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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-40510965560249848852019-01-06T16:32:24.024+00:00Andy ManAgainst Generational Abuse &
 Toxic Gender IdeologyAndy Thomas (Andy Man)http://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-79370283142004565442018-11-27T07:22:00.001+00:002018-11-28T08:30:28.224+00:00Before the dream fadesIt's early morning here, and I've just had a dream. Isn't it funny how dreams fade? But this time I got straight to my keyboard and managed to bottle it while it lingered.

For me, it's about self-acceptance. I suspect some will identify with this, which is why I share it. But perhaps others won't. I'm OK with this also.

Here it is...

I woke up in my bed at my parents' home, but as the adult I am now. I wondered to myself, could I create a clone?

As I pondered on it, a copy of myself emerged from my body like an expanding bubble. "Where is all this matter coming from to do this?" I thought as it was happening. And then there I was -- lying in bed with myself, and holding myself. It wasn't sexual. I noted how physically large I was.

But then we decided we better get up and face things. We couldn't figure out which one of us was the copy and we laughed about it. We decided that it didn't matter.

I saw that we had no hair and spoke with a thick northern accent. Neither of me liked this particularly, but we accepted that it was OK.

We went down stairs together, and I walked in to the living room to find my dad and sister were already there. My dad was eating his breakfast, as he often did. He was a creature of habit.

I went into the kitchen.

A few seconds later my clone followed me in.

From the kitchen, I called back, "Dad. I've got something to tell you." And we both walked back into the living room.

My dad seemed mildly taken a back.

I said, "I hope you don't find this disturbing because I think it's rather cool!"

"It is a bit weird," my sister said in slightly surprised manner, but also in a way that indicated that it would be OK.

"It would have to be," I thought.

I went back into the kitchen and was trying to make another copy of myself when I woke up.

Please! Don't wake me from the dream. It really is everything it seemed.

Andy Thomas (Andy Man)http://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-34863332610890806582015-09-02T08:19:00.000+01:002015-09-02T08:34:40.370+01:00Janice Fiamengo - The Anti-feministI'd like to thank Janice Fiamengo for her willingness to speak up when silence would surely be convenient, for her intellectual honesty when others advocate delusion, and for her empathy when it would be acceptable not to give a damn.

We think we have outgrown prejudice, but we have not. We just can't see it in our time. All prejudice is culturally invisible in its day, the time in which it is seen as the acceptable norm, fashionable or even virtuous. The fashion has changed perhaps, but have we? - Andy T

Andy Thomas
Andy Thomas (Andy Man)http://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-83259995824144354202015-08-28T21:12:00.001+01:002015-09-02T08:48:18.611+01:00May as well be ghostsIn a world where celebrity culture reigns supreme, fashionable consumerism wears a glittering sheen. But in the shadow world of living ghosts, an anguished soul lies in the street but goes unseen. Ghosts are they who occupy space and time, when those who pass perceive only their shadow or a stime. - Andy Thomas

Andy Thomas (Andy Man)http://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-31868192300507931052014-08-13T15:13:00.001+01:002015-07-26T12:39:21.595+01:00Does the Independent's Matthew Champion condone violence against Indian men?"We can't condone violence." These are the very words that i100 website news editor Matthew Champion uses to introduce his latest article on the Independent's new UK website. In the very same sentence, he describes how "satisfying" it is to see an Indian man being forced to kneel while a woman stamps on his head. "Hurrah!" Champion exclaims in this outstandingly shoddy piece of reporting.

He is writing about a YouTube video shot in Bangalore. A young man, K R Suryaprakash, is pursued down the street and physically attacked by a woman after he allegedly "eve-teased" her—an Indian term used to refer to sexually suggestive behaviour by men toward women.

The term "eve-teasing" is important because it has cultural significance in India and is subject to a drive for cultural change. It is often portrayed positively in Indian cinema as mild teasing and flirtatious courtship. In recent times, there has been a drive to stamp it out and to conflate it with rape and throwing acid at women. Now I do not defend sexual harassment—I think it is unacceptable—but the fact is that the term "eve-teasing" could mean virtually anything. The reality is what Suryaprakash allegedly did or said isn't captured in the video, nor is it even clear what that was.

Nevertheless, Matthew Champion reports his "crime" as fact—he "sexually harassed her," states the title of his article. In the video, however, all we see is Suryaprakash being chased and ordered to kneel in the street by the woman he is accused of harassing, who then stamps on his head after he submissively complies. Personally, I think there's a whole debate to be had here about who's actually being socially disadvantaged in this complex cultural backdrop.

But you know what? Who gives a fuck?

Why should Champion let an inconvenience such as "balanced reporting" get in the way of an opportunity to demonstrate his "real man" credentials? Indeed, why let old-fashioned concepts such as justice and humanity get in the way of the sheer glee of seeing physical and social harm meted out to a young Indian male who is culturally unable to defend himself?

After all, he probably deserves it, right? No need then to consider his account, the cultural context, or even what it is that he is actually accused of? No need for any kind of due process on this one—no one cares about perverts anyway, so fuck him. "Hurrah!"

Is this what passes for reporting nowadays?

After a little searching, I found this less than objective article of the incident in the Bangalore Mirror. For the sheer level of vitriolic prejudice, this article takes some beating. (Perhaps it should serve as a glimpse of things to come for young men in western countries.)

However, it does provide an account by the woman in the video, Veena Ashiya Chindlur. This is what the young man is accused of:

"Around 9.30 a.m., my friend and I were jogging when he [Suryaprakash] made strange noises and eve-teased me. I tried to scare him by running after him. He tried to flee, but I chased him and hit him."

After Chindlur showed the video of her beating the man to the police, Suryaprakash was arrested and charged with "outraging the modesty of a woman" and "intending to insult the modesty of women," both of which are crimes under Indian law. From the above account, therefore, I surmise that he is alleged to have said something or made some gesture.

Let me reverse the genders here so that we can experience how things look the other way around...

As a teenage boy, I recall an incident in which lewd remarks were shouted at me by a group of drunken middle-aged women while I, too, was out jogging. If the genders were reversed, that incident would fall under the loose definition of "eve-teasing." Culturally, males are meant to feel "lucky" when women make sexually suggestive remarks to them. I didn't, and instead felt uncomfortable and kept running. At no point, however, did it occur to me to chase those women down and stamp on their heads.

No, I can't discern what it is that Suryaprakash actually said or did (if anything), and I would bet neither had Matthew Champion before taking to his keyboard. What I do know, however, is what is on display in the video is not justice. Simply because someone feels outrage at another does not and should not give anyone the moral and legal right to chase them down and attack them in the street. Irrespective of whatever he has done wrong, I see a young man with no opportunity to defend himself, no rights, and no one to represent his interests. He is simply painted as sub-human and "othered" by the media.

Moreover, I see people who should know better taking pleasure in watching him being harmed. The concept of "innocence until proven guilty" and the "right to a fair trial" are important human rights—both of which Matthew Champion has denied Suryaprakash.

Written by
Andy Thomas
Find me on FacebookAndy Thomas (Andy Man)http://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-20508242037412939112014-04-17T03:42:00.000+01:002014-04-17T15:44:55.111+01:00Love's Bitter RebukePART 1

I will always remember my mother's words.

"You'll never forget your first love," she said as I cried into her arms.

For some months, I had been keeping a terrible secret. My girlfriend, my first girlfriend, had been raped. They didn't just rape her; they broke her nose. A knife was used. She was cut. There were two of them.

Picture Alley Sheedy in The Breakfast Club — well, that was Louise. Her soft Irish accent, long black hair and scruffy oversized jumpers made me love her with all my heart.

We were both seventeen years old and still at school.

Louise had met my mother just once, but things hadn't gone well at all. My mother had ignored her and when she had left, she pronounced caustically that Louise looked like she had "come off a council estate*," and that I was never to bring her to the house again.

I never understood my mother's snobbery. So much of my mother's behaviour left me terribly confused. In any case, her prejudice was unfounded — Louise was actually from a wealthy Irish family who lived in the expensive part of town. They were also puritanically Catholic. If anything, I had assumed that my mother would approve.

I had a part-time job at the time pushing trolleys around a local supermarket car park, and it provided me with just enough money to run a rusty old Datsun. At weekends I used to heap body filler into the gaping holes around the bodywork, and slap on some industrial paint in the hope that it would stop it rusting to death. In the evenings, I would drive it around to Louise's place and we'd cruise around and find a quiet spot to park up.

There, we'd kiss, engage in foreplay and lie in each other's arms while we talked.

It was during these moments that she told me about what happened to her only a few months before we had met, and she swore me to secrecy. The fact that I betrayed her to my own mother has haunted me most of my adult life (it is only relatively recently that I have come to a realistic reconciliation with the past).

"You'll never forget your first love," is what my mother said when I told her.

"What do you mean?" I replied, confused. "It's not over."

At that point, my mother stepped back from me, her face turning cold. Then after a moment or two she spat, "Get lost!" before turning her back and walking from the room. Those words were a typical retort my mother used, but nevertheless I was left standing there, shocked, confused, hurting desperately and so utterly lost.

Over the coming months my mother conducted, what I now consider to be, an "emotional war" in order to get her way. Drunk on gin, she would accuse me bitterly of "killing her," and threatened suicide unless I would agree never to see Louise again.

"You're destroying me," she would complain. "Can't you see what this is doing to me!"

I would not agree to give up Louise, but I had already confessed to her that I had told my mother, and Louise had become distant from me as a result. Later, she would refuse to see me altogether.

My father, having been brought up in loving home, was a reasonable and rational man. He was so utterly ill-equipped to understand what was happening.

"Your mother's right," he would say trying to rationalise her behaviour. "She must know something about that girl."

I loved my dad, but his understanding of the situation was so utterly awry and I was so utterly confused, that neither of us could relate to each other during that time. I realise now that my mother put my father under tremendous strain, in effect pressurising him to pressurise me.

My school study petered out and I spent the days on long walks around the suburbs. I had few friends, and any attempt to express myself to outsiders ended in failure and misunderstanding. So I remained distant, said nothing, and slowly became detached from everything and everyone.

I ate little and my weight fell dramatically.

I spent my long walks lost in my own thoughts, trying desperately to make sense of things. During one of these walks, I was distracted by an advertisement billboard.

"So strange," I remember thinking, having been brought out of my reverie by the imagery of a chimpanzee drinking a can of soda when, out of nowhere, came a sickening blow.

I almost blacked out and half blinded, thinking that I had been punched, looked around desperately to see where the attack had come from. But there was no one, and as I stared down at the blood pooling in my hands, I realised that I had simply walked full speed into the concrete lamppost while looking the other way. I dreaded going home, for I already knew what my parents would think.

"She's had you beaten up!" I was told when I got home.

While I initially tried to explain, I sensed how unlikely my lamppost story sounded and was resigned to that fact that any protestation was pointless. My dad took the keys to the rusty old car from me and declared that I would no longer be allowed to "drive that girl around."

The sad irony was of course that, by then, I no longer had any contact with Louise — not that either of them would have believed me if I had told them.

The last time I ever saw Louise was when, on a Saturday afternoon, she walked across the car park where I was pushing trolleys at the supermarket. She never looked at me, and as she disappeared from sight, I began to feel that I was bleeding internally. I never finished the shift, but simply walked away from the job.

I heard later that her parents had sent her to Ireland. "She needs a priest," I was told by a caustic old woman who worked on the tills at the supermarket.

I never saw Louise again.

It wasn't long after that things came to a head when my mother burst into my bedroom one evening swinging a heavy piece of wood in a drunken rage. It was a baluster, a piece of wood roughly the same shape and weight as a baseball bat, which my dad kept around in case of burglars.

"If you ever see that girl again, I'll kill you!" she raged.

I swear to you now that if she had struck me, I had no intention of even lifting my arms to shield my face. At that moment, I cared for nothing and said simply, "Go ahead."

She didn't strike me, but instead started to smashed up the room. I simply stood back and did nothing while she went berserk. It was my dad who, on hearing the commotion, came in and stopped her. I will always remember his words to me after she had left the room. I can quote them verbatim, and here they are...

"This is not your mother, this. Whatever it is that you are doing to her, it's time to pack it in."

He was wrong — that was exactly my mother. But at the time, I had no alternative perspective and with no way to understand such things, I had come to accept that, somehow, in some way, he was right.

I sat my exams, having done little revision, and as soon as they were over, I left home with a rucksack and some foolish notions about living "on the road". I camped on a mountain side in the English Lake District for a few weeks, before finding a job and boardings in a remote pub called the Kirkstone Inn.

In the years that followed, I slid gradually into self-imposed isolation, characterised by drinking and self-harm. I ached so much to be with Louise, and I cursed myself for failing her. My mother had got her way in the end, and I lived for years with a confused sense of guilt and repressed anger that I had no way of reconciling.

PART 2

On my first day at school at the age of six, my mother had told me that there was no point in me going there because I was only going to be a road sweeper when I grew up. I can remember crying and insisting that I wouldn't, while she explained to me, rather matter of factly, that I was stupid and that she was telling me for my own good. That is my first memory of her calling me "stupid", but not my last. In the years that followed, she never missed an opportunity.

Despite the events of my last year in school, I actually passed my exams, but only just. Half an hour into one exam, I was lying in bed not caring when a teacher turned up at my house in his car to collect me. Nevertheless, having initially thrown away my place at university when I had left home with the intention of tramping the roads, I eventually went to University and got a degree in Physics — proving in my own mind that my mother was wrong about me.

