“Women’s rights!

The right not to be subject to the rules you’ve agreed to.

Women’s equality!

The right not to be subject to the rules you’ve agreed to.”

Fantastically entertaining presentation (video, 40:15) from Molyneux, worth listening to both for his non-feminist analysis – and for his list of John McEnroe’s misdemeanours and punishments (turns out that male tennis players are subject to rules, who knew?)!

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Alison Inman, President, Chartered Institute of Housing

A tip of the hat to Andy for this. A link to the Women’s Aid piece on Alison Inman is here. There the following remarks are attributed to her (emphasis ours):

“We don’t know the true scale of domestic abuse because so much of it goes unreported. But a survey in 2016 revealed more than four million women reported having been a victim at some point since the age of 16. That means all of us are providing homes for victims.

Changes to law, though welcome, will only achieve so much while most domestic abuse remains unreported. We simply have to do more to help victims.

And that doesn’t just mean providing refuge for them when things have reached crisis point – though we could do more on this, too. It means helping people before, during and after their abuse.”

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A piece by John Simpson, Crime Correspondent, in today’s Times, emphases ours:

A senior Scotland Yard officer faces losing his job in a racism row after he used the phrase “whiter than white” while encouraging responsible policing.

The detective superintendent will face an independent investigation for gross misconduct after he gave a briefing to colleagues during which he is said to have reminded them of the need to be exemplary in their police work.

The officer, who serves in the force’s anti-corruption unit, has been put on restricted duties while the Independent Office for Police Complaints (IOPC) deals with the allegation as part of a broader inquiry.

A Met officer who was aware of the case told the Evening Standard: “It may have been a poor use of language but this is not what the misconduct process is for. This is not corruption. This is not serious wrongdoing.”

In a separate inquiry at another force, an officer is believed to be under investigation for use of the phrase “pale, stale and male”. The term “a good egg” is also thought to be discouraged for fear that it is associated with the racist rhyming slang “egg and spoon”. [J4MB – are we alone in never having heard the term “a good egg” used in a racist manner?]

A range of complaints has been made against officers from the Met’s department of professional standards, with a total of 14 officers subject to the IOPC investigation, codenamed Operation Embley. There has been speculation that the watchdog is also investigating suspicions that officers from the unit protected colleagues who faced allegations of child abuse, grooming, fraud, physical assault and racism.

Cressida Dick, the Met commissioner, made clear recently that she would back her officers and that the allegations were not on the level of corruption seen in the 1970s, when officers were caught taking bribes.

“The word corruption is very easily said and easily bandied around,” Ms Dick said last month. “Most members of the public, or indeed police officers, when they look back and think about police corruption, they have an image of, for example, officers doing the wrong thing because they are perhaps being paid to do the wrong thing.

“I take it very seriously because it’s my professional standards department. I have confidence in my professional standards department.”

A spokesman for the IOPC said: “I can confirm that as part of Operation Embley into allegations of serious corruption and malpractice within the Directorate of Professional Standards a notice of investigation has been served on an officer informing them we are investigating the alleged use of language deliberately intended to offend and that had racist undertones.

“A notice is issued to inform an officer at the earliest opportunity following an allegation and to safeguard their interests. It in no way indicates that misconduct proceedings will take place.”

Scotland Yard declined to comment on the details of the allegations but confirmed that the detective was subject to restrictions. A spokesman said: “This forms part of the IOPC investigation under Operation Embley. The officer remains in their [J4MB: his] operational post.”

The phrase “whiter than white” is believed to originate from Shakespeare’s poem Venus and Adonis, published in 1593. A spokesman for the Plain English Campaign said: “As the phrase means ‘morally beyond reproach’ and is used in that context with that intent, it seems fairly ludicrous that the officer is being investigated at all.”

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A piece by Tom Whipple, Science Editor, in today’s Times:

We all know what is meant to happen when the genders become more equal. As women smash glass ceilings and open up education, other differences should disappear too.

Without the psychological shackles of being the second sex, women are free to think and behave as they want; to become physicists or chief executives, unfettered by outdated stereotypes.

Yet to the confusion of psychologists, we are seeing the reverse. The more gender equality in a country, the greater the difference in the way men and women think. It could be called the patriarchy paradox.

Two new studies have again demonstrated this counterintuitive result, meaning it is now one of the best-established findings in psychology, even if no one can properly explain it.

In a survey of about 130,000 people from a total of 22 countries, scientists from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden have shown that countries with more women in the workforce, parliament and education are also those in which men and women diverge more on psychological traits.

Separately, a research paper published by the online journal Plos One found that in countries ranked as less gender equal by the World Economic Forum, women were more likely to choose traditionally male courses such as the sciences or online study.

Erik Mac Giolla, the lead researcher in the first study, said that, if anything, the results found a bigger difference than in previous work. Personality is typically measured using the “big five” traits. These are openness, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism. Women typically score higher on all of them but there is always overlap.

In China, which still scores low on gender parity, the personality overlap between men and women was found to be about 84 per cent. In the Netherlands, which is among the most gender equal societies, it turned out to be just 61 per cent.

“It seems that as gender equality increases, as countries become more progressive, men and women gravitate towards traditional gender norms,” Dr Mac Giolla said. “Why is this happening? I really don’t know.”

Steve Stewart-Williams, from the University of Nottingham, said that there was now too much evidence of this effect to consider it a fluke. “It’s not just personality,” he said. “The same counterintuitive pattern has been found in many other areas, including attachment styles, choice of academic speciality, choice of occupation, crying frequency, depression, happiness and interest in casual sex.

