I should have turned the radio off. But I was mesmerised like a deer in headlights. It was Yvette Cooper on a hustings phone-in programme on BBC Radio 4 (30th April 2015) – she of the planned totalitarian brain-washing of primary school boys.
None of the callers asked any questions about gender issues. She wasn’t going to let that stop her. You don’t think she’d pass up the opportunity to exercise her obsession with “violence against women” on Radio 4, do you? Nope, she shoe-horned it in during a reply to a question about policing.
This was her propaganda gem,
Two women per week are killed by a partner or ex-partner. If this were happening at football matches there’d be an outcry.
One has to feel sorry for the truly great propagandist. By its nature, the propagandist’s art must go unnoticed by its target audience. What a shame that only those of us who see through it are in a position to appreciate its quality. What malice there is here, what pre-meditation.
I have already put deaths due to partner violence in context in a previous post.
Allow me to deconstruct Cooper’s apparently off-hand remark.
Firstly – how preposterous it is to compare deaths due to PV with deaths at football matches. Why not a comparison with deaths in supermarkets, or deaths in concert halls (or, of course, deaths at work)? Ah, but the choice of football was not random. Oh no.
You see “football” suggests “blokes”. Yes, yes, I know many women go to football matches. That’s not the point. We’re talking impressions here; propaganda. In the subliminal mind of Mr or Mrs Joe Public, “football” says “blokes”. OK?
What Cooper has skilfully done with her remark is to conjure this impression: “vast numbers of women are dying. If this were happening to men there’d be an outcry!”.
Get it? The subliminal message is that women are not only particularly victimised, but that they receive scant sympathy or concern relative to that which would be afforded to men.
I am all admiration. Let it not be said that feminists are stupid. I wish they were. What Cooper has done is to project an hypnotic suggestion into the heads of the public, subconsciously persuading them to believe the opposite of the truth. This is what fine propaganda is. She is utterly shameless.
Almost everyone goes through life in a state of deep hypnosis, kept there by incessant snippets of propaganda of this kind. As a result the public suffers a mass psychological delusion about male power and male privilege, an hypnotic state which cannot be dislodged by reason. In truth, our society is largely defined by a gender dynamic in which compassion, and hence special pleadings, are reserved for females whilst males as a class are not the suitable recipients of compassion or special consideration. The purpose of the propaganda is to maintain the popular conviction that this state of affairs is justified by historic and on-going oppression of women. The induced hypnotic state prevents the public from registering the myriad disadvantages suffered by men and boys.
That’s my main message. But while I’m at it…
Cooper may have made a PR blunder using the football thing. Has she not heard of Hillsborough? Is she not aware there’s an Inquest going on? There were 96 people killed at Hillsborough. People are a bit sensitive about that. She could run into a shit-storm.
And there was also the Bradford fire (56 dead) and Ibrox Park (66 dead).
In 2013/14 the number of homicides attributed to partner violence was 84 women victims and 23 men. (All data here relate to England & Wales). The number of homicide deaths apart from those due to PV were 320 men and 99 women.
If you want to make a comparison between PV homicide numbers and other ways of dying, why not deaths at work? In 2013-14 there were 152 men killed at work, and 19 women. So, nearly twice as many men are killed at work as there are women killed by their partners.
But the most relevant comparison is with the excess deaths of men following divorce or partnership break-up. There is no firm data on this, but there has recently been a strong indication from the excess of deaths of non-resident versus resident parents. This implies around 5,000 excess deaths of men over women in a period not exceeding 11 years ( 2003-2014). This suggests that at least 450 men are dying each year as a result of divorce or partnership break-up. But Yvette Cooper is not bothered about this. She is concerned only with those 84 women. (To be more precise, she is only bothered about the propaganda value of those 84 women – not the women themselves).
And then there’s suicide. Male suicides increased by 6.5% between 2012 and 2013. The latest figures, for 2013, were 4020 male suicides, some 48 times the number of women being killed by their partners. Cooper doesn’t give a shit about them either.
Nor did she choose to compare the number of women dying from partner violence with the number of female suicides, which was 13 times greater – some 1120 women in 2013, or 22% of the total. Not the same propaganda value, eh, Yvette? No obvious man to blame? Feminists are not really concerned about women. They are merely using women as their lever into power. It is power, and specifically the overthrowing of male power, which is their purpose.
And then there is the bottom line: every year about 37,000 more men die than women. No, it isn’t biology. This is despite there being about a million more women in the population. Or rather, there are a million more women because 37,000 more men die every year.