Janice Fiamengo has uploaded a video explaining why she is an anti-feminist.
Let’s go through this down the line, shall we?
Anti-Feminism As “Adversarial”
It’s not just that it’s adversarial, Janice. It’s that it shows nothing about what you actually believe in, only what you don’t.
This is a microcosm of anti-feminist thought: anti-feminists will bring up male homelessness while supporting policies that increase homelessness and doing nothing for the homeless, or bring up the soldiers who die in war while proposing more wars.
If Feminism Ever Was About Equality?
This hyperbolic driveby shows that she is dishonest.
To assert that fighting for the franchise or fighting for the very earliest domestic abuse shelters or fighting to enter the workforce at all or fighting for the end of patriarchal laws that kept women in the home by force wasn’t about equality is reprehensible.
23 Ways Feminism Has Made the World a Better Place for Men indicates that even today feminists expand rights for men, including in many of the areas where anti-feminists deceitfully assert that they do not.
Special Privileges And Advantages for Women
How is giving a class targeted at women for self-defense sexist? Women often don’t like self-defense classes that assume a level of aggression and a level of physical acumen that many men might prefer. The average woman objectively needs different physical defense training than a man does, just like a short man and a tall man should have different training. She is dishonest.
How is giving women tampons a special preference for women? Do men menstruate? Would it be sexist to give out Viagra? She is dishonest.
Sheehy’s Argument About Women Killing Spouses
Janice now crosses the line to outright deception. If her argument is that all feminists endorse that women should legally be able to kill their husbands because one argued that, then by her logic all anti-feminists endorse killing women because Peter Nolan said so and all Republicans must be child molesters because of Dennis Hastert. Would she accept that she is in favor of murdering women, including herself? Or would she insist that you do not judge every person in a movement by one or even several individuals?
In fact, Sheehy’s argument, whether or not you agree with it, is not sexist. Her principle, that an abused woman is exercising self-defense and acting out of a mental illness, is perfectly applicable to men as well in parallel situations. Janice once again cherry-picks how she wants to engage with her opposition while of course presenting her own side far more favorably by implicit contrast. That is what we call a straw-man, and it is intellectually reprehensible and deliberately deceitful. She is lying to her viewers.
So why don’t you read Sheehy herself giving context to what she said? Elizabeth Sheehy: The law, and history, speak for themselves. You’re free to disagree with her, of course, but nothing there is remotely misandrist.
(We’re not even at one minute. This isn’t particularly good).
One Standard for Women, One Standard for Men
By her own admission, the police didn’t say why the person in the case in question was charged. Even if I trust that she’s not cherry-picking her journalistic outlets, which at this point I don’t given how she willfully misrepresented Sheehy, one data point is not a trend and it’s not even a data point in her favor because the cops didn’t say what she claims they did.
Similarly, notice how she doesn’t bother supporting the men’s varsity hockey team case with a parallel example of a female team that did something wrong that was not all benched. She needs two data points to make her argument and she won’t be arsed.Incidentally, when two members of a team commit a crime, it’s very likely that other members of the team knew what was going on. Oh, what a surprise, they did.
Feminism Proposes The Idea That Feelings Are More Important than Objective Reality?
Once again, Janice doesn’t even bother to prove that any of her opposition actually says this. Her first example is, again, a headline from an article without context. She isn’t citing her academic opposition, but student activists. That’s dishonest and reprehensible. But, of course, she leaves out the actual argument her opposition was making, being really dishonest. The position of those opposing it was that she was a cheerleader for rapists. You can agree or disagree with Sommers, of course. Frankly, I find the remarkable speed with which women like Sommers are willing to tell rape victims that they’re lying to be pretty damn suspicious, and something she probably wouldn’t do in any other context, but hey, who am I to tell? Oh, right, a person who has no duty to not protest her bull.
Worse, sometimes, feelings are reality, Janice. If a woman feels stressed, it doesn’t matter if she has some “good reason” to or not to: she will and that will have an effect. The stereotype threat literature doesn’t need to demonstrate that anti-female stereotypes exist, only that women perceive them.