In reality, however, I was a very troubled young man and throughout it all, what I so desperately looked for was a meaningful answer to the question, "What was so wrong with me?" Having no useful framework with which to understand either myself or the past, I was groping around in the dark with questions I could not even begin to formulate.

"So how does that make you feel?" I was asked, at various times through the years, whenever I tried counselling.

And I would stare at the floor, wringing my hands, as I replied, "Well, I don't know really."

It was always the same — meaningful answers were always held just out of reach by those who knew them.

It wasn't until my mid-thirties that things began to change when one day I had a profound revelation while walking home from work. It so shook me so that I stopped at the next telephone box I saw and made an international call to my sister.

"Our mother was an emotional bully, wasn't she?" I asked tentatively the moment she answered the call, not even waiting to say hello.

There was a short pause, and when she replied her words were the very first chink of light to penetrate darkness that was my confused inner world.

"Yes," she replied. "She was."

The first time I tried to speak to others about what I was discovering, I was told rather angrily, "That's a terrible way to talk about your mother!"

Those words shamed me back into silence for a while, but it would not last. I had begun to challenge the invisible cultural taboo that had prevented any rational scrutiny of my mother's behaviour. In fact, I was now on the way to realising a meaningful answer to my question, "What was it that was wrong with me?"

What was wrong was simply that I had been the subject of childhood emotional abuse in the form of my mother's sustained criticism, ridicule, interrogation and bullying as far back as I can remember. There was, in fact, a far bigger picture to be uncovered here than just the one depicting the fallout over Louise.

The astoundingly simple answer was that there had never been anything "wrong with me". I had never been "defective" — I had just been a normal child like any other. This, for me, was a life changing realisation.

Throughout childhood, my mother had taunted me, telling me that I was stupid and that everyone was "laughing at me." As a result, the message I internalised at a very young age was one of shame and inadequacy. I don't have a single memory of my mother ever cuddling me, playing with or reading to me. It was my dad who did all these things, and it is not lost me now how fortunate I am to have had that from him.

Now, here's the thing...

The things my mother said and did were normalised in my family. My father had grown up in a loving environment in which motherhood was sacrosanct, and this was the framework with which he made sense of the world. In my mother, he only saw what he wanted to see, and rationalised what didn't fit. Through him, she had a license to speak and do as she pleased.

She was beyond all reproach.

My mother would rarely talk about her own childhood. She opened up only once when, in my early teens, I found her sitting on the kitchen floor, drunk and crying. This was the only time she told me that her own mother used to openly express how she wished that she had been killed instead of her teenage brother, who had died in a motorcycle accident shortly before I was born.

My mother continued to drink and died a slow and lingering death, her brain corroded by the ammonia in her blood that her liver was no longer able to remove. Toward the end, she regressed into a child-like state, and my dad spent his last days spoon feeding her and taking her to the toilet.

One of the saddest memories I have is of him sitting with his arm around my mother, who was no longer fully aware, and trying to comfort her.

"I don't know how we will do it," he said, "but somehow we'll get through this."

I knew as I watched him that there would be no way "through this", but only continued decline.

Within a year of that moment, both my mother and father were gone.

My dad had worked hard in a manual job from the age of fourteen, and spent the little retirement he had as a full-time carer for my mother. My parents were deeply in love with each other, and toward the end he often remarked how he would not have had things any other way.

After my mother's death, my father lived just long enough to put all his affairs in order and then, one day while out walking, he sat down and just died. After all the years of trauma and distress thrown up by my mother, I find it most distressing how he had managed to arrange things so that his own passing would be of no trouble to anyone. It is only now that I can begin to appreciate how, in those last few months of his life, he must have grieved so.

PART 3

I still find it difficult to tease out the good moments from bad, and properly reconcile the past. There were certainly good things about my mother, and some good times with her, and it would be wrong of me to paint an overly negative picture.

As a child, she had been cruelly bullied by her own mother which, other than the astute observations of a relative, had been culturally invisible at the time. As an adult, she had been put on a pedestal and emotionally spoiled by my well-meaning father whose chivalrous notions about gender came from a bygone age. Never had my mother been expected to deal with the fallout from her own behaviour.

Recent UK legislation aims to make emotional abuse a criminal offence. While it's undoubtedly a good thing that its seriousness is at last being recognised, its criminalisation is utterly wrong headed and will ultimately benefit no one except an army of lawyers and bureaucratic enforcers. The scope for institutionalised injustice here, I believe, far outweighs any benefit it could bring.

The solution lies, not in ever more punishment, condemnation and social exclusion, but in a sea change in our attitudes toward the generational nature of abuse. My mother didn't know how to be a mother because she was never properly mothered herself. Had the right kind of therapeutic intervention been available decades ago — one that would not have implied criminalisation and shame — the effect on my family could have been transformative. On the other hand, the involvement of the police and judiciary would have undoubtedly torn us apart and destroyed all our lives.

Abuse within the human family is not new — it has always been with us. Human beings are not inherently bad, rather the lives of our ancestors were characterised by subsistence level survival to which they were brutally adapted. Today, we still experience the echo of that in our relationships, on our streets, and in our prisons. If we could ever effectively dampen out this destructive echo from the past, we could transform human society within a few generations.

Whenever you encounter a damaged adult who is racked by deep insecurity, or who is emotionally destructive or physically or sexually violent, you are almost certainly looking at a battered or abused child who has simply grown up. Condemnation and contempt, without a willingness to investigate and to understand, ensures only continued ignorance and misunderstanding for new generations of children, and their children.

No, human beings are not intrinsically bad, but we are easily damaged in childhood, irrevocably so in extreme cases. Ultimately, however, it's all about how we treat children, not about how many people we lock up.

Written by
Andy Thomas
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Notes.
* In the UK, a "council estate" is a social housing development.
Louise's name was changed in this for anonymity reasons. Wherever she is today, I hope she is happy.Andy Thomas (Andy Man)http://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-61172877698760467012013-12-17T04:06:00.002+00:002013-12-23T21:35:54.728+00:00How our children are betrayed from one generation to the nextIn a rather succinct book, Erin Pizzey gave the world a simple message that should have changed our society for the better. I will never forget the breathtaking sense of clarity I felt as I read its very first page. Her book was called "Prone to Violence", and in it she documents her experience of running the first ever domestic violence refuge, Chiswick Women's Aid, which she founded in 1971.

What she wrote seemed incredible to me at the time, but today it seems incredible that it wasn't obvious before that moment. Indeed, I find incredible that it isn't immediately obvious to everyone. I realise now, of course, that the reason for this is that our cultural narrative blinds us to the truth, and we must cut through this first.

It was my involvement with the men's human rights movement which caused me to read Erin's book and to seek her out personally. Later, it became clear that we shared an ability to view society from an outside perspective, and she and I became good friends as a result. If it surprises you that the woman who set up the first shelter for "battered women" should want to associate herself with men's human rights, then perhaps that's an indication that you need to question the things you've always been told.

In my case, I guess I could say that it was Sharon Osbourne, the celebrity, who caused me to question things with the degree of seriousness required to jolt me out of my oblivious state. I won't be thanking her for it, however.

A few years ago, I stumbled across a clip of a US television show, "The Talk", which Sharon Osbourne co-hosts. In this clip, Osbourne ridiculed a man over his horrific mutilation and torture at the hands of his psychotic wife – a woman he had been attempting to divorce. As Osbourne mocked his suffering, her fellow co-hosts, all women, laughed along with the audience, which appeared to be all female.

I felt sick at the spectical.

I recognised on an emotional level that what I was watching was very wrong — these women were unable to see this man as a human being. History has shown us time and time again that once we stop thinking of a group of people as human, it becomes acceptable for society to target them. It was the apparent acceptability of Osbourne's behaviour that disturbed me most and, from that moment on, I began to take on new perspectives and new priorities.

Erin initially opened her refuge for battered wives. What she found, however, was that the abusive behaviour she encountered was often mutual between partners, and that men and boys were equally the targets of violence. Her shelter took in boys, and she often enlisted the help of men to look after her women and children, many of whom had never known good decent men. She also tried desperately to open a shelter for abused men but found that while offers of money for women were forthcoming, no one wanted to help adult males.

Most significantly, however, Erin was perhaps the first to truly appreciate how family violence and abuse is generational in nature, rather than gender based. Both men and women can be equally abusive in their personal relationships, and the significant factor in this is their childhood, not their gender. This is what she wrote about in "Prone to Violence", and its message stood in stark contrast to that of the feminist movement of the 1970s which viewed men as the ones who were responsible for all violence, and that such behaviour is intrinsic to them. This is the belief among many within feminism as well as those outside of it, likely due to the influence of feminist thought, some 40 years later.

Consequently, upon trying to bring her perspective to a wider audience, Erin found herself subject to a campaign of threats and violence, including bomb threats against her family. Gender ideologues, using intimidation against her publisher, were successful in having "Prone to Violence" removed from the shelves. Eventually, Erin fled the country in 1981 after feminists managed to take control of the very organisation she had founded.

What remains of Chiswick Women's Aid today is known as Refuge, the UK national charity. Feminist ideology is now mainstream, and whenever we hear about domestic violence in the media, we are always told that it is "gender violence", or "violence against women and girls".

This is a tragedy for us all.

Erin Pizzey was the first person to understand the true nature of generational abuse — that whenever you encounter a damaged or destructive adult, you are almost certainly looking at a battered or emotionally abused child who has simply grown up. In the UK, we express anguish over Baby Peter whose mother, along with her boyfriend, tortured him to death. However, had Peter survived and played out his own childhood trauma in adulthood, society would have a viewed him as a monster — seeing only his abusive behavior as beginning and ending with him. In reality, abuse rarely begins or ends with one person, or with one generation.

This is not about "bad men" or "bad women"; it is about how we treat children. Each generation replays their learned pattern of behaviour to their own children, and the cycle continues. Erin's work was prevented from ever reaching the full light of day, however, and she often recounts a remark a prison governor once made to her. "Every abused child is a point on my pension," she was told.

Once you grasp the true nature of generational abuse, you are only a step away from realising that if we could ever start to eradicate generational abuse effectively, we could transform the lives of future generations of children. What's more, we would also empty the prisons in the process.

We cannot allow Erin's legacy to remain buried.

Abuse within families and between intimate partners has always been with us. I can trace abusive behaviour within my own family back to my great grandmother. I suspect that it doesn't stop there, that it would go back centuries — an echo from times when life was hard, short, and cheap.

The lesson that Erin Pizzey gave the world in "Prone to Violence" is that things do not have to continue like this — if we could stop the echo of abuse from reverberating forward into future generations, we could transform human society forever.

Written by
Andy Thomas

Follow: @AndyManMRA

Notes.

* The Talk, CBS, July 2011.

** Baby Peter (Peter Connelly) was a 17-month-old British boy who died in London after suffering more than fifty injuries, including a broken spine, at the hands of his mother and her boyfriend.

This article was updated for style and clarity on December 23, 2013.

Further Information.

Ideology to Inclusion, a talk by Erin Pizzey. Sacremento, 2008.
http://youtu.be/oCw9LdrSnbI

Erin's book, "Prone to Violence" is available as "used" from Amazon. See also Erin's most recent work, "This Way to the Revolution".Andy Thomas (Andy Man)http://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-64890346533250773762013-09-15T15:32:00.000+01:002013-09-15T18:30:42.945+01:00The Returned TV Series - Are all men sex killers, perverts and batterers?I started watching The Returned (Les Revenants) on DVD recently. It's a spooky French TV series, written by Fabrice Gobert. The story concept is just too good to resist — dead people inexplicably begin to turn up in an alpine village and, with no recollection of their death, try to carry on with family life as if nothing had happened.

How cool is that?

The Returned - Channel 4

It started brilliantly enough when a young girl, who had died in a motor accident several years ealier, walks into her family home and goes up to her room (which had been kept by her mother as a shrine) as if nothing had happened. The moment of bizarre reunion between the girl, her mother and, now much older, twin sister had the hairs on my neck standing upright.

I don't speak French, but I have no problem with subtitles and love cinema from around the world.

But by the fifth episode, however, I had turned off and wasn't going to watch any more.

Why?

The fifth episode is when I realised that, almost without exception, every male character is typecast as one of the following:

Serial sex killer

Pervert

Wife batterer

Child batterer

Abusive thug

Peeping tom

The one exception being, up to the point where I turned off at least, a seven year old boy called "Victor". (Although, it had been touch and go in the series as to whether this boy was really a sadistic killer or not.) Remember - little boys don't stay little — past the age of 15 or so, they are "fair game".

In contrast, the female characters in The Returned are portrayed, without exception, as brave heroines who are victims of male violence.

This kind of gender-stereotyping is old now, but toxic nevertheless.

While adult males with healthy childhoods may be able to "brush it off", young minds can't. It is dehumanising poison for any young boy to be made to behold himself through a prism of shame and perversion during his formative years.

I no longer tolerate anti-male propaganda. Nor should you.

Written by
Andy ThomasAndy Thomas (Andy Man)http://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-22265170715062108502013-07-14T10:18:00.001+01:002015-01-24T12:42:51.655+00:00Why are men going their own way when it comes to relationships?Everywhere, men are stepping back when it comes to romantic commitment. Many young men are simply indifferent to the idea, some are afraid, while others are angry and have this bitter message for the opposite sex — "We don't know you; we don't need you, and we don't want you."

