[TRIGGER WARNING: Discussion of child rape]
Tom Martin is one of the most prominent Men’s Rights Activists in the UK. He’s best known for a failed lawsuit he launched against the London School of Economics, charging the school’s gender studies program with, you guessed it, misandry. The case was thrown out of court this March, and Martin celebrated his defeat by calling a lot of people whores on Twitter and, I am proud to say, in the comments here at Man Boobz.
While Martin, known perhaps ironically as @sexismbusters on Twitter, is clearly more famous in the UK than he is here in the states, this peculiar crusader against what he sees as sexism has been celebrated (and his defeat in court mourned) by numerous Men’s Rights sites on this side of the pond. He’s been discussed many times on the Men’s Rights subreddit, where one supporter declared:
And he’s gotten write-ups on an assortment of other MR sites from The Spearhead to MensActivism.org to one Man Boobz favorite, the now-defunct What Men Are Saying About Women. On the website of the National Coalition for Men, one enthusiastic commenter gushed:
Finaly a real man with balls !!! Not like the rest of us . Tom is my hero .
But the Men’s Rights site that has given Martin the most support has been A Voice for Men, which featured Martin on one of its “radio” shows, reposted an article on Martin’s crusade from his website that seems to have been written by Martin himself (in the third person), offered updates on his lawsuit, and even publicized a recent public debate of his in England. The site has also encouraged people to donate to Martin’s legal fund.
One wonders what these supporters will make of some of the strange and awful things Martin has been saying in the comments here on Man Boobz in recent days. (There is no question that it is really him; he confirmed his identity earlier by emailing me from the account associated with his website Sexismbusters.org, and anyone skeptical of any of this is invited to contact him directly through his website.)
Most of the comments he posted here during his first commenting binge were rather risibly misogynist, frequently punctuated with his favorite epithet “whore,” a designation he feels is an appropriate one for 97% of all women and (he had recently added) for 98% of Man Boobzers of either gender. You can see here or here for numerous examples of Martin’s wit and wisdom – including his argument that hard chairs are discriminatory towards men and his now famous declaration that “female penguins are whores.”
His more recent comments, though, haven’t been funny in the slightest. Martin’s new obsession? Child prostitutes – and why they aren’t victims so much as victimizers, willing participants in an activity that makes them big money. Let me put another TRIGGER WARNING here. This is some of the most repellant material I have ever featured on man Boobz.
Here’s Martin’s opening statement on the subject:
The latest establishment scam in the UK, is to describe child prostitutes as “vulnerable children groomed for sexual exploitation”, then talk about them being “passed around” etc, without mention of the fact that these young people agreed to be whores, and are getting paid for it.
In a followup, he elaborated on this logic:
“Yeah, she offered me a job as a prostitute abroad, which would involve me receiving lots of money for taking cock, so I accepted, became a prostitute, and therefor, according to the official fem definition, this makes me a sex slave”.
Grow up!
Even a 10 year old knows, if someone is paying you for sex, that makes you a whore.
And when he talks about ten year olds here, he means this literally; in his mind, trafficked ten year old children aren’t really victims, but economic actors making an economic choice:
I stand by my statement, that child prostitutes know what they are doing, and therefore deserve to be called prostitutes, not victims.
A progressive European country (either Holland or one of the Scandinavian countries, I remember hearing), introduced in the late 90s, the legal principle of no arbitrary minimum age for consent, rather, the legal requirement to ascertain whether lawful sex had taken place was to establish whether the child or young person ‘understands the meaning of consent’ …
Now, if a ten year old is for instance [specific sexual act redacted] for money up front, then there is very much less question whether that whore understands the meaning of consent or not.
In another comment, Martin suggests that ten-year-olds who have been the victims of what some people insist on calling “real rape” would be offended by anyone thinking that ten-year-old prostitutes suffer from rape – when, after all, the child prostitutes have “agreed” to it.
