Sad. But on another level, simply two of countless examples of women’s narcissism and consequent self-objectification. A few years ago Katie Price made an appearance at WH Smith in Bedford, to sign copies of her latest ghost-written autobiography. Looking from the outside, I could see the shop was packed with excited people wanting to meet her – mostly young, all female. No male objectification, then.

After every high-profile killing of innocent people, such as the recent shooting of two young news reporters in the United States, we’re told the problem is a combination of lax gun controls and ‘toxic masculinity’. Because only men murder innocent people, right? No. As Janet Bloomfield explains in her piece:

Women prefer victims who can’t fight back. They prefer to stab, beat, shoot, burn, strangle, cut the throats of babies, toddlers and children. Often prompted by sheer cruelty, vindictiveness and selfishness.

None of those innocents’ lives would have been saved if there were no firearms in the United States. We could – we should – add the lives of many millions of embryos and foetuses brought to an early end by the choices overwhelmingly made by women. In the UK alone, well over 8 million elective abortions have been carried out since the Abortion Act 1967.

[We thank 5hadowfax for permitting us to post his video onto our YouTube channel – here. Please leave your comments there, rather than in response to this post. Thank you.]

Not long ago we published a link to a blog piece by William Collins on MGM, which included observations on the ongoing WHO/UNAIDS programme to mutilate the genitals of 20 million Sub-Saharan men and boys (as young as 10). A link to the piece is here, the content in PDF format here.

5hadowfax yesterday published a video (11:24) on the subject of that MGM programme, and it’s a ‘must watch’ piece.

Interesting. In Pakistan, as in the UK, 70% of medical students are women. The result is a very costly taxpayer-funded catastrophe in both countries, because female doctors typically work far fewer hours than their male colleagues over the course of their medical careers. After a long and very expensive taxpayer-funded training, female doctors are more likely to quit the profession at all points from graduation onwards, they’re less likely to work unsocial hours, less likely to work in stressful environments (e.g. A&E), more likely to work part-time, more likely to retire early…

As a poor country, Pakistan can ‘afford’ the problem of the feminization of the medical profession less than than the UK, so thoughts there are turning to what might be done about the problem. It’s about damned time British politicians had the courage to do some hard thinking in this area, it need hardly be said, with the NHS on its knees.

Extracts from the early part of the BBC article:

In Pakistan’s prestigious medical schools, female students outshine and outnumber their male counterparts. However, many do not end up as practising doctors – and now there are calls to limit their numbers, the BBC’s Amber Shamsi in Islamabad reports…

…government figures suggest most of these bright female undergraduate doctors do not actually go on to practise. Only 23% of registered doctors are female…

The vice-chancellor of the prestigious Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto medical university in Islamabad, Dr Javed Akram, says that girls are more focused on excelling academically than boys.

At the same time, he accepts that some female students are more keen on catching a husband than on pursuing a career.

“It’s much easier for girls to get married once they are doctors and many girls don’t really intend to work as professional doctors,” he says. “I know of hundreds of hundreds of female students who have qualified as a doctor or a dentist but they have never touched a patient.”

Privately, many doctors – both male and female – tell me that a medical degree is an extremely hot ticket in the marriage market…

Wherever we look, we see the same global pattern, as outlined Dr Catherine Hakim’s Preference Theory, in 2000. Far more men than women are work-centred – in the UK, by a ratio of 4:1. Denying this persistent reality leads to outcomes such as the relentlessly ineffective and inefficient NHS.

Our thanks to K for this. Irene Kelly was the authoress of Sins of the Mother, which was published two weeks ago. She says she has yet to receive an apology from the Catholic church. From the book’s back cover, as described on Amazon:

‘At night, when it’s very quiet, I can still hear the sound of babies crying. The babies from the nursery, the ones I couldn’t help.’

Irene Kelly was brought up in poverty and abused by her mammy from an early age. But home life was still better than the time she spent in one of Dublin’s industrial orphanages. Under that harsh regime, she was beaten and sexually assaulted. Set to work in the nursery, she saw nuns treating babies with horrifying cruelty.

So, will the mainstream media show the same interest in abusive nuns, as it rightly showed in abusive priests?

Interesting.

