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.
Umm. That link is no longer available.
musing on MRAs…i am suddenly struck by the resemblance of their world vision to this:
UK Manboobzers of my vintage may well remember this as i do.
Lying liar Tom,
You keep citing that paper as proof of your stance. Here’s a link to the abstract of that paper. There’s nothing at all in it that describes misogyny or misandry; Rudman and Goodwin were looking at in-group bias towards women, not bias against men.
Your phraseology, “[w]omen are four times more misandric than men are misogynistic” is a fundamental misrepresentation of their research.
Thanks for pointing to a couple of rape claims that were proven to be genuine thanks to video evidence. As I said, they do exist.
I could probably dig out at least 100 where video evidence has proved the claims false though – but well done for finding those two.
Whilst searching, be sure to inform us of all the falseys proven by video evidence along the way. Reliable reporting and all that.
Well done for getting the picture.
Your actual evidence is nothing compared to the evidence he could probably find!
Tom. Three rapes of women you belive are true. Cite. Now.
okay so do it.
By the way, since the journal article is not free, if anyone is able to get access to the full paper by way of an institutional licence, I would love them to report whether it confirms Tom’s point of view.
As far as I can tell, the research abstract points in exactly 180° opposition to Tom’s quotation of it: the experiment is describing in-group behaviour, so the “four times as much” refers to men favouring men, versus women favouring women. Another way of putting that would be, men are four times as misandric towards their fellow men, than women are misogynistic towards other women.
I’m not surprised at all that Tom is so dishonest to turn around the research this way.
I used to think calling MRAs “pigs” would be appropriate.
But that’s too generic. “Pricks” is a better world.
Xanthe, I just read the introduction, and it talks about how most dominant groups show in-group bias more than minority groups, so a white person has a stronger implicit preference for other white folks than a black person does for black people. The authors then go on to talk about how gender is the only grouping that doesn’t follow this, as men have less in-group bias, while women have plenty.
I’ll keep reading, but it is very interesting to me that Tom went the way he did with his interpretation. I feel like a stronger argument would be that men would, of course, show lesser in-group preference because they are the political and social minority, not women. But that would require that he understands the articles that he reads.
Xanthe:
You need to read Goodwin and Rudman, not just the abstract. What you will find, is that it’s Goodwin and Rudman burying the facts, not me. On the last page of the research, they admit there’s what they feministically call ‘a reversal of sexism’ regarding the results of implicit attitude tests (IAT) which shows women attribute negative traits to men four times more than men do to women or men.
You can read the research for free, if you go to my youtube video, and follow the instructions in the lowbar
Also, the other thing that Goodwin and Rudman touch on in their interesting paper, is that people’s attitudes to the other sex are affected by fear-mongering, by inflating a sense of risk associated with the other sex – and this is a hint about why it is so wrong of feminists to be inflating rape statistics, or domestic violence statistics, or drinks spiking, or date rape, or stranger rape, or taxi driver rape, or male dominance, or male monsterism etc – it makes an already sexist female population even more weary about men.
Didn’t I already debunk you terrible video?
@Maya
yes, you bravely took it apart, excruciating detail by excruciating detail
Tom Martin,
I asked for someone else to read Rudman and Goodwin – not you. You obviously cannot be trusted not to lie about research.
Yes Maya, you did. Tom is indeed repeating himself, again, once more.
(Wait, is he not very secretly MoJoJoJo?
I bet if I looked I could probably find video of Tom Martin having sex with a donkey. I mean, I’d put it at about a 90%-97% probability.
ARE YOU NOT CONVINCED BY MY PROBABILITIES
THEY ARE NUMBERS AND EVERYTHING
Tom, your assertion you bring the proof. Now, about that challenge. Three rapes you believe to be true.
random 6×7,
thank you for doing that. Tom seems to think that the authors are hiding stuff on the last page, so perhaps you could skip ahead to check the veracity of that claim. Also, do you know how they are measuring these numbers and what sort of a sample group was used in the various experiments?
How is it that every time Tom brings up a study, it’s proven to say something opposite to what he claims. I’ve only seen one admission of a mistake. Now he just seems to be accusing everyone who comes up with data different than he likes of covering up, burying facts, and other general conspiracy theory nonsense.
@Tom Martin:
You mean like saying that 97% of all rape accusations are false? Or that paternaty fraud is so prevalent that it is prudent to legislate mandatory paternaty tests? Or that nearly all women are whores (a bad thing)? Yeah.. You’re probably right about
… Oh. Well then. Huh. You, my friend, have a very special brain.
Well, here’s a positive development. Baroness Scotland actually exists. I thought, no way, that can’t be an actual title and/or person. But it is!
“Her story is a history of firsts: she was the first black woman to be made a QC in 1991, and at 35 the youngest Queen’s Counsel since William Pitt the Younger. She became the first black female government minister in 1999 and the first woman and black person to be appointed Attorney General since the post was created in 1315.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/baroness-scotland-the-cost-of-being-in-political-life-1916518.html
Also in deep hot water over an undocumented nanny and what sounds like church-molester apologism. But actual person. I am stunned to find two words out of Tom “whoriarchy” Martin that actually stand up to fact checking. The others not so much.
