Mike Buchanan’s manifesto, read by a girl
by isabelrogers
Mike Buchanan is a man. He used to be a Tory, but left to set up his own political party when he realised David Cameron (despite being a public school oik) actually talks to girls. Mike doesn’t want to talk to girls. After seeing an article in The Mirror, I read his manifesto.
Allow me to take you through the funniest points of the 2015 Election Manifesto of the Justice for Men and Boys (and the women who love them) Party. Or the JFMABATWWLTP. Coincidentally, that acronym accurately describes the noises I made while reading it. Sorry – this is long, and you have to wait until the very end for a picture of Keanu Reeves.
It is 80 pages long. I admit, I skim-read a few of those. The main points to take away from the JFMABATWWLTP is that Mike likes a public enquiry. He calls for five of them: in the areas of employment (what the government can do to get jobs for the boys), sexual abuse (why women are so rarely held to account), suicide (to explore the male suicide rate), criminal justice (to find out why the criminal justice system treats men far more harshly than women), and health (to work out how to improve men’s health).
Mike’s language skills are quite extraordinary. I like to imagine him writing this at home. Alone, at home, because both his two former wives won’t speak to him, apparently. I don’t know why. He’s probably a witty and erudite conversationalist. Perhaps they interrupted him mid-flow: however, that is not the thrust of our investigation here.
He starts with a history lesson. ‘For centuries, probably millennia, the family has been the basic building block of society … a man would … take on sole responsible [sic] both morally and legally for their [wife & kids] welfare.’ That’s a full legal system in place while we were in caves. Probably. He’s a bit vague with the actual dates.
Once kids are born into building block families (does Mike have any financial interest in Lego?), they get educated. A minefield! ‘The growing influence of feminists in education is a disturbing but predicable development, following the feminization of the teaching profession.’ I admit, it would be easier for blokes like Mike to keep girls at home learning stuff like how to sew his shirts and playing tiny, tiny violins to accompany his ranting when he returns from the wild and dangerous full-time work environment, but that ain’t going to happen. We’re out now. Look at me, typing with my girlie fingers on this keyboard. As if I were literate and everything. Sorry Mike.
If he gets ill, he’s not too happy about all those female doctors either. Apparently medical schools ‘discriminate in favour of women’ because of the ‘face-to-face interviews’ as well as the ‘good exam grades’. That is, Mike. Women use their feminine wiles to flirt their way into medical school. He doesn’t mention evidence showing the opposite.
A running gag throughout this political romp is that men pay 72% of tax compared to women’s measly 28%. At no point does he ask why it isn’t 50:50. No: men pay, and deserve more for their buck. It’s a rather beautifully circular argument. Keep women at home with the kids, they won’t earn much, men earn more and so deserve more.
Then he’s off and running full tilt at the world of work. He takes issue with politicians’ language (ironic, I thought), saying they ‘loftily declare’ we need more female engineers. He imagines the skittish fillies being ambushed into the sciences, like pheasants beaten towards the guns, ‘seeking to drive women into this and other line [sic] of work few women wish to enter.’ Oh, and apparently we leave early too. Why is that, Mike? Those pesky ovaries again with no male nanny for the brood? Have you thought about this?
Next, we get Mike the Crime Fighter, wondering why ‘women are held barely more accountable than children by the justice system’. Really? Do you want to unpick that? Are you sure you’re not projecting just a little bit?
Then we get to the real anger that lies deep in the twice-divorced Buchanan heart. Sex. However much he hates us from the neck up, he still has male needs. They are natural. But sex is just sex, right? Nothing more? Now, I reckon if a man is that averse to having kids, he might just shoulder the responsibility for not impregnating his partner. But then I’m just a silly girl who thinks informed consent and equality within a sexual relationship are pretty important. Forgive me while I titter.
Mike can’t bear that a man ‘is expected to bear heavy financial responsibility for his children,’ (would he be happier with a bit of light responsibility? I don’t know – he doesn’t say) ‘even when his partner has chosen to become pregnant without his express consent.’ I might be misreading this, but deliberately ejaculating into your partner would imply an awareness of possible consequences.