From the perspective of a child who has actually been raped by an adult, how must it seem, to hear the victim-feminist establishment conflate child rape with child prostitution? The raped child remembers having no choice about participating in the sexual activity, of being forced, and then is asked to consider his or her fate or level of agency as similar or the same as that of a child who marketed them self for sex to an adult, took payment, then performed the act.
I don’t think the average 10 year old genuine rape victim would buy the manboobz style analysis that all child prostitution is rape … .
Questions of genuine agency are complicated, but not complicated enough to pass a 10 year old genuine rape victim’s bullshitometer I posit.
Oh, Martin doesn’t actually think ten year olds should be prostitutes. He thinks they should wait a few years, until they’re at least 14.
Should child prostitution from the ages of 13 up be legal?
Nope. I think that prostitution is a potentially dangerous profession for which a basic qualification in health and safety be required, like an NVQ – and that kind of course would not be attainable until after the minimum of secondary school years are completed, so aged 14, 15, 16, 17 or even 18 or more depending on the country.
The real problem, in his mind, is that young girls try to enter into the business when they should be in school:
States with child prostitution problems should be forced to get these children back into schools to complete their education, and child prostitutes who persist should be treated as school truants, a misdemeanor, and given the carrot and stick approach to get them back on the straight and narrow or go to young offenders institutions. If they want to be prostitutes when they’re old enough, then they can go to the careers advise officer, where the pros and cons of the profession can be laid out, and an application for the training course and license can be given.
Martin mocks the very notion that child prostitutes are being exploited:
Imagine you caught your underage 15 year old daughter on the game, what would you say to her?
“Okay darling, obviously you played no part whatsoever in choosing to be a prostitute yourself, so mummy’s going to help catch the nasty pimp who put you up to this, because what you need to learn is when 15 year old girls accidentally suck cocks for money, they should be compensated, with a bit of victims of crime compensation, and, not forgetting, the original £12 cock-sucking bonanza from the punter. That’s right sweety. Double bubble time. Pass me the phone. Now how does this thing work?”
Or… would you ground the whore for 6 months until she passes all her GCSEs?
Well, given that approximately 98% of manboobzers are whores themselves, I’m guessing you’re probably going to want to blame it all on MRAs.
So prostitution should be legal. But since prostitutes are very bad, they should pay high taxes for the privilege of plying their trade, to keep them poor and in order to repay society for the damage they do:
Prostitutes need to be taxed and licensed so heavily, rendering the profession a relatively poor way of making money.
Anyone who practices as a prostitute without the necessary qualification and license, can go to young offenders institute/jail – just like any other persistent illegal unlicensed trader would.
Anyone working on the sly as an escort, should be hunted down by the taxwoman, and if caught, given a huge bill for tax evasion, as well as a fine, and prison for not having a license. Unlicensed tax-evading prostitutes should be hunted down (which would be easy enough).
Anyone choosing prostitution should pay the highest taxes, and know why those taxes are so high – because of the damage prostitution does to the prostitutes and their customers and their environment and the society.
In a followup comment, Martin sees a silver lining in the form of all the tax revenues that prostitution will bring in:
If licensed hookers pay for a massive license fee and heavy taxes, then some of that money can be ring-fenced to research how best to get women (and girls) to renounce prostitution in all its forms, because let’s face it, a lot of housewhores and princess wannabes could do with a little economic activity-inducing work ethic therapy themselves.
Meanwhile, the customers of underage prostitutes – in other words, the child rapists – should be treated gingerly:
[M]en who pay money to have sex with child prostitutes should not be criminalized – but taken out of circulation and treated compassionately for their condition. I’ve heard that most criminal activity peaks with testosterone levels, in the late teens, but paedophillia is the only crime that increases in frequency as these men get older, indicating a growing pathology for them rather than just a typical immature criminal act.
