Some people say that women never invent anything. I disagree! Feminists and their supporters have invented some of the biggest hoaxes of the twentieth century. The “rule of thumb” hoax was one of the most well known and, despite the fact that it was exploded by Christina Hoff Sommers in her book “Who Stole Feminism?“, some untinking people, even today, still quote it as though it were a fact. Sadly some academics and publications like Time magazine, all of whom should know better, do the same.

Here is the truth of the matter as given by Christina Hoff Sommers in her book:

“…The ‘rule of thumb’ story is an example of revisionist history that feminists happily fell into believing. It reinforces their perspective on society, and they tell it as a way of winning converts to their angry creed…

The ‘rule of thumb’, however, turns out to be an excellent example of what may be called a feminist fiction. It is not to be found in William Blackstone’s treatise on English common law. On the contrary, British law since the 1700s and our American laws predating the Revolution prohibit wife beating, though there have been periods and places in which the prohibition was only indifferently enforced.

That the phrase did not even originate in legal practice could have been ascertained by any fact-checker who took the trouble to look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, which notes that the term has been used metaphorically for at least three hundred years to refer to any method of measurement or technique of estimation derived from experience rather than science.

According to Canadian folklorist Philip Hiscock, “The real explanation of ‘rule of thumb’ is that it derives from wood workers… who knew their trade so well they rarely or never fell back on the use of such things as rulers. Instead, they would measure things by, for example, the length of their thumbs.” Hiscock adds that the phrase came into metaphorical use by the late seventeenth century. Hiscock could not track the source of the idea that the term derives from a principle governing wife beating, but he believes it is an example of ‘modern folklore’ and compares it to other ‘back-formed explanations.’ such as the claim asparagus comes from ’sparrow-grass’ or that ‘ring around the rosy’ is about the plague.

We shall see that Hiscock’s hunch was correct, but we must begin by exonerating William Blackstone (1723-1780), the Englishman who codified centuries of legal customs and practices into the elegant and clearly organized tome known as Commentaries on the Laws of England. The Commentaries, a classic of legal literature, became the basis for the development of American law. The so-called rule of thumb as a guideline for wife-beating does not occur in Blackstone’s compendium, although he does refer to an ancient law that permitted “domestic chastisement”….

In America, there have been laws against wife beating since before the Revolution. By 1870, it was illegal in almost every state; but even before then, wife-beaters were arrested and punished for assault and battery. The historian and feminist Elizabeth Pleck observes in a scholarly article entitled “Wife-Battering in Nineteenth-Century America“:

It has often been claimed that wife-beating in nineteenth-century America was legal… Actually, though, several states passed statutes legally prohibiting wife-beating; and at least one statute even predates the American Revolution. The Massachusetts Bay Colony prohibited wife-beating as early as 1655. The edict states: “No man shall strike his wife nor any woman her husband on penalty of such fine not exceeding ten pounds for one offense, or such corporal punishment as the County shall determine.”

[Pleck] points out that punishments for wife-beaters could be severe: according to an 1882 Maryland statute, the culprit could receive forty lashes at the whipping post; in Delaware, the number was thirty. In New Mexico, fines ranging from $225 to $1000 were levied, or sentences of one to five years in prison imposed. For most of our history, in fact, wife-beating has been considered a sin comparable to thievery or adultery. Religious groups – especially Protestant groups such as Quakers, Methodists, and Baptists – punished, shunned, and excommunicated wife-beaters. Husbands, brothers, and neighbors often took vengence against the batterer. Vigilante parties sometimes abducted wife-beaters and whipped them.

Just how did the false account originate, and how did it achieve authority and currency? As with many myths, there is a small core of fact surrounded by an accretion of error. In the course of rendering rulings on cases before them, two Southern judges had alluded to an ‘ancient law’ according to which a man could beat his wife as long as the implement was not wider than his thumb. The judges, one from North Carolina and one from Mississippi, did not accept the authority of the ‘ancient law.’ The North Carolina judge refered to it as ‘barbarism,’ and both judges found the husband in the case in question guilty of wife abuse. Nevertheless, their rulings seemed to tolerate the notion that men had a measure of latitude in physically chastising their wives. Fortunately, as Pleck takes pains to remind us, they were not representative of judicial opinion in the rest of the country.

In 1976, Del Martin, a coordinator of the N.O.W. Task Force on Battered Women, came across a reference to the two judges and their remarks. Neither judge had used the phrase “rule of thumb,” but a thumb had been mentioned, and Ms. Martin took note of it:

“Our law, based upon the old English common-law doctrines, explicitly permitted wife-beating for correctional purposes. However, certain restrictions did exist… For instance, the common-law doctrine had been modified to allow the husband ‘the right to whip his wife, provided that he used a switch no bigger than his thumb’ – a rule of thumb, so to speak.”

Ms. Martin had not claimed that the term ‘rule of thumb’ originated from common law. Before long, however, the ‘ancient law’ alluded to by two obscure Southern judges was being treated as an unchallenged principle of both British and American law, and journalists and academics alike were bandying the notion about. Feminist Terry Davidson, in an article entitled ‘Wife Beating: A Recurring Phenomenon Throughout History,’ claims that “one of the reasons nineteenth century British wives were dealt with so harshly by their husbands and by their legal system was the ‘rule of thumb’ and castigates Blackstone himself. “Blackstone saw nothing unreasonable about the wife-beating law. In fact, he believed it to be quite moderate.”

These interpretive errors were given added authority by a group of scholars and lawyers who, in 1982, prepared a report on wife abuse for the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Under the Rule of Thumb: Battered Women and the Administration of Justice – A Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. On the second page, they note: ‘American law is built upon the British common law that condoned wife beating and even prescribed the weapon to be used. This ‘rule of thumb’ stipulated that a man could only beat his wife with a ‘rod not thicker than his thumb.’” It went on to speak of Blackstone as the jurist who “greatly influenced the making of the law in the American colonies [and who] commented on the ‘rule of thumb,’” justifying the rule by noting that “the law thought it reasonable to intrust [the husband] with this power of… chastisement, in the same moderation that a man is allowed to correct his apprentices or children.”

