Alison Saunders, Director of Public Prosecutions, failed to respond by the required deadline to our FOI request in September 2015 asking for minutes of meetings she’s had since she took on her role in November 2013, with organizations advocating for victims of domestic and/or sexual abuse. Her response is now 18 weeks overdue.
Our letter to Ms Saunders is here. We’ll publish a post each week on the delay, and email the Crown Prosecution Service each time, until we get a response.
With the conference little more than four months away, I’ve just finished a Hangout with Paul Elam on the subject – here (31:49). I had an intermittent problem with video on my PC, so the only video is of Paul. He plans to have a Hangout every week between now and the conference, with different speakers each time, and he hopes to speak to Sage Gerard next Sunday.
You can book your conference ticket here.
Have a good week.
No winner of our awards has ever been more deserving than the execrable Alison Saunders, Director of Public Prosecutions:
If you can possibly make this debate, tomorrow evening, you must. Details here. The five speakers include two infamous feminists:
– Jess Phillips MP, who sought to deny Philip Davies MP the first-ever debate in parliament on men’s issues, on International Men’s Day, 2015. A video of her disgraceful attempt is here. Fortunately she failed, but she won a ‘Toxic Feminist of the Month’ award – here. Predictably, in common with many of Labour’s most men-hating female MPs, she was selected from an all-women PPC shortlist.
Her woeful narcissistic maiden speech in the House of Commons is here. In it she boasted of her academic qualifications, whilst mocking her husband for his lack of them.
– Kate Smurthwaite, the notoriously unfunny feminist ‘comedienne’ who relentlessly interrupts opponents during debates, whilst angrily demanding they don’t interrupt her. I have yet to see her display any wit during a debate. She won one of our ‘Lying Feminist of the Month’ awards – here.
It would be good to meet up with people before the event, a few of us have already arranged to meet very near the venue at 5pm. If you’d like to do meet up (once your ticket is booked) please call me on 07967 026163. It should be a memorable evening…
Our thanks to K for drawing our attention to an interesting piece by Neil Lyndon, published in The Telegraph last September.
Excellent. I note that Laura Bates BEM, twice a ‘Lying Feminist of the Month’ award winner, is a member of the silly organization Kathy has been invited to join. In which field does Special Snowflake ‘lead’, other than whining? She was, after all, the inaugural member of The Whine Club.
A fine article by Gary Costanza for AVfM. Circumcision is demonstrably illegal in the US, as it is in the UK.
Tickets are still available for the second International Conference on Men’s Issues, being held in the capital’s largest and most prestigious conferences and events venue, ExCeL London, 8-10 July. You can book your ticket(s) here.
The line-up of 20 speakers, and other well-known people advocating for the human rights of men and boys, is below. For many, this conference will be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to watch these people speak ‘live’, and to meet them face-to-face. It may be many years before the UK hosts another event of this size and scope, so don’t leave it too late to apply for a ticket. There’s a very strict limit on the number of people who can be accommodated in the conference area we’ve hired.
Keynote speaker
Erin Pizzey Domestic violence campaigner – ‘Intergenerational Family Violence v. The Big Lie.’
In 1971, Erin founded the very first battered women’s shelter in the world, in Chiswick, London. She had no idea what would be coming her way for her troubles, including death threats, bomb threats, and multiple incidents of stalking. In her book Prone to Violence (1982) she showed how misguided we are in dealing with Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). She has been refuting lies about IPV for 40+ years, and runs WhiteRibbon.org.
Master of Ceremonies
Terrence Popp – For several years Terrence has been addressing men’s issues using comedy as a vehicle. He is also a highly decorated combat veteran who was one of the presenters at ICMI 14 in Detroit, Michigan. Terrence is also the proprietor of Redonkulas.com
Other speakers, in surname alphabetical order
Paul Apreda – Families Need Fathers (Both Parents Matter) Cymru – ‘The State’s War on Fathers’
Paul is the National Manager of the charity FNF Both Parents Matter Cymru. The charity provides practical and emotional support to parents with child contact problems in Wales, and undertakes research on issues impacting on men.
Janet Bloomfield – ‘How Feminism Infantilizes Women’
Janet is a Canadian anti-feminist writer and blogger. She was one of the first female anti-feminist bloggers, using the pseudonym ‘JudgyBitch’. She was one of the original contributors to Women Against Feminism. She has explained why feminism is the major ideology standing in the way of legal equality between men and women.
Mike Buchanan Party leader, J4MB – ‘The Political War on Men and Boys’
Mike is a British anti-feminist author and men’s rights advocate. His latest book is Feminism: the ugly truth. He launched J4MB in 2013. It remains the only political party in the English-speaking world campaigning for the human rights of men and boys on many fronts. He also runs Campaign for Merit in Business.
