Our thanks to Jeff, one of our original supporters, for pointing us to this. Sir Timothy Hunt, a Nobel laureate, said this:

On his remarks about women crying, he said: “It’s terribly important that you can criticise people’s ideas without criticising them and if they burst into tears, it means that you tend to hold back from getting at the absolute truth.

Science is about nothing but getting at the truth and anything that gets in the way of that diminishes, in my experience, the science.”

What reasonable person could argue with those sentiments?

I’ve just received an email asking why an image of Margaret Thatcher appears on the award we present to women we admire. She was a true meritocrat with no time for feminists, as an article in the Daily Telegraph in 2013 explained. A number of quotations attributed to her made clear her opposition to feminism.

We present Maggie awards to women who courageously contribute to the battle for the human rights of men and boys, or the battle against feminism. There have been very few winners of the award, but we’re pleased to present one to Kathy Gyngell, Co-Editor of The Conservative Woman. Her award certificate is here.

Phill Ferreira is the indefatigable father of twin boys, Oliver and Oscar. We wish him success in the face of a family court system which is institutionally hostile to fathers.

For the past 30 years John Timpson has been Chairman of Timpson Group plc, a retailer with over 1,300 branches in the UK. The company has five directors on its board, none of whom are women. He has a small column in the Daily Telegraph, ‘Ask John’, which I happened to catch today. In it was a piece titled In 50 years, the women on boards debate will be over.

The piece is woeful on a number of levels. We’ve penned a public challenge of John Timpson, which I expect to lead to us presenting him with a Toady award on 25 June.

Our thanks to Emily for pointing us to a new piece on a site we hadn’t encountered before, Feminist Deconstructionism. She writes:

At last! A website largely devoted to exploring the phenomenon of unattractive women – obese women, in particular – being attracted to feminism like moths to a flame. It’s about time people were more honest about these ‘elephants in the room’.

A video from the inaugural meeting of the CAFE Ottawa branch. The section in which feminists seek to stop free speech starts at 1:25. What does it tell you, that all the speeches from the 2014 International Conference on Men’s Issues in Detroit were streamed live on the internet, and all are available on the website of the conference’s organisers, A Voice for Men, while the only video footage from radical feminists’ conferences results from people infiltrating the events and surreptitiously making audio and/or video recordings?

A lengthy (41:27) but highly impressive video.

We know the NHS is deeply anti-male, even with respect to recruitment of medical students. 70% of medical students today are women, though female doctors will typically work only half the hours over their careers, compared with their male colleagues. The bottom line? Two women have to be trained as doctors to get the same work output as one man, at twice the cost of training to be picked up by taxpayers – still, no problem there, men pay only 72% of the income taxes that finance this social engineering experiment, which has been so disastrous for NHS patients. Only £68 BILLION more than women every year. And the capacity shortfall is ‘solved’ by the recruitment of many doctors from overseas, many trained in poor countries which can ill afford their departure.

The state is negligent in attending to the health needs of men. The issue of healthcare was cover at length (pp.61-65) in our election manifesto.

My thanks to David for pointing me towards a remarkable example of anti-male sexism, on a NHS website providing guidance to people considering being sterilised, or women considering having an abortion. His email takes up the remainder of this blog piece:

“Hi Mike,

I was browsing the NHS website recently and thought you might be interested in examples of casual sexism I found. The NHS website guidance on vasectomies is here. In the section ‘Before you decide to have a vasectomy’, we find this:

If you have a partner, discuss it with them before deciding to have a vasectomy. If possible, you should both agree to the procedure, but it is not a legal requirement to get your partner’s permission…

Your doctor will ask about your circumstances and provide information and counselling before agreeing to the procedure…

Your GP does have the right to refuse to carry out the procedure or refuse to refer you for the procedure if they do not believe that it is in your best interests. If this is the case, you may have to pay to have a vasectomy privately.

The guidance on female sterilisation is here. There is no suggestion that a woman should discuss the matter with a partner in advance of deciding to have the operation. But it does offer this:

Your GP will strongly recommend counselling before referring you for sterilisation. Counselling will give you a chance to talk about the operation in detail, and any doubts, worries or questions that you might have…

If you decide to be sterilised, your GP will refer you to a specialist for treatment.

GPs can refuse to refer men wanting to be sterilised (at low cost), while they cannot refuse to refer women (at a higher cost). It gets worse. In the guidance about abortion there is no suggestion that a woman considering having the operation should discuss the matter with her partner in advance.

The NHS guidance on vasectomies is that a man considering the operation should discuss the matter with his partner beforehand – an open invitation to the woman to commit paternity fraud by causing a contraceptive method to fail e.g. ‘forgetting’ to take her contraceptive pills – while the guidance on abortion and female sterilisation doesn’t recognise that a woman’s partner could have a legitimate interest in the matter.

The NHS clearly regards women’s bodily autonomy, personal wishes, and privacy, in much higher regard than men’s.

Just another example of the rampant sexism and gynocentrism within our NHS.

Regards,

David.”

A chance discovery has made my week. In 2010 the seventh of my nine books was published, David and Goliatha: David Cameron – heir to Harman?. The subtitle was an allusion to Cameron’s purported claim to be the ‘heir to Blair’.

I’ve always enjoyed cartoons, and in my mid-teenage years (around 1973/4) I read Punch avidly every week. Among the talented cartoonists who featured regularly was Martin Honeysett, who had a way of capturing grotesque women like no other cartoonist. He seemed the perfect choice to draw a cartoon including Harriet Harman for the book’s cover, but I didn’t know if he was still alive. Fortunately he was, and living in Hastings. He accepted the commission, and he was a joy to work with. I’ve just stumbled across his original cartoon, which I had assumed permanently lost in the course of a house move in 2011. It’s the image on the front cover of the book:

David and Goliatha is out of print, but all of its content is contained within my eighth book, the snappily-titled The Glass Ceiling Delusion: the REAL reasons more women don’t reach senior positions.

Sadly Martin died four months ago, at the age of 71.