The rise of radical feminism, the connection of the personal/political, the female role in the cycle of violence, being born into domestic violence, opposing anti-male feminism and breaking the generational history of violence. Stefan Molyneux speaks with domestic violence advocate, activist and hero Erin Pizzey.
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| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| I'm here with Aaron Pizzi. | |
| we are going to be speaking together at two conferences, which I wanted to mention just before we start, the Toronto Domestic Violence Symposium, June 6th to 7th, which is at the University of Toronto, torontodv.com, International Conference on Men's Issues, June 26th to 28th, 2014, Detroit, Michigan, June 26th to 28th, 2014, Detroit, Michigan, a voice for men.com. | |
| Thank you so much for taking the time today, Aaron. | |
| Oh, it's a real pleasure because most people don't realize my mother was a Canadian. | |
| She went to Toronto University. | |
| I lived in Toronto as a child. | |
| I went to Moulton College. | |
| Is that right? | |
| I guess I would be one of those people who didn't know that, so thank you for letting me know. | |
| Now, you were actually born in China, is that correct? | |
| That's correct, yes. | |
| I was born in Tsingtao with my twin sister, and then we moved to Shanghai. | |
| I was born in 1939, so about 1940. | |
| Now, the bombs were already falling then. | |
| The Japanese had taken over. | |
| But at that point, Germany hadn't joined up with Germany. | |
| So we were just living that old colonial life. | |
| My mother did only two things in her life, lose her temper and play bridge. | |
| So she was at her best there. | |
| And she wouldn't leave. | |
| Other mothers left with their children, but she wouldn't stop partying. | |
| So what happened is we were suddenly, when the whole thing changed, under house arrest. | |
| And all our friends and our little friends went into the concentration camps and we were on the last boat out of China because my father was a diplomat and we were exchanged for hostages. | |
| That's really how we ended up in Beirut with my mother because she had a Canadian passport. | |
| And we'd briefly joined my father in Beirut and then she came to Toronto. | |
| But it was a very unhappy time for me because she was very violent and particularly to me. | |
| And I remember going to Moulton College to school. | |
| She'd whip me with an ironing cord and I was standing in front of the teacher and she could see my legs were covered in welts with dried blood. | |
| And I said to her, this is what my mother did to me. | |
| Will you help me? | |
| And she said, well, no wonder you're such a dreadful child. | |
| Oh, my goodness. | |
| But that, you see, that was the problem in those days. | |
| Nobody ever admitted anything to do with domestic violence. | |
| Well, I think it was in the 50s when doctors began to first suspect that children who came in with concussions and contusions and lacerations and broken bones, that it might not actually be the endless series of fake accidents that the parents pretended were occurring. | |
| That's quite right. | |
| But the fact is that all stayed within the medical field. | |
| It never got out to the general public. | |
| So in a way, everybody knew and all the agencies knew, but nobody did anything about it. | |
| Until in nineteen seventy one, I had opened a little community center for mothers and kids. | |
| The first woman came in and took off her jersey and she was black and blue to the waist. | |
| And I took her home that night because I did know what she was talking about. | |
| And then from then on, that was the first in the world of its kind. | |
| And from then on, women and children poured in. | |
| But I knew, and I was the only person, because there was no literature you could find about adult domestic violence. | |
| But of course, I was very open-minded because both my parents were violent. | |
| Both were equally dysfunctional. | |
| So as far as I was concerned, it was a family issue. | |
| It was a human issue. | |
| And so almost immediately after I opened the home for the mothers and kids, I opened one for men in North London, which I couldn't keep going because the millionaires who'd give me money for children and my mothers wouldn't give me a penny for men. | |
| And of course, that's true of 43 or so years later. | |
| It's still the same. | |
| There's virtually nothing in terms of refuge for men. | |
| But there needs to be. | |
| This is something I've talked about in this show quite a bit, which is... | |
| It's remarkable how little feedback occurs in the shows that I do where I talk about women's role in the cycle of violence. | |
| And it shocks me, and it still does deeply shock me, that society is unwilling to even discuss violence. | |
