The obvious answer to this question is, ‘Listen to what he (or she) has to say’, but that would be too obvious. My thanks to the estimable Zachery Lorentz for pointing me to an article posted in June 2012 on Jezebel, the notoriously misandrous feminist website. I’m of the firm opinion that most of Jezebel’s hate-driven contributors take Stupid pills on prescription, but Anna North’s article suggests she’d just overdosed on them. Evidence for this includes her citing the leading feminist poodle, David Futrelle:

How should one argue with a loved one who’s turned into a misogynist? I talked to David Futrelle of Man Boobz, who is somewhat bearish on MRAs’ ability to change: ‘Unfortunately, in most cases, I don’t think it’s possible to talk someone out of a Men’s Rights obsession. For most of them, it seems to be driven not by facts – they’re happy to simply make up facts to fit their worldview – but by feelings, most obviously by rage at women.’

Hmm… let’s do a gender switch, shall we, and return to the real world?

‘Unfortunately, in most cases, I don’t think it’s possible to talk someone out of a Women’s Rights obsession. For most of them, it seems to be driven not by facts – they’re happy to simply make up facts to fit their worldview – but by feelings, most obviously by rage at men.’

We move on to possibly the single most stupid sentence in the stupid article, penned by Ms North herself:

I wouldn’t ordinarily advocate trying to get to the bottom of a men’s rights activist’s pain — lots of MRAs talk about how much they’d like to inflict pain on women, and frankly, I don’t have much empathy for them.

In the past three or four years in which I’ve had a strong interest in men’s human rights, I haven’t encountered even one MHRA – in person, or online – who’d ‘like to inflict pain on women’. So to which website does Ms North direct us, to back up her ‘lots of MRAs…’ claim? Why, back to David Futrelle’s ‘Man Boobz’. The man must be very proud of himself.

The article:

http://jezebel.com/5873726/what-should-you-do-when-someone-you-love-becomes-a-mens-rights-activist?

An interesting new piece titled, ‘Raising boys during a “Crisis of Masculinity”: a feminist view’ has just been posted by a feminist, Glosswitch, on her blog:

http://glosswatch.com/2013/07/17/raising-boys-during-a-crisis-of-masculinity-a-feminist-view/

The first paragraph sets the tone for the piece:

I’ll always remember the day my first son was born. “It’s a boy,” said the midwife. “Urgh, take it away,” said I. “I’m a feminist. I don’t do boys.” The fact is, like all card-carrying feminists, I’m contractually obliged not to give a shit about the welfare of non-women. As far as they’re concerned, I’m all out for revenge.

Unlike feminists, men who advocate for men’s and boys’ human rights also care about the welfare of the opposite sex. It’s one of the key differentiators between us. I invite you to post a comment in response to the piece – on Glosswitch’s website –  as I shall be doing myself very shortly. Thank you.

One of many feminist myths which fly in the face of historical evidence is that the suffragettes accelerated women’s emancipation in the UK. A number of authors – including Steve Moxon in The Woman Racket (2008) – have outlined how the suffragettes delayed women’s full emancipation.

Another myth relates to an icon of feminism for the past 100 years, Emily Davison, who died after walking into the path of the King’s Horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby. Many years later Herbert Jones, the jockey, who’d been concussed after the horse’s fall and traumatised by the event, committed suicide. I’ve never heard a feminist express any concerns over his early death.

Emily Davison is always presented by feminists as a martyr to their cause. So what does the evidence tell us? The Guardian recently published an interesting piece on the matter, and it’s perfectly clear Emily Davison hadn’t plan to commit suicide. Foolishly, stupidly, recklessly, she had been attempting to attach a scarf to the racehorse’s bridle.

Just one sentence from the article tells us all we need to know:

The fact that she was carrying a return train ticket from Epsom and had holiday plans with her sister in the near future have also caused some historians to claim that she had no intention of killing herself.

