The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Janice Fiamengo: Feminism, Anti-Feminism, and Common Sense

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

As I describe in the introduction to our discussion, I first learned about Janice Fiamengo by watching an incredible series of videos she produced called The Fiamengo Files. Not surprisingly, because they presented a well-reasoned approach to various hot-button social justice issues, these videos were taken down YouTube. No worries, like the proverbial Phoenix, The Fiamengo Files II emerged and can be found. Janice, a retired Professor of English at the University of Ottawa, calls herself an anti-feminist, which may sound shrill or reactionary, but it is worth listening to her discussions to learn why she so labels herself. Most recently she has been working on a comprehensive history of Feminism and provides compelling arguments, based on data, that much of conventional wisdom regarding such things as universal suffrage and the plight of women currently misrepresents what actually transpired. Whether or not you are inclined to agree with Janice, listening to her is enlightening, and it is also enriching. She is calm and charming, and anything but a firebrand, and I cannot imagine how one could have a non-cordial conversation with her. Nevertheless, she has been censored, and protesters have too often forced her public lectures to be cancelled. It is a great pity, because we need voices of reason to speak to each other if we are ever to rise above the partisan nonsense currently engulfing popular debate. For that reason I was particularly excited that she agreed to come on the podcast to talk about these issues, her current projects, and her past work, including her book Sons of Feminism. I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I did, and are provoked to think about these issues in a new way, no matter what you might ultimately conclude. That is, once again, one of the purposes of the Origins Podcast, and of the Critical Mass website. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers . Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. In this episode, I have a discussion with the professor of English, social commentator and social critic, Janice Fiamengo. Janice may not be well known around the world, but I think she should be more well known for her remarkably cogent commentary, both her writing and her videos, in particular her videos for the Fiamengo file that she produced, which confront a major issue. feminism from a different perspective. In her most recent set of videos, she actually discusses the history of feminism and demonstrates that much conventional wisdom about its history is actually misplaced. Janice is not an ideologue or a firebrand. She's a calm and very gentle speaker, but her arguments are full of logic and data, which is something I particularly appreciate. I really enjoyed my conversation with her, and I think you'll find it provocative at the very least. But I hope you'll listen to what she says because after all freedom of speech is really

the freedom to listen. And she may change some of your views as she's affected some of mine. It was a real pleasure to talk with her and I hope you'll enjoy this conversation. You can watch it ad free by subscribing to our Substac channel, Critical Mass, and all proceeds from subscriptions will go to supporting the nonprofit Origins Project Foundation, which supports the podcast and several other activities. Or you can watch it on our YouTube channel or you can listen to it anywhere where podcasts can be listened to. Either way, I hope that you will enjoy the podcast and it will be entertaining and cause you to think, which is really the point of it all. Thanks. Well, Janice, I really appreciate your coming on the podcast. As you know, I've been a fan of

yours for some time. So thanks for being here. Well, thank you very much for having me on your show. Well, you know, I first discovered you from your videos and I was always impressed by their strict logic and and detail and how willing you were to go against conventional wisdom when the conventional wisdom is nonsense. And that's something I've always been impressed with. So it's real privilege to talk to you. And in fact, for full disclosure also, I, you were actually one of the panelists that we had planned to have on the very first origins project. Foundation public event in Phoenix and it was it was planned and then and then unfortunately the world decided COVID would get in the way and and maybe we'll redo it again sometime and have you in person in Phoenix I hope so I was really sorry to miss the opportunity had a really nice lineup there it was a great lineup and and rather press oh I thought it was prescient but I of course people like you are aware of the issues that what that we were going to talk about for years before

and and that's what I want to talk about but this is an origins podcast and that means I first go into origins. I want to discover what led you to the path that you eventually took to where you're at now and and the things you've talked about. You grew up in BC, right? Yes. And and and and but one thing I don't know is were your parents, I mean you obviously decided to become an academic. Did were your parents uh academics at all or no my mom had worked at an insurance company and she quit her job when she had me. So I had a fairly traditional, I guess I would say lower middle class. I grew up in a kind of lower middle class working class neighborhood. And my dad's sister

taught creative writing at the University of British Columbia. So I did have that connection. I'm not sure. Yeah, I don't know how much that it. It must have influenced me. But I, you know, I wasn't aware like, you know, of particularly choosing to follow my dad's sister's path, but she was a, you know, she was a major figure in my life. I loved her. And she loved literature and always bought me books. And but I, I, yeah, I don't know. I mean, maybe it was genetic. I love to read, you know, from my mom and dad read to me from before I could read. And I, I don't even remember learning to read. It seemed to come naturally. And, you know, I just always, I wanted to write. I wanted to talk about books from the time I was probably, you know, in my early teens, I wanted to be a teacher.

