GB News which is the UK’s right-wing tv answer to Fox – the “home of free speech” – has tripped into another storm of controversy after actor Laurence Fox said of a female journalist on air: “Who would want to shag that?” Dan Wooton, the show’s presenter has also been suspended and decisions will be made soon whether they will survive.
GB News ratings are up, outstripping Murdoch’s TalkTV but the concern will be about advertisers, notoriously sensitive about public outrage, as well as regulators. GB News attracts a majority male audience, mainly middle-class and older.
It launched 13 June 2021 8pm and has an angry (infuriated) Pluto opposition Moon Mars in Leo, hence the tendency to veer towards shock jock-types and twitter-type provocateurs. There is a Gemini Sun square Neptune never a good sign in a commercial venture; and a can-be-autocratic Saturn square Uranus. There will be ongoing hassle for three years with tr Pluto opposition the Moon in 2023/24; opposition Mars in 2024/25 and the SA Pluto opposition Moon Mars in 2025/26 which may see it hit the buffers.
Laurence Fox is a phenomenon all on his own, being the scion of a renowned theatrical family. He had a sound acting career before giving it up to become an opinionator and activist. Born 26 May 1978, London, he is a Sun Gemini with a pushily confident Pluto square Jupiter Venus in Cancer; and a troubled, impatient and hard-edged Saturn Mars in Leo square Uranus which will make him inclined to erupt in a reckless fashion. His Capricorn/Aquarius Moon is not well integrated into his chart barring, maybe, a trine to his Sun, so emotionally distanced.
His father James Fox, famously gave up a successful acting a career to become an evangelical missionary at one point before latterly returning to the screen. Born 19 May 1939, he is a Sun Taurus in an Earth Grand Trine to Mars trine Neptune; with a truly difficult Mars opposition Pluto square Saturn Venus in Aries, suggesting a dominating and aggravating father.
James was one of three sons of Robin Fox, 15 July 1913, a celebrated theatrical agent and a notorious womaniser, who fell out with a director who wanted to employ his son since he insisted he could not act and should stay working in a bank. Which explains a good deal of that Mars Pluto Saturn Venus T square in James’ chart.
All of which suggests there were issues going back at least two generations of problems with masculine anger. Laurence Fox fits in with most of the American right-wing, loud-mouth presenters who are enraged about authority figures and the establishment – and usually women as well. Instead of projecting it out onto society and politics he might be happier if he resolved his own personal issues.
Dan Wooton, 2 March 1983, a GB News presenter and Daily Mail contributor, is a Sun Pisces in an adventurous and lucky square to Jupiter Uranus in Sagittarius. But also with a highly stressed Mars in Aries which is conjunct Venus and inconjunct Saturn Pluto.
Neither Laurence Fox and Wooton, look in a progressive phase with Fox’s Gemini Sun catching the tr Saturn square this year as well as tr Uranus square his Mars Saturn in 2023/24. Wooton is struggling through thick mud this year and the next two or three with tr Pluto square his Pluto and then Saturn and finally tr Neptune square his Mars. He may have one lucky break but it won’t be good thereafter.
Maybe the new era circa 2026 onwards will not favour the screamers.
If anyone is interested please contact ministerformen.uk or Google Minister for Men.
Great news, what about a serious Minister for children who suffered during lockdown
You can think what you like Roderick, but when you are told that the cause of death for most men is suicide: not heart disease, stroke or cancer or kidney failure. It deserves more than a flippant remark from a woman who quite frankly hates men and appears to wish them harm.
As far as the mental health issues spoken about women have the lion’s share when it comes to resources. I am advocating that men get their just and humane share. In the UK women have a minister for women. I am advocating the equivalent for men.
I don’t really understand why you think women should only support issues that affect women , or call time on a woman who quite frankly wishes the whole male population nothing but misery. And I am afraid that would include you. If such a ministry could offer vital support and prevent even just one death, then it is worthwhile. And while men and women can have different needs, at the end of the day- we are the family of man!
