By William Collins aka mra-uk: On 9th March 2016, Jolyon Jenkins hosted a programme The Red Pill on BBC Radio 4. One of the interviewees, Clive Smith (aka CS MGTOW) made his own recording.
I respond to the latter, more complete, record of the discussion
between the two men. In particular I address some topics on which Mr
Jenkins seemed to think he had scored points: partner abuse, hypergamy
and sex-selective abortion or infanticide.
Partner Abuse
The exchange followed a common deflectionary tactic in which details of the survey statistics submerged the actual issue: absence of support for male victims.
Depending on exactly which data you wish to cite, the proportion of male victims of partner abuse might be 1-in-3 or 2-in-5 or 1-in-2. By 2012/13, the CSEW data for the incidence in the preceding year of the most severe category of physical violence had converged to virtual equality between the sexes (about 1% of respondants for both sexes). Curiously this category ceased to be reported in the CSEW the following year. Odd that.
In the case of the PASK data, certainly the most authoritative source to date, men are twice as often the victims of unidirectional intimate partner violence than women.
But the details of the statistics are not the issue. Whatever specific data you use, the clear fact is that men comprise a substantial proportion of the victims of partner abuse – and this contrasts dramatically with the resources available to male victims. In the UK, the women’s domestic abuse charity sector receives several hundred millions of pounds annually, about two-thirds of which is publicly funded. Whilst these charities might protest that they also provide services for men, the reality is very different in practice. Vanishingly few refuge facilities are available for men, and none where men can escape with children.
But worse, the women’s domestic abuse charities promulgate a false perspective on DA/IPV in which only men can be recognised as abusers. Whilst the women’s movement in the early 1970s initially did a laudable job in dragging domestic violence into the open, the feminist movement quickly acted to hide male victimisation because this did not align with its political strategy. The DA/IPV sector has been using this issue to fund an overtly biased gender-political movement for 45 years, with male victims being thrown to the wolves.
Had Jolyon Jenkins been interested in informing the public on the issues of concern to men’s rights activists (and MGTOW) he would have steered the discussion onto these topics. He did not do so and it can hardly be because he is unaware of the issues. Rather it was because enlightening the public was not the purpose of the programme. Its purpose was to mock MGTOW and to discredit the valid concerns they share with the broader men’s movement.
Mr Jenkins is a product of the prevailing prejudice. This prejudice is illustrated by MP Jess Phillips, who, on international women’s day read out the names of the 120 women who had been killed by men over the preceding year. The MPs applauded. I wonder how the MPs would have felt if Jess Phillips had deliberately omitted the names of black women, reading out only the names of white women victims? She did not, of course, because to do so would be the most vile racism. Yet to omit men from the list of victims is regarded as fine.
Yes, it was international women’s day so you might think there was an excuse. But the list of names comes from the ‘Counting Dead Women’ project, a project funded from the feminist-oriented DA/IPV charity sector, and hence largely publicly funded. There is no Counting Dead People project. I doubt that the names of men who are the victims of partner homicide are listed anywhere other than in police records (yet there are about 20 male victims of partner homicide annually). And MP Phillips added, in respect of the 120 female victims, “their perpetrators were not feckless drunks, but respected fathers, City bankers and eminent lawyers“. The message is clear: women alone are victims and men – all men – are the problem. This is the subversion of the truth which this programme has done nothing to dispel.
Hypergamy
Mr Jenkins seemed reluctant to accept that women are hypergamous, i.e., that they tend to ‘marry up’. This is strange. Is it even contentious? Let’s get one thing out of the way. We not talking here about the nubile lovely who marries an ugly old gargoyle who just happens to be obscenely rich. True, any such old gargoyle can bag a nubile lovely. But still, these are but a small minority. There just aren’t enough filthy rich gargoyles around. Here we are talking about the predominant tendency, the norm. And the contention is that the norm is hypergamy. Here are a few studies which support the claim,
An interesting source is the 30th British Social Attitudes Survey, reporting on surveys conducted in 2012. The data below refers to totals for both male and female respondants. So, in as far as it reflects hypergamy it does so both as regards female hypergamy and also male ‘collusion’ with female hypergamy, i.e., both sides of the coin. Interestingly there is generally little difference between male and female recorded opinions.
