Okay, I admit it. Before today, I’d never heard of “Movember,” but apparently it’s a really big deal. In 1999, a bunch of Australian blokes came up with the idea of growing mustaches in November to raise money for prostate cancer research and treatment.
The movement gained momentum, and by 2004, the Movember Foundation was established. Today, “Movember” is the largest fundraiser in the world for male health ($1.1 billion (AUS) in 20 years, according to its CEO)—except that it’s an almost entirely female-run institution, and these women’s idea of “male health” seemingly has less to do with treating cancer than with treating toxic masculinity.
My information comes from Bettina Arndt’s substack, and she’s got receipts to back up her claims. It’s a well-researched essay, long without being boring, so I urge you to read the whole thing, but here’s the CliffsNotes version.
Image created using AI.
Movember’s current CEO is Michelle Terry. In a sign of the organization’s direction, under Terry, Movember has partnered with the UN. Well, more than that, it’s partnered with UN Women, which is a weird partnership for a group dedicated to men’s health.
As part of that alliance, Terry promised that Movember would focus on “healthymasculinities,” and that the organization would mentor...women. There would, she said, be “gender parity” in leadership. Her idea of “gender parity” is a 70% women-led organization.
What’s really stunning is the change in spending as the organization dedicated to men’s health has become feminized. Arndt has a graph showing that Movember’s spending on “prostate and testicular cancer research” has plummeted, with the largest funding growth going to “mental health and suicide prevention.”
Superficially, this might be okay. Maybe there’s more than enough money being spent on prostate and testicular cancer, and men in the West are certainly struggling.
After all, when you’re denigrated as toxic, driven out of institutions, shunned by women, demonized by family courts, and increasingly finding solace in drugs and porn videos, with many eventually committing suicide (75% of suicides in Australia are men), there’s a problem. An organization that’s concerned about men’s health might want to work on reinstating men as equal members of society, while telling them that their innate manly traits, when channeled in healthy, moral ways, are virtues, not vices.
However, that’s not what Movember is doing. It began by sending huge sums of money to an Australian suicide prevention program...which spends 60% of its resources helping women, who account for only 25% of suicides.
At that moment, says Arndt, Movember might have rethought its approach and tried to understand why men are so suicidal. It might have directed its funds to programs that are identifying men’s real risk factors and coming up with ways to help them. But, no, that’s not how feminists operate:
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.
Yup, while Henry Higgins once sang, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man,” an obviously satirical song, Movember’s management is insisting that if men could just be more like women, all their problems would be solved.
This is nonsense. Men and women belong to the same species, but they are not identical; they are, instead, complementary, ideally fitting together like perfect puzzle pieces. A healthy society recognizes these differences and raises little boys and girls to have a high-functioning symbiotic relationship. An unhealthy society demonizes boys and men, drives them to suicide, and then complains that they’re not women.
In 1989, John O’Sullivan coined his first law: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” One could add that all organizations that are intended to benefit men but that allow women in will eventually turn on the men to benefit the women.