A new British men’s human rights activism group was launched recently, HEqual http://hequal.wordpress.com. One of their early posts concerns the bias (financial and otherwise) of Cancer Research UK (CRUK) towards female-specific cancers, although more than twice as many men as women contract gender-specific cancers. Working with others, HEqual have been instrumental in persuading CRUK to add a link on its website to ‘male cancers’, where previously it only had a link to ‘female cancers’. The story:

http://hequal.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/victory-against-cancer-research-uk/

It’s a welcome step in the right direction. We like the vigorous and practical tone of HEqual’s rhetoric, and we wish the group every success. From their ‘About’ page:

What is HEqual?

HEqual represents a new brand of equality activism. We’re politically neutral, egalitarian, independent, and above all else determined to get results. While gender feminist activism concerns itself with making men sitting down to go to the toilet, critiques their seating posture on public transport and seeks to remove Winston Churchill from banknotes, we’ll be tackling the other minor equality issues that appear to have slipped their minds.

Why now?

It’s clear that egalitarians are winning the arguments when it comes to gender issues. Whether it be harmful unmeritocratic quotas, child genital mutilation, female sentencing discounts or sexist domestic violence service provision, we are winning the arguments hands down. Just read the most popular comments for news articles on such issues, views that were quite novel and subject to silencing in the past are now widely accepted amongst the public, if not by the ruling elite.

What are your objectives?

The prime concern of HEqual is to get results and to see real change towards equality. There are plenty of groups out there still winning the arguments which is vitally important work. However, these discussions are not enough, we need to see real change come about as a result of winning these arguments. We aim to bring about that change week after week, small step by small step.

What’s going to happen?

HEqual will be challenging sexism and getting results. Our prime concern is misandry and discrimination by the state or supported by the state, such as by groups in receipt of government funding. After all, the worst kind of sexism is the type you are forced to fund yourself. Using that same logic, then large corporations are also fair game too.

It’s heartening to see that large corporations will be ‘fair game’ for HEqual, given the work that our associated organisation Campaign for Merit in Business http://c4mb.wordpress.com has carried out in this area. We’ll happily collaborate with them in this and other areas.

Around a third of FTSE100 chairmen are members of The 30% Club, an organisation with the sole objective of driving up the proportion of women on major corporate boards, regardless of the relative numbers of men and women well qualified for these roles, and regardless of the negative impact on corporate financial performance that numerous studies would lead us to expect.

The clearest evidence we have of the shortage of board-ready women is that virtually all FTSE100 female directors appointed in the last two years,  since the threat of legislated gender quotas in The Davies Report (2011), have something in common with virtually all the existing ones. They’ve been appointed as non-executive directors.

Around the world senior businessmen and senior businesswomen are collaborating with feminist organisations to advantage women at the expense of men in the senior reaches of their companies. We recently highlighted the case of Michel Landel, the (male) CEO of the French multinational Sodexo. He’s a director of Catalyst, a New York-based feminist organisation campaigning internationally to increase female representation on major corporate boards. Our piece on this story:

https://j4mbdotorgdotuk.wordpress.com/2013/10/01/michel-landel-ceo-of-sodexo-is-a-director-of-catalyst-inc-a-feminist-campaigning-organisation-no-seriously-he-is/

A short but moving video from the good people at Mankind Initiative:

http://www.avoiceformen.com/mens-rights/domestic-violence-industry/male-domestic-abuse-one-mans-story-curled-up/

If you can support Mankind with a donation, it will be put to very good use. They do a lot of great work with limited resources:

http://www.mankind.org.uk/donations_bequests.html

It’s always a pleasure watching anything involving the world’s most prominent Honey Badger (anti-feminist woman) of the modern era, the Canadian legend Karen Straughan (GirlWritesWhat). A recent engaging and informal discussion with a gentleman from CAFE (Canadian Association for Equality):

http://www.avoiceformen.com/updates/cafe-interviews-karen-straughan-aka-girlwriteswhat/

At 30:11 Karen mentions ‘Big Red’, possibly the biggest gift to the men’s human rights movement in years. In the unlikely event you’re unfamiliar with this Canadian gender feminist, here she is, on fine form:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH_ZryBfCtU

You have to watch this gem of a video from Victor Zen. Trust me, you do:

http://www.mediafire.com/watch/x5iel2fuhuqbqsg/The%20Feminist%20Deliverer%20of%20Diabetes.mp4

Victor Zen’s YouTube channel:

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl31wRxmqFaDWLfbouUSEkA

A short and insightful new piece from Mark Trueblood:

http://www.avoiceformen.com/sexual-politics/dude-wheres-my-courtship/

A number of supporters have suggested we present certificates to winners of the ‘Whiny Woman of the Month’ award. Following the success of our ‘Toady’, ‘Maggie’, ‘Harpy’ and ‘Winston’ awards, we’re pleased to bring you the inaugural ‘Whiny Woman of the Month’ award certificate, won by Laura Bates of The Everyday Sexism Project http://everydaysexism.com:

131126 Laura Bates’s ‘Whiny Woman of the Month’ award certificate

Ms Bates is now a member of The Whine Club https://j4mbdotorgdotuk.wordpress.com/the-whine-club/ and will be permitted to leave only if we receive a written undertaking from her that she’ll stop whining. We confidently expect her to be a lifelong member.

