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?
*dies*
It’s so hilarious when trolls tell us to read for comprehension.
Pemra, feminism is woman centric. You wanna know why? Because women are disadvantaged according to gender, and men are not.
I’ll put it in terms you can understand:
Would you agree that welfare is poor people centric?
Would you agree that those free wheel chairs* they let you borrow at Target are disabled people centric?
Well, people who already have money don’t get money** from the government!!! Where’s people who have money welfare?!??!?!
People who can walk without pain don’t get free wheel chairs at Target***!!!! This is so unfair!!! Where’s the free wheel chairs for people who don’t need them?!!?!?!
The only difference is that sometimes gender roles suck for men, and guess what? Feminism doesn’t want gender roles. So there are bits that help women and men. The only difference is men are given much more advantages than disadvantages, so I’m not sure if a men’s movement is necessary, though I wouldn’t oppose one if I saw one that wasn’t misogynistic.
*aka the best things in the world
**and nowhere near enough money to actually live on, if I”m not mistaken about welfare
***actually, they don’t make you prove you’re disabled which is really good because fibromyalgia isn’t the kind of thing you can see from the outside.
Pro-Equality MRA So you are saying feminism is female-centric (have a cookie) and “moderate” mras are not(?). That is insightful. Please tell me why the only people advocating for male victims are feminists? And the very cause you claim as yours do absolutely nothing except complain. Action not reaction dude. It’s basic.
I’d go further and say it means her understanding of feminist arguments is nonexistent.
Nice to see you posting, tigtog!
Because feminism means men are more capable of wrong than women. Duh!
Derp-a-doo.
Eeek! No, that was my rough summation of exactly the kind of analysis they are offering. Apologies!
@Fibinachi- Well then I think you’re wrong. I know feminism is about examining all gender roles, and like I said, I think it has good things to say sometimes and should be combined with MRAism. But also, generally, when I read feminist stuff (especially online) their analysis of men’s issues and men’s motivations is seriously flawed. This is of course understandable, because most people who are feminists are female… so naturally they would have no real direct insight into that. So I stand by my position that feminism is generally insufficient.
As a man, I find feminist analyses of gender far, far superior to MRA analyses. And if I have to wade through the steaming pile of radioactive toxic bullshit that is r/mensrights, where 95% of “the other side of the coin” appears to be making anti-feminist strawmen and ignoring the struggles of african american men unless their struggles can be callously appropriated to make some ridiculous anti-feminist argument, to find these mythical moderate MRAs then I will just have to pass on that.
Fade, that caught my eye, too. I wonder if that’s exactly what the blog title refers to. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least.
@Pro-Equality MRA:
Okay.
—
@Gillyrosebee:
“Arguing with facts is useless! The other side has all of them!”
That is indeed the great failure of feminism. It does not serve men.
permatwit – and you don’t seriously think MRAs’ ideas about women are seriously flawed? Holy shit, that’s putting it kindly. You can be as mealy-mouthed as you like, but if you identify in any way with the MRM, you’re a misogynist: you don’t see women as human beings, you don’t want to change the inherent male privilege in our society, and you’re blind to it, whether because you’ve never bothered looking or because you choose to ignore what benefits men so much.
Go fuck yourself with a cactus, you disingenuous little toad.
@thebewilderness- You’re another one who needs to work on their reading comprehension, and avoid projecting your own preconceptions onto others’ words.
” I know feminism is about examining all gender roles, and like I said, I think it has good things to say sometimes and should be combined with MRAism”
Ok, pemra you’re really going to have to show us some mras who have ideas that aren’t bigoted for me to buy one ounce of what you’re saying.
Ooh, historophilia wrote about this on tumblr either today or yesterday, and I loved it and thought it sumarrized the topic very well.
/hope historophilia doesn’t mind me linking to her post.
“if you identify in any way with the MRM, you’re a misogynist: you don’t see women as human beings, you don’t want to change the inherent male privilege in our society, and you’re blind to it, whether because you’ve never bothered looking or because you choose to ignore what benefits men so much.”
You can inform me what I think as much as you want, but it doesn’t make any of it true.
“kindly. You can be as mealy-mouthed as you like, but if you identify in any way with the MRM, you’re a misogynist: you don’t see women as human beings, you don’t want to change the inherent male privilege in our society, and you’re blind to it, whether because you’ve never bothered looking or because you choose to ignore what benefits men so much.”
Quoted for truth. Read this until it seeks through your very dense skull, pemra
I love it when the trolls comments can be applied to themselves.
Permatwit, what makes you think you informing us of what we think is any more true? Is it your allmighty penis? 😉
From upthread:
My thanks to lensman for this fascinating piece of information, since neither Erin Pizzey nor David said or even hinted at who said this. Let it never be said that MRAs aren’t bright.
I don’t have to and you can’t make me. Neener neener neener!
“what makes you think you informing us of what we think is any more true?”
Where have I been informing you what you think?
Oh good heavens, no.
You can deny it all you like, permafuckshite, but the fact of identifying with the MRM is enough. You could as well call yourself a “pro equality neo-Nazi” and claim not to be a racist. They’re mutually exclusive. The MRM is all about misogyny. It does nothing to help men with real issues. Show me the MRAs who have organised to create men’s shelters. Oh, no, you can’t, can you? They’re more interested in closing down women’s shelters, or wanting them to allow men in despite the danger or trauma that poses for the women. They’re the men who seriously claim women should not have voting rights, or control over our own bodies, or the right to work (yet at the same time they want to have no financial obligations over the children they seem to think they have the right to force onto us).
If you seriously think the MRM has any interest in women’s equality, you are incredibly stupid. I don’t need to be a mind-reader; you’ve left the evidence all over this blog. You know what sort of men are actually interested in women’s equality? Feminists. They may not call themselves that, but that’s what they are.
Go fuck yourself with a chilli-coated cactus.
@Fibinachi
“I reject your ‘reality’ and substitute my own!” Heehee!
@PEM
I really am curious as to how these two things hold together, so I’d be interested in one such example, if you have one to offer. Specifics, please, not a gesture or generalization.
Well, you were generalizing all of feminism as horrible at mens issues.
W/o any citations.
I think that’s awfully presumptious to this group of semi-feminists* 😉
*astrik b/c i’m not sure if everyone IDs as a feminist.
I think David added a number of Thoreau hints. I would imagine Maher made the silly assumption that people would know who he was paraphrasing.