CAFE is making waves in Canada, and they’ve just released this short (7:58) but interesting video. They first came to public attention a couple of years ago, following violent demonstrators’ attempts to prevent a presentation by a visiting speaker, Dr Warren Farrell. There’s a little material on that, but more from a presentation by Karen Straughan (‘Girl Writes What’) at a CAFE event three months ago, and some input from a couple of committee members. It’s always good to see and hear people prepared to talk and be seen in public rather than being anonymous, or hiding behind pseudonyms – although nobody would expect people to go public if they’d lose their jobs as a result, for example (which is true for numerous J4MB donors and supporters). The more people that ‘go public’, the easier it will be for others to do so.

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.”

A new piece from Janet Bloomfield.

We’re seeing a welcome increase in the number of male-sympathetic pieces in the Telegraph. Our thanks to Ian for pointing us to this excellent piece from Neil Lyndon, author of No More Sex War (1992).

Inspired by my appearance on London Live TV on 27.5.14:

140529 meme based on London Live TV discussion

Laurie Penny has made a living out of spinning a few ideas – all of them absurd to any well-informed and intelligent person – into countless different pieces. This is her utterly predictable New Statesman ‘take’ on the Isla Vista killings. From early in the piece:

On Friday night, a young man went on a massacre in Santa Barbara that left six other people dead and seven injured.

‘People’, eh? So far as we’re aware, the identity of the seven injured hasn’t been made public, but four of the six dead ‘people’ were men. It makes a mockery of her entire article. In a just world, this vile woman would be cleaning out blocked sewers.

Sometimes we see stories which are so damned funny we don’t even pretend to have a reason to link to them. This is one of them. Enjoy.

[Note added 23.6.14: A Voice for Men has published the video of this video, along with my associated commentary:

http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/mike-buchanans-second-appearance-on-london-live-tv-everyday-sexism ]

A few hours ago I was engaged in a panel discussion on London Live TV, on the subject of sexism. We’ve posted it to our YouTube channel along with some commentary. If you have any comments about the piece, please leave them there rather than here. Thank you.

A few supporters have suggested I do a blog piece about an online petition to President Obama. I’ve been in two minds about it, but I’ve just read a terrific piece by Dean Esmay of AVfM explaining why he’s signed it, and why other MHRAs should too.

I’ve just signed it, and urge you to do likewise. The petition target is 100,000 signatures, and with less than four weeks to go, there are only 97,975 more signatures required. You’ll have to register your email address, but that only takes seconds. Thank you.

On the same day a report was published showing a 40-year-old female bank worker walking free from court after being convicted of stealing over £30,000 from vulnerably elderly people’s bank accounts (one has Alzheimer’s, another is blind) – see earlier blog piece -we have this nonsense.

His defence claims the contact was an accident. From the article:

Lee Turner, prosecuting, read a statement from the air stewardess and said Thompson told her she was very pretty and that he loved her.

Her statement said: ‘He was looking at me as if I was a piece of meat.’

How, precisely, would one look at a woman as if she were a piece of meat? I’m not conscious of having a lascivious expression when I look at my Sunday roast. And is she implying that he’s in the habit of telling pieces of meat they’re pretty, and he loves them?