What Should I Tell My Daughter? #12 About Feminism

with Janice Fiamengo

In this thought-provoking episode of What Should I Tell My Daughter, we shine a spotlight on the work of an inspiring individual, Janice Fiamengo.

She is a former tenured professor in English literature at the University of Saskatchewan and Ottawa in Canada, who has left an indelible mark on the discourse surrounding feminism, gender studies, and men's advocacy. With a career spanning decades, Fiamengo's extensive research into women's writings from the 1850s onwards and the nuanced history of feminism has provided critical insights into gender dynamics. She has authored multiple insightful books on these subjects, establishing herself as a profound voice in academia.

Join us as we explore Fiamengo's journey as both a feminist critic and men's advocate, a role she embraced since 2012. Despite her courageous advocacy, Fiamengo has faced protests and cancellations, demonstrating the intensity of the discussions her work has sparked.

We explore truisms derived from conversations with women, questioning and critically analyzing their implications. Delve into the assertion that affirmative action and easing pathways for women are ways to correct historical discrimination, and uncover the historical context behind women's limited agency. We discuss the perception that women inherently bring better leadership and are morally superior to men and also take a closer look at the idea that feminism had noble intentions.

As we navigate the complexities of raising girls with the mantra of boundless possibilities, we address the growing Red Pill community and their provocative queries about women's voting rights. Gain insights into the potential challenges and opportunities your sons might face as a result of feminist ideology.

To learn more about Janice Fiamengo's influential contributions and discover the wealth of knowledge she offers through her work, tune into "The Fiamengo File 2.0"

Fiamengo File 2.0

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Here is a transcription of the episode:

Have women really not had a voice until now? Have we been discriminated against for so long that men should step out of the way? Is that just right and wrong? Did feminism mean well but went wrong somewhere along the way? What will happen to girls when they grow up hearing, you can do anything you want. You go girl. What is the minefield waiting for our sons? What should I tell my daughter about feminism? So today I want to share the work of someone I admire a great deal, Janice Villamengo. She was a tenured professor in English literature at the University of Saskatchewan and Ottawa until retirement in 2019. She has done extensive research and work on women's writings and history of feminism. She has published several books on these issues and has spoken out as a men's advocate since 2012. She has been protested and cancelled and her YouTube series, The Fiamengo File from 2015, was permanently banned but she redid it as The Fiamengo File 2.0, The History of Feminism, which I heartily recommend that you go and check out. But she has also received very, very positive feedback and she has touched a lot of people's hearts, including my own. I started watching Janice Villamengo and my maternity leave with my first baby and back then I was still a feminist and her work made me change some very profound attitudes and changed our whole family's life for the better. So thank you for that and I'm so excited to have you with me today. Oh my goodness, Hannah, what a very nice introduction. That's very generous. Thank you. I feel really pleased. Before we dive into everything, I really want to ask you why not just enjoy a very conflict-free retirement where you could just sit and read your books and be left in peace? Well, I am thinking of doing that eventually. It's definitely very tempting and in fact, just this last week I was reading a great deal of feminist theory, radical feminism from the 1970s and then I got into intersectional feminism from the 1980s because I'm writing a course that I hope will become part of Jordan Peterson's online university called Peterson Academy. So I've been really immersing myself some in works that I've read in the past but hadn't read for 25 years and needed to refresh and a few I hadn't ever read and had always meant to. And it is, I find it depressing, the level of, it seems to me, moral blindness. Recently I was reading a memoir by a feminist named Phyllis Chesler, a fascinating book about her experience of feminism in the 1970s, which was really the big first decade of second wave feminism. And she was talking about all the acrimony amongst feminists, the backbiting, the cliques that formed, the personal betrayals, the accusations, the competition for victim status, and the number of women who developed mental illnesses, some who committed suicide or attempted suicide, some were committed to mental institutions. Many were quite miserable during this period and she admits that feminism attracted many women with mental illness at some of the luminaries of the movement, including Kate Millet and Andrea Dworkin and Shula Myth Firestone suffered from mental distress and cause distress to many other people. And yet she says that feminism isn't crazy and feminist ideas aren't crazy, but I find them quite crazy making and it's astounding to read feminist tracks expressing deep animus towards men and the desire to tear the whole of western civilization down and rebuild it allegedly in a better way. And also to admit that there has never been a feminist utopia and that often women are quite cruel to other women, to children, to men, and yet to have at the end not a recognition that women are human, just like everybody else, just like men, flawed, capable of terrible actions as well as very good actions. Not that admission, but in the end the certainty that the answer to all of these problems must be more feminism and always that with the implication that women are morally superior. I find that depressing and astounding and so I do look forward one day to not doing this anymore but I guess it is something that's really close to my heart so I want to keep on for a while longer. I'd like to write a book. I am working on a book on the history of feminist thought. Sounds very interesting. Since you already mentioned animus towards men, can we jump in there and talk a bit about what it was, because a lot of people say well they weren't all like that, it wasn't always meant to be right, feminism is good, but what are your thoughts? I was a feminist originally of course when I was doing my PhD and even in the early years of my teaching although I wouldn't have defined myself primarily as a feminist but I still was interested in gender as a category of analysis as feminists like to say. I don't think I ever thought that feminism had specifically gone wrong at a particular point but that is the myth that we hear all the time, the first wave of feminism. Those women just wanted equality and those women simply wanted to have their chance to contribute to their society which of course I believe in, I don't believe anyone should be prevented from making their contribution on the grounds of sex or race or inborn characteristic. What do you think that it started? Well I think that my argument is that unfortunately this idea that the early feminists were good-hearted women who simply wanted equality, unfortunately that isn't true. It may well have been that there were individual feminists who felt no dislike of men but the movement as a whole always was a very angry movement. It always expressed the conviction that men from the beginning of time had really done nothing other than oppress and subjugate women for their own pleasure