Wednesday 15 December 2010

Great Essay on Rampant Misandry in Britain - by a Woman



Melanie Phillips is a British Sunday Times and Daily Mail columnist. In this thought-provoking piece, she describes the condition of males in contemporary Britain - outrageously oppressed in legal, political and cultural terms:

Why is the British Establishment so Anti-Male?

A SURVEY into women's attitudes this week exploded the official line that they are vulnerable to sexual harassment at work. Women may not be universally the victims they are painted.

Yet one of the many mysteries of our age is why the British establishment has declared open season upon half the human race. It is men who are being systematically robbed of their reputation, their children and their purpose in life.

The people responsible for this sexual warfare are sober women and men in suits - pinstripe, rather than boiler - not to mention wigs and gowns.

If what is routinely thrown at men was directed at any of our fabled victim groups - women, black people, gays - society would stand condemned of the most vile prejudice, discrimination and even persecution.

Yet the vast majority of people either don't know how the dice are being loaded against men or, if they do have an inkling, think deep down (or not so deep) that, well, they really do deserve it.

You think this is exaggerated?

Consider the review of sexual offences which is about to be published.

Through judicious leaks, the Government has indicated that it wants to toughen up the rape law because not enough men are being convicted. So it intends to skew court proceedings against them to make them less able to defend themselves against a prosecution.

Just think about that for a moment. Suppose the Government said, for example, that not enough women were being convicted of shoplifting so it was going to make it more difficult for them to mount a defence.

Unthinkable, isn't it?

That's because the implication that women were naturally shoplifters would be preposterous, that artificially inflating the number of convictions for shoplifting to fit this false stereotype would be grotesque, and that it could be done only by junking our most precious legal maxim: that a person is innocent until proven guilty.

Yet this is precisely what is being proposed in rape cases.

The Government intends to change the definition of consent to sex, the common defence against the charge of rape, so the defendant will have to prove that the woman did, in fact, consent.

LAWYERS are divided over whether this would technically mean reversing the burden of proof. All agree, however, that it would make it much more difficult for a man accused of rape to defend himself. And that's because the Government assumes that all men accused of rape are guilty.

In fact, the evidence suggests this is completely untrue. Home Office figures for 1996 showed that 25pc of rapes reported to the police were false or malicious, or the complainant withdrew the charge.

In a further 39 pc of reported cases, the police or the Crown Prosecution Service took no further action because the complainant and suspect knew each other and so the circumstances were ambiguous. And a further 7 pc of cases resulted in an acquittal.

Yet the Government not only fails to acknowledge this, but also uses statistical jiggerypokery to produce a false picture of soaring rapes and thousands of rapists escaping conviction.

True, there was a fall in the conviction rate from 24 pc in 1985 to 9 pc in 1997. Yet that may be because freer sexual behaviour makes rape claims more untenable.

While 'stranger rapes' are rare, 'date rapes' between acquaintances soared from 1,300 in 1985 to 5,000 in 1996, almost half of all reported cases.

Rape is without doubt a most heinous crime. Yet most reasonable people would probably think that being jumped on in a dark alley is a completely different matter from having second thoughts, sometimes in retrospect, about a bloke with whom you've gone home after a party or with whom you've already been sleeping.

Anti-man prejudice, in fact, runs through government thinking. Baroness Jay and her Women's Unit constantly bring out the old chestnut that one woman in four is assaulted by her partner.

In fact, most British domestic violence studies on which the Government relies for such claims are effectively rigged; they ask only women, not men, for their domestic violence experiences, mainly from self-selecting samples of abused women.

Yet reputable international research shows overwhelmingly that acts of domestic violence are initiated by women upon men at least as frequently as vice versa.

Asked why the Women's Unit had made no reference to all this research, Jay replied that the Government couldn't get involved in such 'subtle' issues.

Instead, it resorts to unsubtle threats to pursue feckless 'deadbeat dads' for child support, promoting the impression that fathers routinely desert their children.

In fact, many fathers desperately want to continue to parent their children after divorce, but find that the courts put huge obstacles in their way, even if the men have acted blamelessly.

