Happy #InternationalWomensDay to My Wife and Mother, from a Husband and Son

The two women to whom I owe the most gratitude and for whom I have the most admiration are both very different, but they do have one important thing in common, they are both mothers. In my old fashioned world, being a mother is the highest form of the expression of womanhood, something which sadly nowadays fewer women get to experience.

To my wife, gorgeous and kind. Thank you for bearing our children and for the utter devotion you showed to them when they were small and helpless. The memories of you giving birth to them will stay with me forever and are amongst my happiest. I will always be in awe of the way you pushed our babies out of your body – I have never seen anybody so focused, determined and totally ‘in the zone’. You did not cry and you did not make a fuss, you were truly amazing. Thank you to the midwives who took care of you and our babies, they impressed me with how they carried out their important task. They even took the time to make sure that I was doing alright too.

My sweet wife, you are older now and our babies are nearly fully grown men, but I still fancy you as much as when we first met on that night when our planets were in alignment. You are a good woman, but you will never be ‘red-pilled’ in the way that I am. You are definitely ‘pink-pilled’ in your own way though; a way which 95% of other women are not and cannot be. For this I am grateful, because when we talk about men’s and women’s issues, you more or less understand what I mean. That is about as far as I think you will ever go with these issues, which are so important to me but less so to you.

To my mother, also present at one of the births of my children, I want to thank you too. You had the hardest of childhoods, but it did not make you a hardened person. You have always given me your love in abundance, even when I haven’t deserved it. You are very old now mum, but still going strong. I can still remember you taking me to your work when I was little and you setting me up to play, whilst you cleaned the houses of women who were richer than you. Mum, when you talk about your past, you occasionally tell me about the people who have upset you, even though the upset might have been from 30 or 40 years ago. You are a sensitive soul. It interests me how the people you still feel wronged by were all women, and that you only have good things to say about the men you knew and worked with.

Mum, your utter devotion to my father, your husband, now long dead, never ceases to inspire me. Your admiration for the the man whom you married and your refusal to find another man after he died, shows the unbreakable strength of your love. You did this because you knew that no other man would have been good enough, compared to the man you married.

Even though we are celebrating Women’s Day, I feel I must mention my long dead father. Why? Because the care and patience he showed for my mother was immense. He protected her and cared for her, and helped my mother navigate the world in ways which she could never have done on her own. When you died dad, your only concern was that somebody would look after mum. You asked me to take care of mum, and I promised you that I would. I have not broken my promise for all these years, just as other men have taken care of the women they love, since the beginning of human history.

Caring for my women, my wife and my mother, is a burden I gladly bear. The idea that men hate women is a terrible lie; men love women and we are deeply programmed to provide for them and to keep them alive. Anybody who says otherwise is a liar with a twisted agenda; we all know who these people are.

So thank you dear wife and thank you dearest mum. Thank you for the life you brought forward into the world; new life, the highest expression of womanhood.

Author: Anon.

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Happy #InternationalWomensDay to Lisa Chamberlain

Lisa Chamberlain (along with her partner Craig Sandiford) arrived late to the International Conference on Men’s Issues last year. I bumped into them in the corridor and Lisa explained that the reason they were late was that they had “been up all night, talking a dad down from the edge”. In their work with Families Need Fathers and, the group they founded, Equal Rights 4 Dads U.K.; Lisa and Craig devote incalculable time and a boundless amount of empathy to supporting fathers who are struggling to secure meaningful access to their kids and/or are struggling to survive without it. They direct men towards practical help and take on the roles of counsellors. I know that, that father they saved back in July was not the first, nor the last father whose suicide has been prevented due to the commitment of this amazing couple – and unfortunately there’ll be more again, due to our corrupt family justice system. This International Women’s Day, I want to celebrate Lisa. Tough, kind, funny, a great baker, fantastic mum – and in the trenches making the most critical difference to men’s lives.

Happy International Women’s Day, Lisa Chamberlain.

Find the Equal Rights 4 Dads Facebook community page here.

Families Need Fathers.

Follow Lisa on Twitter here.

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.

Elizabeth Hobson on Radio Kent, talking #InternationalWomensDay, 7:45am, 8/3/19

Looking forward to appearing on BBC Radio Kent tomorrow morning with presenters: Ian Collins (who informed Twitter that 1 in 10 Brits believe that being a woman is an advantage – my reply here) and guest: Anna Cookson and Women’s Equality Party’s Celine Thomas.

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.

Rev Jules Gomes (‘The Rebel Priest’): Women bishops condemn pipe organ as instrument of ‘toxic masculinity’ on #InternationalWomensDay

Enjoy. The estimable Reverend Jules Gomes (‘The Rebel Priest’) gave a talk titled, “How feminism has destroyed the Church of England beyond repair”, at the last conference. A video of his talk is here (47:47).