As is common with surveys, very similar questions can elicit very different answers depending on how they are phrased. For example, responding to the question,
Overwhelmingly people (of both sexes) expect men to be resource providers. One of the disadvantageous aspects of this for men is that they have no choice. Provision of resource is a man’s only ‘permitted’ role (in the sense of being the only role which the majority of society sanctions as desirable). In contrast, according to Table 5.1, women have a range of options (not working or working part time or full time) which society regards as roughly equally acceptable,
Mr Jenkins seemed quite certain that some countries exercise sex-selective abortion (or infanticide) at systemic rates. I recall looking at the stats on sex ratios at birth across various countries a year or two back and finding the issue of sex-selective abortion inconclusive. I can’t claim to have done more than a brief paddle in the shallows of the literature. However, as far as I am aware there is no direct evidence of widespread systemic sex-based abortion or neonaticide.
Despite the literature commonly referring to millions of “missing females”, as if this were established fact, the evidence appears to rest solely on sex ratios at birth. The argument goes thus: the male:female sex ratio at birth is expected to be in the range 1.03 to 1.07 (e.g., for the UK it is 1.054) so a ratio greater than 1.07 is taken to be indicative of sex-based abortion/neonaticide. The two nations which come in for the greatest suspicion are India and China. There are a couple of obvious problems with the claim of widespread sex-selective abortion in India. The first is that revealing the sex of an unborn child was made illegal in India in 1994, specifically to obviate the threat of selective abortion. The second is that, over India as a whole, the sex ratio at birth has never been very much above the ‘suspicion’ level of 1.07 (namely a peak of 1.079) and is currenlty only 1.06, barely different from the UK (see graph below). To be fair, there appears to be a wide variation between the Indian States, with some locally much higher gender ratios. So I am not trying to pretend the issue is clear, merely that there is room to doubt the normally – very confidently asserted – claims of sex selection.
The case for the prosecution is ostensibly much stronger in China
where the sex ratio is reported to be 1.18. This has been hypothesised
to be related to the single-child policy. It might well be, though that
in itself does not necessarily imply that the “missing girls” are
aborted or killed – but possibly simply not registered. Under-registering births
is believed to result in over-estimating the sex ratio by perhaps 0.04,
and so would not account for the whole of China’s abnormal ratio if
this estimate is valid.
However, the presumption that the ‘normal’ ratio need necessarily be in the range 1.03 to 1.07 is debatable given the factors which can affect it, e.g., the age of the mother at conception, the age of the father, nutrition, stress, environmental effects including exposure to disease agents, and even race itself. Quoting Wikipedia:
However, all this is a distraction. I doubt that Clive Smith was particularly wanting a discussion about India or China. And this sex-selective business has no relevance to first world countries – has it? Well, there is one issue which is generally ignored, but for which the data is solid: the killing of children in the USA. In the UK the sex of child homicide victims, and the sex of the perpetrators, is hard to obtain. But for the USA, Table 11.4 of the report Child Maltreatment 2011 (National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) shows that there is a statistically significant excess of boys being killed over girls. Moreover, the mother is implicated in the death more often than the father. Overall the mother is involved in the death in 61% of cases.
Source
Partner AbuseThe exchange followed a common deflectionary tactic in which details of the survey statistics submerged the actual issue: absence of support for male victims.
Depending on exactly which data you wish to cite, the proportion of male victims of partner abuse might be 1-in-3 or 2-in-5 or 1-in-2. By 2012/13, the CSEW data for the incidence in the preceding year of the most severe category of physical violence had converged to virtual equality between the sexes (about 1% of respondants for both sexes). Curiously this category ceased to be reported in the CSEW the following year. Odd that.
In the case of the PASK data, certainly the most authoritative source to date, men are twice as often the victims of unidirectional intimate partner violence than women.
But the details of the statistics are not the issue. Whatever specific data you use, the clear fact is that men comprise a substantial proportion of the victims of partner abuse – and this contrasts dramatically with the resources available to male victims. In the UK, the women’s domestic abuse charity sector receives several hundred millions of pounds annually, about two-thirds of which is publicly funded. Whilst these charities might protest that they also provide services for men, the reality is very different in practice. Vanishingly few refuge facilities are available for men, and none where men can escape with children.
