Karen Woodall rants about feminism in every blog post, but I have picked out some of the more verbose and lurid quotes to give a flavour.
Karen Woodall particularly loathes “feminist” academics with whom she disagrees - in particular Liz Trinder of Exeter University, who has advised the Government on family court policy, and the single parent charity, Gingerbread.
“There is a powerful and hitherto dominant matriarchy in UK Social Policy circles and to be on message with this group one has to learn that the mantra ‘in the best interests of children’ really means ‘in the best interests of mothers (and their children).’”
“the matriarchal behemoths of academia”
10 March 2012 (written at the time of the spat between Mumsnet and Fathers 4 Justice, with Karen Woodall’s friends, Nick and Ruth Langford of Wikivorce and Fathers 4 Justice, taking part in a demonstration against Mumsnet outside Marks & Spencer in Oxford Street.
“Over at the cosy club that is Mumsnet, the extreme end of the women’s rights movement seems not only to be alive and well, but flourishing. For those of you who are unfamiliar with radical feminist beliefs, let me give you quick summary.
I was a radical feminist in the days when it first came alive as a thought process and way of life. As a former initiate, I am aware of the way in which this particular movement deploys smoke and mirrors to persuade its followers to believe that all men are violent bullies and potential rapists. Women in relationships with men are viewed as collaborators by this particular sisterhood and the Mumsnet gang appear to label these women ‘handmaidens.’ (For the uninitiated, that is a reference to the book the Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, a book described thus – In a dystopicly polluted rightwing religious tyranny, a young woman is put in sexual slavery on account of her now rare fertility ). In Rad/Fem world therefore, all women in relationships with men are in sexual slavery.
Whilst I am no longer interested in listening to or reading the writings of women who are as enslaved in their own tyrannical beliefs as those they think they are liberating women from, I was curious to see what was going on over at Mumsnet. Alerted to the existence of this particular thread by F4J reporting them to the Police for gender hatred, alongside the almost surreal idea that Mumsnet were harboring such a viperous nest, curiosity got the better of me. Wandering onto the thread, I felt as if I were entering the days of my youth, back in the seventies and early eighties. Posts declaring that ‘all women are to be believed without question’ and arguments that women cannot be guilty of misandry whilst men retain all of the power over the state, finance and business along with various unpleasant rants along the lines of the queen of radical feminism herself Valerie Solanas abounded. I half expected to see SCUM Manifestos to appear up there at one point.
Mumsnet apparently went into meltdown on Tuesday night this week with uproar ensuing after posts were deleted and Mumsnetters were cautioned on their use of language and tendency to stray into defamation territory. F4J were the butt of much of this vitriol, which resulted in the report to the Police and, whilst things seem to have calmed down a bit now, the extreme wing of the women’s rights movement continues to have their say, here’s one from last night –
‘women who hate men have no power or cultural endorsement to inflict their hate on anyone other than the odd individual. Such women tend to stand out in society and suffer consequences for their views/behaviour. Men who hate women have the whole structure and culture of society excusing, and sometimes actively reinforcing, their actions.’
Try telling that to Louis de Berniere and the thousands of other fathers out there who struggle with their relationships with children because of the lack of power and cultural endorsement wielded by the women in their lives.
In family separation, the old feminist adage ‘the personal is political’ comes perfectly into play. The personal in this field is most definitely political and the power, invested through the legislation created in the boiling pot of seventies feminism, is most certainly in the hands of women. Examining family separation through a gender lens clearly demonstrates that fathers are at a disadvantage when it comes to relationships with children after family separation. Examining the legislation, it is clear that it was designed to be that way. From the dad who cannot claim any rights to bring up his natural child, to the father who is reduced to the role of secondary helper to be deployed when strategically necessary, the intention is to put the power and control over children into women’s hands. In rad/fem world, a dad is a dispensable device and if they could be reduced to an iDad, as introduced by F4J this week, so much the better. I thought that this type of blinkered bigotry had died out as we, original radical feminists, grew up. I hoped that the conspiracy theories and the constant analysis of everything that is ever said by any man, at any time, was just part of a youthful movement that pushed real oppression out of the way. In the days when women could not leave relationships because they were likely to lose care of their children, this kind of feminism might have had a place, I said might. Now it just seems like the poisonous pedagogy of old, embittered women, who have indoctrinated another generation to believe that boys become dangerous when they reach puberty. But on Mumsnet? Astonished? Much!
