April 8, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:38
3254 Why I Am Not A Feminist | Janice Fiamengo and Stefan Molyneux
Janice Fiamengo joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the true origin of feminism, the rise of victim culture, the invasion of college campuses by social justice warriors, false rape accusations, sexuality without commitment, the myth of gender as a social construct and the lure of moral nihilism. Dr. Janice Fiamengo is a Professor at the University of Ottawa and is host of the popular “Fiamengo File” YouTube Series.The Fiamengo File: Season 1 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHt1Hh27h4Bs3gYpWa5qAu_kOChBKDIawThe Fiamengo File: Season 2https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHt1Hh27h4Bu6rS8AKAYrMEoIY3rqbO8rFor more from Dr. Fiamengo, go to: https://twitter.com/janicefiamengo and http://www.studiobrule.comFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Very, very pleased to have Dr.
Janice Fiamengo.
She is a professor at the University of Ottawa and hosts the popular Fiamengo File.
It's a YouTube series which details the dangers of modern feminism, censorship, and gender bias.
Dr.
Fiamengo, thank you for taking the time today.
Well, thank you very much for having me on your show.
All right, so...
101, the introduction.
Like, just pretend we're fresh-faced, maybe with a few pimples, out of high school.
We're coming into your class on questions about feminism.
What is it that you'd like to say to begin with?
Because, of course, a lot of people think that feminism is sort of pro-equality for women.
And if you say you're anti-feminism, people think you're anti-equality, which I obviously don't agree with.
But what is it that you'd like to say to people to get this conversation started?
Yeah, well I guess I would say to begin with that there are many varieties of meanings that people associate with feminism and lots of people do mean that they are pro-equality, but that feminism as an ideology, if it was ever about equality between men and women, which The more I read about even the origins of the first wave feminist movement in the 19th century, the more I doubt that was ever true.
But certainly some of its proponents did work for certain kinds of justice for women.
But certainly in its 20th century form, It's not about equality.
It's about special privileges, special accommodations for women because they are asserted to be victims.
And it's about penalizing men in various ways because they are men and therefore seem to be oppressors or at least privileged, the recipients of undue privilege.
The more I have delved into the meaning of feminism and its effects, the more I feel that it's actually a very corrupting ideology and that it really has no place at all in the university.
And I'd like to see its place in society generally minimized too, but especially in the university.
And of course, one of the great traditions of philosophy, and certainly of Western philosophy, is the focus on reason and evidence and the subjugation of emotion to empiricism.
One of the things that drives me kind of nuts about feminism is what a sort of fainting couch Cliché of women it turns into because it's like, I'm upset.
I'm upset.
Therefore, you must change your opinions.
And that just seems so retro.
I mean, the women I know generally are pretty tough and pretty strong and willing to surrender to evidence, whatever their opinions happen to be.
There's just this weird, almost 18th century cliché about this sort of smelling salts emotionality that goes on with feminism that drives me a little batty.
Yeah, it drives me crazy too.
And it's as if Feminism has taken the worst of patriarchal so-called ideas about women and made them a kind of sacred ideology.
Women are, according to the feminist worldview, both superior to men in that they are more moral, More collectivist in their orientations, more naturally suited to nurturing and caring for people, all of these kinds of things.
But at the same time, They're also perceived to be in need of constant protection, so vulnerable, supposedly so entirely conditioned by their society to be victims that they must be eternally compensated for a kind of socialization that they claim women are generally powerless to resist.
And it is at its heart A completely irrational sort of movement, and it really has come down to now what it itself says it is about.
It's about believing women, no matter what they say, no matter how self-contradictory and obviously deceitful and obviously harmful what they're saying is, both to themselves and to women, and punishing men simply when they don't believe women.
It's not a recipe for any kind of society I would want to live in, and it's certainly not a recipe for the pursuit of truth, which is what universities are supposed to be about.
Right.
And the traditional sort of Western values in law and in ethics, innocent until proven guilty.
The burden of proof lies upon the accuser and the standard, particularly in criminal cases, of beyond a reasonable doubt is like more than 90 to 95 percent.
I mean, it's not civil, which is sort of 51.
So this presumption of innocence, the burden of proof being on the accuser, and false accusations of a crime being themselves a serious crime all seem to be...
Obviously, nobody likes false accusations, particularly of sexual assault, because then the genuine accusers get mixed in with the bad apples.
So it seemed to me that if you were really into helping women, then you would definitely want sanctions against women who had accused falsely.
But it seems to just vanish.
Like with John Gomeshi recently, he was found not guilty of the first round of charges.
And the general sighing from the feminist camp seemed to be, well, that just means the system is broken and needs to be fixed so that evidence doesn't matter.
And it's like, what?
How many people gave their lives for a just legal system throughout the centuries?
Are we gonna throw that out?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's quite startling.