What does that Zur Institute article about “the victim stance is a powerful one” even say? Janice won’t stop giving you a slideshow of cherry-picked arguments for long enough to explain. If I were to dismiss millions of people, I might spend more than a minute on each separate allegation I made. That’s because I’m honest and she is not. In fact, the actual paper in question is very specific as to what it says and doesn’t say, and does not support her arguments. Psychology of Victimhood, Don’t Blame the Victim, Article by Ofer Zur, Ph.D.
Holy crap, that’s like fifteen lies and it’s not even minute two. Let’s try to speed this up, shall we? Before I jump to her next poorly researched, dishonestly presented hyperbolic driveby, let me just say this: This is not how you argue, this is how you do propaganda. Janice isn’t trying to convince anyone: she’s trying to get people who already hate the other side to pat themselves on the back. The claim that feminists as a group think that feelings are more important than reality and that they are proposing a victim narrative requires evidence. You would need to prove an average trend, and of course show that they are doing so more than comparable people. Need I point out how anti-feminists like to assert that male homelessness proves sexism against men is real but dismiss that women are more likely to be poor, globally and in America?
The irony, of course, is that she is offering wishy-washy arguments and assessments based on her feelings while feminists routinely offer data, the kind of data like rape rates that she claims is miandrist even though it’s true. See how this game works? In reality, it’s anti-feminists who are making poorly researched appeals to feelings by repeatedly asserting that their strawmen are real even when they talk to actual feminists correcting them.
Men Are “Uniquely Guilty”
Janice won’t bother mentioning the simple fact that men are more likely to rape than women are. Period. Both female and male victims are much more likely to have been assaulted by a man.
Does that say anything about men writ large? No, and a Dworkin quote doesn’t prove that feminists think that.
Rape culture isn’t about every man being a hidden rapist ready to come out. It’s about the way that a society coddles sexist tendencies toward rape, downplays rape, and blames the victim inordinately. Rape culture isn’t in isolation: we also have a brutal culture that’s tough on crime. The way those two play out is that we despise rapists when we are sure they are rapists but we have a ludicrously high standard of doubt for rape that we do not for any other crime.
I’ve argued this in my editorial on Brock Turner, Brock Turner: A Case of Injustice, and the Marshall Center makes clear what they mean too at Rape Culture | Women’s Center. Notice how none of the things the Marshall Center says men can do indicates that men are all hidden rapists. Rather, they are calls for male allydom.
Think about a case conservatives might not find that controversial (since I have to make this about other issues to avoid the blatant dishonesty): Gang violence. Would it be reasonable to say that gang violence has antecedents in neighborhoods and that the community can do something about it by standing up to it? Yes. That is not saying that the community wants gang members or is applauding them, but that they could do more to stop them.
Janice can’t make a single honest argument about her opposition to save her life. The few times she does quote feminists, she quotes people on the radical fringe like Dworkin, and then misrepresents them. Dworkin pointed out that she spent decades writing books. If she had just wanted to slam men, she could have done it in twenty seconds. She didn’t because that’s not what she’s saying.
“Lectured About His Propensity” To Rape
I wasn’t. By the standards Janice is putting forward (that is, no evidence at all), I’ve won!
I attended multiculturalism classes that brought up campus rape and rape culture. At no point was I, or any other male, told that we were all predisposed to be rapists. Not once.
UC Davis is pretty liberal. Natalia Deeb-Sossa, my instructor, is a pretty strongly-leaning feminist.
What I’m hearing is that a lot of men are reacting with entitlement to being told that maybe they should do something when their frat bros talk about women like furniture,and then dishonest crowd surfers like Janice are enabling them.
“Women-Only Spaces”
Janice: Would you come to a cancer survivor’s meeting if you didn’t have cancer?
No?
Then don’t do that for safe spaces either.
MRAs have male-only safe spaces. Will Janice mention that? Of course not.
