Tom Martin, a former gender studies student at the London School of Economics, recently became a minor celebrity amongst Men’s Rights activists and other angry men when he sued his alma mater for alleged sexism against men.
He’s now had his case thrown out of court. Let’s go to the Camden New Journal for details:
Tom Martin, 39, who lives in Covent Garden, claimed he suffered “anti-male discrimination” while studying for a master’s degree in gender, media and culture at the world-famous university in Holborn.
Representing himself at his application for a trial at the Central London County Court on Tuesday, Mr Martin complained of a lack of men-only sessions in the university’s gym and the preponderance of posters in the corridors advertising services for women without the presence of similar materials geared towards men.
Mr Martin, who describes himself as a feminist, said “hard” chairs in the library were uncomfortable for men and that a “male blaming culture” was evident in course materials, which “ignored men’s issues” and focused on wrongs done by them.
Damn those misandrist chairs and their man-hating hardness!
The judge didn’t buy it, saying Martin’s case had essentially no chance of success. He threw out the case and ordered Martin to pay LSE’s legal costs.
Martin, welcome to reality.
On Twitter, Martin responded to the news by calling his critics “whores.” One of many examples:
But I was really discriminated against, you whores!
And, yes, his Twitter handle is indeed Sexismbusters.org.
EDITED TO ADD: Actual headline today on What Men are Saying About Women:
EDITED AGAIN TO ADD: Tom Martin has replied to this post in the comments. Some highlights:
My legal complaint did NOT involve a complaint about the seating. You have been misled by the press – The Times and the West End Extra/Camden New Journal both mysteriously got it wrong.
One year prior to joining the university, when visiting its library, I did complain, that the seating being hard created a greater disadvantage for men than for women, as men have considerably smaller weight-bearing buttock pads than women, and men are heavier too – so for men, on average heavier than women, have more weight bearing down onto a pad which is approximately four times smaller than women’s on average – according to a BBC documentary on the subject.
He then details his attempts to fight this grave injustice. Also, there’s this:
[S]everal comments here are confusing ‘whore’ with ‘slut’. A slut has sex freely, which I am all for. Freedom of association is the ultimate in humanity. A whore charges for sex. Even if a woman is a virgin, but is waiting for Mr Right to buy her something, she’s a whore.
It’s counter-intuitive, but a lot of professional feminists are whores. They expect the government and men to do them special favours. They make up stories to convince men and government to believe that we all owe women something.
But really, if someone were keeping a tab, then…
Women owe men five years pension.
Women owe men some National Service.
Women owe men some inventions.
Women owe men positive discrimination in university curricula.
Women owe men some child access.
It’s women’s round at the bar too.
For the whole thing, see here.
For more charming quotes from Tom, see this post on the blog Butterflies and Wheels.
I am now questioning my chromosomes as I fear I may be missing the magical chair softening arse gene, which is apparently only present in females.
What, were there special soft girly chairs the men weren’t allowed to touch?
MRAs are about equality you cunts!
Men’s issues are important you whore!
and then they wonder why they’re accused of misogyny and hate.
Yowza, that’s good to hear.
*dashes off to post on dreamwidth*
And YEAH, hard chairs, OMG the SEXISM!!!!!!!! (I’m boggled by that actually . . . )
To be fair, these were the chairs the women got to use:
http://images.hayneedle.com/mgen/master:CT089.jpg?is=355,355,0xffffff
he is appealing according to his twitter…also watch him come and post comments here. This guy trolls the internet for articles about himself and leaves comments. I noticed on every news article I read on this story.
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/09/brit_universities/source/4.htm
damn, that looks like a pretty cool library (scroll down a bit to get to the LSE Library image.
Hmm. I’m confused about the appeals thing. So I removed the reference in the OP.
I’m not male, so correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t most adult men mastered the art of not sitting on their balls? (I’m assuming that’s what he’s referring to; otherwise I’m completely lost.)
Oh look, we got a MGTOWer in the comment section on that website already.
Quackers,
yes, Tom Martin’s epithet of choice is “whore”; society is a “whoriarchy” (Ophelia Benson’s blog). Also, skank, and prostitution apologists.
He also has an amusing colour code for “male shaming” – calling him a “dishonest, lying shitbag” is a Code Brown, or something.
I haven’t been to a gender studies course, so I don’t know if this is true or not. Has any Manboobzers been to a gender studies course? What’s it like?
Actually, I take my doubts back. Screw him. He’s a typical MRA.
I was about to mention how he called Saudi a whoriarchy. That he throws around the term “whores” is thus not surprising to me. What is surprising is that he is thirty-nine years old. I had him pegged as being in his early twenties, tops–with the mentality of a guy about MRAL’s age, that is. How he got into a master’s program at his age with such muddled thinking, and for that matter without even mastering the use of the comma, is beyond me.