I would have thought that maybe The Gomeshi trial might be the occasion for a really serious conversation amongst women's groups about what it means to be a sexually liberated woman in the 21st century.
What it means to take full responsibility for your sexual agency as a woman.
You know, the revelations of what those women, those complainants were involved with.
Their pursuit of Gomeshi after he supposedly assaulted them.
Their claims that they were just trying to normalize even as they sent him sexy and provocative messages and tried to get back with him and all that sort of thing.
I did find them quite disturbing.
And in some way, maybe one could say that those women are victims.
Victims of their own romantic ideology, perhaps, or victims of their hunger to be with a powerful man.
I don't know what.
But there is something to be discussed there.
But to turn that into an occasion for even more aggressive attacks on our legal system, even more aggressive attacks on the presumption of innocence and how sexual assault complaints are handled, Yeah, it's stunning to me.
And what I find most disturbing about that whole trial, I read the judge's decision, and at first I was really pleased and relieved.
I thought there had been a serious pushback to the feminist narrative.
Sorry, I've got my cat now coming up on me.
He always wants to come in whenever there's a camera.
His hair is even better than mine.
I thought that there had been a serious pushback to the whole feminist narrative of the woman as victim, who must be believed, for whom the trial process itself is a kind of re-victimization and other rape and all that sort of thing.
But actually, I'm sure you've read the decision very carefully, too.
I was really dismayed by the decision in that the judge And I'm not sure whether this is just this is the way judges tend to write their decisions.
I don't have a legal mind.
I don't have any legal training.
So I'm just speaking off the cuff.
But the judge, to me, seemed to actually accept the feminist narrative to a large extent, bending over backwards.
Maybe this was, you know, to avoid certain kinds of attacks or make the judgment A more secure one in some way.
But bent over backwards to say, it's true that we can't judge women's credibility on the basis of their behavior.
So even though someone sends flowers To the man she claims assaulted her, you know, at the end of the weekend.
That doesn't necessarily tell us anything about whether she was really assaulted or not.
And the judge really went out of his way to make it clear that what he was focusing on were the evident omissions and lies, the fabrications, the self-contradictions, etc.
So Gomeshi was acquitted on that basis, but not on the basis, it seemed to me, of the behavior of the complainants.
And the whole question of consent seems to now have completely disappeared.
Consent doesn't matter how many times the woman said yes, how many times she enthusiastically declared that she loved what happened and she wanted to do it again and again and again.
If she later decides, even 10 years, 15 years later, that what happened to her was assault, then we have to accept her word.
In this case, I think if Meshi hadn't had those emails from those women, and even more, if the women hadn't lied about their behavior, I'm not sure what would have happened.
Well, he would have been convicted if he hadn't had those emails.
But I really feel now that what has been established as a precedent is that a woman must not withhold anything.
But at the same time, we must not judge her behavior.
So if there is another complainant out there who can come forward and say, yeah, I pursued him afterwards for years too, I sent him flowers as well, you know, I did all this stuff, and I'm not lying about it now.
I don't know what a future judge will do, aware of, you know, the feminist ire that he is likely to provoke if he questions that behavior.
I'm afraid that a future judge Is going to feel compelled to convict because that complainant didn't lie.
So that seems to have become the only out that a man has now, if it can be proved that his complainant lies about him.
Other than that, no matter what she does, no matter how many times she tells him she loved him and wants to continue, it can still be found to be assault.
That's a very crude, you know, sort of summation of what I got out of that Well, and this is a terrifying precedent in law as a whole.
Again, I'm no lawyer, but common sense would sort of dictate that the he-said-she stuff can never rise above the burden of proof necessary for a criminal conviction.
Now, of course, If there's evidence of assault, if there's bruises, if there's tearing, if there's, you know, then clearly, right?
I mean, violence was involved and that conviction should proceed apace.
But it has been known for literally thousands of years that what occurs in bedrooms where there's no physical evidence...
of any kind of abuse can never rise to the standard of beyond a reasonable doubt.
And therefore, society used to structure relations of unmarried men and women.
So recognizing this basic fact that he said, she said, can't ever prove anything, they used to structure relations so that I think?
And then they face this problem that remorse or regret or a woman scorned or a man scorned for that matter, that whatever happens, there's no proof of anything.
And this is why I think the feminists have to say, well, women must be believed and men must be dismissed no matter what.
And then they have to nerve to talk about male privilege.
Yeah, I mean, two things about that.
One is that, of course, all of that, that the feminist insistence on believing women is now being translated into the way sexual assault and even sexual harassment allegations are being adjudicated on university campuses all across North America, and that's incredibly important.
That men are being thrown out of school and having their career aspirations destroyed forever, simply on the basis of the preponderance of evidence model, where, you know, the panel that's adjudicating the case,
none of whom have any legal training anyway, and are many of them feminist ideologues, The panel simply has to figure that it's more likely than not that what she claims happened is usually she.
