An interesting piece in Spiked.

Our thanks to Mark for this.

[Note added 27 May: This post is being republished as a reminder. It’s a scandal that the police / CPS are failing to bring prosecutions against those who perpetrate the crime of MGM, often making considerable money in the process. The police report into the Home Office. The Home Secretary is Theresa May MP, who once infamously sported a ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ T-shirt. Please show your support for male babies, infants, and children, by supporting us next Wednesday. Thank you. ]

Many proponents of MGM support it partly on the grounds of alleged potential or real health benefits, to men and/or their sexual partners. Does science support that position? For the answer, we refer you to a paper co-authored by Brian D Earp, a scientist and ethicist at the University of Oxford – here.

Two more anti-MGM protests will take place before the London Conference. One of the speakers at the conference will be the American researcher Tim Hammond, who’ll be giving a new talk on the Global Survey of Circumcision Harm.

Our first anti-MGM protest was outside the Conservative party conference (October 2015), the second in Parliament Square on International Men’s Day (November 2015).

The third (March 2016) was the largest anti-MGM protest ever held in the UK, outside the Thornhill Clinic, Luton – the largest private circumcision clinic in the UK. Our blog piece on the matter is here, a video (9:19) of the event here.

Last week we staged a highly successful protest in Golders Green. We’ll shortly be posting videos and still photographs from that protest, along with some commentary. One of the leaflets we handed out was designed by the people behind a website with no connection to this one, Jews Against Circumcision. From the website:

We are a group of educated and enlightened Jews who realize that the barbaric, primitive, torturous, and mutilating practice of circumcision has no place in modern Judaism.

Rabbi Moses Maimonides himself acknowledged that circumcision is done to desensitize the penis and curb masturbation.

Jews are some of the smartest people in the world. We are 1/3rd of 1% of the population, yet we hold 33% of Nobel prizes. We are smart enough to understand that mutilating a little boys’ penis is not an acceptable practice in modern times.

Our next protest will be over 1pm – 6pm on Wednesday 1 June, outside the Home Office – 2 Marsham Street, London SW1P 4DF – because the Home Office is responsible for the police, and the police (acting with the CPS) aren’t bringing prosecutions against the people carrying out the criminal offence of MGM. In the Home Office response to our FOI request last year, the department didn’t deny MGM is illegal, but evaded the question of why it doesn’t prosecute the criminals carrying out the procedure. A map of the area is here.

The final protest before the conference will be over 1pm – 6pm on Wednesday 15 June, outside the Head Office of the NSPCC – Weston House, 42 Curtain Road, London EC2A 3NH. A map of the area is here. An email exchange in our possession proves that the NSPCC couldn’t care less about this unnecessary, cruel, and illegal procedure being inflicted on so many male minors in the UK every year.

Our thanks to Martin for this. The final three paragraphs consist of HEPI’s justification for having committed the heinous crime – in the eyes of some of the report’s critics – of having referenced J4MB in their recent report, Boys to Men.

While we welcomed the report, we had reservations, similar to those William Collins outlined in his blog piece. In the new HEPI blog piece there are comments that are worthy of the Fawcett Society. An example:

We even pointed out that, in higher education itself, female staff face a glass ceiling while men often pass by in a glass elevator.

What a load of glass b***ocks.

The Australian women’s football team is ranked #5 in the world. They made it to the quarter finals of the last three World Cups. Our thanks to Keith for this.

Sarah Vine is the wife of Michael Gove MP, Justice Secretary, who is untroubled by the fact that five out of six men in British prisons wouldn’t be there, if men were treated with the same leniency as women in sentencing terms.

Our thanks to Jeff, Nigel, and one or two others for pointing us to this.

Cat Smith is a Labour MP, and the Shadow Minister for Women. She graduated from university with a BA in Sociology and Gender Studies, and she believes Jesus Christ was a radical socialist. She serves under Kate Green, Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities. In January I was interviewed along with Kate Green, here (video, 15:00).

Our thanks to Guido Fawkes for publishing a piece, Cat Smith Expenses Cover-Up.

[Note added 26.5.16: This post was originally published in 2014, as is being re-published now for technical reasons.]

[Note added 6.7.14: The Brunel University story is small beer in comparison with this story, the government committing £30 million to bribe more women into engineering.]

[Note added 3.7.14: A FoI request has led us to the information that these MSc courses are of one year’s duration, and the sponsorships are worth £22,750. There’s a ‘living allowance’ of £15,000 – male students don’t need to live, it would seem – and the course fees of £7,750 are paid. Today we posted a new piece on the matter.]

Yet more lunacy, part of a scheme expected to cost long-suffering taxpayers £25 million.

From the article:

“Only around a quarter of students on engineering master’s courses are women,” said Brunel engineering lecturer, Petra Gratton. “Bluntly speaking, that has to change if UK engineering is going to continue to compete as successfully as it currently does… While some may see this as positive discrimination the stark reality is that UK plc can no longer afford not to exploit fully this enormous potential talent pool.

Some may see this as positive discrimination? Who – with an IQ above that of a particularly dim fruitbat –  wouldn’t? Four out of seven unemployed people in the UK are men, unemployment is a larger driver of male suicide than female suicide, the male/female suicide differential has increased from 1.8:1 to 3.5:1 in the past 30 years… and here we have one of the few remaining male-dominated professions discriminating against men.

It’s time to join up the dots. In this and many other ways, the state is leading men to kill themselves in large numbers – suicide is the leading cause of death among young men – although men collectively pay 72% of the income tax which largely finances the state.

The £22,750 p.a. additional grants will be paid to female postgraduates solely on account of their gender. So a female student from a rich family will get the grant, while a male student from a poor family won’t. From the piece:

A spokesman for Brunel added that the university was trying to dispel the myth that engineers spend most of their time on site, wearing hard hats.

“At advanced level, engineering is very much an office-based profession, where the emphasis is working with teams on a collaborative basis. These skills are areas where women have traditionally excelled.”

I’ve yet to see any evidence that women have ‘traditionally excelled’ at teamwork in a way that leads to improved economic performance. If there were any truth in this self-congratulatory fantasy, the senior reaches of our major companies would have long been dominated by women. Indeed, without positive discrimination, few women reach those positions.

Would female engineering graduates not understand by the end of their engineering courses, what being an engineer was about? Are they really that stupid? Let’s read between the lines in that extract, shall we? Women clearly prefer to be in nice cosy offices than ‘on site, wearing hard hats’, which presumably mess up their hair.

The reality is surely that by the time these women graduate, they understand perfectly well what the life of an engineer entails, and that’s why they’re quitting the profession they were suckered into entering in the first place – suckered by taxpayer-funded initiatives aimed at getting more women to study STEMM subjects. Now it seems the only way to persuade these women to undertake postgraduate engineering studies is for long-suffering taxpayers to bribe them with an additional £22,750 pa. They must be so proud of having been born with the ‘correct’ genitals to ensure additional taxpayer funding. The effort required from them? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

It’s not just the state that’s relentlessly pursuing this direction of travel. Professional bodies in engineering and other male-dominated professions are discriminating again men, although men surely represent the majority of their existing membership. Our public challenge of Nick Baveystock, the director general of the Institution of Civil Engineers, remains unanswered to this day.

An insightful and sometimes funny piece (video, 16:57) by Paul Elam for An Ear for Men. He critiques a discussion by five female therapists in his unique style.

Our thanks to Mark for this.