These are, without doubt, changing times and when the old gives way to the new, there will always be a fight. As I have said on previous postings however, let us not be deceived by the notion that this is about good women and bad men. Whilst F4J are portrayed as the bullying baddies as they push to make us aware of the reality of 21st Century, fatherless Britain, one only has to take a look at Mumsnet threads to see the kind of bullying that really makes your hair curl. Mumsnet is supposed to offer advice and support, by mums for mums. But this kind of nastiness is not about helping people become better parents and it doesn’t do anything for children affected by family separation either.”
“Liz Trinder… the great misrepresenter of reality herself.”
“academics - speaking gobbledygook together in an effort to make us all believe that they are worth their money”
“this particularly unpleasant gathering of self important academics”
“Which brings me to a recent report released by the Nuffield Foundation, that Charitable body which is charged with improving social well-being in the widest sense. This report that has released just as the issue of shared parenting is back on the public agenda is, in my view, far more dangerous to children than anything a man hanging off tower bridge in a spiderman outfit could do. Above all else, in this short ‘rest’ from blogging, it is this report which has prompted my decision to pick up my pen again, for to not do so, in the face of this kind of poisonous rhetoric, would be to seriously fail my duty to criticise the orthodoxy that has a stranglehold on family policy in this country.”
Jane Fortin, Joan Hunt, Lesley Scanlan - Nuffield Foundation report with University of Sussex Law School and University of Oxford - Taking a longer view of contact: The perspectives of young adults who experienced parental alienation in their youth -
“the prejudice of the researchers comes screeching off the page”
“Until researchers are made to analyse their own personal and professional prejudices before they are let loose on our children and young people, I shall remain, steadfast and here.”
“the verisimilitudinous tale, spun by the women who bake gingerbread”
13 January 2013
“Liz Trinder et al have ruled the roost of academia for so long that no-one really knows how to do anything differently. She isn’t the Einstein of the family, she is the architect of women’s rights as they are upheld through the family court system. How do we get people to pay attention to me? Well, for now I am just a thorn in the side of a system that self replicates on a year by year basis. But that thorn in the side, like the mosquito in the room, can do quite a lot of irritating if it not squashed or removed in some way.”
“In 1970 when the divorce rate rocketed, family separation was seen as a feminist issue, it was about liberating women from marriage, that notion still underpins all family services in my experience even though we are 40 years beyond all of that. This is why state services are so resistant to the work that we do with families, because the state in the arena of the family is still largely controlled by feminist academics and their counterparts in the voluntary sector, which is why fathers and fatherhood are seen as the problem and anyone speaking up for the family is seen as undermining women’s rights. A complex combination of rights based arguments which are dressed up as ‘in the best interests of the child’ in my opinion. What the state is actually doing is upholding the best interests of women at every end and turn, children and the loss of their relationship with their fathers is simply an ‘unintended consequence’ of that.”
“What is happening in our family courts is nothing more than the upholding of women’s rights over children’s rights. Children are collateral damage in the ongoing struggle to ensure that women have dominion over their own lives. Scratch the surface of any of the lone parent organisations or DV organisations and it stares you right in the face. And that, is what Judges are being advised by when it comes to kids and their relationships with parents after separation. A well constructed, massively funded, domineering women’s rights lobby which has changed the law in favour of women and will continue to hold the law in place by peddling lies, untruths, misinformation and a culture of being ‘offended’ should anyone dare to try and change it. Time for change before another generation of our kids is sacrificed on the altar of this madness.”
“CAFCASS are trained using material researched by Trinder et al…those reports were written by people influenced by her..what she is telling us is that the people she has influenced, who have written reports on cases where enforcement was required, have decided that no enforcement was necessary and so, therefore, no enforcement is necessary… its an incestuous, circular, piece of nonsense which has sadly served to further reduce the effectiveness of the proposals in the bill to virtually zero and, has ensured that the enforcement that could have delivered a difference, has been dropped. She is truly a mistress of the sleight of hand and we are all daft for allowing it to continue. Shameful in my eyes.”