The publication of the report established the feminist fable about the origins of the term in popular lore, and the misogyny of Blackstone and ‘our law’ as ‘fact.’ Misstatements about the ‘rule of thumb’ still appear in the popular press.

That same 1993 Time magazine article that popularized the nonexistent March of Dimes study on domestic violence and birth defects and reported that “between 22% and 35% of all visits by females to emergency rooms are for injuries from domestic assaults” also cited new York University law professor Holly Maguigan: “We talk about the notion of the rule of thumb, forgetting that it had to do with the restriction on a man’s right to use a weapon against his wife: he couldn’t use a rod that was larger than his thumb.” Professor Maguigan’s law students would do well to check their Blackstone.

Imagine you are sitting in a Dallas Area Rapid Transport bus one day and you happen to notice the two posters shown above. One shows the fresh face of a young boy with the caption “One day my mother will kill me”; the other shows the innocent face of a young girl with the words “When I grow up I will abuse my children”. I expect you’d be rather shocked, and if you asked the driver of the bus why his company was spreading such misinformation about domestic violence, and he answered “Well, most child abuse is by Moms and most of their victims are boys”, you’d be staggered by this truth; but you’d still not think it was depicting the actions of most women.

I expect this was the reaction of the majority of people travelling on DART transport when they saw the actual posters which the buses carried, shown below.

Husbands do occasionally kill their wives, just as wives also kill their husbands, but young girls who see these posters should not expect to be killed by their husbands as the posters suggest, and young boys should not think that they will be expected to kill their wives.

This whole idea is a travesty of the true situation and all concerned with this campaign have good reason to bow their heads in shame at such misuse of these photographs and the promulgation of such obviously misleading ideas about domestic violence.

Fortunately the situation was brought to the attention of Glenn Sacks who, through his large and popular website, and by other means, informed the world about this child-hating campaign by “The Family Place”. Paige Flink is the Executive Director of this organization and she was happy to pay $25,000 for what turned out in the end to be a massive international backlash against her organization and DART who allowed her to engage in this tacky campaign. Thousands of protests poured in from all over the world; DART didn’t have the staff to deal with them.

The biased Miss Flink said that “Ninety percent of the victims of the reported cases of domestic violence in Dallas are females”. I think the important word here is “reported“. Men who are victims of female domestic violence rarely report the matter either because they are ashamed to admit it or for some other reason. In the UK, even the misandric BBC admit that men are six times less likely to report DV against them as women are.

Glenn Sacks truthfully pointed out that up-to-date research clearly shows that men account for half of all domestic violence victims and about one third of all domestic violence injuries. In the UK the ManKind website, which specialises in accurate and up-to-date information on domestic abuse, publishes very similar figures.

Glenn Sacks also provided the world with the statistics published by the US Department of Health and Human Services in their Child Maltreatment report  from 2001 to 2006 which show that:

70.8% of children who are killed by one parent are killed by their mothers and

70.6% of children abused by one parent are abused by their mothers.

60% of the victims are boys.

This clearly proves that the information contained in the top two posters on this post are much more accurate than the second two. But, even so, I think most fair thinking and responsible adults would consider that, to use any of the above posters, is putting children at risk and is thoroughly reprehensible. I do hope that Miss Flink has learned a lesson from her expensive $25,000 headache!

If, by any chance, you are still in twentieth century thinking mode regarding domestic violence, you might like to read the following quotes from experts on the subject which will quickly bring you into the twenty-first century. Please feel free to copy these and send them to anyone you know who needs to be brought up to date.

Domestic Violence Experts:
Research Has Discredited the Woman-as-Victim/Man-as-Perpetrator DV Model

“Men account for half of all DV victims and incur a third of DV-related injuries. Ignoring female-on-male violence inhibits our efforts to combat domestic violence.”

John Hamel, LCSW, a court-certified batterer treatment provider and author of the book Gender-Inclusive Treatment of Intimate Partner Abuse

“Half of violent relationships were reciprocally violent. In non-reciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases.”

Dr. Daniel J. Whitaker of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, describing a 2007 study published in the American Journal of Public Health

“Every time we tried to say that women’s intimate partner abuse is different than men’s, the evidence did not support it.”

Dr. Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling of the University of South Alabama

“My independent research as to gender and domestic violence reveals that women use all forms of domestic violence at least as frequently as do men and with very similar effects on male victims.” 

“A meta-analytic review of 552 domestic violence studies published in the Psychological Bulletin found that 38% of the physical injuries in heterosexual domestic assaults are suffered by men.”

Dr. Donald Dutton, UBC author of Rethinking Domestic Violence

“Both boys and girls who observe their mothers engaging in violence toward her partners tend to use more violence in their romantic relationships. Moreover, such girls are more likely to be aggressive with their peers.”

Psychology Professor Marlene Moretti of Simon Fraser University BC

“I have conducted surveys of nationally representative samples of American families funded by the National Institutes of Health in 1975, 1985, and 1992. 

“In 2006 I conducted a study of partner violence in 32 nations. In all of these studies, the rate of men victimized by physical and psychological attacks by their partners is about the same as the rate of women victimized by male partners…”Physical attacks by women account for about a third of the injuries.”

Murray A. Straus, Professor of Sociology and Co-Director Family Research Laboratory University of New Hampshire:

“When men with children try to access domestic violence services and are turned away, we deny their children services and put them in danger. There is an unknown quantity of children…who cannot find the services they need to escape their violent mothers, and therefore, they must remain in their homes. Thus, by discriminating against male victims of domestic violence, we are also discriminating against their children and putting both the father and his children at risk. It is imperative, then, to assure that male victims and their children can get access to domestic violence services.”