Let’s move on to Mike’s brilliant solution. “The state should only require a man to have financial responsibility for a child if he’s previously signed a legal declaration that he’s willing to support a child who results from the sexual relationship in question, and a paternity test …”
If he’s previously signed a legal declaration. That’s before any rumpy-pumpy, right? Perhaps between dessert and coffee on a first date, if you want to move things along. Just whip out your legal declaration and a his’n’hers pen set, sign here darling and would you care for the petits fours?
To make the JFMABATWWLTP’s utopian dream come true, Mike needs one more thing. A Minister for Men and Equalities, with all the same things the Minister for Women and Equalities has. I think they should have adjoining offices, perhaps with a Jack & Jill bathroom arrangement between them. Although that could lead to loo-cleaning-related arguments and accusations of bad aim.
Throughout this ‘manifesto’ Mike’s language is ambitious. By the end, his confidence is high. He wraps up his final paragraphs with a stylish flourish, incorporating accusations that have been levelled at women since we were tried for witchcraft for having a bit of a laugh at willies.
Feminists have ‘systematically and ruthlessly exploited the gynocentric culture’, and our ‘appetite’ is ‘insatiable’. (Remember, girls, we must not have appetites.) We have long been ‘manipulating’ politicians into doing our ‘bidding’, and raising the ‘spectre’ of the women’s vote if politicians ‘fail to advantage women over men’. (Note for you, Mike: women have been voting for nearly a hundred years. It is hardly a spectre. You might want to watch your use of metaphor there, love.)
We are warned that feminism is a movement with an ‘ultimate aim of female supremacy … driven by misandry’. Last time I looked, my kind of feminism meant we all got equal dibs at stuff. And, by the way, do you know how Mike came across the word ‘misandry’? Wikipedia. He cheerfully admits this. I think we should have more politicians who use Wiki to research their manifestoes.
Oh, finally, the lying liars. Goodness, feminists lie. Feminism is ‘built upon baseless conspiracy theories – such as patriarchy’, not forgetting our ‘fantasies, lies, delusions and myths’. He doesn’t bother to define those. We have ‘lied relentlessly’ about issues, and ‘radical feminists never retract their lies, even when challenged with evidence proving them to be liars’. He doesn’t like that himself, mind. Show Mike some evidence and he’ll say he’s never heard of it. And the media ‘very rarely expose the lies of feminists, however outrageous the lies might be.’ And do you know whom we have as a ‘collaborator’? None other than Mark Carney, the chap in charge of the Bank of England.
That’s nine mentions of lie or liar in two short paragraphs. Methinks …
He ends the whole thing by referencing the red pill in The Matrix. Not many people would look worse than Mike Buchanan in a long black leather coat, but I’m pleased to see him align the JFMABATWWLTP to a fantasy dystopian world.
But remember, if you are a female woman and love making sandwiches, there is a way forward. If you love Mike, you can join the JFMABATWWLTP. It has to be true love. Not like those two wives before. They lied.
There are three JFMABATWWLTP candidates standing in and around Nottingham in May. Do go along to see them and laugh. They won’t like that.
isabelrogers.org 
[…] a reading list so read it. Also, crochet.‘ on her blog, and Isabel Rogers read and took down Mike Buchanan’s Justice for Men and Boys (and the women who love them) Party Election Manifest… on her […]
[…] thanks to Claire for pointing us to this. As we’ve come to expect of critiques of our manifesto, it contains numerous […]
Isabel, many thanks.
https://j4mb.wordpress.com/2015/02/11/isabel-rogers-mike-buchanans-manifesto-read-by-a-girl/
Mike, you’re welcome.
As pedantry seems to be alive and well here and being exercised with just an ever so slight touch of superiority, might I respectfully point out that ‘more politicians who use Wiki to research their manifestoes’ are only going to find that, yes, those sweet little pinkies on the ends of their feet are real. Just a petty point, I know, but I couldn’t resist it, especially when you make so many petty points whilst ignoring the herd of elephants in your own room.
I know its probably difficult for you to see them, of course, because you are so righteously and sanctimoniously full of your own rights, but feminism’s activities in the name of equality are creating some very serious social inequalities that men are beginning to get just a tad tetchy about. Actually, more than a tad – across the developed world, a backlash is building against your one-sided, so-called equality, and when that breaks, there’s going to be hell to pay.