Family court judges tend to force fathers to prove they are fit parents, prove they are not violent or feckless. By contrast, they assume that a mother is generally the best parent for the child to live with, regardless of how she has behaved.

Of course, some men do behave very badly towards their wives and children.

Divorce barristers, however, estimate that no more than about a third of the husbands they see are violent, and that women and men cheat on each other in equal proportions.

YET THE courts are institutionally biased against husbands, ousting them from their homes on the slightest pretext, stripping a man of his children and his assets even if his wife has gone off with a lover and his own behaviour has been exemplary.

The judges will also accept a wife's claims that the man is violent on the basis of no evidence, in a system where it is impossible to mount a proper cross-examination of her allegations. Yet on this pretext they will deprive a man of contact with his children.

Lack of contact with their children is a source of immense injustice and misery for many fathers.

Lawyers say a typical scenario is this. Mother decides to divorce because she's got a new man. The easiest way to get rid of the father is to claim he's been violent to her or the children. The father leaves or is ousted. His access to the children is governed by a contact order made by the court on the advice of a court welfare officer.

Yet the mother has the whip hand in controlling the father's contact. He finds regularly that the children are too busy to see him. Yet somehow the mother seems able to persuade the court that she is entitled to move the contact goalposts without redress.

The new president of the High Court's family division, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, denied earlier this year that fathers got an unfair deal on contact although, she added ambiguously, a small minority of non-custodial fathers 'gave rise to real problems'.

How could she possibly be so complacent when fathers are routinely denied contact on grounds produced by welfare officers that are so spurious as to be incomprehensible?

There was the father who, in McDonald's, spread his arms to his daughter and said 'Bet you haven't seen me in a suit before', a watching welfare officer misinterpreted the gesture, decided the child had refused to return the father's proffered embrace, and he was denied all contact with the child as a result.

Then there was the father whose overnight contact with his five-year-old was stopped because 'the child had many milestones ahead of him'; another who was denied contact because he 'had to prove his commitment'; yet another because 'the child fell asleep in his car on the way home'.

One child of 13 hadn't seen his father for eight years because he was led to believe that an injunction against his father prevented it. No one - certainly not his mother - had told him that the injunction would last a maximum of three months and that for most of that eight years he had every right to see his father. And so on and so, appallingly, on.

The impact of fatherlessness upon children is well- documented. The impact on fathers is less well-known.

Some are driven to nervous breakdowns or suicide: others lose their jobs as they try to visit their children who have moved to a different part of the country.

Of course, there are men who walk out on their wives and bust their families. But the majority of men are divorced against their will.

The pain of family breakdown becomes unbearable when compounded by the gross injustice of a legal system that, under cover of impartiality, so often rewards the offending spouse and punishes her victim.

HOW CAN this happen? Welfare officers' conclusions about divorcing spouses are rarely questioned by judges, who regard these officers as the only source of expert advice in such cases.

Until now, they have been probation officers; henceforth, they will also be drawn from the children's branch of the Official Solicitor's Department and from guardians ad litem.

Yet this reform is unlikely to do much to counter their prevailing ethos, encapsulated by a document produced by the National Association of Probation Officers in 1996.

Entitled Equal Rights: Anti-Sexism Policy, this proclaimed that marriage subjected women to male tyranny; that society was based on patriarchal male control over women and children which extended into all institutions; that the oppression of women must be challenged in the courts; and that therefore the aim of the welfare officer was to 'challenge the discrimination against women in contested residence and contact decisions'.

Such sentiments may seem extreme; but the presumption of male violence which underpins them is common throughout the family law system.

The Lord Chancellor's Advisory Board on Family Law said last year that the courts should stop fathers seeing their children simply on the basis of allegations of violence by their ex-wives. The board's extraordinary presumption of male guilt was backed by its claim that domestic violence research indicated 'in the great majority of cases the abuser is male and the victim female', and that fathers were overwhelmingly the perpetrators of domestic violence.

Yet the research certainly does not show this. Most violence against children, moreover, is perpetrated by mothers or boyfriends. A child's natural father is least likely to be violent towards it.