* * *

In 1970, more than 94 percent of women in the UK were either married or had been married by the time they were 40 years old. Since then, marriage rates have plummeted, and over all age groups, married couples are now in the minority. The decline of marriage is a popular topic of discussion in the media with many commentators putting it down to changing lifestyles and freedoms for women. Indeed, there is a general consensus that young women are putting careers ahead of relationships, and as a result, the number of marriages taking place per year has almost halved over recent decades.

For much of the last 40 years or so, it is undeniably true that women have been postponing both marriage and childbirth. I would argue, however, that there is now a new phenomenon taking place, one that is a harbinger of radical change for the relationship between men and women. In the years to come, it will be men, not women, who will be the ones driving down marriage and birth rates.

Men are beginning to recognise their appalling vulnerability when it comes to dealing with the opposite sex, and they are individually waking up to the ridiculous risks they face. Almost 70 per cent of divorces are now initiated by women, and typically it is the man who stands to lose everything — his children, his home, his future income and his reputation. With suicide being the biggest killer of young men in the UK, and with those experiencing relationship breakdown being at the highest risk, he also stands to lose his life. In response, many men are now avoiding long-term commitment, or are simply turning their backs on relationships with women altogether.

Recent national crime surveys show that men account for 40 per cent of those who suffer domestic abuse. Many believe the true figure to be higher because men under-report the abuse against them. Male victims know that they face, not just ridicule, but the risk of being falsely labelled as the perpetrator by both the police and female support agencies.

Young men, especially, have internalised the appalling message that whenever two drunken people have sex, one of them is a rapist.

American psychologist, Dr Helen Smith, agrees and argues that men in the west are both consciously and unconsciously "going on strike". In her recent book, "Men on Strike", she describes how young men have internalised society's negativity towards them and are, not only avoiding marriage and fatherhood, but are also dropping out of higher education and leaving the workforce at astonishing rates.

Where married men and father figures where once viewed with respect, they are now presented as buffoons in the media, and new generations of males are simply refusing to relate to such negative stereotyping. As a result, young men are rejecting traditional gender roles, giving rise to the metrosexual male — urban heterosexual men who prioritise themselves and their lifestyle above other commitments. Such men are decidedly single.

If we want a glimpse of what the future may hold, we only need to look to Japan where those who reject their traditional masculine role are referred to as "grass eaters" or "herbivore men". These men are not just decidedly single, but they show little or no interest in sexual relations. With a staggering 70% of young Japanese men identifying themselves in this way, they have become a cultural and economic phenomenon, not to mention, a major target for advertisers. They are also considered the significant factor in the plummeting Japanese birth rate, and are blamed for many a single woman's solitude.

Irrespective of whether men are reacting consciously, having become aware of their own vulnerability in adulthood, or unconsciously, having already internalised the negativity towards by adolescence, most are doing so on an individual basis. There is, however, a growing counter-culture of males who collectively define themselves to be "Men Going Their Own Way", or "mig-tow", a pronunciation of the acronym "MGTOW". These are men who positively identify in their refusal to commit romantically to women. Many MGTOWs would disagree with Helen Smith's metaphor of men "being on strike", but would prefer to claim that they have simply "left the building" and are not coming back.

Geoff is a typical young man who identifies himself as a MGTOW. At the age of 23, he tells me that he was trapped in an abusive relationship with someone who was, in his words, out to destroy him. He explains that what really affected him was how he had believed, all along, that it was his role as a man to make his girlfriend happy. Therefore, he had always felt that whatever was wrong in the relationship was, somehow, his fault.

Several years later, however, he began to find websites where other men had similar stories to tell and he realised, for the first time, that he wasn't alone in his feelings or experiences. Looking back, he recalls how amazed he felt to see the things he had been secretly wondering openly voiced by other men. "It was if all those tiny nuggets of dissent that I'd carefully tucked away for fear of being seen as a sexist were suddenly validated," he says. He adds, "I realised that I didn't have to apologise for being male."

MGTOWs can be seen as an off-shoot of a wider men's movement, which also encompasses egalitarian and traditionalist sub-groups. Whereas traditionalists argue for a return to family values, egalitarians accept that the profound cultural changes of recent times mark an end for the traditional sex roles. For egalitarians, the toothpaste is already out of the tube and there is no putting it back. Indeed, many would not want to. Members of all groups claim that, contrary to popular perception, it is men who are the ones being disadvantaged and marginalised in society, not women.

Now, I'm going to let you into a big secret here, one that hasn't yet reached mainstream consciousness — outside of the MGTOW groups, a significant proportion of those in the men's human rights movement are, in fact, women. I would estimate that women account for around 20% of those active in the movement, falling evenly between traditionalist and egalitarian camps.

MGTOWs are separatists, however. They represent a collective rejection by men of the traditional relationship with women and, in some cases, of women themselves. While they typically claim to be indifferent towards women, I personally sense a strong under-current of anger (they regard "nice guys" and "good men" as fools). Outsiders typically see them as misogynistic. I, myself, used feel this way toward them, but my view has changed somewhat over time.

I now recognise that our tendency to see male dissent as misogynistic is nothing other than a symptom of our cultural inability to acknowledge the pain and suffering of adult men, even when it is laid out bare before our eyes. It might seem appropriate to dismiss MGTOWs as a bunch of angry misfits, but to do so would be a grave injustice. If, instead, you are willing to look through their anger, you will see men who have had their children stripped from them by the family courts, or men who have had their lives ruined by abusive partners and false allegations. Among their number, you will also find the children abused by their mothers who, knowing nothing except what it means to be rejected and disbelieved, have now grown up into damaged adults.

These are men who have long since given up waiting for somebody to care about them.

Moreover, I have come to appreciate that MGTOW-ism embodies a coherent ideology — one which is diametrically opposed to that of the radical feminists of the 1960s and one which will be extremely compelling to many a disenfranchised male. Their philosophy is based largely on the writings of Esther Vilar (yes, a woman) and her 1971 book, The Manipulated Man. In this, she describes how women coldly manipulate men for their own ends, and while some of it may be patent nonsense, I sense that many a man will find profound identification within its pages. Those who read it, having first been suitably broken at the hands of a woman, may forever look upon all women with dark eyes.

Just like an iceberg, most of which lies hidden beneath, there is a great body of disenfranchised males out there. With no voice, and no one to represent their interests, they lie invisible just beneath the surface of society. If you were to put Esther Vilar's book into their hands, I surmise that it may cause many to radically re-evaluate their world and their place in it.

No one controls MGTOWs. There is no central website, no leader and no particular plan. In any case, men are individually "going their own way" whether they realise it or not, and whether women like it or not.

Men never retaliated in the gender war that was declared upon them on behalf of all women, everywhere, by the radical feminists of the 1960s. Instead, slowly at first, they simply began to walk away. One of the few rays of hope is that it will be women themselves who, in increasing numbers, give their support to the wider men's human rights movement, thus providing an alternative to "men going their own way".

If allowed to continue to its miserable end-game, however, I solemnly predict that the gender war will be a war that all women, everywhere, will eventually come to bitterly regret.

Written by
Andy Thomas
Copyright 2013. All rights reserved.

Follow Me: @AndyManMRA

Sources

 1. Marriages in England and Wales, 2010. Office for National Statistics
2. http://www.thecalmzone.net/help/issues/suicide/
3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/sep/05/men-victims-domestic-violence
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbivore_men

Andy Thomas (Andy Man)http://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-6769083095275014302013-06-18T15:32:00.000+01:002013-06-23T11:24:00.233+01:00Open Letter to Peter J Reilly, White Knight to Cathy BrennanPeter J. Reilly is a US accountant who claims to have extensive experience of taxation and dealings with "high net worth individuals". He is a regular contributor to Forbes.com, and believing himself to be a white knight in shining armour, has just stepped up to defend the honour of Radfem organiser, Cathy Brennan. He is also a man who has very suddenly become aware that he is standing in the middle of a minefield, and doesn't know what to say or do next. Let's help him to decide!

Dear Mr. Reilly,

I am writing to you about your article on Forbes.com (link below) in which you describe your recent interview with Cathy Brennan, one of the organisers of Radfem 2013.

Peter J Reilly Interviews Cathy Brennan on Radfem

In your article, you openly admit that you don't really understand the issues involved, but step up to offer Cathy Brennan your support because you claim that radical feminists deserve respect. You also state that MRAs are the only people who refuse to acknowledge that radical feminists "have a worthwhile viewpoint" because they don't like to have "nasty things said about them." Furthermore, you say yourself that your analysis of the situation is that of an idiot. I suspect you were attempting to be disingenuous here, however, I am going to agree with you on your last point.

Last year, the Conway Hall convention centre in London rejected Radfem's 2012 booking citing the UK equality law after protest by transgender activists. Radfems typically refer to themselves as "TERFs", or trans-exclusionary radical feminists. In other words, they do not recognise male-to-female transgender individuals as women, and their 2012 event was advertised as being open only to "women-born women". Cathy Brennan, herself, has a documented history of espousing hate toward transgender women, see below.

Until February 2013, Cathy Brennan owned and ran a website called the "Radical Hub" (aka "Radfem Hub"). This served as a collective blog for her cause, and the articles it carried discussed gendercide and the genetic modification of males, as exemplified by Vliet Tiptree (aka. Pamela O'Shaughnessy, an author of crime novels from California) in her article titled, Radical Feminism Enters the 21st Century. Other posters called for the killing of baby boys at birth (see below) while still others argued that they should be deliberately denied care or nurture.

Men's human rights activists kept a dossier of articles, posts and screen-shots. They are too numerous to include here, but allow me to provide a quote, below, by Danielle Pynnonen, a child care worker who identifies herself as a Radfem organiser on Mumsnet under the handle "allectoTauniallectospoison".

Most radfems campaign against any funding or recognition for male victims of domestic violence and abuse, insisting that domestic violence is suffered exclusively by women. Almost all argue that children should have no rights to a relationship with their father. Over the last few months, radical feminists have violently demonstrated in Toronto, Melbourne and Paris, in one case abusing attendees and threatening speakers at a conference on tackling male suicide.

The London Irish Centre, the original planned venue for 2013, rejected Radfem's booking earlier this year after a protest by MRA London. As the organiser of this protest, I can attest to the fact that it was peaceful, without incident and ended with a cordial conversation with the centre's director. As you are aware, Radfem 2013 found a new home at the Camden Centre, who chose to ignore UK equality law and flout their obligation under the "No Delegation" clause of the Public Sector Equality Duty.

Mr. Reilly, you accuse us of trying to shut-down Radfem 2013 so that, as you put it, "our ears won't burn while they say nasty things about us." On the contrary, we have used the controversy as a means of exposing these bigots and their ideology, and we make no apology for this.

At the time, I discussed the merits of trying to insist that I attend the Radfem 2013 event myself with Erin Pizzey, patron of MRA London and founder of the first ever women's domestic violence refuge in 1971. We decided that it would not be safe to do so even if, in the unlikely event, we were granted admission. Erin had previously been the subject of death threats and had fled the country in 1980s after being forced out of her organisation by radical feminists. Furthermore, shortly after the London Irish Centre protest, which took place months before the event itself, MRA London members were subject of an anonymous complaint to the police over alleged violent behaviour, an allegation even the director of the centre refuted.

You may believe yourself to be chivalrous and virtuous in your support for Cathy Brennan. You should not, however, expect anybody to respect you for this. Radfem members are, in fact, fully-fledged human beings, not weak helpless women in need of your protection. As such, they should be accountable for their own views and actions, just like everybody else. Furthermore, I can tell you now that they don't regard chivalrous men, such as yourself, as noble or virtuous — but only as useful "idiots".

It angers me immensely, when wealthy male "idiots", confusing their social privilege (or entrepreneurism) with feminist notions of gender privilege, believe that their sense of guilt can be relieved by "stepping up" in order to push down those under-privileged males beneath them. (Erin, herself, notes that she had no difficulty in soliciting donations from wealthy men to support women's refuges, but when she tried to open one for male victims, they suddenly stopped caring.)

Outside your circle of "high net worth individuals", there is a sea of broken men out there. Certain outdated notions of chivalry, combined with years of negative stereotyping by gender ideologues, means that society is utterly blind to their suffering. Indeed, I could fill a book with it, but let me say that where society refuses to let women fail, the choice facing many men today is often one of suicide or homelessness.

Here in the UK, according to the charity CALM, it is suicide that is the biggest killer of young men, not accidents or illness. Likewise, it is men who make up the overwhelming majority of the homeless and rough sleepers. And yet, when do you hear the issue of "homeless men" ever being addressed? Whenever male suffering is at issue, men are hidden behind gender-neutral terms such "the homeless", "homeless people" and "rough sleepers".

Mr. Reilly, let me ask you, how do you think such men end up being homeless? I'll give you a clue — the primary cause is not recession, but domestic violence. Homeless men are the dirty secret that society refuses to acknowledge, they are the human overflow of male targeted abuse and childhood neglect — the little boys who were once denied care and nurture.

