HOPE not hate can reveal that Martin Daubney, Brexit Party MEP for the West Midlands and prospective parliamentary candidate for Ashfield, spoke at the 2016…
HOPE not hate can reveal that Martin Daubney, Brexit Party MEP for the West Midlands and prospective parliamentary candidate for Ashfield, spoke at the 2016 International Conference on Men’s Issues (ICMI). The ICMI was founded by A Voice For Men, an organisation run by notorious men’s rights activist (MRA) Paul Elam (AKA “The Happy Misogynist”).
The manosphere is a loose collection of websites, forums, blogs and vlogs concerned with men’s issues and masculinity, oriented around an opposition to feminism and, within parts, an embrace of extreme misogyny and wider hatred.
Elam, who has repeatedly used violent language towards women, also spoke at the conference. Daubney defended Elam in 2015 as having “long been smeared” as one of “the internet’s biggest anti-feminist bogeyman”.
Prior to joining the Brexit Party, Daubney had an eight-year spell as editor of lads mag Loaded, describing himself as “a skilled defender of the indefensible”, and organising a “straight pride” march in London in 2007.
He has since sought to remake himself as “the UK’s go-to voice on masculinity & men’s issues”, writing nine articles for the far-right, anti-feminist Breitbart News in the process, and penning an article for The Telegraph in which he bemoans that “lads” have become more hated than “jihadists, child rapists or even politicians”.
Daubney’s forays into the men’s rights activism (MRA) community led him into unsavoury company, speaking at the International Conference on Men’s Issues (ICMI) in 2016 in London, on the subject of “Pornography and the demonisation of young men”.
The ICMI is a key international meetup for MRAs, and was founded by the American MRA organisation A Voice for Men (AVFM). The 2016 conference was run in association with AVFM, and featured speeches from key AVFM figures, including founder Elam, who concluded the conference with a talk titled “Gynocentrism: the Root of Feminism” (“gynocentrism” referring to the notion that society favours women, at the expense of men).
Elam, who has claimed that men are “indentured servants to a malicious matriarchy”, has repeatedly used violent language against women, notoriously calling for the month of October to renamed “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” (before claiming this was “satire”).
He has elsewhere written that:
all the PC demands to get huffy and point out how nothing justifies or excuses rape won’t change the fact that there are a lot of women who get pummeled or pumped because they are stupid (and often arrogant) enough to walk [through] life with the equivalent of I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.
As a BuzzFeed profile of Elam has detailed, AVFM also ran the now-deleted website Register Her, which posted personal details of women who were believed to have falsely accused men of rape, or were otherwise regarded as anti-men.
In 2011 the site published the personal details of The Guardian journalist Jessica Valenti, claiming that she had been put “among her morally bankrupt contemporaries, where she righteously deserves to be”. Elam stated on his radio show “We’re gonna be all over her like [male porn star] Ron Jeremy on a drug-addled bimbo”. Valenti contacted the FBI and was forced to relocate for a period after receiving numerous threats.
The Guardian reports that, in defence of such tactics, Elam attacked a female critic by stating “I find you, as a feminist, to be a loathsome, vile piece of human garbage. I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection”.
Despite this, Daubney defended Elam in the pages of The Telegraph, writing in 2015 that he and early MRA Warren Farrell have “long been smeared as some of the internet’s biggest anti-feminist bogeyman”.
Other speakers at the 2016 ICMI included Conservative MP Philip Davies, who has his own scandals, including filibustering for more than an hour in order to prevent the passage of an anti-domestic violence bill. Davies is also the Parliamentary spokesman for the Campaign Against Political Correctness, writing to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission to ask chairman Trevor Phillips “Why is it so offensive to black up your face, as I have never understood this”.
Davies is speaking at the 2019 ICMI, taking place this weekend in Chicago, which also features Carl Benjamin (AKA Sargon of Akkad), the UKIP anti-feminist who has made rape “jokes” about MP Jess Philips and produced a disgusting racial slur-ridden video in 2015.
Daubney has praised Davies as an MP who “deeply cares about men and boys’ issues”. Daubney has also retweeted content from Benjamin.
HOPE not hate has exposed multiple links between Brexit Party officials and extreme figures and conspiracy theorists. See also:
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