Dr Greg Canning – ‘The Health Gender Gap’
Greg is a general practitioner and medical educator who has cared for families at Hermit Park Clinic in Townsville for over 25 years. Current interests include the diagnosis and management of skin cancer, the impact of social factors and policy on men’s health, and drawing attention to the issues faced by men and boys in his local community.
Martin Daubney – ‘Pornography and the demonisation of young men’
Martin is an award-winning magazine Editor and newspaper journalist of 20 years’ experience. He also writes regular in-depth men’s issues features for The Sunday Times, and is a seasoned broadcaster for Sky News, ITV, BBC & Channel 5. In 2013 he presented Channel 4’s Porn On The Brain, which has since been aired in seven countries. From 2002-2010 he edited iconic lad’s mag loaded, until fatherhood dragged him into the real world.
Paul Elam Founder and publisher, A Voice for Men – ‘Gynocentrism: the Root of Feminism’
Paul is an American, and the most well-known men’s human rights advocate in the world. A former mental health professional, he launched A Voice for Men (AVfM) in 2009. AVfM has long been the most-visited and most influential website in the world advocating for men’s human rights.
Janice Fiamengo Professor, Department of English, Ottawa University – ‘How Feminism is Destroying Higher Education’
Janice is a strident Canadian supporter of free speech, and an advocate for gender fairness. She is producing a series of anti-feminist videos called The Fiamengo File.
Sage Gerard Collegiate Activism Director, AVfM Operations LLC – ‘How to Bring Men’s Rights to Campus’
Sage is an internationally-recognized advocate for men’s rights student organizations, and an authoritative contact for students trying to resist hostile universities. He founded Zen Men to counteract gender ideology in education systems.
Guttorm Grundt – ‘Discrimination of men and fathers in Norway, and MannsForum’s strategy and actions for gender equality in practice.’
Guttorm has been engaged in gender equality for men for 30 years, both as telephone support for distressed men, co-founder of Resource Centre for men (Reform), and now board member of the organisation Men’s Forum in Norway; mannforum.org. He is also a father and grandfather.
Kathy Gyngell – ‘Feminism and Family Dysfunction: A Disaster for Men, Women and Children.’
Kathy is co-editor of The Conservative Woman. She researched and wrote the Addictions reports for the Conservative Party’s Social Justice Policy Review publications Breakdown Britain (2006) and Breakthrough Britain (2007). She published further critiques of drug policy, The Phoney War on Drugs (2009) and Breaking the Habit (2011) with The Centre for Policy Studies where she has been a research fellow since 2007. She writes frequently for The Daily Mail and has written for The Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, The Times and the Evening Standard.
Tim Hammond – ‘Exploring the Aftermath of Male Circumcision: Findings from the 2012 Global Survey of Infant Circumcision’
Tim is an American independent researcher and human rights advocate. He has conducted two surveys into the long-term adverse effects of infant circumcision (Male Genital Mutilation) on men’s health.
Anil Kumar Save Indian Family Foundation – ‘Organizational Models that made the difference: Success stories in India’
Anil was the founder of India’s first ever men’s community centres, in New Delhi and Bangalore. He has testified twice in front of Parliamentary inquiries, seeking to protect innocent men and women from the impact of false allegations against men. His community centre website is www.confidareindia.com. SIFF’s NGO (charitable trust) website is www.saveindianfamily.org
Josh O’Brien – ‘Where are all the young MRAs?’
Josh is a 19-year-old British politics and sociology student, who has been making videos on Men’s Issues and Feminism for a number of years. He’s been featured on A Voice For Men, Inside-Man, Fabulous Magazine, J4MB and the BBC among others, and seeks to become an expert on men’s issues in years to come.
Herbert Purdy– ‘Feminism: Their Angry Creed’
Herbert is a British author, commentator, and blogger on feminism and its effect on society. He stands implacably opposed to all it represents, and believes it is time people woke up to its danger.
Karen Straughan – ‘Toxic Femininity’
Karen (GirlWritesWhat) is a Canadian anti-feminist who has been writing and video blogging on gender issues since 2010. Her widely-admired videos have raised the consciousness about gender issues and feminism of huge numbers of people, and she has been described as the #1 Recruiting Sergeant for the Men’s Human Rights Movement.
European News Director, AVFM Operations, LLC – ‘The Status of Men in Continental Europe: Ideology, Legislation, and Activism’
Lucian is a Romanian libertarian-conservative, polyglot, and staunch non-feminist. He runs the YouTube channel Freedom Alternative.
