About four weeks ago I was commissioned by International Business Times, a leading international online news service, to provide some balance in their output of pieces about gender-related matters. I would be free to write on any matters I wished, in a fortnightly column. The website already had two feminist commentators on gender-related matters, including Laura Bates of The Everyday Sexism Project, twice a winner of our ‘Lying Feminist of the Month’ awards. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first time that a men’s rights advocate anywhere in the world had been given a regular platform by the mainstream media.
I was commissioned to write pieces on men’s issues, with an open-ended contract, and I was looking forward to providing pieces for years to come. I started off with surely uncontroversial pieces. The first was on gender balance in corporate boardrooms. Nobody in the world is challenging the evidence presented by Campaign for Merit in Business, demonstrating a causal link between artificially driving up female representation on boards, and corporate financial decline. I presented the evidence to House of Commons and House of Lords inquiries in 2012, yet the government continues to bully major companies into taking on more female directors, with the threat of legislated gender quotas. The second piece was on suicide, the leading cause of death of men under 50 in the UK. The male:female suicide differential rose from 1.7:1 in 1983 to 3.5:1 in 2013, and the government is not only doing nothing about the matter, it is actively driving the high male suicide rate, as the article explains.
A day or two after the second article was published, I received the following email from my (male) Commissioning Editor, and it’s reproduced here with his kind permission:
Hi Mike,
Hope all’s good with you.
We’ve had a chat as a senior editorial group and unfortunately we think it’s best to terminate the relationship we have with you.
Your articles for us have been balanced and backed by evidence, which is fine. But we realise you have courted controversy for other articles you have written, and we feel this isn’t the best image for the IBT brand going forward.
Please understand that we will continue to seek balance in our coverage of gender issues, and we will keep a close eye on the progress of J4MB. We may well be interested in doing an interview with you in the lead-up to May’s election.
You will, of course, be paid in full for what you have written for us.
I hope you understand our position on this, and, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to raise them with me. Good luck for the election.
Hard to believe…. Articles supported by evidence are not good for their image…..feminist articles supported by hysteria and lies are great for IBT image…. If this status quo continues much longer, perhaps Borat will no longer need to travel to Kazakhstan to make ‘documentaries’… ?
Disappointing Mike. I must say that this less surprising than the offer to write articles in the first place. Still, you got out two good articles for people to read.
Just weeks to the election, onwards and upwards.
History will note that when law enforcement started getting paid to engage in protocol perversions, semantic games, and right-defining what the meaning of is, is, in order to start manufacturing faulty and inflammatory statistics……they not only stained law enforcement, they might have just accepted blood money of the innocent that may come back to haunt them later.
Mike I am so so saddened, maddened and disappointed to hear this…..you have so many important things to say with regard to men’s inequalities and that journal would have been brill for that…how small minded and lacking in courage they are….I hope another option emerges….
The good thing, of course, is that this is yet more evidence for you to incorporate into your portfolio of subjects relating to the plight of men when you eventually get a one hour slot to write and present a documentary on TV, just like Trevor Phillips just did in the recent documentary “The things we won’t say about race that are true”. Very controversial, outspoken, groundbreaking but thought-provoking and potentially culture changing.
So, you’ve ‘courted controversy’ eh? Perhaps it desperately needs courting, given the circumstances that they, themselves, have demonstrated only too well – better than any article written by any third party, no matter how good.
You will, of course, be paid “in full” if you please….. as though you cared about that, insult number 1 (to all men).
Oh yes, and they will contine to “seek gender balance” – funny way to do it. Insult number 2.
“And if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to…….” Insult number 3. Yes, I have a question. Why are you and your colleagues such cowardly, venal *****? [Word redacted by J4MB.]
And there we have it. Proof that men and their free speech is severely constrained and restricted by the influence of the women in their workplace and the financial threat that feminist dictate imposes in terms of risk to businesses when businesses are not conforming to the feminist narratives. Proof that the ‘patriarchy’ doesn’t exist. Proof that women get what they want because they shout and make a noise. Proof that men bow to the pressures of female persuasion. Proof that women’s opinions matter more than the voice of men. Proof that men give into pressures exerted by their colleagues if they think they could be perceived as lesser men if they aren’t seen to be riding the wave of feminism – a wave which, unbenown to them, is about to crash into the rocks and get stopped dead in its tracks. The pressure to recognise men’s issues is nearing boiling point at the moment and I can guarantee that the next hot topic is going to be all about men’s rights and the intrinsic link between ignoring men and many of the problems of the world we live in today. What’s the betting that the International Business Times has had a small number of complaints which they believe threaten their business and has drawn them to the conclusion that the risk isn’t worth taking. What’s the betting that if a major competitor of theirs gets a prominent figure to write about men’s issues (a competitor with a much larger following and financial turnover) they’ll be back and wanting a slice of the action. It’s a real shame that IBT didn’t grasp and follow through with the opportunity to lead the way in our changing culture.
Reblogged this on World4Justice : NOW! Lobby Forum..
What cowards this man’s colleagues must be. Mike, ensure you keep a live link to the content before it is removed.
Sad news, but hardly surprising. ‘We’re afraid that your demonstrable truths may rock the gynocentric, misandric, boat, thereby ‘triggering’ an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance in some special snowflake or white knight readers or advertisers. Slow jazz hands everyone.
‘I hope you understand our position on this … ‘
We understand perfectly. If only he’d had the balls to write ‘our advertisers are terrified of upsetting the feminists and our wives have threatened to put our balls through the mangle.’
Printed matter tends to survive in unexpected places and often to be read by unexpecting eyes. Your two articles will have been read in business class on aeroplanes across the globe and be sitting in doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms in the major cities of the world. Who knows what seeds you have sown.
Well done Mike.