speech for his actions in the episode "Who Can Piss Off More People", where he paid to have a plane fly over Toronto dragging a banner that reads "Jesus Sucks".

Hotz had a small part in Kevin Smith's 2008 film Zack and Miri Make A Porno, starring Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks.

Kenny made a cameo appearance as a homeless man in the second episode of the Pure Pwnage television series, as well as a cameo in Degrassi Takes Manhattan in 2010. Kenny has just completed his final episode of Kenny vs. Spenny ("The Kenny vs. Spenny Christmas Special"). He is currently working on his new series Kenny Hotz's Triumph of the Will which is premiering in the Spring of 2011.

Filmography

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987)

It Don't Cost Nothin' to Say Good Morning (1994)

Pitch (1997)

Kenny vs. Spenny (2002–2010)

The Papal Chase (2004)

Ed vs. Spencer (2004)

South Park – Three episodes (2005)

Elton vs. Simon (2005)

Testees (2008)

Zack and Miri Make a Porno (Cameo as the other Zack) (2008)

References

External links

Kenny Hotz Merchandise Kenny Hotz Merchandise.

Kenny Hotz Official Website Kenny Hotz's Official Website.

Kenny's My Space Home Kenny Hotz's MySpace.

Kenny´s Blog Kenny Hotz MSN blog.

10 Questions: Kenny Hotz interview.

A Hotz Comedy (Interview with Kenny Hotz): A Very Hotz Interview

Kenny Hotz Imdb Profile

Category:Canadian atheists Category:Canadian bloggers Category:Canadian Jews Category:Canadian television personalities Category:Jewish actors Category:People from Toronto Category:1967 births Category:Living people

Name	Hillary Rodham Clinton
Office	67th United States Secretary of State
President	Barack Obama
Deputy	Jim Steinberg
Term start	January 21, 2009
Predecessor	Condoleezza Rice
Jr/sr2	United States Senator
State2	New York
Term start2	January 3, 2001
Term end2	January 21, 2009
Preceded2	Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Succeeded2	Kirsten Gillibrand
Office3	First Lady of the United States
Term start3	January 20, 1993
Term end3	January 20, 2001
Preceded3	Barbara Bush
Succeeded3	Laura Bush
Office4	First Lady of Arkansas
Term start4	January 11, 1983
Term end4	December 12, 1992
Predecessor4	Gay Daniels White
Successor4	Betty Tucker
Term start5	January 9, 1979
Term end5	January 19, 1981
Predecessor5	Barbara Pryor
Successor5	Gay Daniels White
Birth date	October 26, 1947
Birth place	Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Party	Democratic Party
Spouse	Bill Clinton
Children	Chelsea
Residence	Chappaqua, United States
Alma mater	Wellesley CollegeYale Law School
Profession	Lawyer
Religion	Methodist
Signature	Hillary Rodham Clinton Signature.svg
Website	Official website

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (; born October 26, 1947) is the 67th United States Secretary of State, serving in the administration of President Barack Obama. She was a United States Senator for New York from 2001 to 2009. As the wife of the 42nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton, she was the First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001. In the 2008 election, Clinton was a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

A native of Illinois, Hillary Rodham first attracted national attention in 1969 for her remarks as the first student commencement speaker at Wellesley College. She embarked on a career in law after graduating from Yale Law School in 1973. Following a stint as a Congressional legal counsel, she moved to Arkansas in 1974 and married Bill Clinton in 1975. Rodham cofounded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families in 1977 and became the first female chair of the Legal Services Corporation in 1978. Named the first female partner at Rose Law Firm in 1979, she was twice listed as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America. First Lady of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and 1983 to 1992 with husband Bill as Governor, she successfully led a task force to reform Arkansas's education system. She sat on the board of directors of Wal-Mart and several other corporations.

In 1994 as First Lady of the United States, her major initiative, the Clinton health care plan, failed to gain approval from the U.S. Congress. However, in 1997 and 1999, Clinton played a role in advocating the creation of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and the Foster Care Independence Act. Her years as First Lady drew a polarized response from the American public. The only First Lady to have been subpoenaed, she testified before a federal grand jury in 1996 due to the Whitewater controversy, but was never charged with wrongdoing in this or several other investigations during her husband's administration. The state of her marriage was the subject of considerable speculation following the Lewinsky scandal in 1998.

After moving to the state of New York, Clinton was elected as a U.S. Senator in 2000. That election marked the first time an American First Lady had run for public office; Clinton was also the first female senator to represent the state. In the Senate, she initially supported the Bush administration on some foreign policy issues, including a vote for the Iraq War Resolution. She subsequently opposed the administration on its conduct of the war in Iraq and on most domestic issues. Senator Clinton was reelected by a wide margin in 2006. In the 2008 presidential nomination race, Hillary Clinton won more primaries and delegates than any other female candidate in American history, but narrowly lost to Senator Barack Obama. As Secretary of State, Clinton became the first former First Lady to serve in a president's cabinet.

Early life and education

Early life

Hillary Diane Rodham was born at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. She was raised in a United Methodist family, first in Chicago and then, from the age of three, in suburban Park Ridge, Illinois. Her father, Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, was the son of Welsh and English immigrants; he managed a successful small business in the textile industry. Her mother, Dorothy Emma Howell, was a homemaker of English, Scottish, French, French Canadian, and Welsh descent. She participated in swimming, baseball, and other sports. For her senior year, she was redistricted to Maine South High School, where she was a National Merit Finalist and graduated in the top five percent of her class of 1965. Her mother wanted her to have an independent, professional career,

Raised in a politically conservative household, at age thirteen Rodham helped canvass South Side Chicago following the very close 1960 U.S. presidential election, where she found evidence of electoral fraud against Republican candidate Richard Nixon. She then volunteered to campaign for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in the U.S. presidential election of 1964. Rodham's early political development was shaped most by her high school history teacher (like her father, a fervent anticommunist), who introduced her to Goldwater's classic The Conscience of a Conservative, and by her Methodist youth minister (like her mother, concerned with issues of social justice), with whom she saw and met civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., in Chicago in 1962.

College

In 1965, Rodham enrolled at Wellesley College, where she majored in political science. During her freshman year, she served as president of the Wellesley Young Republicans; with this Rockefeller Republican-oriented group, she supported the elections of John Lindsay and Edward Brooke. She later stepped down from this position, as her views changed regarding the American Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. In contrast to the 1960s current that advocated radical actions against the political system, she sought to work for change within it. In her junior year, Rodham became a supporter of the antiwar presidential nomination campaign of Democrat Eugene McCarthy. In early 1968, she was elected president of the Wellesley College Government Association and served through early 1969; In 1969, she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, Her speech received a standing ovation lasting seven minutes. She was featured in an article published in Life magazine, due to the response to a part of her speech that criticized Senator Edward Brooke, who had spoken before her at the commencement. She also appeared on Irv Kupcinet's nationally syndicated television talk show as well as in Illinois and New England newspapers. That summer, she worked her way across Alaska, washing dishes in Mount McKinley National Park and sliming salmon in a fish processing cannery in Valdez (which fired her and shut down overnight when she complained about unhealthy conditions).

Law school

Rodham then entered Yale Law School, where she served on the editorial board of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action. During her second year, she worked at the Yale Child Study Center, learning about new research on early childhood brain development and working as a research assistant on the seminal work, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973). She also took on cases of child abuse at Yale-New Haven Hospital Edelman later became a significant mentor. She was recruited by political advisor Anne Wexler to work on the 1970 campaign of Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Joseph Duffey, with Rodham later crediting Wexler with providing her first job in politics.

In the late spring of 1971, she began dating Bill Clinton, also a law student at Yale. That summer, she interned at the Oakland, California, law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein. The firm was well-known for its support of constitutional rights, civil liberties, and radical causes (two of its four partners were current or former Communist Party members); Clinton canceled his original summer plans, in order to live with her in California; the couple continued living together in New Haven when they returned to law school. The following summer, Rodham and Clinton campaigned in Texas for unsuccessful 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. She received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale in 1973, having stayed on an extra year to be with Clinton. Clinton first proposed marriage to her following graduation, but she declined. Discussing the new children's rights movement, it stated that "child citizens" were "powerless individuals" and argued that children should not be considered equally incompetent from birth to attaining legal age, but that instead courts should presume competence except when there is evidence otherwise, on a case-by-case basis. The article became frequently cited in the field.

Marriage and family, law career and First Lady of Arkansas

From the East Coast to Arkansas

During her postgraduate study, Rodham served as staff attorney for Edelman's newly founded Children's Defense Fund in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as a consultant to the Carnegie Council on Children. During 1974, she was a member of the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington, D.C., advising the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate scandal. Under the guidance of Chief Counsel John Doar and senior member Bernard Nussbaum, Wright thought Rodham had the potential to become a future senator or president. Meanwhile, Clinton had repeatedly asked her to marry him, and she continued to demur. However, after failing the District of Columbia bar exam and passing the Arkansas exam, Rodham came to a key decision. As she later wrote, "I chose to follow my heart instead of my head". She thus followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, rather than staying in Washington where career prospects were brighter. Clinton was then teaching law and running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in his home state. In August 1974, she moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, and became one of only two female faculty members in the School of Law at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where Bill Clinton also was. She gave classes in criminal law, where she was considered a rigorous teacher and tough grader, and was the first director of the school's legal aid clinic. She still harbored doubts about marriage, concerned that her separate identity would be lost and that her accomplishments would be viewed in the light of someone else's.

Early Arkansas years

of Little Rock from 1977 to 1979 while he was Arkansas Attorney General.]] Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton bought a house in Fayetteville in the summer of 1975, and Hillary finally agreed to marry. Their wedding took place on October 11, 1975, in a Methodist ceremony in their living room. She announced she was keeping the name Hillary Rodham, although her decision upset their mothers. Bill Clinton had lost the congressional race in 1974, but in November 1976 was elected Arkansas Attorney General, and so the couple moved to the state capital of Little Rock. There, in February 1977, Rodham joined the venerable Rose Law Firm, a bastion of Arkansan political and economic influence. She specialized in patent infringement and intellectual property law

Rodham maintained her interest in children's law and family policy, publishing the scholarly articles "Children's Policies: Abandonment and Neglect" in 1977 and "Children's Rights: A Legal Perspective" in 1979. The latter continued her argument that children's legal competence depended upon their age and other circumstances and that in serious medical rights cases, judicial intervention was sometimes warranted. while conservatives said her theories would usurp traditional parental authority,

In 1977, Rodham cofounded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, a state-level alliance with the Children's Defense Fund. Later that year, President Jimmy Carter (for whom Rodham had been the 1976 campaign director of field operations in Indiana) appointed her to the board of directors of the Legal Services Corporation, and she served in that capacity from 1978 until the end of 1981. From mid-1978 to mid-1980, she served as the chair of that board, the first woman to do so. During her time as chair, funding for the Corporation was expanded from $90 million to $300 million; subsequently she successfully fought President Ronald Reagan's attempts to reduce the funding and change the nature of the organization.

Following her husband's November 1978 election as Governor of Arkansas, Rodham became First Lady of Arkansas in January 1979, her title for twelve years (1979–1981, 1983–1992). Clinton appointed her chair of the Rural Health Advisory Committee the same year, where she successfully secured federal funds to expand medical facilities in Arkansas's poorest areas without affecting doctors' fees.

In 1979, Rodham became the first woman to be made a full partner of Rose Law Firm. From 1978 until they entered the White House, she had a higher salary than her husband. During 1978 and 1979, while looking to supplement their income, Rodham made a spectacular profit from trading cattle futures contracts; an initial $1,000 investment generated nearly $100,000 when she stopped trading after ten months. The couple also began their ill-fated investment in the Whitewater Development Corporation real estate venture with Jim and Susan McDougal at this time. she also took a leave of absence from Rose Law to campaign for him full-time. As First Lady of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton was named chair of the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee in 1983, where she sought to reform the state's court-sanctioned public education system. In one of the Clinton governorship's most important initiatives, she fought a prolonged but ultimately successful battle against the Arkansas Education Association, to establish mandatory teacher testing and state standards for curriculum and classroom size. She was named Arkansas Woman of the Year in 1983 and Arkansas Mother of the Year in 1984.

Clinton continued to practice law with the Rose Law Firm while she was First Lady of Arkansas. She earned less than the other partners, as she billed fewer hours, but still made more than $200,000 in her final year there. She seldom did trial work,

From 1982 to 1988, Clinton was on board of directors, sometimes as chair, of the New World Foundation, which funded a variety of New Left interest groups. From 1987 to 1991, she chaired the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession, which addressed gender bias in the law profession and induced the association to adopt measures to combat it. When Bill Clinton thought about not running again for governor in 1990, Hillary considered running, but private polls were unfavorable and, in the end, he ran and was reelected for the final time.

Clinton served on the boards of the Arkansas Children's Hospital Legal Services (1988–1992) and the Children's Defense Fund (as chair, 1986–1992). In addition to her positions with nonprofit organizations, she also held positions on the corporate board of directors of TCBY (1985–1992), Wal-Mart Stores (1986–1992) and Lafarge (1990–1992). TCBY and Wal-Mart were Arkansas-based companies that were also clients of Rose Law. Once there, she pushed successfully for Wal-Mart to adopt more environmentally friendly practices, was largely unsuccessful in a campaign for more women to be added to the company's management, and was silent about the company's famously anti-labor union practices.

Bill Clinton presidential campaign of 1992

Hillary Clinton received sustained national attention for the first time when her husband became a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination of 1992. Before the New Hampshire primary, tabloid publications printed claims that Bill Clinton had had an extramarital affair with Arkansas lounge singer Gennifer Flowers. In response, the Clintons appeared together on 60 Minutes, where Bill Clinton denied the affair but acknowledged "causing pain in my marriage." This joint appearance was credited with rescuing his campaign. During the campaign, Hillary Clinton made culturally disparaging remarks about Tammy Wynette and her outlook on marriage, and about women staying home and baking cookies and having teas, that were ill-considered by her own admission. Bill Clinton said that in electing him, the nation would "get two for the price of one", referring to the prominent role his wife would assume. Beginning with Daniel Wattenberg's August 1992 The American Spectator article "The Lady Macbeth of Little Rock", Hillary Clinton's own past ideological and ethical record came under conservative attack. At least twenty other articles in major publications also drew comparisons between her and Lady Macbeth.

First Lady of the United States

Role as First Lady

When Bill Clinton took office as president in January 1993, Hillary Rodham Clinton became the First Lady of the United States, and announced that she would be using that form of her name. She was the first First Lady to hold a postgraduate degree and to have her own professional career up to the time of entering the White House. She was part of the innermost circle vetting appointments to the new administration, and her choices filled at least eleven top-level positions and dozens more lower-level ones. She is regarded as the most openly empowered presidential wife in American history, save for Eleanor Roosevelt.

on Marine One, 1993. ]] Some critics called it inappropriate for the First Lady to play a central role in matters of public policy. Supporters pointed out that Clinton's role in policy was no different from that of other White House advisors and that voters were well aware that she would play an active role in her husband's presidency. Bill Clinton's campaign promise of "two for the price of one" led opponents to refer derisively to the Clintons as "co-presidents", or sometimes the Arkansas label "Billary". The pressures of conflicting ideas about the role of a First Lady were enough to send Clinton into "imaginary discussions" with the also-politically-active Eleanor Roosevelt. from the time she came to Washington, she also found refuge in a prayer group of The Fellowship that featured many wives of conservative Washington figures. Triggered in part by the death of her father in April 1993, she publicly sought to find a synthesis of Methodist teachings, liberal religious political philosophy, and Tikkun editor Michael Lerner's "politics of meaning" to overcome what she saw as America's "sleeping sickness of the soul" and that would lead to a willingness "to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the twentieth century, moving into a new millennium." Other segments of the public focused on her appearance, which had evolved over time from inattention to fashion during her days in Arkansas, to a popular site in the early days of the World Wide Web devoted to showing her many different, and frequently analyzed, hairstyles as First Lady, to an appearance on the cover of Vogue magazine in 1998.