and profit. That men hated women, that men feared women. It's right there in 1848 if you go back to what is sometimes considered the first women's convention and the first declaration of women's rights at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a series of Quaker women friends of hers penned a declaration of sentiments. Their thesis in that declaration was that the history of mankind is the history of repeated injuries and usurpation on the part of man toward women having as its object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. It goes on from there in that fervid kind of manner. It doesn't admit that men ever acted to protect women and children. It does not admit that any aspect of the building of civilization any aspect of the gender order as it developed developed naturally because of men's and women's different capabilities and roles that it developed in order to protect women and children and to provide for them or that it developed according to the basic biologically based natures of men and women it did not admit that at all and I have not found any significant statement by a feminist since that time or even earlier if you go back to 1792 Mary Walston Kraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman it also breathes the conviction that women have been oppressed and oppressed only by men always denied their natural rights always treated with contempt always treated as the other as Simone de Beauvoir declared in 1949 it's just there in every phase of the feminist movement deep anger a special loathing and repulsion for male sexuality a conviction that the family is the site of women's oppression early feminists you know back in the 1850s used phrases like sex slavery to describe the position of women in the family and in marriage in particular of course and also this conviction as I say of female moral supremacism that if women ran the world women would do a much much better job of no recognition that men have ever acted with benevolent intentions towards women it's quite something and overt calls for male extermination among feminists who are still celebrated today as leaders in the feminist movement if you take a women's studies course you may well read a widely admired writer named Valerie Solanis who wrote something called the SCUM Manifesto published in 1967 SCUM stood for the society for cutting up men and she called for women to exterminate men and she said that men were eaten up with hatred and envy of women and because they recognized that women were superior women had every right to hate men because men were inferior and brutish she said that women had a prior right to existence over men just as human beings have a prior right to existence over dogs and she said that men were such sick miserable individuals that eliminating them was a righteous and a good act and these writings are taught that's what it's based on from these women I was just recently reading Mary Daley's book Guine Ecology the metaethics of radical feminism Mary Daley was a professor of religious philosophy and theology at Boston College she was employed there for many decades before she was finally forced to retire because she wouldn't allow male students to take her upper level classes she in that book which also asserts immeasurable female superiority to men and actually advocates female separatism she thought women could only thrive if they lived completely independently of men she cites Valerie Solanis as a particularly astute and insightful commentator on the nature of maleness Valerie Solanis actually put her exterminationist views into practice she tried to murder Andy Warhol and his manager and an art critic who were with him she did actually shoot Andy Warhol a number of times with a .32 caliber pistol she shot him and he almost died he was pronounced dead at the scene but he was revised the bullets she fired into him pierced various internal organs and he had to wear a kind of like a girdle to keep his organs in place for the rest of his life he was terrified for the rest of his life as a result of this near death experience now Valerie Solanis was mentally ill when she did this but feminists have never expressed any particular concern about the direct relationship between her calls for the extermination of men and her actual extermination attempt she's been celebrated there's an admiring biography of her by a woman named Brianna Fawze she is you know taught admiringly the book The Scum Manifesto was reissued not too long ago with a very admiring introduction by a feminist professor in the United States named professor Avital Ronel so you know she's considered a heroine of the movement and I could spend the whole next hour boring you with other feminists who have also called for the reduction of the male population Sally Miller Gearhart is another one and these are not just crazed individuals in a dark corner of the internet and this is the thing that strikes me as very significant that feminists are always telling us that there's a whole bunch of misogyny out there and it's true you can find expressions of hatred of women on the dark corners of the internet but these are not celebrated individuals we do not have courses in philosophy in which Elliot Rogers crazed rantings that was the man who killed six people in Isla Vista California some years ago we do not he had a manifesto about his sad life that he put up on the internet we do not teach the ravings of his hate filled mind as interesting you know philosophical thought as we do with similar feminist ravings we do not have male professors at university going on the going on twitter to tell us how much they hate women as feminist professors often do I mean kill all men is a popular hashtag that many prominent feminist leaders are quite happy to put out there Clementine Ford an Australian feminist commented during the coronavirus epidemic that the coronavirus wasn't killing men fast enough a professor named Christine fair at Georgetown University tweeted out her desire for the deaths of all those who supported Brett Kavanaugh during the hearings the senate hearings for the supreme court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh she said that she wished death on all those who supported him and she hoped that their bodies would be desecrated their genitals mutilated and fed to pigs that's a professor at a university imagine being a young man or even just a young conservative in her classes she claims of course that she teaches everybody in a very fair manner there's another professor named Susanna Walters at Northeastern University in Boston I believe who wrote an article in the Washington Post a couple of years ago called why can't we hate men and it was perfectly serious not a satirical article talking about how women have every right to hate men and that has been a dominant strain in feminist thought from Robin Morgan and Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett right up until the present and so I find that staggering and unfortunately there is no point at which one can say up until here feminism was decent and it was just and it went wrong at this point no it was always so angry and so convinced that men are an inferior species of being that I just simply don't think it can ever be reformed so is there a pattern among these women these feminist these mothers of feminism in their personal lives you know that they have kids this hatred of men did that also show in their in their personal lives well that that is a very interesting question and I would say that no it there isn't a very clear pattern although it is true that a number of prominent feminists never had children for instance Virginia Woolf Simone de Beauvoir hated the idea of motherhood she thought it was disgusting she has a