“The lone parent model of support to families was designed as part of a women’s rights agenda. The split of roles into carer and provider is denoted by the Child Benefit. Whoever receives it, receives all of the financial and other support available, regardless of how much care each parent gives, even when it is a fully shared parenting arrangement. Almost 100% of Child Benefit is paid directly to mothers when the family is together. Using it as a gateway to denote who is the primary carer was a supreme move by those who designed the legislation because it ensures that control over the family after separation lies well and truly in the hands of women. Try being a mother who is not the primary carer in this model, consider for a moment how other people will react to you. Now add a large dose of the lies, stereotypes and misinformation peddled by the women’s rights movement about fathers after separation, and you will begin to understand how the lone parent model of support to separated families is designed to create and maintain fatherlessness and how, if you underpin services with research and strategies from this model, you will deliver the same outcomes of disengaged fathers that we have seen in the past four decades since the women’s rights movement took over social policy around the family.”
2 December 2013. Gender wars: feminist falsehoods and fabrications
“I have been thinking through some of the barriers to improving support to separated families in this country. One of the biggest barriers in my experience being the manufactured gender war that is perpetuated by the women’s rights/single parent lobby. This ‘war’, which is exemplified by the constant negative stereotyping of men as fathers and the persistent assertions that women and children in separated families are stigmatised if anyone dares to say that children need both parents, forces men into a position of having to fight back to establish any kind of status in their children’s lives. This creates a permanent state of conflict between the two sides representing mothers and fathers, which in turn mirrors the way in which the separating couple move into adversarial positions. In reality, this is a manufactured state of war, which is created and perpetuated by feminist falsehoods, some of which are breathtaking in their arrogance and some of which are quite simply just silly.
Nevertheless, it is these nonsensical fabrications, which infect the already indoctrinated, that ooze through into the policies and practice surrounding our separated families. In short, the gender war, is nothing but a made up game of smoke and mirrors, created to gain control over family policy and maintained to keep control over funding. Anyone wanting a quick rinse through how this happens should take a look at episode five of Borgen shown on Saturday night. It is a beautifully crafted showcase of exactly how feminist control over policies and practice is maintained through bullying, lying and downright manipulation of the truth. Have a look. I promise you, if you really believe that feminism is about equality, you are in for a surprise.”
“This madness, this utter utter madness, is part of the feminist movement that I left behind. It is part of the hysterical, conspiracy theory loving, warped analysis that is utilised by women who want to keep women as well as men in their place. Watching Saturday’s episode of Borgen, in which feminists use skewed statistics and shaming to ensure that their agenda – and no-one else’s – is carried through, I was reminded of the way in which seemingly endless new myths were cooked up in my days as a feminist to keep us convinced that the ‘Patriarchy’ was watching and always about to rise again if we were not looking carefully enough.”
“This war. This stupid, childish silly war, which is manufactured to keep the feminist movement in charge of what reality is allowed to look like is, a dangerous and all pervasive cult.”
This post drew lots of comments from Karen Woodall’s ardent fans. Anthony Esler, the Helpline Coordinator for Families Need Fathers, wrote:
“I must say Karen…’I’m lost in wonder love and praise’ by your writing. Not only are you morally very brave to attack your ‘sisters!’ so ferociously…but you are so good at wheedling out what they are really about and so articulate at putting it down on paper. My I enquire: Did you gain a double first in English at University? No…I’m serious! I still wish though that your views could get out there more; to have more influence. I’m sure your blog could be turned into a newspaper column…have you ever thought about that? What about The Evening Standard…read by every commuter on every train!”
Karen Woodall replied:
“My sisters? they are no sisters of mine Anthony! MY brothers and sisters are those with whom I work day to day for equality, fairness and justice. Thank you for your kind words on my words, I write because when I write my thinking sharpens and my practice with families improves. Some call it shooting from the hip, I call it seeing clearly now the brainwashing has gone and like all escapees from a cult, part of my recovery is speaking the truth of my experience.”
Nick Child, a therapist in Edinburgh, suggested a sense of perspective:
“Good to see you firing from the hip at worthy targets, Karen. But there will be huge numbers of more sensible feminists who agree with your critique of this couple of silly extremists. It’s such a shame that you have to damn so sweepingly so many of those moderate feminists who would be potential allies.”