A tragic event – for both Emily Davison and Herbert Jones – but clearly not an attempt at suicide, nor heroic.

I sometimes think of feminism as like a hot air balloon. The only thing keeping it up is hot air, and there’s a big problem if the balloon starts to get holes in it. For all the hot air spouted by angry feminists, the men’s human rights movement is relentlessly blasting holes in their balloon, and the balloon’s losing altitude. How long before we see the balloon’s crash landing? I don’t know, but I do know there’s a historical inevitability about it. As long ago as 1913 Ernest Belfort Bax, a socialist philosopher, revealed in The Fraud of Feminism that the true aim of feminism was extending historical female privilege yet further:

https://j4mbdotorgdotuk.wordpress.com/2013/07/10/the-fraud-of-feminism-1913/

A movement based upon visceral hatred of half the population can’t be sustained indefinitely. 100+ years is more than long enough.

I was reminded of the balloon metaphor by a very intriguing piece just published by ‘A Voice for Men’, on the absence of feminist contributors to a recent debate:

http://www.avoiceformen.com/updates/feminist-no-show-during-avfm-news-and-activism-show-scheduled-just-for-them/

Feminists are increasingly aware they have only two choices:

– debate with men’s human rights activists – many of whom are women – and reveal themselves as the misandrous ideologues they are, incapable of engaging in a rational exchange of views; or

– decline to debate, and thereby have all their decades-old narratives challenged to destruction

Whatever they choose to do, the result will be yet more holes in the balloon. I hope feminists are preparing for the inevitable crash landing…

If you’re looking for relentlessly whining women prepared – nay, keen – to play the ‘victim card’ at the drop of a hat 24/7/365, the ladies at the Fawcett Society should be high on your list. Though why you might be looking for such women, heaven only knows. A diagnosis of masochism would surely be in order.

So what have the Fawcett ladies got their knickers in a twist about now? In the final months of the last Labour administration, feminist Labour MPs finalised the Equality Bill (2010). It would be difficult to imagine a more left-wing and anti-male piece of legislation. Within weeks of attaining power in May 2010 David Cameron did two things that must have delighted militant feminists such as Harriet Harman:

– he appointed Lord Davies of Abersoch, a Labour peer, to write a report making recommendations on how (not whether) to increase the proportion of women in senior positions in the public and private sectors; and

– he passed the Equality Bill into law, with very minor modifications.

Almost two-thirds of public sector employees are women, and this has been the case for many years. In the interests of equality, therefore, it would surely be fair for the public sector to favour men over women in terms of recruitment and promotion, especially given men largely finance the public sector, collectively paying 72% of the income tax collected in the UK while women collectively pay just 28%.

We know unemployment is a bigger risk factor for men than women, and three times more men than women commit suicide in the UK. So any drive to favour women over men in employment terms would inevitably contribute to the male suicide rate. Surely the state wouldn’t pursue policy directions which would lead to men killing themselves, would it? A rhetorical question, of course. It would and does in this area and many others e.g. denying fathers reasonable access to their children following relationship breakdowns, virtually non-existent support for male victims of domestic abuse…

In the Equality Act (2010) is the nefarious ‘public sector equality duty’ – PSED. It permits public sector bodies to favour women as a ‘disadvantaged group’ – seriously , I’m not making this stuff up – over men in recruitment and promotion, despite women already outnumbering men in the public sector almost 2:1.

