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?
“Is it your allmighty penis?”
Is that the cooked penis I saw mentioned in another thread? 😉
(With apologies to Shadow in case you’d uncrossed your legs yet.)
@Kittehserf- The Nazi party, and other hate groups like the WBC and ShitRedditSays, are built on the fundamental premise than certain groups of people are subhuman or inferior. This is what makes them hate groups. They aren’t about building up but tearing down. The MRM, for the most part, is meant to be *about* men. You can argue that some MRAs effectively make it about hating on women (and I wouldn’t even *totally* disagree… I have issues with parts of the MRM) but that’s on those individuals. So your analogy is stupid.
Have you noticed that mansplaining trolls have the least entertainment value? Or is it just me because I have heard it for over six decades.
That’s what MRAs do, permatwit. How the heck to you explain the guys who go “domestic violence is the only thing that makes women behave better than chimps?” or “women shouldn’t vote b/c it contributes to the destruction of society or w/e” or “women’s place is in the house, not workplace” or “women’s work is just make work crap” or any other example of misogyny that MRAs have expoused.
And btw, that’s not about men. It’s about women. And their hatred for us.
So the analogy is valid.
@Bewilderness
eh, pemra is semi amusing imo (otherwise I wouldnt’ bother to try “engaging*” with him), but that’s probably becasue I am bored on a sunday night.
Though since I’m listening to Emilie Autumn atm, when you said you’e heard it for over six decades, all I could think of was heard it all
*astrik for pemra: this is in quotes not for whatever reason you think, but because you are a disingenuous fuck who is impossible to talk to on an adult level. Just to clear that up. 😉
Of course, the original quote from Thoreau is… a bit different.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.
But BITCHES AMIRITE?
The neo nazis make the same argument. They aren’t really racist they just think everyone should stick to their own kind and know their place or die.
The MRM may be ‘meant’ to be about men, but it ends up being about women, about how awful and evil we all are, how we deserve violence up to and including (perhaps especially) rape and death, about how we all, every one, are out to steal from, lie to and harm men.
And I’ve never seen a movement leader, or a moderator or administrator at one of the MRM sites say, “you know, this is supposed to be about men, let’s stop all this complaining about women and see what kind of concrete ideas we can come up with to make life better for men.”
Sorry, the bewilderness, I thought it was obvious that I was being sarcastic. David really couldn’t have been any more explicit. Which is what makes lensman’s response so fascinating.
“@Fibinachi
“I reject your ‘reality’ and substitute my own!” Heehee!”
Accurate. XD
“The Nazi party, and other hate groups like the WBC and ShitRedditSays, are built on the fundamental premise than certain groups of people are subhuman or inferior. This is what makes them hate groups”
At first I was laughing because you were still on that shitredditsays shtick, but then I got kind of pissed, since the nazis committed genocide, and comparing that to an Internet group you don’t like is really not ok. Even if you don’t like srs, don’t minmalize genocide.
@Shaenon
Gad, I hate it when quotes are taken out of context. Like that thing “all women become like their mothers, that is their shame. No man does, that is his” or something I can’t remember it word for word that’s attributed to Oscar Wilde. He did write it, but it was in the mouth of a character in a play. Unless I’m mistaken and he quoted someone else saying it, but I remember Algodon or w/e his name was saying it in The Importance of Being Earnest*
It’d be pretty much like this:
“I am your father” – George Lucas
*guess what we had to read in English?
/ot, but taken out of context quotes bug me, especially when someone uses a character in a comedy play to try to sound deep.
QFT
I bet the people who love pinching the “lives of quiet desperation” line would never deign to consider that it applied even more to women when Thoreau wrote it. Or later, for that matter, whether it’s the medicated mid-century decades in the West or the lives of desperate poverty and sexualised violence in so much of the world right now.
Fade, thank you for that! It is totally “my song”.
Bee, sorry, misunderstood.
I forget, which troll was it who was arguing that sexualised violence didn’t “Count”? They all blur together…
Fade – yes, it it was Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest. It was “their tragedy” not “their shame” about women vs men becoming like their mothers.
Yup. No leader of the mrm actually, really care about men. It’s mostly a how well can you hide your utter disdain and aggression towards women movement. They are not doing so terribly well.
I think that was permedfriedbrain saying sexualised violence didn’t count.
*waves*
Hi Theda Bara!
@fade
“I forget, which troll was it who was arguing that sexualised violence didn’t “Count”? They all blur together…”
Oh we. Somehow missed that one. Should be glad, they sound super icky
Have I mentioned that I love your nicknames for pemra? 😉
Anyway, if anyone thinks that that’s supposed to sound deep, I will gladly point out that more of Algerdonon’s wisdom is that it’s shameful for women to flirt with their husbands in public!
Though MRAs might actually agree, b/c that would be giing her some agency.
Given it all comes from Oscar “look at me I’m such a cynical wit” Wilde, it’s not surprising. Not that public displays of affection weren’t frowned on then, and at other times, of course.
Mind you I can forgive Oscar a lot for having written that one line “A handbag??” – nothing like hearing Dame Edith Evans say that in the 1952 film. Best rendition of that line ever. 🙂
And of course it’s Lady Bracknell John Worthing’s thinking about when he asks Algy if he thinks Gwendoline might become like her mother in a century or so, and Algy does the “all women” line.
Hey Kittehs’ hope the anniversary was awesome!
thebewilderness:
I was thinking this exact same thing while reading PEMRA’s explanations. I have met many “moderate” neo-Nazis who don’t hate black people or Jews (they say). They just hate the ones who act uppity, and think it would be better if we all recognized and embraced our inherent differences (which of course means the white man’s inherent superiority). And being a neo-Nazi is really about white pride, you know, not hate. They just want to support and continue their way of life. I mean, there are some bad apples who make it all about the hate, but they’re not all like that, really! (nevermind the fact that most if not all of the leaders are like that)
Seriously, it’s pretty much boilerplate defense of a hate group. See also: fundamentalist Christians talking about their feelings re: gay rights.
How about no we DON’T combine the two? Take your simpleminded shit somewhere else. You have sucked up far too much airtime here.
It was, it was! So awesome I’m not sure I can write it up, ‘cos X rated. Even the falling off the garden swing bit. 😉
Speaking of which, have your best lace fan ready to flutter if you look at the latest blog. Sa majesté dans le bain!