Our "right-wing" party, the Conservatives, have chosen a famous professional victim feminist as the Department of Education's Mental Health Tsar. She has used her new power to "call for a strict and rigorously enforced age limit of 16 to be placed on gym memberships, unless accompanied by a supervising adult". Her reasons given for this are nonsense.

The attack on masculinity continues as always, but with two major differences:

  • feminism is mainstream and professional victims are now becoming official government policy advisors above actual professionals and academics.

  • the feminists have learnt to stop saying that boys/men do not have problems, and now will list accurately the problems that boys/men have, evening blaming feminism on some of it. But only as a preface to push their own agenda, which always seem to literally do the harm to boys/men they claim to prevent.

Here is Natasha Devon. There also are many images of her posing in a bikini on google images, as she is very body-positive and proud of her currrves. Good on her, but maybe she is not my go-to #1 expert person when it comes to the topic of nationwide fitness legislation.

Now lets dig in to the article she has written for the Daily Telegraph: https://archive.is/ClTgi

We now skip the first 4 or so paragraphs which are naturally about her, and get to:

Ostensibly, there's nothing much wrong with this. It's incredibly difficult to be a young man in today's society. The increasing prevalence of mum-only one-parent families, plus the relative dearth of male teachers, has left many teenage boys without real-life role models. Aspects of the new wave of feminist thinking in our culture have also meant a lot of young men are struggling to find a sense of identity.

Wow, this is great. Those are real issues and we have a feminist actually acknowledging it. The pendulum really has been starting to swing the other way these last 2 years.

Educational psychologists will also tell you that boys tend to crave structure and routine more than girls, and like to work towards a tangible set of measurable short-term goals. All of these needs can be fulfilled somewhat by the gym. It's a testosterone-fuelled space where teenage boys can find older men who will instruct and induct them into the ways of fitness culture. It's little wonder they're seeking gym memberships in their droves. So why, then, in my new role as the Department of Education's Mental Health Tsar, have I called for a strict and rigorously enforced age limit of 16 to be placed on gym memberships, unless accompanied by a supervising adult?

I'll make this note here: I think young teens SHOULD have a supervising adult for their first few workouts at the very least. Good parents should pay for a PT. PE lessons in school should give condensed copies of starting strength. There should be school tests on the material at http://simplesciencefitness.com.

But I believe that banning gym access outright for teens (that know what they are doing) would destroy school athletics, lead to dangerous home-gym constructions, and possibly be set as a precedent for further increasing gym bans for all of the wrong reasons. The reasons she gives for banning under 16s are not age specific and can be used on under 21s.

My reasons are numerous. Firstly, it's because young men are vulnerable and dangers lurk beneath the gym's friendly edifice. Less scrupulous fitness professionals 'up sell' protein shakes, energy drinks and even illegal steroids to impressionable gym-goers. Experts warn that excess protein consumed during teenage years can not only lead to kidney failure, but also inhibit the growth of the skeletal structure if too much muscle is bulked onto a growing frame. Energy drinks are in fact mainly sugar, which rots teeth and the potentially fatal consequences of steroid use have been widely documented.

All of this is clutching-at-straws. There is nothing wrong with protein powder and energy drinks (in moderation, as with all things). You aren't going to get kidney failure from eating more protein (unless you have CKD, which you and your doctor would know about). They sell Gatorades everywhere, and protein powder is in super markets now - you shouldn't stop teens going to the gym because they can buy supermarket products there. Christ, taking an energy drink after a workout is probably the only time you should be taking one.

As for steroids: this is very rare, and you get in serious trouble for selling them already, ESPECIALLY to a young person. Banning gym access because you might bump into steroids is like banning nightclubs as you might bump into cocaine.

Also she came into this discussion as a "Mental Health Tsar", not a fitness expert. We don't need to be told that sugar can rot teeth.

Secondly, there's the potential for distorted body image. Over the past decade, ie since gyms went mainstream, male hospitalisations for eating disorders have risen by 70 per cent, according to excellent charity Men Gets Eating Disorders Too. This is not, I believe, a coincidence.

Based on just a hunch she creates this link. You don't get eating disorders for eating 3500kcal of chicken, broccoli and brown rice. That increase in eating disorders is either coming from anorexia or perhaps there might be some sort of 'obesity epidemic' or something going on. Beats me. It also might be that increased awareness is actually encouraging boys to get help, and that is driving the numbers up.

Usually if you come up with a theory about a correlation like this you would look into what those eating disorders actually were, before pushing a motion to parliament and writing for a national newspaper.

Obsession with being muscular is not the same as wanting to be healthy and whilst gyms can undoubtedly assist men with the latter, they can just as easily fuel the former.

Muscles are not healthy! You are too big! Its the kind of shaming you expect from your friends and family when you start putting on size. Crabs in a bucket.