Health care and other policy initiatives

favorable and unfavorable ratings, 1992–1996 ]] In January 1993, Bill Clinton appointed Hillary Clinton to head the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, hoping to replicate the success she had in leading the effort for Arkansas education reform. She privately urged that passage of health care reform be given higher priority than the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (which she was also unenthusiastic about the merits of). The recommendation of the task force became known as the Clinton health care plan, a comprehensive proposal that would require employers to provide health coverage to their employees through individual health maintenance organizations. Its opponents quickly derided the plan as "Hillarycare"; some protesters against it became vitriolic, and during a July 1994 bus tour to rally support for the plan, she was forced to wear a bulletproof vest at times. The plan did not receive enough support for a floor vote in either the House or the Senate, although Democrats controlled both chambers, and the proposal was abandoned in September 1994. Republicans made the Clinton health care plan a major campaign issue of the 1994 midterm elections, which saw a net Republican gain of fifty-three seats in the House election and seven in the Senate election, winning control of both; many analysts and pollsters found the plan to be a major factor in the Democrats' defeat, especially among independent voters. The White House subsequently sought to downplay Hillary Clinton's role in shaping policy. Opponents of universal health care would continue to use "Hillarycare" as a pejorative label for similar plans by others.

Along with Senators Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch, she was a force behind the passage of the State Children's Health Insurance Program in 1997, a federal effort that provided state support for children whose parents could not provide them with health coverage, and conducted outreach efforts on behalf of enrolling children in the program once it became law. She promoted nationwide immunization against childhood illnesses and encouraged older women to seek a mammogram to detect breast cancer, with coverage provided by Medicare. She successfully sought to increase research funding for prostate cancer and childhood asthma at the National Institutes of Health. The First Lady worked to investigate reports of an illness that affected veterans of the Gulf War, which became known as the Gulf War syndrome. As First Lady, Clinton hosted numerous White House conferences, including ones on Child Care (1997), on Early Childhood Development and Learning (1997), and on Children and Adolescents (2000). She also hosted the first-ever White House Conference on Teenagers (2000) and the first-ever White House Conference on Philanthropy (1999).

Clinton traveled to 79 countries during this time, breaking the mark for most-traveled First Lady held by Pat Nixon. She did not hold a security clearance or attend National Security Council meetings, but played a soft power role in U.S. diplomacy. A March 1995 five-nation trip to South Asia, on behest of the U.S. State Department and without her husband, sought to improve relations with India and Pakistan. Clinton was troubled by the plight of women she encountered, but found a warm response from the people of the countries she visited and a gained better relationship with the American press corps. The trip was a transformative experience for her and presaged her eventual career in diplomacy. declaring "that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights" She helped create Vital Voices, an international initiative sponsored by the United States to promote the participation of women in the political processes of their countries. It and Clinton's own visits encouraged women to make themselves heard in the Northern Ireland peace process.

Whitewater and other investigations

The Whitewater controversy was the focus of media attention from the publication of a New York Times report during the 1992 presidential campaign, and throughout her time as First Lady. The Clintons had lost their late-1970s investment in the Whitewater Development Corporation; at the same time, their partners in that investment, Jim and Susan McDougal, operated Madison Guaranty, a savings and loan institution that retained the legal services of Rose Law Firm Independent counsels Robert Fiske and Kenneth Starr subpoenaed Clinton's legal billing records; she said she did not know where they were. The delayed appearance of the records sparked intense interest and another investigation about how they surfaced and where they had been; After the discovery of the records, on January 26, 1996, Clinton made history by becoming the first First Lady to be subpoenaed to testify before a Federal grand jury. After several Independent Counsels had investigated, a final report was issued in 2000 that stated there was insufficient evidence that either Clinton had engaged in criminal wrongdoing. The 1996 discovery of a two-year-old White House memo caused the investigation to focus more on whether Hillary Clinton had orchestrated the firings and whether the statements she made to investigators about her role in the firings were true. The 2000 final Independent Counsel report concluded she was involved in the firings and that she had made "factually false" statements, but that there was insufficient evidence that she knew the statements were false, or knew that her actions would lead to firings, to prosecute her. Following deputy White House counsel Vince Foster's July 1993 suicide, allegations were made that Hillary Clinton had ordered the removal of potentially damaging files (related to Whitewater or other matters) from Foster's office on the night of his death. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr investigated this, and by 1999, Starr was reported to be holding the investigation open, despite his staff having told him there was no case to be made. When Starr's successor Robert Ray issued his final Whitewater reports in 2000, no claims were made against Hillary Clinton regarding this. In March 1994 newspaper reports revealed her spectacular profits from cattle futures trading in 1978–1979; allegations were made in the press of conflict of interest and disguised bribery, An outgrowth of the Travelgate investigation was the June 1996 discovery of improper White House access to hundreds of FBI background reports on former Republican White House employees, an affair that some called "". The 2000 final Independent Counsel report found no substantial or credible evidence that Hillary Clinton had any role or showed any misconduct in the matter.

Lewinsky scandal

favorable and unfavorable ratings, 1997–2000 Events surrounding the Lewinsky scandal eventually led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton. When the allegations against her husband were first made public, Hillary Clinton stated that they were the result of a "vast right-wing conspiracy", characterizing the Lewinsky charges as the latest in a long, organized, collaborative series of charges by Clinton political enemies rather than any wrongdoing by her husband. She later said that she had been misled by her husband's initial claims that no affair had taken place. After the evidence of President Clinton's encounters with Lewinsky became incontrovertible, she issued a public statement reaffirming her commitment to their marriage, but privately was reported to be furious at him and was unsure if she wanted to stay in the marriage.

There was a variety of public reactions to Hillary Clinton after this: some women admired her strength and poise in private matters made public, some sympathized with her as a victim of her husband's insensitive behavior, others criticized her as being an enabler to her husband's indiscretions, while still others accused her of cynically staying in a failed marriage as a way of keeping or even fostering her own political influence. In her 2003 memoir, she would attribute her decision to stay married to "a love that has persisted for decades" and add: "No one understands me better and no one can make me laugh the way Bill does. Even after all these years, he is still the most interesting, energizing and fully alive person I have ever met."

Traditional duties

Clinton initiated and was Founding Chair of the Save America's Treasures program, a national effort that matched federal funds to private donations to preserve and restore historic items and sites, including the flag that inspired "The Star-Spangled Banner" and the First Ladies Historic Site in Canton, Ohio. and hosted Millennium Evenings, a series of lectures that discussed futures studies, one of which became the first live simultaneous webcast from the White House.

In the White House, Clinton placed donated handicrafts of contemporary American artisans, such as pottery and glassware, on rotating display in the state rooms. the redecoration of the Treaty Room into the presidential study along 19th century lines, and the redecoration of the Map Room to how it looked during World War II. Once she decided to run, the Clintons purchased a home in Chappaqua, New York, north of New York City, in September 1999. She became the first First Lady of the United States to be a candidate for elected office. Initially, Clinton expected to face Rudy Giuliani, the Mayor of New York City, as her Republican opponent in the election. However, Giuliani withdrew from the race in May 2000 after being diagnosed with prostate cancer and having developments in his personal life become very public, and Clinton instead faced Rick Lazio, a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives representing New York's 2nd congressional district. Throughout the campaign, opponents accused Clinton of carpetbagging, as she had never resided in New York nor participated in the state's politics before this race. Clinton began her campaign by visiting every county in the state, in a "listening tour" of small-group settings. During the campaign, she devoted considerable time in traditionally Republican Upstate New York regions. Clinton vowed to improve the economic situation in those areas, promising to deliver 200,000 jobs to the state over her term. Her plan included tax credits to reward job creation and encourage business investment, especially in the high-tech sector. She called for personal tax cuts for college tuition and long-term care. Clinton won the election on November 7, 2000, with 55 percent of the vote to Lazio's 43 percent. She was sworn in as United States Senator on January 3, 2001.

United States Senator

First term

by Vice President Al Gore in the Old Senate Chamber, as President Clinton and daughter Chelsea look on. January 3, 2001.]] Upon entering the Senate, Clinton maintained a low public profile and built relationships with senators from both parties. She forged alliances with religiously inclined senators by becoming a regular participant in the Senate Prayer Breakfast.

Clinton has served on five Senate committees: Committee on Budget (2001–2002), Committee on Armed Services (since 2003), Committee on Environment and Public Works (since 2001), She is also a Commissioner of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (since 2001).

Following the September 11, 2001, attacks, Clinton sought to obtain funding for the recovery efforts in New York City and security improvements in her state. Working with New York's senior senator, Charles Schumer, she was instrumental in quickly securing $21 billion in funding for the World Trade Center site's redevelopment. She subsequently took a leading role in investigating the health issues faced by 9/11 first responders. Clinton voted for the USA Patriot Act in October 2001. In 2005, when the act was up for renewal, she worked to address some of the civil liberties concerns with it, before voting in favor of a compromise renewed act in March 2006 that gained large majority support.

Clinton strongly supported the 2001 U.S. military action in Afghanistan, saying it was a chance to combat terrorism while improving the lives of Afghan women who suffered under the Taliban government. Clinton voted in favor of the October 2002 Iraq War Resolution, which authorized United States President George W. Bush to use military force against Iraq, should such action be required to enforce a United Nations Security Council Resolution after pursuing with diplomatic efforts.

After the Iraq War began, Clinton made trips to Iraq and Afghanistan to visit American troops stationed there. On a visit to Iraq in February 2005, Clinton noted that the insurgency had failed to disrupt the democratic elections held earlier, and that parts of the country were functioning well. Noting that war deployments were draining regular and reserve forces, she cointroduced legislation to increase the size of the regular United States Army by 80,000 soldiers to ease the strain. In late 2005, Clinton said that while immediate withdrawal from Iraq would be a mistake, Bush's pledge to stay "until the job is done" was also misguided, as it gave Iraqis "an open-ended invitation not to take care of themselves." Her stance caused frustration among those in the Democratic Party who favored immediate withdrawal. Clinton supported retaining and improving health benefits for veterans, and lobbied against the closure of several military bases. favorable and unfavorable ratings, 2001–2009

In 2005, Clinton called for the Federal Trade Commission to investigate how hidden sex scenes showed up in the controversial video game . Along with Senators Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh, she introduced the Family Entertainment Protection Act, intended to protect children from inappropriate content found in video games. In 2004 and 2006, Clinton voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment that sought to prohibit same-sex marriage.

Looking to establish a "progressive infrastructure" to rival that of American conservatism, Clinton played a formative role in conversations that led to the 2003 founding of former Clinton administration chief of staff John Podesta's Center for American Progress, shared aides with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, founded in 2003, and advised the Clintons' former antagonist David Brock's Media Matters for America, created in 2004. Following the 2004 Senate elections, she successfully pushed new Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid to create a Senate war room to handle daily political messaging.

Reelection campaign of 2006

In November 2004, Clinton announced that she would seek a second Senate term. The early frontrunner for the Republican nomination, Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, withdrew from the contest after several months of poor campaign performance. Clinton easily won the Democratic nomination over opposition from antiwar activist Jonathan Tasini. Clinton's eventual opponents in the general election were Republican candidate John Spencer, a former mayor of Yonkers, along with several third-party candidates. She won the election on November 7, 2006, with 67 percent of the vote to Spencer's 31 percent, carrying all but four of New York's sixty-two counties. Clinton spent $36 million for her reelection, more than any other candidate for Senate in the 2006 elections did. Some Democrats criticized her for spending too much in a one-sided contest, while some supporters were concerned she did not leave more funds for a potential presidential bid in 2008. In the following months, she transferred $10 million of her Senate funds toward her presidential campaign.

Second term

Navy Admiral Mike Mullen responds to a question during his 2007 confirmation hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee.]]

Clinton opposed the Iraq War troop surge of 2007. In March 2007, she voted in favor of a war-spending bill that required President Bush to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq by a deadline; it passed almost completely along party lines but was subsequently vetoed by President Bush. In May 2007, a compromise war funding bill that removed withdrawal deadlines but tied funding to progress benchmarks for the Iraqi government passed the Senate by a vote of 80-14 and would be signed by Bush; Clinton was one of those who voted against it. Clinton responded to General David Petraeus's September 2007 Report to Congress on the Situation in Iraq by saying, "I think that the reports that you provide to us really require a willing suspension of disbelief."

In March 2007, in response to the dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy, Clinton called on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign. In May and June 2007, regarding the high-profile, hotly debated comprehensive immigration reform bill known as the Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007, Clinton cast several votes in support of the bill, which eventually failed to gain cloture.

As the financial crisis of 2007–2008 reached a peak with the liquidity crisis of September 2008, Clinton supported the proposed bailout of United States financial system, voting in favor of the $700 billion Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, saying that it represented the interests of the American people. It passed the Senate 74–25.

Presidential campaign of 2008

Clinton had been preparing for a potential candidacy for United States President since at least early 2003. On January 20, 2007, Clinton announced via her web site the formation of a presidential exploratory committee for the United States presidential election of 2008; she stated, "I'm in, and I'm in to win." No woman had ever been nominated by a major party for President of the United States. In April 2007, the Clintons liquidated a blind trust, that had been established when Bill Clinton became president in 1993, to avoid the possibility of ethical conflicts or political embarrassments in the trust as Hillary Clinton undertook her presidential race. Later disclosure statements revealed that the couple's worth was now upwards of $50 million,

Clinton led candidates competing for the Democratic nomination in opinion polls for the election throughout the first half of 2007. Most polls placed Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina as Clinton's closest competitors. Clinton and Obama both set records for early fundraising, swapping the money lead each quarter. By September 2007, polling in the first six states holding Democratic primaries or caucuses showed that Clinton was leading in all of them, with the races being closest in Iowa and South Carolina. By the following month, national polls showed Clinton far ahead of Democratic competitors. At the end of October, Clinton suffered a rare poor debate performance against Obama, Edwards, and her other opponents. Obama's message of "change" began to resonate with the Democratic electorate better than Clinton's message of "experience".

in Minneapolis, Minnesota, two days before Super Tuesday 2008.]] In the first vote of 2008, she placed third in the January 3 Iowa Democratic caucus to Obama and Edwards. Obama gained ground in national polling in the next few days, with all polls predicting a victory for him in the New Hampshire primary. However, Clinton gained a surprise win there on January 8, defeating Obama narrowly. Explanations for her New Hampshire comeback varied but often centered on her being seen more sympathetically, especially by women, after her eyes welled with tears and her voice broke while responding to a voter's question the day before the election. The nature of the contest fractured in the next few days. Several remarks by Bill Clinton and other surrogates, and a remark by Hillary Clinton concerning Martin Luther King, Jr., and Lyndon B. Johnson, were perceived by many as, accidentally or intentionally, limiting Obama as a racially oriented candidate or otherwise denying the post-racial significance and accomplishments of his campaign. Despite attempts by both Hillary Clinton and Obama to downplay the issue, Democratic voting became more polarized as a result, with Clinton losing much of her support among African Americans. She lost by a two-to-one margin to Obama in the January 26 South Carolina primary, setting up, with Edwards soon dropping out, an intense two-person contest for the twenty-two February 5 Super Tuesday states. Bill Clinton had made more statements attracting criticism for their perceived racial implications late in the South Carolina campaign, and his role was seen as damaging enough to her that a wave of supporters within and outside of the campaign said the former President "needs to stop." On Super Tuesday, Clinton won the largest states, such as California, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, while Obama won more states; they almost evenly split the total popular vote. But Obama was gaining more pledged delegates for his share of the popular vote due to better exploitation of the Democratic proportional allocation rules.

rally in support of her former rival, Barack Obama; October 2008.]] The Clinton campaign had counted on winning the nomination by Super Tuesday, and was unprepared financially and logistically for a prolonged effort; lagging in Internet fundraising, Clinton began loaning her campaign money. Obama won the next eleven February caucuses and primaries across the country, often by large margins, and took a significant pledged delegate lead over Clinton. On March 4, Clinton broke the string of losses by winning in Ohio among other places, Throughout the campaign, Obama dominated caucuses, which the Clinton campaign largely ignored organizing for. Obama did well in primaries where African Americans or younger, college-educated, or more affluent voters were heavily represented; Clinton did well in primaries where Hispanics or older, non-college-educated, or working-class white voters predominated. Some Democratic party leaders expressed concern that the drawn-out campaign between the two could damage the winner in the general election contest against Republican presumptive nominee John McCain, especially if an eventual triumph for Clinton was won via party-appointed superdelegates. On April 22, she won the Pennsylvania primary, and kept her campaign alive. She won some of the remaining contests, and indeed, over the last three months of the campaign she won more delegates, states, and votes than Obama, but it was not enough to overcome Obama's lead. In a speech before her supporters on June 7, Clinton ended her campaign and endorsed Obama, declaring, "The way to continue our fight now to accomplish the goals for which we stand is to take our energy, our passion, our strength and do all we can to help elect Barack Obama." By campaign's end, Clinton had won 1,640 pledged delegates to Obama's 1,763; at the time of the clinching, Clinton had 286 superdelegates to Obama's 395, with those numbers widening to 256 versus 438 once Obama was acknowledged the winner. with both breaking the previous record. Clinton also eclipsed, by a very large margin, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm's 1972 mark for most primaries and delegates won by a woman. Clinton gave a passionate speech supporting Obama at the 2008 Democratic National Convention and campaigned frequently for him in Fall 2008, which concluded with his victory over McCain in the general election on November 4. Clinton's campaign ended up severely in debt; she owed millions of dollars to outside vendors and wrote off the $13 million that she lent it herself.

