Jolyoff, Jenkins

Jolyon Jenkins

Jolyon Jenkins

On 9th March 2016, Jolyon Jenkins hosted a programme The Red Pill on BBC Radio 4. One of the interviewees, Clive Smith (aka CS MGTOW) made his own recording. I respond to the latter, more complete, record of the discussion between the two men. In particular I address some topics on which Mr Jenkins seemed to think he had scored points: partner abuse, hypergamy and sex-selective abortion or infanticide.

Partner Abuse

The exchange followed a common deflectionary tactic in which details of the survey statistics submerged the actual issue: absence of support for male victims.

Depending on exactly which data you wish to cite, the proportion of male victims of partner abuse might be 1-in-3 or 2-in-5 or 1-in-2. By 2012/13, the CSEW data for the incidence in the preceding year of the most severe category of physical violence had converged to virtual equality between the sexes (about 1% of respondants for both sexes). Curiously this category ceased to be reported in the CSEW the following year. Odd that.

In the case of the PASK data, certainly the most authoritative source to date, men are twice as often the victims of unidirectional intimate partner violence than women.

But the details of the statistics are not the issue. Whatever specific data you use, the clear fact is that men comprise a substantial proportion of the victims of partner abuse – and this contrasts dramatically with the resources available to male victims. In the UK, the women’s domestic abuse charity sector receives several hundred millions of pounds annually, about two-thirds of which is publicly funded. Whilst these charities might protest that they also provide services for men, the reality is very different in practice. Vanishingly few refuge facilities are available for men, and none where men can escape with children.

But worse, the women’s domestic abuse charities promulgate a false perspective on DA/IPV in which only men can be recognised as abusers. Whilst the women’s movement in the early 1970s initially did a laudable job in dragging domestic violence into the open, the feminist movement quickly acted to hide male victimisation because this did not align with its political strategy. The DA/IPV sector has been using this issue to fund an overtly biased gender-political movement for 45 years, with male victims being thrown to the wolves.

Had Jolyon Jenkins been interested in informing the public on the issues of concern to men’s rights activists (and MGTOW) he would have steered the discussion onto these topics. He did not do so and it can hardly be because he is unaware of the issues. Rather it was because enlightening the public was not the purpose of the programme. Its purpose was to mock MGTOW and to discredit the valid concerns they share with the broader men’s movement.

Mr Jenkins is a product of the prevailing prejudice. This prejudice is illustrated by MP Jess Phillips, who, on international women’s day read out the names of the 120 women who had been killed by men over the preceding year. The MPs applauded. I wonder how the MPs would have felt if Jess Phillips had deliberately omitted the names of black women, reading out only the names of white women victims? She did not, of course, because to do so would be the most vile racism. Yet to omit men from the list of victims is regarded as fine.

Yes, it was international women’s day so you might think there was an excuse. But the list of names comes from the ‘Counting Dead Women’ project, a project funded from the feminist-oriented DA/IPV charity sector, and hence largely publicly funded. There is no Counting Dead People project. I doubt that the names of men who are the victims of partner homicide are listed anywhere other than in police records (yet there are about 20 male victims of partner homicide annually). And MP Phillips added, in respect of the 120 female victims, “their perpetrators were not feckless drunks, but respected fathers, City bankers and eminent lawyers“. The message is clear: women alone are victims and men – all men – are the problem. This is the subversion of the truth which this programme has done nothing to dispel.

Hypergamy

Mr Jenkins seemed reluctant to accept that women are hypergamous, i.e., that they tend to ‘marry up’. This is strange. Is it even contentious? Let’s get one thing out of the way. We not talking here about the nubile lovely who marries an ugly old gargoyle who just happens to be obscenely rich. True, any such old gargoyle can bag a nubile lovely. But still, these are but a small minority. There just aren’t enough filthy rich gargoyles around. Here we are talking about the predominant tendency, the norm. And the contention is that the norm is hypergamy. Here are a few studies which support the claim,

  • Elizabeth Cashdan (1996), Women’s Mating Strategies (Evolutionary Anthropology 5:134–143), (“women value wealthy, high-status men in good physical condition, both for the resources such men can provide and for the genetic quality that they can give the woman’s offspring“)
  • Gilles Saint-Paul, Genes, Legitimacy and Hypergamy: Another Look at the Economics of Marriage (CEPR Discussion Paper No.DP6828, May 2008): Human female hypergamy is argued to occur because women have greater lost mating opportunity costs from monogamous mating (given their slower reproductive rate and limited window of fertility), and thus must be compensated for this cost of marriage by a resource-rich mate.
  • Bokek-Cohen, Peres & Kanazawa (2007), Rational choice and evolutionary psychology as explanations for mate selectivity, Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology (2007) 2, p. 5.  (“women remain more selective than men even under conditions of extreme ‘marriage squeeze’ for women“)

However, hypergamy is simply a basic evolutionary trait, is it not? MRAs are somewhat culpable for presenting female hypergamy as a pejorative. Actually it is one side of a coin, the other side of which is the male impulse to provide resources. You can hardly complain that someone is ever so willing to take resources off you if you are ever so willing to provide them. The two tendencies are consistent co-evolved behaviours which, together, are a key aspect of pair bonding. Why is this contentious? Well, it only becomes contentious once feminism enters the picture because it appears to conflict with the “strong, independent woman” paradigm – and also appears to give legitimacy to patriarchal oppression, which is how male resource provision becomes misrepresented in that perverse ideology.

An interesting source is the 30th British Social Attitudes Survey, reporting on surveys conducted in 2012. The data below refers to totals for both male and female respondants. So, in as far as it reflects hypergamy it does so both as regards female hypergamy and also male ‘collusion’ with female hypergamy, i.e., both sides of the coin. Interestingly there is generally little difference between male and female recorded opinions.

As is common with surveys, very similar questions can elicit very different answers depending on how they are phrased. For example, responding to the question,

A man’s job is to earn money; a woman’s job is to look after home and family

Figure 5.2 records that only 14% agreed. This is not surprising because the phrasing of the question makes it sound like a vote for patriarchal oppression. People have been programmed by political correctness to react to, and resist, suggestions that ” a woman’s place is in the home”. But, in truth, this is indeed what the majority of people think – or, at least, a man’s place is definitely not in the home. For example, Table 5.3 gives the responses to the question,

What is the best and least desirable way for a family with a child under school age to organise family and work life by sex

This is how Glen Poole summarised the responses in Table 5.3,

7 thoughts on “Jolyoff, Jenkins

  1. Groan

    As always thank you for some very clear and succinct presentations. as you say if one looks at general population surveys and indeed the actual behaviours across populations in the US UK and EU one sees that both attitudes and behaviours reflect quite the opposite from the PC “line”. In many respects the increases in female “economic” participation really reflect two broad “opportunities”. The growth in service/office work in many economies and longer lives and birth control meaning nursing and caring for young is in fact a much smaller part of life. Yet still generally women “work” less and regard the male as the should be primary earner even if circumstances mean this can’t easily be achieved.
    As always there is a real problem that we can’t face how much our behaviour reflects our evolution rather than some remarkably recent novelties in human experience. Of course both sexes have equal moral value, but they are different.

    Reply
  2. Tim Patten

    Sadly, this is propaganda and not accurate. But I appreciate others interest in MGTOW, it is saving male lives…. litterally.

    Reply
  3. Pingback: William Collins: Jenkins, Jolyon | Justice for Men & Boys

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