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.
Steele, I don’t know you bothered coming back, you’re never going to win.
Kirby: he’s probably chortling softly over his keyboard so as not to disturb “Ella.”
@Steele:
Hmm… you could always use “beardhurt” so you could stop making jokey references to anal rape, though that’d probably not be a good way to describe me.
I’d like to see your argument for how men in that audience were attacked and demeaned by anyone in the debate. Seems to me they took their agendas into the room.
@Hellkell:
Is… is “Ella” who I think “she” is? Are Steele’s opinions of women and feminism justified because he has a female friend? 😛
What does this even mean? Presumably every time someone is falsely charged, they say “I didn’t do it”, implying that every false claim is reported. Do you mean that every time someone reports a rape and they don’t get a conviction, they should count that as a false report and, like, report the false-ness. I’m confused.
Kirby, yes, that’s his alleged girlfriend.
I’d like to see your argument for how men in that audience were attacked and demeaned by anyone in the debate.
You are butthurt because, as you say in black and white, some audience members said:
“I don’t know of one feminist text book that doesn’t slag men off, and that is just as offensive as slagging off gays or the foreigns”
I don’t think Steele understands what “under-reported” means. I think he may think it means “not talked about enough on TV” or something like that.
Is “slag off” being defined here as “fails to actively fellate”?
Also, Steele, the semicolon is a noble creature. What did it ever do to you to engender such abuse?
I have to attend to my matters; I anticipate you all to mock my “flounce”; to that, I’d recommend that you all get a life, and maybe you’d have to “flounce” too.
Kirbywarp, in gender politics, the question of whether egalitarian MRAs have female friends is less salient to feminism than the question asking whether egalitarian feminists can claim to have any egalitarian MRA friends.
Yeah the flounce is that you need to announce that you are leaving. Everyone else just stops posting if they are done.
Meanwhile, the rest of us have to attend to our anti-matters, because being a physicist is hard.
Also , going from hating Tom Martin as a child rape advocate to loving Tom Martin your long lost buddy is always going to be funny.
Bostonian, I am against child rape, and child prostitution (but they are not the same thing).
Tom Martin: Sinking to new depths–i.e. defending the Taliban as only being against coed schools, not the education of women entirely.
And this: It would be nice to hear Malala use her platform (now she has police protection) to directly and explicitly challenge sex segregation in education, rather than going along with the conceit that the Taliban are dead against girls’ education all together, her perpetuation of this propaganda it seems, the actual reason they shot her in the head.
*headdesk*
http://www2.webster.edu/~woolflm/taliban.html
Tom Martin: Taliban Apologist.
“Egalitarian MRAs”? The fuck does that mean? Is that what someone like Tom “child sex slaves are oppressing men!” Martin fancies himself to be?
I’d like to note that I exhorted Steele to cease his flagrant violence against semicolons before he left us this gem:
ithiliana,
I’m against sex segregation, therefore I am against the Taliban’s enforcement of it.
You manage to miss this point, then give a bog standard ‘rad fem’ reference page, which obviously skirts the reasons the Taliban are keeping girls out of school (not really very radical then)
Here’s a referenced bit from this wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban_treatment_of_women
Education
The Taliban claimed to recognize their Islamic duty to offer education to both boys and girls, yet a decree was passed that banned girls above the age of 8 from receiving instruction. Maulvi Kalamadin insisted it was only a temporary suspension and that females would return to school and work once facilities and street security were adapted to prevent cross-gender contact.
As I was saying, the Taliban insist on sex segregation, but Western agencies insist on coed (rightly), so the Taliban are reacting to this by stopping girls going to mixed schools, or any schools.
Malala was probably using her diaries to parrot the Western story that the Taliban simply doesn’t want education for girls, rather than being more precise, and making it clearer that the Taliban are opposed in particular to mixed schools. She was being a bog standard, tell half the story, liar, I guess – maybe she got the habit from reading manboobz – but I have not read her advocacy or diaries. I could be completely wrong.
I would like to see feminists demand, that Malala stand up against sex segregation in education, but as feminists love few things more than sex segregation, I don’t expect to hear anything from the ‘radical’ sisterhood any time soon.
@Nepenthe: While I’m not defending Steele’s style, those semi-colons are all grammatically correct: i.e. separating independent clauses (lord knows there are other problems), but:
I have to attend… S V etc.
I anticipate you all to mock. . . SV etc. (should be “you will all mock”)
The “to that,” is the weirdest interjection, not sure what that is about, but the last “I’d recommend that… is correctly (comma plus conjunction) linked to maybe you’d have to…
I suppose he was going for something like “in connection with that (i.e. what I just said)?
He’s still not getting it that ANNOUNCING is the FLOUNCING, not leaving.
It’s a crappy sentence for many reasons, but (as I tell my students) a sentence can be grammatically correct (and still crappy).
Too many crammed into a fairly short sentence, and there’s too much repetition for such a short sentence, bloated out with clauses.
It would be better along these lines:
“I have to attend to my matters although I anticipate you will all mock my ‘flounce.'” (OK, matters is ridiculous noun here). ” If you all would get a life, maybe you’d have to ‘flounce’ too.”
29 vs. 32, not a huge saving in word count although I could shave a few more off (“to things” instead of “to my matters”, cut the “alls” which aren’t strictly required, etc.), but I think it flows a lot better with the two dependent clauses rather than four independent clauses jammed together.
I’m afraid SteeleTrolle mangles and abuses the language on every possible level.
Erm, “too many clauses crammed” OOPS!
True, it’s technically correct, but stylistically it’s a mess. He’s not actually whipping the creatures but is yelling epithets at them. *pictures a herd of semicolons locked in Steele’s basement, quivering in fear*
Also, according to one of the Pakistani guys I chat with who work in the local corner shop, ‘The Taliban’ are not so much to blame for keeping girls out of school in Pakistan. In truth, according to this guy, it is more the peasant population itself, enforcing traditional rural gender roles, where the women don’t do paid work anyway (the whores), so don’t need an extended education (as the natives see it).
But when I bring up Malala, the first thing he says, is that I know nothing, because I live in the West, so get lied to by Western media.
Malala was effectively working for the BBC, and they have an absolute lies approach to covering gender issues in Muslim countries. It is the absolute line that women are oppressed there, and men are privileged – which of course, is a lie, given marriage gifts, and earnings being legally obliged to travel from the male to the female, with no legal obligation for the women to reciprocate.
Malala is young, but already a seasoned political standpoint rhetorician – the likelihood of her being dishonest confirmed by the fact the BBC chose her opinions to represent facts in the Muslim world.
Maybe now she’s taken a shot to the head she might be a bit more inclined to realize the gravity of the situation, drop the spin, and rise above all that low class victim-feministing expected by her BBC paymasters.
I can’t get over the fact that Steele thinks manure is bred.
Maybe now she’s taken a shot to the head she might be a bit more inclined to realize the gravity of the situation, drop the spin, and rise above all that low class victim-feministing expected by her BBC paymasters.
Every time you show up here, you get worse and worse and worse and worse and worse.
Do you even HEAR the crap that comes out of that brain of yours?
Please, feel free to go and join the Taliban. You are clearly a natural ally of theirs.
Sheesh, I go away for a few hours to overload on “Firefly” nostalgia and I miss both Tom Martin and Steele having meltdowns.
I kind of want to open a home for all those poor abused semicolons and find them adoptive families that will treat them well.