The biggest threat to free-speech. Governments or ordinary folk?

Recently, reading this page on the openDemocracy site, I wrote a comment - where I was basically thinking aloud - mentioning how some of the forces that curtail our freedom of speech are simply other ordinary people, playing power games with one another.

Government censorship & free speech

This needs further explanation, because our first, intuitive idea of "censorship" is of government control of expression. Modern day hate-speech laws are a perfect example of this. To bullet point my problems with the idea:

• "Hate-speech" is impossible to define (partly because the word "hate" is, too)
• what constitutes "Hate-speech" therefore becomes a matter of interpretation
• that interpretation is in danger of 
• being applied unequally to different groups
• being applied in too many scenarios

The last point is key. Officials will eagerly look for new ways of applying this new law, forgetting the essential maxim that one should leave our liberties well alone (especially free speech) unless there is an excellent reason for restricting them. Roughly, being free to kill someone has such a deleterious effect on others' freedom & lives, that it's reasonable to restrict that freedom. 

Casually making it illegal to say something because someone might be offended or angered is a most dangerous path - which we've seen the consequences of. We ought to know better..

People power

What of the other sort of thought control? I think it's worth examining the way ordinary people influence each other's language and expression. It's surely a phenomenon we'll never be rid of, but being fully aware of such forces can only strengthen us against the appeal of GroupThink. 

Over and over again on Twitter and Facebook you can see people saying X because they think the larger peer group (their friends and acquaintances) will approve of X, not because they truly believe X.

My belief is that organised religions used to retain power by this sort of social pressure. As well as the threat of eternal damnation, religion was one vehicle for people to play games of social approval with one another. In the West, we have a new faith that tries to exercise the same sort of moral power - and it is the new Left, with their relentless accusations of racism and misogyny.

I've said often enough that I think feminism is about control rather than the stated aim of equality. Because of the nature of the movement, their means of influencing what you do think or say are numerous: social disapproval, righteous anger, group politics, etc. A respected scientist who says the wrong thing or even wears the wrong shirt is hounded online by an unpleasant army.

The tactic I find scariest, and most akin to something from Orwell's 1984, is the rather successful attempt to influence literature, screen drama, and all levels of education.

Sure a lot of ludicrous feminist dogma has already infiltrated government - and it's a major headache. But nothing says more about how feminism operates than that they quietly lobbied for 'guidelines' for textbooks and writers of drama. (I see the same influences at play with children's literature)

Trying to control the stories and ideas people come into contact with is reminiscent of the worst excesses of the nastier 20th century governments. This effort started with ordinary people telling each other what they should think or say, and has turned into a major movement for doing same. It seems that as long as there is a loosely-defined feminist movement, there will be attempts not to persuade, but to indoctrinate.

Feminism is about control, not equality

EDIT: A piece from early 2016 that I didn't publish originally. Still worth a look I think, as I'm revisiting the same theme

Occasionally, when they think they are getting a bad press (or when soul-searching over the fact that very few people believe their bizarre opinions) feminists say things like "feminism is about equality". This is suitably vague, enabling them to "clarify" later on, I want to suggest that the only thing that makes sense of numerous strands of feminist behaviour is the unusually strong desire to exercise control others - very often men - by any means possible.

Control of language

Feminists in the 80s seemed to get quite excited about the word "chairman", which they wanted changed because, to quote one of them "it reflects a male-dominated society". That was the language they used in those days, I'm not sure "patriarchy" had caught on back then.

A couple of years ago, feminists en masse decided to use the #banBossy tag on twitter - they wanted the word "bossy" made illegal or unacceptable  in some way because they thought (mysteriously) that it was used mainly about women.

One celebrity suggested that the word "fat" be banned too, apparently she believed this would be accepted by many people. It's probable that she will have thought this because of many conversations with friends where they all got rather overconfident about what things should be banned because they didn't like them, so this is more than just one person's eccentric idea

Finally there was a proposal to the EU in 2013 that anti-feminism be criminalised under "hate-speech" laws.

Feminists want to control what you say. George Carlin spotted this fact, though he was considerably more sympathetic to feminism than I am. They also hope, by doing so, to control what you think as well

Control of male sexuality

Feminist groups regularly complain about pornography, and the supposed attitudes it causes in adolescent boys. They've no evidence for this. Similarly to how computer games actually calm kids down, there is no evidence to suggest that the availability of porn increases the amount of sexual assault (even though the definition of such assault has been extended massively in recent years)

But feminists want to control it. Feminist groups also put pressure on governments to ban prostitution, on dubious grounds - and if they can make the legislation demonise the male clients rather than the sex workers themselves then all the better, In some cases this pressure pays off for them.