What she claims happened really did happen, and that's incredible to me.
I can hardly believe that Anyone could go ahead with that, and yet it seems to be being, there is some pushback, but it's being enthusiastically embraced by universities, certainly my university, all across North America.
The other thing is that, you know, in a weird way, yeah, feminism has created, as you said really, I'm just echoing what you said, feminism has created this situation in a way by insisting to young women that to be a cool girl, you should, you know, and And to be real in some way.
You should be just like a guy and, you know, be enthusiastic about sex.
There's no morality anymore.
You jump into bed with whoever takes your fancy.
And there seems to be no conversation about the fact that that actually doesn't work for a lot of young women or older women.
And again, I don't know, I'm not an expert on evolutionary psychology or anything like that, but it just seems that Women do have different needs in regards to sexual intimacy and that they do end up more often than men.
Although I've had young men say, you know, look, I felt really used to, you know, so maybe this is a sexist generalization I'm making.
But it seems a lot of young women feel bad after those kinds of encounters.
And it's feminism that has encouraged that kind of attitude and popular culture as well.
And then when they end up feeling bad, then they're told that actually what you experienced was not just, you know, meaningless sex that makes you feel like your body was used as an object, but was actually assault.
And so they're encouraged then to lodge these complaints.
And so it's a vicious circle that feminism has wrought.
Yeah, I mean, if women want to act like men, there's not a lot of men pressing rape charges for sex they regret.
So perhaps that could also be the case.
Evolutionarily speaking, of course, this is almost too obvious to say, of course, but the investment of energy and resources required for the results of sexuality for a woman, 20 years of raising a child or more, is much greater than it is for a man.
And therefore, of course, the old bargain used to be That I will give you sex in return for a commitment because the results of sex were children and without the man's commitment the children would not likely survive and certainly wouldn't flourish in most environments.
And so this idea that, you know, there's this old thing, you know, if you want to prevent pregnancy just use a quarter, put it between your knees.
Keep your knees together.
And so this idea that sexuality would be handed out prior to commitment, I think what happens is it does go against the way that women have evolved, which again, you know, there's a bell curve, there's lots of exceptions to it, but I think there's a generality.
And they've done this, these studies where a handsome guy goes into a bar, a hotel bar, and offers, you know, free sex to women at the bar, and they all say no, right?
Almost all.
Whereas if an attractive woman goes into a bar and offers free sex upstairs to guys, they basically start taking their pants off at the bar.
It's the way it is.
It's a wild and exciting force of jigsaw puzzle sexuality that has, I think, just been completely smashed up with all of this, we're all the same ideology.
Yeah, the whole idea that gender and even heterosexuality itself is a sexual construct that can be remade according to feminist dictates.
It just clearly doesn't work that way, and yet instead of recognizing that, feminists just double down and want to put more laws in place so that it's, well, they have now created a situation in which if I were a young man, I wouldn't want to get involved with any woman on a university campus.
It is way too dangerous because, you know, at any time, The woman can make a false charge against him.
I mean, it's not even just, of course, if you're sexually involved, just even staring at a woman, you know, or anything, offering her compliments that made her feel uncomfortable, asking her out on a date, and not realizing when she said, oh, I'm busy that day, that that meant, you know, go away.
And then you ask her again, and now suddenly, you know, she can say that you're stalking her, and therefore the man is forced to...
Stay away from her or whatever and has this shadow cast over his character.
The more you read about these cases, it's just a terrifying world that we're creating.
And in the, as you point, well, these university tribunals, I mean, are Soviet in nature.
This is like something out of the Gulag Apikalago, because in a lot of these places, you're not even allowed to have legal counsel to step you through it.
So you have a star chamber of people who are ideologically driven, judging you and possibly destroying your future.
And you're not even allowed a voice or a legal protection.
It is shocking that somebody who is a shoplifter has far greater legal rights than somebody accused of a sexual assault or a rape.
This is truly astounding.
And it is creating a little totalitarian vortex right in the heart of higher education across North America.
Yeah, I mean, I've read cases where Not only was the young man not allowed to have a lawyer present or not allowed to consult a lawyer beforehand, but he didn't even know the nature of the charges against him.
He just has to go in to meet this committee, knowing that somebody from his past has made various allegations against him.
So he's not even able to prepare, you know, any kind of defense for himself.
What can we say?
A friend of mine says, I have to stop being surprised every time.
I have to stop being so flabbergasted that these things continue to go on, but I can't somehow stop myself.
And there is an air of unreality to some of these allegations and their aftermath.
So the woman whose pseudonym I think was Jackie, who was part of the Rolling Stone allegation of, I guess, serial rape by some frat boys at the University of Virginia, I think it was.
So now, of course, there are all these lawsuits and she's supposed to be deposed.