Thomas Walter – ‘Men’s Rights in Germany – Issues, Activities, Challenges’
Thomas is an executive committee member of MANNdat e.V., Germany. MANNdat is an independent, unaligned NGO founded by concerned men. They campaign for the civil rights of boys and men and expose and help overcome discrimination against them. MANNdat is the leading political organisation in the German MHRA landscape.
Milo Yiannopoulos – ‘How to Beat Feminists in Debates’
Milo is a British journalist and entrepreneur. He founded The Kernel, an online tabloid magazine about technology, which he sold to Daily Dot Media in 2014. He was involved in the Gamergate controversy, criticizing the politicization of video game culture. He is an Associate Editor for Breitbart.com, a United States-based news and opinion website.
A number of well-known individuals will be attending the conference, but not giving speeches. They include:
There can be few videos I’ve linked to more often than Alison Tieman’s excellent Men’s Rights Versus Feminism Explained With Magnets. It explains that society treats men as ‘actors’ and women as ‘acted upon’, leading to women not developing moral agency.
Rarely a day goes by in which I don’t see examples of women’s lack of moral agency, whether in the course of my day, or in the news. Yesterday we had the story of a drunk male barrister having intimate relations with a drunk female QC near a London railway station. Both were arrested and spent the night in the cells, and accepted police cautions the next morning. His face and details are over all the paper – he’s a married man too, for added humiliation – while six weeks after the event she claimed she’d been sexually assaulted, and will therefore enjoy anonymity for life, regardless of whether her claim turns out to have any basis in fact. Meanwhile the poor man will be hauled through the courts in an effort to save her skin.
I experienced another example of women’s lack of moral agency only this afternoon. Although I’m even busier than usual because of the demands of the conference preparations, I agreed to meet a London-based female journalism student – I’ll call her Lucy, not her real name – for an hour-long interview at Starbucks, in Bedford station. The station is half an hour’s walk from where I live, but I need the exercise, no problem there.
A week ago we’d agreed to meet at Starbucks at 14:00 today. At 11:26 I received this text message:
Hi mike its Lucy. I’ll be arriving into Bedford at 3 – does that suit you? Best wishes
No explanation for why she wanted to change the meeting time, no hint of an apology for possibly inconveniencing me. I replied:
Thanks Lucy, that’s fine
At 14:30 I left home for the station, but forgot to take my mobile phone, so I missed this text from Lucy at 14:46:
I’m getting on the 2:48 train – see you soon!
Given that the journey from St Pancras to Bedford takes 40-60 minutes, depending on the service, Lucy was clearly going to be late. Again, no hint of an apology. At 15:19 she texted:
What a beautiful train journey it is! I’ll be there shortly sorry for any inconvenience [at last, an apology!] but traffic to St Pancras was horrific – a nightmare I’m sure Bedford is exempt from!
Traffic to a major London train station on a Saturday was ‘horrific’. An utterly unprecedented phenomenon, I’m sure. Lucy clearly bore no responsibility for her lateness – no moral agency, in short.
I waited in Starbucks for half an hour, until 15:30, gradually becoming more agitated. I then left, arriving home about 16:00, and had just read her texts when she called. I made clear my displeasure about what had happened, and she predictably asked if I hadn’t received her texts. I explained I’d forgotten to take my mobile phone with me. She reacted exactly how I’d anticipated, saying triumphantly:
Oh… you forgot to take your phone with you!
The inference couldn’t be clearer. The responsibility for the meeting not taking place lay with me, not with her. I asked her to email me to arrange another time, another day. A few minutes later she texted me again:
Could I meet you somewhere more convenient for you now or would you rather another time?
I texted back:
Another day. You’ve messed me around enough for one day.
I’ll email her a link to this piece, but I doubt if she’ll grasp the point I’m making. In her world, I feel sure, a young woman should be entitled to treat men in a cavalier manner, and think no more about it.
[Note added 23.3.16: A second meeting in Bedford station was duly arranged. Entitlement Princess was late for that one, too.]
Regular followers of this blog will be well aware of the Thornhill Clinic, Luton, and the boast by the people running it, that it’s the largest private male circumcision clinic in the UK. Our protest outside the clinic during the afternoon of 22 March (details below) will relate specifically to the non-therapeutic circumcision of male minors (Male Genital Mutilation, MGM). Male minors cannot legally give informed consent to the procedure.
We strongly urge parents who are thinking of having their sons circumcised – whether at the Thornhill Clinic, or elsewhere – to explore the content of the website Neonatal Cutting.
Darrel Gregory is the Executive Director of the Thornhill clinic, and my recent email exchange with him is here. Details on Mr Gregory and the four doctors working at the clinic are here. The doctors have been placed by A Voice for Men on their Known Genital Mutilators directory, and our previous two posts on the clinic are here and here.