And finally we come to sex robots. Is there anyone who doesn't realise that the inventor of a perfectly realistic sex-robot is going to be an overnight billionaire? Yet feminists recoil from the idea. I think the laughably obvious reason for this is that - when such robots become available - women will lose their main method of influence over men.

One could be concerned about the effect the robots would have on relationships (hard to say), but I don't think that's what bothers feminists, exactly - though they may claim it is so. The motives for their behaviour become clear when you look at everything else they do. Their reaction to something unknown or frightening is to try and control it, and that goes 100% for the men around them,

"Avoiding negative stereotyping" is usually a lie

Plenty have noticed the very politically correct casting choices of The Force Awakens.  There is a long very dishonourable history of this sort of thing, carried out very prominently by the BBC.

The thought police who influence such things always make very sure that there are a preponderance of female characters in "action" roles. Women and ethnic minority characters tend to be honourable, decent people. White make characters, on the other hand are free to be as nasty as possible, and are frequently pathetic, lacking in confidence.

This piece documents just a few examples of the depiction of white men. Here's another.

Diane Ravitch tells this story from her days working on the National Assessment Governing Board

"I reviewed one- and two-page passages that had been prepared by the testing consortium ... Most of these passages had been previously published in children's magazines or in recent anthologies. After I had read about a dozen such passages ... I realized that the readings themselves had a cumulative subtext: the hero was never a white boy. Instead, the leading character -- the one who was most competent, successful, and sympathetic -- was invariably either a girl (of any race) or a nonwhite boy. Almost without exception, white boys were portrayed as weak and dependent. In one story, a white boy in a difficult situation weeps and says plaintively, 'If only my big sister were here, I would know what to do.'"

The obvious hypocrisy

Now never mind what it does to creative effort, to have these political rules shackling the outcome. There's a very obvious, very logical corollary here. If the content of drama and literature is policed so much that there are no "negative" stereotypes of women or non-whites, then you have 2 choices left:

• either your story has no characters with negative traits at all, or
• surprise! White men have to fill all the negative roles

Now anyone worried about how stereotyping affects people ought to be worried about the effect these anti-role-models will have on young white boys (who incidentally seem to be slipping down the rankings in academic achievements). But of course our betters see nothing wrong with negative stereotyping of white men. They don't care. You'll be insulted for suggesting there is a problem.

If people were serious about avoiding negative stereotyping of groups, television drama would be impossible. There would be no characters, no interest. If you choose to protect all groups except one from negative roles, then you are ensuring that this one group will get all the negative roles. You can't escape logic.

Thus the whole exercise of fighting stereotypes is worse than flawed, it does exactly what it claims to be fighting against

The madness of the WomenInSTEM brigade

In UK universities, there are more women studying overall. That is what is known as an inequality. Specifically, more women study languages, biological sciences, subjects relating to medicine, history, and social sciences (psychology, sociology etc). The imbalance is striking*

Feminists - our scrupulously honest defenders of equality, remember - always stay strangely silent about these facts. But, it's ok, they magically regain their voice again when you mention that more men study STEM sciences than women: engineering, maths (only just), physics & computer sciences have more men sudying.

Then our feminist betters are suddenly saying something cogent like "Inequality! Sexism! Discrimination! Patriarchy!"

OK, that's irritating, it's stupid & it's intellectually dishonest. But they're not done yet. NO way. Because if you put this fact to them, that inequalities run both ways, and they only care about those affecting women, then they often DON'T UNDERSTAND THAT THIS IS A PROBLEM. I've said this and had someone say "well yes, feminism is about equality for women"

At which point you realise they're just trying to annoy you. Right?

Here's some basic logic: equality doesn't work just one way, or it ain't equality any more, it's then greater than or equal to. This is denoted by >= in maths notation and is different from =. You can't have equality for women and not for men. That's silly. So stop talking about equality, s'il vous plait.

And if some lunatic wants to reply "feminism isn't maths", then I would even more say "stop talking about equality" because maths is where equality lives, outside of maths, the word is meaningless.

Here endeth the maths lesson.


* the hard data for this is readily available. If you don't believe me, go down the long and boring road of checking it - even the Guardian reports the facts straight on this one.

Guardian readers' comments on UK divorce settlements

After a recent story on the Guardian website involving divorce settlements where wives were granted tens of millions of pounds, I thought it might be time to talk about CiF again.