large chapter in her book the second sex about women who loathed their children particularly their sons and loathed the experience of motherhood Kate Millett didn't have children there you know there are a number of prominent feminists who consciously rejected the idea of the family they wanted to destroy the family and and they hated the idea of having children there's a very strong lesbian separatist strain within feminism as well but no I couldn't say that overall that is the case Elizabeth Katie Stanton who was the radical leader of the American women's movement from that time 1848 the Seneca Falls Convention right up until the end of the 19th century she advocated free love she advocated making divorce just a simple matter of dissolving a legal contract she thought that people should change their partners as often as they felt like it and seemed to have no concern for the children of these rapidly shifting kaleidoscopically shifting romantic liaisons she had many children and seems to have had a generally amicable relationship with her husband so I think it's difficult to say that there's you know and I think this is something that we we tend to want to look for some kind of explanation I've often had conversations with people who are exploring feminism saying that you know is it because these women had the experience of oppression what was their relationship with their father like did they get the idea that their father would have preferred to have had a son rather than a daughter and did that then generate resentment or anxiety and I have not been able to find a through line in that way I really haven't the circumstances of individual feminist leaders and feminist adherence are as different as all of the women out there and the only thing that I would say that many of them share in common is the victim mindset I think there is a kind of mindset in many women and in some men as well but I think it is maybe something that women have a greater tendency to experience which is this almost enjoyment of seeing oneself as victimized and I think it's a personality type there's been a paper published not too long ago in 2020 I think by some researchers talking about the they call it the tendency to interpersonal victimhood as a personality type not really a mental disorder or anything like that but just a way of thinking and it involves feeling that oneself is a victim and you don't necessarily have to have had any kind of trauma or experience of injustice to develop this kind of personality type but you feel that you've been particularly mistreated and you've experienced injustice you want people to recognize that and it gives you a sense of moral innocence you know you haven't done wrong to others but others have done wrong to you and then what that ends up doing that becomes the ground of your identity you ruminate on it everything is filtered through that framework and you as a result you feel more empathy towards other people who suffer in the same way so you identify strongly with others in your group who have experienced the same injustice but you have a deeply reduced empathy for anyone who is outside your group and in fact your empathy is so reduced even if you're presented with evidence that that group or individuals in that group have also suffered in different kinds of ways you don't see it you do not recognize it it's nothing comparable to the suffering you've experienced and you will begin to feel that you feel no moral responsibility to care about those others and you even begin to feel that aggression towards them even violence towards them is justified because of the terrible things that they have allegedly done to your group and I really do see that that to me is the unifying strain in feminist ideology many other ideologies as well but feminist ideology is the one that I've really looked into and I see that so strongly the inability even if presented with evidence that these men are also suffering or these individuals have experienced terrible things or have done good for you but there's that refusal to see that other person as fully human and you mentioned earlier divorce and I wanted to ask about the family breakdown that we see now what do you think that has to do with feminism or can we blame feminism for some of that yeah that's a big question I wouldn't say we could blame feminism for divorce in any one to one way but it certainly does seem that the whole structure of family law has been deeply influenced by feminist assumptions about what is old women in general you know by men by the assumption about women suffering in marriage the destruction of the family is a key tenet of much feminist thought if not the absolute destruction of the family certainly it's reordering to free women from what are seen as burdens that women solely bear whether that's the emotional labor of looking after the well-being of children and the father of the family or whether it's the unpaid labor so-called that women perform in the home there is that sense that women are uniquely burdened by family responsibilities within the home so I think that the stoking of resentment the conviction that women have always given more than men in every sphere of human society but especially in the family I do think that plays a huge role in the fact that I mean how else can you really explain the fact that marriage is dissolved in cases where a divorce is sought it's 75% women who are initiating the divorces and I think that the sense of resentment and grievance the conviction that one is owed something that does come from feminism and of course in material terms feminism has had its effect on family law in that we now live in a situation where a man can find himself essentially unilaterally divorced he doesn't want the marriage to end he may be quite happy to have it keep going or he wants to work on the relationship but he finds himself divorced he finds himself ejected from the family home still forced to pay the mortgage on that home which he's now no longer allowed to enter unable to see the children that he still is forced to pay for and forced under penalty of going to prison and we don't know how many men are in prison now because of non-payment of child support and alimony forced to pay for a woman that he will never perhaps see again and who doesn't care for him or look after him in any way it's certainly a system that favors women heavily and is an incentive I think you could even say to dissolving marriages in cases where the woman simply has grown tired of a husband and I think you know all of us of course understand why laws are created to protect women and children from abuse but we have now defined abuse so elastically that nearly any behavior on the part of the man in the family can be seen as psychological or financial abuse and you know and we're so concerned and we have allowed that concern to overturn due process of law and the presumption of innocence so that all it takes if a woman decides she wants to have nothing more to do with her ex husband and she doesn't even want him involved in her children's lives anymore all she has to do is make an allegation of some sort if she says that he has ever threatened her and the children if she says that she suspects he sexually abused one of their children if she says he physically abused her or her children there doesn't have to be any evidence there is no due process for him he is not presumed innocent her word alone can result in that man being barred from seeing his children perhaps for the rest of his life or certainly for a serious number of years you know it's a terrible problem it certainly makes the institution of marriage very very fragile indeed right but what I always hear is that if these no-fault divorce laws they were created to