Denise A. Hines, Ph.D. of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire

“It’s mandated that I have the Duluth Domestic Violence Power & Control Wheel prominently displayed in the office where I provide batterers’ treatment classes. I do, but with one minor modification — I drew a circle around it and a line going through it.”

[In the Duluth theoretical framework, domestic violence is caused by a patriarchal society that sanctions violence by men against their female partners. Women are assumed to be either victims or, when they are found to aggress against their male partners, to be doing so in self-defense.]

Claudia Ann Dias, MSC, JD Batterers’ Treatment Provider

“A recent study [published in the journal Violence and Victims] analyzed data originally obtained through the National Violence Against Women Survey in the mid-90s…[which was] a study which was designed, conducted and analyzed by feminist researchers.

“Researchers looked at 10,000 respondents who were currently married, and found that adult women are just as controlling and jealous towards their male partners as the other way around. 

“They also found that the relationship between use of control and jealousy and physical violence existed equally for both male and female respondents, and that ‘intimate terrorists’ can be either male or female.” 

John Hamel, LCSW, a court-certified batterer treatment provider and author of the book Gender-Inclusive Treatment of Intimate Partner Abuse

“The domestic violence establishment–of which I was once very much a part–has distorted the research to minimize and ignore female and mutual domestic violence.”

Dr. Donald Dutton, UBC Author of Rethinking Domestic Violence

California State Long Beach University professor Martin Fiebert maintains an online bibliography summarizing 219 scholarly investigations, with an aggregate sample size exceeding 220,000, which concludes “women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners.”

“Research shows that domestic violence is actually more common in lesbian relationships than in heterosexual relationships.”

Dr. Donald Dutton, UBC Author of Rethinking Domestic Violence

“According to the [female] victims themselves, the majority of these cases did indeed involve mutual abuse and, and some featured a dominant female perpetrator whose [male] partner was arrested after fighting back. This clinical data contradicted much of what I had been taught, and led me to conduct an extensive review of the research literature. What I found more than corroborated my clinical findings.”

John Hamel, LCSW, a court-certified batterer treatment provider and author of the book Gender-Inclusive Treatment of Intimate Partner Abuse

‘Domestic Violence Is a Serious Problem for both Women and Men’

“California domestic violence laws violate men’s rights because they provide state funding only for women and their children who use shelters and other programs, a state appeals court has ruled. 

“The decision by the Third District Court of Appeal in Sacramento requires the programs to be available to male as well as female victims of domestic violence…

New California Appeal Court Ruling

“Domestic violence ‘research’ has been misleading, in that data has been extracted from crime reports and/or ‘crime victim surveys – in which men underreport more than women – and have been publicized as indicating domestic violence is a gender issue (male-perpetrator/female-victims). In fact, when larger surveys with representative samples are examined, perpetration of domestic violence perpetration is slightly more common for females…”

Dr. Donald Dutton, UBC Author of Rethinking Domestic Violence

“The real horror is the continued status of battered men as the ‘missing persons’ of the problem. Male victims do not count and are not counted…

“Federal funds typically pass to a state coalition against or to a branch of a state agency designated to deal with violence against women. 

“Thirty years ago battered women had no place to go and no place to turn for help and assistance. Today, there are places to go—more than 1,800 shelters, and many agencies to which to turn. For men, there still is no place to go and no one to whom to turn.”

Richard James Gelles, PhD, Director for the Center for Research on Youth & Social Policy

“Under current policy, abused men are both denied services and told, essentially, that they don’t even exist. Ignoring male victims is not only a human rights issue, but also a public health issue. Until all perpetrators of family violence are held accountable for their actions, regardless of gender, our efforts will be limited, with serious implications for future generations.”

John Hamel, LCSW, a court-certified batterer treatment provider and author of the book Gender-Inclusive Treatment of Intimate Partner Abuse

“I interviewed women in battered women’s shelters and wondered why some were leaving in less than a week. The answer, it turned out, is that they too were engaging in violence against their partners, and in some cases had left to pick up the battle again. We weren’t helping these women because [by ignoring their role in DV] we were ignoring their paradigm

Dr. Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling of the University of South Alabama 

“The majority of mainstream researchers are now acknowledging the gender-inclusive nature of intimate partner abuse.”

John Hamel, LCSW, a court-certified batterer treatment provider and author of the book Gender-Inclusive Treatment of Intimate Partner Abuse

Erin Pizzey who opened the first women’s refuge in London in the 1970s, states in her book “Prone to Violence” that, of the first 100 women who entered the refuge, 62 were as violent or more violent than the men they were allegedly running away from.

For many years her book had been successfully censored in all UK libraries and bookshops but now it is available to download free. You can do so by visiting:  http://www.mankindwales.org.uk  and going to the literature section. Erin Pizzey is a patron of the UK ManKind charity.

Hans Christian Andersen’s story, The Emperor’s New Clothes, is a vivid illustration of how people can easily be deluded. You will remember that two tailors told the emperor that they had manufactured a really marvellous cloth, very fine and more beautiful than any other. They told the emperor that it was so special that only very intelligent people could see it; ordinary people couldn’t. This great con trick was swallowed in wholesale fashion by the emperor and all his subjects. When the tailors ostensibly made him a magnificent outfit from the cloth the emperor paraded down the street in it admired by all his subjects who said they could see the cloth. It wasn’t until a small boy, who wasn’t taken in by the trick, cried out that the emperor had no clothes on, that everyone came to their senses and realised they had all been party to a big lie.
Such was the case when feminism was introduced in the second half of the twentieth century. Women were told that for centuries they had been dominated by an evil patriarchy and that they were a downtrodden section of the community that needed to fight for freedom and equality. Some people say that women never invent anything; I disagree; feminists have been inventing, or rewriting, their own version of history – which some of the sillier sisters referred to as “herstory” – for half a century. In doing so their total ignorance of true history stands out like a sore thumb.