If I might be so bold as to offer some advice? If I were you, I would be thinking very seriously about coming down off your self-created pedestal, and engaging with the ideas of honest men who are expressing honest opinions, cogently argued, instead of ridiculing them and engaging in that old canard of the ad hominem attack. Frankly, it demeans you more than it demeans the man. If I were you, I would be losing the levity and waking up to the reality that the politicisation of gender has been one of the greatest tragedies to befall women, let alone men – and children – in our society.
And, you are a fool if you think that feminism is getting ‘equal dibs at stuff’. Maybe it is you who should take the red pill. Feminism is cultural Marxism driven by the likes of Germaine Greer, Kate Millett and a host of others in the 1970s and right up to the present, including Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewitt, and a their clones in parliament today who are intent on tearing our society to ribbons, casting women and men as political classes and setting them against men to the good of neither. These radical feminists are feeding naive women like you the sugary pill of ‘liberation’ and quasi-equality in the name of alleged historical oppression by men, which is one of the most flagrant examples of the basic logical fallacy of the argumentum ad logicam there is. And whilst you are buying it lock, stock and barrel, your sugary feminism is subjugating you and destroying your families, your freedoms and your respect for men.
You write with humour, Isabel, but the last laugh may not be yours, or feminism’s m’dear. I shall be interested to see if you have the confidence to pass this comment for public viewing.
(Oh, and just a note for you too: ‘Women have been voting for nearly a hundred years’, which is about the same time as the overwhelming majority of men have been too. Do some research and work it out.)
as “read by a girl’
Why do so many women who write rubbish take cover behind their sex, as though that were some kind of excuse? I imagine you consider it to be some kind of credential, which is another sad story about so many women – we might call it ‘argument from vagina’ – and seems to betray the fear that they may have little else.
Wonderful! We must add the Argumentum ad vaginum to the list of logical fallacies. (Just kidding Isabel – put it down to male humour eh?)
Herbert, if you weren’t an oik yourself, who hadn’t been to public school (don’t worry, I didn’t either, but I did at least learn some Latin), and if you had learnt from The Life of Brian (“Romanus ite domo”), you’d have known that what you call the “argumentum ad vaginum” is more properly the “argumentum ad vaginam”, or perhaps better, the “argumentum ab vagina” or “… ab vaginis”.
So, kindly write out a hundred times, “Romani ite domum”, or “argumentum ad vaginis”, stupid boy! 🙂
Mike Buchanan seems fawningly grateful that a female blogger who has, but there again *hasn’t*, exactly, “read” the J4MB manfesto (i.e she admits to “skimming” some of its 80 pages), has at least linked to it, so that diligent researchers in her fan club with more stamina than her or me, can contradict her, in theory, once better educated.
At least when Ms Rogers rogered our beloved patron saint Mike, she attempted a few feminist gags that didn’t amount to hate speech. She thus ingratiated herself with Mike.
OK, granted Ms Rogers laboured the irrelevant point that Mike is divorced, twice, by mentioning this irrelevance twice. The feminists don’t want to go back to the 1950s, but the 1950s thinking that nobody who’d ever been divorced deserved to be listened to, is vital to feminism even today, as far as divorced men are concerned, but with a pussy pass for divorced women, whose divorces make them MORE entitled to hold opinions, not less so, as Ms Rogers would like us to consider divorced men to be. Point taken. Point disputed though.
Being divorced twice is a badge-of-honour that *enhances* the perceived qualifications by life-experience of those who femsplain what’s going on, arousing the scepticism of men and the more canny of the women who just love them. Paradoxically,Ms Rogers would apparently have us believe, for anybody with the talent to document 20 different ways in which the British states disadvantages men and boys, two failed marriages discredits a mere mansplainer like Mike, however many women love him. (None of this double standard is explained.)
