Does anyone here understand string theory and dark matter and all that physics crap? Because I am seriously beginning to wonder if Men’s Rights Activists literally live in an alternate universe that only partially intersects with our own.
In the universe I live in, Canada is a lovely and somewhat uncannily polite country to the north, the home of Rush and Kate Beaton and, I’m pretty sure, a lot of bears. To MRAs it is a land under the bootheel of a radical feminist gynarchy in which men cower in elevators because they are deathly afraid of being accused of sexual harassment.
No, really.
I was skimming through an old interview with good old Erin Pizzey, A Voice for Men’s pet domestic violence expert, probably because she’s the only one who thinks jokes about eating “battered women” — you know, like batter fried chicken — are hilarious.
In the interview, she was telling Dean “Long Tie” Esmay about a speaking tour she’d made in Canada — a place she describes as “one of the worst countries in the world.” No, really. Here’s what she had to say about her harrowing ordeal:
I did a six week tour, with Senator Anne Cools, all across Canada. And there were some wonderful … uh, men’s groups, just struggling to keep going. And as we traveled and talked to men’s groups, we realized how terribly dangerous it is because it’s almost as though the entire government and the judiciary–the same people–had been infiltrated by very radical feminists out to get men. And I talked to people all the way across Canada. You know my mother was Canadian, and I’m half Canadian, and it hurt actually. See I was a child in Toronto, and my feeling as we went through is real fear. I remember I was working with Anne in the Senate and I walked in to the lift, and this man who was in the lift with me was cowering over in the corner. And I came out and I said to Anne, “What on earth was that about?” And she said, “Men are frightened. They just don’t know when they’re going to be told they’re sexually harassing somebody.”
I’ve highlighted several of the passages which I think may have entered our universe from the Bizarro Men’s Rights multidimensional wormhole of misandry.
But, seriously, what planet does this woman live on? Does she actually think something like this really happened? Was there really a man in an elevator with her who was literally cowering in the corner because he thought she would accuse him of some sort of sex crime? Was there a man there at all? Was there even an elevator? Is Canada a real country? THEN WHO WAS PHONE?
Well, theoretically, we have strict hate speech laws here, so maybe that’s what they’re afraid of???
I am Canadian. I have been in many elevators. I have never seen a man cower away from a woman. Ever.
Uh, I’m skimming the interview…she says she doesn’t go out to dinner ’cause she looks at people and “just knows” the bad things they’ve done. What?
In any case, I’m pretty sure Pizzey has a history of lying through her teeth, or, at least, exaggerating greatly.
From what I’ve read about Pizzey, I might not be entirely comfortable being in an elevator with her.
She might accuse me of attacking her dog.
Well, hey, if I were to find myself in an elevator with Erin Pizzey, I’d cower too, lest I be dragged into one of her delusional fantasies.
@Toolbox
We’ve got ourselves a modern day Sherlock Holmes! We should ask her how she arrived at that deduction. No doubt it involves a trip around Saturn.
But really, given that most of the stuff she’s written or talked about etc. has been composed of glaring projections on her part, I think that’s pretty much the case here.
Buildings with more than one floor are misandry! Why did men let the evil gynocracy drag them out of harrassment-accusation-free cave living in the first place?!
I am Canadian (from Canadia as Tony Abbott might say) and live in a city pretty close to Edmonton. It is pretty horrifying that for a country that doesn’t make the news that much, we have a world-famous MRA group up there. But then again, we have excellent standards for maternity leave, gay marriage and abortion is legal. Obviously it’s just a terrible hell-hole to which I am blinded by my female privilege.
I guess it’s kind of reassuring, and humanizing of our frost-bitten northerly neighbors, to know that conservative canadian politicians are just as predictably delusional as those here in Amercia.
David, your final paragraph o’ questions made me lol
Oh Lord. So if women implode and men explode, doesn’t that make men more likely to assault women? Or is this magical man gene going to trigger and allow said man to throw himself out the window?
I’ll admit, growing up in Canada, I did feel some fear that women would accuse me baselessly of harassment.
Then I began to read feminist blogs, and realized that fear wasn’t coming from actual women, but from right-wing whining points hyping it up. Any “rational” fear I had of being considered a creep vanished when I read the sort of things women were experiencing from the people they considered creepy: boundary violations, creepy stares, horrifyingly inappropriate comments, wandering hands, and explosive anger. I also realized just how much guys were willing to stretch to claim those were “misunderstandings”.
If there’s fear in Canada, folks like Erin Pizzey are responsible for it, not feminists.
I’m Canadian and thoroughly confused by this. All I can think is exactly what canuck_with_pluck already said – that the MRAs and their supporters are terrified of legislation against hate speech. Someone should give Erin Pizzey a copy of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms to read. Constitutional law making most forms of discrimination illegal? Vile misandry and hate against all healthy white heterosexuals! Even our Conservative Prime Minister said, at the beginning of his term in office, that NO, he was not even interested in reopening the abortion debate. Though to be fair to his unfairness, he also shut down a bill that would have protected women under hate crime legislation.
I have to say, this whole article made me laugh a lot. I am proud to live in a country that pisses off MRAs so much!
It’s really hard for me to understand why men would be afraid if all they have to do is not harass anyone .
Is Pizzey not aware that men can accuse people of sexual harassment, too?
Seconding the “I would cower if I were in an elevator with Pizzey” notion. But did this actually happen? No.