The courts should actually be giving fathers, not mothers, the benefit of the doubt.

Many judges think mothers are intrinsically vulnerable and must be protected, as they are generally to be the parent with care of the children.

Yet why should this be? If a mother has gone off with her lover, jeopardising the wellbeing of her children and demonstrating infidelity to their father, promise-breaking, deceit and selfishness, why should she be automatically regarded as the fitter parent to bring up the children?

The answer is to restore issues of conduct to divorce and the subsequent care of the children. The spurious argument that 'children's needs' must come before any other consideration means children are being used as hostages to protect adults from facing the consequences of their own behaviour.

Children's needs are, in fact, best met by having both their parents to look after them; failing that, by living with the more responsible parent.

This may even bring the divorce rate down, as has happened in American states where mothers no longer get automatic custody.

Men are terrified of being thought prejudiced against women, not least because of an old-fashioned sense of chivalry. They look at the absence of women among captains of industry or MPs; they look at the football hooligan and the burglar from hell, and they think it must be true that men are basically vile victimisers.

But life's a lot more complicated and the result of such browbeating into false stereotypes is that everyone ultimately becomes a loser.

SOURCE: UK Spectator, 2010


My only criticism of this article is its theoretical naivety. Phillips seems surprised that the British Establishment promotes a gender-feminist agenda when, as the source of Anglo-American puritanism, Britain would be expected to embody such national misandry.

Since puritanism reflexively denigrates males as sexualized beings while exalting women as 'owners' of scarce sexual resources, the puritanical meme inevitably promotes misandry in any culture where it takes root. Given this fact, Phillips' list of injustices becomes perfectly explicable. Indeed, we should expect such iniquities to be promoted by the Anglo-American Establishment: where puritanism reigns, men are always oppressed.

14 comments:

  1. Excellent post!

    Two things really stuck out:

    "Men are terrified of being thought prejudiced against women, not least because of an old-fashioned sense of chivalry."

    She fails to mention "shaming language" that is often used against men. I think "shaming language" is more common than chivalry. That is just my opinion based on my observations.

    "...the British Establishment promotes a gender-feminist agenda when, as the source of Anglo-American puritanism, Britain would be expected to embody such national misandry."

    Perfectly stated.

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  2. Women are a waste... meditating day and night on their foibles is a waste. Just take your money and pay for it, that's what I say.

    Anyway, Muzalon... I'm planning on becoming a fearless male warrior. Any books/authors you can recommend to help me in this endeavor?

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  3. A woman lamenting misandry? Why? What's in it for her?

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  4. She probably has 1 or more sons - and no daughters.

    I have seen this several times.

    After playing and gleefully accepting all the male-hatred in our society - they squeeze out only male children. With no husband (ex-thug, or alienated man), they realize their future in her sons.

    The only way to ensure her "well-being" in the future is to ensure that her male children do well.

    Hence, it suddenly becomes in her interest to "protest" all the garbage (male-hatred) she lived off of in days past.

    I have seen that way too often indeed.

    I would bet dollars to dimes that she has only male children.

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  5. Scarecrow:
    I wouldn't doubt it a bit. More likely, though, she'll end up marrying some desperate mangina who'll work like a slave paying for her sons; then suddenly she'll revert back to her old way of thinking and clean the husband out for every penny she can squeeze out of him. Then her sons will grow up listening to more lectures on how all men are pigs.

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  6. *Anyway, Muzalon... I'm planning on becoming a fearless male warrior. Any books/authors you can recommend to help me in this endeavor?*

    Ernst Jünger, Germany's most decorated solder in the First World War wrote a wondrous book entitled 'The Storm of Steel' about his combat experiences. In this, he sets forth his 'philosophy of the warrior' in economical prose. Unlike invalids such as Nietzsche, or dreamers like Mishima, Jünger actually lived his martial philosophy to the full.

    This is a great site on Jünger:

    http://www.juenger.org/contents.php

    And these are books of his I have read and been moved by:

    The Storm of Steel. From the Diary of a German Storm-Troop Officer on the Western Front. London: Chatto & Windus (1929).