That’s odd. Let me try some other links.
http://mynorthwest.com/?nid=11&sid=463549
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/560606/pictures_of_woman_charged_with_filing_false_rape_report_found_on_accused_serial_rapist's_camera/
If thosse don’t work, try googling “lynnwood false rape.”
Here is the underbar of my video, with the free link to the Goodwin and Rudman research, and some other eye-watering statistics too:
References: Women 4 times more sexist than men: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15491274
– unfortunately, the researchers have hidden their findings within the above paper – so reading the extract is not enough, but it is well worth the $11 to download, or you could read it free, by going to http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~socoglab/publications.html and find the listing:
Rudman, L. A., & Goodwin, S. A. (2004). Gender differences in automatic in-group bias: Why do women like women more than men like men? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 494-509.
Clicking the link labeled “Request Paper” at the end of that entry will bring up a window that will email a PDF of the paper to whatever email address you enter.
No pay gap for under 30s, and part-time women out-earning part time men: http://fullfact.org/blog/dominic_raab_gender_gay_pay_gap-2461
Per unit of effort, women earn more than men per hour overall: Go to http://www.roydenhollander.com/MediaCoverageWS.htm
and download video clip entitled ‘Neil Cuvuto show, August 21th, 2008’. Roy Den Hollander says women earn 3% more than men for all work-related hours – and here’s how he got that number:
‘Females earn more per unit of time at work than males. The average man spends 44% more time working or doing work related activities than the average female. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Time Use Survey 2007, Table A-1. So for every hour a guy works, a girl works 42 minutes, but the average female makes 77% that of the average man. If the two were paid equally per unit of time actually worked, then the pay for the average female would be 69.5% that of the average man—not 77%–so girls are overpaid.
You’ll have to update the figures because I believe now the Dept of Labor stats are girls making 80% that of a guy and the Dept of Labor has a more current Time Use Survey.’
As for women more likely to use weapons, poison, element of surprise, or an accomplice: http://www.batteredmen.com/batsacks2way.htm
As for women initiating 70% of DV and being 70% of lone abusers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOu_BszChIE – Martin S. Feibert’s enormous annotated bibliography is in the lowbar of that video.
Indian domestic violence allegations (98% false) video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in_4QhWQaq4
Tom can be contacted at [email protected]
Xanthe, I have access to the article; will try to post some info. Oh, I see random6x7 is reading too — very glad to see that since I don’t have a background in psychology.
Some interesting quotes so far:
So their research question was:
Well, I can think of one person here this is true of…
Oh, Tom, did you read that article when you were drunk?
Hokay, so. The authors tested several theories about why women have strong in-group bias while men do not. The idea is not that women dislike men, but that they prefer other women more than men prefer other men. They used Intro to Psych college kids for their tests, and they do talk about some of the issues with that. The researchers used the implicit attitude test (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/) which was modified to fit the questions they were trying to answer.
Test number one! Maybe it’s a cognitive balance issue? It turns out, women are more likely to have the implicit idea that “I am a woman. I am good. Ergo, other women are good”, where men are much less likely to have that last bit.
Test number two! Maybe it’s because Mom tends to be the main infant caregiver, thus creating a general preference for women. Also, maybe gender stereotypes are an issue. The mom thing turned out to be the case – people raised by their mothers prefer women. The stereotype thing was not an issue for implicit bias, although it comes into play for explicity bias.
Three! Men are scary? Yes, this is a factor. Interestingly, men have a higher explicit association with other men and threat than women do with men and threat, so I really don’t think the scourge of false rape claims is a factor here.
Four! Sex! I thought this one was fascinating, except that the researchers kept talking about how women were less enthusiastic about sex. That claim deserves examination in terms of cultural issues, but whatever, I can see why and how that might be the finding. Anyway, heterosexual women had a higher preference for men, no matter how much sex they’ve had. Men, on the other hand, have a higher preference for women if they’ve had a lot of sex, but not if they are fairly inexperienced. The researchers had some explanations, like they might resent women for not having more sex or some of the inexperienced guys might be “incipient homosexuals” – these are college guys, and that is an age when lots of people are still exploring and figuring that shit out.
So, overall, men prefer women and not men because mom, safety, sex, and cognitive balance. Other issues that were not explored but were brought up were men being afraid of being called gay if they preferred men, something that is not nearly as much of an issue for women. They also mentioned that women may have a bond due to their similar minority circumstances, but that doesn’t really explain why other minorities have less in-group bias.
I don’t know what Tom thinks the researchers were trying to hide. The “reversal of sexism” refers to women’s and men’s implicit positive beliefs about women, which are in contrast to the explicit beliefs that more closely align with stereotypical, sexist crap. Again, minority groups (which women are politically and socially if not numerically) usually lack the in-group bias that majority groups do, so the case of gender is particularly interesting. The paper does not talk about women’s attitudes toward men or vice versa except in explaining the sexual relationships or the threat thing, neither of which make women look particularly man-hating.