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’m commenting too much now but I can’t let this one go, because it’s hilarious. “For the 4th or 5th time in this discussion I’ve shown myself to be either lying or incapable of doing my own due diligence, so FUCK YOU!!!”
This fucking moron is still here?
Hey, Martin – have you begun translating your writing on the Whoriarchy and the Whoran into Arabic so that you can proselytize to the men of your neighboring Islamic communities? Just think of how many donations you could get!
I’m having too much fun with ME3 to really engage but:
How in the world have you never EXCHANGED gifts with someone before?
Shorter Tom Martin “There is an article that proves me right, but I forgot it, but take my word for its existance and my interpretation of its contents”
Scholarship – how the fuck does it work?
@Viscaria:
Not to mention the fact that the the expression is usually “so shoot me” or “so sue me” or something. Changing around the subject is kind of creepy. ._.
@Shadow
Because only whores do that! Tom is NOT a whore. WHOOOORRRRRRESSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!
Updated definition of “whore”:
1. A woman who has sex for money.
2. A woman who receives anything from anyone ever.
3. A woman who tells men what she wants.
4. (NEW) A woman who complains about anything.
TOM WORDS ARE SUPPOSED TO MEAN THINGS TOM
Okay, I’ve sort of worked this out.
A whore is any woman who causes men who have sex with her (or who might have sex with her, or who might have sex with other women) to incur a cost. And hearing a woman complain is a cost.
Therefore, complaining in your husband’s earshot is exactly like prostitution.
…Complaining in your wife’s earshot is of course fine because MAN.
And Tom wonders why we don’t want to seriously engage him on the issues.
Waitaminute, I thought Beyonce was a whore for wanting someone to put a ring on it. So surely non-whoredom involves not getting husbands in the first place, rather than liberating men, right?
I wonder what the Strauss 1986 study was!
Was it “Agricultural household models: Extensions, applications, and policy”? Or perhaps “Purification, characterization, and in vitro differentiation of cytotrophoblasts from human term placentae”? Oooh! Ooh! Maybe it was “Formal and Functional Approaches to Separation of Powers Questions A Foolish Inconsistency”!
@Quackers
If it wasn’t for the fact that it would make me a dick, I swear I would walk down the street just randomly emitting a “WHOOOOOORRRRRREEEE” into the ether. Kinda like my own little whale song. I think Tom really may be a feminist: he’s done more to remove the sting from that slur in one week than feminism has in years!
Good guess Tom, but what I’m actually thinking is “You made that number up out of thin air. And now you’re making up more numbers.”
Are you a whore if you don’t pay for his gas when your man comes over have dinner and spend the night? I mean, do you have to make sure that the cost of the dinner is equal to the cost of the amount of gas that he used to get to your house?
What happens when women buy men a drink before having sex? Is this more of that “liberating men” deal?
Look, this whole “whore” thing is really very simple:
A whore is a whore. Of course? Of course!
And no one should talk to a whore, of course.
She’ll take your watch, she’ll take your purse says famous Tom Martin!
Nobinayamu – Not only that, but if he ejaculates, you must compensate him the full price that he could have received at a sperm bank. To just expect semen for free is blatantly whorish.
Reading Tom make up all these numbers reminds me of ‘Numberwang’ from That Mitchell and Webb Look
Holly, now I’m wondering if I should be paying for his visits to the barber shop. Don’t get me wrong, I love him to pieces, but our relationship was initially based on a great deal of physical attraction. And I do think his barber does a terrific job…
Through the magic of my google machine here, I found a book published by Harvard Press (“Alone Together: How Marriage in America Is Changing,” by Paul Amato, et al) that said that out of 2250 American adults, “Forty-three percent of all couples surveyed reported that the woman makes decisions in more areas than the man. By contrast, 26 percent of couples reported that men make more of the decisions. Joint decision making arrangements were reported by 31 percent of the couples.”
Now, who knows whether this is the study Mr. Martin is thinking of. There may have been many different studies published out of Harvard or by Harvard graduates or professors on the decision-making processes of spouses. And lord knows there’s not one right answer to the question of how married couples make decisions — culture, religion, financial status, and nation of origin probably play into how couple both make decisions and would talk about making them, for example.
But it’s worth noting that at least one Harvard publication from 2007 does not support Mr. Martin’s theory. I’m just sad that Mr. Martin didn’t finish his master’s program at LSE now. Perhaps some rigorous training in research, writing, and analytical thinking would have helped.
You know what’s funny about MRAs? There are lots and lots of “grr women should stay in the kitchen and stop stealing our jerrrrbs” MRAs, and then there are a fair number of “grr women should stop being lazy housewhores, get off of their fat asses and get jobs like the men have to!” and members of both camps will blame feminism for their pet issue. They don’t seem to notice the other MRAs are fighting directly against their own goals, as far as I can tell.
Viscaria – There’s also “grrr women run everything and it should be equal” MRAs in conflict with “grrr men run everything because they deserve it, equality is a threat” MRAs.
Although with his groundbreaking “women secretly run everything by being whores” thesis, Martin is providing some degree of synthesis between the two models. I guess.
Ya’ll, when men get angry at each other, they react by whipping each other with strands of unicorn hair collected when they were virgins (Gandalf, et. al 1888 and some study from Hogwarts in 2007, or something).
There we go, I have made a claim about as well sourced and well supported as Martin’s.
So is there a trick to getting Tom to respond to your question? Here are my top three:
1. Why are penguins feminist whores?
2. You totally went to college just so you could sue them, didn’t you?
3. Why should I care if you call me a whore? Why should I do what you say?
Tommy, Tommy, Tommy
We had this before: If a woman writes her husband a shopping list because the tasks to figure out what’s for dinner, what’s still in the fridge, what’s in the larder and what needs to be bought fresh, not to mention the cooking falls on her, it’s not that she’s a tyrant bullying him around.
No matter who pays for the shopping.
Tom’s problem is that he really, really thinks that women have never done anything.
His idea of women is Peggy Bundy (who lived in a surprisingly spotless house)
In pre-industrial times, Only men worked on the fields. The animals tended themselves and such.
And all those things women may have done in those times are not necessary anymore.
You know, you can just buy clothes and microwave meals in shops (all made by men! Don’t you dare posting pictures of sweatshops with lots of women).
Children also care forthemselves. They didn’t invented TV for no reason.
Laws that banned women from inheriting, that transferred their posessions automatically to their husbands, that banned them from working and that allowed their husbands to quit the women’s jobs were secretly written by women.
The fight against those laws, the small steps towards equality were actually fought by men who finally wanted to liberate themselves. If women only let them they’d already share 50/50.
Also, studies that show that, in experiments with “paper people applications” where they are equal in everything except gender, women, especialy mothers but not fathers got less endorsement, job offerings and more objections were pulled out of the ass are fake because they don’t agree with Tom.*
*Yes, if you want I’ll reference them. Because I can. I#m just too lazy to type them now.
New theory of Tom: As a young child, he saw a whore shoot his father, putting him into a catatonic mental state where he sees whores everywhere.