Do you really believe that all those who call themselves feminists are the same? That they would all hold with these plainly extreme views? We call them “extreme” because we know there are others who do not agree with them.
And surely we all know that sweeping generalisations are always liable to be wrong for some of those swept into them. That’s why we don’t say “all men are this” or “all ethnics are that” etc. That’s why most people who wish to seem rational and reasonable in public see it as good practice to at least say: “SOME men are this” and “SOME feminists say that”.
Even if all members of a class of people were in fact evil, we still hold out for the possibility of the one individual in front of us to not be. We try not to presume they are “like all the rest”. We here object to any “all men are bastards” statements. Yet you, Karen, are happily handing out the same sweeping statements back yourself.
The reason this matters especially here is that we are particularly well aware of how polarisation happens. We see some extreme feminists making sweeping generalisations. To hit them with our brooms adds yet another level of polarisation and scorn. “
Is it not possible to get your point across just as or even more strongly by the use of the little word: some?”
However Karen Woodall refused to acknowledge that any feminists can be moderate:
“Sometimes, just sometimes one has to get off the fence and name which side of it one is standing on. This is my journey Nick, you have yours as does Woodman and all the rest. I don’t have a message and I am not trying to convert you or anyone else and sweeping statements about feminism are exactly what this part of my recovery is about, I lived it, it ruined much of my life, it may not have ruined yours and i may not have ruined others but it ruined much of my life and writing about it, like all survivors, is part of the process of establishing balance.”
“Feminism = women’s rights = determined dominance by women over men – admittedly many women would demur and say no, they are really for equality but those women allow the ‘other’ feminists to do too much in their name which is about dominance by women over men and therefore for me feminism is a tainted and broken brand that does not and cannot ever represent equality. I refer you to my earlier posting by Girl Writes What* – your good feminism, is simply the same feminism that allows funding for violence in the home to be disproportionately delivered to women even though we know from solid and respectable research (I refer you to that which I reference in the article) that men and women suffer violence and men AND women perpetrate it.”
*Girl Writes What is Karen Straughan, a prominent Canadian “honey badger”, i.e. a female men’s rights activist and anti-feminist.
“the length and breadth of feminism in our world has taken us to a place where their views and only theirs are allowed to exist. I consider it to have taken a cult like hold on the consciousness across the globe and it is not about equality or the relationships between us.”
“I experienced feminism as having oppressed ME, that’s when I abandoned it and took off the glasses. I knew for years it had treated men badly and I still fell for the arguments that a) men deserved and b) if you gave them an inch men would take a mile and so I kept on colluding with it, shame on me for not having done something sooner. It was when I recognised how feminism had oppressed ME that I finally gave it up. When I realised how it had preyed on my difficult upbringing and the way that men had treated me and made me believe that all men were like that. It took my young years and made me distrusting of men, it made me believe that independence was the only right way to be and that relationships with men were risky. Now I accept that this is my journey and that other women experience things differently but the more I pulled at the threads the more I unravelled the way in which feminism had infected my ability to recover from my life experiences. Think about it, as a young person you are harmed and then a group of people tell you the people who harmed you are from one half of the human race and that ALL of that half of the human race is harmful to you and will harm you at any and every opportunity. Your young mind is fed poisonous rhetoric about how you have the right to defend yourself from these harmful beings, how you have the right to harm them in return. If you are in relationship with these harmful beings you are seen as betraying your half of the human race, you are warned again and again and again, through stories, myths, scare tactics and more that dalliances with these harmful beings will harm you and even when you think you are not being harmed you will be. Around the globe as you grow up you are shown how your half of the human race is good and the other half is bad and harmful, repeatedly you are shown how your side is good and the other side is bad. You are given permission to fight these harmful beings by papers which call for killing of men and raging torrents of vitriol which are spewed regularly. As you grow older, the raging torrents become normalised and spread their tentacles through all walks of life so that one day, as you watch a man crawl after a woman for a drop of beer on an advert, you realise that the harmful half of the human race has been beaten to a pulp and whether they are harmful or not, their power is reduced by collective power of the normalisation of rage used by your half to keep the harmful half in its place. And then you look at your six month old grandson destined when he is 12 years old to be deemed harmful to women by your side of the human race simply for being born male. And the question that lingers in your mind is……will my relationship with this small helpless creature also be shaped by the bitterness of women who came out of those generations whose desire for revenge normalised damage to generations of young people. How much longer, I reasoned, was I prepared to let my rage against those who had harmed me be fed by feminist normalisation of it? I gave up feminism when I realised that it had prevented me from healing. When I did I healed. This is not about feminist oppression of men it is about feminism per se. Its not about equality, it is about rage, rights and revenge.”
