Longtime antifeminist crusader Erin Pizzey recently did an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit. Here are some highlights — by which I mean lowlights — from her answers.
Ms. Pizzey wants to ban feminism as a hate movement:
Personally, I would like to see the feminist movement described as a hate movement, so that we can then ban them from the government, from university faculties, from anywhere where they can destroy the minds of young women and men.
It’s just a teensy bit ironic, I would say, that she characterizes feminism as a hate movement at the very same time that A Voice for Men, a site she has very publicly aligned herself with, is leading a hate campaign against an individual feminist activist. (More on this to come tomorrow.) Indeed, Pizzey herself adds to the vilification of the activist here.
And speaking of A Voice for Men, she apparently agrees with AVFM’s Paul Elam that feminists are only interested in the issue of rape because they have rape fantasies and are angry that they’re not getting enough attention from men:
If you’re referring to Paul’s statement that many or most women fantasize about being taken, I’m sorry but that’s the truth. That doesn’t mean they want to be raped, but it’s a fantasy I think almost all women have. And I think he went on to say that feminists like Andrea Dworkin who were and are so obsessed with rape are really projecting their own unconscious sexual frustration because men don’t give them enough attention. Andrea was a very sad lonely woman like this–I didn’t know her but I knew of her, and I knew Susan Browmiller and you can just read her stuff to see it there.
Yeah, I’m thinking that Dworkin’s “obsession” with rape might have had less to do with her wanting “attention” from men than it did with the fact that she had been raped.
In response to a question about using Title IX to increase the number of women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), Pizzey argues that most women’s brains aren’t equipped to handle all that sciencey stuff, and that most women would rather be raising children:
what will happen is that a few women will come out of that world in those areas that suit men’s brains better than women’s, and do well, but most of them won’t, and they’ll just leave and go on to other professions or to have children or family. That’s what’s been happening all the time when they’ve had quotas.
But what about the men who get excluded because of that? That’s the tragedy isn’t it, and the waste of money. Harriet Harman has proposed quotas for women in parliament, quotas for women in all the high-status fields, and women have flocked in but do not want the gruelling hours that men are willing to put into their professions because most of them–MOST of them–want to be spending time with their children at home, and that God for that.
Pizzey believes that most feminists are “mental patents” who deserve only condescension:
Personally, I don’t get into arguments with mental patients, which is what most feminist women are. Look at them with pity and compassion if you can, speak the truth as you know it.
But if you want a real reaction, pat her on the head and tell her not to worry her pretty little head about it. That’s what I do! I think men have to start using their sense of humor as a weapon. You must get past any sense of anger when you do such things though!
She believes most prominent second-wave feminists were feminists mainly because they hated their dads:
One of the early mantras of the feminist movement was to make the personal political. Therefore, those women who had bitter and violent experiences of the first male their lives (e.g. their father) then branded all men as violent and dangerous. They are also what I call the walking wounded. As far as I’m concerned the prominent feminists of the day virtually all had appalling relationships with their fathers. So if feminism grew out of a justified sense of grievance, and created a platform where they did not attempt to heal their own damage, but to project onto all men… so yes it’s very cultlike that way. But it’s any cult group that works that way, they all have either a figure they adore or a hate object that keeps them together. And their hate is against men, even when they deny it.
Yes, that’s right, she says all this and somehow does not notice the hatred of women amongst the MRAs she’s aligned herself with.
While she dismisses feminists with “daddy issues” she urges those who have been abused by their parents to forget the abuse they’ve endured, forgive their abusers and “move on.”
[T]each yourself that the past is truly the past, it is done and you cannot change it, all it is is a loop in your brain that needs to be closed down so that you can move forward. Because those patterns are deep within you, it takes a lot of hard work, but in the end you FORGIVE YOURSELF and you FORGIVE YOUR PARENTS and move on.
Meanwhile, she thinks that it makes sense for men who don’t like feminism to “head for the hills” and Go Their Own Way.
It was many years ago I was talking to a very eligible bachelor, who was a lawyer, and asked him about American feminists. He laughed and he said “what they never banked on was that men would get together and take to the hills.” This is where that expression comes from. He and his male friends would get together and have a wonderful time, they did not make permanent relationships with women, because they realized they would have too much to lose: their homes, their children, and their money. I always remember this. When 40 year old feminists complain that they can’t find any men to commit themselves, why is it men’s fault? I can’t blame men who feel this way in today’s legal environment. If the so-called women’s movement, the feminists, want men, they have to care equally about men’s desires and men’s need for protection.
This sort of makes sense, given that Pizzey seems to live in an imaginary world in which women, not men, are the truly privileged.
