The Illustrated Empathy Gap: Challenging public incredulity on the prejudice against men and boys

This book does not duplicate the material in my earlier book, The Empathy Gap, though the broad topics are, of course, the same - specifically gender issues from a male perspective. This book therefore provides a complement to the earlier book, focussing on specific instances of disadvantage - and often downright prejudice - against men or boys. If anything, it is even more hard-hitting as a result.

This book is based on blog articles, the originals of which can still be found on my blog The Illustrated Empathy Gap (http: //empathygap.uk). But the book has not been compiled simply as cut-and-paste from the blog. All the chapters have been edited, in some cases only slightly and in some cases quite radically. Like the earlier book, The Empathy Gap, this book is heavy with references.

The original articles date from 2014 to 2023. It was not my intention to carry out a wholesale updating, e.g., by using updated datasets. Rather the original articles are, in part, a testament to the time they were written and I wished this to be maintained. However, where confusion or misunderstanding would occur otherwise, suitable updating has been carried out.

Original material on related topics has been collected into 13 sections, these being Broken Justice, Sexual Assault, Domestic Abuse, Boys, Education, "Equality" for Some, Health/Death, Feminist Propaganda, Evolution/Psychology, Relationships, Books (Reviews, Extracts, Authors), Culture and finally Moral Usurpation. The latter section is an introduction to my other book The Destructivists.

The overall purpose of this book is the same as that of The Empathy Gap, namely to illustrate the reality of the gender empathy gap and the closely related gamma bias. To be more blunt, it is prejudice.

One issue I perhaps failed to make sufficiently clear in the previous book I now emphasise: none of my writings or talks are intended to make a play for men in the victimhood Olympics. I abhor with every fibre of my being the spurious leveraging of victimhood to gain social advantage. Seeking victimhood is a profoundly false and deeply unethical behaviour which has played a large part in the destruction of our society. In any case, you would need to have failed to appreciate the foundational thesis of my books, namely the empathy gap itself, to think that claims of victimhood could be advantageous for men. The empathy gap precludes the very possibility. That is rather the point. Victimhood works only where there is an antecedent condition of empathy to exploit and plunder.

What, then, is the purpose of highlighting the male disadvantages (or prejudice)? The purpose is to bring this reality into collision with the approved narrative, and thereby to attempt to convince the reader that the empathy gap is real. What would follow from that revelatory experience is that the approved narrative, including feminism, is actually just an epiphenomenon of the empathy gap. Rather than being empirically based, the approved/feminist narrative is a psychosocial product of the empathy gap.

This book should not be seen as identity politics but an illustration of where identity politics leads, and hence a condemnation of identity politics.

However many times I emphasise that a focus in my writings on harms to men does not mean I am denying that bad things - including serious sexual offences and domestic abuse - also happen to women. There are those who will not - apparently cannot - see books such as this as other than such a denial. This results from the moral infantilism which is now rampant in our culture and which is only able to see these issues as a zero sum game. I emphasise that my focus on issues affecting men and boys is to redress the imbalance that these are generally neglected, not to pretend that women and girls do not have their own issues.