Back in the Middle Ages women were much better cared for than the feminists would have us believe. Joseph and Frances Gies’ book Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages records that “Widows were given half or full provisions of their husband’s estate after his death. (The children were sometimes given the other half.) This includes monies, land and houses. Children were also explicitly cared for in their fathers’ wills, with guardianship entrusted to the widow.” In cases of adultery men were charged equally with women.

Paintings from that time show us wives chasing their husbands with broomsticks. Modern surveys clearly show that women are just as violent in the home as men; perhaps they always have been. 

It was always assumed that only men were promiscuous and fathers always assumed that the children borne by their wives were always their offspring. With the advent of modern DNA tests it has now been proved beyond all question that one in five children in all developed nations are not the children of the man claimed to be the father by the woman. Mothers today are having to repay many thousands of pounds to men who have discovered that they are not the fathers of the children as claimed by the mother.

The alleged “oppression” of women by men in not allowing them to enter certain jobs and professions such as the medical and legal professions were attempts to shield women from danger within society. Women were forbidden to work down coal mines on the ground that it was “too dangerous”. However, it wasn’t too dangerous for men and thousands were killed doing the job.

So successful were feminists with their “emperor’s new clothes” trick that we have now reached the stage of “let’s pretend” by allowing women into the military on an alleged equal footing with men; equal except that the standards expected of men and not the same as the watered down standards expected of women. Also women do not share the same dangers as men. If they did they would share the same percentage of casualties. Of course, women can be casualties but they are few and far between as the following graph clearly shows:

Men represent 90% of the armed forces but 98% of the casualties.
Women represent 10% of the armed forces but only 2% of the casualties. 

Something else that feminists have invented are false statistics and, by infiltrating the media over the last four decades, they have managed to get those false figures accepted by a gullible public. Many people today are convinced that domestic abuse is something perpetrated by men on women whereas the truth is that women are equally as violent in the home as men.

Child abuse is another case in point. Aided and abetted by the BBC and the National Society for the Prevention of cruelty to Children (NSPCC) the impression has been given in the UK that men are responsible for most child abuse. This is hypocrisy of a very high order as the figures published by the NSPCC show that the vast majority of child abuse is perpetrated by mothers. Figures from Scotland show that over half child abuse there is perpetrated by mothers as the following graph shows. 

As you can clearly see, the only area where child abuse has increased from 2002 to 2003 is that by mothers. All the others have decreased or remain the same. As recent figures in the UK show that violence by women has doubled in the last five years, one can only suppose that child abuse by women has increased also. This is probably the reason why I couldn’t find an up-to-date table of child abuse on the Scottish Government website. It’s been well and truly hidden. The statistics on domestic violence on the website are truly antique. I think they are about as old as Edinburgh castle!

But the game is up! Feminism is now known as one gigantic lie. The empress is found to be wearing no clothes!

Why maleness is essential for really great achievement

A song came out in 1939 which was a big hit. It was called “Scatterbrain” in which a man is singing about his girlfriend. It went like this:

“You’re as pleasant as the morning and refreshing as the rain

Isn’t it a pity that you’re such a scatterbrain?

When you smile it’s so delightful,

When you talk it’s so insane,

Still it’s charming chatter, scatterbrain.”

Women were often referred to as scatterbrains. Now they call it “multitasking”. In other words it’s the ability to half do two jobs at the same time. It’s possible to make sandwiches and listen to the radio at the same time but with jobs which require a lot of concentration, like landing an airliner, you need to give the job your full attention. This partly accounts for the career choices, and hence the slight differential in salaries, of men and women.

If we represent all the men in the world on a horizontal line starting with the geniuses and the saints on the left and moving to the villains and the drop-outs on the right we would get a shape something like this:

And if we do the same thing with all the women in the world we would get a shape like this:

At both the saints’ end and the sinners’ end men appear in reasonable numbers: women, on the other hand, hardly at all. They congregate in the middle. Professor Camille Paglia put it rather well when she said, ‘There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack-the-Ripper.’

This being the case, I often wonder why it is that the media, and particularly female writers and women’s magazines, only ever consider the right hand end of the men’s line but concentrate almost exclusively on the left hand end of the women’s line.

With the one exception of childbirth, you can choose almost any other field of endeavour and you will find that the really high achievers in it are almost exclusively men. I am not saying that women never appear amongst them, but they do so only in very small numbers.

According to Robert Newman, the higher the voice, the lower the intellect. This suggests that  testosterone is a factor in high achievement. It enables the mind to focus on specifics instead of roaming over a wide area – the scatterbrain approach.

For many years, Cambridge University has been concerned that in a subject such as history, which is supposed to be female-friendly, 10%  more men than women attain first class honours degrees in the subject. A survey of students at Cambridge University by Dr Chris Mann, reveals that women’s study is wide ranging whereas men’s is more focused. “Men are alert to the performance aspect of their examinations from early on and tailor their intellectual development to public success. They have more confidence in their innate ability and in using examination techniques.”

Today, when examinations are designed so that girls get better results than boys overall – as per the above graphs – a suggestion was made some years ago at Cambridge that female students might be getting lower marks because the mainly male markers were biased against them. It was therefore decided that the names would not be entered on exam papers and all students were to be recognised merely by a number. One would assume that this was obviously a better way of running an examination anyway. When this was done, the female students’ results were even worse, suggesting that the mainly male examiners favoured female students. When this was discovered, the action of the Cambridge University authority is interesting: they reverted to putting names on the exam papers thus ensuring that women would, once again, be put in a more favourable position than the men.

Every year in TV news reports at exam time we are constantly told that “once again girls have outperformed boys” in the results. It never seems to occur to the exam authorities that as boys have slightly higher IQs than girls, which denotes native intelligence, the fact that boys do not perform well can only be due to one of two reasons: either the mainly-female teaching force is biased against boys and is failing them or the examinations are badly designed and deliberately offer an advantage to girls.