And there was a big fight.
because her lawyer said, well, you can't depose her because then she'll have to re-experience the trauma of what happened when according to every single conceivable shred of evidence, nothing happened.
Nothing happened at all.
And if she's so traumatized, why would she talk to a reporter in the first place?
Yeah.
And this is level of unreality.
Like, I don't want to talk about something that never happened because it's traumatic.
I mean, this has become Kafkaesque.
Yeah, it really has.
And yet, many very intelligent people are seemingly intelligent.
I can only think that this ideology, it must be a kind of mental illness that allows people to still continue to operate in the world with some appearance, some semblance of Of reason, and yet their thinking is so profoundly disordered.
Yeah, in the tangled psyche of young people, yeah, there is definitely unreason, and a lot of us take great satisfaction in seeing ourselves as victims, seeing ourselves as not responsible for anything bad that ever happens,
believing that we are uniquely innocent, but for For legal minds and for academics and for administrators, you know, for all of those people, many of them, to go along and to actually give credence to these ideas and to seem to believe themselves and to think that our entire justice system, the whole way we structure relations in society, should be changed according to these fantastical claims.
You know, what do you say about it?
Yeah, I think there's very little objectivity, rationality, and almost no biology in the entire equation at the moment in sort of the more radical feminist elements.
And I think that this is conditioning the whole debate.
It's not about reason and evidence anymore.
It is about avoiding...
The swords, knives and pitchforks and torches of the rampaging horde of politically correct social justice warriors who have basically two particular methods is that they slander you and they attack the source of your income.
They'll try and get you fired.
They'll try and tell...
Terrible things about you to anyone they can find and there's very little redress available these days.
So I don't think that anyone...
It's like race in the US. There's very little empirical or objective data that's going on.
It is really just Go get the guy over there.
Don't get me.
You know, you hope that the zombie horde of pitchfork-wielding lunatics passes you by and goes and eats someone else.
And I think when you have this level of verbal abuse, of career destruction, of economic attack going on in any particular field, I would consider it kind – it's like trying to have a rational debate about communism versus capitalism in Joseph Stalin's inner circle.
I mean, it's not going to go very well, to put it mildly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's true.
And so you can certainly understand why many people just choose to keep their heads down.
And when they see that someone is being attacked, they're relieved.
Mainly that it's not them, as you say.
Yeah and it's not pleasant.
Most people just want to live their lives and do their jobs and you know I'm like that too.
I don't like having arguments with people.
I don't like people calling me names or spreading rumors about me or anything.
But still I have to feel that there is like the level of cowardice In our society does still astound me because it isn't quite, you know, the Soviet Union.
You can't be hauled off to jail.
In some cases, people are fired.
Yes, I can see that.
But in the academic environment where I spend most of my time, There really are very few material consequences.
There are some, and they're significant, if you go against the SJW narrative.
It's true, especially if you're early on in your career, you're not going to get invited to the conferences, you're not going to get invited to contribute to the books that, you know, will help you establish your career and that sort of thing.
So yeah, you can be materially harmed to a certain extent, but once you've got tenure in the academic environment, if you happen to be in that stream, You're pretty safe.
And you can speak the truth and you could get yourself in trouble.
You can say what you really believe about things.
Go against the reigning narrative.
They can't actually hurt you that much.
And yet, what I witnessed in my careers both at the University of Saskatchewan where I first worked and now at the University of Ottawa, so many people They just can't bear the thought of losing a friend or having, you know, of losing...
I don't know if you ever read it.
There's an essay by C.S. Lewis called The Inner Ring.
Just a brilliant essay, which is kind of comforting in the sense that it reminds us that what we are experiencing now is not all that unusual, really.
And, you know, he wrote it whenever, I don't know exactly, 1940s.
And...
We all want to be in those inner rings.
We want to be part of those inner circles.
We want to be in the know.
And we just can't bear the thought of losing that.
Where are the cool kids at?
I want to be there.
Who's eating at the lunch table with the cool kids?
I mean, it is like high school.
And the frustrating thing, of course, about tenure was its original plan was to make sure that people with divergent opinions, to put it mildly, wouldn't get fired.
Yeah.
But of course, what it means now is that people with divergent opinions will never get hired because you can't ever get rid of them.
And this adds to this kind of conformity.
But I think, you know, on looking at your videos, it's fair to say, perhaps, that you were kind of an infiltrator.
In other words, you were educated in third wave feminism as an undergraduate.
And, you know, like most people whose elders are lecturing at them from giant podiums, you're like, yeah, OK, makes sense to me.
And so early on in your career, it would have been interesting if you had come to these conclusions as an undergraduate where your career may have ended up.
But I wonder if you could help people understand that sort of transition for you from ideologue to reasonable and curious human being.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, that says that I could talk about this forever, really.
And I haven't worked out all the different strands.
So you'll have to stop me if I go on too long.