    Copse 125. A Chronicle from the Trench Warfare of 1918. London: Chatto & Windus (1930).

    The Glass Bees. New York: Noonday Press (1960).

    Like the British politician and academic Enoch Powell, I view German culture to be purer than its English counterpart, embodying an existential integrity utterly lacking in modern Anglo civilization. My only issue with Jünger is that he sets the bar of warrior-manliness and genius almost too high for emulation.

    Another book I love is Heinz Knoke's I Flew for the Fuhrer, the autobiography of one of Germany's best pilots in the Second World War.

    You are right about female iniquity, especially its Anglo-American variant. Do we need any more MRAs telling us about it?

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  7. *I wouldn't doubt it a bit. More likely, though, she'll end up marrying some desperate mangina who'll work like a slave paying for her sons; then suddenly she'll revert back to her old way of thinking and clean the husband out for every penny she can squeeze out of him. Then her sons will grow up listening to more lectures on how all men are pigs.*

    I think you have hit the nail on the head. Many educated Anglo-American women have a conscious awareness of the injustices meted out to men across the Anglosphere - just as they have a conscious awareness that thugs will beat them up and desert them. Unlike men, however, who are ruled by reason, such women are primarily controlled by instinct. This leads them to follow the instinctive line at every major life-juncture, whether it be divorcing a decent husband or shacking up with Charles Manson.

    The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called American universities 'Animus Incubators', in that they developed the masculine aspects of the female mind while never acknowledging that women are primarily ruled by instinct, not reason. In consequence, women from American universities strut about parroting ideas and arguments they have heard, while lacking any real UNDERSTANDING of such arguments. Academic feminism is a perfect example of this unfortunate tendency, full of bumptious and false claims about everything from anorexia to 'patriarchy', most of which can be effortlessly overturned by a moment's logical thought.

    As in academia, so in life. Women like Phillips may well be able to articulate the foibles of feminism brilliantly, but remain unable to ACT on their understanding - since instinct, not reason, remains their primary psychic mode.

    Professor Murray Rothbard gives a great example of an Ivy League educated female who suddenly 'dropped out' to become an Earth Mother in a commune, pumping out child after child to a succession of bums. This example shows why matriarchy is incompatible with civilization: because instinct is inimical to civilization, and female decisions are always made on instinct.

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  8. Rookh;

    Speaking of psychologists, I came across a book I hadn't read in awhile titled 'Masochism in Modern Man' by Dr. Theodor Reik. It seems to back your suspicions about the character of the Thomas Flemings of the world.

    Reik makes the point that masochism is the commonest sexual perversion among males; but his thesis is that masochism is a perversion of men's instinctual desire to prove themselves strong in winning the female: in the warped mentality of masochists they suffer abuse from women to prove that they are strong enough to endure it, in hopes of winning them.

    Anyway, you should check it out, it's mostly a technical work, but makes some good points.

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  9. Sir

    My first instinct is to explain such perversion with recourse to the de-gendered, de-natured puritanism of Anglo culture. Since the natural gender polarity is missing from Anglo culture (which promotes a 'sexless' ideal) the male's innate solar gender identity is irreparably compromised. Denied normal expression of his psycho-sensual identity, his only recourse is to self-abasement before the all-pervasive Anglobitch archetype, the sole sacred symbol in any puritanical culture.

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  10. Islam is the first, last and perhaps only antidote to fembots!

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  11. "...masochism is a perversion of men's instinctual desire to prove themselves strong in winning the female: in the warped mentality of masochists they suffer abuse from women to prove that they are strong enough to endure it, in hopes of winning them."

    This is exactly my sentiment. I think it works hand in glove with Rookh's inciteful comment which followed. These two motive forces work in symbiosis. They feed off of each other.

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  12. melanie phillips is a famous uk conservative journalist. she is jewish and writes about islamists a lot but is also pro family pro father. she's middle aged at least. i dont know about her kids. google it.

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    Replies
    1. The fact she's a jew tells me everything i need to know about her.

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