Ms Roger’s piece was catty. She came across to me as preaching to her own choir, or at least trying to get them to laugh at her gags. I do not anticipate that she will ever engage intelligently over the “at least 20” ways in which men are disadvantaged, by the British state. But, like me, on my own strident and opinionated blog, she is liberal enough politely to publish comments that do not praise her. She allows dialogue, between one “camp” and another, that she could prevent, by harsh moderation. And she does appear to have a sense of humour, or at least to know that there is such a thing as humour. She may even be intelligent enough to switch sides. Abandoning feminism isn’t a betrayal of a gender. There are male feminists such that an intelligent woman can mature enough to realise that they were wrong. There are female anti-feminists whom this Ms Rogers could one day come to regard as awesome.
Ha ha. Such erudition! Actually I did study Latin at Grammar School, and such was the tsunami of disinterest amongst the class, the Latin master not only told us the questions for our second term exams, he even told us the answers – and we still failed to a man. My most abiding memory of him was – John Cleese like – standing me on a chair repeatedly and precisely pronouncing ‘Vidisne, boy!’ (With a ‘W’) until I got it right. Ah well. As Einstein once said ‘Education is what a man is left with after he has forgotten everything he ever learned.’ (Or is it learnt? Do I sense a correction winging in my direction here?) Nevertheless, I take your rebuke like a man and, Kipling-like, stand properly corrected, never to breath a word about my loss.
When I think about it, it’s just as well I didn’t say ‘Romanis eunt domus’ then, isn’t it? A misspelling there might have been rather terminal. It is rather doggerel-ly apposite (past participle of apponere, I believe) in the context of this exchange n’est ce-pas? Know what I mean? Nudge nudge… ?
Could I just say that actually I made Isabel’s pedestal. I specialise in solid wood pedestals at risk of being trampled by herds of elephants (you can see my work at http://www.elephantpedestals.com). I don’t think Isabel claimed to have made it herself in her post, but I just wanted to clear that up. Thanks.
Also, although I have not yet ventured into elephant-proof pulpits, if you need one, Isabel, you know where to find me. Assuming you’re happy with the pedestal of course.
http://www.elephantpedestals.com
And if you need a ladder to get up on to your pedestal, Isabel, I’d be delighted to lend you one. Also a box to stand on in your pulpit, just in case you need to patronise anyone – m’dear. x
(Does anyone know the Latin for ‘indulgent self important rambling with elements of arrested development’?)
This-here dialogue, about elephant pedestals (complete with broken link, so I have at least worked out that there is a joke there) and now elephant pulpits and ladders, is, to me, what my eldest of five, a daughter aged 39 this year, with two children of her own and a good psychology degree, would call “random”, in the sense that she once described a text she didn’t understand that I’d sent her late in the evening a few years ago as “totally random” (giggling as she said this).
Problem is, although quirky humour can be amongst the best, if it gets *too* quirky, it just falls off a comprehension cliff.
I suspect that the elephant metaphor that I just don’t *get*, is an *in* joke, in that it uses a metaphor I’ve never come across before, because I am new to this. I cannot actually tell whether the intended joke is at Isabel’s expense, or (say) at Herbert’s and mine.
I therefore look forward to having the elephant metaphor explained, mansplained, or femsplained, soon, if Isabel, Claire, Jane, Herbert, or some other contributer or lurker will kindly educate me better.
Maybe the elephant pedestal metaphor is an old one that crops up often, whenever Marxist Feminists and anti-feminist Men’s Rights Activists lock horns, and trade insults. However, it’s new to me, that’s the point.
As a single-issue activist (he says, oxymoronically), there are multiple “single” issues that I care about. (I don’t have a one-track mind.) I am, especially, a newcomer to Mike Buchanan’s analysis, although I do find consonance in it with my own surprising discoveries.
I (almost accidentally) *funded* an “equal parenting” activist’s standing for Parliament in 2005, but not realising way back then that this issue would touch me eight years later, or why it was so important.
No, so-called “men’s rights” didn’t become an issue on which I even knew that there was a problem as serious as that which Mike (at worst) hardly exaggerates at all, let alone how serious that problem was even then affecting paternally-deprived children especially; nor felt-I strongly about the problem, nor had read up on different commentators’ perspectives, only to conclude that a certain misandric brand of feminism that is the ruling elite of *all* “feminism” was to blame for it, a veritable virus of a meme infecting the contemporary culture of today’s post-Christian, post-liberal quasi-democracies. (Citation needed? Make my day!)
