Our thanks to Paul for this.

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One of many memes on the UK Men’s Rights Action Facebook page, our official supporters page, where comments aren’t moderated in advance (unlike this site). Why not click on the link, enjoy the content, maybe engage in some exchanges? It won’t take long, comments and feedback help to keep the people operating the site motivated. They’re doing great work, it’s good to see how well the site is doing.

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A piece by Dea Birkett in the current edition of The Spectator:

They cut virgin paths through tropical forests, paddled dugout canoes over West African rapids, sailed along the Yangtze in a sampan, climbed the Rocky Mountains with a gun-toting guide, galloped across the Iraqi desert in search of sheikhs, slept under the stars and ate a lot of snake.

It’s easy to be seduced by the exploits of the Victorian women travellers. Broadcaster Mariella Frostrup pays homage to ‘their courage, curiosity and pioneering spirit’ in her new book, Wild Women and Their Amazing Adventures Over Land, Sea and Air, a collection of 50 pieces of travel writing by women. Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, now revived by the National Theatre in London, features the 19th-century traveller Isabella Bird in the cast of celebrated proto-feminists.

The fabulous image of the black-clad, umbrella-shaking, girdle-wrapped, convention-breaking Victorian woman explorer still struts forcibly through the pages of books and across the stage. But these figures are anything but exemplary role models for our daughters. They were women-hating imperialists. They were just as tyrannical as their male counterparts.

It’s not difficult to understand why. While they were condemned to be invalids at home, they were Samsons abroad. Isabella Bird — who features in Wild Women as well as Top Girls — spent most of her life in Scotland crippled on a couch, suffering from a series of unidentifiable illnesses. Then, aged 40, an insightful doctor made an unusual prescription — travel — to cure her depression. The ailing spinster embarked on journeys through America, China, Japan, Korea, Persia, Kurdistan and Tibet, no longer a feeble dutiful daughter. Gertrude Bell, who in 1888 gained first-class results in modern history at Oxford but, as a female candidate, wasn’t awarded a degree, wrote from Syria, ‘In this country they all think I was a Person!’

Being a ‘Person’ meant they held sway over scores of semi-naked men who guided [J4MB: carried, presumably]them through the bush, steered their canoes and carried their extensive luggage. Sometimes they abused this new-found power. May French Sheldon, trekking through East Africa in the 1890s with a 100-stro ng entourage, came across the body of a Maasai woman wearing beautiful anklets, which she coveted. The body was too bloated to remove them so she ordered her men to cut off the woman’s feet. When they refused, she took up a machete and did the job herself.

Sheldon could act in such a manner only because, in an era of colonial expansion, she was defined by her race, not her sex. Women travellers embraced this privilege, claiming the status of a ‘white man’. ‘I would open my tent-flap and say “Boy”,’ wrote Sheldon, ‘and back would come the answer “Sabe” [Sir]’.

The power and prestige these explorers grabbed wasn’t to be shared. They had no time for sisterly solidarity. When the wandering artist Marianne North, writer Constance Gordon Cumming (author of From the Hebrides to the Himalayas) and Bird discovered they’d all been invited to the same society gathering, they were appalled. North stumbled across Bird, ‘seated in the back drawing-room in a big armchair, with gold embroidered slippers and a footstool to show them on… and a ribbon and order across her shoulders, given to her by the King of the Sandwich Islands’. The hostess grabbed Miss North and Miss Gordon Cumming and, joining their hands with Miss Bird’s, exclaimed with glee, ‘Three globe trotteresses all at once!’ Miss North recoiled: ‘It was too much … we retired as fast as we could.’

Although these travellers are claimed as early advocates for women, they’d have vehemently denied it. In 1871, North recorded in her diary that she ‘would be terribly bored by the possession of a vote’. She went on: ‘And those sensible women would certainly not use it if they had one, and thus give a dangerous majority to the wild women in the world of petticoat government.’

Gertrude Bell, meanwhile, was a founding member of the Anti-Suffrage League and refused to walk along Piccadilly without a male chaperone. When Mary Kingsley was approached by petitioners for women’s rights, she protested: ‘I have no time for these androgines.’ Bird complained to the Times about a report that said she’d ‘donned masculine habiliments’ when riding over the Rocky Mountains. She insisted she was wearing ‘a thoroughly feminine costume’.

These women’s tales of derring-do are as racy as any pith-helmeted man’s. But are they our feminist forebears? As they themselves would say — most certainly not.

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A piece by Toby Young in the current edition of The Spectator:

On Monday, the vice-chancellor of Cambridge university, Stephen Toope, issued a statement defending the decision of the divinity faculty to rescind its offer of a visiting fellowship to Jordan Peterson. The world-famous professor had been invited by the faculty to give a series of lectures on the Bible later this year, but was dis-invited after some academics and students objected.