Secretary of State

Nomination and confirmation

holds the Bible.]] In mid-November 2008, President-elect Obama and Clinton discussed the possibility of her serving as U.S. Secretary of State in his administration, and on November 21, reports indicated that she had accepted the position. On December 1, President-elect Obama formally announced that Clinton would be his nominee for Secretary of State. Clinton said she was reluctant to leave the Senate, but that the new position represented a "difficult and exciting adventure".

The appointment required a Saxbe fix, passed and signed into law in December 2008. Confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began on January 13, 2009, a week before the Obama inauguration; two days later, the Committee voted 16–1 to approve Clinton. By this time, Clinton's public approval rating had reached 65 percent, the highest point since the Lewinsky scandal. On January 21, 2009, Clinton was confirmed in the full Senate by a vote of 94–2. Clinton took the oath of office of Secretary of State and resigned from the Senate that same day. She became the first former First Lady to serve in the United States Cabinet.

Tenure

in April 2009]] Clinton spent her initial days as Secretary of State telephoning dozens of world leaders and indicating that U.S. foreign policy would change direction: "We have a lot of damage to repair." She advocated an expanded role in global economic issues for the State Department and cited the need for an increased U.S. diplomatic presence, especially in Iraq where the Defense Department had conducted diplomatic missions. She pushed for a larger international affairs budget; In March 2009, Clinton prevailed over Vice President Joe Biden on an internal debate to send an additional 20,000 troops to the war in Afghanistan. An elbow fracture and subsequent painful recuperation caused Clinton to miss two foreign trips in June 2009 amid media speculation about her level of influence within the administration. Clinton returned to the diplomatic scene sitting down with ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who agreed on a U.S.-backed proposal to begin talks with the Micheletti government. Clinton announced the most ambitious of her departmental reforms, the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, which establishes specific objectives for the State Department’s diplomatic missions abroad; it is modeled after a similar process in the Defense Department that she was familiar with from her time on the Senate Armed Services Committee. (The first such review was issued in late 2010 and called for the U.S. leading through "civilian power" as a cost-effective way of responding to international challenges and defusing crises.) In September, Clinton unveiled the Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative at the annual meeting of her husband's Clinton Global Initiative. The new initiative seeks to battle hunger worldwide as a strategic part of U.S. foreign policy, rather than just react to food shortage emergencies as they occur, and emphasizes the role of women farmers. The same month, when asked about her political future, she said: “I have absolutely no interest in running for president again. None. None.”

In a major speech in January 2010, Clinton drew analogies between the Iron Curtain and the free and unfree Internet. Chinese officials reacted negatively towards it, and it garnered attention as the first time a senior American official had clearly defined the Internet as a key element of American foreign policy. By mid-2010, Clinton and Obama had forged a good working relationship; she was a team player within the administration and a defender of it to the outside, and was careful that neither she nor her husband would upstage him. She met with him weekly, but did not have the close, daily relationship that some of her predecessors had had with their presidents. Clinton assumed a prominent role in the September 2010 resumption of direct talks in the stalled peace process in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, after having cajoled the reluctant parties to the table. In late November 2010, Clinton led the U.S. damage control effort after WikiLeaks released confidential State Department cables containing blunt statements and assessments by U.S. and foreign diplomats. A few of the cables released by WikiLeaks concerned Clinton directly: they revealed that directions to members of the foreign service, written by the CIA, had gone out in 2009 under her (systematically attached) name to gather biometric and other personal details on foreign diplomats, including officials of the United Nations and U.S. allies.

Political positions

Kevin Rudd in March 2008]] In a Gallup poll conducted during May 2005, 54 percent of respondents considered Clinton a liberal, 30 percent considered her a moderate, and 9 percent considered her a conservative.

Several organizations attempted to measure Clinton's place on the political spectrum scientifically using her Senate votes. National Journal's 2004 study of roll-call votes assigned Clinton a rating of 30 in the political spectrum, relative to the then-current Senate, with a rating of 1 being most liberal and 100 being most conservative. National Journal's subsequent rankings placed her as the 32nd-most liberal senator in 2006 and 16th-most liberal senator in 2007. A 2004 analysis by political scientists Joshua D. Clinton of Princeton University, Simon Jackman and Doug Rivers of Stanford University found her to be likely the sixth-to-eighth-most liberal Senator. The Almanac of American Politics, edited by Michael Barone and Richard E. Cohen, rated her votes from 2003 through 2006 as liberal or conservative, with 100 as the highest rating, in three areas: Economic, Social, and Foreign; averaged for the four years, the ratings are: Economic = 75 liberal, 23 conservative; Social = 83 liberal, 6 conservative; Foreign = 66 liberal, 30 conservative. Average = 75 liberal, 20 conservative.

Interest groups also gave Clinton scores based on how well her Senate votes aligned with the positions of the group. Through 2008, she had an average lifetime 90 percent "Liberal Quotient" from Americans for Democratic Action and a lifetime 8 percent rating from the American Conservative Union.

Writings and recordings

As First Lady of the United States, Clinton published a weekly syndicated newspaper column titled "Talking It Over" from 1995 to 2000, distributed by Creators Syndicate. It focused on her experiences and those of women, children and families she met during her travels around the world.

Other books released by Clinton when she was First Lady include Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids' Letters to the First Pets (1998) and (2000). In 2001, she wrote an afterword to the children's book Beatrice's Goat.

In 2003, Clinton released a 562-page autobiography, Living History. In anticipation of high sales, publisher Simon & Schuster paid Clinton a near-record advance of $8 million. The book set a first-week sales record for a nonfiction work, went on to sell more than one million copies in the first month following publication, and was translated into twelve foreign languages. Clinton's audio recording of the book earned her a nomination for the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.

Cultural and political image

Hillary Clinton has frequently been featured in the media and popular culture from a wide spectrum of perspectives. In 1995, New York Times writer Todd Purdum labeled Clinton "the First Lady as Rorschach test", Clinton has often been described in the popular media as a polarizing figure, James Madison University political science professor Valerie Sulfaro's 2007 study used the American National Election Studies' "feeling thermometer" polls, which measure the degree of opinion about a political figure, to find that such polls during Clinton's First Lady years confirm the "conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton is a polarizing figure", with the added insight that "affect towards Mrs. Clinton as first lady tended to be very positive or very negative, with a fairly constant one fourth of respondents feeling ambivalent or neutral." University of California, San Diego political science professor Gary Jacobson's 2006 study of partisan polarization found that in a state-by-state survey of job approval ratings of the state's senators, Clinton had the fourth-largest partisan difference of any senator, with a 50 percentage point difference in approval between New York's Democrats and Republicans. Northern Illinois University political science professor Barbara Burrell's 2000 study found that Clinton's Gallup poll favorability numbers broke sharply along partisan lines throughout her time as First Lady, with 70 to 90 percent of Democrats typically viewing her favorably while 20 to 40 percent of Republicans did not. University of Wisconsin–Madison political science professor Charles Franklin analyzed her record of favorable versus unfavorable ratings in public opinion polls, and found that there was more variation in them during her First Lady years than her Senate years. The Senate years showed favorable ratings around 50 percent and unfavorable ratings in the mid-40 percent range; Franklin noted that, "This sharp split is, of course, one of the more widely remarked aspects of Sen. Clinton's public image." Troy further wrote that Hillary Clinton "has been uniquely controversial and contradictory since she first appeared on the national radar screen in 1992"

for fifteen years. Her professional career and political involvement set the stage for public reaction to her as First Lady.]] Burrell's study found women consistently rating Clinton more favorably than men by about ten percentage points during her First Lady years. In particular, Anderson states there has been a cultural bias towards traditional first ladies and a cultural prohibition against modern first ladies; by the time of Clinton, the First Lady position had become a site of heterogeneity and paradox. University of Indianapolis English professor Charlotte Templin found political cartoonists using a variety of stereotypes such as gender reversal, radical feminist as emasculator, and the wife the husband wants to get rid of to portray Hillary Clinton as violating gender norms.

Over fifty books and scholarly works have been written about Hillary Clinton, from many different perspectives. A 2006 survey by The New York Observer found "a virtual cottage industry" of "anti-Clinton literature", put out by Regnery Publishing and other conservative imprints, Van Natta, Jr., found that Republican and conservative groups viewed her as a reliable "bogeyman" to mention in fundraising letters,

Going into the early stages of her presidential campaign for 2008, a Time magazine cover showed a large picture of her, with two checkboxes labeled "Love Her", "Hate Her", while Mother Jones titled its profile of her "Harpy, Hero, Heretic: Hillary". Democratic netroots activists consistently rated Clinton very low in polls of their desired candidates, while some conservative figures such as Bruce Bartlett and Christopher Ruddy were declaring a Hillary Clinton presidency not so bad after all and an October 2007 cover of The American Conservative magazine was titled "The Waning Power of Hillary Hate". By December 2007, communications professor Jamieson observed that there was a large amount of misogyny present about Clinton on the Internet, up to and including Facebook and other sites devoted to depictions reducing Clinton to sexual humiliation. that "We know that there's language to condemn female speech that doesn't exist for male speech. We call women's speech shrill and strident. And Hillary Clinton's laugh was being described as a cackle." Newsweek editor Jon Meacham summed the relationship between Clinton and the American public by saying that the New Hampshire events, "brought an odd truth to light: though Hillary Rodham Clinton has been on the periphery or in the middle of national life for decades ... she is one of the most recognizable but least understood figures in American politics." She gained consistently high approval ratings, and her favorable-unfavorable ratings during 2010 were easily the highest of any active, nationally prominent American political figure. She continued to do well in Gallup's most admired man and woman poll; in 2010 she was named the most admired woman by Americans for the ninth straight time and the fifteenth overall.

Awards and honors

Clinton has received many awards and honors during her career from American and international organizations for her activities concerning health, women, and children.

Electoral history

Notes

References

Bibliography

Further reading

External links

;Official sites Official Biography of First Lady Clinton

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Category:1947 births Category:Living people Category:American female lawyers Category:American feminists Category:American legal scholars Category:American legal writers Category:American memoirists Category:American Methodists Category:American people of English descent Category:American people of French-Canadian descent Category:American people of Scottish descent Category:American people of Welsh descent Category:Arkansas lawyers Category:Children's rights activists Category:College Republicans Category:Arkansas Democrats Category:Female foreign ministers Category:Female United States presidential candidates Category:Female United States Senators Category:First Ladies and Gentlemen of Arkansas Category:First Ladies of the United States Category:Grammy Award winners Category:New York Democrats Category:Obama Administration cabinet members Category:People from Park Ridge, Illinois Category:Presidents of the United Nations Security Council Category:United Methodists Category:United States presidential candidates, 2008 Category:United States Secretaries of State Category:United States Senators from New York Category:Wal-Mart people Category:Wellesley College alumni Category:Westchester County, New York politicians Category:Women in New York politics Category:Women members of the Cabinet of the United States Category:Yale Law School alumni Category:Democratic Party United States Senators

Caption	President of IRF
Birth name	Zakir Abdul Karim Naik
Birth date	October 18, 1965
Birth place	Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Education	Kishinchand Chellaram College
Alma mater	University of Mumbai
Occupation	President of Islamic Research Foundation, Orator, Public speaker
Years active	1991–present
Boards	Islamic Research Foundation
Religion	Islam
Influenced by	Ahmed Deedat
Spouse	Farhat Zakir Naik
Website	IRF.net PeaceTV

Zakir Abdul Karim Naik (Urdu: ذاکر عبدالکریم نائیک; born 18 October 1965) is the founder and president of the Islamic Research Foundation (IRF), which is a non-profit organization that owns Peace TV channel based in Mumbai, India. A prominent Muslim figure in the Muslim world, Naik is also a public speaker and a writer on the subject of Islam and other comparative religion.

Naik originally began his career as a medical doctor, having attained a Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery (MBBS) from the University of Mumbai. After being inspired by Ahmed Deedat, Naik began part-time and later switching to a full-time career by giving Islamic speeches to the public.

Biography

Zakir Abdul Karim Naik was born on 18 October 1965 in Mumbai, India. He attended St. Peter's High School (ICSE) in the city of Mumbai. Later he joined the Kishinchand Chellaram College and then studied medicine at Topiwala National Medical College and Nair Hospital in his native city and received his MBBS degree from the University of Mumbai. In 1991 he started working in the field of Da'wah Islam.

Naik says he was inspired by the late Ahmed Deedat, who had been active in the field of Da'wah for more than 50 years. According to Naik, his goal is to "concentrate on the educated Muslim youth who have become apologetic about their own religion and have started to feel the religion is outdated", He considers it a duty of every Muslim to remove perceived misconceptions about Islam, to counter what he views as the Western media's anti-Islamic bias in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks upon the United States. Some of his articles are also published in magazines like the Islamic Voice.

Anthropologist Thomas Blom Hansen has written Topics he speaks on include: "Islam and Modern Science", "Islam and Christianity", and "Islam and secularism".

Apart from IRF, Naik is also the founder and chairman of the Islamic International School (IIS), Mumbai. He is also the founder of Peace TV Network.

Lectures and debates

Naik has held many debates and lectures around the world as well as in Mumbai, India. One of Naik's most cited debates took place in Chicago in April, 2000 featuring William Campbell of Pennsylvania, USA on the topic "The Qur'an and the Bible: In the Light of Science".

Naik also stated that "despite the strident anti-Islam campaign, 34,000 Americans have embraced Islam from September 2001 to July 2002." He cited an article by Edward Said published in the Time magazine, which said that 60,000 books about Islam and the Orient have been written between 1800 and 1950 alone.

In a lecture at Melbourne University, Naik argued that only Islam gave women true equality. He stressed the importance of the headscarf by arguing that the more "revealing Western dress" makes women more susceptible to rape.

On 21 January 2006, Naik held an inter-religious dialogue with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. The event was about the concept of God in Islam and Hinduism, the aim being to bring understanding between the two major religions of India, and at best to point out the commonalities between them. It was held in Bangalore, India with up to 50,000 attending at the Palace Grounds.

In a lecture delivered on 31 July 2008 on Peace TV, Naik stated, regarding 9/11: "it is a blatant, open secret that this attack on the Twin Towers was done by George Bush himself", to give Bush reason to attack and control oil-rich countries.

On 7 March 2010 Naik participated in a live discussion with Soha Ali Khan and others on a TV show We The People on NDTV.

Peace conferences

Every year since November 2007, Naik has lead a 10-day "Peace Conference" at Somaiya Ground, Sion, Mumbai. Lectures on Islam have been presented by Naik as well as twenty other Islamic scholars from around the world. Another prominent personality was the Malaysian politician, Anwar Ibrahim in 2008.

During one of the lectures at the Peace Conference, Naik provoked anger among members of the Shia and Sunni communities, when he mentioned the words "Radiallah ta'la anho" (meaning 'May Allah be pleased with him') after mentioning the name of Yazid I and made remarks that the battle of Karbala was political. Others, however, believed the comment was blown out of proportion.

In November 2009, the IRF organized a 10-day international Islamic conference and exhibition titled 'Peace – the solution for humanity' at the Somaiya grounds in Mumbai. Lectures on Islam were presented by Naik as well as thirty other Islamic scholars from around the world.

Writings

In 2007, the Saudi publishing house, Dar-us-Salam Publications, published two titles written by Naik, entitled "The Concept of God in Major Religions" and "The Qur'an and Modern Science: Compatible or Incompatible?".

Criticism and controversy

On the issue of the theory of evolution, Naik commented that it contradicts Islam since it remains "just a theory and not a fact". According to Naik, scientists "support the theory, because it went against the Bible – not because it was true." According to Naik, there are hundreds of scientists and Nobel Prize winners who speak against Darwin's theory.

In 2004, Naik visited New Zealand and then the Australian capital at the invitation of Islamic Information and Services Network of Australasia. At his conference in Melbourne, senior Age writer and columnist Sushi Das commented that "Naik extolled the moral and spiritual superiority of Islam and lampooned other faiths and the West in general", further criticizing that Naik's words "fostered a spirit of separateness and reinforced prejudice".

