Two weeks ago, you may recall, antifeminist crusader and recent A Voice for Men recruit Erin Pizzey made an “Ask Me Anything” appearance on Reddit which was a rousing success, at least by the standards of Reddit and the Men’s Rights movement. (By the standards of logic and ordinary human decency, not so much.) This Saturday, she gave a sort of encore.
Here are some of the interesting things I learned from her latest three-hour appearance. (I haven’t read all thousand-plus comments in the thread; this is based solely on what she herself said. Click on the headlines to see her original comments in their entirety, in context.) Her comments are, as always, models of good sense and lucidity.
Ban feminists from government perhaps! Personally, I think, I would describe feminism, and I have fought for 40 years to publicize the damage that they were doing to family life and men and boys. To me, to condemn men as sole perpetrators of all or almost all atrocities in this world, feminists are a hate movement. I say this because just recently Sweden, Norway, and I think Finland are trying to bring in a law in those countries that will make any criticism of feminism a punishable offense. That is not the action of a movement dedicated to equality and freedom of speech for all, it is totalitarianism.
As far as I’m concerned, a sufficient amount of women have reached boardrooms and many of them publicly have said that they prefer a quality of life which includes family time, which for women in many ways is more important because we, in the long term, through our children and grandchildren. Men, as they climb up the steps to fame and fortune define themselves by how well they can take care of their wives and children. Different lifestyles, different goals, very few women want to spend the time and the total energy in making that high-achieving career lifestyle.
According to the most recent Catalyst survey, only 16.6% of Fortune 500 board members are women, and an even smaller percentage (14.3%) are CEOs. That’s a very strange notion of equality you have there, Ms. Pizzey.
So many men are lickspittles. Often in my travels when I’m speaking, I have asked men, informally, why they would never stand up to women who were devoted to the idea of a world without men. The honest answer was they were too dependent on having relationships with women to stand up for what they believed. …
I think most men live lives of quiet desperation–that’s a quote, I can’t remember who said it but it’s true.
I believe that was Elmer Fudd.
Wait, no, he said something about hunting wabbits. No idea, then. Who could have Thoreau-n such an idea around? Walden you like to know?
I’m not surprised that men are going their own way. Why would any sane man want to risk losing his property, his relationship with his wife, his financial stability, the children that he will be deprived of… at the moment, men don’t have any rights in this area. In England, Harriet Harman and her very powerful harpies are trying to bring in a law that will mean a woman has only got to live with a man for a very short period of time before she’s entitled to exactly the same amount of money and power that is given to married women. That’s already happened in Australia and Canada too!
I am constantly in the company of women in their late 30s and 40s who after choosing a career have decided they want children and marriage. I have to regretfully inform them that the present climate against men, they are very unlikely to have a relationship with a man and will probably never have children.
It’s true. Nowhere is the problem more noticeable than Los Angeles, by the way, where men give themselves the right to date (meaning, they can have sex with as many women as they want at the same time)… very sad situation, but, why would they do anything else? The legal system can destroy them if they commit to a relationship.
The Feminist Hegemony will fuck up your hard drive:
I did manage to get exactly one paper published, decades after the fact, on the surveys I did of the first 100 women in my Refuge. Just one, in a tiny journal. … But the feminist hegemony has worked hard to keep work like this out of the public eye.
They actually destroyed the hard disk of Professor Viano from Washington University when he tried to publish some of this work.
[citation needed]
For what it’s worth, there doesn’t seem to be anyone named Viano associated with Washington University in St. Louis (aside from a physics professor who got her PhD there), nor, for that matter, with George Washington University in Washington DC.
There is an actual Professor Emilio Viano who teaches at American University’s School of Public Affairs and is an adjunct professor of law at the Washington College of Law, and he’s written about violence and victimology so perhaps he is the man Pizzey is referring to. There is, however, no evidence I can find online that anyone, much less the “feminist hegemony,” has ever destroyed his hard drive, and he seems to have published extensively and had what looks like a pretty successful academic career without any obvious hindrance from the evil femlords.
I did find a news article in which Viano is quoted about a case in which the FBI secretly got its hands on the hard drive of one of its agents suspected of selling secrets to the Russians, but 1) that wasn’t Viano’s hard drive and 2) I’m pretty sure the Feminist Hegemony had nothing to do with that, as it was never discussed at any of our meetings that I can recall, though admittedly I spent most of our meetings eating the complementary bon-bons and playing with the cats.
I eagerly await Ms. Pizzey’s clarification of her assertions about the mysterious “Professor Viano from Washington University” and his “hard disk.”
The last little lesson I learned from Pizzey’s appearance:
Fried food gives me indigestion.