In the story, 2 wives gained the right to re-open already HUGE divorce agreements (£10 and 30 million, If my memory serves) because husbands were ruled to have misled the court about how much they were worth.

The details are interesting, in one case the husband had stated that he was "considering floating his company". In fact he had more concrete plans than the word considering might imply. Even so, it seems remarkable that lawyers said they would have waited until they had a "clearer view" of his worth.

It almost sounds - perish the thought - that the wives & lawyers saw in retrospect that the flotation made millions, and then pounced. But to the CiF comments..

Aside from the many comments removed by moderators as usual (and some disappearing altogether), a few (men mostly) expressed angry disgust at the size of the settlement (some using terms like gold-diggers).

Interestingly, several of those responding to them basically changed the subject, saying "the issue is that these men lied in court".

It is important to note that this is a logical sleight of-hand. One issue is that the men lied, which, true or not, nobody is disputing..or even interested in. Another unrelated - but very important - issue is the rule which sees ex-wives able to divorce rich husbands for a fortune - none of which they have earned.

To say that "the issue is the lie" is simply to display temporary blindness to any other issue. All of a sudden the only thing these self-righteous CiF-readers care about is lying in court. One wonders why.


What else?

One exchange of note was apparently between an ex-husband who had been through divorce proceedings, and a character called jakboot who unfailingly took the women's side on every issue. I must say, jakboot's compassion was evident in the exchange:

I don't know about you, but there seems to be an element of glee in that question.

This being the Guardian, there was also the inevitable whiff of "it's happening to rich males, so who cares". If women in large numbers were being fleeced by similar settlements, you might reasonably expect journalists and readers who fret about women serving food at the table to be concerned about it. They might even wax lyrical about women who by their wit and hard work had deservedly made money, being "robbed".

But it's rich men, so no one on CiF really minds what happens to them.... Instead we saw a lot of huffing and puffing about how the men supposedly lied in court, some interesting discussion of the legal technicalities, and a baffling disinclination to discuss the amounts of money in question.

A family lawyer was most helpful in the comments, explaining many points. At one point (s)he was forced to admit, as an aside, that:

In terms of whether the wives "need" more, no, not by any stretch (perhaps in Gosil, not Sharland), and it's an issue that with the types of cases that get to this level, the sums in question are so high that it's difficult to care on an individual level whether they get more money. Or, on the flipside, whether the husbands pay more money.


To conclude...

It's understandable that the ex-husbands commenting on CiF are angry, but I also see that their anger is going to be represented as "hate" somewhere down the line, especially if their language is intemperate.

But a subtle point is how willing many posters were to avoid the issue of the colossal sums which ex-wives were paid - and they still wanted more.

Is Free speech really in danger?

So it became half an issue when some students conspired to close down a debate on abortion in an Oxford college. All sorts of excruciatingly dishonest reasons were given as to why the debate should not happen - but one occasionally stated reason was that 2 men were debating the issue. Some feminists do not want men even expressing a view about abortion.

Anyways, one of the 2 men who were going to speak was Brendan O'Neill, and you can read his thoughts here - and also hear his discussion (I use the word loosely) with  the nightmare feminist from hell Harriet Brown, an Oxford post-grad who doesn't quite seem to have the knack of letting people talk uninterrupted for more than 5 seconds.

Ironically, one of the criticisms from student commenters was that free speech is actually no more than the freedom from government censorship or arrest for your views. So the shutting down of a debate wasn't a free-speech issue. This seemed worthy of some discussion, as it might sound at least plausible. 

So were a bunch of Spectator-reading, frothing-at-the-mouth right wingers getting upset over nothing?

No.

Oh, the long answer...OK

I think it's important to think of “free speech” more broadly than as just about government censorship. Schools etc could exercise censorship, so it doesn't seem a great step to think of student bodies doing so.

More complex is the social pressure we exert on each other: queues, good manners, etc. These are restrictions on freedoms - no freedom is absolute, after all - and are necessary to society. But they needn’t affect calm debate on ANY issue, even if a student announces the issue closed or "passe".

I think free speech is under attack, from those who want to ban words like "fat" & "bossy", from those who dreamt up "hate speech" laws … and from the feminists who try to stop men talking about abortion, by shouting them down (podcast above), by closing down debate, or by claiming:

"I'm not sure that men should be allowed to be part of the debate about anything that happens before a child could be potentially viable. While it remains as much a part of the woman as her liver or her hair"

or 

“The Pope’s beliefs about abortion will become relevant the day the Pope gets pregnant.”

or 

“The idea that in a free society absolutely everything should be open to debate has a detrimental effect on marginalised groups”

I pulled those quotes at random. The censoring attitude is common enough - I've seen it many times myself.

