We present Winston and Maggie awards to men and women who’ve made notable contributions to the battle for men’s and boys’ human rights and/or or the battle against radical feminism. Later today we’ll be presenting the first Maggie award for a long time, but now we’re presenting Winston awards to two important British bloggers, Herbert Purdy and William Collins. Links to some of their best pieces are on their award certificates. We heartily congratulate them both for their outstanding work.

I invite you to email me mike@j4mb.org.uk and nominate contenders for these awards, or any of our other awards. Thank you.

An excellent piece by Glen Poole for the Telegraph. Be sure to read the comments too, if you have the time. One commenter went to the trouble of tracking down the profile of Dr Annika Newnham, one of the two co-authors of the University of Warwick report, and found this:

I supervise a number of Undergraduate Dissertations, predominantly on child law topics, but also some which critique the law from a feminist perspective. [my emphasis]

Later in the same profile:

My work on shared residence orders has compared Sweden and England to learn valuable lessons on what works, and what doesn’t work, when using the law to promote shared parenting.  It employs both autopoietic theory and a feminist perspective [my emphasis] to consider how concepts like family, equality and parenthood are understood in the two countries and examines law’s over-reliance on rigid definitions and abstract presumptions as well as its inability to recognise the true value of care.

As someone who self-identifies as a MGHOW, I was pleased today to accept an invitation from ‘CS MGTOW’ to speak at a meeting in Central London on the evening of 9 July. A short video in which he reflects on the need for MGTOWs to meet up regularly is here. I wish him well with the project.

Only 30 tickets are on sale for the event, here. I shall be speaking for 30-45 minutes, and there will be a Q&A session afterwards. The provisional title of my talk is:

Why men shouldn’t marry, and the long-term impact of marriage on male wellbeing.

CS MGTOW liked the content of my book The Marriage Delusion: the fraud of the rings? (2009), which I’ll draw on in my talk. I’ll bring along a few copies from the signed and numbered first edition (a hardback) for sale. He also appreciated the content of one of our associated blogs, Men Shouldn’t Marry.

With so few tickets available for the event, if you’re interested in attending, I recommend you order your ticket(s) soon. I look forward to meeting you there. It promises to be an interesting evening, hopefully the first of many for MGTOWs in London and across the UK.

A solid piece by a staff writer at Spiked.

David Cameron has won our ‘Toady of the Year’ award for the past four years in succession. It’s not surprising that Steve Hilton, his former chief strategist, is a Toady too, as he illustrated by fawning over Harriet Harman recently on The Andrew Marr Show. A link to a video of his sickening contribution is on his award certificate.

It was a huge privilege to meet Terrence Popp (the host of Redonkulas) – an American ex-marine, the winner of two Purple Hearts, and much else – at the first International Conference on Men’s Issues in Detroit last year. His latest video piece What is MGTOW? might start to explain why.

[Note added 8.6.15: We’ve decided to change the award for which Chris Blackhurst is in contention from a ‘Gormless Feminist of the Month’ to a ‘Toady’, and we’ve emailed him accordingly. Our revised letter to him on the matter is here.]

This challenge relates to the drive to increase female representation on major corporate boards. I thought it might be timely to explain why we cover this topic so frequently given – as people sometimes point out – it would appear to affect relatively few men, and well-off men at that. There are a number of reasons:

1. There is clear evidence (from longitudinal studies) that increasing female representation on boards leads to corporate financial decline. This is only to be expected. Far fewer women than men have the work ethic and professional experience and expertise for major corporate board positions, so to increase female representation better-qualified men have to be sidelined.

2. Given the opportunity, women’s in-class preferences will lead them to appoint and promote women in preference to better-qualified men. This phenomenon was well described in Steve Moxon’s The Woman Racket (2008).

3. Campaign for Merit in Business remains, to the best of my knowledge, the only organisation in the world campaigning on this issue, and we’re not in the habit of dropping initiatives we believe to be important.

4. My experience as a business executive over 30 years (1979-2010), much of it in business consultancy roles, told me that feminist narratives on the ‘glass ceiling’ and the ‘gender pay gap’ were ludicrous. My book The Glass Ceiling Delusion: the real reasons more women don’t reach senior positions was published in 2011, at a time my understanding of feminism was a fraction of what it is today. It’s still available to buy on Amazon and elsewhere.

5. The government continues to press FTSE100 companies to appoint more women to their boards, despite having been presented with the evidence of the likely impact on corporate financial performance by me in House of Commons and House of Lords inquiries in 2012.

6. The government’s bullying of companies is profoundly anti-meritocratic and therefore unConservative.

7. The government has a longer-term goal of gender parity on FTSE350 boards. This will require a tenfold preferencing of women over men. Put another way, for every 10 women appointed in a bid for gender parity, nine of them could be replaced by better-qualified men (probably many better-qualified men).

8. The capitulation of major businesses to these initiatives embarrasses me, as a former business executive. Perhaps driven by chivalry, some businessmen may have believed the relentless stream of propaganda about increasing female representation on boards being good for corporate performance. But I doubt that businessmen as a class have suddenly become less intelligent than they were formerly, and I think there’s a more troubling explanation for their lack of resistance. To the best of my knowledge, not one FTSE350 executive has raised any objections publicly, and organisations such as the CBI have long been keen on increasing female representation on boards. Our suspicion is there’s a Faustian pact going on here. FTSE100 companies aren’t raising objections, in return for the government’s private assurances that ever-smaller companies will be affected over time. Smaller companies will be disproportionately badly affected than larger ones, so FTSE100 companies support the government’s anti-competitive policy direction.

9. Big businesses share with the government a wish to see ever more women in paid employment, which has a deflationary impact on salaries, and leads to increased demand for goods and services as well as higher tax revenues for the government.

This brings us to an article written by Chris Blackhurst and published by the Evening Standard yesterday. Astonishingly, he’s calling for the government’s target for FTSE100 companies of 25% female representation on their boards by the end of this year – which looks likely to be met – to be replaced by a 25% target for executive directors (mainly chief executives and finance directors).

We’re about to send Chris Blackhurst our public challenge, and if he doesn’t respond by June 24, or his response is deemed inadequate by the Awards Committee – which is due to meet the next day – he’ll become our first male ‘Gormless Feminist of the Month’ award winner.

It’s always heartening to see women calling out men who support feminism. Nobody does it better than Janet Bloomfield, as in her latest piece.

An excellent piece by Paul Elam.

You can rely on William Collins to publish pieces backed up by a considerable amount of research. His new piece on MGM is impressive, and will be a good source of references for us for the years ahead. We’ll be devoting a higher proportion of our efforts to MGM in future, than we have in the past. It is, after all, an area where a huge amount of future human suffering could be avoided with a single Act of Parliament. The time to end MGM on religious or cultural grounds, for those under 18, has surely arrived.