I learnt none of that until, in 2013, helpless, I watched a social worker herself far less brainy than the two year-old boy she thus abused, and enabled his mother to continue to abuse, or me … until I watched this a social worker, who had never even bothered, not even once, to watch my son and me together, summarily decide to set out on an immutable, publicly-funded mission of hers, to deprive the youngest of my five children, still presently only four, for the rest of his life, of any contact at all with his father, his four half-siblings, his five uncles and aunts on the paternal side of his family, his eight nephews and nieces to whom he is related through his father, and countless cousins.
Of all the 20 ways in which Mike Buchanan claims, in his manifesto, that the state disadvantages men and boys, the cow-towing to a vicious “smash the family” agenda peddled for the past half-century by Marxist Feminist pseudo-intellectuals, this is the only one that engages my emotions. The state also disadvantages the daughters of the disadvantaged fathers it intervenes to remove from their children’s lives. Every scientific study points to that conclusion. Only the lame, non evidenced-based gender war polemic rhetoric of ideologues like Harman and Hewitt assert that fathers aren’t necessary to daughters, just as they are to their sons.
Tongue-in-cheek, I posit that Feminists should ideally be purged from the public sector and thrown onto the dole, even if they have paper qualifications in social work. Why? Because the Equality Act 2010 imposes upon public authorities a statutory duty, in everything they do, to have due regard to the “need” to foster good relations between men and women. In contrast, the driving force behind the sort of feminism (documented in his book, “Feminism: The Ugly Truth”, for example) about which Mike Buchanan educates those who are willing to do more reading and critical thinking than Isabel, and less ignorant mocking, is the “need” of malicious social engineers who expressly want to smash the family, to foster as bad as possible relations between men and women. Theirs is an unlawful agenda which has already deprived about a third of British minor children of their Principle 6 right, set out in the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child, to the love and care of BOTH of their natural parents, where possible.
A significantly large proportion of women who are _not_ intellectuals, who would gladly vote for J4MB if they had a J4MB candidate to vote for where they live, are the female relatives, especially the paternal grandmothers, but also (for example) my son’s three aunts on my side of the family, and his three sisters, deprived of contact with their relative, because the despised male father of their relative is deprived of contact, by the feminist-infiltrated state,
The hatred of men and boys, and the disadvantaging of them, has no proper place, in the jurisprudence of modern, post-Christian, post-liberal quasi-democracies. Until she grapples with THAT, Isabel had best stop trying to be funny. My son is the victim of her flippancy, as Herbert calls it. He is only four. He won’t get her feeble jokes, any more than I got the obscure elephant jokes.
In reply to John’s comment (I can see he is too busy to leave short comments, but I will take the time to be concise):
Could I refer you to http://www.intellectualmanbungees.com Perfect for those ‘comprehension cliff’ moments.
Best regards.
Try fēminīnus? Or isabel effeminatus?
I’d just like to congratulate us all for playing so nicely below the comments line. Not a swear in sight. Look – we CAN have a spat about feminism without horrible threats. It’s refreshing. (I’m actually being serious here.)
Isabel. If I may say so, sarcasm and hollow rhetoric used against someone you do not know, misrepresenting him and what he is actually saying, and making personal comments – for example about him being married twice – is neither being serious, nor is it a spat about feminism. If you want to be serious, I suggest you examine yourself as to what it is you are doing in writing like this.
Not all men who are against feminism swear or abuse women, or anyone else for that matter. Indeed, those who are against feminism are against it because, with intelligence and social awareness, they see it for what it is, and what it is doing in ripping men and women apart and setting them against each other to the detriment of all. Those men (and there are many women too who are speaking out) can see what is happening to women, children, and men, and they are speaking out with wisdom: a wisdom that seems to have been lost from women who only seem intent on continuing the stereotype of the belittled woman and men’s alleged domination of them – which is not only a canard, it is utterly passé.
