Earlier today I published a post responding to Professor Matt Goodwin’s new article The Collapse of the British Family. The post included some comments I made, Alan Craig replies to my comments with:
Excellent. Very good comment, Mike.
There’s much discussion here about starting a new political party. Why did J4MB deregister as a political party earlier this year after launching 10 years ago? Are there any lessons for us?
I’ve just replied with this:
Alan, thanks for your kind words.
I could write a book in response to your questions! But I guess the bullet points are:
– across the world, there exists an empathy gap in relation to men and boys. The best exploration of many of the issues is in William Collins’s “The Empathy Gap”.
– we explored 18-20 issues in our manifestos from when we launched in 2013. The final manifesto was published last November, it’s here https://j4mb.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/221128-J4MB-manifesto-3.pdf.
– male disadvantages are the obvious consequence of female privileging.
– presenting facts in support of addressing men’s and boys’ issues never gets any traction, in part because of the empathy gap. To give but one example, carrying out male circumcision (Male Genital Mutilation) of minors is always very harmful (it removes 90% of the nerve cells in the penis which will later give adult males sexual pleasure) and is illegal under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, being at least ABH and probably GBH. But the criminal justice system won’t bring prosecutions, and I was stopped from bringing a private prosecution. There are no exceptions from the law permitted on religious or cultural grounds. Legislation has existed in relation to Female Genital mutilation since the 1980s.
– feminism isn’t the pursuit of gender equality (except rarely), it’s the pursuit of female privilege and supremacy, and has been since at least the Seneca Falls Convention, New York state, 1848 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_Falls_Convention
– Ernest Belfort Bax, a British socialist journalist and philosopher, nailed many truths about feminism in “The Fraud of Feminism” (1913), free to download here https://j4mb.org.uk/2013/07/10/the-fraud-of-feminism-1913/.
– every feminist narrative is one or more of the following – a baseless conspiracy theory (e.g. patriarchy), a fantasy, a lie, a delusion or a myth.
– the mainstream media (the BBC being a particularly egregious example in the UK) almost never give a platform to Men’s Rights Advocates, or challenge feminists or feminist narratives, even when they’re demonstrably outright lies e.g. on domestic violence. But even allegedly right-leaning media (e.g. The Spectator, Telegraph, Mail…) have feminist contributors (e.g. Julie Bindel), and NO anti-feminist contributors.
– a depressingly small proportion of men (and even fewer women) are willing to accept that the human rights of men and boys (as a class) are assaulted, almost always by the state’s inactions and inactions (see manifesto for details). We tried but failed to persuade men that all they had to do was tick the box for our political party at general elections, hence our decision to de-register the party after 10 years. We gave it our best shot, and continue doing what we can to raise public consciousness.
– the complicity of politicians with feminists is scandalous. Philip Davies MP (C, Shipley) is virtually the only elected politician in the world willing to speak up about assaults on men’s rights, and he’s spoken at a number of our International Conferences on Men’s Issues (I’m hosting one in Budapest next August). He can only do this because he’s been clear since first elected (2005) that he has no ambition to be a minister one day. Any MP who speaks up on behalf of men and boys can be confident of never becoming a minister.
I hope this helps – as I said, I could write a book on this!
Mike Buchanan
JUSTICE FOR MEN & BOYS
CAMPAIGN FOR MERIT IN BUSINESS
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20 years ago I happened on the stats for Europe for teenage pregnancy. The gist of the report was that there was a general rise accross the EU. What took my eye was that this rise was from a very much higher base in the UK compared to even the most liberal EU nation. Looking as the wider world it transpires the US and Australia were also very high. Further research found exactly the same to be true of all forms of family breakdown. There is something specific to the advanced English speaking nations that makes them by far the world leaders in broken families. As the Prof. Reminds us this is not just a small lead but a huge lead. There is something that is specific to “our” particular ability to continually grow more failures in family formation. It seems unlikely to be just welfare (after all most states in the US are no where near as generous as the UK when it comes to welfare) but something in our culture. I’d suggest that specific thing is the particular combination of feminism (an ideology crystal clear about the traditional family structures being oppression) and a sort of chivalry that seems to facilitate legal and social policy to be bent to the destruction of family.