“Woodman, my deconversion as you put it is not from ‘this type’ of feminism, it is from FEMINISM, full stop. I do not typify, categorise or distinguish, there is no good and bad feminism there is just FEMINISM, please will you allow me the right to express and experience that.”
“What worries and concerns me most when I watch this is the way in which the no holds barred approach of modern day feminism has been normalised and given permission to be celebrated. Who gives permission for those men who are standing there quietly to hold their views? We don’t and I am afraid, when I consider this, that the length and breadth of feminism in our world has taken us to a place where their views and only theirs are allowed to exist. I consider it to have taken a cult like hold on the consciousness across the globe and it is not about equality or the relationships between us.”
Guilty feminists included the usual suspects, academics Liz Trinder and Joan Hunt:
“Read some of what Liz Trinder, Mavis Mclean and Joan Hunt have to say about dads and the need for them………..feminists all…..father dismissive, women’s rights academics who dominate all research into family separation, Then read Harriet Harman’s piece called The Family Way from the nineties, along with Carol Smart and her gang…you will find, each and everyone of them to be self proclaimed feminists, all writing about the family of the future where fathers are unnecessary….When I have time I will post up some links, if you really want to know what feminism has done to fatherhood in this country you are in for a treat.”
25 February 2014 blog discussion about the “Being A Man” festival at London’s Southbank Centre:
“Woodman, I could make it but I won’t. I read Glen Poole’s account of being hectored and lectured at the BAM event and the depressing interviews with Billy Bragg about how being a man would be great if only men were women. I couldn’t think of a worse way to spend my time than sitting in a room full of men and women talking about being a man within the feminist paradigm. I am really sorry, I know how keen you are, but I just don’t want to go there. I know I keep trying to explain it to you and I don’t know how else to say it but like it is…I don’t want to have a conversation about being men and women within a feminist discourse…I don’t live in that world, I did live in it but now I don’t. I would gladly and happily spend a day talking with Glen Poole and Nick Woodall and you and anyone else who was interested about men and women and how to help them and help them help each other, now that WOULD be something I would make time for. But this. No, sorry. The very thought makes my heart sink to my boots. K”
20 March 2014: The female of the species is more deadly than the male
“This week I have been working with yet another father who is being pushed out of his children’s lives through a combination of this country’s slavish adherence to the lone parent model of support and the iron grip of domestic violence allegations.”
“Family used to mean a mum and a dad and children, with extended family members around it. Nowadays family means anything you want it to mean, from one parent to as many as you like and it is taboo or certainly old fashioned to consider that children need a mother AND a father. This eradication of the need for a mother AND a father and the homogonising of both into the role of parent, means that the argument of the single parent lobby that children don’t need their fathers becomes increasingly a powerful one. And the Fatherhood Institute, by embracing the notion of equal shared parenting, are contributing to the very demise of the meaning of the word father as well the belief in the importance of them in children’s lives. Just as feminism has slowly but surely eroded masculinity, compelling men to become more like women to be acceptable, this movement will erode fatherhood in my view and mean that the distinct and important things that men bring to children’s lives will be lost. And you can bet that, if Parliamentary politics moves to the left in 2015, this will be speeded up. Remember, for the left, the family containing a mother a father and children, is a hotbed of danger, abuse and damage which feminist academics and policy makers have systematically undermined, attacked and silenced.”
“From the erosion of the difference between mothers and fathers in the equally shared parenting movement, to the continued lack of support for fathering by the Fatherhood Institute with a huge dollop of feminism and the control of post separation fathering through the domestic violence industry chucked in for good measure. I am reminded again and again that family policy in the UK is controlled by a small group of feminist women from the academic, parliamentary and lobby world.
