Our thanks to Lars, one of our many Scandinavian supporters, for this.

I probably don’t need to explain that you can read Kindle e-books (and other e-books, for that matter) on PCs and other devices through excellent software that’s free to download. So you may be interested to learn that the estimable Janet Bloomfield (Judgy Bitch) is generously offering her e-book The Fitness Test for free on Amazon for the coming five days. The length is equivalent to a 172-page paperback. A link to the Amazon UK web page for ordering the book is here.

I learned of the offer in the course of reading Janet’s latest blog piece, here.

Tom Golden is an American psychotherapist, and runs the blog Men Are Good. His YouTube library is here.

Tom’s pieces are always worth catching, and his latest is no exception.

We’re stepping up our efforts to have non-therapeutic circumcision of male minors in the UK declared illegal, and this will be our #1 campaigning issue for the foreseeable future. We recently publicly challenged Alison Saunders and Theresa May MP on the matter.

A few days ago we emailed letters to leading Jewish and Muslim clerics, organizations, and newspapers. The one we sent to Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis is here, and the (very similar) one we sent to Dr Omar El-Hamdoon (President, Muslim Association of Britain) is here.

We’ve just received our first response, from an organization we didn’t write to. It’s a letter signed by the Co-Chairmen of Milah UK, Prof. David Katz and Dr. Simon Hochhauser. They describe the organization in the following terms:

Milah UK is the campaign group set up by the organizations of the Jewish community in the UK to promote and protect the right of the Jewish community to carry out religious circumcisions in accordance with our religious beliefs.

The letter is here, and it’s been posted here with the kind permission of the organization. Our response is here, and it ends with the following:

Your lack of humanity towards male minors only reinforces our determination to have non-therapeutic circumcision of male minors declared illegal in the UK, so that future generations of Jewish men and boys will not have to suffer as their predecessors have. Along with a number of other organizations, we shall work tirelessly towards that goal, for as long as it takes. When that happy day arrives – as it surely will – you’ll need to find something to replace the mutilation of baby boys’ genitals as ‘the most important, recognizable and indeed celebrated element of Jewish culture’.

Well, this video (5:49) is interesting. A young American woman in a car resists arrest by a policeman – throughout the exchange he displays the patience of a saint, it has to be said – and she records the encounter, in a transparent bid to win a ‘Gormless Feminist of the Month’ award. At 1:40:

I am not a US citizen. I am a free inhabitant. I am of the Earth. I do not belong to any corporation. I do not belong to any country. A free inhabitant is… is… is… they are free people, they have all the rights of a US citizen without following any of their laws.

Displaying admirable control, the policeman drily responds:

Well, that would be pure anarchy, if that were the case.

At 3:21 she makes some dubious claims, all things considered:

You’re raping me. This is rape. This is rape. This is rape.

She then screams. At 5:04, the high point of her bid to win our award:

Policeman: You’re under arrest.
Woman: No, I’m not.

It turns out he was right, and she was wrong.

An interesting piece from Paul Elam. From near the end:

Now that we have established a business structure, a way to support AVfM Operations and Education, LLCs, which means the expense of running A Voice for Men, it is time for us to forge ahead with changing the (cultural) narrative in more focused ways.

The tl;dr on that is that we are refitting the AVFM ship for furthering a narrative change deeper in the culture. This primarily involves pushing into the medical and mental health establishments with vocal and forceful challenges to the gynocentrism and ideology that permeates them.

That includes the sexual mutilation of children for religious, traditional or aesthetic reasons.  It also includes the upcoming mental health network for men, which I assure you will be no wallflower in the discussion of men’s mental health issues. You can expect some fireworks there.

This fits in well with our own increasing focus on MGM.