The First Amendment guarantees Americans the right to meet with who they wish and to not meet with who they wish.
When feminists insist on female-only neighborhoods and female-only water fountains, I’ll be the first one to loudly protest. Until then, stop lying about what safe spaces are, anti-feminists and alt-righters.
What She Doesn’t Say
So Janice is just repeating the standard right-wing propaganda.
Does she mention
- Pink-collar jobs and segregation
- The glass ceiling
- The “old boy’s network”
- Feminist concern for female oppression in the developing world, including more extreme areas of the Muslim world like Saudi Arabia or Iran
- Barriers to women in STEM fields
- Paired audit studies showing that women applying to the same job get offered less
- Stereotype threat that lowers womens’ performance on tests
- Global female poverty
- Global female illiteracy
- Feminist criticisms of psychiatry
- TRAP laws that prevent rape victims from getting abortion?
No, of course not. Why ever mention what the Feminist Majority Foundation or Ms. Magazine or Everyday Feminism or Jezebel actually say and argue for?
This is a video about a strawman. It’s far from the most dishonest presentation I’ve seen about feminism, and that’s saying something.
If you want to engage with your opposition, read what they say, in their own words.
As a bonus for this blog, let’s consider how Janice could have been honest, shall we?
1. Polls
If you want to assert something about a group, a good place to start might be a poll. If she showed a poll that academic feminists as a majority, or even a substantial plurality, believe that all men are predisposed to be rapists, or that women deserve to be dominant over men, or something of the sort, that would have been an appropriate argument.
2. “Not All My Opposition Is Like This”
Unless your polls or evidence show that literally 100% of your opponents have the position that you claim, a minimally honest person would say, “I recognize that my opponents are not all like this. Many who have the idea that I disagree with might not have thought through the implications of what they are saying either”.
So, if I were in her position, I might argue, “I recognize that feminists are a diverse bunch, including some on the campus and some off, some in politics and some in academia, and with a diverse set of beliefs about the world. But there is still a trend in this group, a mainstream one, that is misandrist and destructive”.
She can’t do that because her video is a propaganda piece.
3. Consistent Evidence from Multiple Sources
Pick an array of people on the other side from various wings of the movement to show that the movement in general has the problem.
If I want to say that the anti-feminist movement has a serious problem with misogyny and repeating immoral nonsense, I don’t just point to Peter Nolan. I point to Warren Farrell equating being rejected on a date to being raped (yes, however tongue-in-cheek he was being), Roosh V’s entire nonsense and his spectacular dishonesty and backtracking on his idea to make rape legal, repeated statements from redpillers that treat women like literal infants, and the repeated times that A Voice for Men slut-shamed or outright lied.
Fred B-C: Freelance Hope Warrior 
‘Think’ the irony when most university Marxist feminist departments don’t encourage independent free thinking only listen and believe, misrepresention of statistics and and ‘evidence’ presented is a case of ‘putting the horse before the cart’ start with the conclusion and find ‘evidence’ to fit said conclusion never the scientific method!
You just ranted for an entire poorly-written paragraph about what you view as the scientific method instead of making a single cogent argument, and it was all a “tu quoque” anyways: every feminist could be Marxist (they’re not and you’re lying) and academic (they’re not and you’re lying) and exactly as unscientific as you say, and that doesn’t make Janice’s sheer dishonesty any more acceptable.
Moreover, it’s nonsense. People try this “It’s unfalsifiable” crap against things like the stereotype threat. But that’s absurd: if there were equal average test scores between whites and blacks or men and women, that alone would be a scenario that would disprove stereotype threat. Stereotype threat is a perfectly reasonable causal explanation of the phenomenon where someone does well on a test if they know it’s not that important, struggles more if they think it’s important or demonstrates something about their competence or their group’s competence, and then does as well as normal again if properly prepared to handle that stress.
I took classes under actual feminists, Ian. Not only did my feminism precede taking such classes, but nowhere was I ever told to just listen nor was I told to put the conclusion before the evidence. What I was taught was to listen to female perspectives and understand how women may view the same phenomenon, the same statistics or facts, as men in a different light. I somehow doubt you have that level of self-awareness and intellectual honesty.
you’re kidding right?