Two days ago we published a piece about how token female panelists who don’t make an effort are ruining comedy quiz shows, notably a particular favourite, 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown. I was still incensed over the matter this morning, and duly sent this email to Channel 4:

Good morning. I used to be a HUGE fan of ‘8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown’ but it is becoming a shadow of its former self, and for one reason only, as I explained in a blog post recently, here.

PLEASE – stop including token female contestants who contribute damn all to the programme. They manage to make the overall show a lot less funny, the past two episodes have been particularly bad.

A person of the female persuasion at Channel 4, who will remain nameless, responded a few hours later with this:

Dear Mr Buchanan,

Thank you for contacting Channel 4 Viewer Enquiries regarding 8 OUT OF 10 CATS DOES COUNTDOWN.

We are sorry to hear that you were unhappy that female guests were included in the comedy panel that feature on the show because you feel that they are less funny than male guests.

Please be advised that it is a fact that very few presenters on any programme meet with the unqualified approval of everyone in our audience. Nevertheless, please be assured your complaint has been logged and noted for the information of those responsible for our programming.

Thank you again for taking the time to contact us. We appreciate all feedback from our viewers; complimentary or otherwise.

Regards,

<name redacted>
Channel 4 Viewer Enquiries

I responded with this:

Thank you. It’s not that I ‘feel’ the female guests were less funny, I KNOW they were, as would anyone with a sense of humour. Jessica Hynes was just particularly woeful.

Disgruntled with the response from Channel 4, I forwarded the exchange to one of the party stalwarts, H. He replied with this:

Years ago, the story goes, when people travelled in Pullman railway sleeping cars, a passenger found a bed bug in his berth. He wrote a letter to George M. Pullman, president of Pullman’s Palace Car Company, informing him of this unhappy fact. By return, he received the following:

“The company has never heard of such a thing, and as a result of your experience, all the sleeping cars are being pulled off the line and fumigated. The Pullman’s Palace Car Company is committed to providing its customers with the highest level of service, and it will spare no expense in meeting that goal. Thank you for writing, and if you ever have a similar problem, or any problem, do not hesitate to write to me again.”

However, enclosed with this letter, by accident, was the passenger’s original letter to Pullman, across the bottom of which the president had written a note to his secretary,

“Send this S.O.B. the standard bedbug letter!”

Our thanks to Jeff for this. It’s about time women started to admit publicly what we all see with our own eyes, in our work and home lives, decade after decade. Woman are typically more prone to anxiety than men, and they don’t cope as well with healthy competition, so they suffer more stress when put under pressure, such as in the workplace – the subject of the newspaper article.

36 years ago Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, yet year after year we hear calls for female role models, leaving aside the tricky question of who’ll be the role models’ role models. There’s a seemingly never-ending need to ‘celebrate’ and ‘inspire’ women, endless propaganda on the BBC and the media generally about ‘strong’ high-achieving women, taxpayer-funded initiatives to ‘encourage’ women into fields they don’t want to enter (engineering, £30 million), lowering of standards to enable more women to meet entry and/or ongoing employment requirements (women-only MP shortlists, police, fire service…), preferencing of women over men in the public sector (Equality Act 2010), the decline of state education partly resulting from the feminisation of the teaching profession (masked only by grade inflation, decade after decade), and so much more.

For three years Campaign for Merit in Business has been informing the government and businesses of the evidence that driving up female representation on corporate boards leads to corporate financial decline – its short briefing paper is here. On the basis of merit we’d expect women to occupy fewer than 5% of the board places in major companies – for the simple calculations leading to that conclusion, see reference #2 on p.68 of our election manifesto – yet due to government threats of legislated gender quotas, the proportion of women on FTSE100 boards has risen from 12.5% to 25% in the space of five years. Almost all the new female directors were appointed as non-executive directors – what does that tell you about the competence gender gap at the top of major businesses? The government has a longer-term goal of gender parity on FTSE350 boards, which will require a more than tenfold preferencing of women over men, and a large number of male executives being denied board places they would deserve on the grounds of merit.

What are the consequences of this ideologically-driven insanity? A small number of women are advanced far beyond their natural abilities, and the rest of us – men, the vast majority of women, and children – pay the price, in so many ways.

She’s not wrong.

Our thanks to K for loading this onto our YouTube channel. Jane Humphries, a professor of Economic History at Oxford University, nominated herself for the award in the course of an interview with James Naughtie on the Today programme last week, as explained in the short description under the video.

On the day the piece was originally broadcast, we published a longer blog piece on the matter – here.