But worse, the women’s domestic abuse charities promulgate a false perspective on DA/IPV in which only men can be recognised as abusers. Whilst the women’s movement in the early 1970s initially did a laudable job in dragging domestic violence into the open, the feminist movement quickly acted to hide male victimisation because this did not align with its political strategy. The DA/IPV sector has been using this issue to fund an overtly biased gender-political movement for 45 years, with male victims being thrown to the wolves.
Had Jolyon Jenkins been interested in informing the public on the issues of concern to men’s rights activists (and MGTOW) he would have steered the discussion onto these topics. He did not do so and it can hardly be because he is unaware of the issues. Rather it was because enlightening the public was not the purpose of the programme. Its purpose was to mock MGTOW and to discredit the valid concerns they share with the broader men’s movement.
Mr Jenkins is a product of the prevailing prejudice. This prejudice is illustrated by MP Jess Phillips, who, on international women’s day read out the names of the 120 women who had been killed by men over the preceding year. The MPs applauded. I wonder how the MPs would have felt if Jess Phillips had deliberately omitted the names of black women, reading out only the names of white women victims? She did not, of course, because to do so would be the most vile racism. Yet to omit men from the list of victims is regarded as fine.
Yes, it was international women’s day so you might think there was an excuse. But the list of names comes from the ‘Counting Dead Women’ project, a project funded from the feminist-oriented DA/IPV charity sector, and hence largely publicly funded. There is no Counting Dead People project. I doubt that the names of men who are the victims of partner homicide are listed anywhere other than in police records (yet there are about 20 male victims of partner homicide annually). And MP Phillips added, in respect of the 120 female victims, “their perpetrators were not feckless drunks, but respected fathers, City bankers and eminent lawyers“. The message is clear: women alone are victims and men – all men – are the problem. This is the subversion of the truth which this programme has done nothing to dispel.
Hypergamy
Mr Jenkins seemed reluctant to accept that women are hypergamous, i.e., that they tend to ‘marry up’. This is strange. Is it even contentious? Let’s get one thing out of the way. We not talking here about the nubile lovely who marries an ugly old gargoyle who just happens to be obscenely rich. True, any such old gargoyle can bag a nubile lovely. But still, these are but a small minority. There just aren’t enough filthy rich gargoyles around. Here we are talking about the predominant tendency, the norm. And the contention is that the norm is hypergamy. Here are a few studies which support the claim,
- Elizabeth Cashdan (1996), Women’s Mating Strategies (Evolutionary Anthropology 5:134–143), (“women value wealthy, high-status men in good physical condition, both for the resources such men can provide and for the genetic quality that they can give the woman’s offspring“)
- Gilles Saint-Paul, Genes, Legitimacy and Hypergamy: Another Look at the Economics of Marriage (CEPR Discussion Paper No.DP6828, May 2008): Human female hypergamy is argued to occur because women have greater lost mating opportunity costs from monogamous mating (given their slower reproductive rate and limited window of fertility), and thus must be compensated for this cost of marriage by a resource-rich mate.
- Bokek-Cohen, Peres & Kanazawa (2007), Rational choice and evolutionary psychology as explanations for mate selectivity, Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology (2007) 2, p. 5. (“women remain more selective than men even under conditions of extreme ‘marriage squeeze’ for women“)
An interesting source is the 30th British Social Attitudes Survey, reporting on surveys conducted in 2012. The data below refers to totals for both male and female respondants. So, in as far as it reflects hypergamy it does so both as regards female hypergamy and also male ‘collusion’ with female hypergamy, i.e., both sides of the coin. Interestingly there is generally little difference between male and female recorded opinions.