By the time I was in high school, I think I wanted to teach at a university. If I could, I didn't think I would. But and yeah, I just, you know, I just, I was one of those, I was an only child, so that probably contributed to it as well. I just, I loved, I spent all my time really, just sitting by myself reading and and being enchanted by words and imaginary worlds and just wanting to to talk about language and, you know, stories and what stories do and all of that. And so that's what I did. I had just a wonderful time at university. I did a master's degree. I thought I would stop then. I taught for a while as a sessional instructor, part-time instructor at the University of British Columbia and at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. But then I decided, why not keep going? I love this. So I did a PhD and I got a job at the University of Saskatchewan. I taught there for four years. It was a wonderful place. And I got a job at the University of Ottawa. And I taught there for the next 16, 17 years before I took early retirement.

Yeah, it was a very smooth path for me. And I imagine that I would do that, you know, until they kick me out. Because I love, you know, it's such a privileged job, you know, to be able to do the thing you love and get paid very well for it. And I had to have so much time, relatively free time to do one's own writing and research and really to be able to shape one's own. research profile and all of that. It was, it was just, it was lovely. At the same time, of course, I was becoming aware of the darker currents that are, have, have overtaken, I would say, academia now, the obsession with victimhood and, and remedying victimhood. And yeah, I, so I started to speak about that. And the thing I knew best was, of course, feminist ideology. The feminist

approach to literature is a dominant one. And I had studied feminist theory for years when I was a PhD student and I was just taken for granted that that's the perspective that one taught from, including other victim-oriented theories such as post-colonialism and anti-racism and all of those kinds of things. And yeah, I just, I reached a point where, you know, it started gradually. I stopped really identifying as a feminist because I became aware of what a just unforgiving, relentlessly aggressive and mean-spirited and simplistic kind of perspective it offered. I looked out at all the young men, well, there weren't that many of them, but, you know,

they're about 20% of the ordinary English literature class. But I looked out at those young men, and it was just so obvious to me that not only were they not privileged and entitled and oppressors, but they. that they were, well, bewildered, shamed often, unable to voice their life experience in any way that would be validated. You know, I just, I just, I couldn't go on pretending that everything women did was to be celebrated, that women were these heroic survivors who had overcome generations of sexism and now must be celebrated.

And men were always, you know, these privileged oppressors who didn't care about women who, in fact, objectified and oppressed and hated them, held them back and should now, in recompense for the sins of their fathers, step back entirely and allow women to take over the world because women would do a much better job of it, allegedly. I just, you know, I couldn't be a part of it anymore. And finally, just about 10 years ago now, I gave my first public lecture speaking against feminist criticism and really the whole orientation towards grievance studies and victimology that is so popular at every university in North America. And then I started making my videos, the Fiamengophile. Wow. Well, this is great.

Your monologue just now covered much of many of the questions I had and anticipated them of your background. There's a perfect description of where you are. There were a few things I wanted to fill in. So you did your PhD also at UBC. And just to point out, you'd studied feminists, as you said, studied feminist theory. Your PhD, as I understand, was actually about female journalists in early Canada. Is that the case? So it was actually kind of a feminist kind of view.

view of journalism. It was. It was, it was, it's called, well, the book I published based on the, thesis was called the Woman's Page, and it was about women writers in general, essayists, novelists, but especially journalists, also public speakers, activists in late 19th century, early 20th century Canada. And really, I think writing that, although I was certainly steeped in feminist theory at the time, it also, it made me really. realize that the feminist view of history simply wasn't true in that here were women writing over 100 years prior to when I was talking about them. And they didn't see themselves as oppressed, and at least most of them didn't. A number of them were feminists and were able to articulate

their stridently feminist and even quite vociferously anti-male views, even back to then in the 1880s, 1890s, first decade of the 20th century, they found a willing audience. Their radicalism was celebrated. They were able to make careers out of voicing these heterodox opinions. And in fact, they had a great deal of authority and legitimacy as women speaking to these various social issues. So I realized that something had to be wrong in a feminist version of history if these women were able to give voice to very radical ideas and in some cases to live very unconventional lives with very few limitations, relatively little criticism or opposition. And so that was what started me, I think, on my journey away from the feminist perspective. Although that was quite a while before you eventually gave the talks.

In fact, you've explained, I sum up a question that I want to answer it. I guess, you know, we started University of Ottawa when in 2009, which was when you were by many standards somewhat older than than, and so I wondered what you had done in between, but part of it was teaching, but. No, it was actually 2003. Oh. Yeah, and my first job was at the University of Saskatchew. When I started there in 1999, I'd had a postdoc before then.