| Women's role in the cycle of violence somehow it's like if you say well women are part of the cycle of violence Somehow people believe you're demonizing women and excusing men and so on which I don't find to be the case at all But it is remarkable the degree to which it's simply something which you can't talk about and it seems to me that that's very much against the idea of equality for women, right? | |
| I mean I was always sort of raised to say well treat women as equal to men it's like okay well then if they're committing crimes against children which they are on a regular basis and Not all, of course, then we should hold them accountable and work to find ways to deal with and remediate that issue. | |
| But boy, it's like this whole white knight phalanx comes up around blackened women's hearts to defend them from any moral responsibility, which I find is treating women like children. | |
| Well, you have to go back to the beginning. | |
| And recently I wrote a book called This Way to the Revolution. | |
| It's the story of the setting up of the first shelter in the world and then what happened subsequently. | |
| Now, for the first few years, I built a therapeutic community because I realized that where a parent can't parent, because they too have been brought up in violence, there needs to be a therapeutic intervention. | |
| When you have a child that's come in, As an example, his father was a murderer. | |
| He murdered another child when he was 13. | |
| He strangled the child. | |
| And everybody was terrified of Peter except for me. | |
| And I talked to Peter. | |
| He'd been let out of prison. | |
| He'd been in prison since he was little. | |
| But when you know that his mother was a prostitute and beat him, she then abandoned him and his father sodomized him regularly, which is why at 13 he was in the children's home. | |
| Who do we put in the dock? | |
| Where does it stop? | |
| That generational violence has probably gone on for four or five generations. | |
| I've always said what we need is family therapy. | |
| And indeed, I changed the name from Women's Aid to Family Rescue. | |
| And this is what we haven't done. | |
| A few years later, The emerging feminist movement was called Women's Liberation in those days. | |
| They had a meeting in Washington after they'd all come back from fighting in the South against segregation. | |
| And the women there decided to turn on the men in their lives, the left-wing men. | |
| They said, we will no longer fight global capitalism. | |
| We will now rename this the patriarchy. | |
| This is how this was born. | |
| And with that, that meant that they had access to all women everywhere. | |
| Men were the enemy. | |
| And all of a sudden, those of us who were following desperately this idea of a new movement, which we understood was equality for women, was actually a sham. | |
| And that we were all paying our money into joining the women's liberation movement. | |
| Then we were told to have groups in our houses. | |
| And then we were told that we would have consciousness raising sessions. | |
| Now, I know exactly where we're going because my father and mother were captured in Tin Sin in 49 under a house arrest by the communists. | |
| So my father was an expert on how it worked. | |
| And it was interesting because as far as I was concerned, when the first meeting in my house called the Goldfork Road Group, this head honcho came down and told me that my isolation with children and the wish to do something, to join with other women, was not my problem. | |
| My problem was my husband. | |
| He was my oppressor. | |
| And I remember laughing and saying, well, I'm living enormously comfortably. | |
| He's paying the mortgage, so I have the luxury to stay at home. | |
| She said, well, yes, but what you don't realize is that you have a mink-lined cage. | |
| And I looked at it and I thought, I know, I just thought, I was there in the very early days, and I knew quite a lot of the people who were the leading lights in this. | |
| I would say the majority of them, that mantra that we were given, the personal is the political. | |
| If your father is a bastard and is violent, then all men are bastards and violence. | |
| That's really what went behind it. | |
| And they used to pick at me regularly when I spoke anywhere, and the banners would actually say, all men are rapists, all men are bastards. | |
| And I had to have a police escort for a book I wrote called Prone to Violence, which is a study of my therapeutic program. | |
| But in 1974, There was a small conference given by us to help other groups, but unbeknown to us, they had all been organizing, and a lot of them were American, and they voted themselves into a national organization that would be feminist, and that men would not be able to work in any of the refuges, and boys over the age of 9 to 12 would not be admitted. | |
| And that's the situation now, 43 years later. | |
| Well, and you faced significant danger in this. | |