What people are now starting realise is that, when their little boys grow up, society will no longer see them as human beings, but as "just men" — utilitarian providers lacking in human worth and legitimate targets for social hostility and discrimination. While your wealth may protect you, if the wheels ever came off your own life, you will discover just how little intrinsic human value you have in this society as a male. For example, when a man is physically attacked, abused, and even horrifically mutilated, he is not seen as a human being in need of care, but as a source of fun and ridicule. Where do you think this will end if people like you continue to give credence to the ideologies of people like Brennan?

We in the men's human rights movement are not a bunch of angry misogynists, but are simply trying to improve society's negative stereotypical view of males, so that boys growing up today won't have to face a dystopian future.

Mr Reilly, you have no idea what have blundered into, have you? Maybe you should just close your eyes and go back to helping "high net worth individuals" avoid paying tax.

Yours sincerely

Andy Thomas

PS. Anyone needing tax advice, can find Peter J. Reilly's blog here.Andy Thomas (Andy Man)http://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-26330756505515172152013-06-16T08:02:00.000+01:002013-06-16T08:02:03.395+01:00We are the radicals nowSaul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" is a book which has our name on it. After all, the Men's Human Rights Movement is, in reality, the most radical movement ever in the history of the human species. Andy Thomas explains...

I groan inwardly whenever somebody pushes a book at me, and insists: "You must read this!"

The thing is, after reading Steve Moxon's "The Woman Racket", I was smashed as a going human concern. It isn't healthy to keep focusing on "the problem" without sight of "the solution", and I now feel a little reluctant to expose myself to further crushing analysis of how bad "the problem" is.

With that in mind, I'd like to introduce a particular book, and urge you to read this! But trust me; this one speaks of the "the solution", rather than "the problem".

Rules for Radicals, by Saul D. Alinsky, was first published in 1972. Having been extensively used as activist handbook by various left-wing and environmental groups, the impact of this book have been far reaching, although many outside political and PR circles may not have heard of it. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the sheer bloody effectiveness of Alinsky's counsel has made him an unpopular figure to those on the Right.

Alinsky began his professional life as an organiser for the Congress of Industrial Relations in the US. What he learned about union strategies in industrial disputes, he applied later in his work as a community organiser in the black ghettoes of Chicago and Oakland. Shortly before his death in 1972, he distilled his experiences and insights into a relatively short and accessible book. While not quite a step-by-step instruction manual, Rules for Radicals provides inspiration and, more usefully, strategy and tactics for anyone involved in direct, but non-violent, activism.

The opening page of the book begins...

"What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be."
Alinsky goes on to present a distinctly Marxist approach that is rooted in a world-view of perpetual conflict between the "Haves" and the "Have-Nots" of life. The book's overriding purpose is to empower the Have-Nots, and when I first read it, I was struck by its potential applicability to our own struggle. For example, when contemplating injustice and the often perplexing lack of male response to egregious attacks upon their identity and human worth, I am often reminded of some of Alinsky's observations, including these two:

"...if people feel they don't have power to change a bad situation, then they do not think about it."
And:

"Remember, too, that a powerless people will not be purposefully curious about life, and they then cease being alive."
For anyone who has attempted to communicate the male human rights issue to those who prefer to turn away, these sentiments must feel rather apt.

I grew up in a working town in the time of its transition from a centre of coal mining and manufacturing to one of unemployment and welfare dependency. My father was a union representative who stood in picket lines as they were charged by police (or as he claims, by soldiers in police uniforms without identity numbers). While my early memories of politics were coloured by TV news of "Militant", the extreme wing of the labour party in the 1980s, I sometimes wonder if I had been a young man in the early 20th century, would I have been an active member in the British Labour Movement back then? I also contemplate the parallel between that thought and the here and now of the early 21st century — a time in which I have somehow found myself to be a member of the Men's Human Rights Movement. It seems that I have always been a bit of a radical, and somewhat unfashionable.

This is the thing — the landscape in which we live out our lives has always been in flux. Our universe is one of perpetual change and conflict between opposing forces. Perhaps the single attribute that has made Marxism so enduring is that, by teaching its followers to view life through a prism of eternal conflict, it embraces change.

As described by Alinsky, the Haves of life fear change because they have nowhere to go but down. Whereas life's Have-Nots, with nowhere to go but up, have no such fear. If we see his words in the context of own movement as being a harbinger of change, I think he describes our experiences rather well:

"Religious, economic, social, political, and legal tracts endlessly attack all revolutionary ideas and action for change as immoral, fallacious and against God, country, and mother. These literary sedations by the status quo include the threat that, since all such movements are unpatriotic, subversive, spawned in hell and reptilian in their creeping insidiousness, dire punishments will be meted out to their supporters. All great revolutions, including Christianity, the various reformations, democracy, capitalism, and socialism, have suffered these epithets in the times of their birth."

Today's feminist revolutionaries may think they are radical, but they are nothing of the sort — they are simply fashionable. They represent more of the same; it is we who represent meaningful change.

Because effective organisation of people is essential to bring about change, the key player in Rules for Radicals is what Alinsky's refers to as "the organiser". An organiser is not so much a local leader, but more a creative thinker who's initial task is to "stir up dissatisfaction and discontent", and to "provide a channel into which the people can angrily pour their frustrations." The organiser's job description does not, in fact, appear to be a particularly appealing one, especially in the early days, as Alinsky explains:

"In the early days the organizer moves out front in any situation of risk where the power of the establishment can get someone's job, call in an overdue payment, or any other form of retaliation, partly because these dangers would cause many local people to back off from conflict. Here the organizer serves as a protective shield: if anything goes wrong it is all his fault, he has the responsibility. If they are successful all credit goes to the local people."
And:

"The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a "dangerous enemy."
Nevertheless, reward comes if the organiser is successful...

"The organizer's job is to begin to build confidence and hope in the idea of organization and thus in the people themselves: to win limited victories, each which will build confidence and the feeling that 'if we can do so much with what we have now just think what we will be able to do when we get big and strong.'"
However, I do wonder if Alinsky saw the construction of mass power organisations more of an end in its own right, rather than simply a means to advance a just cause. He, himself, says:

"One of the great problems in the beginning of an organization is, often, that the people do not know what they want."
Thus, one of the key roles of the organiser is help the people to know what they want by identifying the "enemy" for them. Or, as he puts things:

"Before men can act an issue must be polarized. Men will act only when are convinced that their cause is 100 per cent on the side of the angels and that the opposition are 100 per cent on the side of the devil."
Many of us in the Men's Human Rights Movement, myself included, have no previous background in activism, protest or social politics. Most of us have started out from nowhere and are here simply because we have woken up to the tide of injustice that threatens to engulf us. But what to do? How often have we seen wounded men on forums complain bitterly of injustice, as if simply talking about the problem is actually doing something about the problem? Nobody is going to read their comments, recognise their plight, and put things right for them.

Nobody is coming to save them.

Endless rhetorical debate about "the problem", without reference to "the solution", is nothing other than emotional masturbation. What I am suggesting to anyone who might consider themselves an activist is that a good place to go for inspiration would be Alinsky specifically because he counsels on how to be a "realistic radical", rather than a "rhetorical one".

I warn, however, that with Rules for Radicals there also comes a sickening awareness of how its tactics have been deployed against the men and boys from the 1960s onwards, and I found the sheer bloody cynicism of it all overwhelming. As I turned its pages, it dawned on me that the entire male gender had, in effect, been identified as "the enemy" in order to "polarize the issue" and, thus, create conflict were none existed previously.

You see, back in the 1960s, those subscribing to Marxist ideology had a problem — the lives of the working classes were being transformed by higher wages and property ownership, and the old Marxist model of an oppressed proletariat and a wealthy bourgeoisie was in danger of breaking down. A possible solution, at least to some women on the left, was to re-purpose Marxist theory in the context of a gender war rather than a conflict between social classes defined by property ownership. The players were thus changed, but game went on. In fact, patriarchy theory was never anything other than a pseudo-scientific construct manufactured by Kate Millet and her ilk to give a veneer of credibility to the idea that men and women were, and have always been, at war with each other.

In the hour when I first understood, the sense of betrayal was profound.

Nevertheless, it proves nothing if not how Marxist thinking embraces change. The irony now, of course, is that it is men and boys who are the Have-Nots of western society, both in terms of social empowerment and wealth ownership. However, I'm not so sure that I would go as far as to claim that all women represent the Haves. Instead, I would argue that feminism has not universally benefited women at all, especially when you start to consider the hidden implications for them (a modest home in the UK now requires two full-time incomes to pay the mortgage). However, there are a subset of women with disproportionate influence who have been feminism's prime benefactors — they are the feminist academics and public sector elite — the bourgeoisie of our age.

Times have changed since Alinsky's penned his influential work, and some of the more hands-on tactics he suggests may not be so appropriate today. For example, one particularly delightful tactic is, what he lovingly refers to as, a "shit-in" (as opposed to a "sit-in"). This is where a handful of protesters occupy all available toilet cubicles at crowded public event and absolutely refuse to come out. The resulting distress of the crowd is a great cause of mayhem, apparently.

The sky turns darker, however, when Alinksy tackles ethics and how "the end justifies the use of almost any means." On this issue, I can't help but wonder whether his use of the word "almost" was a conscious addition to keep his book on the right-side of the line that separates riot from direct action. I doubt he cared that much for the distinction himself and, because of this, I think that we in the Men's Human Rights Movement would do well to remember the following instead:

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster." - Friedrich Nietzsche

I recommend Alinsky, not for ethical guidance, but for pragmatic inspiration. His book is, after all, mostly about communication, strategy and tactics. It's also a book about change — not only how to effect change, but how to live with and thrive in a climate of change. In the end, we must follow our own moral compass. It is our prerogative to take from Rules for Radicals what we find useful, and disregard what we find unacceptable.

Human society has rested on the back of male disposability ever since the time of Lucy*, and what we in the Men's Human Rights Movement represent is the beginning of the end of that and the start of a new era for our species. We are not just radical, we are in every sense the most radical thinking movement in the history of human society.

This article was first published on MRA London.

Andy Thomas
Copright 2013. All rights reserved.

Notes. Summary of Alinsky's Tactics

1. Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.

2. Never go outside the expertise of your people.

3. Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.

4. Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

6. A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

8. Keep the pressure on. Never let up.

9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

10. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

11. If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.

12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

* Lucy (Australopithecus)Andy Thomas (Andy Man)http://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-28185391535558640352013-06-16T07:56:00.002+01:002013-06-16T07:59:17.571+01:00NCDV's Steve Conner — "Drag him away"Last year, a small UK non-governmental outfit launched a particularly distasteful attack on half the human population. Their campaign took the form of a huge interactive billboard at Euston Station. It was called "Drag Him Away", and here it is:

The billboard showed looped footage of a man hectoring a passive woman. Although no actual crime was depicted, passers-by were invited to interact with the billboard using their mobile phone in order to see the man "dragged away". The organisation behind it, the National Centre for Domestic Violence (NCDV), is headed by a barrister called Steve Conner.

As a teenager, I recall how I was filled with so much shame after learning about how "men rape and abuse women", that I wrote into a women's magazine to apologise on behalf of my entire gender. I believed myself to be the "one good man", and felt an overwhelming obligation to stand up to these "other men", thus letting the world know that I wasn't one of them. While I watched the video of NCDV's stunt, I was reminded of this as I contemplated how dehumanising it it must be for a young boy or teenager to look up and behold himself through this prism of shame and guilt. Like I once did, many will simply disassociate themselves from their gender, rather than to see "Drag Him Away" for what it is — an opportunistic attack on their human identity by a professional NGO keen to raise its profile in a misandric state culture.

A "Drag Her Away" campaign, one in which people are invited to dispense justice to a female abuser, would never fly of course. It would widely be perceived as an unacceptable attack on women in general and would come in for fierce criticism (no funding would ever be made available for such a campaign in any case). However, NCDV's campaign was not targeted women, but at men — and this in today's society makes it acceptable, normal, even virtuous. What could possibly be wrong with protecting women from abusive men, many would ask?

By the late 1930s, having for years been painted as devious money lenders who were unclean and sub-human, German society reached the stage that social hostility against Jewish people had become normalised. We like to delude ourselves that we have consigned such things to history and, today, a billboard featuring a "Drag the Jew Away" campaign, one in which an archetypal Jewish figure is shown hectoring a passive Aryan, would be seen exactly for what it is — disgusting propaganda belonging in a 1930s Nazi film reel, not 21st century Britain. The lesson we have utterly failed to learn, however, is that in the time of its happening, all prejudice is seen as acceptable, normal, even virtuous.

In the here and now of today's "enlightened" society, after years of ideologically motivated campaigning, it is males who have been painted as perpetrators of sexual and domestic violence, and dominant oppressors.[1]

In reality, long standing cultural reasons and the legitimate fear of being wrongly identified as an abuser have always inhibited men in reporting domestic violence against them. However, government crime surveys, such as the BCS in the UK,[2] and its equivalent CDC Intimate Partner Violence Survey in the US,[3] are now presenting a picture of approximate parity between the sexes. Additionally, research increasingly shows that the majority of inter-partner violence is mutual, i.e. the violence and verbal abuse goes both ways, and where it is unilateral, the initiators of such violence are overwhelmingly women.[4] Within the government and non-governmental agencies of the west, however, domestic violence has been defined as "gender violence" or, increasingly, "violence against women and girls". (See the 2011 UK government policy paper, A call to end violence against women and girls.)