In August 2006, Naik's visit and conference in Cardiff (UK) were the object of controversy, when Welsh MP David Davies called for his appearance to be cancelled. He argued that Naik was a 'hate-monger', and said his views did not deserve a 'public platform'; Muslims from Cardiff, however, defended Naik's right to speak in their city. Saleem Kidwai, Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Wales, disagreed with Davies, stating that "people who know about him (Naik) know that he is one of the most uncontroversial persons you could find. He talks about the similarities between religions, and how should we work on the common ground between them", whilst also inviting Davies to discuss further with Naik personally in the conference. The conference went ahead, after the Cardiff council stated it was satisfied that he would not be preaching extremist views. Khushwant Singh, a prominent Indian journalist, politician and author argues that Naik's pronouncements are "juvenile" and said that "they seldom rise above the level of undergraduate college debates, where contestants vie with each other to score brownie points". Singh disagreed with Naik's statement that "Western society claims to have uplifted women. On the contrary, it has actually degraded them to the status of concubines, mistresses, and society butterflies who are mere tools in the hands of pleasure seekers and sex marketers". Singh wrote: "Dr. Naik, you know next to nothing about the Western society and are talking through your skull cap. People like you are making the Muslims lag behind other communities." Singh also noted that Naik's audiences "listen to him with rapt attention and often explode in enthusiastic applause when he rubbishes other religious texts".

Fatwas

In August 2008, Darul Uloom Deoband issued a fatwa stating: "The statements made by Dr Zakir Naik indicate that he is a preacher of Ghair Muqallidin. One should not rely upon his speeches.".

The Shariah Board of America has also issued more than 20 fatwas against Naik on their website. They believe Naik has gone astray, as he is not a scholar and issues Islamic teachings without authority or any knowledge to do so, which is dangerous to Islam; "Naik is known for discussions on comparative religions. He is not a qualified Aalim of deen. His comments on fiqh have no merit. If it is true that he condemned the fiqh of the Imams, then that in itself is a clear indication of his lack of fiqh and understanding of Shariah. We have come across a fatwa from Darul Ifta Jamia Binnoria, Pakistan regarding Zakir Naik not being a certified Aalim of Deen. He should consult with Ulama in his endeavor of propagating deen."

In November 2008 the Lucknow-based cleric Abul Irfan Mian Firangi Mahali issued a fatwa against Naik, describing Naik as a "Kafir" (non-believer) and stating in the fatwa, that Naik should be ex-communicated from Islam. He argued that "Naik is not an Islamic scholar. His teachings are against the Quran. In his speeches, he insults Allah and glorifies Yazeed, the killer of Imam Hussain", and that Naik had supported Osama bin Laden and called upon all Muslims to become terrorists. Naik, however, said that his speeches had been misquoted and that he was allegedly targeted by people with vested interests and said of the fatwa: "fatwas mean nothing. They should also issue fatwas against Imam Bukhari. Some clerics who have limited understanding of Islam are doing these things. It doesn't affect me". The All-India Sunni Board and Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jilani Foundation have also defended Naik.

Views on apostasy

Naik has stated that any Muslim is free to convert out of Islam if the person so chooses, but added that if a Muslim converts and then speaks against Islam it should be considered as treason. Naik stated that under Islamic law this is punishable by death.

During a question and answer session at Naik's lecture on May 29 on the Maldives, a 37-year old Maldivian citizen named Mohamed Nazim stood up and announced that he was struggling to believe in any religion and did not consider himself to be a Muslim. Nazim further asked what Naik's verdict would be under Islam and in the Maldives. Dr Naik responded that he considers the punishment for apostasy does not necessarily mean death, since Muhammed was reported in the Hadith scriptures on some occasion to have shown clemency towards apostates, but added that if a Muslim apostate speaks and propagates against Islam under Islamic Shari’a rule then the apostate should be put to death.

Views on homosexuality

During a 16 October, 2006 lecture, Naik said that "one-third of New York are gays" and that homosexuality is "a problem" in the United States.

Views on terrorism

Naik's views and statements on terrorism have at times been criticised in the media and by the United Kingdom Home Secretary. In a YouTube video speaking of Osama bin Laden, Naik said that he would not criticise bin Laden because he had not met him and did not know him personally. He added: "If he is fighting the enemies of Islam, I am for him. If he is terrorizing the terrorists, America, the biggest terrorist, I am with him. Every Muslim should be a terrorist. ... A terrorist is a person who causes terror. The moment a robber sees a policeman he is terrified. A policeman is a terrorist for the robber. Similarly every Muslim should be a terrorist for the antisocial elements of society, such as thieves, dacoits and rapists. Whenever such an anti-social element sees a Muslim, he should be terrified. It is true that the word ‘terrorist’ is generally used for a person who causes terror among the common people. But a true Muslim should only be a terrorist to selective people i.e. anti-social elements, and not to the common innocent people. In fact a Muslim should be a source of peace for innocent people." This evoked strong criticism from Hindus in general and Arya Samaj in particular, who consider Vedas to be revealed texts. Because Naik claimed to have defeated Sri Sri Ravi Shankar in a debate, he was challenged to debate Arya Samaj on this issue. After he refused to officially respond, a detailed rebuttal of Naik's views along with the details of communications with IRF was made online by Arya Samaj.

2010 exclusion from the UK and Canada

Naik has been denied entry into the United Kingdom and Canada since June 2010. He was banned by the Home Secretary Theresa May. He had arranged to give talks in London and Sheffield. May said of the exclusion order regarding Naik, "Numerous comments made by Dr Naik are evidence to me of his unacceptable behavior". She noted statements from Naik such as, "every Muslim should be a terrorist". Naik's full quote is: "Every Muslim should be a terrorist. A terrorist is a person who causes terror. The moment a robber sees a policeman he is terrified. A policeman is a terrorist for the robber. Similarly every Muslim should be a terrorist for the antisocial elements of society, such as thieves, dacoits and rapists".

Naik believed that the Home secretary was making a "political decision and not a legal one". It was reported that Naik would attempt to challenge the ruling in the High court. His application for judicial review was dismissed on 5 November 2010.

Influence as revealed by published newspaper rankings

On 31 January 2010, the Sunday Express published The Indian Express list of the “100 Most Powerful Indians in 2010”. It ranked Naik at 89. Of the Muslims in this list, Naik was the only Islamic preacher. The other Muslims were a political secretary, a politician, a government official, a business magnate and three film personalities. He was the third most influential religious figure listed in 2009, whereas in 2010 he rose to become the highest placed religious leader at No. 89 followed by Jaggi Vasudev at 94, Baba Ramdev at 99 and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar at 100.

References

External links

Islamic Research Foundation (official website)

Peace TV (official website)

Articles and Answers of Zakir Naik

Here’s Zakir Naik, ‘Fundamentalist, not Fanatic’ Mumbai Newsline

Correct Islamic Faith International Association

Second opinion: Zakir Naik’s ‘reverse orientalism’ —Khaled Ahmed’s TV Review

Response of Arya Samaj to Zakir Naik's views on Hinduism

Official Peace Conference Website

Zakir Naik Exlusion Official Website

Category:1965 births Category:Living people Category:Muslim scholars Category:Indian Muslims Category:Muslim apologists Category:Konkani Muslims Category:People from Mumbai Category:Indian religious leaders Category:University of Mumbai alumni Category:Personae non gratae

Name	The Hoosiers
Background	group_or_band
Origin	London, England
Genre	Pop rock, Synthpop
Years active	2003 - Present
Label	RCA Label Group
Musical influences	The Cure, Jeff Buckley, The Flaming Lips, XTC
Url	thehoosiers.com
Current members	Irwin SparkesMartin SkarendahlAlphonso Sharland

The Hoosiers are an English pop/rock band, consisting of members Irwin Sparkes (lead vocals, lead guitar), Martin Skarendahl (bass guitar, rhythm guitar), and Alphonso Sharland (drums, percussion).

Their first single "Worried About Ray" reached #5 on the UK Singles Chart in July 2007. In October 2007, they released their debut album The Trick to Life, which reached number 1 in the album charts. The band have recently released their second top ten album The Illusion of Safety which was released on 16 August 2010 and was preceded by the lead single "Choices" which was released on 1 August 2010.

Biography

Hailing from Exeter (Sharland), Reading (Sparkes) and Stockholm (Skarendahl), the band claimed to create a sound that they called "Odd pop", combining a number of musical genres with the first album The Trick to Life. They reinvented themselves for the release of The Illusion of Safety as a more conventional pop band with electro influences.

According to their band biography, Alphonso Raymond Sharland and Irwin Nathanael Sparkes the lead singer spent some time in the United States, encouraged by their chemistry teacher (Grant Serpell who was part of the band Sailor during their fame in the 1970s), in an attempt to broaden their horizons. The pair won themselves a football scholarship at the University of Indianapolis {fact} despite a reputed claim to be "allergic to running". Their time spent in Indiana inspired the band's name: a citizen of Indiana is colloquially called a Hoosier. Having gathered enough material to compile an album, Alphonso and Irwin returned to London where they met Swiss keyboard player and sound engineer Duri Darms, and Martin Skarendahl, a Swedish ex-fireman who was then working with Darms as a recording studio engineer and studying at The London Music School.

The trio of Sparkes, Skarendahl and Sharland subsequently signed to RCA and released their first album The Trick to Life on 22 October 2007. The band have spoken of their desire to write songs that are about more than just "boy and girl.. finding love on a Friday night on the lash with your mates",

They are produced by ex-member of Jamiroquai, Toby Smith, and managed by Steve Morton.

The band's second single, "Goodbye Mr A", appeared in the football video game FIFA 08, and the game can also be seen in the "Goodbye Mr A" music video. Lead singer Irwin Sparkes, who is from Reading, is playing on the game as Reading against Manchester United. The song also appears in a trailer for the 2007 film, 'Juno'. Following the release of "Worst Case Scenario", the next release from The Trick to Life was "Cops and Robbers", as confirmed in a live webchat with The Hoosiers on GMTV. The video was broadcast on Channel 4 at 12:10pm on 22 March 2008.

The title track "The Trick to Life" is featured as the end credits music on the thriller From Within released in 2009 which is ironically about a series of unexplained deaths in a small town.

Their second album, The Illusion of Safety, includes song 'Unlikely Hero' for which they filmed the video in a quarry in Derbyshire, and was due to be a single, until it was announced via a message posted on Twitter on 14 October 2010.

Members

Chart History

{| class="wikitable sortable" |- ! Song Name !! Peak UK Chart Position |- | Worried About Ray || 5 |- | Goodbye Mr A || 4 |- | Worst Case Scenario || 76 |- | Cops and Robbers || 24 |- | Choices || 11 |}

Discography

2007: The Trick to Life

2010: The Illusion of Safety

References

External links

The Hoosiers video interview with stv/music, October 2007

The Hoosiers Exclusive Interview

The Hoosiers Interview

Category:2000s music groups Category:English pop music groups Category:Musical groups from London Category:Musical groups established in 2003

Name	Slick Rick
Background	solo_singer
Birth name	Richard Walters
Born	January 14, 1965London, United Kingdom
Origin	New York City, New York, United States
Genre	Hip hop
Occupation	Rapper, record producer
Years active	1982–present
Label	Def Jam, Columbia, CBS Records, PolyGram, Universal
Associated acts	Doug E. Fresh, Nas, Prince Paul

Richard Walters (born January 14, 1965), better known by his stage name Slick Rick (also known as MC Ricky D and Rick the Ruler) is a Grammy-nominated British American rapper. He began his career in late 1983, in the hip hop genre, where he recorded a series of acclaimed recordings such as, "Children's Story", "La Di Da Di" and "Hey Young World." Walters is best known for his British accent and his story telling innovations in this genre. His music has been frequently sampled and interpolated by other artists such as, TLC, Black Star, and Snoop Dogg; with many of these songs later becoming hit singles. Slick Rick rose to stardom in an era known to fans as Golden age hip hop.

Career

Originally from Mitcham in London, England, Walters moved with his British Jamaican family to The Bronx in 1975 where he met Dana Dane with whom he later formed a hip hop duo known as the Kangol Crew. Walters received his characteristic eye patch after being blinded in the right eye by broken glass as an infant. Once he gained a degree of wealth, Walters earned a reputation for wearing the eye patch over his right eye, and a significant amount of gold and diamond jewelry.

He first gained success in the rap industry by joining Doug E. Fresh's Get Fresh Crew, with the stage name MC Ricky D. He was featured on two singles, "The Show" and "La Di Da Di". "La Di Da Di" featured Walters' rapping over Doug E. Fresh's beatbox. These singles gained some mainstream attention. In 1988 Walters' solo debut The Great Adventures of Slick Rick came out on Def Jam Records. The album was very successful, reaching the #1 spot on Billboard's R&B;/Hip-Hop chart. It also featured three charting singles: "Children's Story", "Hey Young World", and "Teenage Love". These are now some of Walters' best known songs.

In 1990, Walters shot a bystander and his cousin whom he had hired as a bodyguard and who later admitted to having Walters shot outside a club. Walters was indicted on two counts of attempted murder and plead guilty to all charges, which included assault, use of a firearm, and criminal possession of a weapon. He spent five years in prison, two for the second degree attempted murder charges he received for the shooting, and three for his struggle with the Immigration and Naturalization Services over his residency in the US. He was bailed out by Russell Simmons, head of Def Jam records. After being bailed out Walters recorded his second album, The Ruler's Back. The album got mixed reviews and wasn't as commercially successful as his debut. In the documentary film, The Show, Russell Simmons interviews Walters while he was a prisoner on Rikers Island.

Walters third studio album Behind Bars was released while he was still incarcerated. It was met with lukewarm sales and reviews. After being released from prison in 1996, Walters remained with the Def Jam label and on May 25, 1999 released a fourth album entitled The Art of Storytelling. Generally considered the authentic follow up to his 1988 debut, The Art of Storytelling was an artistically successful comeback album that paired him with prolific MCs like Nas, OutKast, Raekwon, and Snoop Dogg among others. On October 6, 2008, Rick was honoured on the VH1 Hip Hop Honors show.

"La Di Da Di", "Mona Lisa" and "Children's Story" are among Walters most well known songs, with "La Di Da Di" being covered nearly word-for-word by Snoop Dogg on his 1993 album Doggystyle. Lines from "La Di Da Di" were borrowed by other multiple high profile artists. "Children's Story" was sampled by Montell Jordan for his 1995 hit, "This Is How We Do It", and rapper Everlast covered the song for his album Eat at Whitey's. Rapper Eminem also borrowed from the song extensively in his diss track "Can-I-Bitch". "Children's Story" was covered with similar lyrics by the MC duo Black Star on their 1998 album "Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star", as well as by Tricky on the album Nearly God. With a similar and very similar lyrics, rapper The Game also made a similar song which was named "Compton Story". "Compton Story" was on the Mixtape BWS Radio 5 made in 2008. The chorus of Notorious B.I.G.'s song "Hypnotize" is also derived from "La Di Da Di".

Rapping style

Slick Rick’s style is commended by music critics - music journalist Peter Shapiro says, “‘La Di Da Di' was important because of its narrative structure and Rick’s understanding of how crucial little sonic details—such as his use of a female voice and his yawning rap—were to hip hop style.”

He is largely known for his story raps, such as ‘Children’s Story’ and ‘La Di Da Di' – “he largely introduced the art of narrative into hip hop… none of the spinners of picaresque rhymes who followed did it with the same grace or humor.” - Allmusic states that he has the “reputation as hip hop's greatest storyteller.” In the book Check the Technique, Slick Rick says, “I was never the type to say freestyle raps, I usually tell a story, and to do that well I’ve always had to work things out beforehand.” Kool Moe Dee comments, “Slick Rick raised the lost art of hip hop storytelling to a level never seen again.” Devin the Dude notes that Slick Rick’s ‘Indian Girl’ is a good example of the type of humor that existed in hip hop’s golden era, and Peter Shapiro says that “he was funnier than Rudy Ray Moore or Red Foxx”

Slick Rick uses very clear enunciation and raps with the “Queen’s English”. O.C. states: “The Great Adventures of Slick Rick is one of the greatest albums ever… the stuff he was just saying on there, it was so clear… the [clear] syllable dude was Slick Rick for me”. He is also renowned for his unique “smooth, British-tinged flow” which contains distinct structures - in the book How to Rap, it is noted that on the song ‘I Own America’, he “puts a rest on almost every other 1 beat so that each set of two lines begins with a rest,”. Kool Moe Dee states that, “Rick accomplished being totally original at a time when most MCs were using very similar cadences.” He has what is described as “singsong cadences” - Andy Cat of Ugly Duckling mentions that Slick Rick uses a melodic delivery on the track ‘Hey Young World’. Slick Rick is also known to extensively use punch ins, especially in his story rhymes as different characters - Kool Moe Dee says Rick used “multi-voices to portray multiple characters.”