Those women who got hold of the family policy making power back in the seventies, have become more powerful than the men that preceded them in parliamentary terms. Their say rules your life and mine and your children’s lives too. Their work has underpinned the control of the family unit for over four decades, they have systematically demonised men as fathers and labelled men and boys dysfunctional, they have controlled your expression of your biological self and they have set rules about what it means to be human in the world.
Some of those women were involved in arguing for the destruction of the family whilst at the same time calling for the lowering of the age of consent to 10 back in their youth, some of them were running single parent charities, some of them said that it cannot be taken as read that families need fathers. Four decades later, their descendents are telling government that men and women are interchangeable, that families come in all shapes and sizes and that there is nothing distinctly different or important about fathers. And some of you, who get excited when the words equal and parenting are joined together, thought that this was about equality.
The female of the species has engaged the male in the construction of his own demise, I cannot think of anything more deadly than that. Can you?”
“Harriet Harman, Anna Coote, Patricia Hewitt, Sue Slipman, NCOPF (now Gingerbread), all implicated in the NCCL call for the lowering of the age of consent to 10 and in some cases to 4. Harman, Coote and Hewitt wrote The Family Way, in which they discuss their belief that it cannot be taken as read that families need fathers.
Joan Hunt, Mavis Mclean, Liz Trinder, Brigid Featherstone, all feminists heavily involved in shaping family policy, all committed to the notion of men and fathers as problems. All massively funded by tax payers and charitable money to keep recycling the same stuff about families not needing fathers and collaboration between men and women being dangerous to women. Women’s Aid and Refuge, funded in eye wateringly large amounts of tax payers money to keep the illusion that all men are dangerous intact so that the industry can grow. Resistant to the idea of differentiation of domestic violence and updholding only the feminist concept of violence in the home being about patriarchal power and control.
The Freedom Programme, devised to educate and liberate women from patriarchal power and control, funded by Local Authorities and delivered to women in their own homes as well as in groups. Social work as a feminist industry, delivering judgement to your families on a daily basis from the perspective of patriarchal power and control. The Fatherhood Institute, updholding feminist control of family policy by failing to challenge the valuing of men as fathers and children’s need for fathers.
Charities such as Relate, Barnardos, One plus One, Resolution, campaigning against the changes to the Children Act and winning, Families need Fathers, joining with Gingerbread, Relate and the Fatherhood Institute in 2010 in the Kids in the Middle Campaign handing back power to the single parent lobby and undermining change towards collaborative parenting, and to this day failing to understand the politics of the field they are working in….Duncan Fisher and his mumsanddadsnet.com turning men into women and co-opting the very language that is used to argue for change…
Anyone who believes that family policy and the appalling treatment of men and children in this country after separation is not underpinned and controlled by feminism is a fool and frankly, deserves all that is coming to them. Open your eyes people, this is about the very fabric of our society and our rights to live our lives free from indoctrination, control and acts of revenge perpetrated upon us by damaged women who live in a social construction which is only relevant to their lives not yours or mine. There is no such thing as patriarchy, its a social construct, its a way of describing a world which doesn’t exist anymore in this country, its arrested development, its the half hysterical ramblings of young women who once thought that the age of consent should be lowered 10 because in some cases, where men had sex with girls over 10 and under 16, the girls had lead them on (Hewitt). These women, along with the likes of Jimmy Savile, made the world a very dangerous place for kids in the seventies and we are only just seeing the results of their involvement. And they are still controlling family policy now and you are still falling for it every time you dismiss the reality of feminism and its corrosive impact on your life and on the life of your kids.”
“Underneath the surface however are some interesting stirrings, something different from the binary divisions which have ruled this field since the early seventies when the sisters of mercy of feminist doctrine came storming in to rewrite legislation and reshape the battlefield of post separation family life.”
“Looking back, it is so easy to see how those academics who wrote social policy in the seventies, thought they were doing us a favour. Give women total control over their children after separation and they will leave their marriages in droves, was the thinking. And that is what happened. After that however, the cul de sac of the social policy outcomes which were devised for us by those women, meant that far from sharing care of children, we were lumbered with the sole responsibility and, perversely, told that that was liberation. The liberal feminist dominance of the social policy field around family separation never really got to grips with the mess it made of women’s lives in that way and so, in my view, it was easier to expand the myth that all men are dangerous after separation (and create the kinds of domestic violence policies and practice which more or less ensured that all men were dangerous whatever they did) than to tackle the fact that women had been shoved back into the kitchen by the second wave feminist academics and their determination to put all the power over children into the hands of women after the previous centuries of it being held in its entirety by men.