The actual irony of this situation is there is nothing more privileged than white middle class women, who are most of feminists. Very very privileged, because they know when they are born that either the state or a man will take care of them if they do not choose their own career. Men on the other hand are born underprivileged, particularly now, even as small boys they are demonized and discriminated against. …
I cannot see how sane sensible educated intelligent woman can consider that men are privileged. It has always been rich and middle class women who have been protected, and they are the truly privileged.
Indeed, she’s managed to convince herself that “never in the history of the world have men been so unprivileged, if you think about it.”
Naturally, all of her comments were happily upvoted by the Reddit masses, and her “Ask Me Anything” post itself got more than 1200 upvotes. Evidently pandering to Reddit’s collective fantasies about the oppression of men pays off big in the upvote department.
I didn’t know that. So yay for your cousin’s son! Sad that his mom won’t vaccinate their younger brother, especially considering it’s b/c what happened to the older one. I mean, that kind of strikes it to me like you think that you’re kid is a… like … trying to think of a way to say this
Like idk you’d go back and try to make things different to prevent it? And I could swear we have a thread where people mentioned whether they thought their mental conditions were part of them, or afflicting them, and lots of times it was part of them (though I will admit, I mostly feel my depression afflicts me. The only possible bright side is that I mellowed out and learned how to live with myself since it got worse)
Yeah, it’s the fact that anti-vax ideas are so common among people that I generally agree with on other things that makes me want to tear my hair out.
18 cases so far this year, versus 41 year to date in 2012.
So on one hand, MMR for fucks sake yes. On the other…most countries can forgo polio vaccine at this point, it’s dead in all but a handful of countries. Haven’t turned anti-vax, just that polio can be reintroduced from vaccine caused cases, and those cases are beginning to equal the number of wild cases. May you live in interesting times?
@cassandrasays
::gets demotivated::
Marie — not there yet, but damned close!
Fade — yeah, idk if he’d say similar, he’s 13~ but I can’t imagine what I’d be if not bipolar. I’ve always been this way and it’s a part of who I am the way…idk, my eye color is almost? And idk about his mother, she definitely loves him, fought to make the school still classify him as special needs since “if he can make a movie…” *tears hair out* but yeah, I get the impression she’d have preferred he be “normal”
Better than the husband of one of my other cousins, who left not long after his daughter was born with an easily correctable birth defect. She talks a bit funny still, but is a perfectly normal happy kid…who he can’t deal with because she isn’t perfect. So compared to that I can’t fault other cousin, she definitely loves him, just, loves him “anyways”?
Ah, I didn’t doubt she loved him. Just to clarify. XD
Whooping cough…
In my family, we are all vaccinated. My mother would have no truck with putting her kids and the larger community at risk. That being said, my brother got whooping cough anyways when he was five. He cough so long and hard he’d turn blue and pass out. All that coughing made breathing an agony for him, the muscles in his chest were so overworked and abused. Couldn’t eat much, because the coughing made him throw up and he couldn’t sleep because being anything other than verticle set it off.
That was a moderate case. I pray I never see a worst case scenario, because I wouldn’t be surprised if the coughing fits broke ribs.
One thing I have noticed about vaccines though, is that babies get them way earlier than the CDC recommends the ages. My guess is its to ensure kids get the full shots, especially as they frequently get minor illnesses that would delay the vaccine schedual.
And to think that when vaccines came out for things like polio, people lined up for hours to get their kids vaccinated. Ask someone over the age of sixty what it was like going to school and have friends disappear after being diagnosed with it. It was very very common and the outlook was pretty bleak.
FYI, the one study that showed a causative affect between vaccines and autism is the Wakefield study, which has since been thoroughly debunked. Wakefield not only purposely left out any data that didn’t conform to his desired outcome, but he also falsified data, all on the promise of the money he’d make if he was the guy who proved that vaccines cause autism. The anti-vaxxer true believers just claim that Wakefield was “silenced” by the evil scientists who are bent on making their own money on tainted vaccines that cause everything from autism to HIV and cancer. Somehow, Wakefield doing this all for the money doesn’t seem to matter to them.
We enjoy herd immunity, but only until it dips below the 85% range. This issue is particularly important because infants who are too young to be vaccinated are actually dying over this.
I work with an anti-vaxxer, who has spouted all kinds of nonsense at me over the issue (she brings it up, I try to avoid the subject).
I read about Wakefield in the local papers recently – quite an eye opener. I hadn’t known the origin of the anti-vaccines nonsense.
And I see Wakefield still has an audience. There’s a measles epidemic in south Wales right now, 700 cases. And The Independent ran a front page screed by Wakefield blaming the government for causing it. He’s an utter egomaniac and a murderer as far as I’m concerned.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/apr/13/department-health-andrew-wakefield
Holy shit…whooping cough CAN fracture ribs. Sweet Jesus, why wouldn’t parents want to spare their kids so much pain?