We shall be joining Men Do Complain at the protest – as we did in two protests in the autumn – and it will be held outside the clinic between 15:00 – 18:00 on Tuesday, 22 March. The clinic’s opening hours on Tuesdays are 15:30 – 17:30, and the address is 1-3 Thornhill Road, Luton, Beds. LU4 8EY.
We wouldn’t be surprised if the people running the clinic decided not to open it that afternoon, but no matter. Both national and local media will be attending and filming the protest, as will supporters of MDC and J4MB. It hopefully doesn’t need to be said that we’re planning an entirely peaceful protest, which won’t be directed at any religious group(s).
We’re confidently expecting an even larger attendance than we saw at the very successful protest last International Men’s Day, in Parliament Square. A video (6:30) of that protest is here. We’ll be ordering more placards etc.
We urge you to attend the protest, whether or not you’ve been personally affected by MGM. We have men at these protests who were themselves circumcised, and have no problem with that – but they believe firmly that in future, male minors should not suffer the procedure, and be allowed to make up their own minds after they’ve passed 18 years of age. MGM is, of course, only one of many areas where the human rights of men and boys are assaulted by the actions and inactions of the state. 20 such areas were outlined in our 2015 general election manifesto.
The reasons MGM remains our #1 campaigning issue don’t change over time:
1. MGM is an exercise in harming a minor’s body and is duly illegal. This is not our opinion, but that of a prominent barrister speaking at a conference in 2013.
For MGM not to be illegal, there would have to be a parliamentary override, and no such override exists. There are no exemptions in the law of England and Wales for religious or cultural considerations. I recently had a 20-minute-long discussion with Dr Simon Hochhauser, one of the Co-Chairmen of Milah UK, a Jewish organization promoting the continued mutilation of the genitals of eight-day-old baby boys. The discussion was on BBC 3 Counties Radio, and it’s here.
2. MGM is unethical, for precisely the same reasons Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is unethical. (FGM has been specifically illegal since 1985.)
3. MGM is a human rights violation, and breaches Articles of UN and EU conventions. For details, click on the first link in (1) above.
4. The historical objective of MGM was to reduce the pleasure males would later derive from sex, to encourage their fidelity to their wives, as explained in an excellent article by William Collins. The relevant extract:
This is how Moses Maimonides, the Jewish intellectual and physician, expressed it as early as 1135:
“With regard to circumcision, one of the reasons for it is, in my opinion, the wish to bring about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question, so that this activity be diminished and the organ be in as quiet a state as possible.
It has been thought that circumcision perfects what is defective congenitally…How can natural things be defective so that they need to be perfected from the outside, all the more because we know how useful the foreskin is to that member? In fact this commandment has not been prescribed with a view to perfecting what is defective congenitally, but to perfecting what is defective morally.
The bodily pain caused to that member is the real purpose of circumcision. None of the activities necessary for the preservation of the individual is harmed thereby, nor is procreation rendered impossible, but violent concupiscence and lust that goes beyond what is needed are diminished.
The fact that circumcision weakens the faculty of sexual excitement and sometimes perhaps diminishes the pleasure is indubitable. For if at birth this member has been made to bleed and has had its covering taken away from it, it must indubitably be weakened. In my opinion, this is the strongest of the reasons for circumcision. Jewish men, sexually subdued and readily controlled by their wives, don’t stray into mischief. The power of his member has been diminished so that he has no strength to lie with many lewd women.”
5. MGM can lead to further physical and psychological harm and therefore suffering, and sometimes death – as a direct consequence of the procedure, or later suicide. Should anyone be in any doubt about the issue of physical and psychological harm, they are invited to watch a video (49:32) on Tim Hammond’s Global Survey of Circumcision Harm. Tim, an American, will be talking on the topic of circumcision harm at the second International Conference on Men’s Issues, London, July 8-10.
We recommend a video of a presentation by Ryan McAllister, an American professor, titled, ‘Child Circumcision: An Elephant in the Hospital’.
Last September I gave a presentation, ‘Why don’t politicians give a damn about MGM?’ at the 20th Annual General Meeting of an anti-MGM charity, 15 Square. The video is here.
Among our list of key posts are many about MGM, scroll down to ‘Male Genital Mutilation’.
I urge you to join us at the Thornhill Clinic protest, for which we’ve already been assured strong support by leading anti-MGM campaigners. We have every reason to believe it will be the largest such protest ever held in the UK. Please email me mike@j4mb.org.uk if you’ll be able to join us. Let’s have a protest on a scale that people won’t be able to ignore. It’s time for MGM to be consigned to where it has long belonged – the dustbin of history. Thank you.
Justice for Men & Boys 