save women out of very abusive relationships marriages where they were stuck that was a net positive thing how abused how much were they suffering before well this is it's difficult to determine that because of course we may hear about certain cases we don't know how general those types of cases were the idea that women were the property of their husbands and had absolutely no rights within marriage is a common feminist myth and it's actually quite difficult it's difficult to find books that actually lay out the specific laws that governed marriage over the centuries when they changed in my research I have certainly found that feminist reformers were active throughout the 19th century and were taken very seriously by all male governments in changing laws in order to protect women's rights their right to own property their rights in divorce their rights in child custody settlements and so it simply isn't true that that male politicians and men in general didn't care about women's well-being in marriage men always had in marriage a primary responsibility to take care of women's you know to take care of them financially even if the woman left the husband he was still responsible for her he was responsible for all her debts many men went to debtors prisons because they couldn't pay their wife's debts in the 19th century and earlier so the idea that women bore the entire burden of marriage is simply not true many men bore a terrible burden as well and there's a fascinating book on this subject by a man named Ernest Belfort-Bachs he's actually written two books and many articles on the position of men in 19th century British society he was a barrister he saw many many many legal cases involving husbands and wives and accusations of one against the other and he wrote a book he was also a journalist and he wrote a book in 1896 called The Legal Subjection of Men it was a response to a book by I'm forgetting his name right now I've just had a mind-length but it was a response to a book called The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill which was published in 1869 in which John Stuart Mill argued that women were unjustly barred from many areas of society and that they should be granted many more rights and freedoms so Bachs was responding to Mill and his argument was that in fact yes there was a bias in law but it wasn't as everybody seemed to believe a bias against women he believed that there was a bias in law against men both within marriage and in the society generally and it is a really really fascinating book he talks about how many women had they were exempt from many laws they weren't prosecuted for many types of crimes that men were prosecuted for he talked about the fact that if a woman killed her husband she would very rarely be convicted of murder because the man's character would immediately be put on trial he would be depicted as an abusive person who actually deserved to die because of the terrible things he had done to the woman and he made the point that in reverse if a man murdered his wife there would never be any case of his claiming that he murdered her because she was abusive to him he made the point that a man who was physically abusive to his wife she would be divorced he would be paying her alimony for the rest of her life if a woman was physically abusive to her husband there was no there was nothing the man could do about it even if she set him on fire or drove over him in her carriage he could go to the police he would likely be laughed at she might be fined and he would have to pay the fine because of course he was responsible for her debts you know so he goes through and he talks about the fact that at every stage of the legal process the woman was treated with far more generosity empathy and pity than any man had to do with whether she was charged in the first place whether she would be convicted of the crime you know how she would be represented in court what what kind of sentence she would receive how she would be treated in prison all those types of things so the inability to take seriously women's criminality women's violence women's propensity for cruelty or dishonesty the inability to take that very seriously he claimed was a primary feature of 19th century British society and western society in general and it seems I would argue that that is still the case today so our belief that there was this time in the relatively recent past when women were harshly treated and that now you know things have changed somewhat for the better no I think it's true at least if Bax is telling the truth and he was a barrister nobody has come forward to say he was lying in his book he wrote a later book by the way called the fraud of feminism published in 1913 elaborating on some of the same ideas the greater empathy that we tend to have for women has been a feature of western societies for some centuries at least and I think feminism capitalized on that and it exacerbates it there's a study by a woman named Sonia Starr who is a professor of criminology that came out in 2012 I believe and she did an extensive study of what she called gender disparities criminal sentencing and she found the exact same thing that Bax argued was the case a century earlier that women received sentences for the same crimes if you sort of try to work out a crime with the same degree of violence involved the same degree of forethought the same degree of malice she found that women received sentences that were on average 63% less harsh than those that men received and she said again all through women are far less likely to be charged if charged they're far less likely to be convicted than men if convicted they're far more likely to have a suspended sentence which they serve in the community rather than serve time in jail they're far more likely to be exonerated they're far more likely to have their criminal conviction overturned at every stage of the legal process there's that greater empathy that was across the western world or in the US well she was looking at the US but it's certainly true in Canada as well from all the research that I've done and I suspect it's true in the western world but I couldn't say for sure but the fact that men are 95% of the prison population that is quite astounding and again we see the internal contradictions in general feminist thinking on a subject like this if you ask a feminist why are most Nobel prizes awarded to men they all say well it's because there's gender bias that's why it's not because men have done more great things that deserve the Nobel prizes just clear gender bias but if you say to them why are there more men in prison that's because more men commit crime so sometimes there's gender bias when it's a case that a woman wants to point out that women have been discriminated against but sometimes it's just a case of men do bad things and when men do bad things it's because men do bad things men are bad when women do bad things it's because women are victims of men the hypocrisy I find that so startling if you put into a Google search attempts to keep women out of prison you'll find all sorts of articles and programs I found some in the United Kingdom certainly in Canada and the United States saying that we should try to keep women out of prison why? well because when women commit crime it's usually because they they were abused as children they were led into their life of crime by a man in some way they were influenced to do what they did because of a man or they were abused by the man so they were reacting in response to that they had childhoods or their youth was one of deprivation or addiction or mental illness and ok I agree probably that is the case in at least many instances but it's also true for men men usually don't just decide one day hey I'm