| But before we get to that, your book that came out in the 70s, which I think sparked a lot of the controversy, which was the degree to which in conversations with women, you found that women were not always... | |
| The sort of stereotypical Victorian victims of non-reciprocal male violence. | |
| I said from the beginning, of the first hundred women that came into the refuge, and we all did questionnaires together going back three generations, I said 62 of those hundred women were as violent, or in some cases more violent than the men they left, and that most domestic violence is consensual. | |
| Both couples are violence prone. | |
| And I said the real victims, like me, We had no choice. | |
| At least my mother and father chose each other for whatever their bad needs. | |
| But children have no choice. | |
| You're born and marinated in violence. | |
| And a high percentage of you will continue the pattern. | |
| And if the power imbalance is considered to be the most egregious element to add to domestic abuse, then even if we accept that there's a power imbalance between the male and the female, like the husband and the wife, the power imbalance between parent and child is infinitely greater. | |
| And so to me at least when either parent, but again I focus on women because that's not part of the conversation as yet, But when parents abuse children, they are exercising in human relations the greatest power disparity that is possible, because children have no economic independence, no legal independence, they have no particular place to go, whereas women who are abused have all of those things. | |
| And talking about power imbalance with regards to mothers and children in particular, again, is one of these absolutely taboo topics still within society, which, again, I sort of wandered into it thinking, well, this can't be that controversial, it's so obvious. | |
| But my naivety made me a bit more outspoken than I might have otherwise been. | |
| I've since learned better. | |
| Well, it's sad because it can't silence us. | |
| I mean, that's my big argument. | |
| And the argument also is For me, the majority of people who are violent in interpersonal relationships mostly have some form of personality disorder, and you cannot leave. | |
| Somebody like my mother, who is a classic narcissistic exhibitionist, shouldn't have been left anywhere near children. | |
| She had a hair-trigger temper, and unless she was the center of attention, she was very dangerous, particularly to me, because I looked like my father. | |
| One of the things, my argument along all these years has been don't take away children from mothers. | |
| Take the mothers in and mother the mothers so they can mother the children, learn to mother the children. | |
| And that's what I did. | |
| I had long-term accommodation, shared accommodation, and women stayed with me for two or three years till it was time for them to be rehoused. | |
| By that time, they had learned all the things they needed to do to be able to enjoy their children and to have a future with their children. | |
| And of course, nobody would listen. | |
| And now what happens if a woman gets involved in a violent relationship, the social workers say to her, if you don't give this man up, we're taking the children into care. | |
| Or if she's what they call an unfit mother, they take the children into care. | |
| Care, in many cases, is even worse than the family. | |
| And also, the mothers replace the children. | |
| So you double and treble the problem as the years go on. | |
| It's a madness. | |
| The main point of all this is, at some point, we have to offer family rescue, family therapy, as an antidote to violent childhoods. | |
| Not this idea that you simply take women into refuges, you tell them they're victims, they're not responsible for their choices, and you let them loose and they just re-addict themselves to some other violent relationship. | |
| Well, and I think one of the things that has happened is that with private charity, the private donors tend to look for long-term results because they can put their money anywhere. | |
| When the public money begins to flow in, in a sense, there's less incentive to solve the problem in the long term because if the problem is solved and the public money dries up. | |
| And so I think that there's, and again, it's not that the people doing it are in any way malevolent or conscious of this, but I think there is this issue where With the public money flowing, the revolution, in a sense, can never end because then the money dries up and people have to find something else to do with their time or other ways to earn their money. | |
| Partly that, but of course it's also a billion dollar enterprise now. | |
| And the problem, and I've always said this, and it does bother me, is that for many of the shelters in America and across the Western world, these are the bunkers where you can actually brainwash fragile women. | |