Women slightly outnumber men in university now, yet, in the popular TV series “University Challenge”, presented by Jeremy Paxman, most of the teams are composed of men; women rarely make up even half the team from any university and it is noticeable how many more answers are given by the men in the teams. Recently, when an all-women team from a women’s college challenged an all-men team, the men scored four times as many points as the women. Jeremy Paxman, at the end, told the women that they seemed to be asleep.

Most of the competitors in each event of the TV “Mastermind” series are men, usually about 75%, sometimes 100%. The competitors in the final are mostly, and sometimes all, men with almost always a male winner. In the Junior Mastermind the situation is the same and a girl has never yet won this competition. No physical strength is needed to perform well in this area so that cannot account for female failure; all that is needed is a superior intellect.

Now the age-old myth that women are not encouraged to achieve or are socially conditioned to take second place to men really will not wash after four decades of feminism and the preferential treatment given to women in taking up studies. There are many fields in which women students far outweigh the number of men, such as catering, and yet almost every top chef is a man.

Look at any school orchestra and you will find that it is composed largely of girls. Youth orchestras have a better sprinkling of boys and by the time you get to the national symphony orchestras containing musicians of real distinction, you find the vast majority are men; and the best orchestra in the world, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, until recently, was composed entirely of men. Today, because of accusations of misogyny, a few women have been admitted. Obviously any orchestra recruits the best musicians available whether they are men or women so if they lack women it means their performance is not as good as that of the men.

When I was asked, whilst playing a game of Trivial Pursuit, “How many women have won the world chess championship?” I found the answer easy; it’s “none”. This is despite the fact that for many years past both boys and girls in this country and others such as Russia, have been taught how to play chess and also encouraged to enter competitions. No physical strength is needed to move a chess piece, so this cannot be entertained as an excuse for lack of girls’ achievement in this field, but you certainly must not be a scatterbrain to win at chess.

When it comes to the higher echelons of science and mathematics, men just leave women standing, computers being a classic example. An article in The Pscychologist stated that computerphobia affects 25% of the population but three quarters of those affected are women. Mark Brosnan of the University of Greenwich, one of the authors of the article, says that “Being anxious about computers or trying to avoid them can be a real handicap. Failure to acquire computer literacy may become a factor keeping these women out of a wide range of careers.” Recent studies have found that women are more anxious about computers, whereas men have a positive attitude towards them. Female attitudes tend to be negative at all ages.

In the field of art, all really outstanding artists have been men despite the fact that women have always been encouraged to take up the subject. In the part-publication series by Marshall Cavendish, The Great Artists, it is interesting to note that of the 95 artists in the series, 93 are men. This is yet another area where men succeed and women fail.

Men also have a higher spiritual and moral sense even in the face of persecution and death. I mentioned saints in my title. Did you know that 82% of all the saints are men? Hymn writers too are almost invariably men. In the Methodist Hymn Book for example, for every three hymns written by women, there are 97 written by men. And even in some of the modern hymns and chorus books where the poetic standard is quite low and the spiritual content meagre, 90% of the contents are usually provided by men.

In literature and language alone do women almost come alongside men; yet, even here, there has never been a female Shakespeare or a Milton. In poetry particularly women perform poorly. Even the extreme feminist, Germaine Greer, admitted in her book on the subject, Slip-shod Sibyls, that women could not write good poetry.

To cover up for women’s failure in so many areas, feminists often advance the hoary old excuse that women have time off to bear children and this is what holds them back. What they fail to realise is that, while a mother is at home caring for her children, (the most important job of all) she will have time for reading, painting, writing or playing a musical instrument. After all, children do sleep quite a lot when young and, later, spend many hours in school.

Some women can achieve high degrees of excellence and there is a myth put about by feminists that men do not like such women because they are successful. This is misleading to say the least. On the rare occasion when a woman does become a high achiever she almost reaches masculinity, and, of course, loses her femininity. It is because of her loss of femininity that men do not feel attracted to her; it has nothing to do with the fact that she is successful.

So why is it that maleness and high achievement go so closely hand in hand? Dr Goodheart states quite frankly that it is all a question of testosterone, the male hormone which gives men forcefulness, ambition, competitiveness, originality and general push. Women underachieve because they lack this hormone. The same hormone which produces the yobbo also produces the genius. But why is it that the yobbo gets all the publicity in today’s media?

This is an intersting update received during May 2009:

“The ‘National Inventors Hall of Fame’ is planning their 2009 Induction ceremony at their
Silicon Valley Museum this week. This year, the focus is on the 50th anniversary of the
invention of the integrated circuit chip.

Without a doubt, the creation of the integrated circuit chip has had a profound effect on
the lives of everyone on the planet, maybe even more so than some of the other inventions
of the previous centuries.

But the next time you find yourselves in a ‘male-bashing’ debate with a radical feminist,
point out to them that ALL of this year’s 16 inductees are MEN. MEN who essentially made
today’s modern technology possible.“

If our sad society is ever to get back on the rails, shouldn’t we be considering the vital question of guidance for young men? The yobbo is a product of our divorce courts and the resultant single-parent families. A good male role model can encourage a young man to gravitate to the left end of our line; a job so obviously for a father. But as long as judges are allowed to routinely separate father and son in the divorce courts, so long will this process be delayed.

The good news is that, at long last, some politicians are realising that the two-parent family is the very bedrock of our civilization and its partial destruction is the fountain of many of our ills. The question is, when will those in power have the guts to do something about it?

I remember the time when the BBC was looked upon both nationally and internationally as the quintessence of rectitude in every department of broadcasting. But now, alas, such is far from being the case. Only recently the BBC has been heavily fined for lying and organising phone-in scams to make money and dupe the public. This even happened on Blue Peter, the children’s programme. You cannot sink much lower than that.

Not that it’s necessary to engage in outright lies to give a distorted or wrong impression. The BBC are now skilled in telling just half the truth and a half truth is, by definition, half a lie. Take, for instance, the oft quoted figure, beloved by the BBC, that 1 in 4 women can expect to suffer domestic violence in their lifetime. Now this comes from a government report and is probably true, but only a short distance away from that fact, and in the same report, is the fact that 1 in 6 men can expect to suffer domestic violence in their lifetime. But the BBC conveniently always forgets to include that fact, so that listeners and viewers and left with the impression that it’s only women who suffer domestic violence.

