Two days ago Dina Rickman, a feminist journalist, was with me on a discussion panel on London Live TV, covering the topic of ‘everyday sexism’. Also with us was Daisy Buchanan, a pleasant woman despite being a Guardian journalist.
I challenged the three women (including the presenter, Claudia-Liza Armah) to state even ONE area in which British women and girls are disadvantaged by the state’s actions and inactions, given that men and boys are assaulted in at least 20. Ms Rickman came up with ‘the gender pay gap’. Seriously, she did. Inspired by this public display of utter idiocy, a supporter created the latest meme of the week.
Later in the discussion Ms Rickman scraped the bottom of her very shallow intellectual barrel, and asked me:
I don’t know if you know any women?
At a guess I’d say insinuations or allegations of misogyny have been made in most of my BBC interviews, and male presenters are no better than female presenters in this regard. This morning I was interviewed about positive discrimination on BBC Radio London by Jeni Barnett, standing in for Vanessa Feltz. The interview should be on our YouTube channel in the next day or two. In the final minute of a 16-minute-long interview during which I’d presented numerous rational arguments against positive discrimination, and explained a few of the many ways in which men and boys have long been disadvantaged in Britain, Ms Barnett trotted out this gem:
Do you like women, Mike?
Insinuations of misogyny invariably come in the wake of my presentation of reasoned arguments, and I’m pleased with how I responded to the question today.
Feminist commentators on Ally Fogg’s blog pieces invariably play the misogyny card, and I’ve ceased wasting my time responding to them. There are only so many hours in the day.
I was very pleased to receive a couple of emails in recent days from Paul Inman, a supporter. The first was prompted by the tragedy in which a young American man, Elliot Rodger, shot dead four men and two women. The content of Paul’s emails take up the remainder of this blog post:
“I love the way that murdering men is now also misogyny. Elliot Rodger didn’t kill those people because he was a misogynist – even though the evidence on his internet sites would suggest he was – he killed them because he was a deeply disturbed and maladjusted individual. His actions are a tragedy and trying to play the gender war card is pretty cheap.
On the other hand I’m happy for people like Laurie Penny to keep labelling everything as misogyny because every new thing that they put under that umbrella just dilutes the meaning of the word almost to irrelevance. When EVERYTHING becomes misogyny, then misogyny will no longer have any meaning at all, and I think we’re almost at that point now. Keep up the good work, Laurie.
There’s a reason we have many words for different things – meaning. The more meanings a word has, the less meaningful it becomes in practice.
For example, dogs have one word for everything:
Woof.
The word means nothing, so we can’t converse with dogs. Feminists have one word that they use to describe anything they don’t like – misogyny – consequently that word now means nothing, and we can’t converse with feminists about their issues.
The English language is a thing of beauty; we have a plethora of words, multiple words for the same thing and even allow foreign words to be used for effect. There’s no excuse for not using the correct word for something when 1,000+ years of linguistic evolution have created a language full to the point of bursting with words.”