They are acting on intelligent analysis and clear minded rationality, born of solid male integrity (as with Mr Buchanan I believe), a commodity that has been put down too much and for too long by feminist women and their fellow travellers. However, as a man, I can fully understand why some men are abusive to women, especially those who write with such disrespect, as you do. Disrespect begets disrespect n’est ce-pas? But that is not what men are really about. Yes, some men, maybe younger men, perhaps those who see how feminism is now nothing to do with equality but female superiority, or those, like young fathers cut off from their beloved children who have suffered egregiously in what is now a totally gynocentric society, are bound to be angry at the arrogant pomposity that emanates from some feminist writing whilst they are hurting and full of resentment.
Anger is a natural emotion that evokes when a person’s needs are not being met. It might not be pleasant, but it is essentially human. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927 – 2003), four-term U.S. Senator, ambassador and academic said, ‘A community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future – that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder – most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure – that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable. And it is richly deserved.’
This is the monster that feminists are creating, and you appear to be part of that. Women who (maybe like you?) espouse feminism and its one-sided, self-centred, and deeply divisive ideology, without thinking-through what it is they are doing, need to wake up and smell the coffee IMHO. I believe you would do well to recognise that your approach to Mr Buchanan who is acting with obvious rationality and intelligence even if you do not agree with him, is not only rude and unwomanly, but smacks of inappropriate arrogance and a form of ideological blindness based on stereotypes that is tantamount to fiddling whilst Rome burns.
If you want to get serious, then I truly believe you would benefit from engaging constructively with what the likes of Mr Buchanan is saying and not mistreat them, misrepresent them, or mock them – even implicitly. Nobody deserves that. You come over as having rather obvious and rather childish chip on your shoulder about belittled women, and if that is a true reflection of your attitude to men in society today, then I believe it is undignified and misguided, to say the least.
I suspect there is an intellect lying beneath your flippant rhetoric, and I take at face value your expression of serious intent. Maybe one day you might realise that a debate about feminism: its attitudes toward men, it’s infantilising of women, and its arrogant, destructive, unrelenting self-centredness, is going to have to be engaged constructively not destructively, as you have done here. If you want to do that, I for one would be prepared to respond with intelligence, politeness, and respect for other’s views properly expressed. I cannot speak for Mr Buchanan, but I suspect he would be open to that too.
Herbert, I didn’t think that Isobel’s post on which we’re supposed to be commenting actually made any serious and well-informed yet provocative points for anybody to get emotional about in the first place. Rather, I think she merely made a few jokey remarks, having pretended to have read and understood the J4MB manifesto, using humour as found in ethic jokes, but based instead upon stereotyping anti-feminists and/or post-feminists rather than (say) Irish or Jewish people..
This seems not to be either a blog set up for the purpose of stimulating intelligent debate, or a blog set up for a pitch battle in a gender political flame war.
Quite possibly, Isobel was half-expecting the sort of evil, hate-speech diatribes one finds on We Hunted the Mammoth. But, she didn’t pitch an outrageous, bigoted, abusive sexist point of view, to bring that reaction down on her head. Apart from making gags (the “JFMABATWHLT” being particularly laboured) mostly based upon stereotyping outrageously a gender politics school of thought and one of humanity’s two genders with it, she hasn’t actually said anything at all worth bothering with. So, of course nobody is angry, and swearing.
If she joins We Hunted the Mammoth, and asks the bigots allowed to comment THERE, to check out this blog post, she might get a flame war here. But I don’t think that that is what she wants. Do you? As somebody who tries to be witty on my own blog, not always appealing to the reader’s sense of humour successfully, I feel quite protective towards Isabel.
–
Sent from John Allman’s BlackBerry® smartphone on O2 – +44 7720 842242
–
Full contact details published at:
http://JohnAllman.UK
This article is the grown up feminist version of school girls giggling and joking about how stupid boys are. Waste of time for everyone else.
This, and other recent web content that links to the J4MB Manifesto, has inspired me to pin my colours to the mast, so-to-speak, in a post on my own blog entitled
Masculism + Feminism = ?
https://johnallmanuk.wordpress.com/2015/02/16/masculism/
I have decided that I am a feminist too, as well as being a masculist. (The blog post explains why.)