Ok I am going to be nice to you because you seem to be still grieving the loss of your brother, but your inability to comprehend what someone is saying without adding your filter is your issue not mine.
I am not anti male/man but being a gay man I am aware of male privilege and I have no idea why you’re anti woman and see the world as a zero sum game.
Just because there is a focus on traditionally undeserved groups doesn’t mean that males especially white males are somehow losing something when they chose not to access resources due to machismo and fear of looking ‘weak’ due to brainwashing from the patriarchy.
Try being a racial minority or poor in America attempting to access any sort of health care.
Roderick you are treading on very thin ice at the moment. There is a way of voicing an alternative opinion whether about this or politics without coming across as contemptuous and unpleasant. Much more in terms of offensive comments and you’re gone.
Of course men need a Ministry, they have been in a bad way for years, while everyone talks rainbow and women.
If men have been in a bad way it is due to the 1% not gays or woman.
I see we have another person who believes in the zero-sum game fallacy.
Unmystic Mom and Marjorie thanks for your input, it helps. Especially as I felt great anger towards my brother for many years. This would be followed by shame and guilt.
It is only in recent years that I found I had to forgive him to find any peace.
It’s always the family, those left behind to deal with the aftermath, who suffer most from suicides. Please take care of yourself, Linda. You’ve had so much to deal with in recent years. Sending you a virtual hug!
I’m so sorry for your loss, Linda. Anger is very much part of the grieving process. When my brother died young from alcoholism, it took me years to accept the despair and rage I felt – a precious life thrown away. Thank you for sharing.
Ava Evans is a totally vile woman. Her flippant attitude towards men who commit suicide was totally repugnant.
When I was 18 my 30 year old brother killed himself by shooting himself in the head. He was in a coma for 6 weeks. He had previously overdosed on pills in the past and had therapy. He left 5 children.
Some months later I met a gay man in a pub, it was just in the new year. He had just lost his entire family in a pile-up on the motorway. They had been coming to spend Christmss with him. He was absolutely devastated. I had to keep telling him that none of this was his fault. At 18 I was ill equipped with how to deal with this. Though I did my best.
Anyway after awhile nature called, so he said he would get some drinks in and I went to the loo. When I came back he had gone and I realised that I didn’t even know his name. To this day, I still feel frantic when I think about him. I pray that he found the strength to go on.
I support the group that want a minister for men, because they definitely need compassion and support. The Ava Evans of this world harbour nests of vipers in their souls and are dangerous not just to men but but to everyone!
I’m really sorry for you, Linda. I have a brother to whom I am close and I know how close a sibling bond is. I can imagine the depth of your loss.
Conversely I had suicidal thoughts for the better part of a decade and I know how dark and deeply depressing they are. And I didn’t want to drag those I loved into the deep mire that were the cause of my suicidal thoughts. So I couldn’t even talk about it.
About the point you make about Ava Evans, I think men have bought into the narrative that they are worthless to society. My brother had told me a long time ago that biologically and socially, women are much more valuable than men, who are much more expensive.
In other to have children, the continuation of society, women have to carry a child (and generally it is only one child at a time) for nine months and then look after it, while men’s biological role in procreation is seconds-to-minutes long. And a man can fertilise multiple women. The other men are biologically irrelevant and can be sent to war or can die and society won’t care (apart from putting up a monument or two).
His argument is that that is why women were locked away, because they were valuable to society.
It is an interesting, different twist.
Again, commiserations on the fate of your brother. Take care of your own health.
The old adage used to be that mothers/women brought children to birth and fathers/men brought them to maturity.
I wasn’t aware of this age, Marjorie. Thank you for this.
My brother had a similar observation, that the role of mothers is to pamper the child, while that of the father is to teach the children the limitations of living in society.
But, given that modern society is about the lack of limitations, the role of the father is redundant. Indeed any mention of limitations on human behaviour is reviled as patriarchal and to be despised.
Conversely, it has been suggested that the most troubled segment in society is young men who haven’t got a father figure to teach them limits.