But yeah, I mean, it's true that if I had become myself at age 26, when I was working on my PhD, and I had tried to get a job...
You know, a few years later and had made it clear who I was, I wouldn't have got a job.
There's absolutely no way.
And actually, I have to say that by the time I had applied to the place where I work now, I was already deeply skeptical of the entire SJW narrative, which was going full bore at every university in North America.
And I did hide that.
You know, I focused on...
I gave a job talk that wouldn't bring up any of those issues, really.
And so I just...
I hid the fact.
And then I came out once I was in the department.
And, yeah, so the process...
I don't know.
I mean, it must go way back to my family experiences.
And so that I think I always knew at some level that feminist theory didn't apply in every case, because my experience hadn't been anything like that.
You know, my experience of my father, my experience of dating.
You know, I just knew that that wasn't true about the world.
And yet at the same time, it was also so...
So seductive.
I don't know exactly how to describe it.
It's like a religious faith, really, but it's even more intoxicating in how it makes a woman feel about herself.
To be told she's an innocent victim and she's smashing the patriarchy.
She's bold and she's unconventional, but she's also deeply pure and innocent and put upon.
It's so wonderful.
You have all this power.
With no responsibility whatsoever.
The rush of it, the intoxicating pleasure, it really can't be exaggerated.
So even though I knew at some level that it wasn't true, I was willing to take it on for quite some time and it leads to all sorts of Happy social relations, you know, you bond with other women, you bond with pro-feminist men, you march and take back the night marches and all that sort of thing gives you a sense of purpose, sense of identity, sense of meaning, all of that.
But I just couldn't maintain it.
And I'm not quite sure.
I'd like to understand better.
I don't understand why some people can maintain it forever.
It's your father!
You have a close relationship with your father, so you can't alienate him to that magic land called the other.
I don't mean to interrupt your narrative, but it has not escaped my attention.
And I've done an unofficial survey of people who call into my show.
And those who reject this idea of the evil patriarchy are the people who have good relationships with their fathers and can't put their father into that category.
You know, if your best friend is a black guy, you can't be racist again.
And so the fact that men have been separated from women through the destruction of the family, through a bunch of mechanisms, means that a lot of women are growing up.
With either no parental role models and they don't get them in early childhood education because it's all women teaching in the primary grades.
Or, you know, if they have a single mom, there's probably a succession of low-rent, destructive men waltzing through her life and her bedroom.
And so they can develop this sense of negativity towards masculinity either because there's no father present or because there's negative role models present and therefore it's just easier to project all that frustration, rejection, loneliness, hatred and lack of respect onto the gender as a whole.
Sorry about that.
I don't mean to interrupt your narrative, please go on, but I would imagine that's a good place to start.
Yeah, no, that's, yeah, and I do think that must have something to do, a big part of it, although I have this conversation often with a friend of mine, David Shackleton, who is very interested in these issues, too, and trying to get the origin.
Like, how did second wave feminism work?
If it started in the late 60s, 70s, this narrative about male evil and female oppression, it started then, it must go back to something in the family configurations of the early 1950s or even earlier, which wasn't the time when we had families without fathers.
Well, there was the Second World War, which took a lot of men not just out of the family for the time of their duty, but took a lot of men out of life, you know, because they got killed in the war.
And so I think that there was a vast reduction in male influence in the family throughout Europe and to a smaller degree, of course, in America, though a larger degree.
In Canada, of course, because Canada went to war with England.
But yeah, that's a huge evisceration of male influence.
And the same thing happened in the 60s with Vietnam, although, of course, to a lesser degree.
Yeah, yeah.
And so he's really interested in trying to figure out exactly what happened in the family, whether that was it, you know.
But at the same time, I mean, culturally, I don't think there was the same kind of devaluation of the male.
You know, there was an emphasis on men as heroic defenders of Of their families and of the nation.
And so how we came from that to get to in the 60s, where suddenly men are the source of all that's wrong with the world, and women are the ones that might save the world if only they can, you know, somehow disarm men and take away their There's another approach that could be taken, and which I scarcely say is definitive.
But one possibility is that, of course, a lot of the collectivists and socialists and relativists and postmodernists fled the war in Europe and came to North America, where they tried to get as many teaching posts as possible, which would have limited the toxicity of their ideology, except that the GI Bill put, you know, hundreds of except that the GI Bill put, you know, hundreds of thousands of men into contact with this collectivist ideology as they went to school through government largesse.
And that's one possibility as to how this virus spread from Europe, where it had destroyed a lot in the 1920s and 1930s and then spread and metastasized in North America.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, obviously, that's part of it.
And I agree that, you know, feminism is a subset and a part of this larger collectivist push in education, both from primary school right up into higher education.
I have friends who became feminists and have stuck to that, even though, as far as I can see, it doesn't actually have anything to do with their real lives.