This is the great delusion of our age, and to continue to define inter-partner violence as "gender based" is to propagate the myth that one gender is responsible for perpetrating violence against the other, while disregarding and rendering invisible the suffering of millions of boys and adult men. Whether it be physical, verbal or sexual, the origins of abuse lie in early childhood, not in any intrinsic deficiency in males.

Both men and women can be equally abusive in their relationships, and the environments they create for their children is the significant factor in understanding abusive behaviour — for behaviour learned in early childhood, when the child's brain is in flux and the personality in formation, is carried forward into adult relationships.[5] As an abused child grows up, early emotional damage goes to define his or her default emotional responses and thinking patterns in adulthood. It is a cycle stretching back generations, and the reality is so simple that it should be self-evident. Only now, however, are MRI scans being used for the first time to reveal the damage in the brains of abused children.[6]

The problem is not gender-based — it is inter-generational. And the solution to it lies, not in curing some intrinsic male defect, but in our treatment of children. There is no reason why men and boys, therefore, should continue to wear society's garland of shame.

Now, to be fair, NCDV's stated aim is to provide a free legal service, both to the police and to individual "clients", in order to obtain emergency injunctions against alleged perpetrators of abuse. I do not condemn NCDV in this, but recognise that in those cases where domestic violence is uni-directional, or largely so, such a facility would be invaluable. Nor is it lost me that the language used throughout the NCDV website is gender-neutral, and NCDV states that its service is open to "anyone", not just women. Their use of visual communication on the other hand, as expressed by their website imagery and past campaign videos, is strongly stereotyped and hard-hitting. Previous NCDV campaign videos, which include this and this, exclusively depict men as abusers and women as victims.

It is with the sheer ugliness of "Drag Him Away", however, that I take particular issue. I have to question the commitment to due process on display here, when NCDV's own media campaign so clearly gives the message that any man can now be "dragged away" on the basis of a mobile phone text or mobile app. It represents more than NCDV's contribution to the negative stereotyping of males — it takes the whole thing to the next level.

I solemnly predict that the day will come when the accumulative fallout of years of anti-male propaganda won't stay confined to "other men", but will be felt by your son, your brother and your father. Every mother of a son should realise that when he grows up, society will increasingly view him with suspicion and contempt, and in a culture where guilt is assumed by default, virtue of his gender, the only thing preventing any man from being "dragged away" is the absence of an allegation. Many men would have some legitimacy in claiming that we have reached such a point already. One day perhaps, even NCDV's Steve Conner may realise that for himself when society fails to make sufficient distinction between him, or someone he cares about, and the "other man" in his interactive billboard.

Additional Information. NCDV ceased being a UK national charity in February 2012, and became a private limited company, "The Centre For Domestic Violence Ltd", registered no. 07917926. At the time of writing, Companies House lists this company as active but with a "proposal to strike off". The company's annual return appears to be four months overdue.

This article was first published on MRA London.

Written by
Andy Thomas

References
1. For a related discussion, see Neil Lyndon, Big Sister's Memorial: The Legacy of Germaine Greer
2. The British Crime Survey (BCS) for 2010/11 reported that 5% of men and 7% of women had experienced domestic abuse in the year prior to the survey. See: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-statistics/research-statistics/crime-research/hosb0212/hosb0212?view=Binary
3. The American CDC National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey for 2011 reported that 5.0% of men and 5.9% of women reported experiencing rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in the 12 months prior to taking the survey. See: http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_Report2010-a.pdf
4. Graphic generated by SAVE was based on a US study by Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling. Rates of Bidirectional Versus Unidirectional Intimate Partner Violence Across Samples, Sexual Orientations, and Race/Ethnicities: A Comprehensive Review. Partner Abuse Vol. 3 No. 2, 2012.
5. Erin Pizzey, 1982. Prone to Violence. ISBN 978-0600205517
6. Eamon McCrory, 2011. See: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1112/111205-maltreated-children-fMRI-studyAndy Thomas (Andy Man)http://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-43746149109130351372013-06-16T07:35:00.000+01:002013-06-16T07:53:43.041+01:00A female monster and a hidden sufferer?I want you to watch the footage below and make a mental note of what you see taking place. Stop reading here, until after you have watched the video.

There are a number of things happening in this. Did you spot them all?

The woman in the video is clearly a monster. Her behaviour is disgusting and violent; the issue of where the young man should or should not put the refuse is irrelevant. What's more, if he were to lift a finger to defend himself and she picked up the phone to the police as a result, the consequences for him could be severe.

That was the obvious bit.

Then there's the guy with the camera, who thinks it's amusing — until she comes after him that is, at which point the footage ends abruptly. The original up-loader put the video under the "comedy" category and describes it in the low-bar as "highly funny." This says a lot about society's perceptions of male targeted aggression.

But did you spot who is, potentially, the real victim in all of this?

The guy in the blue top — his role in trying to restrain and calm the woman was largely incidental, but he is almost certainly her husband or partner.

While it's not possible to know for certain on the strength of this video alone, I would strongly suspect that he has, in fact, endured a living hell for decades at her hands. Look again at how delicately he attempts to intervene — he is afraid to antagonise her.

A man like this could be in a dire position. His only options would be live in misery or try to escape and lose his home. But at his age, with his parents gone, where would he go and how would he live?

Moreover, wider society will not easily recognise him as the victim in this — did you? For him, there are few options, and they are dwindling...

Duluth Model: Helps men to stop battering women

Recent UK trials with Domestic Violence Protection Orders (DVPOs) have facilitated the immediate removal of those accused of abusive behaviour without need of evidence. An accusation alone suffices, and police are trained to see men only as abusers, not suffers. For example, the title of the 2011 UK government policy paper, "A Call to end violence against women and girls" says it all.

It is an incarnation of the Duluth Model of domestic violence, if ever there was one.

The Duluth Model is a standard intervention approach used throughout the world and is based directly on feminist "patriarchy theory," i.e. that men, such as the man with the blue shirt in video, oppress women. As such, it focuses solely on teaching men not to be batterers.

If that wasn't enough, men, especially those of older generations, are culturally conditioned to believe that should be able to sort out their own problems, thus isolating themselves.

In reality, an innocent man trapped in a relationship with a manipulative and malicious woman would be uniquely powerless. His life would be lived on the edge of a knife in which the threat of a phone call to the police over some perceived wrong or slight would be an ever present reality. If he attempted to flee, the police could be weaponised against him, especially if past allegations had established a track record of his purported behaviour. If, having been abused for years, he snapped and resorted to physical violence himself — that would only condemn him.

If you heap abuse on a man, while denying him the ability to respond, then you are killing that man.

I wonder just how many men, who are primary abuse sufferers, are made to undergo Duluth based "education" programmes each year in order to "teach them not to batter?" In such cases, the effect would be utterly dehumanising — the state would be perpetrating psychological abuse against the abused.

Further viewing: Women Abusing Men In Public — and how society views them. This article was first published on MRA London.

Written by
Andy ThomasAndy Thomas (Andy Man)http://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-7872592219638782642013-01-18T18:42:00.000+00:002013-06-21T14:34:50.076+01:00Who taught you to hate yourself?I have no words of my own I could possibly use to express myself more eloquently than the following few lines taken from the work of an unknown poet:

Men my age are all the same
They hate themselves & feel ashamed
For what they are & cannot change

Little heads filled up with lies
Raised only to apologize
For thousand-year conspiracies
In gender-studies histories

These words, written by L. Byron [1], had a profound effect on me when I first read them. Although I chose to use them as the opening to my latest video production, I ultimately wanted to take a different approach to communicating the men's rights issue than simply documenting yet more injustices to men and boys in society.

In the video, below, I am attempting to showcase—without compromise to the feminist narrative—the positive traits of men and those aptitudes which are typically male. I do hope you like it.

Direct Link: http://youtu.be/64nFPc93idc

Although it was not my intention at the outset, I took inspiration from the words of Malcom X and used them to help define the message I wanted to convey. I make no apology for this. His legacy is a checkered one and, according to many, his philosophy was one of racism, black supremacy, and violence. I can't justify many of the views he preached and don't intend to try, but I would like to give you this quote [2], which were his words shortly before his death in 1965:

I realized racism isn't just a black and white problem. It's brought bloodbaths to about every nation on earth at one time or another.

Brother, remember the time that white college girl came into the restaurant—the one who wanted to help the [Black] Muslims and the whites get together—and I told her there wasn't a ghost of a chance and she went away crying? Well, I've lived to regret that incident. In many parts of the African continent I saw white students helping black people. Something like this kills a lot of argument. I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I'm sorry for now. I was a zombie then—like all [Black] Muslims—I was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march. Well, I guess a man's entitled to make a fool of himself if he's ready to pay the cost. It cost me 12 years.

That was a bad scene, brother. The sickness and madness of those days—I'm glad to be free of them.

In fact, toward the end of his life, Malcolm X retracted and apologised for many of his preachings. I've learned for myself that many people are unable to do this; many would rather defend their delusion than face reality. In the end, Malcolm X was willing to own his mistakes and admit them. He paid for that with his life.

He was a radical, but I say he was also a humanitarian who lived in extreme times in history. And whatever you think of some of his earlier views, to a people used to accepting low human worth, his message was a hugely powerful one, as demonstrated by the following extract from a speech in Los Angeles in 1962:

Who taught you to hate the color of your skin? Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin, to such extent that you bleach to get like the white man? Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lip? Who taught you to hate yourself, from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind? Who taught you to hate the race that you belong to—so much so that you don't want to be around each other? No... Before you come asking Mr. Muhammad does he teach hate, you should ask yourself who taught you to hate being what God made you.

Malcolm X helped to demolish the negative stereotyping of black people, ultimately equipping them with the tools with which to build their own perception of self-worth.

Is it possible that we could do this for ourselves? Is it possible that we can start to believe in ourselves once more?

This is so important and so worthwhile because the systematic negative stereotyping of males is no longer restricted to adult men, but is now common place in the classroom. Our feminised education system, and wider society, teaches young boys that all the good things in the world are about women, and all the bad things are about them. Many boys, especially those lacking fathers, have come to understand that this world has no place for them. Their natural path is to drop out and fall into drugs, gangs, isolation, alcoholism and suicide.

I knew a man recently, an alcoholic, who's only ambition was to own a large screen TV. While visiting him at home, I commented on why he had a rag hanging from the letter box of his front door. He explained that it was flapping in the wind and he had stuffed a rag in there to try and silence it. A moment or two later, he added, "I've been calling the council for months and months to come out and fix it, but they never do."

Naturally, I asked him why he didn't just fix it himself, and the wounded and confused look he gave me in reply told me a great deal about his upbringing. I withdrew myself from his company, while he continued to spend his days in front of the TV, drinking cider from a plastic bottle, hoping that someone would come and save him.

Then one day, I saw social services clearing out his house. I don't know what happened to him.

Likewise, many men who find themselves in desperate situations, often in connection with family courts, cling to the hope that if only people could see what was happening to them—if only everyone knew just how bad things were—somebody will be outraged and something will be done. What they fail to grasp, but we've come to understand, is that society does not care about men.

No one is coming to save them.

No one is coming to save us. The pendulum is not going to swing back unless we are prepared to swing it. It's up to ourselves to do the saving.

In my own way, this is the message I'm trying to convey in the video. I wanted to produce something that tells us about ourselves—something that reminds us all, myself included, just what it is that we really are, and not what we have been told all our lives.

A man's life has never been about privilege; it's historically been about hard-work, responsibility and sacrifice. It's also historically been about providing for and protecting women and children. We are not useless, stupid, brutish oafs and emotional reptiles.

Far from it...

It was the toil of men—that of our fathers and grandfathers—that built the industry, the railways, the water and sewage systems that lifted millions, if not billions, out of subsistence level poverty. It is typically the male sex that is willing to shoulder the risk and endure the suffering necessary to push back human boundaries for the benefit of others. It is typically the male left-brain psyche that is the inventive one, the one to gaze at the heavens and to have the inclination to go there.

Young boys deserve a better future than that of a sperm donor and a walking cash machine, only to be cast aside when of no more use. They are human beings, not the pack animals of the human race.

No schoolboy should ever have to sit in class while his teacher makes him feel responsible for all the wrongs perpetrated throughout history, or makes him feel worthless and inadequate, or tells him that his gender harms the other and that women will need protecting from him when he gets older. This should be seen for what it is, nothing other than an ideologue abusing her position as a teacher in order to deliver dehumanising classroom propaganda to children. That's misandry, miss!

We need to drive a positive dialogue about males, not just one of injustice and suffering. We must teach men and boys the truth about themselves if they are ever build their own identity free of feminism's stigmatising invective.

Reference
1. Feminists Killed Kurt Cobain, L. Byron. TriggerAlert.BlogSpot.com
2. Parks, Gordon, "Malcolm X: The Minutes of Our Last Meeting", Clarke, p.122Andy Thomas (Andy Man)http://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-30370373835825435992013-01-10T18:40:00.000+00:002013-03-06T18:41:59.558+00:00Dawn Raid Music - Now that's Entertainment!We already know the answer to the following question. When is it OK to celebrate gratuitous sexual violence, mutilation and torture? When the victim is male, of course, and the topic of Lorena Bobbitt's sexual mutilation of her sleeping husband has been dealt with previously by Peter Lloyd and John the Other.

What I want to do here, however, is to expose the repugnant prejudice masquerading as morality in the form of Dawn Raid Entertainment, the music label behind Aaradhna's new song "Lorena Bobbitt".