He offers this final summing up of his twisted argument:
[P]edophiles who pay children for sex are not really rapists, because the child consents, then performs the act, indicating they understand the nature of the contract. The elder is still a pedophiles, but the child prostitute is still a prostitute.
If the child is enslaved – it’s rape, or too young or stupid to know what he or she’s doing – rape. But poor, and in need of food? Not rape. A choice. Unwilling to do other hard labour paying 9 times less than the prostitution route? Not rape. A choice.
He then extends his argument to the rest of the alleged 97% of women who, in his mind, are whores:
Whatever your age, follow the golden rule, of never taking money for sex, then prostitution will be eradicated. Only the prostitute can stop charging for sex.
And of course, that means rejecting courtship gifts, engagement gifts, marriage gifts, divorce gifts, and government largess also.
I don’t think many of you are ready to renounce prostitution in all its forms. …
I know a whore when I see one.
He even returns momentarily to his earlier assertion that female penguins are whores:
Someone or other here said I was anthropomorphising human behaviour onto penguin behaviour by calling penguins whores or something.
But the point is, being a whore, is an animalistic trait, that human females should not need to resort to, given they’re at the top of the fucking food chain already. Google “nuptial gifts” and you can read studies about various animals granting sex to those males who provide the most food, or even the most glittery non-edible trinkets etc, or in the case of penguins, rocks to build nests and shelter with.
I’m saying women are better than penguins, or at least would be if they renounced prostitution in all its forms.
I’m sure the women of the world will be happy to hear that Mr. Martin thinks they are potentially better than penguins.
I doubt many of Mr. Martin’s American supporters are familiar with his elaborate apologia for child rape. I would like to invite Man Boobz readers to show this post, or at least some of the more repellant quotations from it, to the proprietors of the various MRA blogs and MRA forums I have mentioned above.
I wonder if any of his supporters will be willing to renounce him publicly once they know what he has said here – and apparently in some recent public debates as well. Surely no legitimate “human rights movement” would want to be associated with anyone who spouts filth like this.
Also, apparently “Three Italian Girlfriends” is the same thing as “All Italian People Everywhere.”
Wow, tell me more about how entire populations of people can be completely summed up through the experience with only three.
Also, nice touch there with the “eats pasta all the time” racist epithet. Did they also have moustaches and shout “It’s-a-me-Mario!”?
I have this fantasy that by keeping Tom up all night, we singlehandedly sabotage his documentary and prevent the fall of the feminist regime. 🙂
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Also, I’d think Tom would want more women to be fat and thus unattractive (in his mindset), because it’ll vastly reduce our whoring potential, right?
Also, how does economic inactivity lead to obesity? I know that (at least in the US) poverty is highly correlated to obesity, probably because of a combination of stress and lack of available and affordable healthy food/time to cook it/mental energy to care, but poor != not working (many times the poor work harder than the middle-class and rich because it takes more hours of more difficult labor to make a living).
Also, being underweight is seriously risky–more risky than simply being overweight–and the strategies used to get to underweight tend to be much more dangerous than maintaining a high weight.
See here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15840860
While “obesity” (as defined by BMI) was correlated with excess deaths, as was being “underweight”, being “overweight” (as defined by the BMI) was in fact not. Also, long-term weight loss is not really possible and large weight swings can screw up someone’s metabolism and cause more weight gain.
Fun fact time: back when Italians were still discriminated against in the US, and my dad was a very small child, he went over to a friend’s house. Father of this friend was discussing tablecloths and whatnot with his wife, and in the course of things said “No, I don’t want the red checked one, it looks too dago.” Right in front of…what, a four year old?
Wait, that fact wasn’t fun at all.
Oh wait, I’m sad that it took me this long to realize that Cupcake here is one of those sex-negative misogynists. Tommy, you don’t have the right to say what people can and can’t do, people can have as much sex as they want, and it doesn’t change a thing about who they are.