“It’s definitely a challenge to one prominent stream of feminist theory, according to which almost all the differences between the sexes come from cultural training and social roles.”

Dr Stewart-Williams, author of The Ape That Understood the Universe, said an explanation could be that those living in wealthier and more gender-equal societies had greater freedom to pursue their own interests and behave more individually, so magnifying natural differences.

Whatever the reason for the findings, he argued that they meant we should stop thinking of sex differences in society as being automatically a product of oppression. “These differences may be indicators of the opposite: a relatively free and fair society,” he said. If this contradicted some feminist analyses, he said it was also a surprise to pretty much everyone else too. “It seems completely reasonable to think that, in cultures where men and women are treated very differently and have very different opportunities, they’ll end up a lot more different than they would in cultures where they’re treated more similarly and have a similar range of opportunities.

“But it turns out that this has it exactly backwards. Treating men and women the same makes them different, and treating them differently makes then the same. I don’t think anyone predicted that. It’s bizarre.”

My comments, currently pending approval:

There is only a “patriarchy paradox” if you look at this phenomenon through a feminist lens. But given that all feminist narratives have been debunked many times – including their notion of the patriarchy, which claims that men as a class oppress women as a class – why would you look through that lens? It’s ironic that by looking at phenomena only through feminist lenses, academics fail to understand what people with much less education understand.

If you look through a non-feminist lens, the phenomenon is EXACTLY what you’d expect. It’s driven in large part by gender-typical differences in work ethic, which are manifested more strongly in more affluent countries, where gender equality tends to be higher.

In 2000 the world-renowned sociologist Dr Catherine Hakim published a paper on “Preference Theory”, following her research which showed that while four in seven British men are work-centred, only one in seven British women is.

Mike Buchanan

JUSTICE FOR MEN & BOYS

(and the women who love them)

http://atomic-temporary-215937230.wpcomstaging.com

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Evening Express caption: Mike Buchanan is now officially the new chief of Clan Buchanan (Tony Marsh/PA)

A tip of the hat to Mike Buchanan for this. An extract:

Mr Buchanan, who is now known as The Buchanan, said: “I am honoured and proud that my claim to the chiefship of Clan Buchanan has been upheld by Lord Lyon.

“There has not been a chief for a very long time – over 337 years – but there is a thriving community of Buchanan clansmen, clanswomen and septs around the world.

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A piece by Rod Liddle, published a few days online by The Spectator. I left comments linking to Sandi Toxic’s (and Sophie Walker’s) “Lying Feminists of the Month” awards (two apiece). The Spectator is pre-moderating my comments, and hasn’t (so far) published them. The paper also removed comments from Belinda Brown and myself in response to James Innes-Smith’s recent blog piece on ICMI18. It’s the sort of censoring I’d expect of The Guardian, but not of The Spectator, of which I’ve long been a subscriber.

Rod Liddle’s piece:

Shocking news emerges that Sandi Toksvig is paid 40pc of what Stephen Fry was on to present the lamentable programme QI.

Really? It had never occurred to me that Toksvig was paid anything at all. She is boring, smug and bereft of wit. I assumed she did it out of delight at being beamed into our living rooms, knowing that everyone was quickly turning off the TV. I’m no great fan of Stephen Fry – an idiot’s conception of what intelligence is, frankly. But he presented that programme with chutzpah and humour, both qualities patently absent from Sandi’s make-up. As is make-up, of course.

Sandi also complained that she was on about the same as Alan Davies. But Davies is about the only thing that makes the programme work, with his flailing, drooled, bifferdom. Sandi should in truth be paid twenty per cent of what Davies gets and a tenth of what Fry got.

Just because you’re a woman it doesn’t mean you’re automatically as good as everybody else. You might be totally shit. But then I suppose the BBC is to blame for trying to expunge men from every sector of its output and replacing them with women who are neither use nor ornament, as we say in the north.

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Our thanks to Mike P for this. An extract:

Last June 6 Mr Shepley was parking his van when Ashworth emerged from her home and asked him to look after her dog.

When he declined she became angry and began shouting and swearing at him.

During the row Mr Shepley said: ‘No one likes you round here’ – but she retorted: ‘if you come any closer to me I will punch you in the face.’

As he got his phone out to record the incident Ashworth suddenly attacked him and knocked the phone out of his hand causing it to smash on the floor.

Eye witnesses saw her then kick or punch Mr Shepley up to ten times before walking off.

Later when she was charged with the attack, Ashworth turned up outside Mr Shepley’s home saying: ‘If I go back to prison then your home and pub will get rushed.

If I get locked up then I have got friends who will rush his house and his mum’s pub will be no more.’

A neighbour also heard Ashworth shout: ‘drop the charges or you will get shot’. In a phone call to Mr Shepley she added: ‘Your life will not be worth living if I go to jail.’

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A piece in yesterday’s Times:

A charity has called for changes to divorce settlements to prevent women from missing out on money. Age UK said that many divorcing women did not realise that they were entitled to seek a share of their husband’s pension pot. It argued that it should become the norm for pensions to be considered alongside other assets. A government spokesman said that courts could already grant an order to allow pensions to be transferred as part of a divorce settlement.

Because women deserve proceeds not only from men’s existing assets and income, but income possibly decades away in the future.

Men shouldn’t marry.

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Our thanks to Ian for this.

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Daily Mail caption: Hollie-Louise Brown, 23, was left almost bald after being attacked at Bubbles pub in Ashington on Saturday

Our thanks to Mike P for this.

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