For those of you unfamiliar with the other awards presented by our associated organisations The Anti-Feminism League http://fightingfeminism.wordpress.com and Campaign for Merit in Business http://c4mb.wordpress.com we thought we’d collect some examples of the award certificates in this post.

We start with the ‘Toady’, an award presented to men in positions of power who abuse their power to advantage women (and/or girls) at the expense of men (and/or boys). Under the leadership of David Cameron the Conservatives have slavishly followed the anti-male agendas of the three preceding Labour administrations. In some areas they’ve gone even further, e.g. threatening to legislate for gender quotas in major corporate boardrooms, so Dave was the obvious choice for the 2012 ‘Toady of the Year’ award:

120308-toady-award-certificate-for-david-cameron

Around a third of FTSE100 chairmen won a ‘Toady’ on account of their memberships of The 30% Club, an organisation seeking to drive up the proportion of women on major corporate boards, regardless of the impact on corporate financial performance.

The journalist and broadcaster Angela Epstein was a worthy winner of a ‘Maggie’:

121015 Maggie award for Angela Epstein

Other winners of a ‘Maggie’ have included Charlotte Vere and Katie Hopkins.

About 18 months ago we presented Harriet Harman MP with a ‘Harpy Lifetime Achievement Award’:

120401 the inaugural Harpy Lifetime Achievement award

Other winners of a ‘Harpy’ have included Lynne Featherstone MP, Cherie Blair and Janet Street-Porter.

There have been only three winners of a ‘Winston’ to date, the journalists Quentin Letts and Peter Lloyd, and Philip Davies MP. Peter Lloyd’s award certificate:

121214-winston-award-for-peter-lloyd

A few months ago the BBC Newsnight programme broadcasted an outrageous piece on domestic abuse and violence (DA):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy8TxOQcWdU

Kirsty Wauk interviewed three women on the matter. In the background were images of victims of DV, all of them women. The clear message anyone watching the programme would have received was that the overwhelming majority of victims of DA are women, and the overwhelming majority of perpetrators men, which 300+ studies show to be manifestly untrue. They show that women are at least as physically aggressive towards their intimate partners as men. Indeed, the highest incidence of DV is in lesbian relationships.

We were surprised but pleased by a rare break in this anti-male narrative on Woman’s Hour recently, when two female academics presented some facts about DV which must have come as a surprise to the programme’s regular listeners. The piece started off with the presenter’s outright lie that ‘we know’ that abuse of men by their female partners is on ‘nowhere near’ the same scale as the abuse of women by their male partners, but after that it gets better:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLlEJFcVOCQ

It’s vanishingly rare to read, see, or hear non-feminist narratives in the mass media, and very occasional pieces such as the Woman’s Hour piece are but drops in the ocean compared with what radio listeners and TV viewers have encountered decade after decade. There’s no ‘balance’ in any meaningful sense.

The BBC has been far from alone in peddling feminist anti-male narratives decade after decade. All mass media outlets have done the same. But as the taxpayer-funded broadcaster you’d really hope for better from the BBC. You’d be relentlessly disappointed, but you could hope.

Increasingly, feminist narratives in the mass media are driven not so much by what’s said, but by what isn’t. Problems faced by men simply aren’t reported. On the BBC lunchtime news today there was a sterling example of this. The piece starts with the murder of a woman by her partner, who had a history of being violent towards women, and moves onto domestic violence. See if you can spot the briefest of moments when the existence of male victims of DV is acknowledged:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV5GnTZxLhQ

Our thanks to T for this. Normally it takes quite a number of false rape allegations against different men before women are charged with the offence, and even then they rarely receive  custodial sentences. So we applaud a judge in Northern Ireland for his decision in this case:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-25089367

Quite why her sentence was halved just because she’s now a mother, is a mystery. We’ve never heard of any man’s sentence being halved because he’d become a father after committing an offence.

 

It’s really heartening to see the start of street protests condemning the assaults on the interest of men and boys, in this case male genital mutilation (MGM). We take our hats off to Jerry the Other for this inspiring video:

http://www.avoiceformen.com/men/boys/intactivists-protest-in-front-of-pro-circumcision-doctors-house/

Now please sign this petition, if you haven’t already:

http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/sarah-sands-editor-at-the-evening-standard-newspaper-must-include-men-and-boys-in-her-paper-s-opposition-to-forced-circumcision-otherwise-known-as-genital-mutilation

Would religions be better if they were led by women? Here at the J4MB headquarters we have no opinions on the matter, obviously, but we were interested in a discussion on the BBC TV programme Sunday Morning Live earlier today:

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKhX1c3ow6BrzdzP3ydpeZQ/videos

It’s always good to see the writer and broadcaster Angela Epstein on TV, because she articulates non-feminist (and sometimes anti-feminist) perspectives, many of them nuanced, in discussions about gender-related issues. She’s an Orthodox Jew, and makes the good point in this programme that the quest for women to hold leadership positions in religions is nothing more than the politicisation of religion, driven by feminist ideology. Another insightful contributor to the piece was Susie Leafe, a director of Reform http://reform.org.uk which aims to reform the Church of England.