Personal life

After performing on a Caribbean cruise ship in June 2001, Walters was arrested by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) as he re-entered the United States through Florida. He was promptly told that he was being deported because he was a British citizen since he had been born in London and moved to the States as a youth. In 1996, a law was passed which called for foreigners convicted of violent felonies to be deported, a ruling which was more vigorously enforced amid heightened security concerns after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Rick was continuously refused bail, but after 17 months in prison he was released on November 7, 2003.

Rumours suggested that Walters planned to release a new album, "The Adventure Continues," in 2007. However, in a recent XXL Magazine interview, he denied the claim. Rick is supposedly "waiting for a market to open up for a mature audience."

In October 2006, the Department of Homeland Security began a new attempt to deport Walters, moving the case from the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit based in New York to the more conservative Eleventh Circuit. The court is based in Atlanta, Georgia but the trial was expected to proceed in Florida, where immigration agents originally arrested Walters.

On May 23, 2008, New York Gov. David Paterson granted Slick Rick a full and unconditional pardon on the attempted murder charges. The governor was pleased with his behavior since the mishap. He has volunteered his time to mentor youths about violence.

Discography

Albums

The Great Adventures of Slick Rick

*Released: November 3, 1988

*Billboard 200 chart position: #31

*R&B;/Hip-Hop chart position: #1

Last RIAA Certification: Platinum

*Singles: "Teenage Love", "Children's Story" & "Hey Young World"

The Ruler's Back

*Released: July 2, 1991

*Billboard 200 chart position: #29

*R&B;/Hip-Hop chart position: #18

*Last RIAA Certification: None

*Singles: " A Woman in Love With Other Men", "It's A Boy" & "I Shouldn't Have Done It"

Behind Bars

*Released: November 22, 1994

*Billboard 200 chart position: #51

*R&B;/Hip-Hop chart position: #11

*Last RIAA Certification: None

*Singles: "Behind Bars" & "Sittin' In My Car"

The Art of Storytelling

*Released: May 25, 1999

*Billboard 200 chart position: #8

*R&B;/Hip-Hop chart position: #1

Last RIAA Certification: Gold

*Singles: "Street Talkin'"

Singles

Featured Singles

Appearances

1986: "The Show (Oh My God! Remix)" (from the Doug E Fresh album Oh My God!)

1989: "If I'm Not Your Lover (12" remix from the Al B. Sure! album In Effect Mode)

1991: "Get Bizzy" (from the Greyson & Jaysun album Livin Like a Troopa)

1994: "Let's All Get Down" (from the Nice & Smooth album Jewel of the Nile)

1994: "Move On..." (from the compilation The Show (Original Soundtrack))

1996: I Like (From the Montell Jordan album More)

1996: "Got To Give It Up" (from the Aaliyah album One in a Million)

1997: "Just Another Case" (from the CRU album Da Dirty 30)

1998: "Fresh" (from the Jermaine Dupri album Life In 1472)

1998: "Faces Of Def" (bonus track on Jayo Felony's Watcha Gonna Do?)

1998: "Unify" (from the Kid Capri album Soundtrack to the Streets)

1998: "Pimpin' Ain't Easy" (from WWF Aggression with Ice-T & Charles Wright)

1999: "If We Give You A Chance" (from the Warren G album I Want It All)

1999: "Your Moms House"

1999: "Night Riders" (from the Rahzel album Make The Music 2000)

1999: "So Fresh" (from the Will Smith album Willennium)

1999: "Don't Come My Way" (from the Whiteboys soundtrack with Common)

1999: "Da Art of Storytellin' (Pt. 1)" (from the OutKast album Aquemini)

2000: "Why Not" (from the Erick Sermon album Def Squad Presents Erick Onasis)

2001: "What We Do (For Love)" (from the De La Soul album )

2001: "Pie" (from WWF The Music, Vol. 5 with The Rock)

2001: "Girls, Girls, Girls" (from the Jay-Z album The Blueprint)

2001: "Guidance Counselor"(from the Little-T And One Track Mike album Fome Is Dape)

2001: "Hey Young World, Part 2" (from the Macy Gray album The Id)

2002: "Women Lose Weight" (from the Morcheeba album Charango)

2004: "The Return (Remix)" (from the Jay-Z/R. Kelly album Unfinished Business)

2005: Performs live for Vox Entertainment @ Club Strata NYC

2005: "The Sun" (from the Ghostface Killah album Put It on the Line)

2005: "Irresistible Delicious" (from the Missy Elliott album The Cookbook)

2006: "Vows" (from the Juggaknots album Use Your Confusion)

2007: "Hip Hop Police" (from the Chamillionaire album Ultimate Victory)

2008: "VH1 Hip Hop Honors" (Honoree)

2009: "Y.O.U." (from the Asher Roth album Asleep in the Bread Aisle - UK bonus track)

2009: "Auditorium" (from the Mos Def album The Ecstatic)

2009: "We Will Rob You" (from the Raekwon album Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt. II)

2009: "Family Jewels" (from the Dynas album The Apartment)

2010: "Rock The Bells 2010" (from album The Great Adventures of Slick Rick)

Filmography

Backstage appearance on Jay-Z's Fade to Black DVD.

Cameo in Ludacris's music video for the single, "Number One Spot".

Cameo, wearing his excessive jewelry in the New York Shit music video (2:56) by Busta Rhymes featuring Swizz Beatz.

Himself in the game .

Drug kingpin in the 1999 movie Whiteboyz, co-starring fellow rappers Doug E. Fresh, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Fat Joe, Dead Prez and Mic Geronimo.

Cameo in the film Brown Sugar, which starred Taye Diggs and Sanaa Lathan.

Himself in the seminal Run DMC film, Tougher Than Leather, performing the song Treat Her Like a Prostitute.

Interviewee in 1995 documentary The Show

Opened Chris Rock's Apollo Theatre comedy Show Bigger & Blacker

References

External links

Category:1965 births Category:Living people Category:1990s rappers Category:2000s rappers Category:2010s rappers Category:African American rappers Category:American musicians of English descent Category:American people convicted of assault Category:American people convicted of attempted murder Category:American rappers of Jamaican descent Category:Black British musicians Category:British expatriates in the United States Category:British people convicted of assault Category:Columbia Records artists Category:Def Jam Recordings artists Category:English people of Jamaican descent Category:English rappers Category:People from South Wimbledon Category:People from the Bronx Category:People from Wimbledon Category:Rappers from New York City Category:Recipients of American gubernatorial pardons

Name	Mel Gibson
Caption	at the 1990 Air America premiere
Birth date	January 03, 1956
Birth place	Peekskill, New York, U.S.
Birth name
Nationality	Australian-American
Religion	Roman Catholic
Occupation	Actor, film director, film producer, screenwriter
Years active	1976–present
Parents	Hutton GibsonAnne (née Reilly, deceased)
Children	6 sons, 2 daughters
Spouse	Robyn Moore Gibson (1980-present)

Mel Colm-Cille Gerard Gibson, AO (born January 3, 1956) is an Irish-American actor, film director, producer and screenwriter. Born in Peekskill, New York, Gibson moved with his parents to Sydney when he was 12 years old and later studied acting at the Australian National Institute of Dramatic Art.

After appearing in the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon series, Gibson went on to direct and star in the Academy Award-winning Braveheart. In 2004, he directed and produced The Passion of the Christ, a controversial, yet successful, film portraying the last hours in the life of Jesus Christ. Outside his career, remarks by Gibson have generated accusations of homophobia, antisemitism, racism, and misogyny; he has previously attributed the statements to his battle with alcoholism.

Early life

Gibson was born in Peekskill, New York, the sixth of 11 children, and the second son of Hutton Gibson and Irish-born Anne Patricia (née Reilly, died 1990). His paternal grandmother was the Australian opera soprano, Eva Mylott (1875–1920). One of Gibson's younger brothers, Donal, is also an actor. Gibson's first name comes from Saint Mel, fifth-century Irish saint, and founder of Gibson's mother's native diocese, Ardagh, while his second name, Colm-Cille, and is the name of the parish in County Longford where Gibson's mother was born and raised. Because of his mother, Gibson holds dual Irish and American citizenship.

Soon after being awarded $145,000 in a work-related-injury lawsuit against New York Central Railroad on February 14, 1968, Hutton Gibson relocated his family to West Pymble, Sydney, Australia. Gibson was 12 years old at the time. The move to Hutton's mother's native Australia was for economic reasons, and because Hutton thought the Australian Defence Forces would reject his oldest son for the draft during the Vietnam War.

Gibson was educated by members of the Congregation of Christian Brothers at St. Leo's Catholic College in Wahroonga, New South Wales, during his high school years.

Career

Gibson gained very favorable notices from film critics when he first entered the cinematic scene, as well as comparisons to several classic movie stars. In 1982, Vincent Canby wrote that “Mr. Gibson recalls the young Steve McQueen... I can't define "star quality," but whatever it is, Mr. Gibson has it.” Gibson has also been likened to “a combination Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart.” Gibson's roles in the "Mad Max" series of films, Peter Weir's Gallipoli, and the "Lethal Weapon" series of films earned him the label of "action hero". Later, Gibson expanded into a variety of acting projects including human dramas such as Hamlet, and comedic roles such as those in Maverick and What Women Want. He expanded beyond acting into directing and producing, with: The Man Without a Face, in 1993; Braveheart, in 1995; The Passion of the Christ, in 2004; and Apocalypto, in 2006. Jess Cagle of Time has compared Gibson to Cary Grant, Sean Connery, and Robert Redford.

Stage

Gibson studied at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney. The students at NIDA were classically trained in the British-theater tradition rather than in preparation for screen acting. As students, Gibson and actress Judy Davis played the leads in Romeo and Juliet, and Gibson played the role of Queen Titania in an experimental production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. After graduation in 1977, Gibson immediately began work on the filming of Mad Max, but continued to work as a stage actor, and joined the State Theatre Company of South Australia in Adelaide. Gibson’s theatrical credits include the character Estragon (opposite Geoffrey Rush) in Waiting for Godot, and the role of Biff Loman in a 1982 production of Death of a Salesman in Sydney. Gibson’s most recent theatrical performance, opposite Sissy Spacek, was the 1993 production of Love Letters by A. R. Gurney, in Telluride, Colorado.

Australian television and cinema

While a student at NIDA, Gibson made his film debut in the 1977 film Summer City, for which he was paid $400.

Gibson then played the title character in the film Mad Max (1979). He was paid $15000 for this role.

During this period Gibson also appeared in Australian television series guest roles. He appeared in serial The Sullivans as naval lieutenant Ray Henderson, in police procedural Cop Shop,

Gibson joined the cast of the World War II action film Attack Force Z, which was not released until 1982 when Gibson had become a bigger star. Director Peter Weir cast Gibson as one of the leads in the critically acclaimed World War I drama Gallipoli, which earned Gibson another Best Actor Award from the Australian Film Institute. The film Gallipoli also helped to earn Gibson the reputation of a serious, versatile actor and gained him the Hollywood agent Ed Limato. The sequel Mad Max 2 was his first hit in America (released as The Road Warrior). In 1982 Gibson again attracted critical acclaim in Peter Weir’s romantic thriller The Year of Living Dangerously. Following a year hiatus from film acting after the birth of his twin sons, Gibson took on the role of Fletcher Christian in The Bounty in 1984. Playing Max Rockatansky for the third time in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, in 1985, earned Gibson his first million dollar salary.

Hollywood

Early Hollywood years

Mel Gibson's first American film was Mark Rydell’s 1984 drama The River, in which he and Sissy Spacek played struggling Tennessee farmers. Gibson then starred in the gothic romance Mrs. Soffel for Australian director Gillian Armstrong. He and Matthew Modine played condemned convict brothers opposite Diane Keaton as the warden's wife who visits them to read the Bible. In 1985, after working on four films in a row, Gibson took almost two years off at his Australian cattle station. He returned to play the role of Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon, a film which helped to cement his status as a Hollywood "leading man". Gibson's next film was Robert Towne’s Tequila Sunrise, followed by Lethal Weapon 2, in 1989. Gibson next starred in three films back-to-back: Bird on a Wire, Air America, and Hamlet; all were released in 1990.

1990s

During the 1990s, Gibson alternated between commercial and personal projects. His films in the first half of the decade were Forever Young, Lethal Weapon 3, Maverick, and Braveheart. He then starred in Ransom, Conspiracy Theory, Lethal Weapon 4, and Payback. Gibson also served as the speaking and singing voice of John Smith in Disney’s Pocahontas.

After 2000

In 2000, Gibson acted in three films that each grossed over $100 million: The Patriot, Chicken Run, and What Women Want. While promoting Signs, Gibson said that he no longer wanted to be a movie star and would only act in film again if the script were truly extraordinary. In 2010, Gibson appeared in Edge of Darkness, which marked his first starring role since 2002 and was an adaptation of the BBC miniseries, Edge of Darkness. In 2010, following an outburst at his ex-girlfriend that was made public, Gibson was dropped from the talent agency of William Morris Endeavor.

Producer

After his success in Hollywood with the Lethal Weapon series, Gibson began to move into producing and directing. With partner Bruce Davey, Gibson formed Icon Productions in 1989 in order to make Hamlet. In addition to producing or co-producing many of Gibson's own star vehicles, Icon has turned out many other small films, ranging from Immortal Beloved to An Ideal Husband. Gibson has taken supporting roles in some of these films, such as The Million Dollar Hotel and The Singing Detective. Gibson has also produced a number of projects for television, including a biopic on The Three Stooges and the 2008 PBS documentary Carrier. Icon has grown from being just a production company to also be an international distribution company and film exhibitor in Australia and New Zealand.

Director

Mel Gibson has credited his directors, particularly George Miller, Peter Weir, and Richard Donner, with teaching him the craft of filmmaking and influencing him as a director. According to Robert Downey, Jr., studio executives encouraged Gibson in 1989 to try directing, an idea he rebuffed at the time. Gibson made his directorial debut in 1993 with The Man Without a Face, followed two years later by Braveheart, which earned Gibson the Academy Award for Best Director. Gibson had long planned to direct a remake of Fahrenheit 451, but in 1999 the project was indefinitely postponed because of scheduling conflicts. Gibson was scheduled to direct Robert Downey, Jr. in a Los Angeles stage production of Hamlet in January 2001, but Downey's drug relapse ended the project. In 2002, while promoting We Were Soldiers and Signs to the press, Gibson mentioned that he was planning to pare back on acting and return to directing. In September 2002, Gibson announced that he would direct a film called The Passion in Aramaic and Latin with no subtitles because he hoped to "transcend language barriers with filmic storytelling." In 2004, he released the controversial film The Passion of the Christ, with subtitles, which he co-wrote, co-produced, and directed. The film went on to become the highest grossing rated R film of all time with $370,782,930 in U.S. box office sales. Gibson directed a few episodes of Complete Savages for the ABC network. In 2006, he directed the action-adventure film Apocalypto, his second film to feature sparse dialogue in a non-English language.

Honors

On July 25, 1997, Gibson was named an honorary Officer of the Order of Australia (AO), in recognition of his "service to the Australian film industry". The award was honorary because substantive awards are made only to Australian citizens. In 1985, Gibson was named "The Sexiest Man Alive" by People, the first person to be named so. Gibson quietly declined the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French government in 1995 as a protest against France's resumption of nuclear testing in the Southwest Pacific. Time magazine chose Mel Gibson and Michael Moore as Men of the Year in 2004, but Gibson turned down the photo session and interview, and the cover went instead to George W. Bush.

Landmark films

Mad Max series

Gibson got his breakthrough role as the leather-clad post-apocalyptic survivor in George Miller's Mad Max. The independently financed blockbuster helped to make him an international star everywhere but in the United States, where the actors' Australian accents were dubbed with American accents. The original film spawned two sequels: Mad Max 2 (known in North America as The Road Warrior), and Mad Max 3 (known in North America as Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome). A fourth movie, , is in development, but both Gibson and George Miller have indicated that the starring role would go to a younger actor.