What a nightmare of a student he must have been. The instructors and admin staff will have been logging every interaction in a CYA effort from the day after orientation. Did he actually graduate, or did he just “study”? (off to read the links)
@Maya: “Gender studies” can cover a vast range of materials, theories, and approaches. Here’s a link to the Google results for “Gender studies” limited to .edu sites (which means American universities).
https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1ARAB_enUS452US452&ix=seb&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=gender+studies+site%3A.edu
There are actually masculinity studies that are done in academia that are seen by many of the MRA sites as a super sekrit feminist plan to emasculate men!:
https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1ARAB_enUS452US452&ix=seb&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=masculinity+studies#hl=en&rlz=1C1ARAB_enUS452US452&sclient=psy-ab&q=masculinity+studies+site:edu&oq=masculinity+studies+site:edu&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=3&gs_upl=4880l7950l3l8803l28l12l0l1l1l2l1077l4771l2-7.2.1.0.1.1l13l0&gs_l=serp.3…4880l7950l3l8803l28l12l0l1l1l2l1077l4771l2-7j2j1j0j1j1l13l0.frgbld.&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=6ca356a6bb614143&ix=seb&biw=1024&bih=475
Last time I taught my gender theory (graduate course), I taught it entirely through sf texts because, as I argue, sf (speculative fiction) is the current literary genre best suited to deconstruct and question gender narratives/theories…..gimme a minute and I’ll pull up the books I assigned.
He sounds delightful. I bet the teachers and other students in the gender studies department were always just charmed. And of course everyone knows the old saying, anyone who represents himself has a heroic visionary for a client. What is there for a judge not to love about a man who calls his imaginary she-enemies whores in a public forum while contemplating an appeal for his own discrimination lawsuit?
Did anyone go to the school’s websites to check out the course descriptions? The place doesn’t exactly fit the stereotype of a gender studies department being a place where militant 2nd wave feminists go to gaze upon their crazy navels. Maybe Thomas is just mad because he thought he was in for an easy Master’s from the London School of Economics and then the whores all expected him to think. Example:
sorry for that horrible mesy google search url….*frowns at the internet*
Tom’s into colour coding shaming tactics! So pretty. Looking for what shade “creep” is….
http://exposingfeminism.wordpress.com/shaming-tactics/
These people were the very reason ‘frivolous lawsuit’ was invented as a legal concept.
Anyone know how to find Martin’s original wording regarding the chairs? Not that he isn’t a complete boob already, but I do find it suspicious that every article seems to quote it as “mr. martin complained about ‘hard’ chairs…”
My completely evil man-bashing ball-busting list of readings for a gender theory course (I teach all my theory courses as ‘applied theory’) (Time before, I did a bunch of more typical gender theory stuff, including Eve Sedgewick and Judith Halberstam, and our text we ‘applied’ the theories too all semester was BEOWULF the Heaney translation which seriously discombobulated some older senior male colleages: “what does GENDER have to do with BEOWULF” one famously asked me).
Samuel R. Delany, Jr. Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia, Wesleyan University Press. United States. ISBN: 0-8195-6298-X ISBN13: 978-0-8195-6298-2. Price: $15.95 (USD Retail) University Press of New England (Distributor)
Suzy McKee Charnas. The Slave and the Free: Contains Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines. Tom Doherty Associates, LLC Orb Books United States ISBN: 0-312-86912-6 ISBN13: 978-0-312-86912-0. Price $21.99 (USD Retail) Macmillan (Distributor). Series Title: Holdfast Chronicles Ser.
Melissa Scott. Trouble and Her Friends. Tom Doherty Associates, LLC. Tor Books. United States. ISBN: 0-8125-2213-3. ISBN13: 978-0-8125-2213-6. Price: $6.99 (USD Retail) Macmillan (Distributor)
Tobias S. Buckell. Ragamuffin. Tom Doherty Associates, LLC Tor Science Fiction United States ISBN: 0-7653-5410-1 ISBN13: 978-0-7653-5410-5. Price: $7.99 (USD Retail) Macmillan (Distributor)
Nalo Hopkinson. The New Moon’s Arms. Grand Central Publishing United States. ISBN: 0-446-57691-3 ISBN13: 978-0-446-57691-8. Price: $23.99 (USD Retail) Hachette Book Group (Distributor).
N. K. Jemisin. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Little Brown & Company Orbit United States. ISBN: 0-316-04391-5 ISBN13: 978-0-316-04391-5. Price: $13.99 (USD Retail) Hachette Book Group (Distributor). Series Title: TheInheritance Trilogy Ser.
Gwyneth Jones. Life. Aqueduct Press United States. ISBN: 0-9746559-2-9 ISBN13: 978-0-9746559-2-5. Price: $19.00 (USD Retail) (Publisher)
Justine Larbalestier. Liar. Bloomsbury Publishing, Bloomsbury Children. United States. ISBN: 1-59990-305-9 ISBN13: 978-1-59990-305-7. Price: $16.99 (USD Retail) Macmillan (Distributor)
Justine Larbalestier. The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press United States. ISBN: 0-8195-6527-X ISBN13: 978-0-8195-6527-3. Price: $22.95 (USD Retail) University Press of New England (Distributor)
Helen Merrick. The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms. Aqueduct Press United States. ISBN: 1-933500-33-6 ISBN13: 978-1-933500-33-1. Price: $19.00 (USD Retail) (Publisher)
Brian Attebery. Decoding Gender in Science Fiction. Routledge United States. ISBN: 0-415-93950-X ISBN13: 978-0-415-93950-8. Price: $31.95 (USD Retail) Taylor & Francis Group (Distributor)
@Maya: he does seem to have MRA ties!
http://toomuchtosayformyself.com/2011/09/17/tom-martin-the-lse-and-the-missing-minister/
Ha. According to that article, he made it through a whopping 6 weeks in the program.
RE: ithiliana
I love spec fic. Can you tell me a little more about some of the books besides their titles (are they YA, how good they compare, that kind of thing)? If any of those books include people who’re trans, ambiguously gendered, or off the binary altogether, I am immdiately way more interested.