This from a woman who claims to care about victims of domestic violence, and whose biggest claim to fame is that she was the founder of one of the first DV shelters for women. Evidently when you spend a lot of time in the company of Men’s Rights Activists, jokes about “battered women” are just part of the landscape.
Ms. Pizzey, might I suggest that if you indeed suffer from any sort of digestive problem it might just be because you are full of shit?
I recently had a hilarious discussion about this in the comments on Slate. It just floors me when women are told that they will “probably never have children” just because they haven’t bagged a guy, quit school and given up on their careers by 23. Or 30. Or 38. The whole notion that women (who want to have children) are supposedly hugely disadvantaged by their biology, whilst men aren’t, is based on a bunch of false premises and far-reaching assumptions.
First of all, if worse comes to worst, a woman doesn’t need a husband or a long-term partner simply to have a child. After all, a man’s necessary investment in child-bearing is laughably minimal. Note, I’m not saying, in a general fashion, any nonsense along the lines of “men are superfluous” or that men have no purpose in life, only that if a woman really-really-really wants to have a child, and the clock is ticking, and she can’t find a man suitable to be a husband and father, she can have a child without one. It’s not easy on many fronts, and it’s not ideal, but it is a realistic option for the kinds of women that Pizzey likes to subject to her epic schadenfraude. And of course, young women who want to delay child-bearing have the option of freezing their eggs, or making embryos with donor sperm and freezing those to use later.
It’s actually far more complicated for men who want to have kids, but can’t find a suitable woman to have them with. When people who say, “Men can have kids at any age, just look at Charlie Chaplin,” this presupposes that a man can have, at any time he wants, a willing, conscientious, healthy partner of child-bearing age. And this simply isn’t supported by reality — a fact as clear as the fact that most men aren’t Charlie Chaplin. Getting younger women to have sex with you, even date you, may not be a problem, but to bear your children? That’s a different order of business altogether, and the older a man is, the less likely he is to get a woman to have kids with him, unless he is wealthy, which describes only a small handful of men. Sure, there is the option of surrogate motherhood, but given how much more is expected of a biological mother than of a sperm donor, the fact remains that it has to be someone healthy and trustworthy enough to take her folic acid every day and to go to all her prenatal visits, and never to take ibuprofen for headache during the pregnancy. And this isn’t easy.
So it seems to me, with the current state of medical science, and in view of improved employment opportunities for women, women’s childbearing options are actually much better than men’s. If anyone should worry about being left without the joy of having kids, it’s men, not women. But boy, those people who like to rub it in women’s faces that female fertility declines after 35 — hell, to they get angry when you point this out to them!
Her arse must be roughly the size of Wyoming, to contain so much bullshit.
@Dvarghundspossen: Is it true that Sweden fines people for discrimination, or did I just hear wrong? If that’s true, she could be confusing hate speech with criticism of feminism, since that’s something MRAs seem to do a lot.
As a feminist, never had a problem having a relationship and a family with men. I just don’t do such things with misogynists.
Not so sure Erin’s pals in the MRM can say the same about women! After all, they’re GTOW.
David, the feminist hegemony is displeased with you. Pay attention to the next meeting or we will send our StrawFeminist ninjas to sneak into your house at night and make you sit on hard chairs. HAAARD!
@amused Plus, there’s adoption (although that’s also pretty complicated)
@annabanana12698: Yes, absolutely. As complicated as adoption is, it is still easier for single women than for single men.
So if we’re living through our children and grandchildren, does that mean the girls grow up to have lives of their own to vicariously satisfy us? Or should we be producing male infants only, because the next generations of women should be popping out yet more babies and living through them?
Cthulu, yeah, we have hate speech laws here, and anti-discrimination laws. It’s pretty hard to prove that you were discriminated against rather than, you know, merely not hired or merely not allowed into an establishment for perfectly valid reasons, but if you can prove it you can get compensation. “Hate speech” doesn’t encompass misogyny though, only hate towards people based on race, nationality, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. In order to count as hate speech, what you said or wrote has to go far beyond mere criticism. For instance, there was this reverend who was convicted for saying during sermon that homosexuals are a cancerous tumour on society. He was later freed in the supreme court.
Perhaps there are politicians advocating that misogyny ought to be included here, and I’ve just missed it, but that would be pretty far from suggesting that criticizing feminism be made illegal.
One of our best friends is a single mother by choice. She adopted an infant daughter and has done a bang-up job of raising her. Our sons consider her their cousin, as her mother has always been their auntie. It’s sometimes amusing when we all go somewhere together – two dads, one mom, and three kids. Ms Pizzey would be in a tizzy.
annabanana – not only make him sit on hard chairs, but destroy his hard drive! Bwahahahahaha!