A few years ago, in an undercover investigation into parents harming their children in hospital in order to gain attention to themselves as grieving parents, a film was made of 31 parents actually doing this. There was one grandmother, one father and 29 mothers, all engaged in this activity. In the BBC news report about the film they stated that “31 parents” had been filmed and then went on to show parts of the film. The first person shown was the one and only father, the second was the one and only grandmother and the third and last was one of the 29 mothers thus giving the impression that all three had had equal responsibility in this. The fact that it was, by a long way, mainly mothers who abused their children in this way was never mentioned. Doubtless it was the feminist  influence in the BBC that inspired such a one-sided and dishonest treatment of this serious matter.

Many people in the UK, and probably in many other countries also, are asking why this fall from grace. I think the answer is that the staff at the BBC are a mere shadow of their predecessors and have become sloppy, touchy-feely and politically “correct”. This shows up many times during the day in sloppy and incorrect English, poor grammar and pronunciation which is “Hey! Please yourself!” 

But the root cause of this is the fact that over the last couple of decades the BBC has been infiltrated by feminists who have worked their way up through the ranks and are now in positions of influence – and not for the better either.

A well known personality of long and considerable standing at the BBC, Jeremy Paxman, the Newsnight presenter, recently upset some of the BBC feminists by saying that it is men, not women, who are being discriminated against at the BBC. He even named five female executives as examples: Jana Bennet, director of BBC vision, Janice Hadlow, controller of BBC 4, Dorothy Byme, head of news, current affairs and documentaries at Channel 4, Jay Hunt, controller of BBC 1, and Dawn Airey, soon to be chief executive and chair of Five.

In an interview at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, Paxman said: “Do I think it’s a man’s world in television? That is the most ridiculous question I have been asked all week. The worst thing you can be in this industry is a middle class white male. If any middle class white male I come across says he wants to enter television I say give up all hope. They’ve no chance.”

Of course feminists rushed to attack Paxman for what he said; so what’s new? But many of the public, who are forced by the government to pay their licence fee to the BBC every year, mainly white middle-aged men, have supported what Paxman said and have condemned the constant politically “correct” approach of the BBC to broadcasting as unjust.

Not that Jeremy Paxman is the only one to criticise the BBC in this respect. The former newsreader, Michael Buerk stated a while ago that the “shift in the balance of power between the sexes” has gone too far, and men were now little more than “sperm donors”. 

It seems that the BBC has few admirers these days and many critics. Of course the main trouble with the BBC is that it is so overfunded by the licence fee so that the staff are featherbedded to a ridiculous degree. They can, and do, ignore public opinion. I have written to criticise them on many occasions and only get back the usual anodyne reply with the final paragraph saying that the BBC values my comments. The only trouble is they never do anything about them but carry on in their predictable fashion repeating the same sexist mistakes.

Feminists on both sides of the Atlantic – the few who remain – now have a new hate figure in the shape of the authoress Kathleen Parker. Her book “Save the Males” tells the truth about the massive damage feminism has wrought throughout the Western World. In particular she deals in truthful detail with the way in which feminists, aided and abetted by governments, the media and the law courts, have downgraded fathers thus perpetrating child abuse of the worst kind on so many children.

Its witty style makes the book easy to read but it doesn’t deal lightly with the important issues. The writer is one of an increasing number of perceptive women who are genuinely concerned for the welfare of both men and children who are now suffering from the effects of the feminization of society. She cuts through the cant promulgated by so much of the media for decades past as she deals with marriage, sex, education, pornography etc. in a responsible way seldom seen in today’s media. The book is by no means politically correct; it’s not that shallow, but time and again, I gave a mental “Hear! Hear!” as nail after nail was hit right on the head.

Men, and women with a sense of humour, will love reading chapter five of this book. Kathleen Parker’s style really comes into its own here where she deals with the diatribe of the “Vagina Monologues”. Be sure to hold on to your sides if you are a man. This chapter is a real hoot. The mental health of Eve Ensler and the women who attend performances of these monologues which encourage the female rape of a young girl, must be in considerable doubt.

Here are just a few quotes from the book, to whet your appetite:

“The same feminist movement that encouraged women to use their critical faculties also gave them the green light to be hostile and demeaning towards men.”

“We’ve had a few decades of this shtick and have produced a new generation of children tattooed, pierced, angry, depressed, obese, anorexic, drugged, self-mutilating, whoring, pimping, failing.”

“Boys had absorbed the message that life isn’t fair and that girls are to blame . . . Nobody likes a teacher’s pet, and girls were the culture’s pets.”

“Twenty-five million American children are more likely to see a father on television than in the home.”

“A 2007 University of Washington study . . . revealed that women reported instigating domestic violence twice as often as men in the previous year.”

“Women can kill their husbands with relative impunity as long as they can convince a jury that they were in an abusive marriage.”

“The state’s power in criminalizing fathers and alienating their children is an astounding development in a free democratic society.”

“For the past thirty years or so, males have been under siege by a culture that too often embraces the notion that men are to blame for all life’s ills.”

This cartoon is mine. It’s not in the book, but the sentiment is.

This is, without question, one of the most important books to be published this century and points the way to saving our society. Writers like Kathleen Parker deserve our support. The hardback book can be obtained from Amazon at about £10 including postage.

WE’VE HEARD IT ALL BEFORE haven’t we?

‘They say that in ten years time, women will . . .’
‘By the year 2006 women will be . . .’
‘It is estimated that women will comprise . . .’
‘Experts say that by 2002 . . .’

Usually the ‘Experts’ the ‘Theys’ and the ‘Its’ are amorphous and anonymous, and the figures proclaimed are as totally unbelieveable as those given about domestic violence. 