The coalition government is reviewing the PSED, and this is what has got the Fawcett ladies’ knickers in a twist, as reported in the Guardian. The link to the article was contained in an email sent to Fawcett supporters a little over an hour ago. One of those (lady) supporters perhaps doesn’t support Fawcett as much as Fawcett might think she does, because she forwarded the email on to me. Now here’s an odd thing, which the estimable lady spotted. My name’s in the middle of the URL. Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jul/14/coalition-accused-of-assault-on-equality?INTCMP=SRCH&utm_source=fawcett-society.msg2u.net&utm_medium=email&utm_content=mikebuchanan%40hotmail.co.uk&utm_campaign=2013%20newsletters&utm_term=Women%92s%20rights%20are%20not%20red%20tape%20%96%20save%20the%20Equality%20Duty

Clearly a female: male employee ratio of 2:1 in the public sector isn’t high enough for the Fawcett ladies. Let’s hope the coalition scraps the PSED, and earns some appreciation from us as a result. But I very much doubt they’ll scrap it, I regret to say. Everything the coalition has done since May 2010, where legislation or guidance impacts differentially on the genders, has been pro-female and anti-male.

A remarkable new video by Karen Straughan (‘GirlWritesWhat’) on rape and false rape allegations:

http://www.avoiceformen.com/featured/dont-be-that-lying-feminist/

About four months ago I was in a discussion on The Jeremy Vine Show, a BBC Radio programme which regularly attracts 6-7 million listeners. Here’s a link to that discussion:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75Z4NRGkeVE

Also in the studio was Laura Bates, founder of The Everyday Whining Project, as we call it. She herself – along with her miserable band of whiners, both female and male – calls it The Everyday Sexism Project.

Prior to the programme I sent a few polite emails to Laura Bates with links to various posts, so she’d have the opportunity to better understand our positions on a number of matters, and thereby prepare more thoroughly for our discussion. She said nothing on this show to suggest that she’d ready any of that material. Once we were ‘off air’ she had a hissy fit and demanded I stop sending her emails. She then strode angrily out of the studio, leaving a shell-shocked Jeremy Vine to remark, ‘Wow! Interesting… thanks Mike!’

I mention this because yesterday’s Sunday Times carried a full-page article by Francesca Angelini on the topic of sexism, giving huge exposure to material provided by The Everyday Whining Project. Ms Angelini called me on Saturday afternoon, and we had a lengthy discussion, but sadly little of it appeared in the final article – to be fair to her, she was up against a very tight deadline. I’ll restrict myself to reproducing just two paragraphs from the article. The second refers to the incident following which Foreign Secretary William Hague apologised last week, after being caught mouthing the words, ‘Stupid woman!’, to a Labour MP during last Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions.

It pains Mike Buchanan, 55, the founder of Justice for men and boys (and the women who love them). He claims women simply whine more than men. ‘The Everyday Sexism Project is all about attracting dissatisfied women and telling them all their problems are down to men, which just infantilises them,’ he said. ‘They’ve attained incredible power and it’s terrifying.’

Even some women think their own sex is too quick to take offence. Amanda Platell, the former Tory party spin doctor, leapt to Hague’s defence last week. ‘As it happens, Cathy Jamieson, the MP he targeted, IS a stupid woman’, she insisted. ‘But I can only say that because I’m female.’

(Amanda Platell is the Daily Mail columnist who wrote an outstanding piece on abortion for last Saturday’s edition of the paper.)

In my defence, I don’t believe I referred in my discussion with Ms Angelini to The Everyday Whining Project having ‘attained incredible power and its terrifying’. I certainly don’t believe that. I may have made the remark in connection with militant feminism.

The Everyday Whining Project is simultaneously influential and laughable, fighting such ludicrous battles as shaming Tesco, the nation’s leading supermarket chain, to ‘Lose the Lad’s Mags’ –  a battle I predict they’ll win before long. And when they do win it, they’ll inevitably move on to ‘Lose The Sun‘ until such times as that paper loses its Page 3 topless models. Oddly, no woman has ever claimed she was forced to appear on Page 3, and I understand ‘lad’s mags’ are inundated by women keen to appear in the magazines, without being paid.

Maybe we should start a campaign for Tesco to ‘Lose The Romantic Fiction’. Books in this genre invariably show men on their covers, who are:

– rich and/or

– handsome and/or

– tall and/or

– powerful

It’s not fair that the general public, and male store workers in particular, are exposed to such objectifying imagery, which must surely damage men’s and boys’ self-esteem and body image.