Not that the faculty had the courtesy to inform Peterson of this, mind you. He learned about it through the grapevine and then saw it on Twitter. He was left to work out what had prompted the volte-face by reading the various statements given to the media. For instance, a spokesman for the university told the Guardian that Cambridge ‘is an inclusive environment and we expect all our staff and visitors to uphold our principles’. What these ‘principles’ are is anyone’s guess, but presumably they do not include free speech.

We now know a bit more about what went on behind the scenes, thanks to Toope’s statement. It was all to do with a slogan on a T-shirt, apparently. Five hundred years ago, biblical scholars at Cambridge poured (sic) over Erasmus’s translation of the New Testament into Latin; today, it’s a T-shirt slogan. And the offending item of clothing wasn’t even worn by Peterson. No, his sin was to be photographed at a public-speaking engagement next to someone in a T-shirt that read ‘I’m a proud Islamophobe.’ According to the vice-chancellor, ‘The casual endorsement by association of this message was thought to be antithetical to the work of a Faculty that prides itself in the advancement of interfaith understanding.’

The words ‘casual endorsement by association’ are doing quite a lot of work here. At Peterson’s public lectures, a VIP ticket entitles you to be photographed with him and, typically, hundreds are sold. One of the rules is that you’re not supposed to stop and chat to Peterson while having your photo taken, because if everyone did the people at the back of the queue would be waiting for hours. So he has only a few seconds with each person — they appear, he puts his arm round them, the photo is taken and then it’s on to the next one. Not enough time to scrutinise what’s written on their T-shirts, let alone cross-examine them about their political views. So the fact that Peterson was photographed next to this ‘proud Islamophobe’ does not constitute an ‘endorsement’ of such views, ‘casual’ or otherwise.

To put this in perspective, I once persuaded Jeremy Corbyn to pose next to me in the green room of The Andrew Marr Show. To date, no one on the left has suggested Corbyn isn’t fit for office because he was once photographed next to a Tory.

Several Cambridge dons have been in touch to express their dismay at this craven capitulation to the mob. One sent me a string of pictures of Toope ‘casually endorsing’ the political views of a variety of people who haven’t done much to advance the cause of multiculturalism, including the Chinese diplomat who compared the people of Japan to Voldemort. And this was an official portrait by an embassy photographer, so he doesn’t have Peterson’s excuse that it was the 100th person he posed with that day.

These dons were at pains to convey that only a minority of faculty staff and students have embraced left-wing identity politics and most would have welcomed Peterson. They pointed out that last November he played to packed houses at the Corn Exchange and Cambridge Union. ‘I know that many of the students were over the moon at the thought of an academic rock star of his calibre spending a couple of months with us,’ wrote an anonymous correspondent.

It’s all so depressing. Say what you like about Donald Trump, but at least he’s taken a stand against this kind of virtue-signalling censorship. Last week, he issued Executive Order 13865, which is intended to address the free speech crisis at American universities. Henceforth, if a university fails to protect free speech, the federal government can withhold millions of dollars in research funding. That’s speaking to them in a language they understand.

The new English universities regulator, on which I briefly served last year, is supposed to defend intellectual freedom on campus and has similar levers at its disposal, but so far it’s been pretty toothless. And to think, this assault on our cherished freedoms is occurring under a Tory government! Imagine how much worse it would be if Labour ever gets re-elected.

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Excellent piece in The Spectator by Vanessa de Largie.

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Please do pop into our new Facebook page, it’s a great community hub where you can find excellent memes and good conversation!

If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.

Please donate what you can. Only 38 hours before the deadline. Thank you.

If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.

Our thanks to Sean for this. The start of the piece:

A woman who stole almost €12,000 from the Dublin city centre pub where she worked as general manager has walked free from court with a suspended sentence.

Donna McGarry (38) pleaded guilty to two counts of theft at Four Dame Lane carried out on dates between October 4 and November 6, 2017.

At Dublin Circuit Criminal Court today, Judge Melanie Greally sentenced McGarry to two and a half years in prison, but suspended it in full.

The judge set a headline sentence of three years but gave McGarry credit for her early guilty plea, her good work history and the excellent testimonial from her current employer.

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Our thanks to Steve and others for this. An extract:

The judge told Worsley: “You became overwhelmed by the situation in which you found yourself.

“No-one could fail to be moved by your story.

“You were under enormous pressure and I have no doubt that all of this started as a result of you wanting to raise the money for his treatment.”

Worsley racked up £140,000 in gambling debts but the judge noted she had not spent any of the money on “luxuries” for herself.

Judge Kearl said: “This case is unique. The confluence of mitigating factors takes it far outside the norm and are unlikely to recur.”

Male criminals never have such a “confluence of mitigating factors”, to escape punishment completely.

If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.

My response to a common misrepresentation of the Men’s Human Rights Movement. A quotation from the article has also made it onto Wiki4Men.

I’d like to draw attention to Shrek’s comment underneath the original article too, very interesting contribution to the discussion.

If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.