Gallipoli

Gibson played the role of the cynical Frank Dunne alongside co-star Mark Lee in the 1981 Peter Weir film. Gallipoli is about several young men from rural Western Australia who enlist in the Australian Army during the First World War. They are sent to Turkey, where they take part in the Gallipoli Campaign. During the course of the movie, the young men slowly lose their innocence about the purpose of war. The climax of the movie occurs on the ANZAC battlefield at Gallipoli and depicts the brutal attack at the Nek. According to Gibson, “Gallipoli was the birth of a nation. It was the shattering of a dream for Australia. They had banded together to fight the Hun and died by the thousands in a dirty little trench war." The critically acclaimed film helped to further launch Gibson's career. He won the award for Best Actor in a Leading Role from the Australian Film Institute. According to John Hiscock of The Daily Telegraph, the film did, indeed, establish Gibson as an international talent.

Gibson was initially reluctant to accept the role of Guy Hamilton. "I didn't necessarily see my role as a great challenge. My character was, like the film suggests, a puppet. And I went with that. It wasn't some star thing, even though they advertised it that way." Gibson saw some similarities between himself and the character of Guy. "He's not a silver-tongued devil. He's kind of immature and he has some rough edges and I guess you could say the same for me."

Hamlet

Gibson made the unusual transition from the action to classical genres, playing the melancholic Danish prince in Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet. Gibson was cast alongside such experienced Shakespearean actors as Ian Holm, Alan Bates, and Paul Scofield. He described working with his fellow cast members as similar to being "thrown into the ring with Mike Tyson".

Braveheart

Mel Gibson directed, produced, and starred in Braveheart, an epic telling of the legend of Sir William Wallace, a 13th century Scottish patriot. Gibson received two Academy Awards, Best Director and Best Picture for his second directorial effort. In winning the Academy Award for Best Director, Gibson became only the sixth actor-turned-filmmaker to do so. Braveheart influenced the Scottish nationalist movement and helped to revive the film genre of the historical epic. The Battle of Stirling Bridge sequence in Braveheart is considered by critics to be one of the all-time best directed battle scenes.

The Passion of the Christ

Gibson directed, produced, co-wrote, and self-funded the 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, which chronicled the passion and death of Jesus Christ. The cast spoke the languages of Aramaic, Latin, and Hebrew. Although Gibson originally announced his intention to release the film without subtitles; he relented on this point for theatrical exhibition. The highly controversial film sparked divergent reviews, ranging from high praise to criticism of the violence and charges of antisemitism. Gibson also sparked controversy with his statements regarding New York Times writer Frank Rich, "I want to kill him. I want his intestines on a stick.... I want to kill his dog" in response to Rich's suggestion that the film could fuel antisemitism.

The movie grossed US$611,899,420 worldwide and $370,782,930 in the US alone, surpassing any motion picture starring Gibson. In US box offices, it became the eighth (at the time) highest-grossing film in history and the highest-grossing rated R film of all time. The film was nominated for three Academy Awards and won the People's Choice Award for Favorite Dramatic Motion Picture.

Apocalypto

Gibson received further critical acclaim for his directing of the 2006 action-adventure film Apocalypto. Gibson's fourth directorial effort is set in Mesoamerica during the early 16th century against the turbulent end times of a Maya civilization. The sparse dialogue is spoken in the Yucatec Maya language by a cast of Native American descent.

Future films

In March 2007, Gibson told a screening audience that he was preparing another script with Farhad Safinia about the writing of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Gibson's company has long owned the rights to The Professor and the Madman, which tells the story of the creation of the OED.

Gibson has dismissed the rumors that he is considering directing a film about Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa. Asked in September 2007 if he planned to return to acting and specifically to action roles, Gibson said: "I think I’m too old for that, but you never know. I just like telling stories. Entertainment is valid and I guess I’ll probably do it again before it's over. You know, do something that people won’t get mad with me for."

In 2005, the film Sam and George was announced as the seventh collaboration between director Richard Donner and Gibson. In February 2009, Donner said that this Paramount project was “dead,” but that he and Gibson were planning another film based on an original script by Brian Helgeland for production in fall 2009.

It was reported, in 2009, that Gibson would star in The Beaver, a film directed by former Maverick co-star, Jodie Foster. He has also expressed an intention to direct a movie set during the Viking Age, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The as-yet untitled film, like The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto, will feature dialogue in period languages. However, some sources have speculated that DiCaprio might opt out of the project.

In June 2010, Gibson was in Brownsville, Texas, filming scenes for another movie, tentatively titled How I Spent My Summer Vacation, about a career criminal put in a tough prison in Mexico.

In October 2010, it was reported that Gibson would have a small role in , but he was removed from the film after the cast and crew objected to his involvement.

Personal life

Family

Gibson met Robyn Denise Moore in the late 1970s soon after filming Mad Max when they were both tenants at a house in Adelaide. At the time, Robyn was a dental nurse and Mel was an unknown actor working for the South Australian Theatre Company. On June 7, 1980, they were married in a Catholic church in Forestville, New South Wales and she became known as Robyn Gibson. The couple have one daughter, six sons, and two grandchildren.

After 26 years of marriage, the couple separated in August 2006. Nearly three years after the separation began, Robyn filed for divorce on April 13, 2009, citing irreconcilable differences. In a joint statement, the Gibsons declared, "Throughout our marriage and separation we have always strived to maintain the privacy and integrity of our family and will continue to do so." The divorce filing followed the March 2009 release of photographs appearing to show him on a beach embracing another woman.

On April 28, 2009, Gibson made a red carpet appearance with Oksana Grigorieva, a Russian pianist and an artist on Gibson's record label. Grigorieva has a son (born 1997) with actor Timothy Dalton. Grigorieva gave birth to Gibson's daughter Lucia on October 30, 2009. In April 2010, it was made public that Gibson and Grigorieva had split. On June 21, 2010, Grigorieva filed a restraining order against Gibson to keep him away from her and their child. The restraining order was modified the next day regarding Gibson's contact with their child. Gibson obtained a restraining order against Grigorieva on June 25, 2010. In response to claims by Grigorieva that an incident of domestic violence occurred in January 2010, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department launched a domestic violence investigation in July 2010.

Investments

Gibson is a property investor, with multiple properties in Malibu, California, several locations in Costa Rica, a private island in Fiji and properties in Australia. In December 2004, Gibson sold his Australian farm in the Kiewa Valley for $6 million. Also in December 2004, Gibson purchased Mago Island in Fiji from Tokyu Corporation of Japan for $15 million. Descendants of the original native inhabitants of Mago, who were displaced in the 1860s, have protested the purchase. Gibson stated it was his intention to retain the pristine environment of the undeveloped island. In early 2005, he sold his Montana ranch to a neighbor. In April 2007 he purchased a ranch in Costa Rica for $26 million, and in July 2007 he sold his Tudor estate in Connecticut (which he purchased in 1994 for $9 million) for $40 million to an unnamed buyer. Also that month, he sold a Malibu property for $30 million that he had purchased for $24 million two years before. In 2008, he purchased the Malibu home of David Duchovny and Téa Leoni.

Religious and political views

Faith

Gibson was raised a Traditionalist Catholic. When he was asked whether is an intolerant position, he said that "through the merits of Jesus' sacrifice... even people who don't know Jesus are able to be saved, but through him." Acquaintance Father William Fulco has said that Gibson denies neither the Pope nor Vatican II. Gibson told Diane Sawyer that he believes non-Catholics and non-Christians can go to heaven.

Gibson's traditionalist Catholic beliefs have been the target of criticism, especially during the controversy over his film The Passion of the Christ. Gibson stated in the Diane Sawyer interview that he feels that his "human rights were violated" by the often vitriolic attacks on his person, his family, and his religious beliefs which were sparked by The Passion. and “politically very liberal” (by acquaintance William Fulco). Gibson's Icon Productions originally agreed to finance Moore's film, but later sold the rights to Miramax Films. Moore said that his agent Ari Emanuel claimed that "top Republicans" called Mel Gibson to tell him, "don’t expect to get more invitations to the White House". Icon's spokesman dismissed this story, saying "We never run from a controversy. You'd have to be out of your mind to think that of the company that just put out The Passion of the Christ."

In a July 1995 interview with Playboy magazine, Gibson said President Bill Clinton was a "low-level opportunist" and someone was "telling him what to do". He said that the Rhodes Scholarship was established for young men and women who want to strive for a "new world order" and this was a campaign for Marxism. Gibson later backed away from such conspiracy theories saying, "It was like: 'Hey, tell us a conspiracy'... so I laid out this thing, and suddenly, it was like I was talking the gospel truth, espousing all this political shit like I believed in it." In the same 1995 Playboy interview, Gibson argued that men and women are unequal as a reason against women priests.

In 2004, he publicly spoke out against taxpayer-funded embryonic stem-cell research that involves the cloning and destruction of human embryos. In March 2005, he condemned the outcome of the Terri Schiavo case, referring to Schiavo's death as "state-sanctioned murder".

Gibson questioned the Iraq War in March 2004. In 2006, Gibson said that the "fearmongering" depicted in his film Apocalypto "reminds me a little of President Bush and his guys." Gibson later defended his comments In 1999 when asked about the comments to El País, Gibson said, "I shouldn't have said it, but I was tickling a bit of vodka during that interview, and the quote came back to bite me on the ass." Gibson was barred from coming near Grigorieva or her daughter due to a domestic violence-related restraining order. while forensic experts have questioned the validity of some of the tapes.

Racism

On July 8, 2010, Gibson was alleged to have made a racial slur against Latinos using the term "wetbacks" as he suggested turning in one of his employees to immigration authorities. On July 9, 2010, some audio recordings alleged to be of Gibson were posted on the internet.

In December 2010, Winona Ryder claimed in an interview with GQ magazine that at a party in 1995, Gibson made "a really horrible gay joke", and then attacked her as "an oven-dodger" — a comment which at the time she did not understand.

Anti-semitism in The Passion of the Christ

Gibson's 2004 film The Passion of the Christ sparked a fierce debate over alleged anti-semitic imagery and overtones. Gibson denied that the film was anti-semitic, but critics remained divided. Some agreed that the film was consistent with the Gospels and traditional Catholic teachings, while others argued that it reflected a selective reading of the Gospels.

Alcohol abuse

Gibson has said that he started drinking at the age of thirteen. In a 2002 interview about his time at NIDA, Gibson said, "I had really good highs but some very low lows. I found out recently I'm manic depressive."

Gibson was banned from driving in Ontario for three months, in 1984, after rear-ending a car, in Toronto, while under the influence of alcohol. He retreated to his Australian farm for over a year to recover, but he continued to struggle with drinking. Despite this problem, Gibson gained a reputation in Hollywood for professionalism and punctuality, so that Lethal Weapon 2 director Richard Donner was shocked when Gibson confided that he was drinking five pints of beer for breakfast. He took more time off acting in 1991 and sought professional help. That year, Gibson's attorneys were unsuccessful at blocking the Sunday Mirror from publishing what Gibson shared at AA meetings. In 1992, Gibson provided financial support to Hollywood's Recovery Center, saying, "Alcoholism is something that runs in my family. It's something that's close to me. People do come back from it, and it's a miracle."

DUI incident with antisemitic remarks

On July 28, 2006, Gibson was arrested for DUI while speeding in his vehicle with an open container of alcohol. A leaked report revealed that during Gibson's July 28, 2006 arrest for driving under the influence he made anti-semitic remarks to arresting officer James Mee, who is Jewish, saying "Fucking Jews...the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." Gibson issued two apologies for the incident through his publicist, and in a later interview with Diane Sawyer, he affirmed the accuracy of the quotations. He admitted to making anti-semitic remarks during his arrest and apologized for his "despicable" behavior, saying the comments were "blurted out in a moment of insanity" and asked to meet with Jewish leaders to help him "discern the appropriate path for healing." After Gibson's arrest, his publicist said he had entered a recovery program to battle alcoholism. On August 17, 2006, Gibson pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor drunken-driving charge and was sentenced to three years on probation.

Prankster

Gibson has a reputation for practical jokes, puns, Stooge-inspired physical comedy, and doing outrageous things to shock people. As a director he sometimes breaks the tension on set by having his actors perform serious scenes wearing a red clown nose. Helena Bonham Carter, who appeared alongside him in Hamlet, said of him, "He has a very basic sense of humor. It's a bit lavatorial and not very sophisticated." During the filming of Hamlet, Gibson would relieve pressure on the set by mooning the cast and crew, directly following a serious scene. In addition to inserting several homages to the Three Stooges in his Lethal Weapon movies, Gibson produced a 2000 television movie about the comedy group which starred Michael Chiklis as Curly Howard. As a gag, Gibson inserted a single frame of himself smoking a cigarette into the 2005 teaser trailer of Apocalypto.

Philanthropy

Gibson and his former wife have contributed a substantial amount of money to various charities, one of which is Healing the Children. According to Cris Embleton, one of the founders, the Gibsons gave millions to provide lifesaving medical treatment to needy children worldwide. They also supported the restoration of Renaissance artwork and gave millions of dollars to NIDA.

Gibson donated $500,000 to the El Mirador Basin Project to protect the last tract of virgin rain forest in Central America and to fund archeological excavations in the "cradle of Mayan civilization." In July 2007, Gibson again visited Central America to make arrangements for donations to the indigenous population. Gibson met with Costa Rican President Óscar Arias to discuss how to "channel the funds." During the same month, Gibson pledged to give financial assistance to a Malaysian company named Green Rubber Global for a tire recycling factory located in Gallup, New Mexico. While on a business trip to Singapore in September 2007, Gibson donated to a local charity for children with chronic and terminal illnesses.

Filmography

Gibson's acting career began in 1976, with a role on the Australian television series The Sullivans and has continued for 34 years. In his career, Gibson has appeared in 43 films, including the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon film series. In addition to acting, Gibson has also directed four films, including Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ; produced 11 films; and written two films. Films either starring or directed by Mel Gibson have earned over $2.5 billion, in the United States alone. Gibson's filmography includes television series, feature films, television films, and animated films.

Awards and accomplishments

People's Choice Awards: Favorite Motion Picture Actor (1991, 1997, 2001, 2003, 2004) People's Choice Awards: Favorite Motion Picture Star in a Comedy (2001) ShoWest Award: Director of the Year (1996) American Cinematheque Gala Tribute: American Cinematheque Award (1995) Hasty Pudding Theatricals: Man of the Year (1997) Australian Film Institute: Global Achievement Award (2002) Honorary Doctorate Recipient and Undergraduate Commencement Speaker, Loyola Marymount University (2003) World's most powerful celebrity by US business magazine Forbes (2004) Hollywood Reporter Innovator of the Year (2004) Honorary fellowship in Performing Arts by Limkokwing University (2007) Outstanding Contribution to World Cinema Award at the Irish Film and Television Awards (2008)

References

Bibliography

External links

"Exclusive: Mel Gibson's Apocalyto Now" (sic), by Tim Padgett/Veracruz, Time magazine

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Mark Gonzales (born June 1, 1968), also known as "Gonz" and "The Gonz," is an American professional skateboarder and artist. He is known in the skateboarding world as a pioneer of modern street skateboarding, currently skateboarding's most popular form.

Biography

Skateboarding career

Gonz came on the skateboarding scene at age 15 with a modern approach to street skating and made the cover of Thrasher magazine's November 1984 issue, riding a board from Alva, by whom he was sponsored at the time. He was soon to be picked up for sponsorship by Vision Skateboards.

In 1986, Gonzales performed a groundbreaking ollie at the Embarcadero in San Francisco. So historic was this incident for skateboarding, it became forever known as the "Gonz Gap" and helped make the Embarcadero a popular location for skateboarders.

Various media

Gonz has appeared in a few movies, including Harmony Korine's cult film Gummo, where he wrestles a chair. He was also the male lead in a 1997 Spike Jonze short film, How They Get There. A film called Beautiful Losers (film), about Contemporary Art and Street Culture, also features Gonzales and was released on August 2, 2008.

In 2007 he published a skateboarding video called "Gnar Gnar" that was shot with an old VHS camcorder and was limited to only 1000 VHS copies.

Most recently, Mark Gonzales was also featured in the music video "West Coast" by Jason Schwartzman's band, Coconut Records. This was a skate video sequence originally filmed in 1998 at a German museum, but edited and synced for this music video with his permission. He also recently directed and is featured in Coconut Records' new video "Any Fun" alongside actress Chloë Sevigny as well as skateboarder Alex Olson.