Free speech means..

...well many things, for example letting idiots say whatever they lie, no matter how stupid you or I find it. As said, total freedom is hard to come by in everyday life (on the internet you can come close) or we'd go quite mad. What I want is for anyone who wants to stifle debate to have to give a bloody good reason why it shouldn't happen, and not the cringingly mendacious pretexts given by those who have disgraced Oxford University's good name

Here's the reason: if we didn't take free speech seriously, there is a plentiful supply of young people in every generation who think they know better than us what we should be doing, saying, and thinking. They tend to get so impatient that the idea of shutting up dissenters occurs to them as a really good idea. Any restriction on free speech will be manipulated by such people for their political purposes.

We have to go through this every generation or 2 because we're too stupid to learn from our mistakes. I'd love if we could wise up and not repeat the process.

Yrs,
Angry from Middlewhere

Feminism's dishonesty - pt 2: the pay-gap, and jobs in science and politics

The pay gap debate - lies, or just sins of ommission?

My previous post concerned #shirtstorm, which touched on the fact that there are fewer women working in science. Now I think the argument about women being or feeling excluded in scientific disciplines resembles that of the gender pay-gap. Men measured by a certain average, earn more money than women - just as there are currently more men in senior positions in science departments and, for that matter, political parties all over the world.

I think it's fair to say that feminists hate these facts, but they can't seem to argue a case consistently or at all honestly. With the pay gap, they will repeat the basic statistic, but not the more detailed work showing WHY the gap is there. There is a wealth of research showing that women work fewer hours than men, they choose different types of jobs, and make career choices for different reasons. They choose safer work, nearer to where they live, that doesn't interfere with their social lives, and they take a great deal of time off to have and raise children.

Thus there is no reason to suppose that discrimination lies behind the pay-gap. We have an excellent idea what lies behind it. So feminists can't say it's discrimination so easily. The problem is that they love to imply as much, or to carefully phrase things so that you might mistakenly conclude that discrimination was at work. 

The fact that anyone paying men and women different rates for the same work risks being prosecuted under the law is also swept under the carpet.

So many a time I've read or heard feminists mentioning that there is a pay-gap, and that this is a blatant injustice. But as said, the reasons for the pay-gap don't seem to be discrimination, but the results of women's own choices, so where is the injustice?

Feminists don't answer this, of course, but, like any politician, quickly move on to state that getting the numbers equal would be a desirable outcome. But it's pretty clear that if men are working more hours, doing more dangerous jobs, and taking less time off for children, then you've basically have to pay women more, or enforce quotas, or some such measure that would entail discrimination against men.

Not that feminists mind this part all that much

Jobs in science - same old same old...

Very similar considerations apply with the argument about fewer women working in scientific posts. There is less data, but there could be a number of reasons for this disparity. It may simply be that fewer women may be interested in these jobs in the first place - a heretical suggestion, but quite possible in reality. Then there is the small matter of the chunk taken out of one's life by having children.

...and there may be an issue with the atmosphere in the workplace. It's hard to say, and even if there were such an issue, why should we blame men? Science departments are very competitive places, socially and professionally - making a stressful work environment. It's quite likely that a female scientist might negotiate in a different way from a male, and be more likely to complain about an atmosphere.

And there will be considerable pressures to join a feminist organisation working for women in this field - after all they are a ready-made social network (or guild perhaps?), and you wouldn't want to make enemies of these people.

Lies, damned lies, statistics, and political debate

But my point is about dishonest political debate. Despite the difficulty in finding evidence for discrimination or a sexist atmosphere driving women away, Feminists

a) repeat the numerical discrepancy in scientists by gender - as though it were an obvious evil.
b) they forget to mention that fewer women apply for such posts
c) if this fact is mentioned, they imply dark forces of discrimination against schoolchildren, with no solid foundation in evidence,
d) they then claim - again with little evidence - that the reason for any women not succeeding brilliantly in science is not that there are fewer in the first place (again they often forget to mention this), but because of malign forces of sexism in the office.

So that's one set of evasions and baseless claims. But as with the pay-gap, feminists then seem to want to influence what is done about the gap. They claim that nothing short of 50/50 parity between the sexes is acceptable. But how on earth are we to achieve this if women make different choices? Well, feminists say either

a) that women should be encouraged to make different choices (possibly by incentives for women only to do science) or
b) that there must exist subtle underlying discrimination, and that the only way to battle this is by positive discrimination in recruitment.