going to become a criminal some do I'm sure but most also had childhoods of deprivation most also suffer from mental illness addiction, stress all sorts of problems in their lives that led them to become criminal violent fathers or violent mothers indeed or they were fatherless so again it's this lack of empathy on men and just in general that is how our society is and was in earlier times so women are taken less seriously in some cases but that also means they're taken more seriously in other cases yes or it's sometimes it's nice when you're taken less seriously in the sense that your criminality, your capacity for violence is taken less seriously I was reading some accounts of infanticide in the 19th century and one article I was reading by a social policy professor at the University of Belfast named Pauline Pryor she had found in her study of 19th century criminality that it was estimated that up to 61% of homicides were of persons under one year old and the vast majority were committed those homicides were committed by women and we know that women are the predominant killers of babies and very few of those were convicted in the 19th century very few were even pursued it was quite common that the dead bodies of children would be found in towns and villages it was a common crime and all male juries simply found it difficult to convict the often rather pathetic women who were brought forward in the rare cases where they were actually charged with the crime because they felt sorry for the women and often not always but often they had the children outside of marriage so the men felt sorry for them they felt seduced and deceived and abandoned sometimes they had been but married women killed their children as well and in those cases the defense was a defense of temporary insanity so far more often women would be sent to a mental health institution where they would spend a few years and then they would return to society in some cases they were able to marry and live quite well after the crimes that they had committed and there was just that general unwillingness to see women as we have trouble as a society today and obviously in the past we have trouble taking that aspect of women seriously their capacity for violence and sometimes that's very nice for the women this idea that women weren't taken seriously to some extent it's true there's an interesting book by a man named Tim Goldich called Loving Men Respecting Women and he makes the point that in general sorry the subtitle of that was the future of gender politics so loving men respecting women and he says in general throughout society men get respect but they don't get love women get love but maybe they don't get respect and his point is that then women have in feminism or maybe just in general society they have looked and they have seen that and they look with eagle eyes and they see the advantages of men including that respect and they see only the disadvantages of women but they don't see their power as women and they don't see the struggles that men experience and that's really the fundamental problem with the feminist world view is that that is all it sees and you know if you take a case like the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 were women not taken seriously during that sinking clearly they were taken very seriously the survival rate for women was about 75% of all the women on board whereas the survival rate for men was about 20% so one in five men survived the sinking and three out of four women it would have been even much higher except that the third class women the women who were down in the steerage compartments just simply didn't have a chance to escape because those compartments were flooded almost immediately once the iceberg sliced through the hull of the Titanic a first class and second class women who were on the upper levels their survival rate was around 85% to 90% the policy on board the ship was that women and children were the first ones to go into those lifeboats because women and children's lives matter in a different way and that men that was part of male privilege was also that responsibility to sacrifice for women and children and to die if necessary and many upper class men there were incredibly wealthy men on board that ship JJ Astor one of the richest men in the world Benjamin Guggenheim names that we still recognize today Strauss the owner of Macy's department store those men went to their deaths because they were men and that was the code of chivalry so it's hard to see how that was an example of men hating women or having contempt for them or not respecting them very few feminists on board that ship although this was the time 1912 was a time of deep agitation about the right to vote women were the suffragettes in England were setting off bombs and burning country houses to the ground and smashing shop windows because of their agitation for the right to vote and so one of the slogans that came out of the sinking of the Titanic was votes or votes the idea being you can have votes and you can be equal or you can get the life votes in these kinds of tragic situations and the general life vote that patriarchy has created for women in western societies you can't have both you have to think seriously about what equality means would the women have got the vote without the suffragette movement well that's a good question I did want to just finish that by saying there were very few women who chose to stay behind I don't blame them for that but there was one Ida Strauss the wife of the Strauss who I can't remember his first name right now it might have been Isidore the Macy's department owner she chose to die with her husband very few women made that choice and I am not blaming them it's hard to moralize about a catastrophe like that I'm sure all of us would prefer to live in a society where nobody has to prove their worthiness by dying but only men have ever been asked to do that only men have been asked to prove their worthiness and their dignity as men by dying as men are repeatedly asked to do at times of war and during tragedies we always hear about if there's a mass shooting there's always cases where men will throw themselves onto the bodies of women in order to take the bullets so that the women will be protected I've never heard of a case where a woman throws herself on the body of a man in order to take a bullet it's even ridiculous to say that in a way because that's just how we are that is how we are wired I've talked to men who said it's not that every man on board the Titanic wanted to die I'm sure some desperately wanted to get into those life boats and they couldn't, employees of the ship actually had pistols in hand to prevent men from getting on the life boats until they've been filled by women and children it was a law of the sea and many men perhaps went to their deaths feeling horror others it seems went to their deaths feeling that this was the right thing to do Benjamin Guggenheim sent a message through one of the women who survived to his wife who was in New York City saying I am doing my duty by dying I'm doing the thing that I know I must do and there isn't a lot of men that deep need to protect and provide for women and children women are evolutionarily programmed to protect ourselves that's how we ensure the survival of the race because women protect themselves and therefore ensure the survival of the children we have self-sacrifice towards our children that's a very good point yes, if you put into Google man dies saving you'll find all sorts of cases of men dying saving just perfect strangers they'll see somebody in a river drowning the man will dive in without a second thought and he may himself die to try to save that person women will die saving their own children and