– Feminists take over.
It was a great idea – a charity started by a couple of Aussie blokes who persuaded men to grow moustaches to support the Prostate Cancer Foundation. Twenty years later, Movember has grown from that small group of men sporting hairy upper lips to become the major male health charity in the world.
Every November, in country after country, blokes fondly imagine they are doing their bit growing a Mo to support men’s health. As one of the very few events where men’s issues make it onto the public agenda, men with Mos and their financial supporters bask in the glow of raising funds they think will improve the welfare of other males.
Little do they know that this huge enterprise, run by a feminist and supported by mainly female staff, is increasingly committed to diverting men’s health dollars away from real male health concerns towards woke projects promoting anti-male ideology.
Last year Movember formed an alliance with UN Women. Movember’s CEO Michelle Terry became one of four global “Champions” feted at the HeForShe summit, designed to mobilize the world for gender equality. Here she is on video boasting of raising $1.1 billion over the last twenty years through Movember’s 6 million supporters.
Terry made a series of commitments to UN women including that Movember would promote “healthy masculinities” – which generally means publicly denigrating men and taking boys to task for their toxic masculinity.
Terry also promised Movember would implement “inclusive hiring”, develop mentorship programs for women, and maintain gender parity in her senior leadership group – goals which few would see as relevant to a men’s health charity.
But Terry has certainly nailed the female leadership issue. Her leadership group is now 70% women. Take a look at the Movember team at a recent conference on the French Riviera.
It’s the weirdest thing that these women don’t see it as inappropriate to boast of taking over a men’s charity. Can you imagine the fuss if the genders were reversed? It’s always a tricky business to include any men in prominent positions in organisation raising funds for women – their role is usually very well hidden.
But look at this brazen pair, shown in a 2020 Movember feature celebrating that their workplace had hit 51% women. Here’s the headline: Mo Sisters #BreakTheBias this International Women’s Day!
The entitlement is breathtaking. Clearly it never occurs to them that this is in any way inappropriate.
And when it comes to their goals, it’s not surprising that this mob would have a rather different agenda to the blokes who started the whole thing off.
Look at this graph showing Movember’s expenditure in recent years, particularly since Michelle Terry took over in 2020. The big drop – see blue line – is from the initial major focus on prostate and testicular cancer research, which declined from 30% of the total spend to only 7%.
The major push now is on “Mental Health & Suicide Prevention” – see the grey line – which has shifted from 18% to 37% of Movember’s spend – $13.5 to $34.4 million.
Nothing wrong with that, you might say. Yes, naturally we are applauding Movember’s increasing interest in male suicide, which surely is the most critical of all the health issues. Given that our suicide prevention bodies are still callously ignoring men, which should be their major target group, this is a real breakthrough.
This is particularly important given the hostility of the anti-male Albanese government to spending money on men’s health. I wrote recently about how they brought together all the key men’s groups prior to the last budget, seeking funding strategies for men’s health. They then turned around and announced $160 million for women’s health and zero for men in the budget.
So it’s great that we have Movember, which had an annual income in 2023-24 of $137 million, willing to throw money around on mental health and suicide.
But the problem with Movember’s approach to this territory is how they spend it.
One of the key initiatives Movember is supporting – to the tune of $2.35 million – is the WayBack Suicide Prevention Service, run by Beyond Blue, a charity tackling depression. What’s disappointing is that while 3 in 4 suicides involve men, 60% of the people helped by WayBack are women. That’s to be expected, say the health bureaucrats because WayBack aims to reduce the likelihood of suicide – or a further attempt, for people who have made a previous suicide attempt – and women make more unsuccessful attempts than men.
Ok then. So Movember discovers the program they are funding to reduce MALE suicide isn’t actually helping all that many men because males are more likely to be successful when they try to end their lives.
You might have thought that someone in Movember would have had the bright idea to look at the factors triggering male suicide and see if there is some way of intervening to actually reduce the risk? Look at the efforts made in our society to support women who are vulnerable to post-partum depression, reducing risk of depression and suicide during that period.
When it comes to male suicide, we have solid data showing relationship breakdown is critical – coroner’s report data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed that among men 25-44, the biggest cause of suicide is now “problems in spousal relationship circumstances”.
It is possible to support these men and prevent them taking their lives. That’s what Parents Beyond Breakup (PBB) has been doing for decades. And it works. Here’s a recent video featuring CEO Pete Nicholls explaining the results of a recent survey they conducted with 500 of their clients showing 66% of men surveyed reported suicidal thoughts when they reached out for help from PBB which reduced to 10% after receiving support.
These are men helping men. The PBB support groups and help lines are run by men who have been through similar ordeals to the men who seek help – parental alienation and the loss of their children, false allegations, loss of home and assets, massive legal costs, homelessness. The organisation is now registered as a suicide prevention charity – Keeping parents alive and in their kids’ lives – and is one of the few that appears to be actually achieving that, for men.