Those second wave feminist academics however are getting old now and will soon be shuffling off into their twighlight years. Whilst they have managed to influence (brainwash) and educate (distort) the minds of more generations of women coming after them, they haven’t quite got the control over all of us that they would like. “
8 July 2014: Education, emasculation and equality: a letter to Yvette Cooper (Labour MP and former Minister)
“As parents and grandparents, practitioners and ordinary people, we will hold you to account for your crimes against our children and our grandchildren. I hope I stay alive long enough to see the day.”
Nick Langford of Fathers 4 Justice and Wikivorce commented: “Just as former smokers make the most evangelical campaigners against smoking, so it takes a former feminist to warn against the dangers of feminism, as Yvette Cooper plans to turn the education system into a machine of mass ideological indoctrination.”
Karen Woodall replied: “Knowing what it did to me all those years makes me so afraid for our children, I won’t rest until more and more people know what how dangerous a doctrine it really is Nick.”
“It isn’t actually difficult to carry on now that I am primarily working with families directly. making the decision to leave the government and voluntary sector was a very important one for me because it meant that I could finally work how I wanted to (and how families want us to) as well as speak about the way in which the dissonance between what Westminster is told about men and women and the reality for men and women. Some say that being on the outside is ineffective and they do not like our approach of highlighting what needs to be done to create change. Having been onthe inside and witnessed the way in which the feminist doctrine rules every inch of Westminster, I can honestly say that if we chose to try and change that, I would likely be dead and things would still be the same.
Outside, where we are working directly with families across all of the socio-economic spectrum, we are simply able to give what is needed to help families through the worst and to give children the chance of hanging on to their parents. Outside, I can also speak freely about the blocks and barriers that cause the problems that government tell us they are solving when in reality they are doing nothing of the sort.
And I can sleep again at night.”
“She is one of the architects of the horrors facing men and children.”
“Feminism IS about women’s dominance, I don’t know why you continue to hang on to the idea that it is not, it is NOT about equality it is about women’s rights first dressed up as equality.”
“Fourth wave feminism, which is what we are now into, has followed the same route as all the rest only now it has a much greater grip on the societies we live in it can ramp itself up to claim dominance over all spheres of existence, including primary schooling.”
“Wherever one travels in the field of family separation, the tentacles of women’s rights creep determinedly in, like japanese knot weed in need of reporting.”
23 July 2014: The handy guide to the pre-election posturing punch up!
“On the left we have Gingerbread. Those gals who fervently want you to believe that all families come in shapes and sizes, or is it families come in all shapes and sizes? Either way what they want you to know is that one parent or two, the only thing that matters is the money. Forget children’s psychological adjustment, ditch the concerns about mothers who alienate, away with the idea that children benefit from the relationships between their parents and off with the heads of anyone who thinks that fathers are necessary – unless of course they are deserving single parent fathers, which basically means that they have to be widowers or the mother of their children must be bad, bad and dangerous to know (think drug/drink/mental health problems). Any father who is non resident is automatically suspicious, especially if he wants to have a relationship with his child. Such men are only good for the colour of their money, which should be hoovered from their pockets and their bank accounts, preferably by the state, with a threat of severe punishment (if not death) should he fail to tip up. Gingerbread have recently released their pre-election manifesto (sorry research), confirming that the only thing that matters after separation is money (to pay for their enormous staff team and cover their senior management salaries/ whoops, sorry, so that children can be fed and have shoes).”