“Ms Pizzey would be in a tizzy.”
Love that! It seems to be her default state. 😀
Male offspring, please, as my female offspring will spend their lives producing my grandoffspring whom they will live through only if their offspring are male. It’s the circle, the circle of life.
@Amused, yeah, these are really good points. Here in Sweden we have this stupid law (although that might change, it’s heavily debated) according to which you’re only allowed to be inseminated by donor sperm if you have a wife/husband or “sambo” (I don’t think there’s any word for “sambo” in English, but it means a girlfriend or boyfriend whom you live with in a serious committed relationship). Denmark require no such thing, so you can still go to Denmark for insemination if you want to be a single mum and don’t just want to sleep with a friend (because that might be awkward) or have unprotected sex with some random guy (because that’s risky). I have a friend of a friend who just broke up with her long-time “sambo”, is thirty and want kids, and is contemplating whether it’s “time for a trip to Denmark” (which has seriously become a euphemism by now).
And on the other hand, my sisters husband is much older than her, and began to think that he might die childless despite wanting to have a kid, for the reasons you just mentioned. Like most middle-aged men he mostly hung out with other middle-aged people, and sort of thought he’d missed the train on having kids, when he unexpectedly met my sister through work, found out they had tons in common and were just made for each other, and ended up marrying her. However, as a middle-aged man without children you can’t just COUNT on that happening.
Well, Erin Pizzey certainly succeeds in making an argument for infanticide. If the point of having children is to live through them, and you can’t live through female children (since they themselves can only live through others), then what’s the point of raising a girl? Might as well take her to the nearest mountaintop and dump her there at midday. Just like they did in the Cradle of Western Civilization.
Omg, my boyfriend recently had his hard drive fried and now I know why. It was my evil feminist ways! I killed the anime/Steam games collection! I REPENT.
I’m not surprised that men are going their own way. Why would any sane man want to risk losing his property, his relationship with his wife, his financial stability, the children that he will be deprived of…
I know, wouldn’t it be terrible to lose that precious relationship with your wife who-you-will-now-never-meet-’cause-you-hate-women? And just think of the children you-now-won’t-have-any-chance-of-at-all-because-relationships-are-scary!
‘Tis better to have completely shut yourself off from humanity than to have loved and lost! Wise words, Mz. Pizzey. Wise words.
@kitteh
I’m not sure.
Since all women want to have babies, we live our already fulfilled dreams through our daughters?
The scourge against female fetuses Lila Rose told me about IS REAL! And it was Erin Pizzey’s idea!
It’s just that I really wanted to be a physicist but couldn’t because I have a vulva so I had to do so through my children but biologically female children would have to stay home and make babies too so I kept the males ones, as many as I could. What was I supposed to do? Break the mould and be a physicist myself? Ms. Pizzey says no!
I think this is the basis for their claim that criticizing feminism is going to be made illegal:
http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/1az3zk/nordic_feminists_are_trying_to_make_criticism/
Practically, it appears some people are trying to add gender as a protected category so that threats against a person on the basis of their gender (no matter the gender) can be considered hate crimes. Later in the article, some people express an opinion that anti-feminist hate speech should be punished, but I don’t see that in the proposal. It’s a bad translation though.
@Cloudiah: When I google “hate speech feminism” in Swedish, I get tons of racist, fascist and MRA sites claiming that we might get a hate speech law according to which feminists count as a group you must not criticize (not that criticism and hate speech are even the same thing, but whatever). The thing is, recently there’s been much attention given to the fact that famous Swedish feminists get so much death threats, torture threats and rape threats all the time, so I can totally see why someone would like to suggest that hating someone on account of them being feminist should count as hate speech (obviously actual threats are already covered by the law). BUT it seems like no politician or other influential person HAS actually suggested that, because if that were the case, you’d think Google would give me SOMETHING other than fascist, racist and MRA sites when I try to search on “hate speech feminism”.
I have often wondered if Pizzey is suffering from dementia… I know it’s not nice to speculate but she continually trumps up new conspiracy theories. It kind of reminds me of this nice old lady who used to tell everyone her kids were coming to visit her but they never came. Sad really.
I did what I could, guys: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1d7toq/hi_im_erin_pizzey_founder_of_the_first_womens/c9ns392
I have suspected for many years that Pizzey was a rescuer who, like so many other rescuers, had contempt for those she rescued.
You run into it a lot in NGOs. People who are in it for the gratitude and appreciation they think they deserve from those they are rescuing and admiration from all the world. They don’t last long when self aggrandizement is their motivator.