Dominic Raab is no more keen on the Equality Act than he is on the Human Rights Act
Esher and Walton MP Dominic Raab has just been made justice minister alongside Michael Gove.
Raab is a longtime critic of the Human Rights Act – this appointment looks like David Cameron’s way of saying he is serious about scrapping it. In January 2014 Raab voted to allow human rights grounds to be used to prevent a foreign criminal being deported only in cases where there would be a breach of right to life or the right not to be tortured.
In 2013, he voted to remove the duty on the Commission for Equality and Human Rights to work to support the development of a society in which people’s ability to achieve their potential is not limited by prejudice or discrimination.
And in 2013 he also voted against making it illegal to discriminate on grounds of caste.
Raab also took an unusual stance on gender equality in 2011, when he expressed his fears that ‘from the cradle to the grave, men are getting a raw deal’. He attacked the ‘obnoxious bigotry’ of feminists and complained that men work longer hours than women (no mention of pay gap etc).
“While we have some of the toughest anti-discrimination laws in the world, we are blind to some of the most flagrant discrimination – against men.”
Seeming to have fallen at the first hurdle – assuming that feminism is anti-men – Raab also suggested that men start ‘burning their briefs’, presumably as a long- overdue retaliation against the feminists of the sixties (who did not, in fact, burn their bras.)
Raab’s diatribe continued:
“Britain’s not perfect, and we will never eradicate all human prejudice.”
This is especially true when we do not understand that prejudice. Another interesting choice from David Cameron.
Ruby Stockham is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow her on Twitter
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398 Responses to “He thinks feminists are ‘obnoxious bigots’: meet the new justice minister”
killiandoyle
And almost 100% of men will experience sexual assault or at minimum physical harassment within their lives.
Rex Duis
Hi Debbie, thanks for getting back to me. I’ll try and respond as briefly to your points as I can since our posts are quite long and I want others to read them too.
Re genital male genital mutilation, your response seems to suggest you don’t see forced circumcision on non-consenting infant boys as mutilation. I and many others do. Perhaps my previous comments will make better sense in that light. FGM was barely heard of or practised in the UK when it was swiftly banned, while boys are still being butchered today on the NHS.
Re retirement age.. we could argue that men have greater risk of death in the workplace than women, so there’s a price to pay for those additional job prospects you mention. I don’t see the ending of the disparity as an achievement of feminism when there are forum boards filled with older women and feminists complaining that changing the retirement age was an unfairness on those women who expected to be able to retire at 60. I believe one woman has even started a petition to have it reversed or something. If it’s something feminism achieved then it’s not being seen favourably by all.
We jump back to circumcision now and as you will later take umbrage at my suggesting women be forced to carry a baby to term for a man, I take offence at your comment that removal of the foreskin is nearly painless. I suggest you do some research into this area some more. It won’t take you long to learn that over 20,000 nerve endings are found in the tissue that’s removed. Often little painkillers or none are given. In the Jewish ceremonies you reference the mohels sometimes infect the baby with diseases which sometimes lead to their death as the Jewish procedure involves sucking blood out of the tiny babies penis.
You also need to read up on the functions of the foreskin. You claim it’s not necessary for long-term functioning, but it has many purposes, all of which are denied the baby boy and the man he becomes. One is the obvious, to keep the glans or head of the penis moist and sensitive. A penis that has been desensitised requires greater friction on it in order to feel pleasure, leading to rougher sex play for those men, which can in turn hurt their partners.
The foreskin also performs an important role in protecting men from infections and during sex to maintain natural lubrication in the vagina. A circumcised penis is rough and dry and requires frequent application of additional lubricants for many partners. Removal of a mans foreskin leads to discomfort for any women who sleeps with him.
Lastly, some research suggests that the very torturous act of removal on the infant is a sexual assault which rewrites the pain centres of the boys brain. For the rest of his life he will not respond so well to painkillers including morphine and will have a higher pain threshold than intact men. In Norway or Finland they discovered 80% of rapists were circumcised. I won’t even go into the cosmetics companies using baby foreskins in rejuvenation creams. But there’s plenty of reasons NOT to mutilation otherwise health infant boys and it’s depressing to read how lightly you view this barbarism. Perhaps learning more about it might sway your opinion.
Re gender-biased laws. I don’t believe women have more laws protecting them because of a perceived inequality. I’m saying that in terms of rights that men and women do not enjoy, men have a long list of rights we’re still waiting for, which women have enjoyed for a long time now in many cases. The aforementioned genital integrity laws with FGM illegal in the UK since 1985 and Canada from 1997 I think, are one good example. Reproductive rights are not equal either. Alimony and Maintenance laws still make men slaves to the women they divorce regardless of whether there are children to pay for.