But, occasionally, very occasionally, a prophet will be found who is bold enough to give a figure and give a date. Two such prophets of feminist prowess were Susan Ward and Brian Whipp who, in 1992 announced confidently to the world in the scientific magazine ‘Nature’, that the wide gap between men and women athletes was closing fast.

They actually predicted that by 1998 women marathon runners would equal the times of men marathon runners and that female athletes would catch up with men and even surpass them at all other distances.

In 1992 the winning man’s time in the prestigious Boston Marathon was 2.08.14 a full 15 minutes 29 seconds in front of the fastest woman runner.

Well, this is 2008, so what was the result of the Boston Marathon this year? The fastest woman was Dire Tube who clocked in her win at 2 hours, 25 minutes 25 seconds.

The winning man was Robert K. Cheruiyot who raced home in 2 hours, 7 minutes 46 seconds – 17 minutes 39 seconds faster than the fastest woman, thus adding another 2 minutes 10 seconds to the gap between men and women runners.

In the recent Beijing Olympic Marathon, the winner of the men’s race, Samuel Kamau Wansiru, beat the winner of the women’s race, Constantine Tomescu Dita, by a massive 20 minutes 12 seconds.

Far from closing, the gap is getting wider. Thus yet another feminist prophecy bites the dust!

So where do feminist prophecies go wrong? They suffer from an overdose of optimism and a sad lack of logic. They also have the ability of manufacturing and massaging statistics to put a better gloss on them. 

Some years ago I read a piece by a female sports commentator who proudly proclaimed that in such-and-such an event in 1997 the winning woman clocked up a better time than the winning man in the same event in 1947!

She was supposing that men athletes had not improved over the last 50 years, but as anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of athletics knows for a certainty – they have. And, if the Boston Marathon is anything to go by, men have improved more than women.

If we consider as a footnote the recent Olympic Games in Beijing, it is interesting to note that in team GB the men gained over half again as many medals as the women; clearly not an encouraging omen for feminist prophetesses.

So what about all those other feminist prophecies for the next century? I’m going to prophecy that they will also be wrong!

I must ask viewers to bear with me while I post below a magazine article I wrote almost a decade ago. I’ll also post a quote from a Press Association news item of just a few weeks ago. You can then judge whether the title of my article was correct.

                                                            ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

THE FUTURE OF VIOLENCE IS FEMALE

The fact that women are equally as violent as men has been stated in so many magazines, scholarly documents, surveys and government figures that most thinking people now take it as a fact. The truth of this has been known to many men from bitter experience, but has also been suspected by many women who realise that there is a dark side to their personality. It has only been the constant preaching of feminists about men’s violence, and the constant harping of organizations such as Women’s Aid and Justice for Women, which have conned society into believing that all violence was perpetrated by men.

Now that people are waking up to the fact that  feminism  had a double agenda, the truth is, at last, beginning to emerge. Some years ago I saw the Panorama programme “Violent Women.” It was more of the Femorama programme we have come to expect from this particular stable, complete with suspect research and falsified figures, but the fact that even Panorama had  to admit that 20% of violent crimes were committed by women was indeed a step forward and a nod in the direction of truth, albeit a slight one. Not that the whole truth emerged. Far from it! We were informed twice (presumably just in case we missed it first time around) that 80% of violent crimes were committed by men.

Now, no reader of this blog needs me to point out that this cannot possibly be an accurate figure since we now know beyond doubt that at least 50% of all domestic violence is perpetrated by women. It was no surprise that domestic violence was mentioned only briefly and illustrated with just a few predictable  anecdotes.

The fact that Panorama is totally unfeeling about the way men are treated by women was blatantly exposed in one section of the programme where a husband revealed that, following a short affair he’d had with a woman referred to as ‘a tramp’, his wife boiled six wax candles in a saucepan and, when he had fallen asleep, poured it over him. As a result he was rushed into hospital and had to have several operations and skin grafts. For an interesting article on such treatment of men, (on the Manorama site) click here:  Domestic Violence Against Men

The flat-voiced interviewer (female, of course!) asked ‘Don’t you think you deserved it?’ I could hardly believe I heard it! The interviewee, quite naturally, told her that he did not think he deserved it. But imagine  a wife who had been given say, just a black eye by her husband for being unfaithful, being asked by a male interviewer ‘Don’t you think you deserved it?’ Can you see the headlines in the press the following day? 

If you cast your mind back to the days when even some men watched soaps on TV, you might remember the outburst in some of the tabloids about ‘evil’ Jim of Coronation Street hitting his wife and giving her a couple of shiners because she had been unfaithful to him. Now, by any fair comparison with the Panorama programme, surely she deserved that.

Feminist ostriches

Now you would think that even the man-hating feminists, who for many years past have vilified men on every possible occasion by talking only of female victims of domestic violence and implying that almost all crime is committed by men, would have the good grace to admit that on this occasion Panorama, although grudgingly, has at last revealed the truth about women in a small way. But not a bit of it! The feminazi were up in arms. Though no viewer wrote to Panorama to complain, apparently some did complain to Points of View, and this programme took up the cudgels on behalf of the feminist camp in no uncertain way, and rather unfairly, merely referred to the feminist ‘Women in Prison’ protesters as ‘viewers’.

Chris Tchaikovsky who was quite incorrectly labelled by the programme as ‘Director’ (instead of Directress) of ‘Women in Prison’ was given considerable film footage to try to bluff her way out of the unpleasant truth as revealed by Panorama. She ended by saying that all the evidence presented ‘didn’t mean a thing’.

Isn’t it strange that when a panel of women are seen on TV discussing a subject like domestic violence and one of the ‘experts’ throws in the mythical figure of ‘one woman in four suffers from domestic violence’ the figure is never challenged, and yet there is no shred of evidence to prove it.

