[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.
pecunium: 😀 I love how there’s one of those for every situation. Plus they make good points!
(Well not every situation, or they’d have to stop making them, but you know what I mean. 😛 )
I didn’t know that aged ten. I knew I wasn’t supposed to go off with strangers, but all I knew about why was that vague, unspecified Bad Things might happen. I didn’t know that Bad Things meant rape.
And it’s still rape if you give the kid a lollipop to make them trust you first, you slimy heap of camel dung.
I find it funny that Tom thinks that making stuff illegal will make it magically go away….even though prostitution is actually illegal in the UK and most first world nations…..and yet it still magically exists!
I can see Tom’s brain right now- “whaddya mean making things illegal doesn’t…..” *smoke comes out his ears*
@viola- I knew what would happen if the “bad man” raped you because my mom described it to my sister and I in inappropriate detail when I was maybe 8 years old (my mom was molested/raped as a kid because her mom was an alcoholic single teen mom who worked all the time and so therefore my mom ended up being unsupervised around weird men a lot).
But mainly, the knowledge of what they would do to me just freaked me the fuck out, because I was still, ya know, 8 years old and smaller/weaker than a full grown man.
The idea of being alone with a man freaked me out for YEARS.
Rotate your owl is genius.
DAMN YOU BLOCKQUOTES! First line was the child-rape-apologist, rest was me.
@Futrelle said in OP: “I wonder if any of his supporters will be willing to renounce him publicly once they know what he has said here” …
Now, I don’t technically count as a supporter, as I never actually gave Tom Martin any support – altho’ I once considered donating to his court case, before I heard about chairgate, pengiungate and sexworkergate – but I’m a Men’s Righter, and see my posts way back upthread, I’ve strongly repudiated Tom Martin and his bullshit.
Close enough for ya? Or were you looking for someone like Elam to tell Tom Martin to bugger off? … *cough*
@Nanasha – gosh you’re wrong about a number of things:
1)
Adult prostitution is LEGAL in the UK, altho’ many things associated with it are not e.g. brothels / pimping are illegal, it’s perfectly legal for an adult sex worker to accept ££ for sex and for a punter to pay ££ for sex. Prostitution itself is legal in France and Italy, with similar auxiliary restrictions to the UK.
Adult prostitution is also LEGAL (moreso given the relative lack of peripheral restrictions) in: Denmark, Germany, Spain, New Zealand and Holland (last I looked) and that’s just off the top of my head.
Sooo, that’s most of the EU in terms of population right there… A goodly chunk of First World / G20 nations…
2)
Your argument that Age of Consent should be pushed to the mid 20s is the Looking Glass version of Tom Martin’s FALSE ten year olds’ “consent” to sex acts. You choose to base your argument on a flimsy assertion re. when exactly the cerebral cortex completes “development” and link to notveryreliablepedia.
– Firstly, there’s a lot more to the brain than the cerebral cortex! Also, any in depth observation of human brain activity and behaviour vs. what human’s say about their behaviour will leave any observer in no doubt that the vast majority of decisions are made “lower” in the brain (in other structures besides the cerebral cortex! – There was a recent brainscan experiment that showed the cerebral cortex fired AFTER decisive physical action was visibly initiated) i.e. at the level of emotions / instinct.
– Secondly, there are important physical and physiological aspects of maturity that are also significant in determining the age of majority (sexual and otherwise).
– Thirdly, development is one of the most complex, least understood and most rapidly changing areas of biological understanding, so your making declarative statements such as “rationality is not fully developed until 24” is much more likely to be wrong than right.
– Finally, your argument about hire cars and hotel rooms is entirely spurious, those restrictions are in place subsequent to economic / risk analysis by professionals (including insurers) who will have crunched the numbers on things such as: the much higher statistical likelihood of young adults, especially young men, to have car accidents. These correlations with age do not demonstrate proof of causality by any particualr biological measurement of development – contrary to your assertion.
3)
Re: “emancipation of a minor” – this is a very recent and rare legal issue.
Certainly, ages of consent are a legal / social / moral / political compromise, which draw a “line-of-best-fit” where biological variability in reality describes a natural range (generally a normal distribution / bell curve), i.e. some people develop faster or slower than others.
While, “emancipation of a minor” might be legally, technically = to ability to contract, its main function is to allow the child to separate from parents who are so appallingly bad (e.g. murdering crackheads) that the kid would be better off going it alone. It’s (one of) the last resorts.
In my opinion, people of good consciene would not / should not necessarily regard or treat a legally emancipated minor as morally / socially / emotionally / sexually / physically equivalent to an adult, but would / should excercise best judgement on an individual basis, with a compassionate view towards the young person in question.
Either way: in the case of Alyssa (which was linked above) it’s clear that the kid was NOT at all ready to go it alone and the Dad was trying to PUSH the kid* into a state of emancipation with a view to then contracting with her for rent & board (*at the age of 13 or 14?? as far as I can tell from her story, assuming her account is true).
In other words the Dad was attempting to enforce (IMO) a legal FICTION of majority over a reality of the child being very much a minor, to suit his own economic ends.
As a Libertarian who holds that the civilized institution of a childhood is important and worthwhile, for lots of reasons, I hold the reality of the child’s minority to be more important** than the (IMO) legal fiction of what would have been a “forced emancipation” (which is pretty much an oxymoron).
(**in deciding whether or not the child is competent to contract at an adult level)
I don’t like being censored. When people are losing an argument, it is very easy to get petty about language as an excuse for an out. Some other blog did it, where they got hold of a phrase I used to describe “patriarchy” more accurately as “whoriarchy” – so they were prepared to put that W word in the headline and get the traffic, but then when I started backing up my claims, using the same language, she decided to throw a fit, and censored my arguments towards the end of the debate.