As is common with surveys, very similar questions can elicit very different answers depending on how they are phrased. For example, responding to the question,
A man’s job is to earn money; a woman’s job is to look after home and familyFigure 5.2 records that only 14% agreed. This is not surprising because the phrasing of the question makes it sound like a vote for patriarchal oppression. People have been programmed by political correctness to react to, and resist, suggestions that ” a woman’s place is in the home”. But, in truth, this is indeed what the majority of people think – or, at least, a man’s place is definitely not in the home. For example, Table 5.3 gives the responses to the question,
What is the best and least desirable way for a family with a child under school age to organise family and work life by sexThis is how Glen Poole summarised the responses in Table 5.3,
- 69% of us think dad should be the primary earner
- 9% of us think mum and dad should share the earning responsibility equally
- Zero percent think mum should be the primary earner
- 73% of us think dads should work full time
- 5% of us think dads should work part time
- Zero percent of us think dads should stay at home full time
Overwhelmingly people (of both sexes) expect men to be resource providers. One of the disadvantageous aspects of this for men is that they have no choice. Provision of resource is a man’s only ‘permitted’ role (in the sense of being the only role which the majority of society sanctions as desirable). In contrast, according to Table 5.1, women have a range of options (not working or working part time or full time) which society regards as roughly equally acceptable,
- 33% of us think mums should stay at home until the children start school
- 43% think mums should work part time until the children start school
- 28% think mums should work full time once the kids start school
Mr Jenkins seemed quite certain that some countries exercise sex-selective abortion (or infanticide) at systemic rates. I recall looking at the stats on sex ratios at birth across various countries a year or two back and finding the issue of sex-selective abortion inconclusive. I can’t claim to have done more than a brief paddle in the shallows of the literature. However, as far as I am aware there is no direct evidence of widespread systemic sex-based abortion or neonaticide.
Despite the literature commonly referring to millions of “missing females”, as if this were established fact, the evidence appears to rest solely on sex ratios at birth. The argument goes thus: the male:female sex ratio at birth is expected to be in the range 1.03 to 1.07 (e.g., for the UK it is 1.054) so a ratio greater than 1.07 is taken to be indicative of sex-based abortion/neonaticide. The two nations which come in for the greatest suspicion are India and China. There are a couple of obvious problems with the claim of widespread sex-selective abortion in India. The first is that revealing the sex of an unborn child was made illegal in India in 1994, specifically to obviate the threat of selective abortion. The second is that, over India as a whole, the sex ratio at birth has never been very much above the ‘suspicion’ level of 1.07 (namely a peak of 1.079) and is currenlty only 1.06, barely different from the UK (see graph below). To be fair, there appears to be a wide variation between the Indian States, with some locally much higher gender ratios. So I am not trying to pretend the issue is clear, merely that there is room to doubt the normally – very confidently asserted – claims of sex selection.
India – Sex Ratio at Birth (after Samantha Booth)
However, the presumption that the ‘normal’ ratio need necessarily be in the range 1.03 to 1.07 is debatable given the factors which can affect it, e.g., the age of the mother at conception, the age of the father, nutrition, stress, environmental effects including exposure to disease agents, and even race itself. Quoting Wikipedia:
Scientific studies have found that the human sex ratio at birth has historically varied between 0.94 to 1.15 for natural reasons.I do not claim this is either a complete or a balanced account, only that the claim of widespread sex-selective abortion/neonaticide in India and/or China, which is normally presented as established fact, is challengeable.
The 2011 birth sex ratios for China and India are significantly above the mean ratio recorded in the United States from 1940 through 2002 (1.051); however, their birth sex ratios are within the 0.98-1.14 range observed in the United States for significant ethnic groups over the same time period.
Along with Asian countries, a number of European, Middle East and Latin American countries have recently reported high birth sex ratios in the 1.06 to 1.14 range. High birth sex ratios, some claim, may be caused in part by social factors.
However, all this is a distraction. I doubt that Clive Smith was particularly wanting a discussion about India or China. And this sex-selective business has no relevance to first world countries – has it? Well, there is one issue which is generally ignored, but for which the data is solid: the killing of children in the USA. In the UK the sex of child homicide victims, and the sex of the perpetrators, is hard to obtain. But for the USA, Table 11.4 of the report Child Maltreatment 2011 (National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) shows that there is a statistically significant excess of boys being killed over girls. Moreover, the mother is implicated in the death more often than the father. Overall the mother is involved in the death in 61% of cases.
The Excess of Boys Killed Over Girls, USA, 2011
| Sex | Child population | Number killed | Percent of those killed | Rate per 100,000 |
| Boys | 30,135,740 | 743 | 59.1% | 2.47 |
| Girls | 28,807,316 | 511 | 40.6% | 1.77 |
Source
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