Another woman who was allowed to add an opinion was the killer Jackie Childs of Kingston-on-Thames. She merely said that ‘none of these examples support a new strain of violence in women.’ No proof was offered, of course. But then, with feminists, who needs proof? Perhaps being that closely involved in brutal violence herself, she is unable to detect it in others. I was truly amazed at how Points of View took great delight in pointing out that Panorama had got it wrong when they said that Jackie Childs had been found guilty of the manslaughter of her husband. Actually it was her friend’s husband she had killed. Are we to presume from this that it’s OK as long as you only kill a friend’s husband?

 The partisan spokesman implied by his tone that a lot of viewers had complained to Points of View but as he did not quantify it, I imagine the number was pretty insignificant.

Panorama, as a result put out the following statement:

‘Your audience should be aware that the three “viewers” are all connected with the pressure group “Women in Prison” which does not hide its radical feminist agenda, and that Jackie Childs herself was convicted of the manslaughter of her husband.

Panorama would also like to make it clear that they have received no complaints either from viewers or contributors to the programme which attracted an audience of around six million.

On the specific points raised, Panorama would like to offer the following response:

The use of statistics was not misleading. The figures and expert testimony clearly indicate an increasing trend in female violent crime.

In the case of Helen Danso, we do not accept that important information was missing from the programme. We are confident that Helen and all other contributors to the film were treated fairly and not misled. There is no doubt from the interview with the Curtis sisters that some women do get a thrill from committing acts of violence.

If ‘Women in Prison’ no longer wish to refer women to the media, that is entirely a matter for them.’

One thing is for certain, over the coming years ‘Women in Prison’ are going to get a vast increase in their customers, and trying to brush the issue under the carpet by not allowing prisoners to be interviewed by the media is not going to fool anybody.”

Now let’s see the quote from the Press Association:

                                                ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Violent women are stretching police resources, with increasing numbers arrested for such crime, police have warned.

The chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales, Paul McKeever, told BBC TV there was a “new phenomenon” of violent women. Mr McKeever said: ‘Clearly there is an increase in the number of women who use violence in their everyday lives and when they are out drinking on the streets around the country.’

An average of 240 women a day are arrested for violent offences in England and Wales, according to recent figures from the Ministry of Justice.

Mr McKeever said young women were also joining violent gangs.

‘It’s a new phenomenon and it does stretch the resources of the police service,’ he said.”

                                                ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Crime by women and girls in the UK has doubled over the past five years; that is a much faster rate than crime amongst men and boys.  Naturally this has caused a high degree of panic within the sisterhood who are wildly looking around to find excuses for this huge increase in female killers. As I reported in a previous blog post, Harriet Harman wants to arrange the law so that women who kill their husbands are let off with a mere manslaughter charge. They are also pressing for women to be let off prison altogether and merely to serve “community service”. Other ploys of this nature have also been suggested.

What these unthinking feminists fail to realise is that, if they are successful in their sexist plans, it will encourage yet more women to engage in criminal activity.

Over a period of three decades, the feminist lobby, their allies and other sycophants  built up a huge collection of myths, some general and some specific. As most thinking people now know, there is no substance whatsoever in any of these myths and they are now being shown for what they are: a huge collection of lies.

Here are a few examples of myths already exloded:

• men are bad and women are good
• child abuse is only perpetrated by men
• only men are interested in sex
• women are better than men at caring for children
• all sexual harassment is by men against women
• women are morally superior to men
   

Just in case any visitors to this blog are not up to speed on the true information which has exploded every one of these long-held myths, let’s have a look at a few sources of reliable information which have come to light during the twenty-first century.

Canada’s largest study into the sexual exploitation of street kids and runaways reveals that in British Columbia, 79% of boys on the street are exploited by women. Girls are also being exploited by women. These shocking results came to light after 1,845 interviews with youths, some as young as 12, were conducted across the province between 2000 and 2006. Professor Elizabeth Saewyck was the principal investigator for the study. She said that the stereotypical model of a child being abused – a teenage female being sexually abused by a male – was wrong.

The study found that young males were being preyed upon by sexual predators of both sexes, yet the social systems in place to deter and prevent sexual predation were only designed to help females, and the criminal justice system wasn’t concerned with what was happening to young males.

Saewyc said it was indicative of the prevailing myths about sexual abuse that the rehabilitation program for persons arrested by police for attempting to buy sexual favours on the street was called “John School”. ”I think it’s time we had a Jane School. There should be an equal opportunity school for women predators,” she said. “Part of the challenge is that young males are not seen as being exploited because they are not coming to the attention of the police and the police aren’t out there picking up the perpetrators.

The system is set up to handle the sexual exploitation of young women, not young men,” she said.

Community research associate Jayson Anderson said most of the programs to deal with sexual exploitation were designed by women for women. “There’s really nothing out there for males. So we need programs for young boys,” he said.

Another well-worn feminist myth is that 

• women are better than men at languages.

This hoary old myth has been blown out of the water by a three-year study organized by Christine Chiarello, Professor of Psychology at the University of Florida. The study, “Size Matters: Cerebral Volume Influences Sex Differences in Neuroanatomy,” was published recently in the journal, Cerebral Cortex.  The researchers gathered demographic data, tested language and reading skills, and performed magnetic resonance imaging to map brain structures of 100 female students and 100 male students. The men and women were similar in age, parental education and proportion of students who were right- or left-handed.  Here are some quotes from a report of the study:

“Findings of a three-year study by researchers at the University of California, Riverside and the University of Florida, Gainesville run counter to the popular belief that women have better language skills than men.  In a study of 200 university students, the researchers found that women and men performed similarly on tests of language and reading skills. Differences in brain organization between men and women may be driven by sex differences in brain size, they said.

People have said women have relatively larger language areas of the brain,” said Christine Chiarello, UCR professor of psychology. “In none of our language tasks were women better than men. When you account for differences in brain size between men and women there are few differences in the relative size of areas. While there are differences between men and women, those differences are minimal compared to the wide range of  individual differences in both sexes.”

Chiarello said. “On average, the brains of men in the study were 13 percent larger than the women.”