Ella Whelan (Spiked): Anti-Feminism: The New Heresy

By Mike Buchanan: Ella Whelan is an assistant editor at spiked, and the authoress of numerous pieces to which we’ve linked. Yesterday spiked published this, at times an insightful piece, but not immune to the anti-MRA and anti-J4MB rhetoric more commonly employed by her male colleagues. The second paragraph starts:

Davies chose to vent his anti-feminist spleen at a meeting organised by Justice for Men and Boys, a typically sad group of men’s rights activists.

The hyperlink will take you not to the conference website but to a silly piece by the Independent, itself drawn largely from a Guardian piece. Reliable sources, then…
A ridiculous statement later in Ms Whelan’s piece:

Yet is Davies really deserving of this scorn? For a start, as most women will no doubt be aware, men’s rights activists meetings are pretty lame affairs.

Most women, in common with most men, have never attended a men’s rights activists meeting, so how could they be ‘aware’ of any such thing? In my experience, they are anything but ‘pretty lame’.

The sneering final paragraph:

All free-thinking women must stand up for freedom of speech.
We must defend the right of men who rant about misandry and other mad theories [our emphasis] to say their piece, not because we agree, but because to censor speech is to admit that we are not able to win the argument. The danger to freedom doesn’t lie in isolated gatherings of small-minded men; [our emphasis] rather, it lies in the paternalism of those who think we need to protect women by censoring opinion.

Ella Whelan can do much better than this, and generally does. The comments stream is more interesting and insightful than the article.

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