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?
Work is for men and family (especially raising children) is for women.
Why is there this unjust prejudice that women should be given primacy in matters related to family and children, while the role of men is to provide financial support through work?
Pizzey is daft. If she wasn’t a fist shaking, keyboard smashing, let me type everything that comes into my head that gets me an audience type, I would feel sorry for her. But she seems to be in full command of her faculties, therefore she just gets what they all do. Derision and mockery. She is simply a Kardashion, her currency is just a more nuanced form of fame-wrangling.
I did some background reading on Pizzey, and discovered a 2009 article about her own history of childhood abuse from both parents. Obviously this history was part of her motivation for getting involved in the Refuge movement back in the 70s and understandably so, but it seems to have distorted her analytical lens on DV.
While I don’t want to downplay how damaging the verbal abuse her mother dished out must have been for Pizzey and her siblings, for her to argue (as she seems to when equating men and women as equally abusive) that her 6’4″ physically-violent father could have needed the option of a DV shelter just as much as her 4’9″ verbally-abusive mother might have done seems to be an argument chock full of logical fallacies.
She also explicitly says that she rejected and continues to reject feminism because her experiences with her mother meant that she knew that women could be just as awful as any man, which suggests that her understanding of feminist arguments has always been superficially filtered through her own issues surrounding DV.
If the role of men is to provide for their children financially, while the role of women is to actually do childcare, why is it bad if men don’t get custody in divorce? Seems to me, it’s a continuation of the prior arrangement: the man mostly just provides for his kids financially (though to a lot lesser extent than before the divorce), and sees them only occasionally to throw a baseball, give someone a stern lecture, or pontificate about “life” for five minutes, just like he did when the family was still technically together.
You’re pointing out the hypocrisy of MRAs. Stop that!
I really don’t like people like her. I tend to ignore them. So freaking delusional.
Aside from the women I know who volunteer at rape and DV advocacy services/shelters that serve both women and men.
Congratulations on getting your dream job, TomBcat!
You did take it away from a more deserving man, didn’t you? We’ll have your award for you at the next Feminist Hegemony meeting.
I think one of the reasons for the incoherence of Pizzey’s answers was that she was dictating them to someone from AVFM (I think Dean Esmay) rather than typing them, and it’s easier to lose your train of thought, and to forget to finish sentences,when you’re talking than typing.
But that’s kind of what happens when the folks at AVFM treat her as such a celebrity that she can’t be bothered to type her own answers. (Which is what I think she did with her first AMA.)
Of course she’ll be treated as a celeb only so long as she toes the AVFM line.
lawmedy, the levels of denial in response to your reddit comment are really quite amazing.
You can find a summary in English of the “recommendations” of this now famous “experts panel, here: (page 35-36)
http://www.nrk.no/contentfile/file/1.10947191!reform.pdf
It’s just genuine Manboobz logic: anti-feminism = male privilege = harassment, threats = ban.
My favorite part :
Shut the fuck up you privileged men. Don’t criticize Feminism. Believe everything we say and don’t listen to other voices. Feminism will solve all your problems so keep quiet.
Cold breath in the neck…
Well, since the apocalypse left us with a minuscule number of fertile humans as is, as many different women need to be impregnated by as many different men as possible to ensure a healthy genetic pool for future generations- wait, that didn’t happen? Our global population is over seven billion, and as science and technology advances in remoter corners of the world, the resulting decreases in infant mortality/death rates ensure a growing population for years to come?
False alarm, humanity is going to be fine. Keep calm and carry on.
How the fuck to you get
from
?
Do, not to, I’m a little hung over.
Programmes are misandry!
Maybe brzzz misread it as pogrom.
I agree with Erin about the the obsequiousness of many men (and women) in the face of feminist political correctness. Feminism sometimes has good points and we should *listen*, but we shouldn’t accept it as gospel. We should listen to feminists and MRAs, and pick out the good each has to offer.
You’re reading things that aren’t there. But of course that doesn’t matter to a disingenuous shithead like you.
I remember earlier where someone was mentioning “political correctness” is often just treating people with respect.
Which would change your quote to
This treating people with respect has gone too far!
( Of course, the next bit of that very same point reads:
)
Brz, normally you’re actually very coherent, almost reasonable and kind of clever but this? This is kind of a stretch. You get “Shut the fuck up” from: “Gender equality organisations must consider addressing men’s concerns not as the opposite of addressing women’s, but as an integral part of working towards gender equality”.
I’m not sure how that follows.
So by taking something out of context and twisting it, you’re getting the wrong picture.
As an added bonus, I read norwegian, swedish and danish. So more fool you, as I shall now pick articles at random and translate, by eye, cool bits. LET’S BEGIN:
Page 33, Corela Alexa Døving, first paragraph
That was kind of cool, and pretty spot on. OH! Here’s something appropriate:
Page 31, Maria Sveland, Internet Hate and Death Threats.
Hey Brz! Caaaaaalllback to that large rant about safe spaces and the notion of public discourse and shaming language having a decided impact on people’s lives. Huh, how funny. What else can we find in this document?
The article on p. 24-29 is genuinely interesting and maybe you guys want to run it through a translator. It’s a little too dense to pull anything out of without distorting the context.
Oh, here’s something really neat. Page 16-17, “Is The Problem Men”, I’m pulling from the last few paragraphs. It underscores the point of this blog and the people here, and neatly summarizes the problem with your argument, Brz:
Yes, Brz. Indeed. “Shut up, Men”. Indeeeeeeeeeed.
*gives Fibinachi a standing ovation*
Hi everyone, Marie here, didn’t read much but wanted to sneak in to say hello cuz my mom let me borrow her iPad.(my computer died :()
::goes to skim now that I said hello::
I just want to say THIS.
But also that I did a double take at “spearhead” b/c of the mra site.
Wait, she thinks people in Sweden Norway and Finland? Are trying to make criticism of feminism an offence? Wtf? I mean, besides thewhatthefuckness, feminism is not a hive mind, and if someone criticizes feminism, especially second wave feminism (I think) for being too focused on white middle class women, I’ll most likely agree with them, whereas if someone criticizes it for trying to say women are better than men, I’ll laugh in their face. But both are criticisms, and I don’t think either should be an offence.
I hope that made sense, I can’t type on this very well.
“We should listen to feminists and MRAs, and pick out the good each has to offer.”
This is like saying that, when shopping for food, you should stop by both the farmer’s market and the local sewage treatment plant and pick out the good things to eat that each has to offer.