that is the woman's particular form of self-sacrifice so I'm not saying women are bad people it's just that we are it seems we are hardwired very differently and we just generally I think men feel moved by female distress in a way that women do not feel moved by male distress in fact there's some evidence to suggest that women are repulsed by male distress and that's another one of the factors I think that has contributed to our present moment it's contributed both to the success of feminism because when women said hey, we are suffering we need to be heard a lot of men listened if men hadn't been interested in women or if men had actually hated women or objectified them or had contempt for them then none of the feminist movement would ever have got off the ground and so now to come back to your question about the suffragettes that's a fascinating question only the suffragettes in the United Kingdom got into the kind of level of violence and criminality that they did and not all suffrage supporting women were violent there was a huge split in the movement in fact the vast majority of women who were advocating women's suffrage did not believe that you should smash shop windows and set off bombs and put sulfuric acid and phosphorus into letter boxes so that when the male postal workers many of whom themselves did not have the right to vote when they opened up a letter bag would combust when it mixed with the oxygen I mean they did terrible things so I think there's a very strong argument to be made that that hysteria actually probably maybe contributed to slowing the process of women achieving the right to vote it certainly didn't do anything to hasten it I mean this is a fascinating question really in the 19th century it was generally thought that the right to vote was a privilege that came with certain responsibilities and one of the obvious responsibilities was that suffrage activists were often asked about this the idea that the ballot was a substitute bullet in the sense that politics was war by other means and if politics broke down men would have to shoulder the responsibility of putting their lives on the line whether it was civil war or war with another country if politics had not been successful at resolving problems men would have to go to war and risk their lives so to introduce into that system voters who would never have that same responsibility was actually to introduce a fundamental incoherence into the system so you would have voters voting for things that might bring the country to the brink of civil war or war with another country and they would never have to bear that responsibility in their own persons so it was thought that voting was a privilege that came with that responsibility now that all in the first world war might have actually confirmed that idea hundreds of thousands of men died in the trenches of Europe or were hideously named and to imagine that a woman who didn't have the right to vote was somehow equally imperiled equally hurt by that was just a non-starter and yet women did get the right to vote right after the first world war it's likely that the vote would have been extended to them eventually the 19th century was a period of democratic reform generally so property and income qualifications that had limited men's right to vote right up until that point that's the thing that almost nobody knows is that many of the young men who died didn't have the right to vote well many of them were too young to vote but many of the men because a 40% of British men I don't know what percent of American men the United States had income and property qualifications as well so many of those men who went off to war didn't have the right to vote either and we have this idea that there was a period of centuries when all men voted and made the laws and women didn't have any rights in that sphere at all and it just wasn't the case it was a much shorter period of time when the franchise was progressively extended to more and more men and women did have the right to vote at local levels it was always understood that women would be involved in their communities they would do charity work they voted in school board elections and the idea that women weren't taken seriously that their contributions didn't matter that's simply not true either as I found when I was doing my research on women writers women were involved in the public sphere as moral leaders as poets and novelists and journalists one of the women that I studied Sarah Jeanette Duncan became a journalist in the early 1880s she published in many newspapers she worked for the Washington Post at one point and as a very young woman she said that the 1880s was a golden age for girls full of new possibilities 1880s what I hear often is that women didn't have a voice until now I know they have to step out of the way to sort of make, that's just righting a wrong yes exactly and it just isn't true they did have voices they spoke out on many of the major issues of their day and were centrally involved whether that was the abolition of slavery a lot of women who became feminists had been involved in the movement for the abolition of slavery in the 1830s and 1840s they spoke out about all sorts of issues, public schooling especially issues having to do with children and the importance of clean milk and clean water they spoke out on issues of cruelty to animals they were very involved in the temperance movement which was involved in prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol women had many, many public roles and so to imagine that they were voiceless as we hear so often women didn't have a voice oh they did indeed and many people argued that the fact that women didn't have the right to vote didn't in any way lessen their power in fact there's a fascinating book by a man named Brian Harrison about opposition to the right to vote and a lot of women were involved in the anti-suffrage movement more women did not want women to have the right to vote than wanted women to have the right to vote which is a fascinating issue on its own and there were all sorts of anti-suffrage societies in the 19th century well they said they believed fundamentally that women and men had separate spheres of influence and power and that to have women begin to be involved directly in politics was a mistake they felt that men and women operated best when they controlled their separate sphere and there were basic concerns about how many women were actually interested enough in politics to cast an intelligent vote and again women did vote in local elections and school board elections and things that they were especially interested in and there was a concern that that women would vote would vote emotionally and would tend to vote for would prefer safety over individual liberty would vote to make government larger would vote for schemes that would involve the necessary increase in taxation because it would increase the role of government it would increase busy body politicians involvement in people's lives a lot of the things that people say today were being said in that period as well it was a very interesting debate and some people said that the fact that women didn't have the vote didn't mean they didn't have political power there were all sorts of reform movements in the 19th century about women's increased access to higher education about rights in marriage about rights in divorce about women's health initiatives and Harrison points out there wasn't a single major reform movement that women were involved in there wasn't a single one that didn't pass even with an all male parliament and many people argued that the fact that women weren't directly involved in politics they didn't have party loyalties that actually meant that they could come forward as