William Collins was the author of two important pieces about the education gender gap, which leads to about 60% of university places going to women, The trouble with boys in education and Teachers’ unfairness to boys?. In the first piece he showed that the gender gap first emerged in 1987/8, the same year O Levels were replaced by GCSEs. Continuous assessments are integral to GCSEs, and this led directly and inevitably to the gender gap, because they allowed teachers’ anti-male marking bias to manifest itself in a way that hadn’t been possible with O Levels.

The education gender gap has been with us ever since, and we wouldn’t expect Nicky Morgan, Education Secretary as well as Minister for Women & Equalities, to give a damn about the matter. All the same, we publicly challenged her last month, and asked for some questions to be answered under the FoI Act – here. The letter included links to the two pieces by William Collins.

We’ve just received a response from the Department for Education. Our first two questions were about initiatives encouraging boys and girls to study subjects historically regarded as largely the preserve of the opposite sex. The response points to two initiatives, which together will cost taxpayers £7.1 million in the current financial year. They are aimed at increasing participation of both boys and girls in mathematics and physics A levels, ‘… but they do place some additional emphasis on addressing the low proportion of girls progressing to these A levels’. We picked Psychology and English Literature as female-dominated fields, and needless to say, no initiatives are in place to encourage more boys to study these subjects.

Our third question was:

Does the DfE recognize boys’ underachievement as a problem to be addressed, and if so, what initiatives are in place, and how much is budgeted for them in 2015/16?

The first part of the question wasn’t addressed, but we can infer the attitude of the DfE from the following:

The Department does not fund any initiatives that just focus on addressing boys’ underachievement. The Government’s education reforms are designed to ensure that all children, whatever their gender, have the opportunity to attain well at school.

Our fourth question was:

Does the DfE recognize that boys’ academic attainments have suffered as a result of an increasingly feminized teaching workforce? …are there any initiatives underway to encourage more men into teaching?

Once again, the first part of the question wasn’t answered, but we can infer the attitude of the DfE from the following:

There are no initiatives aimed at encouraging more men into teaching.

We consider the DfE response to be insubstantive – evading two key questions – so we’ll keep our public challenge of Ms Morgan on the long list of public challenges of feminists (and their male collaborators) which haven’t received substantive responses. The full list of those challenges is here.

Fewer than 4,000 of the 84,000 people in British prisons are women. The number has been in decline for some time. The conditions in women’s prisons are markedly better than in men’s prisons. We know from a piece by William Collins that if British men were sentenced with the same leniency as women, five out of six men currently in British prisons wouldn’t be there. The male prison population would fall from around 80,000 to around 13,000.

Introducing gender equality in this area would end the ‘prison overcrowding crisis’ at a stroke.

It’s obvious, then, where we need to place the emphasis on prisoner number reductions, isn’t it? Yes, in reducing the female prison population yet further. The Prison Reform Trust has just secured a £1.2 million lottery grant with exactly that aim in mind. An Independent article on the matter is here.

Ally Fogg, a feminist Guardian columnist and blogger on men’s issues, is branching out into writing comedy. It’s the only obvious rational explanation for a blog piece he’s just published, claiming ‘victory’ in the wake of his letter (co-signed by 30 ‘decent, sensible’ people, none of whom publicly self-identify as anti-feminists) about the CPS, which was published by the Guardian recently.

I’ve left a lengthy comment (#7) and have taken a copy in case he deletes it – in which case I’ll add it to this piece.

Jeremy Corbyn is the ultra-left-wing candidate for the Labour party leadership. Our thanks to Jon for pointing us to this. If we hadn’t just awarded the August ‘Gormless Feminist of the Month’ award elsewhere, Corbyn would have won it with this document. It could have been written by a committee of hatchet-faced wimmin including those at The Fawcett Society, Laura Bates – the document refers to ‘everyday sexism’ haha! – Caroline Carping-Perez, Harriet Harman…

Jon calls it an ‘utterly hysterical document’, and he’s right on both meanings of the word ‘hysterical’. Why doesn’t the Labour party rename itself The Feminist Party, and be done with it?