 

 

The leniency of sentences faced by women, when convicted of the same crimes as men, is a scandal. Yet there are relentless calls for the differential to be increased, not decreased. On the BBC this morning:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23308050

In 2007 the Corston report – authored by Labour peer Baroness Corston – recommended jailing only the most serious or violent female offenders. Interviewed this week on BBC radio, she said current policy was ‘perfectly tailored for men’ because there were 80,000 men behind bars – but women were ignored because there were only 4,000 in comparison. ‘The overwhelming majority of them should not be there because they are troubled not troublesome,’ she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. She also said the damage to women and their children was ‘incalculable’.

‘Troubled not troublesome’. It’s the same old story. When men commit crimes it’s because they’re bad, and have to be punished. When women commit crimes it’s due to mental health issues, so their sentences must be lenient, ideally non-custodial. And you have to ask, do women forget they’re responsible for children when they commit crimes? Or do they know that if and when they’re convicted of a crime they can play not only the ‘women card’ but also the ‘child card’, and receive a lenient sentence? Surely the latter is more credible.

On Twitter last night I replied to a tweet by a feminist who uses the pseudonym ‘Glosswitch’, and runs the ‘Glosswatch’ blog. She was lamenting the passing of a bill in Texas which will reduce the period after conception in which a woman can legally obtain an abortion, to 20 weeks. I sent her a short message, and she posted the following on her website in response:

http://glosswatch.com/2013/07/13/dear-cis-men-who-are-sad-about-not-getting-to-make-individual-choices-about-abortion-and-therefore-want-to-make-choices-for-everyone-else/

Her commentary flits seamlessly between the inaccurate and the absurd. An example of both:

What gets me is it seems there are people who oppose abortion on the basis that if they can’t have one, no one else should be able to.

I defy anyone to point to any evidence suggesting this is the ‘basis’ on which J4MB might campaign to have the law on abortion changed. We then had an exchange of comments, and others joined in, inevitably including a male feminist.

It’s often been said that those who strongly support elective abortion glory in their power of life and death over the unborn. The sheer inhumanity of some of the comments was breathtaking. An example, from Emma Newman:

As far as I’m concerned, women everywhere should be able to have all the abortions they want! What a wonderful way to control the population.

Glosswitch inevitably (and predictably) accused me of misogyny whilst (again, predictably) providing no evidence for the accusation. She and a number of the commenters trotted out the usual mantras of ‘choice’ and ‘bodily autonomy’. Along with the charge of misogyny, the aim is to have people not engage their brains when it comes to abortion, not to think seriously about any moral dimensions.

So what happens when people do engage their brains, and think about the moral (and other) dimensions of abortion? A person yesterday left a comment on our post about our plans to consult the British public about possible changes to the law on abortion, and he provided the URL of a YouTube video titled, ‘The 180 movie’. It’s the work of an American, Ray Comfort, and it’s been watched by around 4.1 million people. He describes himself as Jewish at the start of the video, but it’s clear he means Jewish by birth, as he’s now a practising Christian.

Much of the video consists of interviews with young American men and women on the subject of abortion. It’s illuminating to see how their opinions change dramatically when they start to think about the issues involved, possibly for the first time in their lives.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y2KsU_dhwI

Some of Ray Comfort’s arguments are based upon religious convictions, but most aren’t. This interests me, because while some of those who support our plans to consult on abortion do so on religious grounds, this isn’t true for the majority of those individuals, and I’m not personally religious. I repeat a point made in the original post on this matter – a desire to reform the abortion laws in the UK is the leading concern of female respondents to our public consultation document. These women believe that the price being paid for women exercising ‘choice’ and ‘bodily autonomy’ is too high.

A ‘must read’ article written by a woman in 2008:

http://voices.yahoo.com/the-origins-add-adhd-1611843.html