During last Friday’s Durham debate I talked about an organisation called ‘Justice for Women’ http://www.justiceforwomen.org.uk which I’d said had been launched many years ago, Julie Bindel being one of its co-founders. It’s ‘Welcome’ page starts with this:

Welcome to the website of Justice for Women, a feminist campaigning organisation that supports and advocates on behalf of women who have fought back against or killed violent male partners.

What would you think of ‘a campaigning organisation that supports and advocates on behalf of men who have fought back against or killed violent female partners’? Hopefully you’d be as horrified as we would be.

It’s known that the majority of perpetrators of unreciprocated intimate partner violence are women, as you’ll see on slide #7 from a presentation made last year by Dr Nicola Graham-Kevan, a recognised expert on domestic abuse and violence, based at the University of Central Lancashire:

140108 Nicola Graham-Kevan presentation, ‘Female perpetrators of intimate partner violence’

I said that beneath the sinister logo of ‘Justice for Women’ was this strapline:

Men, women and murder

On hearing this, Ms Bindel shouted, ‘Liar!’ or ‘Lie!’

A student in the audience googled ‘Justice for Women’ on his smartphone, and after the debate he went up to Ms Bindle to show her the strapline. I’m told she stormed off. He copied the image he captured that evening, and has since passed it on to us.

After the debate Ms Bindel and I had a discussion, and she said the website I was referring to wasn’t the website of the organisation she’d co-founded. We can’t find another British campaigning organisation with the same name, and here’s something. The strapline has just been removed from the website. An interesting attempt to rewrite the past. It’s like something out of Nineteen Eighty-Four. But thanks to the internet, we have proof of the strapline’s former existence:

https://web.archive.org/web/20111005171448/http://www.justiceforwomen.org.uk/

The strapline goes back some years. A newsletter from 2006:

140201 ‘Justice for Women’ newsletter, 2006

 

The article:

http://www.iea.org.uk/blog/breaking-down-monopolies-in-the-medical-profession

I’ve just posted the following comment:

“The feminisation of the NHS over the past 30+ years deserves far more coverage in an article of this length. It costs some £250,000 – £500,000 to train a doctor, and 70% of medical students in the UK today are women. Compared with male doctors, female doctors are:

– more likely to quit the profession altogether

– more likely work part-time, whether or not they have children

– less likely to work in the most stressful disciplines e.g. A&E

– more likely to work in the least stressful disciplines e.g. general practise

– more likely to retire earlier

It’s been estimated that the NHS gets around half the number of working hours from the average female doctor over a working life, compared with the average male doctor. The inevitable collapse in the staffing capacity of the NHS has been ‘solved through recruiting a huge number of foreign doctors, many from poor countries which have paid for their training, and can ill afford their working abroad.

The bottom line? An ever more mediocre NHS run to suit women choosing work/life balance over work, and costing ever more for taxpayers to fund. The beneficiaries? A small number of women, many of whom wouldn’t have made it into medical schools on the grounds of merit. The losers? Patients (e.g. those unable to see a GP at the weekend) and taxpayers. By taxpayers we mean, of course, men mostly. Men pay 72% of the income tax collected in the UK, and women only 28%. As usual, men are funding both their own disadvantaging and the mediocrity of the public sector.

My political party may include in its 2015 general election manifesto a proposal that medical students be required to pay back the cost of their training once in work. With the average GP today earning £104,000 p.a. – outrageous remuneration given the hours GPs work, their job security, the absence of consequences for poor performance – paying back the cost of their training within a decade should be perfectly feasible.”

 

Another interesting piece from Paul Elam, founder and publisher of AVfM, which has already attracted a lot of comments, including some from the ‘feminist’ in question:

http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/as-close-as-we-get-to-a-debate-with-a-feminist/

The 26 January edition of The Independent on Sunday contained a 46-page supplement, The Men’s Issue. Given how left-leaning and feminist-friendly the paper is, I wasn’t optimistic about the content. In the event, it was far worse than I could have imagined. The tone for the supplement was set by the first words in the first article, by Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler:

Like many men, I am a lazy, good-for-nothing, selfish, forgetful, patronising, sex-obsessed bastard who drinks too much. Or so my wife points out. It’s strange that I have ended up like this. I tried not to. I really did.

The full article:

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/tom-hodgkinson-as-i-have-grown-older-i-have-started-to-revert-to-gender-stereotype-9083512.html?origin=internalSearch

I skimmed through the supplement and couldn’t find a single sentence about the major problems faced by men and boys in Britain today. Nothing on denial of fathers’ access to children, nothing on male victims of domestic abuse, nothing on disadvantaging in the education system and the workplace, nothing on the persistently high male suicide rate, nothing on… well, anything, really.

The few references to feminism were supportive or at best uncritical. An example from the interview with a rich Leftie musician, Billy Bragg:

We can learn a lot from the debates that are going on around feminism, if only for insights.

Most of the supplement’s content was written by women. It included:

‘My wish is to serve you’: A dominatrix reveals her clients’ most intimate fantasies.

Ellen Jones – four-page interview of Joaquin Phoenix.