So, based on no evidence, and starting from the premise that gender discrimination is evil,  they end up lobbying for discrimination in favour of women - which of course means AGAINST MEN. It's political genius, but also disgustingly dishonest and runs against any sort of fairness. It's one of the main reasons why I strongly oppose modern feminism.

Feminism's dishonesty - pt 1: Shirtstorm, or the day the earth went mad

The day and age we live in..

So, for those mysterious loons who don't get embroiled in internet furores, we'll start with the story of #shirtgate.

A team of scientists managed to land a space probe on a comet which was both hundreds of millions of miles away, and moving at 80,000 mph. That is quite a feat by any standards. I'd say even the moon-landings look tame by comparison. Something to make us feel good about ourselves, you might think.

Naturally there are press conferences surrounding this magnificent scientific achievement, and in one of these a prominent scientist from the project, Matt Taylor, was wearing a t-shirt with drawings of almost-but-not-quite-naked women.

...and this is where 21st century lunacy took over. These days we don't in reality have many facists, hardline communists (well a few, but not many Stalinists) or fundamentalist Christians (in the UK at least). We do have some rather fanatical Muslims, though. And we have feminism. Lot's and lot's of feminism.

That's so ostracizing!

The response to Taylor's shirt began in earnest, including angry tweets from Rose Eveleth of The Atlantic, and a piece in the Verge website entitled "I don't care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing".

"Ostracising" is, I suppose, a gerundive, if I've remembered the term correctly, so it just about works grammatically, though it seems not to have flowed from the pen of a master wordsmith, if you ask me. This sort of language is also one of the tell-tale signs that you're reading one of the outraged victimhood-politics mob.

It's hard, isn't it, to see how a shirt can ostracise anyone. I'm not being funny here. This deliberate imprecision is sort of the topic for the day. For of course we are supposed to understand that they mean that the shirt is in some way related to behaviours that allegedly exclude women from working in science.

Let me quote from the Verge:

This is the sort of casual misogyny that stops women from entering certain scientific fields. They see a guy like that on TV and they don't feel welcome. They see a poster of greased up women in a colleague's office and they know they aren't respected. They hear comments about "bitches" while out at a bar with fellow science students, and they decide to change majors

It goes on a bit like this. Now firstly calling the shirt "casual misogyny" is not just exaggeration, it represents the ravings of someone in need of urgent help. Some modern feminists will call depiction of the naked female form on a shirt "misogyny" if a man wears it, and beautiful self-expression if a woman wears such a thing. In truth, they imagine misogyny everywhere they look. All this seething hatred must trouble them (if they are really stupid enough to believe in it - which they might be)

Secondly, we are once again being asked to believe in mysterious forces at play that are stopping women from pursuing science. Now I've worked in a university Science department and seen no such forces - though they may exist elsewhere, I guess.

What I did see was many men in senior positions, but many more of the up-and-coming students and academics were women in this particular field. The point is, far from men conspiring to impede women's progress, they actually very often want to see more female colleagues.

The slightly more serious politics of it

But the debate about women in science has many similarities with the very dishonest debate about the gender pay-gap, and I propose to discuss this in my next post. Suffice it to say that many women, including some prominent feminists, have said the shirt doesn't bother them, and does not seem like sexism to them. Even Julie Bindel is concerned at what feminism "might become".

I'll end by requoting the Verge:

I don't care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing

And ask - do these people care about anything other than their very dubious beliefs - that they hold with such religious zeal? The scientific and engineering achievement will go down in history. But some feminists didn't give this a second thought, because they were obsessing about an unspecified "sexism" that might not even exist.

They couldn't see the brilliance right in front of them, all they could see was something that wasn't there..

12 Varieties of modern British Bullshit - #3 - "Diversity"

This isn't authentically British bullshit. I apologise for claiming ownership of yet another stupid idea we saw fit to import from the States.

What can I possibly add to the debate about diversity?

Just this: the 'diversity' racket is nothing more than an attack on meritocracy. The principle is this: to not employ people on merit, but simply because they are not white British straight male. Any deviation from that template, the more the better, and you'll probably get the job.

It takes the most intellectually challenged of ninnyish nincompoops to not see that this is racial discrimination, also gender discrimination and, yes, discrimination based on sexuality. Every one of the things the political Left in Britain have lectured us about the evils of, all neatly packaged together in one word - and the Left cannot get enough of it.