What frosts my flakes? Pox parties. My daughter has had chicken pox twice, once as an infant and once as a preschooler. And women wanted my daughter and I to come over for a playdate so their kids could catch it.
Why?
To get the pox out of the way, to make sure all the kids caught it at the same time, because a natural immunity is best.
WTF people? Kids die of this disease! And those infected kids will be going to school and potentially infecting their classmates right up until they have the fever and rash. And those unsuspecting classmatesspread it further and risk infecting younger siblings or their other family members. All of this so a mom can get it out of the way…
Not to mention they’re putting their kids, and others, and other adults, at risk of shingles, which is fucking painful, among other things! Some dipshit brought their kid into the Museum when they had open chickenpox sores once. We chucked ’em out as soon as we realised.
Ouch, my dad got shingles recently. It got worsened by the fact that he went swimming, and possibly correlated possibly not, he got a skin infection due to the shingles (and idk if due to the swimming).
So yes. Shingles not fun. (((Protective hugs over Daddy)))
If there’s a death in wales from this measles outbreak, I hope they damn well hold Wakefield criminally responsible.
Yep, broken ribs. Which can be very dangerous in elderly people too.
Wakefield is right at the top of my list of most dangerous woo merchants.
bahhumbugi: He’s deployed to Germany? You could send a message to his Commanding Officer, letting him know that one of his soldiers is harassing you.
Snappy comeback for, “don’t worry your pretty little head”.
“Did you come up with that yourself? How long did it take?”
Best delivered after a moment of apparent contemplation; so as to make it seem spontaneous. Since the odds are his line wasn’t, it’s got teeth.
Tbh, chicken pox as a kid is a lot better than getting it as an adult. A friend got chicken pox from her husband when he got shingles and she was in absolute misery.
But I think there’s a vaccine now anyway, so that is better than getting it at all.
I’m only partially vaccinated – DPT and polio. My brother got a very severe case of measles just after being vaccinated and lost most of his hearing. Mum wasn’t sure if he got it from the vaccine or not, but she wasn’t giving me the MMR vax, just in case.
I had the triple antigen as a kid, and we were vaccinated against German measles and TB at high school, iirc. I don’t recall what else I might have been vaccinated against, though I know I had measles and I think I had chickenpox when I was very small.
Like most Third Culture kids I got pretty much every vaccine on the market, some of them more often than is recommended because we didn’t have records of previous vaccinations. Out of the group of at least 100 kids that I grew up with who had the same experience, the number of kids who’re on the autism spectrum? One.
Wakefield is full of shit.
This.
Also scary is an article I saw on social networks (twitter, in specific) and the, apparently, differential effect (certainly prevalence) of negative/positive exhortations about vaccination.
The short of it is, this study (a first, and so not as strong as it might be, and we can hope it’s wrong) says that negative tweets are both more common, and more effective. They are certainly retweeted more.
I might’ve had a very mild case of Whooping Cough when I was 17, or so. Would have been in the gap between one set of vaccines and the next.
I coughed myself to the floor; from oxygen dep, and failed to get up for 10-15 minutes, because every shuddering breath was used to fuel more coughing. They gave me codiene (which almost as unpleasant as the coughing). It hurt to breathe for a few days.
This is unavoidable. You get the disease, or the vaccine, and then you are at risk of shingles. Which is painful, but rarely fatal. Adult chicken pox can be debilitating/fatal.
I’ve seen conflicting answers about whether the vaccine can make one susceptible (in rare cases) to shingles or actually prevents it, as it does with chickenpox. Either way, though, letting kids get infected and spread a potentially fatal disease, as well as the follow-up one, is an appalling thing to do.
Seconding the “THIS” about the generations who don’t know what these diseases are like.
Add “well I had chicken pox and it wasn’t so bad” — I had it, my brother was vaccinated. And honestly, compared to being a mosquito buffet, it wasn’t at bad. Neither was breaking my big toe, not about to go around breaking other people’s toes though. Why the fuck not prevent something “minor” if you can?
But yeah, I never had to worry about measles, mumps, rubella, polio, no real threat of whooping cough, fuck, smallpox was dead before I was born.
I said this to my co-worker when we were talking about a children’s book by an anti-vaxxer called Melanie’s Marvelous Measles — the author argued that measles is good for kids because it strengthens their immune system. Oh, and this author is a conspiracy theorist who thinks that scientists are giving us AIDS with vaccines.
Anyway, my co-worker’s response to my argument that these people haven’t seen thousands of people dying of infectious disease? “Neither have you!” I sort of stared at her in amazed horror before replying, “But I know that it happened.”
According to WHO, measles killed almost 3 million people per year before widespread vaccination in 1980.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs286/en/