Many of these women are happily married, it seems.
Of course, You can't know what's in somebody's heart or what's really going on for them, but they seem to have very supportive husbands.
They have sons.
In the days when I used to still was kind of a feminist, I would try to engage them in conversation about what feminist ideology actually means for young men.
Of course, they had their rationalizations and everything, but I never really understood why they can't see How absolutely devastating this is for young men.
And that was the key for me.
I mean, to make a long, complicated, ragged story short, I would say that when I started my first job at the University of Saskatchewan in 1999, although I was questioning feminist ideology at that point, I still kind of thought of myself as a feminist.
But then just being in the classroom and thinking, listening to my Colleagues who taught feminism.
I'm in an English department and feminist influence is huge there as a postcolonial and cultural Marxist ideology of various kinds.
And just thinking what it must be like to be a young man Growing up in a world where he's told from grade one on, if not before, that he is part of the sex that's responsible for everything evil, that he has to check his privileges, that he has to feel bad about everything, that he is toxic in some way, that he has to unlearn all sorts of things.
That his natural boisterousness is a source of potential harm to women, that girls are better in all sorts of ways, that he has to step back so that his sisters can come forward.
He owes that to them because of centuries of oppression, which of course now doesn't benefit him in any way, but he's supposed to just recognize that Somehow he is both at the same time super privileged, but also in the position where he's always going to be at a disadvantage in all job competitions with women.
And he should be thankful for that because that's the only way he can redeem his maleness.
And obviously it just seemed to me intolerable that we should make that the reality for young men.
And so it was really when I began teaching that I turned against The ideology that before that I had thought had some good things to say and some sources of insight into contemporary culture.
I started questioning it all then, and then it all kind of fell apart at that stage.
And the other thing that I have said before, but it's really worth saying, was that participating in hiring decisions where affirmative action, we didn't call it that, we called it equity hiring, but participating in hiring decisions where we were just so determined To hire a woman, no matter what.
The dishonesty of it, the injustice of it, the total corruption of the whole academic process, the lack of concern for the students who are going to be taught by people who are not the best people in their field, but who were chosen because they're a woman.
All of that, Yeah, it was absurd, it was farcical, and it was extremely disheartening.
And I thought any system that can support this in the name of social justice and pretend it's a good thing To punish men for the so-called sins of their fathers, which weren't the sins of their fathers, of course, it all had to do with totally different social conditions.
The moment that women could be liberated through the invention of labor-saving devices in the home, they were liberated.
It's pretty telling that men actually pursued the manufacture of labor-saving devices for women before even life-saving devices for men, like masks to help you stop getting black lung in a mine.
I think one of the big issues that may crack this biosphere of isolation from reality that seems to be festering on campuses and in the mainstream media as well, which is, I think, where the biggest problem may lie,
is, I'll tell you this, I certainly don't want to speak on behalf of men, that sort of collectivist concept, but the men that I've talked to, there is a lot of frustration in After having heard how terrible rape culture is, how terrible patriarchy is, how terrible disrespect towards women is, there seems to be this odd alliance between feminism and the Islamic belief system that is currently, I guess, coming into Europe.
Now, if you want to talk about North Africa, you know, where, according to surveys, a third of men admit to having raped women.
I assume that the number is actually higher.
And so there is this jaw-dropping, like for a long time, men were like, okay, they're kind of misguided, a little bit too extreme, but, you know, hearts in the right place.
But then seeing the degree to which, well, the Bill Clinton was the first thing for me, you know, the fact that women were like, yeah, he can...
You can get sex from whoever he wants as long as he keeps Roe v.
Wade upheld or whatever.
I mean, so Bill Clinton was sort of the first thing for me.
But I think for this next generation, what's going on in Europe, I think, is going to be the big thing where you would imagine that feminists would be out protesting like crazy, the degree to which what could be ascribed As a genuine rape culture from North Africa is coming in and threatening and groping and raping and sexually assaulting European women to the point now where I think in Germany they're setting up separate railway cars for men and women to try and keep this problem at bay.
And the fact that feminists are silent about this but are complaining about microaggressions and manspreading, I gotta think if there's a shred of spine and empiricism left in the Western mind, that's gotta be it for the narrative as a whole.
Yeah, I'm not sure.
I mean, I think that cultural madness, once it takes hold, it's very, very difficult to dislodge.
And part of the cultural madness around victims and the innocence of victims is that it applies in all these different categories.
And so, as I understand the feminist silence about the problem of Islam and the problem of mass immigration, it is all part of this victim mentality disorder.
That is at the heart of feminism, as I've argued in one of my Fiamengo files.
And so I figure that it has to do with projecting guilt and claiming innocence.