Furthermore, I can't get over the tone of voice with which leftists deny this is true: the intellectual vanity of those who say "don't be ridiculous, you can't be racist towards whites" (#2 in our series), as if it were the most obvious thing under the sun. Or the vacuous claim that "underrepresentation" is sufficient reason to discriminate against me, and screw the consequences.

To conclude, the fight against discrimination has become just a ploy to bury the white man, It's number 3 on our chart. It's corrosive crap.

Things wrong with gender politics #34057

I can hear you asking, so what's number 764? ..and sniggering. Anyway here we go:

Recently, I was enjoying a Youtube video of a young woman playing a Bach piece on the guitar ... till I saw this comment underneath it:

"The guys complimenting? her looks are undoubtedly nice and well-intentioned but miss the fact that as a woman, it is frustrating to spend so much of your life being judged on your looks. Even here, her appearance is being used as a measure of her quality.

She's put so much love into her craft, and it shows in her sublime musicianship. Honour that dedication by talking about that"

Let's do a quick run-down of what the Youtube user has got wrong:

1. she has taken offence on someone else's behalf. In point of fact the guitarist in question has agreed to to use her looks for publicity. ie: to gain an advantage
2. she is telling men what to think and what to talk about. Does noone else think this is ridiculously bossy?
3. she confuses commenting on the woman's looks with judging her on her looks

I'm not sure what "judging someone on their looks" actually means, but it seems to be an invention of modern feminists. I believe I am at liberty to comment on a woman's looks if I want to. Men like to do so, and if someone doesn't like that fact than why on earth should I or anyone else care?

There is this perpetual and entirely unjustified complaint that women have to work twice as hard to be judged on anything other than their looks - as though the same might not be equally true of men. Is it not distinctly possible that a woman may not only have the advantage of being able to use her looks to create a favourable impression, but also the advantage of countless imagined injustices like this swaying people's minds - a thousand reasons in her favour other than her ability?

If I comment that someone is pretty it doesn't mean I don't value any other part of her. It merely reflects my own instinctive thoughts and feelings, and I'm ..excuse me.. buggered if I'm going to be told what to think, feel and say by a feminist who is enjoying a whinge about totally imaginary unfairness.

This merely reflects the fact that feminists have got way way too confident about their right to tell men what to do based on the most spurious justification that they can dream up on the spot. You wonder if they do this at the office and in the home, in their social lives...


UPDATE: And Another Thing: note the feminist's words about the young woman's "sublime musicianship". It's likely that the reason she is gushing in such flowery terms about the (perfectly competent) performance on the video, is that the performer is a woman.

Because of the perceived and very dubious injustice in judgements of ability, she elects to give excessive praise to a woman - almost certainly more than she'd give to a man playing the same piece, no matter how well he played it.

She may be doing so not for the reasons I've outlined, but merely because of a kind of sisterly solidarity with another woman - whether the woman wants it or not. The justifications for this sort of thing tend to come thick and fast, but the ultimate result is discrimination, pure and simple - which is surely precisely what feminists claim to be angry about.

Why we don't need feminism

So recently I was talking to a woman who told me about some incident, explaining to me that "this is why we need feminism". Now she's repeating an idea she's seen on the internet, "reasons why we still need feminism" is something of a meme on Twitter and Facebook. In one case, a bunch of naive students from Oxford University decided to have their pictures taken infront of the Radcliffe Camera with placards hung round their neck giving their own handwritten notes on why feminism was still needed. They looked exceptionally foolish.

No doubt men's rights activists have already responded in their own, inimitable fashion. But I'd like to give my own little rebuttal if I can. Here's why we don't need feminism.

• We don't need another rabid political group of resentful crazies selectively picking statistics and then misrepresenting them, claiming they show discrimination when close analysis shows just the opposite, or talking about "patriarchical violence" whilst suppressing research showing symmetry in partner/domestic violence
• We don't need young women to be told that if any man criticizes them, ever, then it is ok to call him a "misogynist" and to never listen to a single thing he has to say - and then to claim innocently that they weren't  implying that he hated women when that is precisely what they were doing.
• We don't need good science undermined by people stupid enough to thing that if you want men and women to be the same psychologically, then the real world will magically be that way.
• We don't need an army of amateur theorists on YouTube finding hidden (actually non-existent) patriarchical subtexts in TV drama, or making the ludicrous assertion that toy-manufacturers would rather sell to just boys, halving their profits, rather than marketing to girls (when the manufacturers have made strenuous efforts to sell to girls). We don't need the same theorist to baldly turn around 30 seconds later and find an example of hitherto invisible marketing to girls, and then complain about how it's being done, without offering any alternative
• We don't, in short,  need every discussion, every aspect of life viewed from the narrow political point of view of writers whose only talent is to foster the maximum resentment between men and women - simply to acquire political support for a divisive, selfish cause.

