Mike Buchanan Interviewed About Positive Discrimination - BBC London

By Mike Buchanan: I was interviewed (from 12:50 to 23:05) about positive discrimination ('PD') on BBC Radio London 94.9 by Jeni Barnett, standing in for Vanessa Feltz. The discussion was prompted by the admission by BBC presenter Kirsty Wark that she had benefitted from PD over her career - for being a woman, for being Scottish, and latterly for being of 'a certain age'. Hardly surprisingly, she's a fan of PD.

There were three distinct segments in this discussion:

00:00 -- 1:49: Introduction.
1:50 -- 12:49: Interview with Sunny Hundal, journalist with the Guardian and New Statesman.
12:50 -- 23:05: My interview.

In the last minute of my interview (22:15) after I'd presented numerous rational arguments against positive discrimination, and explained a few of the many ways in which men and boys have long been disadvantaged in Britain, Ms Barnett trotted out this gem:

"Do you like women, Mike?"

Insinuations or allegations of misogyny invariably come in the wake of my presentation of reasoned arguments -- from both female and male presenters.
On the subject of misogyny, I was pleased to receive a couple of emails in recent days from Paul Inman, a supporter. The first was prompted by the tragedy in which a young American man, Elliot Rodger, shot dead four men and two women. The content of Paul's emails take up the remainder of this blog post:

"I love the way that murdering men is now also misogyny. Elliot Rodger didn't kill those people because he was a misogynist -- even though the evidence on his internet sites would suggest he was -- he killed them because he was a deeply disturbed and maladjusted individual. His actions are a tragedy and trying to play the gender war card is pretty cheap.
On the other hand I'm happy for people like Laurie Penny to keep labelling everything as misogyny because every new thing that they put under that umbrella just dilutes the meaning of the word almost to irrelevance. When EVERYTHING becomes misogyny, then misogyny will no longer have any meaning at all, and I think we're almost at that point now. Keep up the good work, Laurie.
There's a reason we have many words for different things -- meaning. The more meanings a word has, the less meaningful it becomes in practice. For example, dogs have one word for everything:

'Woof.'

The word means nothing, so we can't converse with dogs. Feminists have one word that they use to describe anything they don't like -- misogyny -- consequently that word now means nothing, and we can't converse with feminists about their issues.
The English language is a thing of beauty; we have a plethora of words, multiple words for the same thing and even allow foreign words to be used for effect. There's no excuse for not using the correct word for something when 1,000+ years of linguistic evolution have created a language full to the point of bursting with words."