I’d been mulling the Canada MRM phenomena thing a while now. Viscaria had this comment last week sometime I think about just why it is what it is, this being: ‘I think maybe it’s because we endlessly compare ourselves to the US, and because we are, in some ways, slightly more progressive, reactionaries see it as an example of feminism gone much too far…’
And I think this is about right. And I see this as a more general thing on the right up here, not particularly specific to the MRAs. Visit any small town you’ll meet them. The ‘Canada Is Totally Socialist, Eh*?’ dudes…
I figure as they’re likely to have lived lives pretty heavily influenced by US media, this impression this is freakin’ Soviet Canuckistan by contrast is maybe explicable enough, anyway. Given, especially, the picture of US culture you get from the US media, and (so often as they bother to mention it) the picture of Canada you get from them. This, as the land of single-payer healthcare and legal abortion, is some kind of progressive paradise or Soviet hell, depending on who’s writing the copy.
Anyway, I figure the relative virulence of the MRM in Canada is at least partly a byproduct of this. I see it generally in their rhetoric, too: there’s this idea Canadian law is particularly hostile to men, that this terrible European-inflected nanny state is sissifying their manliness, that the courts are all run by feminist symps, and so on.
I’d say also that, generally, I think our politics is weirdly polar as a consequence of the omnipresent shadow of the US. You get people on the left who’d like to see us become the next Norway, those on the right looking south thinking no, This Has Gone Too Far; we’d like to be able to buy assault rifles at Wal-Mart, thanks…
The nutty bit being: while Canada is maybe ahead of the US by certain, specific metrics, in certain, specific policy areas, yeah, um, this really isn’t saying much. A bit like saying, right, we’re doing a little better than the slowest kid in the class, anyway. (No offense intended, USAians, but seriously, people.)
And, of course, more generally, if you make progress, there will be backlash. Which I figure is what this is.
Senator Cools had been at this thing a while now, too, I note.
(*/Yes, actually, the eh is still mandatory, in this particular sentence, at least.)
About 0.6 % of rape accusations are false and most of them are women that are trying to get out of a abusive relationship so the true number is maybe 0.2 or 0.3 %
you have a better chance of winning the lottery.
Someone said it on another post and it’s exactly right
Only rapists truly fear of being accused.
My grandmother told me that years ago a man a lot younger than she was, lied to people about her raping him but no one believed him and they got it all shorted out. I can’t remember the entire story but I dealt with similar things like that with boys and guess what? I still don’t hate men like these MRA misoyginist racist umm you can finish it for me, like they hate women.
Yet another Canadian jumping in here. Love all the comments, lol.
I don’t know about all of Canada, but where I live, it’s often considered polite to avoid too much eye contact and to keep body language neutral in small, enclosed spaces like elevators when you’re with strangers. Everyone does it, it’s not just a guy thing. People who take up more than their share of the limited space are kinda assholes. It has more to do with accidentally invading personal space than worries about harassment, though.
You know after lurking on this forum for so long I am still flabbergasted how truly ridiculous MRA’s can be. When Pizzey was supposedly around ‘mens groups ‘, these are probably a bunch of angry misogynistic bitter guys sitting around in a group of chairs being paranoid about everything including women and the government. It is almost as if she observed a skinhead or kkk meeting. The scary part is that supposedly there are various hateful “mens groups” all over Canada.
As a USAian I have always admired Canada as being a more compassionate country (In my opinion their healthcare is better than what we have here in the states). Also my favorite band Rush with my favorite bassist Geddy Lee is from Canada. That is why it gets me so angry when I hear of these hateful misogynistic mens group such as the so called “mens rights Edmonton”. These idiotic mens have to be exposed for what they are as hateful, bitter, and paranoid.
I
Women being afraid of the very real chance of being raped, assaulted and harassed by men = women are hysterical and weak?
Women being victimized by men while seeking educations = being granted a “special” status?
Men being supposedly “afraid” of the make believe risks of being falsely accused of those things = totes justified?
These people are either utterly divorced from reality, terribly gullible readers of the Manosphere or really dedicated liars.
Standard MRA talking points not applicable in Canada:
1. Selective service enslaves men.
2. “Made to penetrate” doesn’t count as rape and that discriminates against male victims. (There is no such thing as rape in Canadian law. It’s all covered under sexual assault.)
3. There are no DV shelters for men. (There’s at least one that I know of – established by a facility run by a woman that serves female abuse victims.)
Like all conservatives, our nasty PM is hostile to feminism and abortion but at least refuses to press the abortion issue on home soil. That doesn’t stop him from refusing to providing funding for it overseas.
I agree with Viscaria’s theory too. Nothing else explains it.
I live in a state that borders Canada. Maybe I’ll drive up to Thunder Bay this weekend and just ride in every elevator I can find. Because I’m such a total misandrist and will delight in seeing the menz cower in my evil feminist presence. Mua ha ha!!!
All these years, I thought I took the stairs because I like to make little changes like that in order to keep fit (and also because I get claustrophobic in lifts, for some reason) but no, this makes it clear. I avoid lifts for fear that a woman will accuse me of harassing her.
Because women do that! All the time! I mean, one time a woman even made a video about how terribly harassed she’d been in an elevator and pressed charges! Oh, wait, no, she mentioned it off hand in a video about other things, and said “don’t do that”… and then the internet exploded. Because, apparently, it’s unreasonable and misandrist to expect a man to be reasonable.
WWTH: I’ll be in Seattle soon, so I can go up to Vancouver and misander there!
I love this phrase because it demonstrates how little MRAs understand the “radical” in “radical feminism”. All it means is that the ideology addresses the root of patriarchy, which is gender. And so “very radical” doesn’t mean shit in this context.