You suggest if men needed specific laws to protect them that we’d have them.. well we do need them.. and we don’t have them. This is because despite feminist rhetoric about Patriarchy our Western culture is in fact very Gynocentric and has been for a long time. It may not seem that way to you, but you need only concult figures on total deaths per country per year going back over the last 150 years to see women suffer fewer deaths than men, and by a significant number usually. That surely is the baseline by which we measure how well a gender is treated…. Female life is given greater priority plain and simple, even if their lifestyle choices have in the past been restricted. We need to change this perception than men are disposable and that women somehow matter more than men.
You continue in the next bit of your response by referencing ‘patriarchal norms’ but your thinking inside a feminist framework, which is rather limiting. Step outside that ideology for a moment and you’ll see the picture differently. One of the problems I have with the feminist narrative is that every judgement Must be formed from the basis of women as a persecuted group, with males as oppressors, which in fact men have largely been oppressed too for a long time, by the wealthy 1% and nothing much has changed there.
“men wouldn’t be affected so negatively by perceived feminising of themselves just as one example”
It’s not a perception, it’s a fact. Feminism directly attacks what it means to be a man and suggests this should all change. The ideology won’t accept that all humans have instinctive drives like every other animal on the planet has and that trying to force changes in those drives through social pressuring is not only going to fail but it’s going to be very damaging. Again, look at the statistics to see my point. Male suicide figures are always higher by a significant amount than female figures. Happy men don’t kill themselves. It’s not difficult to work this all out. Men have had TV shows and films ripped away from them as being ‘outdated’ or mysogynist. We had the metrosexual and the SNAG sensitive new age guy role models sold to us to emulate. That was feminising and now our culture is finally rebelling and we’re seeing the backlash. If my comments didn’t resonate with people they wouldn’t have been well received on this page or on any other page.
I’m gonna post this now so I don’t lose it and reply again to the last points.
Rex Duis
“We fight for you as well when we fight against these issues”
Some of us don’t want anyone ‘fighting’ for it to be ok to feminize men. Some of us were perfectly happy doing traditionally male things. I felt feminised all the way through my adolescence and didn’t find my masculinity until I hit my 20’s. It’s very hard to find that when you have no clase male relationships, few role models, and live in a society which tells you since boyhood that you have oppressed girls and that you need to be nicer to them. I’ve had a gutsful of other people ramming their woes down my throat. I wasn’t born biased against anybody, but when you see injustice you grow resentful and rightly angry.
A lot of the divisive policies brought into schooling came about due to social justic warriors, many of whom were feminists and they changed our school overnight. It was like all the teachers had been replaced by Stepford Wives. We kids couldn’t understand what had happened, it was kind of alarming. It also made us laugh at them because it was all so pathetic. They divided our class by gender a lot after that, we boys got lectured on female needs. Our sex education class spent more time teaching the boys how a tampon worked than how to use a condom. It divided us by race too as suddenly darker skinned classmates had special safe rooms to sit in during lunch. As a kid who was badly bullied at school I didn’t appreciate being thrown out of what was once a safe room for me to be in on account of my skin being white, so brown skinned kids, often ones who teased me, could hang out there and have a laugh. It’s a load of crap and make our class weaker.
When I said men are less able to fight, I’m talking about womens ability to band together and support each other. This is not something men will do instinctively, whereas women do. Women are also generally better at speaking and at sharing their feelings. Men are reluctant to do that. I don’t buy that it’s an example of patriarchy. It’s simply how male humans are and we should accept that and work with it, rather than trying to force female-referred modes of communicating onto men. As I said, our culture is gynocentric, which means the female has become the baseline of desirable behaviour against which every man must fall short.
“Women have, and should have, the inalienable right to control their bodies. Everyone does.”
Except little boys it seems, who aren’t going to miss that non-essential bit of foreskin…. ?
Re parental rights – “ensuring himself a permanent place in her life forever”….
