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?
PSSST.
There’s a new post up I think some of you might find of interest.
I don’t know why, but the “Dean Esmay’s short tie” meme is hilarious to me. Let’s keep it!
None taken. You’re not wrong.
Ooh, do you have a citation for this? I’d love to know more.
It seems to me that thinking Pizzey made the story up is actually the LEAST crazy explanation.
I mean, finding yourself in an elevator with someone who shakes is an entirely likely situation. I have on several occasions met people (women as well as men) who shook. I have always assumed that the shaking had a medical cause, and sometimes the people confirmed that. I have never assumed that a fear of being accused of rape was the cause. It takes a special sort of lunacy to leap to that conclusion–and to think it so obviously the truth that you would use it as proof in a political argument.
Ally, when they use a word, it means whatever they want it to mean, a/k/a the Humpty Dumpty rule. In this context, ‘radical’ means ‘bad’.
Also, doesn’t Pizzey say somewhere that she knows how violent and abusive women are because of her mother? Interesting way to put it. I know some things about women because of MY mother (mostly wonderful things, btw), but it would be foolish to extrapolate widely from a single data point.
Emilygoddess
I remember reading about it but I can’t remember what the site is called but I’ll still try to find others.
Darn, now I’m torn. I like my current home, but how can I be a proper tool of the oppressive matriarchy if I live in a ranch house?
Bigots all seem to being reading from the same playbook, don’t they?
If you have come to the conclusion that women complaining of men harassing them being far too common an occurrence must really be lying to entrap and torment men and that when a woman complains of being abused, it is men who need to fear and mistrust her, you’re a misogynist.
All the facts, all the research, all the stats show that men do know what they are doing when they harass women. So do women’s experiences. When I was being harassed at work, my harasser knew exactly how to discreetly touch me and make me uncomfortable without being obvious. He knew to be more forward when women were isolated. He knew who would be afraid to tell and how to feel out our boundaries. He was so smarmy. He was practiced at harassing women and did it often. When I went to my employer, I was told to loosen up. Not only does he still have his job, I got to work in a hostile environment until I quit. That’s the norm. That’s what feminists are trying to change.
If you then go to meetings with other misogynists and they agree with you that it’s really scary that women can tell on men for harassing them and be believed, that doesn’t mean all men in that country live in fear of being accused of something by a scary woman.
I live in the US, around where the KKK is still active. If I went to their meetings, they would tell me all the ways POC scare them and how they’re the REAL victims of persecution and racism. (I’ve heard it outside of their meetings.) They have so much to say about the evils of POC and their cultures. That doesn’t mean all white people in the US agree with them or that their fears are founded in anything but their own hatred.
There are fundamentalist churches here who are very homophobic. If I sat through their meetings (and I have) they’d tell me how they live in fear of teh GAY and how they are they real victims of persecution and intolerance just because they think LGBTQ people are evil abominations who should be locked up for the safety of the children. The poor dears do not represent all straight, cispeople or all Christians, nor are they’re fears justified.
When the bigots who protest Mosques being built in the Bible Belt get together, do you know what they talk about? They talk about how scary those Muslim immigrants are and how they’re really the victims of prejudice and intolerance just because they want to keep America white and Christian, like the founding fathers intended. They’ll wave their Bibles (literally, there are pictures) to show that they won’t stand for their religion to be persecuted, while they persecute others for their religion.
Self awareness is just not something these people do well.
These MRAs are no different from other hate groups.
They also have exactly as much credibility.
Sadly, the world is also just as saturated with their sort of bigotry as any other hate group too. These attitudes aren’t just on the fringe’s. That’s what makes sites like this one so important. It holds a mirror up to misogyny and shows people just how ridiculous and hateful it really is.
When a man walks by a group of women walking together, laughing and being boisterous, he wonders if they are going to accuse him of touching them, saying nasty shit to them, threatening them and maybe even beating them, right? It’s so scary for men.
That’s what the real world is like, right MRAssholes?
It isn’t that women actually get treated that way by men and it’s women who have reasons to be afraid, right?
Any woman who says otherwise is just a lying manhater, right?
But, you’re not lying misogynists.
Yeah, I totally believe Erin Pizzey rode in an elevator with a man who was cowering in the corner because he was afraid she was going to accuse him of sexual harassment.
Sure. That’s a totally realistic thing that happens everyday. /sarcasm
If there were really a failure of due process* in harassment cases, that would be a genuine problem.