I’m actually not sure that weight gain is healthy for people who are naturally underweight, and whether the death rates for underweight people are increased by (a) diseases that lead to weight loss and (b) the unhealthy behavior necessary to get to underweight status for the majority, so I’d be hesitant to argue that underweight people should consciously try to gain weight if that’s just they way they are built, but you certainly can’t tell me being underweight is safer than being overweight.
(All terms here based on BMI, which I don’t think is a very good measurement–for one, I don’t think the classifications of “normal weight” and “overweight” have much of a scientific justification for the split.)
VoIP:Yeah, the height thing is primarily from German grandma’s side of things. My grandfather’s family was mostly blonde-haired blued-eyed Italians from northern Italy.
What, Tom still hasn’t gone to bed? Tut tut, you’d think a man such as yourself would display more dedication to his “vocation”.
Oh nifty, where? My dad’s side of the family is from Naples and environs. There’s one blond-haired blue-eyed six-footer back there somewhere—I think a great-grandfather? (there’s a really hilarious old photo of this man and his wife standing side by side: the photographer cut off his forehead, but even so only her head can be seen, peeking near the bottom of the photo).
VoIP: Chiavenna area, and then Genoa and then NYC.
Ha, I’d love to see that photo. There’s no surviving pictures of my great-grandparents, unfortunately, but we do still have my great-grandfather’s artwork.
Conversations that actually happened (unlike Tom’s anecdote) —
My father (drunk as a damned skunk) — I did NOT marry no fucking guinea.
My mother — My mother had me, and her mother had her, and her mother had her in Italy, so yes you did dear.
Holy balls, Chiavenna is WAY up north. You guys are pretty much Swiss. Do you know whether or not any of your relatives spoke some version of Romansch?
Someone or other here says that fatness is caused by a glandular problem, and that I know nothing about it.
Well actually, my fat neighbour has a glandular problem. Lymphs, thyroid, pituitary… you name the gland, she’ll eat plates and plates of them. It’s offal.
I don’t know that for sure. My aunt did some research into the family, and I want to say she did find evidence of that, but I can’t remember.
I hope so. Tiny languages are sweeeeeeeeeet.
Yeah, but your hair line is still receding.
Tommy, you really don’t get it do you, bringing up examples of people who eat offal to counter a statement about glandular problems doesn’t erase the fact that people with thyroid disfunctions actually exist. You aren’t doing much for your case here.
“Well actually, my fat neighbour has a glandular problem. Lymphs, thyroid, pituitary… you name the gland, she’ll eat plates and plates of them. It’s offal.”
Your puns, they are terrible. Just how drunk are you?
That breathalyzer you think all men should carry, you invest in one yet? Do the internet a favor and put down the keyboard if you’re blowing more than a .10.
6 AM in London. Maybe he’s pulling an all-nighter? That’s sure to help with the quality of his “research”.
Oh no. You guys. What if this is on purpose?
What if he’s staying up all night arguing with us, so he won’t get his “documentary” done, so that he can claim that Manboobz shut down his documentary?
The Varpole Gambit, if you will.
I wonder what call time is.
But arguing with the EEEBIL FEMINISTS is his research, he wants to know what makes us tick, when all he’d have to do is take a cursory glance at reality.
I just got home about 15 minutes ago after being at a Brazilian dance party. Gotta say, I was pretty surprised to see that someone with a “shoot” is still up and posting. Not that I didn’t pull plenty of late nights when I worked on films but usually it was because we were already up and call time was 5 am and we just said “Fuck it”.
And we were really young and stupid.
“I wonder what call time is.”
It’s whenever he wakes up, since he doesn’t actually have a crew (because he’s cheap and doesn’t want to pay them, and also who’d want to put this on their resume?).
I will admit that I’ve pulled all-nighters when I’ve had early morning deadlines, but the thing is, after I handed over my copy I went to sleep, or zoned out for a while. I did not then wander around London with a camera.
(Does he even have a real camera?)