Bitching feminists launch witch-hunts when men ask for equal rights

Have you seen The Red Pill? I finally saw it after buying a copy from the director. She was present at the International Conference on Men’s Issues 2018. Cassie Jaye is a feminist who decided to explore the Men’s Rights Movement (MRM). The movie is a startling journey from absolutism (a dogmatic belief in the victimhood of the sistahood) to uncertainty, and then to a new reality (men suffer and bleed as well, don’t ya know, sistah?)

The Red Pill deserves a wide audience in a year when there’s been endless yakity yak about the suffragettes, completely ignoring the working-class male who was also denied suffrage. Discriminatory inequality is bad for both sexes, and society and policymakers need to be alert to men’s as well as women’s suffering.

But feminists are aghast at men claiming victimhood. How dare they? Lara Whyte, a gender politics reporter, attended the International Conference on Men’s Issues, organised by Mike Buchanan, and flared-up like hells-bells casting spells and aspersions on the entire gig. Whyte bitched that she had spent ‘a fact-free weekend among anti-feminists, at an undisclosed location in London’.

‘Fact-free’ is an insult, a libel and a cheap shot: speakers at the conference, many of them academics from prestigious universities including Oxford and Cambridge, presented an abundance of statistical data, verbatim quotes and peer-reviewed research.

Male inequality is not a myth, but scientifically verified in various areas of social policy and outcomes: -

• Compared to female cancers, male cancers receive considerably less funding. Men may not have breasts, but they suffer from prostrate and testicular cancer and have to beg for funding.

• Women live longer than men. Men live on average four-and-a-half years less than women, though feminists typically blame this on men and their risk-taking behaviour. Policy makers and medical researchers would be jumping up and down if the figures were reversed. Notice a gender gap, anyone?

• The overwhelming majority of victims are men when it comes to occupational deaths. Thankfully, these have reduced over the decades, but the number is still too high. How come nobody talks about the gender workplace death gap, eh Cathy Newman?

• The male suicide rate is more than three times that of females.

• There is a huge imbalance in the prison population but government policy is skewed towards reducing the female inmate population. Remember 24-year-old Lavinia Woodward, an aspiring heart surgeon and Oxford University student who punched and stabbed her Cambridge University boyfriend? Judge Ian Pringle decided not to send her to jail because it would ‘prevent this extraordinary able young lady from not following her long-held desire to enter the profession she wishes to’.

• Men receive prison sentences 63 per cent longer than women who commit the same crimes. According to a 2009 study ‘judges treat women more leniently for practical reasons, such as their greater caretaking responsibility’. Did I hear anyone whisper the words ‘gender gap’?

• Domestic violence is pervasively regarded as male perpetrator / female victim problem, despite compelling evidence that men suffer from almost as many attacks. According to a 2010 study by Parity, more than 40 per cent of victims of domestic violence are male. Yet startlingly, as BBC London reports, there are no refuges in London (and only 18 nationally) that serve men. That is despite a nearly 80 per cent increase in reports from male victims between 2012 and 2016.

• When parents separate, family courts discriminate against fathers. Fathers are often denied access to their children by mothers who flout a legal settlement.

Why would Whyte deny the ironclad evidence for these inequalities?

Whyte omitted to mention that the ‘undisclosed location’ was for a reason. Perhaps, she thought, it will suggest something sinister. In reality, men’s rights campaigners are plagued by feminist lunatics, who loudly and aggressively attack events and speakers. Mike Buchanan was forced to relocate the venue of the conference from St Andrew’s Stadium, the home of Birmingham City Football Club, because the venue reneged on the contract under pressure from feminist activists. The new ‘undisclosed location’ was, in fact, the prestigious Excel Conference Centre, at Custom House, in London.

Whyte said she was one of only two women, but I met several – including Dr Catherine Hakim, the shamefully ostracised scholar (I reminded Catherine of an event at University of Surrey back in 1999, when I stood up for her against hysterical outrage by fellow students and the lecturers who booked her). For Whyte, men’s rights activists are the deplorable segment of society: older imperialist white men who rage at the coming of night.

Whyte describe how she ‘was the only woman in a room of entirely white men’ (her story seems to have been edited and updated after more than a hundred commenters pointed out the gross inaccuracies in her reporting – the latest recension reads: ‘I was, briefly, the only woman in a room of entirely white men’) yet there was a wide international mix and more ethnic diversity than you would find at an Anglican gathering or a rally for cultural Marxist causes.

The Rebel Priest, Dr Jules Gomes, was himself present and delivered his lecture on ‘How feminist “Dambusters” destroyed the Church of England beyond repair’). He started by saying how his opponents on social media ask him to ‘check his white privilege’ and call him a ‘white supremacist’. It is his favourite insult because he happens to be brown!

The first speaker was Karen Straughan, a famous YouTuber and a prominent Men’s Rights Activist from Canada. Whyte grudgingly attributed to Straughan ‘decontextualised fact’. That’s as near as you get to praise in Whyte’s review!

On the balcony overlooking Victoria Dock during breaks, I contrasted the angst-ridden feminist protestors in The Red Pill with Straughan’s laid-back assuredness. Friendly banter laced with f words over countless fags. On the last day of the conference, another Canadian anti-feminist academic, Professor Janice Fiamengo from the Department of English at the University of Ottawa, eviscerated the cancer of feminism that has eaten at the very entrails of Canada’s universities (at its worst in Canada, as Jordan Peterson knows). There is hope for the West!

Professor Eric Anderson, a highly eloquent gay man, was one of a procession of impressive speakers. I’m not sure that Anderson is aware of his privileged status in gender debate. Men should not pursue male rights but instead become campaigners for equality, he suggested, but I doubt whether men’s problems would get prioritised.

As remarked on The Red Pill, men are routinely dehumanised in policy and public sympathy. Any problem disproportionately affecting men is always degendered: there is no male-specific suicide prevention strategy, despite men accounting for more than seven-tenths of cases. Homeless charities depict women or girls in their campaigning, because men have less appeal.

For a fair society, we should not allow the hierarchy of identity politics to determine policy and resourcing. Feminists should no longer be granted an undue share of influence on government action. My first column was on Jess Phillips, the feminist MP who read out a one-year toll of domestic violence killings in the House of Commons: a list that omitted all male victims. It’s time to change our one-sided, simplistic view of gender relations, and to strive for a more genuinely fair society in which fathers and sons are as valued as mothers and daughters.

(Dr Niall McCrae is a lecturer in mental health, and a writer on social and political affairs. He contributes regularly to The Salisbury Review, The Conservative Woman and Bruges Group website, and has written two books: The Moon and Madness, and Echoes from the Corridors: The Story of Nursing in British Mental Hospitals).