But, people complaining about how men are terrified of false accusations never seem able to point to unfair rules or laws.
Rather, it’s almost always appeals to what “everybody knows” is the case, or anecdotes.
*Which could mean different things depending on the context. Criminal and civil courts have different burdens of proof (in the US, at least), and employer policies can differ within bounds set by laws. Given the difficulty of providing physical evidence of many types of harassment, drafting a policy could be complicated.
THEN WHO WAS PHONE?
That just took the cake. <3
Sorry I can’t find it. I read that rape accusations are 2-8% and found these links
http://www.wavaw.ca/mythbusting/rape-myths/
http://www.separateddads.co.uk/being-falsely-accused-rape.html
http://thescarletwoman.tumblr.com/post/39779846566/eugene-kanins-study-of-false-rape-reports-and-why-it
I don’t know what everyone’s going on about. Erin Pizzey sounds like a perfectly cromulent scientition.
You see, unlike Erin who is “half Canadian” (because Canadian is an ethnicity), I am whole Canadian, and I can attest to the fact that all Canadian men are basically slaves. I had six men arrested just this morning for looking at me the wrong way. If a man looks at a woman in an elevator, the SWAT Mounties arrive on the scene, within seconds, by helicopter. They use a special tear gas that only affects those with the male “protect their women” gene, which is located on the W chromosome, to disarm and capture the man. He is then transported to the re-education camp, where he can’t have any Tim Horton’s coffee until he agrees to work in the Maple Syrup mines for the rest of his natural life.
Seriously… I live in a small town in Canada and there are a surprising number of people here with confederate flags on their cars. Confederate flags. In Eastern Canada. Wut?
In Canada we also suffer from universal health care.
“Seriously… I live in a small town in Canada and there are a surprising number of people here with confederate flags on their cars. Confederate flags. In Eastern Canada. Wut?”
What??
Could they be Quebec separatists who somehow see an affinity between the confederacy and Quebec?
You all haven’t been conscriped as a chair while riding an elevator? I… I thought that was normal.
Nope. Just redneck culture identification (and almost certainly racism).
And yes, I’ve seen this too in small town New Brunswick.
Perhaps Pizzey and friends got sucked into a black hole of MISANDRY left behind by an imploding feminist and discovered an alternate dimension ruled by the Gynocratic Hivemind. Totally explains where they got some of their more creative tropes.
Wut? Confederate flags in Canada? Jesus. Do they accompany them with faux-Southern accents, like some of the rural Nebraskan wanna-be “Rebels”?
Nope. Just lifted pickup trucks.
magnesium – that was beautiful. *standing ovation*
My state doesn’t so much border Canada as cower from it. We’re squashed into the furthest corner of the US, hoping Quebec won’t falsely accuse us of inappropriate touching.
Ludicrously gigantic trucks with those stupid ballsacks hanging from the hitch, Confederate accoutrements, and of course CB radio antennae: because seeking therapy for insecurity and anxiety is for pussies.
There is no enough facepalm to describe how I feel about that.
There is definitely a unique accent in this particular region, but I wouldn’t describe it as southern. The confederate flags are really confusing. I hadn’t seen them until I moved out here. My boyfriend is from this province, but he is from the city so he can’t offer an explanation for them either. Do confederate flags have any connection to country music? I could see that being a factor in their use here.
Ludicrously gigantic trucks with those stupid ballsacks hanging from the hitch, Confederate accoutrements, and of course CB radio antennae: because seeking therapy for insecurity and anxiety is for pussies.
The decal with the evilly grinning Calvin* pissing on the logo of rival purveyors of grossly fuel-inefficient (but frequently quite beautifully polished) rolling travesties is also pretty standard livery.
But yeah about redneck identification, so far as I can work out. It’s supposed to be Hick Pride, or something. The fact that yeah, that flag just might make a lot of minorities a mite queasy, it’ll be the same song and dance under the lights: it’s our culture**… Away from the lights, responses may be somewhat less bashful.
(/**Erm… Well, it’s someone’s culture, anyway. Also The South Will Bksp bksp bksp Pickerel Lake Will Rise Again!)
(*/Or some dude who looks a little like Calvin, but isn’t, since Watterson does periodically try to do something about the trademark infringement; fun possibly well-known-here comics geek fact: there is almost no approved Calvin and Hobbes merchandise; Watterson was generally very opposed to that whole end of the racket.)