Its great seeing swole shaming come from this woman, of all people. Like any Real Feminist worth her red hair dye and thick rimmed glasses, Natasha Devon has been on TV numerous times to talk of her body image and twitter victimhood. Usually this happened after paying for a professional photoshoot of her oversized body in a bikini then posting it on twitter, which seems to keep happening, for some reason. Its almost as if she deliberately.... ah forget it

The man in the mirror: gyms are a feeding ground for male narcissim [sic]

She equates loving-your-body with narcissism, yet she got famous from posing in her bikini and loving-her-body.

This line is also the closest to the truth we will receive from her. Narcissism from swolenesss is an abundance of body-positiveness. She knows that men would feel better about their bodies with more muscle and less fat. She just doesn't want them to reach that stage, as they wont be beta and controllable any more.

Take a moment to think just how disingenuous and truly evil this is. To be acting as a body-positive ambassador for the government and for male mental health, and to want to ban gyms as it may increase body positivity a little too much. All the while doing nothing else to help.

Recall Robert Conquest's third law of Politics:

  • The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

This shouldn't be read as a tirade against gyms. After all, I'm a member of one and find it an incredibly convenient way to stay strong and fit.

'Incredibly convenient' must not be convenient enough. Here she is posing for BeyondChocolate.co.uk, where she wrote a guest post earlier in 2015. She concluded her guest post with the wisdom "My advice? Tune into your internal voice, learn to distinguish genuine and emotional hunger and then trust your body enough to eat whatever the f*ck you fancy." - Surely she doesn't mean sugary foods?? She saw the sugar in energy drinks as a reason to ban teens from going to the gym, in case they bought Gatorades and their teeth rot.

Thirdly and most importantly, gyms are currently providing a need which should be being met elsewhere in the community. The average state school child does just a single, one-hour session of PE per week. This is nowhere near enough. My group, the Self-Esteem Team , are currently researching in all boys schools to ensure we convey our mental wellbeing message in a way that will resonate with them. Teenage boys are telling us that the lack of physical activity their average school day involves actually impedes their ability to concentrate in class.

Well thats nice and thoughtful of you, but a lack of physical activity outside of the gym is not a reason to ban gyms!! Its a reason to keep them!!!! What twisted logic is this!?!?

If she wanted and cared about having more PE time in schools then she would be campaigning for that.

Throughout the UK, community sports clubs have been closed in their hundreds. Team sports like rugby and football are not only great exercise but teach players the value of teamwork and improve social and communication skills. Much more so, I'd argue, than swapping tips for bigger biceps.

It is feminists that have worked so hard to remove these male spaces. Now that the men have moved to a different one they wish to push them to more controllable places. If the men were all in rugby clubs we would be hearing about 'lad culture', 'why cant women play on the same teams' and 'why must men hurt each other?'.

The changing landscape of feminist policy/persuasion

I have been on TRP for 2-3 years now, and believe it or not, a lot has changed in society. When I first was here you could not speak against feminism in public, it was crazy. It was like being really racist. You would lose a lot of friends. You couldn't speak on reddit either. TRP was hated waaaaay more than it is now. About a year ago we started getting the odd video of extreme feminazis.

Move forward to today, and even leftists acknowledge feminists can be crazy, and that they hate men. I had a crazy leftist trying to tell me why we needed open borders and basic income for all, but in the middle of the discussion he told me not to associate him with feminists as they are crazy. The number of girls comfortable calling themselves feminists is plummeting too.

Smart feminists no longer ignore the plight of men like they did two years ago. They are now forced to pretend to care. They then use it to get attention for their own causes, such as removing male spaces.

This trend is increasing. Here is another example: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/09/20/feminists-complain-green-party-poster-sexist-men/ . They claim that the advert is sexist against men. Thats a new one. They trojan-horse it, by pretending that they are fighting for men, when really its about women - "The sexualized representation of people (mostly women, but increasingly also men) is the most common and visible form of sexist advertising,". The "victim" was the guy who made the advert!

Currently government and policy are getting more feminist, but popular opinion is shifting. The most widely circulated paper in the UK had a 'feminazi' story on its front page last week. The pendulum will swing much sooner for our governments than I first expected back in 2013.

This all really goes to show the genius/wisdom of 'The Misandry Bubble' in the sidebar. I thought 10 years for a full cultural-battle-arc was way too short, having never lived through one (that I was adult enough to be conscious of). But its 2015, we are halfway through, and its no longer a hate-crime to criticise feminists. They are having to resort to actually acknowledging our problems before pushing their agendas. This can only be good. You can control acceptable opinion but the average member of the public eventually catches on if its too far detached from reality. Most people arent pure psychopathic rent seekers.

The bubble wont burst, but it will be deflated in a controlled manner. Some bits will inflate while others deflate. The pendulum wont swing all the way back: it will swing to a new place; but one where men aren't simply hated for the essence of who they are.

The Big Question

How do we make money from this?