Here's a screen-grab and a link to the official video on YouTube:

Aaradhna - Lorena Bobbitt (Official Music Video)

In this, Aaradhna is the archetypical "woman scorned" taking out what is presented as a justifiable revenge for some perceived infidelity. The horrific suffering that would ensue in reality, and indeed did for Lorena Bobbitt's husband, is skipped over and the video ends with the heroic Aaradhna being driven away in the back of police car.

Bullshit!

The reality is that this is nothing other a portrayal of a sadistic and psychotic woman inflicting sexually motivated domestic violence on a helpless man. And society's moral acceptance of this must be brought to book.

In history, past persecutions of identifiably separate groups were always seen as morally acceptable during the time it was happening. This is what allowed such things to happen. In Nazi Germany, the eradication of the Jewish Problem was seen by many as righteous, and in earlier times, slave plantation owners attended church and preached God.

Today, men are seen as the problem. They are portrayed in the media as lacking in unique personality, and their only human worth is that which can be achieved in relation to a woman. It is, therefore, possible to depict their suffering as, not only acceptable, but as morally just. We are on the edge of an abyss with this. At the time of writing, the top comment on the official Aaradhna "Lorena Bobbitt" music video was that by female poster calling herself "856MiiSsiinqYhUuJaZz", and reads:

"To all them unfaithful men out there! This is what yous are gonna get hah! Loveeee this, Aaradhna your amazing!!"

I would, therefore, like to take this opportunity to personally remind Aaradhnaben Jayantilal Patel (aka " Aaradhna"), Dawn Raid Entertainment and, indeed, the whole fucking world, that men and boys are unique human beings, with feelings, capable of both suffering and independent thought. They are not the property of women such as Lorena Bobbitt or entitled princesses such as Miss 856-whatever. They are, in fact, free to associate and have sexual relationships with whomever they so choose, and should be able to do so without fear of grotesque sexually motivated violence. Any woman who feels that she is entitled to enact this kind of sadism and violence, simply because she feels unhappy with her relationship, is nothing but a depraved monster, and should be seen as such.Andy Thomas (Andy Man)http://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-23892433799644900112013-01-05T19:09:00.002+00:002013-01-05T19:09:48.289+00:00If you can't support us, then get out of our wayI have recently be able to resolve a personal dilemma I had been wrestling with for sometime. The solution isn't one I particularly like, but it is necessary nevertheless.

When I took my first faltering steps in the MRM, I initially spent time on various forums where I often found myself appalled by the childish attitudes on display. From the start, I knew in my heart that here was something that I could truly believe in, but at one point, I almost walked away from the whole men's thing in dismay. I'm glad I didn't, because it has ultimately proved to be a positive and liberating experience. And I now believe in it more than ever.

However, that there are so many who were emotionally harmed as vulnerable children is not lost on me. There is a sea of lost and damaged men out there. I know; I was one of those and I have the physical scars to prove it.

So my dilemma has always been how to respond to those who represent a "car crash" for us all—those who would selfishly, unintentionally perhaps, derail everything we stand for with their outpouring of misogynistic, self pitying, attention seeking on public forums. Such people are a gift to the feminist media who will triumphantly hold them up as typically examples of men's rights supporters, especially as we begin to make inroads into the mainstream press.

I have realised, however, that the answer to my own dilemma lay in how the moderators of AVfM's forum deal with such people. I must confess that, at first, I thought the moderators were being unnecessarily heavy-handed. However, I have come to think differently and I now completely support AVfM's policy on dealing with would-be trolls.

I only wish there was a better way because I stand for all men and boys. I will also stand for women who have been genuinely subject to injustice and for women who want to be treated as responsible adults rather than spoilt children. But ultimately, what I do I do for the future generations of boys who will one day become men. I put this above all else and, if necessary, I will stand against anyone who represents a threat to this.

I have personally put everything I have into this endeavour—my time and effort, my financial resources, my heart, my soul. I have nothing to gain other than the experience of engaging in life again and my own salvation. So, you see, it is everything and, believe me, I will fight to protect it whatever the cost to myself. I will not see my efforts and the efforts of others splashed to the four winds by selfish and irresponsible behaviour, no matter how damaged some individuals may be.

What we are doing here is more than just some kind of campaign or awareness raising. We are building an alternative culture—a culture fit for the 21st century and a better future for all. And I say that this is something truly worth fighting for. Its organic nature means that it will eventually take on a life of its own and will become difficult for anyone to stop. But until that happens, unless we can effectively deal with those who will hold us back, even if they are suffering human beings, we will forever be condemned to wring our hands while exclaiming, "But what can we do?"

And future generations of boys will be lost.

So with that, I say that if you can't support us in a constructive and positive fashion, if you can't put others before your own ego, if you can't look inside yourself with honesty, if you are not prepared to take responsibility for your own behaviour, if all you can do is to criticise the efforts of others while contributing nothing yourself, then get the fuck out of our way. We will not stop for you.Andy Thomas (Andy Man)http://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-16151894704246202102012-12-20T18:45:00.000+00:002013-03-06T18:46:27.594+00:00Germaine Greer: A lesson that we have not yet learnedFEATURED ARTICLE: This is London calling, and here is a message. In fact, there are two messages in what follows. One for every mother of a son and another, quite different message, to the great and the good of our society.

In 2009, Germaine Greer began a lecture in Liverpool with the line, "What I want you to think about tonight is whether equality is what we want?" She never explicitly tells us what women should want, if not equality. What we get instead is a diatribe intended for a self-selecting audience rather than mainstream consumption—and it makes interesting viewing.

The video below contains a selection of quotes from this lecture, which she called Equality is not Enough.

Germaine Greer is the leading icon of mainstream feminism, a Professor Emerita at the University of Warwick and a Bye-Fellow of Newnham College Cambridge. She is also considered by the establishment to be an influential thinker of our time and, as such, is given prime time coverage by the BBC and others throughout the world. So if you are still clinging to the notion that "feminism is all about equality", then here's the truth in Greer's own words. At the bottom of this page, you will also find links to the full recording.

Superficially, Equality is not Enough is little more than bizarre rambling conjecture, lacking in any rational foundation or academic rigour, and she presents no tangible conclusion. She finishes the lecture with the assertion that women are socialistic because they are hard-working—just like bees. Greer is no fool, however, and she pitches the level of her content to her listeners, simultaneously appealing to their ego while rocking them, almost casually, backward and forth between the two underlying paradigms that form the real basis of the talk. And it is here that the communication takes place, and the message is this:

Males are sub-human (the silverback gorilla is an analogy she uses repeatedly), malign and capable only of hard-wired behaviour

Women are both virtuous and hard working, but are hated by men and thwarted by them at every turn

Greer's real talent lies, not in any academic prowess, but in the subliminal. I've no doubt that most of her audience believed they were party to some kind of lively intellectual debate. They were not. Instead, they were lead, all too willingly perhaps, through a series of straw man analogies and divisive connotations. Should women want equality with men, given that men are animal-like and malign? She never explicitly answers her own question, although I suspect few actually noticed.

I wonder just how many mothers in the audience of Greer's lecture actually made the connection with reality—that their boys will grow up one day and, when that happens, they will be viewed with contempt by the very women sitting next to them? Or do such women seriously believe that exceptions will be made for their own sons?

History has taught us a valuable lesson that we have not yet learned. Once we stop thinking about a group of people as human, it becomes morally acceptable to target them for aggression and for society to harm them. We like to delude ourselves that we have confined extremist ideology to the past, but we have done nothing of the sort. All we have really done is to ensure that the leading figures of next such ideology will not be instantly recognisable by a silly moustache. So here is a personal message to the great and the good of our time—the academic sycophants, career politicians and corporate sponsors who, in the hope that some prestige will rub off on them as they clink glasses with Germaine Greer at conferences and after dinner speeches, provide her a platform and a veneer of academic credibility.

The message is this:

The day will come when the toxic nature of her ideology is seen for what it is, and when it does, you will not be allowed to simply fade into the background. We intend to personally manacle you to Greer and her ideology, so that your names are remembered in connection with hers.

Further discussion: A separate video discussion, by Girl Writes What, which explores the implications of feminism's tenets is available here: Feminism, y'all gotta own this sh*t.

__________________

Full Lecture:  The full video recording of "Equality is not Enough" can be found below. The lecture was recorded at the "Writing on the Wall (Rebel Rants) in Liverpool (2009).

Equality is not Enough - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6Andy Thomas (Andy Man)http://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-10868674920559192192012-11-18T22:51:00.002+00:002013-06-21T13:48:49.715+01:00Pankhurst - The White Feather Betrayal of HistoryIn modern culture, the story we are given is a simple one—in the past men had the vote and women did not. For example, on the topic of "Women and the Vote", the UK Parliament website states simply and without qualification1, "Before 1918 only men were allowed to vote in parliamentary elections." Indeed, the picture we are generally presented with (such as this poignant example from the BBC) is a very distorted one. According to this popular narrative, the suffragettes led by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst fought a noble campaign for female suffrage and, after a valiant struggle, were ultimately successful. And curiously, the campaign of intimidation, violence and arson they waged largely goes without criticism.

The reality was much more complex, however, and many important historical perspectives have been airbrushed from of our collective memory. For example, the simple fact was that at the start of the 20th century, most men also did not have the right to a parliamentary vote. But this is rarely mentioned.

Only wealthy property owning men could vote in parliamentary elections, and prior to the 1832 Reform Act, only 2% of men in the UK had such a vote2. As of 1903, this had risen to one third3, but the fact remains that, whilst Mrs. Pankhurst and her supporters were fighting for their right to vote, the overwhelming majority of young men sent to the trenches in 1914 lacked any political franchise. Unlike the suffragettes, however, they were fighting for the their lives rather than the vote.

The suffragettes, fronted by the organisation founded by Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughters—the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU)—weren't the only group of the period campaigning for suffrage. Whereas other groups supported universal adult suffrage, such as the Labour movement, the suffragettes advocated a separate bill for wealthy women with property, i.e. women such as themselves. It is somewhat perverse, therefore, that the suffragettes have become synonymous with universal suffrage when this simply wasn't the case at all.

The following extract from the Socialist Standard4 in 1908 makes clear its opposition to their proposals.

 "Men vote at present under the £10 franchise. The suffrage is thus upon a property basis with plural voting for the wealthy. Therefore, according to the proposals of the women Suffragists, only those women having the necessary property qualifications are to be allowed to vote. This excludes not only all those single working women unable to qualify because of their poverty, but it also bars practically the whole of the married women of the working class who have no property qualifications apart from their husbands'. Further, it increases enormously the voting power of the well-to-do, since the head of the wealthy household can always impart the necessary qualifications to all the women of his house, while the working-man, through his poverty, is entirely unable to do so."
John Bruce Glasier, chairmen of the Independent Labour Party, wrote in his diary after a meeting with Emmeline and her daughter Christabel that they were guilty of "miserable individualist sexism", and that he could not support their organisation.

Throughout the first decade of the 20th century, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst waged a campaign of intimidation, violence, vandalism and arson. Shortly after the outbreak of war, however, they agreed to cease their militant activities and the WSPU was promptly awarded a grant from the government5 for the sum of £2,000 (not an insignificant amount back then). Emmeline Pankhurst also declared her support for the war effort and began to demand military conscription for men (which was not introduced until 1916).

Furthermore, the suffragettes were among those who handed white feathers to males not in uniform, including teenage boys as young as 16. Sylvia Pankhurst wrote in her chronicle, "The Suffragette Movement"...

 "Mrs. Pankhurst toured the country, making recruiting speeches. Her supporters handed the white feather to every young man they encountered wearing civilian dress, and bobbed up at Hyde Park meetings with placards: "Intern Them All."
Being both socialised to serve their country and subject to such stigmatizing female coercion, many males felt no option but to enlist in a war that would killed millions of them. A poignant example of this is given by the following incidental comment found in a book of the period about the lice and fleas that afflicted soldiers living in squalid trenches6.

 "...the half-hysterical ladies who offer white feathers to youths whose hearts are breaking because medical officer after medical officer has refused them the desire of their young hearts to serve their country."
While her suffragettes carried placards demanding the "right to serve" by undertaking war work, Mrs. Pankhurst proclaimed that "The least that men can do is that every man of fighting age should prepare himself to redeem his word to women..."

Some 8.7 million British men redeemed themselves in the trenches of the First World War. For them, it wasn't a right, but an obligation. Some 704,803 men from the UK were killed and a further 2.2 million wounded7, with many losing limbs. The overwhelming majority of these never had the vote, but they were expected to lay down their lives nevertheless. There are few references to the average age of the British soldier and, in any case, many teenage boys lied about their age in order to enlist. However, of those executed for failing their obligation to redeem their word, as Mrs. Pankhurst put it, the average age was in the mid-twenties8.

Contrary to popular perception today, the suffragettes did not have widespread support at the time, especially given their proposal for limited female suffrage and advocacy of violence. Nevertheless, Emmeline Pankhurst wielded considerable influence amongst society's political elite and from 1914 onward the government, being primarily concerned with the war effort, considered that the WSPU would be useful in helping to breakdown union resistance to women filling the roles left by men in the workplace.