a non-partisan voice and that that gave them greater moral authority and authenticity than they would otherwise have and also I think a lot of women felt that the women who were agitating for the vote were women who didn't like men that it really wasn't even about the vote it was about animosity towards men that it would cause a wedge a dividing wedge between the sexes and that it was better to imagine that better to insist that male voters had to vote on behalf of their entire family and community rather than to pit women and men against one another as many anti-suffragists were worried would happen and it's hard to argue that that hasn't happened and even now like if you do polls of men and women most women are still not very interested in politics they tend when they read newspapers or we don't have newspapers so much anymore but read news online there's a 20 to 30 point gap between men's interest in national and international politics and in economic affairs and that kind of thing women tend to be more interested in human interest stories narratives rather than the hard facts that one could argue are necessary to make an informed choice at the polling booth since we are on the voting now there's this red pill community that's come out now and there is a backlash and so for example this character Andrew Tate he's representing some of these views and they're voicing loudly should women have the vote is there any limitations to anti-feminism what are your thoughts around this community and what they stand for I'm not intimately familiar with all of the various websites where red pill discussions go on in general I like the idea of the red pill which of course comes from the movie The Matrix if you take the red pill all of a sudden you see what you hadn't seen before you see truths that have been hidden you see that society doesn't necessarily function in the way you've been promised functions and for young men especially it's the idea that what you're taught in school and what the media tells you about your being a man and what you owe to others and your privilege as a man allegedly that all those things are false and that you need to do your own research and look with your own eyes and to recognize that in fact we live in a society that sees men as disposable and that is quite willing to use men's labor and men's inventiveness and men's tax money and exploit men and in fact quite harshly punish them in some situations so to that extent I think it's a movement that I support very strongly I do think that I'm amazed actually that men have taken what has happened to them for so long so mildly even just on the subject of affirmative action which you touched on with women being owed these things and needing a helping hand because they've been held back for so long what a strange idea that men living today who never discriminated against any person weren't responsible for any laws from the past or any practices in the past that may or may not have discriminated against women that they should have to pay in their own lives to advantage women I mean it's a bizarre ideology of collective vengeance essentially collective retribution against people who are not themselves guilty of anything yet have to bear in their own persons the reputed sins of their forefathers I find that astounding it doesn't make sense to me I don't know how I am disadvantaged as a woman because 80 years ago a woman was paid less than a man or because 150 years ago I didn't have the right to vote or whatever the particular fact of discrimination may or may not be so I find that whole idea just bizarre and this is a subject really close to my heart because I was hired essentially on an equity ticket in 1999 when I went on the job market after I had my PhD and I did a postdoc fellowship I was shortlisted for two positions at the University of Saskatchewan where I did get the job and at another university and I was part of all female short lists in both cases and I knew that the men that highly talented dedicated ambitious men that I had gone to school with were at a disadvantage and I realized then and I since researched it that's been going on for decades it was made illegal to discriminate against women in employment in the late 1960s and affirmative action practices were brought in in the early 1970s they've been going on for all that time generation after generation of men have had to recognize that their career ambitions are limited as a result of legalized discrimination against them as men especially as white men wow I mean I find that staggering it's so many patients they just know they'll never be promoted because there are women next to them that is a recipe for ill will obviously deep resentment and anger totally justified on the part of those men how society can adapt to the draining away of talent the ignoring of marriage the promoting of people into positions not because they earned it but because of their identity category I mean it's terrible and it's also I think as a terrible disservice to women we don't do women any what's the word? who wants to be that kind of hire who wants to be promoted simply for an accident of birth I have had to live with that knowing that I think I was good but I can never know for sure that I was actually the best once I was hired at the University of Saskatchewan my department was involved in a series of hires over the next four years that I taught there then I went to the University of Ottawa and affirmative action was practiced in every case we called it equity hiring because affirmative action I think was tainted by then already but it was the same thing it meant that you were looking to hire somebody from one of the designated groups person of color, woman, person with disability all ended up being women in that case and the men who applied for those positions were never told don't bother but that was essentially it no matter how talented how well qualified we were bound and determined we were going to pursue our equity initiatives and we didn't even admit it to ourselves like the level of dishonesty throughout small companies, larger companies corporations, government contractors universities certainly we would never have admitted that men didn't have a chance but they didn't they were wasting their time applying there they would be put into a separate pile and some excuse would be made why this incredibly talented man with two books published with esteemed university presses while his resume was less impressive than a woman with one article published on an obscure subject make up excuses about how oh yeah she's doing really cutting edge work whereas his is more standard or you know she brings something to the department that he doesn't it wasn't even true once you have decided that you are going to fulfill this unimpeachable social purpose you can make up any reason to do so and yeah I was just staggered by the injustice so the fact that there is now a reaction and sometimes an angry and an ugly reaction I don't even think it's too affirmative action I think it's mainly to the problem of marriage a lot of men are now feeling that they don't even marriage has become so dangerous for men and also so difficult to attain a lot of men still want to get married that's the thing I'm always struck by is that a lot of men that's what they want they want to meet somebody love her marry her have children with her provide for her that's what they want but they don't feel like they can do it and it's too dangerous because at any point she can say I'm done with this and you're never going to see me and your children again and they're going to pay for maybe the rest of their lives for the family that they don't even have anymore and that's not even to count the possibility of a false allegation