And so white feminists have for a long time And when a whole bunch of other peoples came along and said,
you can't claim to be oppressed because, you know, I have dark skin and I've experienced this kind of oppression or I'm a lesbian and therefore you have heteropatriarchal privilege and I don't have that and, you know, I'm disabled, you're able-bodied and you don't even recognize my oppression and that's a form of You know, your privilege that you're not acknowledging.
And so feminism had to go through all these contortions.
It became what is now called intersectional feminism, where it recognizes all these different forms of oppression.
And that's the only way that white Western feminists can continue to claim their moral innocence is by joining in common cause with their oppressed brothers and sisters against the common enemy, which is white Western hetero-patriarchal culture.
And so when they see cases where, for instance, Islam is being criticized, Islam cannot be criticized according to the intersectional feminist framework because it too is oppressed.
It too is othered by white Western hetero-patriarchal culture.
So they have to make common cause, not because they care about Ordinary women or don't care really.
It's all about their own moral purity and maintaining that.
And they will do anything, I think, to continue to maintain that.
And they will continue to shame any man who attempts to break the narrative.
And they're so good at projecting that shame onto men.
And I think white men in general have been under such a barrage over the last, you know, 40 years, have been so guilted.
So shamed, told from infancy that they are no good, that many of them, you know, sort of accept it in a way.
And therefore, to go against that narrative and say, no, actually, you know, I think Western culture in general has got a lot of things right, and it's worth defending, very difficult, I think.
I mean, just, you know, point to me, another culture across the world or throughout history outside of sort of Western European and European-derived cultures where women have as many rights and opportunities and freedoms.
And it doesn't exist.
You know, maybe space aliens will come where men and women are completely identical.
But there's two things that you said in your videos.
And, you know, we'll link, of course, to your channel below.
And I really strongly recommend that people...
The reasoning is great.
The delivery is great.
And it's really, really important that people listen to your arguments because we do need as much reason as possible.
But two things you said I won't even get you to comment on because they kind of Hit me like a black arrow to a dragon heart, you know?
The first was when you talked about feminism and this sort of victim disorder, like a psychological ailment.
And you said, it is basically impossible to reason with crazy people.
And this is something I have to keep reminding myself all the time.
Do not mistake the world for yourself.
Do not mistake the world for yourself.
You listen to reason doesn't mean other people do.
That was the first thing.
And the second thing you said was that your biggest concern, I'm paraphrasing, but your biggest concern was that This ideology can only be brought down by a huge disaster, or can only really be challenged by a huge disaster.
I don't know if you could help enlighten other people and strip the last vestiges of hope from them, as you did with me, perhaps, because I think that's helpful.
Yeah, I don't know if I can enlighten people on these.
Often I end my videos not on this sort of arousing, you know, so let's do this to save ourselves.
But, you know, there's nothing we can do.
Simply look with clear eyes at the impending catastrophe.
Well, you plant the seeds and you wait for reality to prove you right and then people listen to you.
Sadly, that's all you can do.
I don't know.
Maybe that's why I only get 5,000 views.
But who wants to hear that?
I mean, I am a glass half-empty kind of gal.
I can't help it.
That's just the way I am.
Maybe it's a self-protective mechanism because I don't want to be disappointed.
I have lots of friends in the men's advocacy movement who feel we're – they're always feeling – We're just about to turn the corner.
You know, this is this is going to be the thing.
This is going to be the moment when public sympathy starts to shift back towards men.
And, you know, they and they're hopeful.
And that's how they get through that.
I don't know.
I mean, communism didn't end because Milton Friedman won out.
It just ended because they ran out of money.
So, you know, it's hard to say that reason wins the day.
But hopefully you can at least prepare the ground for when the disaster strikes that people go off in the right direction afterwards.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
I'm not hopeful that I'm even preparing a ground for some sort of renewal after collapse because I think that the collapse when it comes is going to be so profound that it will result in millions of people's deaths.
I think it's going to be either civil war And certainly men will at least be valuable again if it's that kind of thing.
Valuable and yet oh so disposable.
Exactly.
Oh so disposable.
Exactly.
But the culture, the evaluation of men will at least have to change.
But I'm afraid it will be war, civil war.
Or just mass breakdown.
You know, if we continue with affirmative action and insist that we have to get women into STEM, we have to get women into engineering.
I mean, we might literally have bridges falling down.
But yeah, I'm afraid it'll be something so terrible that there will be no rebuilding in my lifetime.
So why am I doing my videos then?
What good are they really?
Obviously, I hope that I'm wrong.
I hope that there can be a culture shift and people can start saying no.
It seems that now it's almost impossible for men to speak about a lot of these issues, especially feminism.
Talk about sexist, that a man cannot speak because he's a man about an issue that affects men.
I feel like I don't have a lot of the answers, Stefan.
All I really know is what I see in academia, and it doesn't give me any hope at all.
It's getting worse and worse and worse, and I see that spreading into the larger culture.
I was just thinking this morning, Andrew Breitbart, I think, was the one who said that politics was downstream from culture.