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.

#InternationalWomensDay Elizabeth Hobson asks, “Do you believe in equal rights for men and women?”

One of the key themes of the last International Conference on Men’s Issues, held eight months ago at Excel London, was “Equal rights for men and women”. We even had the theme on the lectern placard. A playlist of the 20 presentations at the conference, plus some related materials (notably Ewan Jones’s interviews of speakers) is here.

When considering options for a video commemorating International Wimmin’s Day, and the location, it seemed natural for Elizabeth Hobson, our Director of Communications, to ask women, “Do you believe in equal rights for men and women?” as they were passing the statue of Millicent Fawcett, in Parliament Square, London.

We think Elizabeth did a great job – it was the second cold wet day for her working on the streets, having to carry a handbag which surely deserves an entry in The Guinness Book of Records, for its size and holding capacity – and we thank Tom for his filming and editing. The video is here (16:55).

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.

Amazon has launched Amazon Amplify with the aim to increase women in technology and innovation roles across its UK business

Our thanks to Mike P for this. An extract:

“Diversity fosters greater innovation and helps raise the bar for customers, [J4MB emphasis: What does this mean?] and having a diverse workforce is also just the right thing to do,” said Fiona McDonnell, director of consumer retail at Amazon and chair of the cross-industry Women in Innovation Advisory Committee.

We no longer issue Gormless Feminist of the Month awards. Ms McDonnell would be a strong contender for one.

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.

Freedom Alternative presents the real history of #InternationalWomensDay

Characteristically fascinating video (12:55) from Lucian at Freedom Alternative – about the surprising history of March 8th’s International Women’s Day.

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.

#InternationalWomensDay Caroline Criado-Perez admits to being a liar, then laughs about it, on national television

It’s International Wimmin’s Day tomorrow – joy unconfined – so I’m grateful to Elizabeth for tracking down a video (4:58) from a 20-minute discussion between Caroline Criado-Perez and myself on the daytime ITV show This Morning in 2015, in which CC-P admitted she’d won two “Lying Feminist of the Month” awards because she’d… er… lied. She then laughed uproariously about the matter – what does that tell you about female shamelessness, and lack of moral agency?

Links to her three “Lying Feminist of the Month” awards are here. She won her third award for a lie she stated on the programme, about the number of women killed by partners and ex-partners in the UK. The three awards spanned only nine months, we’ve considered it fairly pointless to point out her subsequent lies.

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.

The importance of knowing who your genetic parents are

We’re so grateful to all the people who take the time and trouble to comment on our blog pieces. They add so much value to this blog. Very occasionally we publish comments as stand-alone blog pieces, and comments from “Thoughtcrime” following Emma Barnett’s advice to a man to not seek a paternity test in relation to one of his children is well worth posting. Our warm thanks to him for this:

Knowing who your genetic parents are is fundamental to understanding why you are the way you are and where you come from. People raised by their genetic parents take this for granted. Many adoptees, and now people conceived through IVF with donor egg or sperm, struggle with lifelong identity issues and difficulty forming close relationships because they lack this information. Personally I grew up feeling totally isolated, like an alien, because I could not see anything of myself reflected in anyone around me. I felt disconnected from the past and future because I had no knowledge of my ancestors and no sense of ‘continuity’. I grew up convinced that I would not live to see the year 2000 and strangely I’ve met two other adoptees (out of a circle of around ten I know) who had very similar fixations.

Meeting my genetic parents, brother, sister and extended family has allowed me to gradually piece together and build an integrated identity over the past 23 years, like a jigsaw or a shattered mirror. I’m one of the lucky ones because many adoptees have only fragments of information to work with and can never find peace from the nagging questions, sense of disconnectedness, and regular reminders that they are different (like a birthday or an innocent question or remark touching on their genetic history, such as “you don’t look like your brother” or “I think I can see a family resemblance”).

It was only after having my own daughter that I began to feel connected – to feel part of a lineage extending into the future and the past. Until then I could never grasp the special meaning the word ‘family’ has for most people (beyond just meaning the people you grew up with). The feeling was (and still is) quite surreal.

My experience has convinced me that knowledge of your genetic history is a fundamental human right because it is the foundation for identity formation in the child. It’s possible to construct an identity of sorts without it, but it’s like building a house on sand. No matter how meticulously it is constructed to look just like any other house, it is structurally flawed and prone to collapse in the face of adversity with sometimes tragic consequences, such as suicide. I only survived the collapse by pure chance.

Hopefully this gives you a sense of why deliberately withholding a person’s genetic history from them is so much more than medical abuse. That is just the tip of the iceberg, but I appreciate why the rest of it might be difficult to see.

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.