| Into whatever you want to brainwash them into. | |
| And the reason why there has never been any research done on any of these refuges in any part of the Western world. | |
| There are no outcomes. | |
| There's nothing. | |
| It's just a fenced off discussion where if anybody tries to have this honest discussion, as you've already experienced, they're screamed at and picketed and threatened. | |
| And my feeling is that It's conferences like this, which is going to be about the family and domestic violence. | |
| It's not one way or the other. | |
| But we do have to look at radical feminism because in my time, I'm 75 now, I was there in those great big It is one of the great tragedies of the 20th century, | |
| the degree to which When leftism, and look, I'm not a rightist, so I'm another species completely, but when leftism tends to infiltrate civil movements or social movements, they almost inevitably bring with them the demonization of some particular group, whether it's class or bourgeoisie or Jews or men or something. | |
| There is this demonization aspect and this sort of feral hatred that emerges, which I think really impedes any long-term productive problem-solving. | |
| Well, I think that's absolutely right. | |
| And I suppose the genius of those early women was working out that if they condemned the other half of the human race, they would have access to unlimited sums of money, which is actually what's happened. | |
| And they can't be questioned. | |
| And the thing that interests me is majority of people in power across the Western world don't argue because they know it's women who vote. | |
| And this is behind an awful lot of why nobody speaks up. | |
| It's not as though I'm saying something that people in the street don't understand. | |
| They do. | |
| People in the street know it's family violence. | |
| They know that mothers and fathers can be violent. | |
| But the fact is that the people in power, it's more important to stay in power than it is to come out and tell the truth. | |
| So some of the dangers that you faced in the 70s, and I also know that you recently won a libel case against a British publisher, which, good for you. | |
| But talk a little bit, if you don't mind, about some of the threats that you faced in the 70s that did cause you, I think, quite wisely as well to flee the country. | |
| Well, it got to where I couldn't go anywhere without being picketed and screamed at and threatening phone calls. | |
| Because I was standing with this new movement And trying to bar them from recruiting vast sums of money and also misinforming the public. | |
| To me, it was fraud. | |
| Because I could see, and the work that I was doing proved beyond all shadow of doubt that it was a family issue and it's a generational issue. | |
| And suddenly up comes this new concept, which it is all men. | |
| The idea of the patriarchy being responsible for violence across the board by all men doesn't make any actual rational sense. | |
| But then you have to remember this isn't a rational movement. | |
| It's a movement to empower women to actually essentially become as grossly aggressive as they like against men in general. | |
| And from the very beginning, I was a totally lone voice. | |
| I think the final thing that broke it for me After a lot of threats, the police said to me, if any parcel or letter parcel comes into your home and it doesn't have a proper stamp on it, I don't mean a postage stamp, a post office stamp, please call us. | |
| And actually, it was my daughter. | |
| Who was living, who was there, and she called me at the refuge and said, look, a parcel's coming. | |
| It's a little parcel and it hasn't got the right stamps on it. | |
| So I put it out on the back of the garden. | |
| So I rang the police and then drove home to my house. | |
| By the time, shortly after I arrived, in came the bomb squad. | |
| And they're a terrifying sight because they're all dressed up and covered with huge gloves. | |
| And so I had two little grandchildren who was looking there, absolutely terrified. | |
| And we watched him go out to the back of the garden and retrieve the package. | |
| And he came back in. | |
| And actually, it wasn't a bomb at all. | |
| It was just something that hadn't been stamped, which you got through. | |
| But I just remember at that point thinking, this is enough. | |
| I can't put my family through any more of this. | |
| And then I packed up, sold everything, and we went to Santa Fe, New Mexico. | |
| Right. | |
| So at least there was a little less rain. | |
| I guess that's the only upside from fleeing. | |
| Yeah, but you know, funny, that was because we were living on a big, because I had the grandchildren, we had to be near a school. | |
| So I was living on this estate of about probably a thousand houses with an acre each. | |
| And it didn't take long. | |
| And it's interesting, this is where I really began to work with men. | |