About what, Scaredgirl? You can be an anti-feminist and agree that Janice is disingenuous and dishonest. I find it interesting how those on the right, from the creationists to the anti-feminists, all have as heroes people who are dishonest and overwhelmingly snide, folks like Ken Ham. I find it surprising and disappointing how often they have to defend lies.
“What I was taught was to listen to female perspectives and understand how women may view the same… statistics or facts, as men in a different light”
This admission confirms that feminism is an ideology espoused by activists, not a legitimate field of intellectual inquiry deserving a place in academia
Gender is irrelevant to one’s understanding of “statistics or facts” because they are objective truths. They are, what they are.
Nor is gender relevant to the rationality and logic required to faithfully interpret the meaning, or absence of meaning, of raw information.
No, your comment actually indicates that anti-feminism is very often rooted in a total lack of basic philosophical rigor.
It’s an objective fact that at X time home prices are going up by Y. But how those looking to buy a home feel about that fact, and how it affects them, is different from how those looking to sell a home feel about that fact.
The only way people can ignore this obvious truth is if they’ve been socialized to think that somehow their needs are literally the only needs that are possibly objective.
In other words, patriarchy when it comes to men, racism when it comes to white folks (or other dominant ethno-racial groups), etc.
I think that it may help if you thought more carefully before regurgitating what the Michael Shermers of the world suggested was brilliant insight.
You rightly point out that the seller of a home feels differently about rising values than the buyer of a home.
You then said that people who ‘ignore’ these different feelings about the housing market have been “socialised” to be selfish; to view their “needs” as the only “needs” of relevance or import.
Now, it’s obvious that you ARE NOT one of these people who ignore others’ feelings about rising house prices, are you? you aren’t selfish and only self-interested – you’re empathetic and you care about others’ feelings, right?
So, logically, when the time comes for Fred-BC to sell a home, can we presume that you will NOT seek to get the best price you can, because this would be detrimental to the feelings of the potential buyers?
Can we assume that you will put buyers’ needs first? that is, you’ll put their need to feel that they paid less than the market value of the home ahead of your own need to feel like you got an market or above market price for the home?
Think carefully before answering.
And you moved the goalposts instead of just admitting that your initial comment was actually wrong. So why don’t you start by doing that and admit that I made a good point that there can be two vantage points to the facts?
And then you try to turn the conversation around onto me. Sure, perhaps I have anti-“seller” bias. Perhaps I don’t. But before I proceed to even consider anything else, notice the difference. The difference is that I admitted that both the sellers and the buyers have a valid perspective. You were the one who started by literally saying that the buyers didn’t exist. You didn’t even have the gall, guts or audacity to do this explicitly: you had to do it implicitly. And that’s how privilege works. Even if you can make a case that there are those on the Left or elsewhere who are misandrist, precisely no one is pretending that men’s needs don’t exist and may be separate from womens’. But you did exactly that to women, and you’re far from alone, and that was my point: that in fact “objective truths” have to be processed through the agenda of people with very different needs, and that people like you just assume that certain stakeholders are the only ones that matter without even realizing it, then call the rest of us unscientific and bigoted for thinking otherwise. Stop projecting. Admit that you could probably do better in conceding that maybe women and men may have opposed or differing perspectives on topics, even with all the facts stipulated to, and that this is important to acknowledge.
It’s like after Katrina, when the majority of whites in polls said that the hurricane said nothing about race and the majority of blacks said the opposite. Do you realize what that means? It means that whites couldn’t even admit that the difference itself said something about race. They couldn’t even realize that the existence of a controversy meant that the hurricane said at least something about race. That’s privilege: the ability to act not only as if your agenda was the only one that mattered, but the only one that exists.
If you can concede that that occurs and is a problem, then we can discuss whether or not I have biases (which, in fact, I do, like everyone else).