Exhibit W.
That’s your lot. I’m stepping round.
““Don’t accept sweets from strangers!” Every kid knows, as soon as the bribes come out, the cock comes out.”
…What? In the universe in which I grew up, one could assume that since most people are not pedophiles, most people offering you sweets were probably not attempting to get you to do anything to their cock (or ladyparts). Now of course pedophiles are one of the reasons why we teach kids to be wary of strangers, but you seem to be envisioning a world in which people who want to molest children are so common that a child can assume that any stranger who speaks to them is trying to recruit them into a pedophile ring, and that’s just not the reality.
Also you’re vastly overestimating what kids “know”. Some of them may be intelligent, but intelligence and knowledge or wisdom are not the same things.
@The First Joe
Meant to put this in my first comment above, but have you ever heard of Ally Fogg? He’s a journalist who writes a lot about issues facing men (especially in the UK). I wouldn’t call him an ‘MRA’ because he’s actually interested in looking at the issues and trying to present solutions to them instead of the usual Spearheadian tactic of “EEBIL FEMINISM WITH THOSE VAGINA-MOUSTACHE-TWIRLING SHE-BEASTS” (that is to say, he wouldn’t like to be associated with people like Price and Elam, and certainly not our Tom).
Anyway, I speak to him reasonably often, he’s a cool bloke. It’s just you said something in a comment around a page ago about wanting to tackle men’s issues the way women tackle women’s issues, so I thought you might like him. The link I left goes to his Graun profile, there’s a few things about men’s issues there.
Dude, I’m still shocked that any MRA at all was willing to actually say child rape is unreservedly bad.
If Elam were to actually say that I would look to see if pigs were flying.
@Tom: “I don’t like being censored. When people are losing an argument, it is very easy to get petty about language as an excuse for an out”
No one is looking for an out from arguments that are too absurd and vapid to be taken seriously unless they are just plain tired of hearing them. After all, they are parroted over and over as if you think they’ll gain credibility just because you’ve repeated it for the hundredth time.
Also, Tom is just a scam artist trying to make a fast buck to pay his legal bills, so this is just his way of gaining visibility.
I’m sure he won’t have any actual videos or other product to sell.
What’s funny is that he seems to think that he can make women paranoid enough about the whole everything is prostitution thing that they’ll buy into his scam too, and he can sell them his (nonexistent) “renunciation” package.
Oh, that’s fuckin’ rich. You can’t even form an argument without your precious go-to slur, but it’s the rest of the world that has a problem.
Anyway, you gonna answer any of my questions anytime soon? Or are you fucking off because you can’t hurl abuse at full capacity? Fucking coward.
Tom Martin on economics:
But wait, you say. He’s not claiming that the average “proper job” pays more than £100,000. He’s saying that after a 60% tax, a “proper job” will pay better.
So… the average salary in the UK is over £40,000 per year?
Really?
Doesn’t that work out to something like $80,000 per year on average in US dollars? And is the standard of living in the UK *really* that much higher than the standard of living on this side of the pond? Because I *know* the average US salary isn’t $80,000 per year.
@Dani, @Viola
Average salary is around £26,000. Median is around £23,000.
The way tax on earnings in the UK works is in (I think) four bands. Any money you earn up to a certain point (band A, around £10,000) isn’t taxed. Then anything earned above that falls into band B which is taxed at a certain rate, until you get to band C, where the extra money is taxed at a slightly higher rate (but not the earnings from band B or A), then finally band D earnings (anything over £100,000) is taxed at 50%. So basically Tom is advocating creating entirely new rules of taxation for one industry. Because he’s a big ninnyface.
And while there’s debate to be had on the standard of living (I’d count the NHS as a massive point in our favour), I’d wager our cost of living is a lot higher. My partner and I spend about 50% of our combined income per month on a one-bedroom basement flat and utility bills, and we’re pretty lucky it’s not more (but even combined, we don’t quite earn the median wage).
I had to move well outside my native London to reduce that percentage to nearer 35. And I’ve no idea if I’ll ever be able to afford to move back.
@Wetherby I’m originally from West Yorkshire, so my first house was more like 25%. Then I lost my job so faced a toss-up between stay where there were no jobs and have to live somewhere I really didn’t want to on HB and JSA for a lot longer, or go down South to look for work and really struggle on benefits, but for a shorter time until I found something. There was the added bonus of my partner living down here, and there being a lot more activist-y stuff, so I thought I’d give it a shot. Seems to have worked out so far 🙂
Did I explain the tax stuff right?
LOL@ renouncing prostitution (in all its forms). That’s Warren Farrel “Robbery-by-Social-Custom: She Exists, He Pays” mentality at its finest.
And why the hell should I (or anyone else) renounce prostitution (in all its forms), save for child prostitution, trafficking, or any other form of coerced prostitution. If men had not and did not (for those who did and still do) place such a high value on female virginity, female lack-of-sexuality, female sexual exclusivity (as sexual property of only one man), etc., prostitution would not be such a lucrative (according to your stats) venture.
@TheNatFantastic
The ridiculous inflation of income involved in Tom Martin’s fictional figures was in fact my point 🙂
Ew, am I the only one that caught that when Tom Martin suggested child rape should be illegal, he meant that raped and trafficked kids should be punished for having been raped and trafficked because he sees them as “whores”.
No, and he got all upset when we pointed out he thinks children who are engaged in prostitution ought to be punished, severely, more severely than adult prostitutes (whom he would also punish) and that the "jons" need to be coddled, because raping children is normal/the sign of someone who has a problem, but being a whore is a sign of moral turpitude, even though it's the normal state of 97 percent of all women.