| Because so many men on that estate were actually victims of very violent women. | |
| And that didn't take long to make me very, very unpopular. | |
| I think the dog shooting incident I don't think was feminist. | |
| I think it was because I was, along with all the other things that people were coming to me, it was a lot to do with pedophiles and pedophile rings in Santa Fe. | |
| Because at that point there were only two DAs and Santa Fe was a real Wild West town. | |
| And that's where I think that came in. | |
| And for those who don't know, and again, it's terrifying stuff, what was the incident with the dog? | |
| Well, what happened is it was Christmas Eve, and Nunu, who was the sort of, he was slightly brain damaged. | |
| He was a big, lovely, smiley dog. | |
| And suddenly, he came, he must have been shot on my property, because he came running in, and I could, and he was, his claw, the paw was curled under, and he was just shaking and crying. | |
| And then I found him and held him and realized that he had been shot in the paw, and we took him to the vet. | |
| And, and, That's where I began to feel the time was running out and we needed to move somewhere safer. | |
| One of the problems with all this is standing up and being a lone voice and fighting huge vested interests. | |
| It's a very dangerous business and you've got to know what you're doing. | |
| Even as recently as it had probably been 1998, I was with Senator Ann Cools, and we were in Vancouver to speak. | |
| And police were all over the place when we arrived there, because we'd been threatened with a bomb by a local radical lesbian group. | |
| But it's been much, much less Violent now than it used to be, possibly because the money that there was required to build this huge empire is rolling in, and they have no interest in actually asking anybody to ask any questions. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, look, I wanted to say, not on behalf of anyone, but just, you know, human being to human being, I'm incredibly sorry for the amount of aggression. | |
| Obviously, as a child that you experienced, it's absolutely horrifying. | |
| But it is very difficult when you see the cure for some of the greatest human evils. | |
| And I've made the case, and others have made the case, that if we can deal with violence against children, the number of human evils that will fall away are incalculable, and it will be a life- and planet-saving event. | |
| And we cannot deal with aggression against children without dealing with women's capacity for violence. | |
| To some degree, we've dealt with males' capacity for violence, and this is well understood within society. | |
| I think it's a bit exaggerated at times, but it's part of the public discourse, even though it's obviously distorted at times. | |
| And I mean, your heroism is astonishing. | |
| Your commitment to A more peaceful world, your commitment to establishing moral responsibility for all adults and your compassion, of course, for those who've even initiated violence against children and others is incredible. | |
| I just really wanted to give you my sympathy and my intense admiration for the strength. | |
| I know this is an uncomfortable thing because you're British and I'm British, or at least grew up in England, so compliments are like, oh yes, well... | |
| No, I actually don't feel it. | |
| I feel if, and this is what happened when the children were older in the refuge and could understand, and we'd have sessions with the children and the mother, if anybody could have sat me down and said, did you know that your mother was viciously beaten by her stepmother? | |
| No, I didn't, not until it was much too late. | |
| No, I didn't, because families don't talk about family violence. | |
| It's all very secret. | |
| But, I mean, once I understood, and I suppose part of what I did in working specifically with violent women and finding refuges that would take non-violent women was because I knew The kind of work that needed to be done with the women who were already violent, had been prostituted, had been sexually abused, I knew what needed to be done. | |
| And those were the women that were closest to my heart. | |
| Because in a way, I endlessly rehabilitate my mother. | |
| Do you think that there's anything in particular, and you know, I always ask these questions and I sound like I'm some sort of determinist, which I'm not, but It always fascinates me and I think it's a huge, huge question. | |
| Do you think there's anything in particular that helped you to overcome This repetition of violence that helped you to be able to handle the insights about female violence that you had, which so many other people simply don't seem to have the capacity to do. | |
| Do you think there's some extra third eye that can observe the world and yourself? | |
| I think it's very simple. | |
| I think when I was four and a half, I had a vision. | |
| And it was a strange experience. | |