All human society is based on limitations (and self-limiting ones self and desires), without which we’d just end up in conflict after conflict. Indeed, law, the basis of society, itself is just codified limitations.
I do wax a bit philosophical at times.
I think we have got into a fearful mess vis a vis men and women. Yes the old patriarchal system was damaging but the replacement (where it has happened) in many ways does not suit either. Maybe it just needs the pendulum to settle in the middle rather than go to extremes.
Part of the trouble (bringing down the ceiling on my head) is this insistence that men and women are exactly the same. And I speak as an extremely independent human being so it is not a personal viewpoint.
Feminism however much ‘a good thing’ has brought about the law of unintended consequences – castrating men.
I remember sitting watching the movie Gladiator in a cinema when second wave feminism was around. Russell Crowe came on in his little leather kilt, roaring ‘give them hell’ and you could feel the women in the audience sighing ‘I want one of those.’ Never to be admitted of course since tree-hugging, metrosexuals were in vogue.
Testosterone has its uses. Which is in no way to excuse jerks and jackasses throwing their weight around who have never grown up.
All of guddle at the moment.
Thanks for this. I too nearly lost a much loved nephew ( age 21) but luckily he survived and is now happily married in a career he loves. He was “lost” , I think, between family expectations and misunderstandings about ambition and his role. However, I have two adult daughters and am depressed to see that the sexism I suffered at work decades ago is thriving and in some ways worse than ever. I think there has to be a minister for women ( look at the case today of the 19 year old soldier’s suicide), but we absolutely must address the situation around male suicide which is not being properly tackled.
Linda, I had a friend years ago who committed suicide and I was furiously angry with him for the mess left behind for his anguished family and for not recognizing how much he was liked and admired by the community. Though from what I have read when the dark walls close in, everything else gets blotted out. My sense at his memorial was he regretted it too. It took his spirit a long time to settle.
I used to live next door in Hampstead to Al Alvarez who wrote The Savage God on suicide. A friend of Sylvia Plath, he attempted to kill himself once and failed. It is a long time since I read it but he was a thoughtful man.
I’m probably going to provide a different perspective, because I’ve had suicidal thoughts, though perhaps I’m alive because I was too cowardly to carry them out, or because of a higher power,I don’t know.
One contemplates suicide when one feels unloved, or even worse, unlovable, which is why all those professions of being loved feel empty to the person, because they feel they are not worth it. They likely also feel worthless and/or useless. I don’t know how to help such a person, but they would require a lot of help, especially from family.
I feel really sad for Linda’s brother, because he had five children, and the pure unadulterated love of children should have gone some way to healing his hurt.
The teenage son of one of my mother’s acquaintances had hanged himself because he was rejected by a girl he was in love with, and my mother was furious at him, as Marjorie above was, for the trauma that wrecked on the family. I, on the other hand, feel sad for the person, because I have seen at firsthand the hell that the person has likely gone through. Somehow I can’t get myself to feel angry at them, given the hell they have given themselves while still living.
I need to step away from this topic now, before I end up all morbid and morose.
I honestly can’t believe the comments that I am reading are coming from females, but here we are.
The main reason that men are in the situation were are is due to the patriarchy and capitalism.
The patriarchy’s narrow definition of a man being the breadwinner of the family and fathering offspring is the reason men lost.
Add to that the stratification of wealth since Reaganomics took hold over four decades ago undermining the idea that a husband alone could provide for his family and that required women to enter the workforce to assist economically.
I don’t know who this Ava Evans person is but she is right.
Men still control the world and still get to define the terms with the help of some self-hating women.
The problem is that most straight men are still clinging to the old notions of so-called masculinity which teaches that men shouldn’t express emotions or even consider sharing what they are experiencing with other men much less therapists.
As for the feminist movement I have no idea how it hurt men.
Actually it has given men permission to be more involved fathers and erased the ridiculous gender roles.