It certainly cannot be denied that, in times past, society placed gender specific burdens and expectations on men and women. Many argue that given the brutal hardship of life, far from being detrimental to women, such distinctions were largely beneficial. However, with the advent of industrialisation throughout the 19th century, society was changing rapidly and things also had to change as far as society's roles for men and women were concerned. But did the WSPU campaign of intimidation and destruction hasten female suffrage, or delay it? Speaking in 1913, Prime Minister Lloyd George, exclaimed...

"Haven't the Suffragettes the sense to see that the very worst way of campaigning for the vote is to try and intimidate a man into giving them what he would gladly give otherwise?

At the conclusion of the war, women over the age of 30 became eligible to vote in parliamentary elections. Rightly or wrongly, it was argued at the time that the age restriction was necessary to avoid a gender imbalance in voting given that so many young males had lost their lives. By 1928, however, universal suffrage for both men and women over the age of 21 became a reality.

Today, next to the Houses of Parliament in London, stands a bronze statue of Emmeline Pankhurst. Located at the right-hand side of the half-rotunda extending from the base, there's a dedication to her daughter Christabel. In fact, Emmeline had two other daughters—Sylvia and Adela, both of whom were equally instrumental in the formation the WSPU. However, you will find no reference to either Sylvia or Adela at Emmeline's statue, and on gaining an insight to the Pankhurst family life, it's hard not to feel a degree of compassion for them...

In real life, Emmeline was an abusively controlling mother and her children were born into an emotionally toxic environment. Sylvia wrote in her chronicle of Adela...

"The desire was a reaction from the knowledge that though a brilliant speaker and one of the hardest workers in the movement, she was often regarded with more disapproval than approbation by Mrs Pankhurst and Christabel, and was the subject of a sharper criticism than the other organisers had to face."

Clearly, Christabel was Emmeline's protégée and nothing Sylvia or Adela could do would have ever met with their mother's approval. After their father's death in 1898, Adela gave a similarly desolate account of family life...

"Mother was now involved in public work. We had no friends, we played no games and went nowhere… she took no interest in our affairs. Christabel seemed at a distance, Sylvia hopelessly depressed… Public life was a relief to her…"

Emmeline and Christabel were enthusiastic advocates of violence but, as female members of the upper-class, they were relatively immune from harm themselves. With the increasing and widespread use of arson by the WSPU, both Sylvia and Adela distanced themselves from such tactics and rejected their mother's politics, eventually becoming estranged from her. Fearing Adela would criticise the WSPU in public, Emmeline had Adela sent to Australia in 1914 on a one-way ticket. She never saw her again.

The forced feeding of suffragettes in prison is widely held up today as an example of their bravery. Although Emmeline and Christabel urged others to do so, neither of them were willing to submit to it themselves (only Sylvia had the courage to do so). Tended by servants and chauffeured to rallies in a motorcar, Emmeline Pankhurst's life was one of privilege—she never had to face the horrors which she readily advocated for others. It is a travesty that this women is so idolised by our modern political establishment, and her ideology so misrepresented in our culture.

By Andy Man

Acknowledgement. Female narration provided by "Girl Writes What" (used with permission). For her full discussion concerning the white feather campaign and the US male-only draft, see her blog.

References:

1. UK Parliament website, Women and the Vote. Link: http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/electionsvoting/womenvote/
2. Steve Moxon, The Woman Racket ("True Sufferers for Suffrage")
3. Spartacus Educational, Emmeline Pankhurst. Link: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/WpankhurstE.htm
4. Socialist Standard, No. 46 June 1908 ("Suffragette Humbug "). Link: http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1900s/1908/no-46-june-1908/suffragette-humbug
5. Spartacus Educational, Emmeline Pankhurst. Link: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/WpankhurstE.htm
6. The Minor Horrors of War, 1915. Link: http://archive.org/details/minorhorrorsofwa00shipuoft
7. Chris Baker. The Long, Long Trail, The British Army in the Great War. Link: http://www.1914-1918.net/faq.htm
8. Wikipedia, The British Army during World War I. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Army_during_World_War_I Andy Thomas (Andy Man)http://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-70449191470128167412012-08-11T02:12:00.001+01:002012-08-11T06:16:49.656+01:00The State of Play for Men: Gender Pay GapMyth: Sex discrimination in the workplace is responsible for the wage gap between the genders, with women being paid less than men for the same work1.

Summary: Often cited, but overly simplistic, comparisons of earnings between men and women fail to account for differences in hours worked, family commitments, occupational and life-style choices, not to mention the hazardous and arduous conditions of labor intensive jobs typically performed by men. When these differences are properly taken into consideration, it becomes clear that claims of widespread discrimination are baseless.

Discussion: In June 2011, President Obama claimed that2, "Women still earn just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns." This figure originates from the US Census Bureau report for the year 2010 which compares the median* full-time earnings of women to those of men3. A separate report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for the same year reports a different value of 81% for earnings ratio4. (The BLS report compared weekly earnings, whereas the Census Bureau report compared annual earnings.)

Both these figures are widely quoted to suggest that there is a significant gender wage gap due to discrimination in the workplace. These figures are, in fact, crude comparisons which take no account of the different occupational choices, hours worked, and personal circumstances of men and women. In testimony given to the U.S. Senate, Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Heather Boushey summarises recent work done by researchers Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn who found that 58.9% of the pay gap can be explained by measurable personal and occupational factors, leaving 41.1% as 'unexplained' by known factors5. If this proportion is applied to the BLS earnings ratio (i.e. 19% * 0.411), it would produce an 'unexplained pay gap' between men and women of 7.8%, a value significantly less than the 23% implied by President Obama.

In the UK, the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings for 2011 found that men's median full-time weekly earnings were £538, compared with £440 for women6. This yields a weekly female-male ratio of 82%, a value almost identical to that given in the BLS 2010 report in the US. However, the UK survey report doesn't quote this figure itself but, instead, calculates the pay gap using hourly median earnings (excluding overtime), and determines the value to 10.5%.

The narrowing of the pay gap as the time period used to measure it decreases can be explained by the fact that men work more hours than women in full-time employment. Indeed, the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings for 2011 finds that men in full-time employment work on average 40.2 hours per week, compared with women who work 37.4 hours7, (i.e. men work, on average, 7.5% more). Furthermore, the survey finds the proportion of pay attributed to overtime and bonuses are significantly higher for men than for women8. The use of hourly earnings, excluding overtime, rather than weekly or yearly earnings, thus eliminates differences due to the hours worked and overtime rates, giving a more accurate result.

Nevertheless, an apparent pay gap of 10.5% remains, even when taking into account overtime and hours worked. The UK Home Office website provides an explanatory breakdown of this pay gap9, as follows:

22% is due to the different industries and occupations in which women work

21% is due to differences in years of full-time work

16% is due to the negative effect on wages of having previously worked part-time or of having taken time out of the labor market to look after family

5% is due to formal education levels

This leaves 36% unexplained by any of the above factors. Applying this proportion to the UK earnings ratio would leave an unexplained pay gap of only 3.8%. Although the UK Home Office, itself, admits that this differential as 'unexplained', it suggests that discrimination may be an important factor, but provides no justification for this claim.

For those working part-time, rather than full-time, the UK Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings finds that pay gap is negative at -4.8%. This means that women actually earn more than men for the same number of hours in part-time employment10.

Turning back to full-time employment, however, a study conducted by American and Korean researchers in 2004 investigated the reasons for the wage gap, including the unexplained proportion often attributed to discrimination. They concluded:11

"In simple models, personal and work characteristics account for two-thirds of the pay gap, but one-third is accounted for by other considerations. Many allege that discrimination explains this one-third. In particular, they allege that women are relegated to poor paying jobs, and thus women in general have lower wages because they are crowded into women's jobs. In short, they claim occupational segregation is responsible for women's inferior economic wellbeing.

"This study investigated the relationship between occupational sex segregation and wages. The empirical findings refute the claim that the number of women in one's occupation negatively influences wages. Instead, the paper supports hypotheses relating to efficient job matching. Women choose female jobs to earn a relatively greater amenity package than they would have received elsewhere. Similarly men choose male jobs to earn relatively more."
The figures reported by the US Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Office for National Statistics in the UK, all clearly show that men earn more than women overall. This is undeniably the case. However, often cited, but overly simplistic, comparisons of earnings fail to account for differences in hours worked, family commitments, occupational and life-style choices, not to mention the hazardous and arduous conditions of labor intensive jobs typically performed by men (men account for 92% of all workplace fatalities in the US in 201012). When these differences are properly taken into consideration, it becomes clear that claims of widespread discrimination are baseless.

In fact, according to the most recent US Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 4 in 10 working wives out-earned their husbands in 200913. Just what would it take to close the overall pay gap still further? Would national policies designed to restrict the numbers of men in high-paying jobs be needed, for example? Or, perhaps, would it be necessary to deny women personal freedoms concerning life-style and family so that they, in effect, have no choice but to spend more time at the workplace?

*Note. The term median is a statistical measure which refers to the midpoint in a sequence of observed data values. It is not the same as the average, or mean, value. It is generally accepted that the use of the median gives a more representative picture than the average value in many cases, especially where a few exceptionally high or low observed values (outliers) may skew the results.

References:

1. Example: Pay Equity & Discrimination. Institute for Women's Policy Research. Link: http://www.iwpr.org/initiatives/pay-equity-and-discrimination/
2. White House (June 04, 2012). Remarks by the President on Equal Pay for Equal Work via Conference Call. Link: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/06/04/remarks-president-equal-pay-equal-work-conference-call
3. United States Census Bureau. Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010. Page 5. Link: http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/p60-239.pdf
4. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Women in the Labor Force: A Databook, December 2011. Page 1. Link: http://www.bls.gov/cps/wlf-databook-2011.pdf
5. Heather Boushey (March 11, 2010). Strengthening the Middle Class: Ensuring Equal Pay for Women. Testimony of Heather Boushey (Senior Economist, Center for American Progress Action Fund) before the U.S. Senate, Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Link: http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/2010/03/pdf/Boushey_testimony.pdf
6. Office for National Statistics. 2011 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (based on SOC 2010). Page 1. Link: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_256900.pdf
7. Office for National Statistics. 2011 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (based on SOC 2010). Page 24. Link: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_256900.pdf
8. Office for National Statistics. 2011 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (based on SOC 2010). Page 23. Link: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_256900.pdf
9. UK Home Office (August 2012). Link: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/equalities/women/women-work/
10. Office for National Statistics. 2011 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (based on SOC 2010). Page 7. Link: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_256900.pdf
11. Soo Kyeong Hwang and Solomon William Polachek (2004). Occupational Self-Selection and the Gender Wage Gap: Evidence From Korea and United States. Link: http://www2.binghamton.edu/economics/wp04/WP0413.pdf
12. US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, and Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 2012. Page 10. Link: http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfch0009.pdf
13. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Women in the Labor Force: A Databook, December 2011. Page 78. Link: http://www.bls.gov/cps/wlf-databook-2011.pdf
Andy Thomas (Andy Man)http://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-60143769317588467162012-07-18T11:43:00.000+01:002012-08-11T02:48:08.357+01:00Hitting OutIt was the mid-1980s, and I was fourteen years old. I'd recently seen the movie An Officer and a Gentlemen, and became interested in karate as a result.

Now, I ask you, what teenage boy wouldn't want to do karate after watching that movie?

I think the scene where teenage Zack gets beaten up by a Filipino gang did more to get young boys involved in martial arts than anything else at the time. It certainly worked on me, and I started attending a local karate club shortly after. I became reasonably good at karate over the next year or so.

I'm not sure whether, if I'd have continued, I would have become exceptional or anything, but I was keen and that's what mattered. And I certainly looked up to the instructor of the club—he was a strong male role model for me, and I would have followed his every instruction without question. If he had told me to jump off a cliff as part of a martial arts training exercise, I would have done so without too much hesitation.

But there were some unhappy aspects of my childhood. I didn't mix too well, and in some ways, the truth was that I lonely and isolated. I spent most of my time reading science books, programming computers and listening to classical music. In fact, I thought that everybody my age did those kind of things, but later, I would learn that this wasn't the case. An interest in the opposite sex didn't happen for me until I was seventeen years old, but around the age of fourteen to fifteen, the only things I cared about were computers, electronics and science.

So getting involved in martial arts was an important break for me. It gave me an interest that was not solitary in nature, and it did a lot for my self-esteem. But then one week, a sequence of events would have unfortunate consequences for me. These are memories I've not been back to for a very long time.

The club I attended practised the Shotokan style of karate, and during training sessions, we would often find a partner and spar with each other. I liked sparring session best of all, because it was competitive. It was kind of like play fighting I guess, but it wasn't full contact and pretty harmless. However, I recall that in one of these sessions I was tapped on the shoulder by a woman who had been sparring with someone else behind to me. She told me that I had caught her hand with a stray kick. I hadn't realised, but she seemed OK, so I apologized and thought nothing more of it at the time.

Later the same week, there was another, but unrelated incident. An older woman attended the club one evening. She was in her forties perhaps. As far as I can remember, it was the first and only time she came, and as we often did, we paired up for a sparring session that evening. I found myself in the unfortunate situation of having to pair up with her.

Looking back now, it's obvious to me that a genuine desire to learn karate was not the real reason she was there. I suspect that there had been some anguish in her life, and perhaps she was there because she wanted to learn "self defence". I don't know, but whatever the reason, the only thing she wanted to do that night was to hit out at a male—any male. And a fifteen year old boy would do.