| But about that time, I realized my mother couldn't stand me. | |
| She really couldn't bear me anywhere near her. | |
| But this vision came with such a comfort, I knew I was loved beyond all human reason. | |
| And then when I was nine and we went to a holiday home because my parents were then in China, Miss Williams came into my life. | |
| And this is where I believe so totally in mentors. | |
| I took one look at this huge woman. | |
| She must have been about 25 stone. | |
| And she was six foot seven. | |
| She'd driven ambulances in the war. | |
| She was a golf champion. | |
| She was the local magistrate. | |
| And she was the most powerful person with a huge compassion and ability to love all 40 of us. | |
| And she was my mentor. | |
| In my refuge, immediately, the first bit of money I had, I hired a man to come and work with us. | |
| And thereafter, Good, gentle men as volunteers and staff came and worked with us for years and years and years. | |
| And I love it because the memories of the children are very largely of the men who played with them, who were part of the play staff, who nurtured them. | |
| And that's why we desperately need men in shelters. | |
| But they're not allowed because they're the enemy, which is to me tragic. | |
| Well, and of course, in any other sphere, if a woman was married to a black man who beat her and then there was a group who said, well, now we're not going to allow any black men near any women, that would be considered horribly racist and would be condemned from every conceivable sphere. | |
| But sexism against men is like physics. | |
| You don't even really question it. | |
| It just is. | |
| I find it amazing because in 1982 when Prone to Violence was published and I had to have a police escort outside the Savoy where I was at a luncheon, the pickets all arrived, many, many women with these big banners saying all men are rapists and bastards and I went down to the police and I just said to them exactly what you said, | |
| if that was Jews or black men you'd arrest them all but because it's all men And he just looked at me and he laughed and he said, we're frightened of them. | |
| No, you're not. | |
| You just think it's funny. | |
| And men, I'm afraid, it's only just recently that men across the board are waking up. | |
| For a long time, they're intimidated. | |
| Well, and what are your views, I guess, after a lifetime of activism? | |
| I know this is tough to compress into a relatively short conversation, but where do you think that The movement to heal families, the movement to bring more moral responsibility to women, the movement to really work with the facts of domestic violence. | |
| How do you think that's going and where do you think it is since when you began? | |
| It's pretty much nowhere. | |
| There are individuals in the field. | |
| But my hope is that I come back to Canada, which is half of who I am, and I'm going to this conference on the 6th and the 7th of June. | |
| And I don't know the details yet exactly, but I will be there. | |
| And I hope this is the beginning, because then again, as you said, we will both be at the conference in Detroit. | |
| And this has to be the beginning of a dialogue. | |
| And I've said this so many times, that men and women working together can protect the next generation of children. | |
| If we can protect the next generation of children, then we can empty prisons and we can empty mental hospitals, because everybody knows that it's in prison where you see those children when they've grown up. | |
| A huge percentage are children from exactly my sort of background. | |
| And if this Williams hadn't, I was an incredibly dangerous child. | |
| That's why I wrote Infernal Child. | |
| It's a story of what it's like to be completely out of control. | |
| They couldn't school me. | |
| They couldn't do anything with me. | |
| I was just dangerous till I met Miss Williams. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, and it doesn't actually take an enormous amount of mentoring to help a child to turn around. | |
| It's not like you have to invest 10 years of your life. | |
| For certain children at least, if you have the example, in other words, if you have an example of A more peaceful approach to human relations, some children will really just grab at that, like a drowning man at a barrel, and will say, wow, I had no idea even that this way of being was possible, and they'll just drive that way forward. | |
| That's not true for all children, but it certainly sounds like it was the case for you. | |
| Yeah, and I used to say to the mothers, You only have one strategy for survival, and that's the boot and the fist, because that is how you were programmed. | |
| But I'm going to teach you other strategies for survival, and that's what we did, and with the children. | |
| And it's lovely now because many of the children contact me on Facebook, and I know so many of them. | |