He is also a poet and author and has published several books including Social Problems, High Tech Poetry, Broken Dreams, and Broken Poems. In 2008, Drag City released a book called The Collected Fanzines that consists of reproductions of old zines that he collaborated with Harmony Korine in making.

Gonz also appears in the skate video game EA Skate and filmed a commercial to promote the game's release.

References

External links

Interview with Mark Gonzales in the frequency: The Snowboarder's Journal

Mark Gonzales at Rolf Contemporary

Krooked Skateboarding (Gonzales' skateboard company)

Mark Gonzales fiction and illustration in Frequency The Snowboard Journal (Gonzales' Interview)

Category:American skateboarders Category:Living people Category:1969 births

Name	Kanye West
Background	solo_singer
Birth name	Kanye Omari West
Born	June 08, 1977Atlanta, Georgia, United States
Origin	Chicago, Illinois, United States
Genre	Hip hop
Instrument	Vocals, keyboards, sampler, percussion, synthesizer
Occupation	Producer, rapper, musician, singer
Years active	1996–present
Label	GOOD Music, Roc-A-Fella, Def Jam
Associated acts	Go Getters, Child Rebel Soldier, Jay-Z, Common, John Legend, Kid Cudi, Pusha T, Mr Hudson, Pusha T, Big Sean
Url

Kanye Omari West (; born June 8, 1977) is an American rapper, singer, and record producer. West first rose to fame as a producer for Roc-A-Fella Records, where he eventually achieved recognition for his work on Jay-Z's album The Blueprint, as well as hit singles for musical artists including Alicia Keys, Ludacris, and Janet Jackson. His style of production originally used pitched-up vocal samples from soul songs incorporated with his own drums and instruments. However, subsequent productions saw him broadening his musical palette and expressing influences encompassing '70s R&B;, baroque pop, trip hop, arena rock, folk, alternative, electronica, synth-pop, and classical music.

West released his debut album The College Dropout in 2004, his second album Late Registration in 2005, his third album Graduation in 2007, his fourth album 808s & Heartbreak in 2008, and his fifth album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in 2010. His five albums have received numerous awards, including a cumulative twelve Grammys, All have been very commercially successful, with 808s & Heartbreak becoming his third consecutive #1 album in the U.S. upon release. West also runs his own record label GOOD Music, home to artists such as John Legend, Common and Kid Cudi. West's mascot and trademark is "Dropout Bear," a teddy bear which has appeared on the covers of three of his five albums as well as various single covers and music videos. About.com ranked Kanye West #8 on their "Top 50 Hip-Hop Producers" list. On May 16, 2008, Kanye West was crowned by MTV as the year's #1 "Hottest MC in the Game." On 17 December 2010, Kanye West was voted as the MTV Man of the Year by MTV.

Early life

Kanye West was born in Atlanta, Georgia, where he lived with his parents. When he was three years old, his parents divorced, and he and his mother moved to Chicago, Illinois. West's mother, Dr. Donda West, was a Professor of English at Clark Atlanta University, and the Chair of the English Department at Chicago State University before retiring to serve as West's manager. He was raised in a middle-class background, attending Polaris High School in suburban Oak Lawn, Illinois after living in Chicago. When asked about his grades in high school, West replied, "I got A's and B's. And I'm not even frontin'".

West attended art classes at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, and also enrolled at Chicago State University, but dropped out to focus on his music career.

Music career

Early career (1996–2003)

Kanye West's first career productions came on Chicago rapper Grav's 1996 debut album Down to Earth. West produced eight tracks on the album. While the album didn't attract much attention and would be the only album released by Grav, West would soon be producing for higher profile artists. In 1998-1999 he produced for well known artists such as Jermaine Dupri, Foxy Brown, Goodie Mob, and the group Harlem World.

West got his big break in the year 2000 however when he began to produce for artists on Roc-a-Fella Records. He produced the well received Jay-Z song "This Can't Be Life" off of the album . West would later state that to create the beat for "This Can't Be Life" he sped up the drum beat from Dr. Dre's song "Xxplosive".

After producing for Jay-Z earlier, West’s sound was featured heavily on Jay-Z's critically acclaimed album The Blueprint, released on September 11, 2001. Jay-Z admitted that Roc-A-Fella was initially reluctant to support West as a rapper, claiming that he saw him as a producer first and foremost. Multiple record companies felt he was not as marketable as rappers who portray the "street image" prominent in hip hop culture. West's faith is apparent in many of his songs, such as "Jesus Walks", which became a staple at his benefit performances, such as the Live 8 concert. These songs were featured on West's debut album, The College Dropout, which was released on Roc-A-Fella Records in February 2004, and went on to receive critical acclaim. The album also defined the style for which West would become known, including wordplay and sampling. During 2003 West also co-produced songs for British singer Javine Hylton, even appearing in the music video to Real Things playing the love interest of Javine.

West was involved in a financial dispute over Royce Da 5'9"'s song "Heartbeat", produced by West and released on Build & Destroy: The Lost Sessions. West maintains that Royce never paid for the beat, but recorded to it and released it; hearing him on the beat, the original customers decided not to buy it from West. After the disagreement, West vowed to never work with Royce again. Other Kanye West-produced hit singles during the period The College Dropout was released included "I Changed My Mind" by Keyshia Cole, "Overnight Celebrity" by Twista and "Talk About Our Love" by Brandy. Like its predecessor, the sophomore effort garnered universal acclaim from music critics. Late Registration topped countless critic polls and was revered as the best album of the year by numerous publications, including USA Today, Spin, and Time. Rolling Stone awarded the album the highest position on their end of the year record list and hailed it as a "sweepingly generous, absurdly virtuosic hip-hop classic." The record earned the number one spot on the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop critics' poll of 2005 for the second consecutive year. Late Registration was also a commercial success, selling over 860,000 copies in its first week alone and topping the Billboard 200. Grossing over 2.3 million units sold in the United States alone by year's end, Late Registration was considered by industry observers as the sole majorly successful album release of the fall of 2005, a season that was plagued by steadily declining CD sales. The sophomore album earned eight Grammy Award nominations including Album of the Year and Record of the Year for the song "Gold Digger". The album is certified triple platinum.

On August 22, 2005, the MTV special All Eyes On Kanye West aired, in which West spoke out against homophobia in hip-hop. He claimed that hip-hop has always been about "speaking your mind and about breaking down barriers, but everyone in hip-hop discriminates against gay people." He then reflected on a personal experience. He said that he had a "turning point" when he realized one of his cousins was gay. He said regarding this experience: "This is my cousin. I love him and I've been discriminating against gays." He drew comparison between African Americans' struggle for civil rights and today's gay rights movement. The following year, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, West further expounded his experiences with and views on the relationship between the black and gay communities.

In September 2005, West announced that he would release his Pastelle Clothing line in spring 2006: "Now that I have a Grammy under my belt and Late Registration is finished, I am ready to launch my clothing line next spring." The current status of this project is unknown. In that year, West produced the hit singles "Go" by Common and "Dreams" by The Game.

Graduation (2007)

.]] In 2007, it was announced that West would be starring in a series directed by Larry Charles. He has been working on the pilot episode for the past two years with Larry Charles and Rick Rubin. He also had this to say on January 14: "I wouldn't do something as cliché as a reality show. At least give me the credit for being more creative than that. It's a situational half-hour comedy. It's fictional, and loosely based on my life. " West also collaborated with Japanese hip-hop group Teriyaki Boyz to produce the single "I Still Love H.E.R.," a reference to Common's 1994 single "I Used to Love H.E.R.". Further to this, during a radio appearance in early 2007, West, like many of his peers, recorded an impromptu freestyle to the popular song "Throw Some D's." The song that to all other rappers was about automobile rims, was used by West to comically refer to D-cup breasts. Because of the unexpected success of the song, West went on to make a video for the freestyle, in which he is seen playing his 'Old Ass Cousin'.

West was also featured in a new song called "Classic (Better Than I've Ever Been)". It was believed to be a single for, Graduation, because he is featured on the track, but Nike quickly explained that it was for the Nike Air Force 1's anniversary. It was meant only to be an exclusive track for the company.

On March 25, 2007, he and his father Ray West supported World Water Day by having a "Walk for Water" rally. After a two-year break, West has returned to being a fashion columnist in lifestyle magazine Complex. On July 7, 2007, West performed with The Police and John Mayer at the American leg of Live Earth. West hosted the August 17 edition of British comedy- variety show The Friday Night Project.

In July 2007, West changed the release date of Graduation, his third album, from September 18, 2007, to the same release date as 50 Cent's album Curtis, September 11, 2007. 50 Cent later claimed that if Graduation were to sell more records than Curtis, he would stop releasing solo albums. However, 50 Cent would later dispel his comments. The album has been certified double platinum. Guest appearances included T-Pain, Mos Def, and Lil Wayne.

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On August 26, 2007, West appeared as himself on the HBO television show Entourage which he used as a platform to premier his new single "Good Life" during the end credits. On September 9, 2007, West performed at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards, losing in every category he was nominated for; he gave an angry speech immediately afterward. (see "Controversies" section)

Following the MTV stint, West was nominated in eight Grammy Award categories for the 50th annual Grammy Awards. He won four of them, including Best Rap Album for Graduation and Best Rap Solo Performance for "Stronger" from Graduation. During the four-hour televised Grammy Awards ceremony, West also performed two songs: "Stronger" (with Daft Punk) and "Hey Mama" (in honor of his recently deceased mother).

Glow in the Dark Tour, 808s & Heartbreak (2008–09)

in Chicago]]

West kicked off the Glow In The Dark Tour in Seattle at the Key Arena on April 16. The tour was originally scheduled to end in June in Cincinnati but was extended into August. Over the course of the tour West was joined by a varying group of opening acts, including Lupe Fiasco, Rihanna, N.E.R.D., DJ Craze, and Gnarls Barkley. On June 15, West was scheduled to perform a late night set at the Bonnaroo Music Festival. His performance started almost two hours late and ran for half of its alloted time, angering many fans in the audience. West later wrote an outraged entry on his blog, blaming the festival organizers as well as Pearl Jam's preceding set, which ran longer than expected.

On September 7, West debuted a new song "Love Lockdown" at the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards. "Love Lockdown" features no rapping and only singing using an auto-tune device. This song appears on West's fourth studio album, 808s & Heartbreak. The new album was expected to be released on December 16, but West announced on his blog on September 24, 2008, that he had finished the album and would be releasing it sometime in November, earlier than previously scheduled. In early October, West made a surprise appearance at a T.I. concert in Los Angeles, where he stated that 808s & Heartbreak was scheduled to be released on November 25, though it was actually released on the 24th, and that the second single is "Heartless". The album was another number one album for West, even though the first week numbers fell well short of Graduation with 450,145 sold.

Along with Alicia Keys, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Leona Lewis, and others, West performed at the American Music Awards ceremony on November 23. That same night he won two AMA awards, including Favorite Rap/Hip-Hop Album for Graduation and Favorite Rap/Hip-Hop Male Artist. West performed at the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August 2008, along with Wyclef Jean and N.E.R.D. in support of Barack Obama. On January 20, 2009, Kanye West performed at the Youth Inaugural Ball hosted by MTV for Obama's inauguration.

On February 17, 2009, West was named one of Top 10 Most Stylish Men in America by GQ. The next day, February 18, 2009, West won International Male Solo Artist at The Brit Awards 2009. West was not in attendance but accepted his award with a video speech, saying "Barack is the 'Best Interracial Male' but I'm proud to be the Best International Male in the world.

In April 2009, Kanye West recorded a song called "Hurricane" with 30 Seconds to Mars to appear on their album This Is War, but was not released due to legal issues with both record companies. The song was eventually released on the deluxe version of This Is War, titled "Hurricane 2.0".

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Watch the Throne (2010–present)

In May 2010, West made an animated television guest appearance on Fox's animated television series The Cleveland Show (a spin-off of Family Guy) as the voice behind "Kenny West", a rival of Cleveland Brown's son. In his first episode he performed in a rap battle with Cleveland's son. The producers stated working with West was a very good experience and a reason they chose him was because they knew he was a fan of Family Guy. Kenny West re-appeared in the season 2 premiere of The Cleveland Show.

West spent the first half of 2010 in Honolulu, Hawaii, working on his new album with the working title "Good Ass Job", later named My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, released on November 22, 2010. West has cited Maya Angelou, Gil Scott-Heron and Nina Simone as his musical inspirations for this album. Outside production is said to come from RZA, Q-Tip, Pete Rock, and DJ Premier. West also had Justin Vernon flown into his studio on Oahu after seemingly expressing interest in sampling one of Bon Iver's songs; Vernon proceeded to feature on a number of new tracks, including "Lost In The World," which features Vernon's vocal line from Woods.

On May 28, the Dwele-assisted first single from the album, entitled "Power", leaked to the Internet. On June 30, the track was officially released via iTunes. The upcoming music video was quoted as being "apocalyptic, in a very personal way" by the director Marco Brambilla.

On September 12, 2010, West performed a new song, "Runaway" featuring Pusha T, at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards. Shortly after the performance, Kanye revealed he was working on a 35 minute short film based around the song. The movie is said to be influenced by film noir and concerns a fallen phoenix whom Kanye falls in love with. The short film debuted consecutively on VH1, MTV, and BET on October 23, 2010.

Watch The Throne, an upcoming collaborative studio album by West and Jay-Z, is scheduled to be released by Def Jam Recordings in 2011. It has been under production since August 2010 as part of West's GOOD Friday initiative of releasing new songs every Friday between August 20 and Christmas 2010. West said through a recent interview with MTV that the album is "going to be very dark and sexy, like couture hip hop. He appeared at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, performing the track "Lost in the World" from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. On January 6, 2011, Kanye announced via Twitter that the first official single from Watch the Throne would be a song called "H.A.M" produced by Lex Luger. The song was released on January 11, 2011.

Personal life

Relationships

Kanye West and designer Alexis Phifer ended their 18-month engagement in 2008. The couple had been dating on and off since 2002, with West eventually proposing in August 2006. According to a friend, the couple's relationship had been straining, significantly influenced by the sheer amount of time and attention West was dedicating to his current concert tour. "It's always sad when things like this end, and we remain friends," Phifer told People.

West was also in a high profile on/off relationship with Amber Rose from 2008 until the summer of 2010.

Mother's death

On November 10, 2007, West's mother, Donda West, died of complications from cosmetic surgery involving abdominoplasty and breast augmentation. TMZ reported that Beverly Hills physician Andre Aboolian had advised Donda West not to have surgery because of a health condition that placed her at risk for a heart attack. He had previously been under scrutiny by the medical board. Adams appeared on Larry King Live on November 20, 2007 but left before speaking. Two days later, he appeared again, with his attorney, stating he was there to "defend himself." He said that the recently released autopsy results "spoke for themselves". The final coroner's report January 10, 2008 concluded that Donda West died of "coronary artery disease and multiple post-operative factors due to or as a consequence of liposuction and mammoplasty."

The funeral and burial for Donda West was held in Oklahoma City on November 20, 2007. West held his first concert following the funeral at The O2 in London on November 22. He dedicated a performance of "Hey Mama", as well as a cover of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'", to his mother, and did so on all other dates of his Glow in the Dark tour.

At a December 2008 press conference in New Zealand, West spoke about his mother's death for the first time. "It was like losing an arm and a leg and trying to walk through that," he told reporters.

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger passed the "Donda West Law," a legislation which makes it mandatory for patients to provide medical clearance for elective cosmetic surgery.

Musical style and influences

(left)]] At the start of his career, Kanye West's production style often used pitched-up vocal samples, usually from soul songs, with his own drums and instruments. His first major release featuring his trademark vocal sampling style was "This Can't Be Life", a track from Jay-Z’s . West said he sped up the drum beat of Dr. Dre's "Xxplosive" to use as a replacement for his drums on "This Can't Be Life". and has said on numerous occasions that Wu-Tang rappers Ghostface Killah and Ol' Dirty Bastard were some of his all-time favorites, "Wu-Tang? Me and my friends talk about this all the time... We think Wu-Tang had one of the biggest impacts as far as a movement. From slang to style of dress, skits, the samples. Similar to the [production] style I use, RZA has been doing that." RZA himself has spoken quite positively of the comparisons, stating in an interview for Rolling Stone, "All good. I got super respect for Kanye. He came up to me about a year or two ago. He gave me mad praising and blessings... For people to say Wu-Tang inspire Kanye, Kanye is one of the biggest artists in the world. That goes back to what we say: 'Wu-Tang is forever.' Kanye is going to inspire people to be like him."