of abuse something that can just destroy them absolutely and it gets so terrifying for them and so they feel bitter and I don't blame them I hear that but I think as a mother I want I don't want that bitterness for my sons just as I don't want my daughter to grow up with that kind of bitterness towards men I want them both happy and settled in a marriage and to that effect I want them to be able to maneuver there's a mind field that my sons will meet maybe you could give some tips to how you can diffuse it how you can help them if they step on a mine yeah I mean that's the hardest to say how do you counter a society wide type of bigotry that tells young men from the time they're boys that there's something wrong with them and that their sisters are morally superior that they should take a step back and have their sisters go forward because their sisters are going to do so much better at leading their societies into the future and all of the strangeness about any kind of romantic sexual interaction you have to have affirmative consent for everything you can hurt a woman even just by looking at her even just by patting her on the shoulder or giving her a hug or just staring at her for a few seconds all of those are now defined as forms of potential sexual harassment or even sexual assault yeah I think I don't have very good advice to give except that you talk about those things and I would definitely want to tell boys and young men that it needs to be emphasized that this idea that because of alleged abuse in the past that they have to somehow pay for that whether it's just being ashamed apologizing for their maleness we're not taking jobs, not taking promotions etc like that is wrong collective punishment is wrong it's led to the very worst of outcomes throughout human history and I would really want to emphasize that that is wrong, no person should have to pay for the imputed sins of their forefathers and how can I help them spot the women who haven't been influenced by this feminist ideology how can I sort of guide them because there are those and I don't think I think many women aren't conscious of these attitudes even that they really do believe that they've been disadvantaged and they wouldn't consider themselves feminists but no, that's the worrisome thing because even those who have maybe never read a feminist tract it's in popular culture now it's everywhere that sense that women are old and it's a terrible, it's a moral hazard I think for young women that the sense of entitlement when we talk about entitlement and privilege when we talk about young men but I think it's really women who are falling victim to that and it's a terrible thing I think for one's character it's, yeah, it's I guess I would just encourage I would encourage boys and young men to really strongly believe that they matter as individuals and that anyone who, any female person who makes them feel that somehow they're not owed the same level of respect or compassion or claim to dignity that anybody who suggests that to them is a red flag I think that would be the main thing I would say because I do think a lot of boys now are going up feeling that they don't matter very much, they're being taught by teachers who literally believe in some cases that they don't matter as much or who believe they're so privileged in the outside world that all the attention should go to helping the girls and the girls only here you couldn't do anything you want from my own experience you just encouragement all the way, 100%, no matter what one day you're going to become a mother and then things are going to change for you that was never something that I heard or one day you're going to want to do things for your husband to further the family that was never encouraging and supporting a husband was never something I was taught what do you think that does to girls? I think it's dangerous because it does contribute to a kind of selfishness and then I think ultimately to a deep disappointment when one realizes that some wonderful life opportunities that most women have throughout history taken great satisfaction and delight in having such as the opportunity to care and support one's family those opportunities are lost and yes, it's very worrisome and I remember and just meanness too those are things that damage your own spirit too because I remember a father telling me that his little boy at age six one day came home and said that on the playground a girl had come up to his son and had said, I can hit you but you can't hit me and it's like, yeah, that's true and that's true at that age and it's true in relationships and that it's that's not a good thing for either the girl or the boy well it's particularly not good for the girl I think and I have a friend who uses the metaphor that in any relationship now between a man and a woman the woman has a metaphorical loaded gun in her bedside table and she knows that she can use that gun with impunity and he can't and even if neither person ever is going to activate that reality even if the woman is not even going to threaten to use the gun the gun could be an allegation or whatever it happens to be could be physical violence that the man can't respond to just knowing that it's there and that there is that radical inequality from the law and before public opinion that radical inequality damages the potential for really healthy trusting relationships and that's sad for both sexes so I guess all we can do is hope that more and more women and men are going to reject the damaging ideology and I think it is starting I do think Pearl Davis just pearly things supposedly the female Andrew Tate I don't know how many young women are in her audience she has a huge audience I don't know if it's primarily young men I just see her alienating a lot of women because we're the ones who talk to our kids and we need to focus on the next generation using that sort of rhetoric saying that there's God and there's men and there's women I don't think I would help my sons if I told them that they listen to these figures and they turn hateful we need more confidence you are so amazing to speak on these issues that it's very sort of based on reason and facts I think just the idea of mutual recognition and respect my sense I'm hopeful I could have a romantic idea because I've spent so much time talking to anti-feminist men and my sense of anti-feminist men is that they are ready to lay down the weapons they are ready to end the gender war and just go forward into the future as equals recognizing that men and women girls and boys are different and working out how those differences are going to manifest in a society where everybody's going to make some sacrifices and everybody hopefully is going to have their needs met so I'm hopeful I think that even boys who are angry and who are turning off, they are ready to be one back and they're not very interested I don't know any young men who are interested in being dominating and being misogynistic or anything like that they are ready to have happy functioning relationships with women, whether as friends or as lovers a lot of them, as I say, do want to get married and have children and provide for their families I think if we can win some women and there are women out there living a life of resentment and loneliness in some cases and powering yourself with your victim mentality that that is not the best way to go I snapped out of it, so I hope that other people will because I realized that it was just not true that is not the story of men men have not simply been interested in oppressing women so I do hope that more women will put themselves especially in young men's shoes and realize that it is wrong to try to pass on that sense of guilt yeah that's very nicely put, thank you so much