But the sisterhood from Movember aren’t going to get down into the gutter dealing with the real life experiences of broken men under attack in the Family Court. There’s never any mention of any of these issues in all their glossy publications. They are determined to push suicide as a mental health problem rather than a response to situational distress – as is true of most of the organisations currently receiving funding aimed at male suicide prevention.
Even though it might make sense to have men supported by other men, Movember takes a different tack. Given that the suicide prevention sector is female dominated – with over 70% of mental health nurses, psychologists and other support people being women – the focus of much of Movember’s suicide prevention work is training these women to talk to men. Stop men slipping through the cracks, says their promotion, claiming they provide the latest strategies to teach these women to talk to vulnerable men.
This means they blame men for being unwilling to reach out to a friend for “fear of being judged or appearing vulnerable or weak.” Here’s where Movember’s healthy masculinities ideology seeps in and the program becomes one more way of fixing men rather than helping them. They push the standard feminist narrative, claiming men are defective and if they are suffering it must be their own fault.
It’s easy to prove that’s utter nonsense. One recent study found that 91% of male suicides had actually sought help. And there’s good evidence that most male suicides are not linked to mental health issues.
It’s not only the Mo sisterhood which is pushing this line. There are males who are key players in the charity, like Australian psychologist Zac Siedler who, as their Global Director of Men’s Health Research, is responsible for all these programs.
Self-described feminist Siedler has become the leftist media’s favored source for pronouncements about toxic masculinity and other male deficiencies. Recently he wrote an article assuring ABC readers that parents shouldn’t be concerned about sons being falsely accused of sexual misconduct. “The number of false accusations that stick is negligible,” Siedler opined. “If your son does not cross the line, if he doesn’t teeter on the ‘edge of consent,’ if he doesn’t misuse his power to control or belittle others, he will be just fine.” Oh yeh?
In such hands it is hardly surprising that blaming men has become Movember’s key strategy. In 2023, they launched the Movember Institute of Men’s Health, investing $1.5 million in a partnership with the Clinton Foundation to explore “how different masculinities shape men’s health outcomes.”
Last year I wrote about Movember providing $3.2 million to contribute to the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children – running a program for the government to help young men and boys “foster healthy, respectful relationships as part of efforts to end gender-based violence.”
Since then they have generously increased that funding to $5.5 million over 4 years.
So it goes on. Yes, Movember does run some sensible programs for tackling diet, weight and heart issues, promoting mental fitness and social connection, as well as work on prostate and testicular cancer.
But it is alarming to see that this much celebrated male charity has been captured by feminists and is diverting funds to women and anti-male programs. No wonder the Albanese government is ultra happy to hand over responsibility for men’s health to this mob.
Every day I am contacted by desperate men seeking help. Abused men, fathers who have lost everything in legal fights to see their children, men escaping violence, sleeping in their cars. We have nowhere to send them, so very few resources.
That’s what makes the monstrous wealth of Movember so infuriating, knowing that they are profiting from the goodwill towards men in our community and exploiting it to promote anti-male propaganda.
In recent months I have been delighted to discover that across the world someone else is tearing their hair out over exactly the same issues. Listen to this:
“Nobody cares about men”, is something I hear all the time. And understandably so; it’s hard to look around, at the neglect, and the dwindling funding, and not feel this way.
But I want you to know, people do care; for years people have run thousands of miles, paddled across oceans, climbed mountains, and put their bodies through immense suffering, to raise money for men’s health and male suicide.
The issue is that this enormous pile of money, courageously raised, is so rarely spent on men, and instead stays in the bank vaults and back pockets of large charities.
Meanwhile, so many smaller, wonderful charities for men are going under, closing shop and sinking into bankruptcy, because they get nothing.
They are buried beneath the SEO-savvy, glossy behemoths; whose million pound marketing departments squash out competition, hoover up donations, and colonise the market.
It’s not right.
This impassioned cry is from George, the UK based digital creator who posts under TheTinMen. I mentioned his work in my last blog, when I showed his excellent post on the misrepresentation of women as the only victims of online abuse.
George has been posting recently about Movember – asking questions about where the money is going (According to his calculations Movember seem to be sitting on huge sums of reserves – GBP54 million in the UK.)
But he has also been asking why Movember avoids getting involved in controversial issues, like family law and suicide and male victims of abuse. So many of the key issues that actually trigger men to take their lives.
Issues we talked about in our long, fascinating video conversation we recorded this week, in which we compared notes about the frustrations of trying to expose the injustices men are suffering, in a world which doesn’t care. Please promote the video and showcase George’s excellent work to a new audience.
I hope you will also share my blog and get the word out about how Movember is going off the rails. We have to persuade people to direct their generosity elsewhere.
When it comes to donating, George is urging everyone to think local – do your homework and find out which men’s services in your area are genuinely tackling real issues faced by men. Local Parents Beyond Breakup or Men’s Shed groups should point you in the right direction. Donate to services which actually relieve male suffering.