Now men have permission to be stay-at-home fathers if the wives earn more than he does or her job has better benefits, and more men are taking paternity leave to bond with their children.
I had a gay friend who grew up in the 1950s.
He was the fourth of five children and the gender roles were very well-defined.
He said that his father has little to no interaction with him or his siblings, and his mother almost pulled her hair out after being stuck at home with five children all day.
Of course it help my friend relate to his father better because he was into theater and musicals instead of athletics.
As for testosterone it is still valued in society because most of the jobs that value the skills that men are better at like engineering and computers still pay more than jobs that are traditionally female like teachers.
Furthermore jobs that require a lot of physicality like delivery drivers are almost exclusively male.
UPS in the States just made a deal that will pay drivers up to $177K with overtime and benefits.
Also a lot of government jobs in the U.S. are dropping education requirements because fewer white males are attending college so no men aren’t getting the short end of the stick.
Men are our brothers, our husbands, our sons. We too want well adjusted family members, and shouldn’t tar all men with the same brush
My point is that people have choices.
They can go along with the lies that society tells us or we can think for ourselves and seek out the help that is available.
Thank you, Marjorie. Great write-up. It’s funny how patterns run through these things. The Sagittarius South Node on the Ascendant suggests it has a habit of shooting itself in the foot and not learning from it. With the South Node inconjunt the Cancerian Venus sextile Uranus in Taurus, revenue will always be an issue and I expect they will lose some advertisers over this. Facing 12 different OFCOM investigations, it will either sink or swim. Pluto has been bringing to light a lot of hideous behaviour that has been previously hidden over the past few months in other media organisations too, including the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, so this is not some vendetta against GBN by the so-called ‘elite’, but part of a wider pattern. With that rather moody, rageful and bombastic Moon/Mars in Leo opposite Pluto, GBN was always going to be a vehicle for expressing angry feelings. With its Gemini Sun in square to Neptune, in many ways it encourages a sense of victimhood among its viewers.
As for Mr.Fox, his fixed T-square on Mars/Saturn in Leo would be better channeled into acting, since his talents as a political rhetorician are very limited. Mars/Saturn in Leo as the focal point of a T-Square does indicate father issues as you point out, Marjorie. Watching the footage of his outburst, it’s clear he was enduring a hot flush of painful, deep-seated rage. I would imagine his family are very concerned about his mental health.
If I understand correctly GB News is meant to be uncensored, Laurence Fox indulged in a bit of school boy language, although a bit too old for it, there is little room in these nervous times for such loose and louche language, conformity being the prevailing mood.
Maybe Saturn in Pisces is curtailing behaviour bringing discipline and restriction.
A storm in a tea cup.
This is precisely how misogyny and the mistreatment of women continues to flourish.
It should be noted that Ava Evans who helped trigger this storm in a teacup is a provocateur herself as her Twitter history and pronouncements on male suicide show. Fox was stupid allowing himself to be dragged into responding to her. Personally I wish he would go back to acting as that is where his talent seems to lie not politics
Saturday’s Full Moon @ 6 degrees Aries hit on Laurence Fox’s South Node (old habits) squaring his Venus Jupiter. He does seem to undo himself to some extent. As Marjorie suggests focusing a bit more on sorting himself out might help. He’s a good actor, it seems such a waste not to be acting, but then he was ‘cancelled’ for saying something ‘incorrect’ on Question Time, which must have been annoying. We live in strange times.
GB News certainly isn’t shock jocks and Fox News. It’s downright woke at times. You clearly haven’t watched it. The idea is simply to get away from the relentless on message conformity of the other stations.
‘Woke’ is an invention of the far right trying to stir up culture wars. It is a ridiculous ‘insult’. Fancy being informed enough to care about other people and the planet!
The original use of the word was positive, to be aware of and awake to the many injustices faced by Black Americans. Then it was twisted beyond all recognition or even meaning by the extreme right and is now, sailing along confidently in the mainstream, used with monotonous regularity to describe anyone who has basic empathy for the plight of the disenfranchised.