Remember Tom Martin, the MRA who was suing LSE for sexism? The one who likes to call women “whores!” when they disagree with him? His case has been dismissed; he has to pay LSE’s costs.
Representing himself at his application for a trial at the Central London County Court on Tuesday, Mr Martin complained of a lack of men-only sessions in the university’s gym and the preponderance of posters in the corridors advertising services for women without the presence of similar materials geared towards men.
Mr Martin, who describes himself as a feminist, said “hard” chairs in the library were uncomfortable for men and that a “male blaming culture” was evident in course materials, which “ignored men’s issues” and focused on wrongs done by them.
Hard chairs. I never knew hard chairs were a feminist invention. So in patriarchal societies chairs are always cushioned? The norm is thick upholstery, and it’s only in decadent egalitarian societies that the hard chair becomes possible? I did not know this.
However, barrister Nick Armstrong, for the LSE, successfully argued that there were no grounds for moving to what would have been likely to be a long trial.
He said Mr Martin’s claim lacked legal coherence, adding that the bar claimants in discrimination cases had to cross to be successful had been set “fairly high” because of the subjective aspects of these cases.
He said Mr Martin would have had to prove that he experienced a “bullying-type scenario” at the LSE, adding: “Whatever Mr Martin says about all this, no objectively reasonable person would feel degraded or humiliated by posters on the wall or course content.”
The whoriarchy wins again. Tragic.
Now if you want to talk about evil chairs I hate the ones that only go halfway up your (read:my) back. Now there’s a chair we need a law suit about ;P.
HA-ha!
Fetch the comfy chair!
I think he’s saying that the university is pandering to women because women all like hard chairs.
Or something.
Well, it’s obvious that hard chairs are discriminatory against men because due to our lower body fat and different fat distribution we have less natural cushioning down there… 🙂
Oh is that what he meant?! :b
*snigger*
In Martin’s case it’s immaterial, because clearly he uses that part of his body for talking, not sitting
I wonder if anyone explained to Mr Martin that the Comfy Chair, that he insists is his right to have, was invented by the manly-male-only Roman Catholic Spanish Inquisition as an instrument of torture?
From the Whoriarchy Watch brigade: a litigious 39-year-old man from Covent Garden has been spotted on David Futrelle’s blog, attempting to defend his theory of unpadded seating misandry. Hilarity ensues.
I’ve been following this on ManBoobz, where Tom is commenting. The results are delightfully hilarious.
RATS, Phillip beat me to it!
Of course feminists invented hard chairs, just as they invented those rock hard racing saddles for pedal cycles that cause the fit and healthy young men who ride the Tour de France and other races to develop penile anasthesia, so they can’t be ‘rock hard’.
This and all things that aflict men is part of a global feminist conspiracy to take over the world! Or am I too late? Damn, I bet I am.
Oh, that Tom is a wacky one! The commenters there are really enjoying his trolling. On page 4 he delivered a 14-point manicfesto on the evils of prostitution, of which I will quote the first two and a bit – point 3 is not for the squeamish (and it gets worse):
… and so on, enumerating another 11 reasons!
Ah I missed that. To quote Captain Oates, I may be some time…
Has anyone ever seen Tom Martin and Frank Miller in the same room together?
A very long time. There was also a post by PZ about yet another MRA – inspired, it turned out, by Scented Nectar at Abbie Smith’s blog – posting a long boring stupid video about how eeevil Rebecca Watson is. Godalmighty, it’s still not over?
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/03/17/john-hembling-aka-johntheother-slimy-psycho-mra/
In a few short months, it’ll be the first anniversary of Rebecca Watson opening the portal to MRA hell.
I’d forgotten all about TM since last September! Wow, he really is an odious little creep (re-reading the threads on PZ’s blog, Cath Elliott’s and here). He’s now a notorious trans-Atlantic laughingstock and he can…get on with his life, I suppose?!
I have to thank him for indirectly leading me to your blog, Ophelia, which I’m really enjoying, so…there’s that silver lining!
Tom Martin truly is the gift that keeps on giving.
The original ManBoobz thread which I linked back at comment #10 is now well over a thousand comments deep, most of them fuelled by Tom’s earnest attempts to argue his case… which in all fairness must be viewed as marginally less convincing than the flaccid attempt he made at defending himself and his ridiculous
£37,000 albatrosslawsuit in court.The thread has gone on so long, in fact, that David Futrelle has put up a “Best of Tom Martin” highlights reel, linking to the best comments Tom has had to offer, so that you don’t need to wade through all thousand or more comments. I think my personal fave is this one:
Backed up by a link to a site mentioning that some nest-building female penguins are willing to trade sexual favours for the gift of a suitable stone. We no longer have an animal kingdom, folks, it’s clearly The Animal Whoriarchy.
“Frivolous lawsuit dismissed”?
All lawsuits which are dismissed are automatically categorized as “frivolous”.