But I really think now academia is, the culture is downstream from academia because it has such an influence.
Ultimately, the crazy ideas of academics, you know, 30 years ago were just being tossed around in a seminar room, you know, ideas about the male gaze, for instance, that nobody really took seriously except as a kind of interesting theory about how film works.
I'm speaking about Laura Mulvey's notion of the gaze in film.
And now that has actually translated into practical feminist discussion about how damaging it is when a man looks at a woman in the wrong way.
Oh, and just, sorry to interrupt, but just so people know, and so I don't get in any trouble, you have a nice picture.
I've actually been looking at that the whole time.
Not at you.
Just so that you're not incinerated by my all-powerful patriarchal male gaze.
You know, it's like Superman's heat rays.
So I just...
I'm scorching the picture behind you, not you.
Yeah, you know, that kind of thing.
And so what I see happening is that, yeah, ideas that were simply fascinating and that I never really took seriously, except as ideas, have actually been translated into policy and practice and have become accepted as truths in some way in mainstream discussions.
So, I see things as getting a lot worse, probably, before they get better, because certainly the dominance of feminist and other SJW ideology in university campuses is Absolutely.
I'm challenged.
And I don't see how it could possibly be challenged unless universities actually collapse and we rebuild institutions of higher education from the ground up as private institutions, I guess.
But how that could be done, I really have no idea.
So I'm...
Sorry to interrupt, but there is always a big challenge in a revolution, which is when do you stop?
When do you stop?
And of course, people dedicated to revolution don't want the revolution to end.
That's their scene, man.
That's their gig.
That's what they do.
And so normally, people, like if you think about sort of the voluntary funding of something...
People will voluntarily fund it if there's still a problem to be solved.
And then they will diminish funding it as the problem gets resolved.
The problem in this situation, I think, is that revolutionary plus government income means that the revolution doesn't ever know when to stop because people aren't funding it anymore voluntarily.
And therefore, the revolutionaries, in order to continue the revolution, have to start inventing injustices after the genuine ones have been dealt with.
And there doesn't seem to be any end to that except a cessation of government funding.
Yeah, it's the difference between a revolutionary and a reformist movement.
And, of course, it's a lot more fun to be revolutionary.
You feel a lot more heroic.
And, yeah, that's what I see happening in feminist ideology.
It's continually creating new crises out of the most trivial of issues.
The real crisis, of course, is the crisis that's facing boys.
And men in our society, the suicide, the mental illness, the general withdrawal from society, the feeling amongst especially young men, but men in general, I think they're just not wanted or liked by their society.
How that can ever be a healthy society, how any woman could think that she'd be better off in a society where men have no incentive to involve themselves in raising families or really doing anything.
There's a whole group of men now A significant minority who just want to drop out altogether, who want to operate sort of underground.
And if that continues to grow, again, we're going to face societal collapse.
If it's open hunting season on testosterone, certainly a society diminishes, dwindles, and demographically dies.
whether the country still survives because you're importing incompatible cultures.
The culture as it exists, if men are pitted against women or if men are seeing that they're playing Russian roulette with a woman plus state power every time they get involved, that is without a doubt that is the best way to drive a culture extinct.
And of course, I wonder at some point if the environmentalists are going to be concerned about Western culture and its extinction.
But given that they're basically driven by a lot of socialism, it seems hard to imagine.
That was good, wasn't it?
To get rid of this terrible culture so that the environment can flourish.
I think at some point, maybe our culture has just decided that it would be better to die.
You know, maybe that's paranoia, but it does seem to me there's a kind of deep self-loathing at the heart of much of the kinds of discussions that we have in both in Western Europe and in North America about our future.
An unwillingness to say that it is a society...
A civilization worth saving or to take the steps that would be necessary to save it.
And feminism is one very virulent feature of that general self-loathing.
And I do have many friends, or I did anyway, now I don't talk to them anymore because they don't want to talk to me, but I did get the sense from them that they felt something much better could grow up out of the utter collapse of our civilization, some utopia.
And so they'd like to see it destroyed.
And that, of course, is what is so brutal for a lot of taxpayers being forced to pay For the indoctrinators who are undoing the very fabric of the civilization that makes it worth getting out of bed in the morning.
But that perhaps is a topic for another time.
I'm not going to even try to leave on a high note because I'm trying to take away hope from people.
You know, crossing your fingers is not a strategy to save the world.
And I would like to take away hope from people.
Hope is usually the belief that someone else is going to save you from whatever is coming.
So I want to take away hope from people because in the absence of hope, we act.
And so I wanted to remind people, Studio Brule, that's Studio Brule.com.
Of course, Fiamango File, we'll put a link to the YouTube series.
You know, go listen to them.
You know, you can daisy chain them on YouTube.
You can download them as MP3s and listen to them on the go.