Lisa Markwell – restaurant review.

Kate Jacobs – four-page article on house decorating.

Louise Saunders – half-page article on relationships.

A full-page advert seeking support for ‘the 500,000 women living with and beyond breast cancer’, http://breastcanceraware.org.uk.

A full-page advert for a British Heart Foundation campaign, featuring a large photograph of the face of ‘Lee Mears, 34, ex-England Rugby player, heart disease survivor’… wearing garish red lipstick.

Bill Granger – three-page article on cooking.

What would men who read The Men’s Issue learn about the problems facing millions of men and boys in Britain today, their causes, and possible solutions? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

A gem from the Daily Mail:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2546511/Keep-wife-happy-spend-time-work-Husbands-longer-hours-office-study-says.html

Our thanks to L for spotting that Mankind Initiative have posted a copy of their letter of complaint to the BBC onto their website, concerning the treatment of domestic abuse on the 7 January edition of Newsnight:

http://www.mankind.org.uk/pdfs/ManKind%20Complaint.pdf

We’ve had confirmation from the BBC that they’ve received our complaint (link below to our letter and associated documentation) and we look forward to a reply in due course.

https://j4mbdotorgdotuk.wordpress.com/2014/01/19/our-first-official-complaint-to-the-bbc-the-newsnight-piece-on-domestic-abuseviolence-7-january-2014/

A short but insightful piece by American writer Suzanne Venker, founder of Women for Men http://womenformen.org:

http://politix.topix.com/story/10072-feminist-fear-mongering?&mailer2108=yes

Our thanks to P for alerting us to this insightful piece:

http://freethoughtblogs.com/hetpat/2014/01/21/male-victims-screening-and-victim-blaming/

Update 08:45 January 28. Just posted the following comment, #156 in the comment stream:

“Ally, thanks for this piece, to which we’ve just put up a link. I regret I don’t have the time necessary to go through all the comments stream at this point, but at Mankind Initiative’s latest National Conference for Male Victims of Domestic Violence, one of the key speakers was Dr Nicola Graham-Kevan of the Uni of Central Lancashire. She’s an internationally recognised expert on the subject of domestic abuse/violence (DA). She pointed to an accumulated 270+ studies from around the world which have concluded that women are at least as aggressive as men towards their intimate partners. She also presented evidence showing:

– only 4% of female perpetrators of DA report self-defence as a prime motivation in assaulting partners; and

– the majority of perpetrators of non-reciprocal DA are women

It’s also known (British Crime Surveys) that the cohort of people most likely (per capita) to report being the victims of DA are lesbians. I don’t know how feminists explain how the patriarchy causes that tricky reality, but doubtless they’ll have come up with some whackadoodle extension of ‘feminist theory’. They always do. Oh, hang on, it’s just come to me.  It’s the same explanation Caroline Criado-Perez used to explain why one of the people charged with threatening her on Twitter was a woman. We live in a deeply misogynistic society, and some women internalise misogyny, so that’s why lesbians abuse one another. Tada!”

Freya Bromley is a student at Durham University, and a HuffPo contributor. She was most helpful in sorting out the arrangements for last Friday’s debate at Durham University. She’s just published a piece on the debate:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/freya-bromley/feminism-debate_b_4666788.html

Her piece is predictably feminist-friendly, it has to be said, and my own view of the event is very different. I was delighted by the rapt attention given to my arguments and Swayne O’Pie’s by the overwhelming majority of the capacity audience (300 people, mainly students). We were originally told to expect a demonstration outside the debate venue by members of the Durham University Feminist Society – presumably referred to as ‘duffers’ – but were reliably informed the demonstration had been called off because… er… it was raining lightly.

The J4MB supporters at the event were pleased at the talks given by Swayne O’Pie and myself, and the audience’s response to them. We always knew we couldn’t possibly win the vote – the audience mostly consisted of women, some angry gender feminists among them – but the support we did get for the motion was well in excess of what we’d anticipated. We also met plenty of students after the debate – both men and women – who were highly supportive.

Being pushed for time, I’ve limited the comments I’ve posted in response to Freya’s piece to the following, which has already been published. The ‘Justice for Women’ URL I refer to is http://www.justiceforwomen.org.uk:

Freya, thanks for this, and for arranging a very interesting evening. My thanks too, to all the people Swayne and I met afterwards.

I’m very pushed for time, but just want to raise one issue. The last URL in your piece takes people to the ‘Justice for Women’ website which I claimed in my talk had the strapline, ‘Men, women and murder’. Ms Bindel shouted, ‘Lie!’ or ‘Liar!’, and later said to me this wasn’t the organisation she co-founded, and that there were a number of organisations with the same name in the UK. We’ve been unable to find any. Would you please be so good as to ask Ms Bindel for the URL of the organisation she’s referring to, or a retraction of the allegation that I lied? Thank you.

We posted a piece on this some months ago, but it’s just been published by AVfM, and has resulted in 50+ interesting comments so far:

http://www.avoiceformen.com/misandry/j4mb-presents-a-toady-award-to-nomas-national-organisation-for-men-against-sexism/