Mike Buchanan has a clever saying: “How can you tell when feminists are lying? Their lips are moving!” Plenty of feminists were moving their lips (or pounding their keyboards) in order to keep J4MB away from Cambridge University – after all, they weren’t about to let opposing thought patterns invade their turf! So, were any of these feminists lying about anything? It’s an interesting question. They were certainly making defamatory claims about J4MB, and I think somebody should shine a harsh lamp of suspicion upon this. In fact, I will do it myself – and let me be clear: my purpose is to establish feminism’s character in the public mind.

The feminists made the opening move in the one-sided battle of Cambridge. This took the form of a co-called “open letter” with 240 signatures, asking the University to either cancel or relocate the J4MB event. The letter was addressed to Vice-Chancellor Stephen Toope. It was arranged by Ph.D. students, and reached a handful of faculty in early April of 2019. As of this writing, the letter has not been released to the public. That’s not a good look!

However, portions of this secret open letter were cited in an April 25 article in the student newpaper, Varsity. These passages alleged that members of J4MB had “harrassed” various ”female academics” at the University. Yet there is nothing on record explaining what the supposed harrassment consisted of, or offering any evidence that it ever really happened.

What are we to make of this? For starters, “harrassment” is a spongy concept, prone to creative interpretation. Furthermore, a lot of people nowadays will useaccusation of harrassment as a form of harassment in itself – that is, they will harrass you by claiming that YOU harassed THEM! This too is highly creative, and it belongs to the realm of operations called “projection” or “reversal”.

At any rate, we want to know what really happened, or didn’t happen. The April 25 article (by Chloe Bayliss) opens with a statement that J4MB is anti-feminist and “controversial”. We have made it clear that anti-feminism should be deemed uncontroversial, but we ought to say something about the word “controversial” itself.