Isn’t this exactly what women have been doing to men for a very long time now? It happened just a few months ago to my friends younger brother. 19 years old, his whole life ahead of him and a girl he slept with twice got pregnant and had the baby. She assured him she was on the pill, and he made it clear that he didnt’ want a baby. Even once she was pregnant he made that point clear. But she had already decided, that this young man whom she’d literally only met twice in her life was the man for her and she wanted his babies. She changed her profile pictures on social media to show a picture of him asleep in her bed and claimed he was ‘her man’. She had the baby against his wishes… he gave up the football scholarship in America he’d been offered and resigned himself to his new fate… all decided by a 19yr old girl who threw away her law studies to become a mother instead. What’s she done? She’s ensured herself a permanent place in his life forever. I fail to see the difference and I find it morally repugnant. She might have just raped him or put a gun to his head. He barely knew her.. he didn’t know her last name so he couldn’t tell her parents so they could talk her out of it and she refused to tell them until it was too late to end it. It’s selfish, malicious and wrong.
Now if that girl had thought that he would have no financial responsibility to look after the baby, she might have thought twice about keeping it. In fact, when she lied and said she was on the pill, she might have thought twice about getting pregnant in the first place as it would give the father the right to ask for his baby to be carried to term. You dislike the idea of a man using a woman as an ‘incubator’ but isn’t it just as bad for a woman to force herself upon a man or to use him as an open wallet for her needs? I think it is.
I’m gonna quote you again here Debbie and I hope you can see the irony in your words.
“Forcing a woman into a permanent and life-long relationship with a man she may not ever want to see again and to bear and bring up a child she never wanted is slavery in its purest essence”.
How is this any different to what just happened to my friends young brother? There was a girl away at college whom he liked, but he’s given up hope of ever seeing her again.. and he’s thrown away his football career… his brother has bullied him into ‘doing the right thing’ and ‘manning up’ and looking after the unwanted child forced upon him. And all because a woman lied to him when he was having a bit of consentual fun with her. He didn’t consent to fatherhood. Now he’s a slave and his dreams are destroyed. There’s nothing you can say here to refute this because your own words outlined his situation precisely.
“these men just need to accept that they have no right to make decisions about how other people choose to use their bodies… you know… like how the world works for everything else…”
My problem with this is largely that a woman has the choice, but she then forces the man to go along with it, without consulting him first. Yes 9 months of pregnancy, with the risks involved with labour and recovering after, are great and not to be taken lightly I agree. But compare that to being financially responsible for a child you may not ever even get to see while it’s mother raises it and enjoys it…. for 18 years. Is that fair or proportionate?
“we all have finally started to make are now clear and obvious steps towards (NOT reaching, not yet) proper equality for all, and so they’re now being used by you and by those deliberately inclined to turn the argument to their own smaller sufferings”
I don’t believe male circumcision is a ‘small suffering’. It’s significant and damaging in ways you probably hadn’t considered before. In addition to the barbaric practice itself, the message we send society by allowing it to continue is that males bodies have less value than females. As I just explained issues around reproductive rights and shared-parenting are also far from ‘small sufferings’ when 4 times as many men are killing themselves as women. I don’t accept your claim that specific laws for certain groups, usually minorities, means that they were more oppressed. The squeakiest wheel gets the grease and feminism is a blaring klaxon horn, drowning out the needs of any other group. Our resources should be shared out fairly and proportionately and were not seeing that happen with spending on heath care for example. White middle-class women are the most privileged group on the planet and that is a fact. In their 20’s they account for the group at the very lowest risk of suicide. Barely any of them kill themselves. That’s a benchmark of a group that’s happy and supported.
I’ll finish off by saying that I am new to anti-feminism. I only signed on so to speak a couple of years ago if that. So I’m far from indoctrinated by MRA writings, in facts I barely read any mens rights forums. I find some of the guys posting, while rightly very angry and frustrated at the injustices they must suffer, are also saying things which are unpleasant and paint the rest of us in a bad light. They just fuel feminists who quote them and say thats why there’s still a need for feminism without a second thought to the idea that their bias might have inspired those feelings in many, otherwise moderate, men in the first place.
I don’t take anything you’ve said personally at all. Neither of us know each other beyond the words we’ve written here, and so our judgements can ony be based on how we’ve presented ourselves. It’s the ideas that I’m debating rather than attacking any one person. I hope you feel the same.
fmf
“Woman” is not synonymous with “feminist”.
Lots of people have yet to realise that sexes don’t have to be a zero sum game, and that we don’t have to be that different.
Like, sounds like you has a very unconstructive discussion and that’s unfortunate, but you literally never mentioned those people calling themselves feminists once in your comment.
fmf
Great job
Now, what are we going to do about it? Sit on our arse ng complain, or find the root of the issue (the fallacy of gender war) and fight it too? Or, just complain and hope people shut up already.