Sharon Osbourne: "I do think it’s quite fabulous"

What does Sharon Osbourne reportedly think is fabulous?

It's the story of a  "California woman accused of cutting of her husband’s private part and disposing of it in a particularly gruesome way after he asked for a divorce"

Fabulous eh? If you say so. And if a man mutilated a woman in some way would that be fabulous too? Is someone going to convolutedly argue that while (for example) rape is an evil crime,  mutilating a man's sexual organs is just fine!

The audience apparently shared the joke

"He's my boyfriend, I can hit him if I want to"

The quote in the title is from this story, in the Guardian of all places.

No one working for that newspaper is going to question where the attitudes of this girl come from (prevalent attitudes towards men, differences in perception of violence towards men and women), though many lines of print are written there on which attitudes towards women lead to violence.

I'd like to ask anyone reading this to think about why this was said - why the girl thought it was ok to say this. Here are some guesses:

a) the knowledge that she will probably escape a prison sentence (now where oh where did I read that someone wanted to empty women's prisons because they are too nasty? Do let me know)

b) common representations of men as more expendable in the media.How many times have we heard on the news that "women and children" were amongst those hurt" in some disaster, natural or otherwise. Hurting a man is represented as more or less ok, and frequently justified, if you watch BBC dramas.


The fact that we are (probably) hard-wired to have a little more sympathy for women and children doesn't mean we can pretend violence towards men is morally any different. Or we can, only if you are ready to disregard everything that is said about gender equality being for the greater good. You will also have to ignore anyone who claims that attitudes of 'men' towards 'women' are the cause of rape/violence. Some examples of this from our favourite rag:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/mar/08/malaysia-international-womens-day
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/mar/23/church-action-against-sexual-violence
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/02/gail-dines-pornography
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/nov/08/islam-channel-ofcom

I wonder at how easy it was for me to come up with those examples...

Yet if you say this to feminists, they look mystified. They simply cannot see how, if "attitudes towards women" cause violence, there can be any such phenomenon involving blatantly obvious attitudes towards men, and the fact that it is men who are sent off to die for their country, commit suicide more often than women, are treated unequally by the law etcetc.

It's slightly annoying :(

How easy it is being a male....

Here you'll find an article on a man who was treated in a particular way by British Airways on the assumption that since he was a man he was, according to them, a risk to children he might be seated next to.

His pregnant wife wished to swap seats with him, so he obliged and found himself next to a child travelling on his own. The man was asked to change back to his seat on the grounds that he became a risk to the child's security.

Now this seems wrong-headed to me, for a number of reasons. Firstly let's not beat about the bush here - it's gender discrimination - precisely what we have been told for years is one of the worst evils in this land. It's sexism but against men so it doesn't make the news. No one will lose their job over this.

BA eventually said that they were at fault because they didn't realise he was with his wife. That too is slightly disgustingly wrong. They are admitting a minor fault, but not retracting their implicit sexism. It's one of the most insulting apologies I've ever seen (and there are many contenders).

Here is a quote from the excellent piece linked to above:

"When you think about it, even though Mr Fischer is quite right to label the policy sex discrimination, he was better off having swapped seats with his wife. Such is the fear and hysteria around child abuse, he might have been at greater risk than any fear-hyped child. Imagine if, having dropped his pen, and feeling for it on the floor, he accidentally brushed his fingers against the child’s leg. The kid screams, “Don’t touch me!” Three hundred eyes swivel his way, the cabin crew come rushing over, the pilot alerts the destination security, the poor sap is hauled off the plane protesting his innocence to no avail, and his life is ruined."

This comes a couple of days after I came out of my OWN HOUSE (which is next to a footpath) and a mother passed calling her 2/3 yr old daughter who behaved slightly shyly. Aforementioned mother then talked to the wife out of our neighbours saying her daughter was being slow because she had seen "a man" - and I think plenty of men would recognize the tone of voice that was said in. 

Not only do you get her bad attitude towards men. But the fact that the lady who lives next door - someone I thought I liked - is extremely unlikely to say anything to her friend, possibly (nay probably) on grounds of solidarity. Try and imagine that, ladies - I mean really try imagining living with those entrenched attitudes - and you might have a bit of a eureka moment about why the man in your life is the way he is.