She came at me, her face contorted in rage, wildly swinging hook punches. This wasn't karate at all! Confused, I simply moved around and avoided all contact with her. At the end of the session I went to shake her hand, which was the custom, but she walked off toward the instructor. A few seconds later, he called me over.

When I got there, I caught the end of her calmly explaining how I had hit her. It wasn't true, but I never got the chance say a word.

Without, a second thought, the instructor turned to me and "punched" me in the stomach. He held back the blow, so the effect was more one of shock rather than physical harm. He said something about not hitting women and told me to get back in line. I just kind of accepted my "punishment" because I didn't really understand what had just happened. I remember thinking it was a bit unfair, but I don't recall reading too much into it at the time. I was more confused than anything. I never saw her again anyway, but things didn't end there.

I turned up for training at the club, as usual, the following week. What I didn't know then was that the first women, the woman who I had accidentally clipped with a stray kick the week earlier, had spoken to the instructor since. She had, apparently, received a fractured bone in her wrist. I say "apparently" because I hadn't known about it—I only learned that information quite sometime later through a chance encounter. However, on the basis of what he heard, the instructor had decided that he was going to teach me a lesson, I guess.

Toward the end of the class, he interrupted training and asked me to come out to front, where he had pulled out a table. He told me to get on it and to start doing press-ups, which I did. This went on for quite some time, and I began to struggle because the sweat that was dripping from me on to the smooth table surface was causing my feet to slide uncontrollably.

Next, he suggested that we spar—just him and me—in front of the class. As a lanky teenager against a fast and powerful adult black belt, I stood absolutely no chance. Time and again, he punched me in the forehead and my legs buckled underneath me, and each time he dragged me up by my hair and forced me to carry on.

In reality, the attack was controlled and I suspect that his targeting of my forehead, rather than landing punches on my nose, was deliberate. Nevertheless, it was a public beating and a humiliation that was intended to be some kind of example. Eventually it ended, and so did the class. In the changing room later, a guy told me that he thought what had just happened was "wrong".

I cried while cycling home that night, without actually knowing why.

I went back to the club a few times, but my heart was never in it after that and I soon stopped going. I switched from karate to running, fell back into solitary activities, and spent my evenings with computers, electronics, physics books and science fiction. People were too difficult, confusing and painful for me.

I had lost something important that night.

Afterword: I originally wrote this as an experiment in challenging society's attitudes toward males. However, the account is entirely true—it happened to me. But it's not your sympathy I want, but for you to ask yourself a few questions...

In the text, I qualify the woman's actions with, "I suspect that there had been some anguish in her life." Maybe you felt a little sympathy for her, despite her anger? I certainly did, and in fact, it felt almost obligatory for me to put in some kind of compassionate justification for her behaviour in there. But then I asked myself, why? Would I have been so considerate if she had been a he, for example?

Ask yourself this...

What would your reaction be on reading a story in which a 40 year old man turns up to a karate club one night and deliberately attempts to punch a 15 year old girl in the face?

No doubt you would simply regard him as a monster, and nothing more. Please don't misunderstand me; this isn't about a bad woman or a bad man, it is about the double-standards in our attitudes.

Moreover, were the actions of the club instructor in my story not really based on misguided notions of chivalry, rather than any rational assessment of the situation? Is it not true that it is often males who display prejudice to other males, but it is not actually regarded as prejudice in our society? Would he have been so willing to beat up a 40 year old woman, had he known the truth, I wonder? (I'm not suggesting that's what he should have done.)

Finally, I also wanted to communicate that men and boys have feelings—we hurt. Not just physically, but emotionally too. It seems that this needs to be said, because male suffering often goes unseen and unacknowledged. In fact, hostility toward males is normalized in the media to such an extent that males are seen as legitimate targets of aggression. How often do you see TV shows or commercials where a man gets slapped in the face or kicked in the groin, and invited to laugh?Andy Thomas (Andy Man)http://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-5384657845046335952012-07-11T09:17:00.000+01:002012-08-11T06:35:59.773+01:00The State of Play for Men: Domestic ViolenceMyth: Domestic violence is a crime largely perpetrated by aggressive men against women.

Summary: Men under report incidents of domestic violence targeted at them, and society downplays the scale of male suffering, and in many cases, refuses to acknowledge that it exists at all. In fact, recent studies on both sides of the Atlantic are increasingly showing that men are affected by domestic violence at least as much as women.

Discussion: In 2000, the National Violence Against Women Survey estimated that there are 830,000 male and 1.5 million female victims of domestic violence in the United States each year1. More recent studies are increasingly presenting a picture of approximate parity between the sexes in terms of partner violence, however. For example, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is a federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services, but it also recognised for its research into domestic and sexual violence. In 2011, it published the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey which shows that 5.0% of men and 5.9% of women reported experiencing rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in the 12 months prior to taking the survey2.

In 2006, the Journal of Family Psychology (an American Journal) published the results of research which found that, between couples, the incidence of male-to-female violence was 13.66%, but for female-to-male violence it was actually higher at 18.20%3. It also found that women were twice as likely as men to initiate severe violence against their partners. This finding is supported by a more recent California State University survey of some 286 scholarly investigations, 221 empirical studies and 65 reviews independent studies. It concludes that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships4.

In the UK, the British Crime Survey (BCS) for 2010/11 reported similar results as the CDC survey in terms of the male-female violence ratio. It found that 5% of men and 7% of women had experienced domestic abuse in the year prior to the survey5. It also found that 3% of men and 4% of women reported that they had experienced stalking in the previous year5.

PARITY, a gender equality campaigning charity in the UK, submitted a memorandum to the UK Parliament back in 2007 stating:6

"There is now a considerable body of evidence, in particular by a succession of detailed Home Office surveys in the past decade of interpersonal violence in England and Wales, to demonstrate the existence of a substantial level of female violence against male partners, including severe and/or repeated physical assault. Despite this, support services specifically for male victims are largely absent or inadequate, and few women are actually charged or prosecuted for domestic violence against a male partner."

The number of women convicted of domestic abuse in the UK has, in fact, increased fourfold in the last 7 years, from 806 in 2004/5 to 3,965 in 2010/117. However, of all prosecutions for domestic violence in England and Wales, approximately 93% of them are against men8.

Men are much less likely than women to tell others about what they had suffered. The BCS found that only 19% of male victims would tell someone in a professional organisation--half the number of female victims (44%). It also found that 28% of male victims do not tell anyone--more than twice the proportion for women8.

In fact, men attempting to report violent assaults against them can expect to face disbelief, ridicule and counter allegations. Only 10% of men will tell the police in the UK, three times less than women9. In their memorandum to the UK Parliament, PARITY stated, "Anecdotal evidence suggests that the police and other agencies...are often not even-handed in their response to male victims...in a significant number of cases arresting the male victim instead of the female perpetrator."

On the other side of the Atlantic, a recent Canadian study reported similar results. It found that women are four times more likely to report partner violence to police than men10, and concludes that: "Men who are involved in disputes with their partners, whether as alleged victims or as alleged offenders or both, are disadvantaged and treated less favorably than women by the law-enforcement system at almost every step."

Organisations working with male victims also report a high degree of scepticism amongst professionals and the public towards male victims of domestic violence11. Much of the literature produced in the field of domestic abuse quote female victim statistics only, while completely omitting those for males, thus suggesting that the problem only applies to women. In fact, some women's organisations even go as far as to make the highly dubious claim that a staggeringly high percentage of men (90%) who report that they are victims of domestic violence are lying (they are abusers pretending to be victims). This claim is refuted by the Mankind Initiative, a charity working with male victims in the UK. According to its own screening program, 98.75% of men calling its helpline are true victims12. It notes that no there is no equivalent research on females as no organisation is willing to make the same assessment.

Moreover, the very narrative of domestic violence itself is often framed in a female only context by international bodies, governments and support organisations around the world. For example, the United Nations defines domestic violence as follows13:

"Any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivations of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life."

By this definition, therefore, male targeted domestic violence simply does not exist. This is the same definition used by many organisations in the UK, including the Crown Prosecution Service and the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. In the US, there is VAWA--the Violence Against Women Act, which is administered by the Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women. There is clearly no recognition of men, other than as perpetrators, in this narrative.

Correspondingly, there is little in the way of support for male victims. There are over 1200 abuse shelters in the United States, but few will accept men. For example, Los Angeles County funds two dozen shelters exclusively for abused women, but only one shelter will accepts male victims14. In the UK, the situation is similar, if not worse. There are 7,500 beds in refuges dedicated to women, but there are only 72 beds that can be used by men15 (the majority of these can also be used by women). And while a woman fleeing abuse may find a shelter that will take both her and her children, a man attempting to do same will fear arrest for kidnap16, irrespective of whether he is the victim or not.

Over the years, large sums have been spent by governments around the world on campaigns to encourage women to report domestic violence and to seek help, with no similar campaigns targeted toward male victims, or provisions made for them. The crude negative stereotyping of men as aggressors and women as victims has no doubt obscured men's suffering from society's view. While the well founded fear and stigma that prevents men from coming forward to report their suffering remains, the true picture of domestic violence will always be incomplete.

References:

1. Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes. Extent, Nature, and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence, Findings From the National Violence Against Women Survey. US Department of Justice. 2000. Link: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/181867.pdf
2. National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, 2010 Summary Report. National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Page 39. Link: http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_Report2010-a.pdf
3. McDonald R. Estimating the number of American children living in partner-violent families.
Journal of Family Psychology, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 137–142. 2006. Link: http://smu.edu/experts/study-documents/family-violence-study-may2006.pdf
4. Martin S. Fiebert, California State University, Long Beach. References examining assaults by women on their spouses or male partners: An annotated bibliography. 2012. Link: http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
5. Homicides, Firearm Offences and Intimate Violence. Supplementary Volume 2 to Crime in England and Wales 2010/11. Page 88. Link: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-statistics/research-statistics/crime-research/hosb0212/hosb0212?view=Binary
6. Memorandum (Appendix 2) submitted by PARITY to the UK Parliament Select Committee on Home Affairs Written Evidence in 2007. Link: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmselect/cmhaff/263/263we03.htm
7. ManKind Initiative, 21 key facts about male victims. Link: http://www.mankind.org.uk/pdfs/21%20Key%20Facts_Feb%202012.pdf
8. Crown Prosecution Service. Defendants prosecuted in England and Wales for domestic violence crimes in 2009/10. Link: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2010-12-08b.29433.h
9. Homicides, Firearm Offences and Intimate Violence. Supplementary Volume 2 to Crime in England and Wales 2010/11. Page 96. Link: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-statistics/research-statistics/crime-research/hosb0212/hosb0212?view=Binary
10. Brown, G. (2004). Gender as a factor in the response of the law-enforcement system to violence against partners. Sexuality and Culture, 8, 1–87.
11. UK House of Commons Select Committee on Home Affairs, Sixth Report May 2008. Link: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmselect/cmhaff/263/26307.htm
12. ManKind Initiative, 21 key facts about male victims. Link: http://www.mankind.org.uk/pdfs/21%20Key%20Facts_Feb%202012.pdf
13. UN Declaration of Violence Against Women, Article 1.
14. Glenn Sacks. July 2012. Link: http://www.glennsacks.com/kuehls_marriage_license.htm
15. ManKind Initiative, 21 key facts about male victims. Link: http://www.mankind.org.uk/pdfs/21%20Key%20Facts_Feb%202012.pdf
16. Glenn Sacks. July 2012. Link: http://www.glennsacks.com/kuehls_marriage_license.htm

Andy Thomas (Andy Man)http://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051096556024984885.post-58356226789129701862012-06-15T08:35:00.000+01:002012-08-11T02:50:56.587+01:00Misandry in the 21st CenturyI oppose misandry and the institutionalised inequalities in family life, the divorce courts, the work place, education, health care and the media.

So what is misandry anyway?

In short, it is the hatred of men and boys--the counter-part of misogyny. Whereas the word 'misogyny' is well known and widely used, the term 'misandry' is hardly known at all--in fact your spell checker is unlikely to even recognize it as a word. You see, society pretends that males are 'privileged', and therefore misandry cannot exist. In fact the opposite is true, and men and boys are subjected to routine phyiscal, sexual and emotional abuse. In today's society, we are the ones who are impoverished, marginalized, exploited, humiliated and ridiculed. The thing is, this abuse has been normalized to such an extent, that it is not only acceptable, but is hardly recognized for what it is.

The first part of video shows extracts from a US TV show called "The Talk" in which an horrific attack on a man is discussed by the all female panel and audience. The point is not so much the sickening attack itself, although it is sickening and a tragedy, but how misandry has become so normalized that it is considered perfectly acceptable to ridicule victims of torture and mutilation on prime time television--provided that those victims are male.

The second part of the video deals with how males are ridiculed in TV ads, how violence against us is portrayed as normal, and how positive male role models have been withdrawn from TV and cinema over recent years. The accumulative effect of this on the self-esteem and mental well being of young boys growing up today's world is incalcuble.

Note. Suicide is the Biggest Killer of Men in the UK, according to CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably). American males between the ages of 20 and 24 have a suicide rate that is seven times higher than that of women (National Center for Injury Prevention and Control).

Note. This video contains short extracts from various sources. Copyrighted material is the property of the respective owners. The principle of "fair use" is claimed for the non-commercial purpose of critical review in the public interest.Andy Thomas (Andy Man)http://firstname.lastname@example.com