While his use of sampling has lessened over time, West's production continues to feature distinctive and intricate string arrangements. This characteristic arose from him listening to the English trip hop group Portishead, whose 1998 live album Roseland NYC Live, with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra inspired him to incorporate string sections into his hip hop production. Though he was unable to afford live instruments beyond violin riffs provided by Israeli violinist Miri Ben-Ari around the time of his debut album, its subsequent commercial success allowed him to hire his very own eleven-piece string orchestra. For a time, West stood as the sole current pop star to tour with a string section. Both a fan and supporter of indie culture, West uses his official website to promote obscure indie rock bands, posting up music videos and mp3s on a daily basis. This musical affinity is mutual, as West has collaborated with indie artists such as Santigold, Peter Bjorn and John and Lykke Li while his songs have gone on to be covered countless times by myriad rock bands.

Other ventures

Business ventures

In August 2008, West revealed plans to open 10 Fatburger restaurants in the Chicago area; the first was set to open in September 2008 in Orland Park. The second followed in January 2009, while a third location is yet to be revealed, although the process is being finalized. His company, KW Foods LLC, bought the rights to the chain in Chicago. Additionally, West planned to launch his fashion career, and applied for internships with major European fashion houses. He is due to release his own clothing line called Past Tell in 2009. He also collaborated with Nike to release his own shoe, Air Yeezys.

On January 22, 2009, during Paris Fashion Week, West introduced his first shoe line designed for Louis Vuitton. The line was released in summer 2009.

Philanthropy

West started the "Kanye West Foundation" in Chicago in 2003. On August 24, 2007, West hosted the inaugural benefit concert to launch the foundation's partnership with Strong American Schools. It is focused on helping Latino and African American children stay in school and to get a proper education through grade school, high school, and college. The foundation also helps children to stay in high school by finding a path through music. West has contributed over $500,000 to his foundation. The foundation has also been called the "Donda West Foundation".

Kanye West has appeared and participated in many fundraisers, benefit concerts, and has done community work for Hurricane Katrina relief, the Kanye West Foundation, the Millions More Movement, 100 Black Men of America, a Live Earth concert benefit, World Water Day rally and march, Nike runs, and a MTV special helping young Iraq War veterans who struggle through debt and PTSD a second chance after returning home.

Controversies

Media

West has had several controversies throughout his career. On September 2, 2005, during a benefit concert for Hurricane Katrina relief on NBC, A Concert for Hurricane Relief, West was a featured speaker. When West was presenting alongside actor Mike Myers, he deviated from the prepared script. Myers spoke next and continued to read the script. Once it was West's turn to speak again, he said "George Bush doesn't care about black people." At this point, telethon producer Rick Kaplan cut off the microphone and then cut away to Chris Tucker, who was unaware of the cut for a few seconds. Still, West's comment reached much of the United States. Bush stated in an interview that the comment was "one of the most disgusting moments” of his presidency.

In January 2006, West again sparked controversy when he appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in the image of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns.

Award shows

Later in 2006, West had his first of a number of incidents involving music award events. After the 2006 Grammy nominations were released, West said he would "really have a problem" if he did not win the Album of the Year, saying, "I don't care what I do, I don't care how much I stunt — you can never take away from the amount of work I put into it. I don't want to hear all of that politically correct stuff." On November 2, 2006, when his "Touch the Sky" failed to win Best Video at the MTV Europe Music Awards, West went onto the stage as the award was being presented to Justice and Simian for "We Are Your Friends" and argued that he should have won the award instead. Hundreds of news outlets worldwide criticized the outburst. On November 7, 2006, West apologized for this outburst publicly during his performance as support act for U2 for their Vertigo concert in Brisbane. He later spoofed the incident in the season premiere of Saturday Night Live. On September 9, 2007, West suggested that his race had to do with his being overlooked for opening the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) in favor of Britney Spears; he claimed, "Maybe my skin’s not right." West was performing at the event; that night, he lost all 5 awards that he was nominated for, including Best Male Artist and Video of the Year. After the show, he was visibly upset that he had lost at the VMAs two years in a row, stating that he would not come back to MTV ever again. He also appeared on several radio stations saying that when he made the song "Stronger" that it was his dream to open the VMAs with it. He has also stated that Spears hasn't had a hit in a long period of time and that MTV exploited her for ratings.

On September 13, 2009, during the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards while Taylor Swift was accepting her award for Best Female Video for "You Belong with Me", West went on stage and grabbed the microphone to proclaim that Beyoncé's video for "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)", nominated for the same award, was "one of the best videos of all time". He was subsequently removed from the remainder of the show for his actions. When Beyoncé later won the award for Best Video of the Year for "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)", she called Swift up on stage so that she could finish her acceptance speech. and by President Barack Obama, who called West a "jackass" in an off the record comment. In addition, West's VMA disruption sparked a large influx of Internet photo memes with blogs, forums and "tweets" with the "Let you finish" photo-jokes. He posted two apologies for the outburst on his personal blog; one on the night of the incident and the other the same day he appeared on The Jay Leno Show, on September 14, 2009, where he apologized again. After Swift appeared on The View two days after the outburst, partly to discuss the matter, West called her to apologize personally. Swift said she accepted his apology. In September 2010, West wrote a series of apologetic tweets addressed to Swift including "Beyonce didn't need that. MTV didn't need that and Taylor and her family friends and fans definitely didn't want or need that" and concluding with "I'm sorry Taylor." West also revealed he had written a song for Swift and if she didn't accept the song, he would perform it himself.

Legal issues

In December 2006, Robert "Evel" Knievel sued West for trademark infringement in West's video for "Touch the Sky." Knievel took issue with a "sexually-charged video" in which West takes on the persona of "Evel Kanyevel" and attempts flying a rocket over a canyon. The suit filed in federal court claims infringement on his trademarked name and likeness. Knievel also claims the "vulgar and offensive" images depicted in the video damage his reputation. The suit seeks damages and to stop distribution of the video. West's attorneys argued that the music video amounted to satire and therefore was covered under the First Amendment. Just days before his death in November 2007, Knievel amicably settled the suit after being paid a visit from West, saying, "I thought he was a wonderful guy and quite a gentleman."

On September 11, 2008, West and his road manager/bodyguard Don Crowley were arrested at Los Angeles International Airport and booked on charges of felony vandalism after an altercation with the paparazzi in which West and Crowley broke the photographers' cameras. West was later released from the Los Angeles Police Department's Pacific Division station in Culver City on $20,000 bail bond. On September 26, 2008 the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office said it would not file felony counts against West over the incident. Instead the case file was forwarded to the city attorney's office, which charged West with one count of misdemeanor vandalism, one count of grand theft and one count of battery and his manager with three counts of each on March 18, 2009. West's and Crowley's arraignment was delayed from an original date of April 14, 2009. West was arrested again on November 14, 2008 at a hotel near Gateshead after another scuffle involving a photographer outside a nightclub in Newcastle Upon Tyne. He was later released "with no further action", according to a police spokesperson.

Discography

; Studio albums

The College Dropout (2004)

Late Registration (2005)

Graduation (2007)

808s & Heartbreak (2008)

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010)

; Live albums

''Late Orchestration (2006)

(2010)

; Collaboration albums Watch The Throne (2011) (with Jay-Z)

Awards and nominations

References

External links

Kanye West at Beatbuggy

Category:1977 births Category:1990s singers Category:2000s rappers Category:2010s rappers Category:2000s singers Category:2010s singers Category:African American rappers Category:African American singers Category:American bloggers Category:American hip hop record producers Category:American music video directors Category:American pop musicians Category:American record producers Category:Songwriters from Georgia (U.S. state) Category:BRIT Award winners Category:Chicago State University alumni Category:Electro-hop musicians Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Hip hop musicians Category:Hip hop singers Category:Living people Category:Mercury Records artists Category:People from Atlanta, Georgia Category:Rappers from Chicago, Illinois Category:Roc-A-Fella Records artists Category:World Music Awards winners

Esther Vilar, born Esther Margareta Katzen (September 16, 1935 in Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a German-Argentinian writer. She trained and practised as a medical doctor before establishing herself as an author. She is best known for her 1971 book The Manipulated Man and its various follow-ups, which argue that, contrary to common feminist and women's rights rhetoric, women in industrialized cultures are not oppressed, but rather exploit a well-established system of manipulating men.

Biography

Vilar's parents were German-Jewish emigrants.

The Manipulated Man (1971)

The Manipulated Man was quite popular at the time of its release, in part due to the considerable press coverage it received. The author Esther Vilar also appeared on The Tonight Show on 21 Feb 1973 to discuss the book. Controversy surrounding the book's main tenets led to the author receiving death threats in connection with them. In fact, comparative to Salman Rushdie's experience, she has reported that she has received decades of scorn:

So I hadn't imagined broadly enough the isolation I would find myself in after writing this book. Nor had I envisaged the consequences which it would have for subsequent writing and even for my private life - violent threats have not ceased to this date.

- Esther Vilar, August 1998

The main idea behind the book is that women are not oppressed by men, but rather control men in a relationship that is to their advantage but which most men are not aware of.

Some of the strategies described in her books are:

Lure men with sex, using Seduction Strategies. As her famous quote goes:

"Men have been trained and conditioned by women, not unlike the way Pavlov conditioned his dogs, into becoming their slaves. As compensation for their labours men are given periodic use of a woman's vagina."

Young boys are encouraged to be sexually uninhibited and associate their masculinity with their ability to be sexually intimate with a woman. Young girls however are raised to be sexually inhibited, and trained to believe that their self-image is negatively affected by sexual intimacy with men. As a result, girls grow up in an environment where men are actively and openly desiring sex, while women are not. A woman thus socially empowers herself to be the gate-keeper to a man's sense of masculinity.

Young boys are also discouraged from masturbation by the use of guilt and shame (i.e. "I guess you're going back home to your hand tonight"), while girls face no such negative emotions with masturbation. This form of emotional chastity is an attempt to cause men to shirk away from masturbation as a form of sexual release, and seek it exclusively with women. The motive for such an attempt comes from the fact that "sexual intimacy" (male desire) is on a lower priority than "security of resources" (female desire). However, "sexual release" is on a higher priority than both. Therefore, it is an attempt to shift power from men to women by limiting male sexual release via women exclusively.

Seemingly innocuous statements act as a means for women to conditionally engage in sexual intimacy as either reward or punishment for good or bad behavior; as opposed to simply pleasing the needs of one's partner. Women contend that they will be able to have sex when "in the mood", but will be unable to do so when "not in the mood". However, these statements are more clearly noted as "when you behave the way I want, then I'm in the mood and you will be rewarded with sex" and "when you don't behave the way I want, then I'm not in the mood and you will be punished by me withholding sex". Therefore, they simply act as a means of controlling their partner and conditioning their behavior to cater to their needs.

Use praise to control men by administering it carefully.

From a very early age, men are conditioned by both girls and their mothers to conform to social definitions and norms which women construct with their needs in mind. These definitions have one common element; they overplay the notion of a girl being emotionally and physically weaker than a boy, and a man being stronger than a woman. As a result, they use this excuse to give license to a woman to construct rules between the sexes that cater exclusively to her needs while ignoring any male needs.

The most common example is that of chivalry, dating etiquette and manners; all of which mandate that a man cater exclusively to a woman's needs while ignoring his own. A man is expected to first approach a woman, initiate a date, and initiate more intimate contact while bearing all risk of rejection. A man is also expected to pay for the cost of dating and maintaining the relationship, help a woman out of a car, open her door, take her coat, pull out her chair, help her sit, walk behind her while walking up the stairs in the event she falls, walk on the traffic-side of the sidewalk, and help her in other things she could normally do by herself. When a man does this, he is rewarded with praise by being called a "gentleman" or "well-mannered" and "knowing how to treat a woman". However, when he fails to cater exclusively to her needs, he is not praised, and in some instances is even scolded or vilified.

When a man sacrifices his personal life and passions so that his wife may stay home while he works to provide the costs of a household all by himself, he is rewarded with praise by being called "a good husband". However, if the man were to do the same thing as the wife, he would be called "a loser" or "a lazy bum".

When a man helps with the burden of household chores and raising the children, he is called a "good father". However, if he is the sole working parent and he does not help out with the children, he is labeled a "bad father".

Praise is never given to a man when he accomplishes something that does not cater to a woman's needs. Praise is only given to a man when a woman's needs are met in some way. Otherwise, any activity that does not cater to her needs is not praiseworthy.

Use emotional blackmail as a means of controlling men.

Boys are discouraged from crying, and learn to control their tear ducts at a very early age. When an event causes a man to cry, it is because the emotional reaction makes it impossible for him to control his tear ducts. However, girls are not discouraged from crying, and can control their tear ducts much the same way any person can control their bladder to pee when desired. Therefore, when men see extreme emotion in women, they believe that this emotion is real as opposed to artificial (acting/fake).

As a result, women will often engage in displays of overly-dramatized emotional reactions to attempt to control men and get their way; much the same way they did as children when they were little girls. These displays include crying, whining, yelling, nagging, and being distant and silent until their demands are met.

By the same token, women will often try and make a man feel ashamed, bad or guilty for behavior that the woman does not agree to. For instance, if a man does not comply to her set of dating rules, she might call him a "jerk" or label him "cheap". She may try to vilify him and make him feel bad about his sexuality. She will scold him for seeing other women, but will expect him to "wait until she's ready" before they have sex. This is an attempt to make certain that the man has no other means to sex or sexual intimacy but her, and then, to sexually starve him and use sex as a reward for good behavior; such as saying "I love you" or making a relationship official and other acts of commitment. She may even tell him that she has a one month rule, and if he will not agree to that, then he "doesn't respect her"; as this allows her to ignore his desires and rid herself of any pressure to respect him.

Women will also assert a sense of moral superiority over men in an attempt to suggest that all things female are right and all things male are wrong. References to the violent tendencies of a few men will be used to support such an argument. However, careful examination of the entire male population clearly fails to lend such support to an argument that depends on cherry-picking. An overall view of the entire female population on the other hand shows perversion of sex as a tool to be used in a manner identical to a prostitute, selfishness, self-serving intentions and motives, lack of care or consideration for their romantic partner, a disgusting lack of empathy and love, laziness, lack of genuine ambition and thirst for creativity and knowledge. Nevertheless, men are conditioned from a very early age to agree to the view as women as "the fairer sex".

Use of love and romance as a guise to mask her real intentions and motives.

Women will often refer to tradition and concepts of love and romance to get men to comply to their demands. Since concepts of love and romance are associated with "goodness" and "morality", while sex is labeled "bad", "dirty" and "immoral"; women condition men to consider female needs an unquestionable priority, while viewing sex as a favor women do for men.

A woman will want a man to be exclusive to her in a relationship, not because she cares about losing him to another woman, but because she wants to more easily control him. The conditional statements she makes are designed to be unquestioned, morally sound, and mask her real intentions under the guise of love. "If you love me, then you won't have sex with another woman". She is not interested in exclusivity so much as her being the only one he can turn to for sex and sexual intimacy. If his actions cause her grip over him to weaken, she makes him feel guilty by feigning that he has emotionally hurt her and labeling him a "cheater".

Men are also trained from a very early age to view marriage as the ultimate goal of any relationship. However, a man has nothing to gain from marriage. It is instead left unexamined by men, why they should take pride in asking a woman to marry him. Women simply contend that it is the ultimate gesture of true love, and that nothing could be more romantic. In an effort to please women and cater to her happiness, men feel a strong desire to get married. However, a woman's goals are different.

Marriage is simply a way of making it nearly impossible for her workhorse (man) to leave her, and allow her to no longer put in the effort of trying to keep him around. She wants the legal right to half of his assets and income, and support for the children should he decide to leave her. When men try and cater to her romantic desire for marriage under the guise of love but try and isolate it to just love and no financial or legal aspects involved (i.e. a pre-nupt), a woman will always object. She will do her best to hide behind the guise of love and romance, claiming "if you really love me, then you won't need one" and "it's unromantic, there is no yours and mine, just ours". However, her intentions are anything but romantic. She wants security, the financial and legal security that a marriage with no pre-nupt provides her.

A revised version of the book is currently in print. Her play Speer (1998) is a work of fictional biography about the German architect and has been staged in Berlin and London, directed by and starring Klaus Maria Brandauer. She has also written many other books and plays, but most have not been translated into English.

Selected works

(play)

External links

Personal site on Esther Vilar

Pinter & Martin, Esther Vilar's English publishers

Category:1935 births Category:Living people Category:People from Buenos Aires Category:Argentine writers Category:German writers Category:Theologians