BBC feminist clique on the website....again

A week or two ago I started noticing this trend in the BBC website again and blogged about it. The front page had a feature on "Women in business: linking to a page packed with rather gender-politically biased headlines.

Today's example is again on the homepage and is a feature called "Women War Artists", with the subtitle
"The Imperial War Museum London is celebrating their remarkable experiences and achievements"

I'm sorry to harp on about this - I really have no problem with women achieving a much as men do. I just take exception to the political and social pressure to constantly "celebrate" it when a woman does anything at all, however minor. There is an implication here - perhaps not clear even to those writing this stuff but there nonetheless - of a certain inequality, which is exactly what feminists claim they hate the most.

The thinking sometimes hear is that women's achievements have to be 'celebrated' (I hate that word, it is rather PC-speak, don't you think?) because they have been under-represented in the past....This is a kind of orthodoxy and there is considerable pressure in some places to accept and affirm it. .Would I be right in thinking the BBC was just such a workplace?

The problem with this orthodoxy are twofold:
a) we don't know if it's bloody true or not! It's just stated and restated by feminists
b) even if it WERE true, the solution that would be most equal would be not to mention the sex/colour/"race" of who is achieving things in the first place

The problem  is that the BBC think that it is important to keep saying that women are doing great things and we need to know why they think that. It does rather look as if they wish to speak negatively about men and always in the most glowing terms about women.

Still doubt me? Do a google search on "women" on the BBC website as a whole, or just in the news section. And you'll see how anxious the BBC are to divide people up into men and women, and assign values and victim status one way or another. Some headlines, in case you miss them:

Women 'cope better with stress'
Men 'out-performed at university'
Are women better negotiators?
If... Women Ruled The World
Monkeys learn more from females
Women drivers 'more law abiding'
Women top men as share tipsters
Women 'to be richer sex by 2025'
Macho culture 'putting off women' in construction
Business | Women could be the way forward
Male managers 'should copy women'
Women better drivers, says watchdog
Women 'better at holding drink'
"Women nose ahead in smell tests"
"Men 'drink far more than women'"
'Don't tell women how to give birth'
Bedside manner 'gives women edge' (in medical exams)
Women 'better investors than men'
Latvian women 'dealing with capitalism better ...
"Hormones make women safer drivers"

The BBC have carefully selected pieces of research that they think are 'interesting', which may mean they fit into a particular slant on gender politics. We need to escape this "Men are from Mars, women are from Venus" reflex that is so prevalent - it is NOT the way forward to fairness

BBC Gender Politics bias

K sooner or later someone is going to tell me I'm imagining the BBC's anti-male gender politics bias. I invite them to look at todays BBC website main page and it's link to the business page. The main page has a feature on two only slightly related topics: "Why do men cat-call" and "Women in the workplace" (oh also a link to a page on "second-wave feminism")

I know there are some people who will seriously contend that these 2 topics are directly related, indeed many people think they have been abducted by little green men in flying saucers who conducted 10 year experiments on them. However, speeding swiftly back to planet earth (on our faster-than-light UFO) and reality I'd like to list some of the topics on the BBC Business News "Women in the workplace" sub-page today.

To their scant credit, the website editors have included the

Gender 'irrelevant in business'

story. This is so they can claim they have added an opposing point of view when in fact their world view is horribly skewed. Here are some of the other stories

Women 'still missing top jobs

• More women in boardroom demanded

  
  

  Women find glass ceiling 'intact'

  
  

  May rebukes 'feminist bigots' MP

  
  

  Sky sacks 'offensive' pundit Gray

  
  

I once started making a list of biassed BBC website pages, with dates, but i got bored of the depressing job. They seemed to leap on every bit of research they could find that made women look morally and intellectually superior to men, credulously swallowing every word. "Women better than men in business", "Women smarter decision makers" etcetc

The problem with people wanting to encourage women in business is that they need to be aware of the possibility that they are creating an imbalance the other way around, whereas in fact they aren't aware of anything (except their perceived cause)

The fact that this feature exists at all is in my view evidence of the strong but very questionable political bias in the news section of the BBC website - I don't know if it comes from the same editorial team as the Today programme on Radio 4, or if the website follows their lead.


UPDATE: By 12:30 the same day these pressing gender issues have been replaced on the BBC front page by the super-vacuous Anna Chapman 


I believe the correct thing to say here is ROFL. Maybe the feminists are balanced out by the lads in the BBC after all :)