12 February 2015: False Allegations: Patterns of Coercive Control, Intimate Partner Violence & Non Feminist Practice
“A political ideology which has been wrapped up and posted into our lives as being all about equality. It is not and until enough people recognise it is not and that saying it is not is not anti mother and pro father, we will circle around this damaged place for a very long time Nigel. Feminism is not about equality, it is about women’s rights before all else and it harms children and their mothers and fathers and has no place in practice with the separated family in my view. The argument that feminism is the way to achieve equality is akin to saying that only Maoism can eradicate poverty. Feminism is an ideology, it is political in nature and it does not promote equality. Equalities practice requires you to drop the political ideology, take off the feminist glasses and see the world as it is, not how it is filtered through a political construct. I am absolutely stunned when I hear therapists and other family practitioners arguing that their feminist practice is helpful to families, I am stunned actually that practitioners practice feminist practice without declaring it because I cannot see how that gives people an equalities based service. Why as a man would you subject yourself to a therapist who uses feminist analysis to understand your world for example? In doing so you are immediately subjecting yourself to their assumptions about you and who you are. Feminism has no place in this kind of work and we have to be brave enough to say it.”
“I have written widely on the subject of legislation surrounding separated families and how it has been so cleverly stitched to ensure that the outcomes after separation are more heavily in favour of women than men. I have written less about the unintended consequences of this legislation and the way that practitioners drive the less than equalities based outcomes that we see in the family courts. These unintended consequences, which cause the ghosts of mothers and fathers to haunt even the President of the Family Division, are caused by the deliberate actions of feminist academics and their lobby group counterparts.”
“Sociopathic behaviour is linked in my mind to the way in which feminism dominates the psychology of family services, it is blinkered and blinded by the belief that a political ideology is somehow a more evolved state of being…”
“Jeepers, Jane Robey of NFM*could not be further from the mark in this. Does she not know that if a psychiatrist has been involved then the door to mediation was shut a very long time ago? As for Maypole Women, well I despair, but if I told you that Mavis Mclean was involved would it explain it to you? K”
*National Family Mediation
“Those of you who know my background will be aware that I consider myself to be a recovering feminist. I lived my life from early teens to recent years within the construct known as patriarchy, a construct which I was surprised to discover, one rainy night when driving across the pennines, was a figment of my own imagination. The dismantling of this construct, (which took all of about two seconds), was triggered by the nastiness of one Julie Bindel who, speaking on Radio 4, told the world that she wanted the right to marry her lesbian partner, so that she could destroy the institution of marriage. She went on to describe men and boys as inherently violent and spoke of them as dangerous human beings who must be firmly constrained and preferably disadvantaged in order to rectify the advantage conferred on them by birth. I recognised the tone of voice, the indignation, the self righteousness as being that which had driven me for so many years and at the same time I found myself comparing what she was saying with the men in my life and the boys, particularly the boys. That night I felt as if I had suddenly developed 20/20 vision after years of being blind in one eye. The panoramic view outside of the narrow construct I had been living in was simply astonishing as I finally understood what equality means. And it doesn’t mean inverting a constructed hierarchy of belief that half the human race is born advantaged, just because they are men.
Our work in the field of family separation had already been propelled down an equalities route through our work with the Oxfam UK Poverty Programme. This work revealed the way in which the gendered legislation around separated families drives outcomes which support a gendered belief system about dead beat dads. Put simply, it is no accident that 90% of non resident parents are dads, the legislation is designed to drive those outcomes. What appalled me back then (1999) and still appalls me now, is that not only are dads driven out of their children’s lives, they are largely blamed, ridiculed and harangued for it. When you scratch the surface of the dead beat dad reality, most dads do not abandon their children, they are systematically shoved out of their lives. That’s not equality, that’s discrimination in action and it is feminists who have done it and if the Julie Bindel’s of this world have anything to do with it, that is how things will keep on being done.”
On 10 August 2018 Karen Woodall explained in her blog:
“When I began work in this area of family support, I was a young single mother. In those days, divorce and separation plus the rights of women to have children outside of marriage, were a political issue embraced by feminists. Whilst I was a single parent because the father of my child was not interested in being involved in her life, the feminist movement became my home for some years as part of my support structure and my consciousness.
As time moved on however, I came to recognise that the feminist movement, whilst supportive of my individual rights as a woman, did nothing to support my relational world, particularly my relationships with men. As I grew older, I came to understand the ways in which feminism had infiltrated my beliefs about men negatively. I came to realise that not all men are in fact bastards and not all women are in fact perfect. I resolved the psychologically split state of mind induced by feminism in my forties. Those of you who have been reading this blog for the decade I have been writing it, will remember those days of my exit from the cult of feminism.”
