Month: December 2015

We wish our supporters a Merry Xmas – or another greeting, if they prefer – and our hopes for a happy and healthy 2016

/ Mike Buchanan / 6 Comments

2015 has been a remarkable year for the men’s human rights movement, and for J4MB. In the next few days we’ll publish a review of our activities over the year, and offer some thoughts on 2016 and the years beyond.

In the meantime, we wish our supporters a Merry Xmas – or another greeting, if they prefer – and a happy and healthy 2016. Supporters come in many forms, but we’re principally thinking of the following:

  • party members, who are now our prime sources of funding
  • one-off donors
  • strategic advisors
  • providers of goods and services e.g. accounting, graphic design, video recording and editing, printed materials, mirroring our YouTube pieces…
  • providers of links to interesting articles and videos
  • people willing to brave all weathers to protest with us on key issues e.g. MGM

We thank all these people for their support in 2015, and we hope they remain as supportive in 2016, in our common pursuit of justice for men and boys (and the women who love them).

More than half of workers think women’s behaviour in the office is dictated by their hormones, survey reveals

/ Mike Buchanan / 3 Comments

Our thanks to Francis for this. The piece (by a female reporter, predictably) is presented with four bullet points at the start:

Poll found 54 per cent thought women’s decisions controlled by hormones

2,000 questioned and just under half said sexes had different capabilities

More than two thirds said they ‘did not believe’ in a gender pay gap

Pollsters said the results were ‘worrying’ for women in the work place

There’s a sentence in the article you might expect to find in the Guardian, rather than the Daily Mail:

More than two thirds of workers also said they ‘did not believe’ in the gender pay gap – despite official statistics showing it stands at 9.4 per cent for full-time employees.

Does the journalist not realise she’s conflating two different things, the overal gender pay gap (which starts at the age of 40, the reasons for which are well understood, and have nothing to do with sexism), and men and women being paid the same for the same work? I’m really tired of such sloppy journalism, day after day. But maybe she’s being deliberately obtuse?

William Collins had the last word on the gender pay gap – here. It’s been one of our most-cited articles this year.

Naima Shereen Mirza, 21, falsely claimed she had been raped so she could resit her A-levels, jailed for two years

/ Mike Buchanan / 3 Comments

Our thanks to Francis for this. For once, with respect to women making false rape allegations, justice has been done. A clue for the police was that the man she named as her rapist was in prison at the time. The end of the article:

Sentencing Mirza, Sheriff Michael O’Grady QC told her: ‘In many years in these courts in one capacity or another, I have come across the whole range of hateful, hideous and downright bizarre things that people do to each other and the world at large.

‘But I doubt, however, in all that time that I have encountered a course of conduct so strange, so needless and so hard to fathom as yours.’

He added: ‘It is also a course of conduct that is selfish, devious and persistent to a truly remarkable degree’.

He said resources were diverted from ‘genuine crimes where genuine victims were anxiously and fearfully waiting for their assailants to be brought to book’, adding: ‘That is not only appalling, it is positively cruel.’

‘For almost a year you spun a web of lies and deceit of quite remarkable scope, intricacy and forethought.

‘Throughout that time, you caused huge amounts of public money and effort, not to mention the dedication and commitment of the police officers from whom we heard, to be needlessly expended for no other purpose than the gratification of watching them dance to your tune’.

The sentence and comments make a welcome change from the usual outcome in such cases, woman being given suspended sentences, then being told they’re very lucky not to be sent to prison.