| It's very obvious the ones that came in younger have the best chance. | |
| When they were much older, it was much harder. | |
| And the other thing I say, which is the saddest thing to say, the girls were so much more resilient than the boys. | |
| I would expect when proper research is done into all these families, you will find that boys, particularly when their mothers are violent, are far more damaged. | |
| That's why you see so many more men in prisons than you do women. | |
| I think that the fragility of boys is one of the great unspoken realities of society. | |
| Because, of course, girls are these tender flowers that need to be protected and nurtured, but boys are considered to be sort of wild animals that will domesticate themselves. | |
| And this doesn't, in my experience at least, is not the case at all, where boys are very fragile. | |
| I think you find, I agree with that. | |
| And I also think that for a boy, It's interesting how the girls would come into the refuge, and yes, they were damaged, and yes, they had strategies that were going to do them no good long term, including finding the violent repercussions in the family drama exciting and finding it very hard to deal with normal everyday life. | |
| But I think for the boys, where the mothers rejected them, and of course, as you know, boys under one and most likely to be murdered, not girls, and the figures go on up. | |
| And that's why I suppose I didn't only have children in the refuge, I brought up a lot of children in my own home with my children. | |
| I just could feel the fragility of them. | |
| And in a sense, I suppose, I grew up with more boys than girls, you see, because the holiday home, most of the girls were abroad with the parents. | |
| They sent their sons to boarding schools. | |
| So I grew up with a lot of boys. | |
| I had a deep understanding of what male is, which has been airbrushed out now. | |
| Because essentially, the whole feminist ideology is that you feminize men, because once you've turned them into women, they will no longer be these ravening brutes. | |
| Actually, that's not true at all. | |
| All you do is create completely confused males, which is what we have, and an inability to make relationships. | |
| Well, and if someone were to suggest that you take a homosexual man and consciousness raise him into being straight, this would rightly be considered homophobic and wrong. | |
| But you can take a man and try and turn him into, like men are considered, or boys are considered broken girls. | |
| And therefore, you just need to fix them by feminizing them. | |
| But that, of course, is because the gold standard of human interaction for a lot of people is... | |
| Girls because because female violence is obscured from society and therefore if women and girls are considered nonviolent then if you make men blah blah blah right I mean it's it's madness and it's it's absolutely anti-empirical and one of the things I think is tragic but in particular about some of the more extreme feminists when they're talking about men as a whole anybody with any knowledge of human psychology knows that they're really talking about Their own fathers or the males in their lives, which they're then extrapolating to men as a whole. | |
| Because if you have a loving relationship with a man, you simply can't hold a sign saying that men are bastards and rapists and so on. | |
| No. | |
| And in fact, those aren't the women that are the radical feminists. | |
| The radical feminists are largely very deeply damaged women. | |
| I remember going to Ms. | |
| Magazine when the first time I'd come across to the Eastern Seaboard and I was helping to set up refuges before I realized how political it was there. | |
| And I just remember looking at all these women and there was this great, you know, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, which was Gloria Steinem's logo apparently, and thinking there's something seriously wrong with all you women. | |
| And there was an atmosphere of, I was wearing makeup. | |
| That was a crime in those days. | |
| I always remember the early days when we were told that anything Even to wear makeup or to use deodorant. | |
| That was anti-feminism. | |
| I used to say, do you mean to tell me that you think it's political to smell? | |
| That's when you learn they have no sense of humor. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, I'm certainly looking forward to meeting you face to face. | |
| And I'm certainly looking forward to hearing you talk at the conference. | |
| I really do want to thank you for the conversation this morning. | |
| I wish we could talk longer. | |
| Well, we will. | |
| Yeah, we will. | |
| And we will, of course, for the video and for the audio, we'll include links to websites and books. | |
| And you're an elegant and witty and compassionate writer. | |
| And, you know, just from a It's a pleasure, Stefan. | |
| Thank you. |