I actually got my PhD in 1996. So I was a little bit older, like I was in my early 30s by the time I got my first job, first full job at the University of Saskatchew. And I'd taken a little bit three years off between my master's and my PhD. So I was that little bit older than most PhDs. I, it may be too interesting. Did you, during those three years, did you, work at something else interesting? You didn't go fishing or anything. No, I didn't do anything interesting.

I taught, I taught, I taught at, at UBC and SFU. I thought at that point that, that I, you know, I might get a college job. At that point, you could easily get a college job. There are lots of colleges in, in Vancouver. So I thought that I might like to do that, but then I just thought, I'm going to keep on because I like this so much. Now, when you, um, in your, after the, I'm interested in academic sort of specialty after the the the the PhD on on female journalists in early Canada what was your research area or area of publications also related to sort of feminist things or wasn't did it go in a different area it was it was basically that yeah and i i became i think what someone might call a member of the loyal opposition i was still kind of working within feminist

frameworks. I was still working mainly on women writers, though not entirely. My focus was still the early 20th century, late 19th century in Canada, although I started broadening out to British 19th century writers. But yeah, it was still basically, I was especially interested in, in nonfiction writers, those who wrote about social issues and how literature and just cultural discourse in general was impacted by changing by social movements that that sort of thing but but i was you know i was questioning i think the the dominant frameworks of the academy good thing to do and you and you and you started to do it in a wonderful way and i i you said your first you gave your first talk on sort of and let's make it clear you define yourself as an anti-feminist and we'll get to that and

I think that's incredibly interesting but you gave your first public talk on this in 2014 what how did that arise and what was the response of your colleagues and at the time it was actually in 2013 okay yeah in in March of 2013 how it arose was that um in in the fall of 2012 I had seen the planned lecture by Warren Farrell. Do you know who Warren Farrell is? I think I saw when I was reading and going through all of your stuff lately. I saw that name come up and now I can't remember. He's a major, he was a feminist. He was involved in the national organization of women, but he broke from feminism for the same reasons that I did. Really, he found its relentless anti-male animus unendurable.

And though he always has expressed a great deal of sympathy for women and for feminist issues, he wanted to broaden the discourse to bring in men's issues too. He, I think, became famous when he published a book in the 1970s called The Myth of Male Power, which I would recommend to anybody who is skeptical about whether there are legitimate men's issues or whether the feminist narrative is inadequate in any way. way, it's a marvelous, marvelous, still extremely engaging and accessible book about men's issues and, you know, and just the inaccuracy of much of what feminism has to say about masculine entitlement and male power. So he was to speak at the University of Toronto

in the fall of 2012. And he was actually speaking about the boy crisis, which has become his, that's his big topic really over the last 10 and more years. He's a sort of writer who researches everything exhaustively. He's got statistics on everything. He's just incredible. And, you know, he's become very concerned over the last couple of decades about what's happening to boys in our culture with all of the emphasis on making sure that girls grow up in a pro-female environment and schools being taken over entirely by female and usually feminist teachers and the effects of fatherlessness on boys and the difficulty boys have in finding male role models and what happens to them psychologically and emotionally when they're told that, you know, really their sex is

responsible for everything evil in the world and that their very sexuality, their very nature is harmful. You know, he's, he's looked into that extensively. And so that's what he was going to be talking about at the University of Toronto. And he was going to be brought in by a group called the Canadian Association for Equality. And they had a, there was a men's issues awareness student group there that wanted to have him come speak. And there was this huge protest. Oh yeah. That's right. I saw that protest in one of your videos, I think. Yeah. And it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, the first protest of that nature I'd ever seen. They're now standard on university campuses. And I'm sure there had been many before this. Well, I know there had been because I started

researching it then. But this was the first one that I saw and that was so clearly wrong in every way. The students that attended that protest knew nothing about Warren Farrell. They hadn't read him. They weren't protesting him. They were protesting him. They were protesting because their women's studies teacher had taken a single quotation of out of one of his books from decades previously, taken it out of context and alleged that he was some sort of rape apologist, which of course was the phrase de jour at the time. Every man who spoke in any way skeptically about feminist claims about sexual assault and sexual harassment was a rape apologist. So they came out to make sure that nobody could attend his talk. And they ripped the

posters down. They blocked the entranceways and exits. They gave the Hitler salute to the campus security who were attempting to keep order there. They verbally harassed, screamed at, yelled obscenities at the people who were trying to attend the talk. One of the young men who was caught on camera by my person who eventually became my collaborator, Steve Bruley, who filmed the entire debacle. One of the young men there was there because he had had two friends. He was 18 or 19. He'd had two friends commit suicide in the past year. And he was hoping that he might find some closure, or at least some understanding from hearing Warren

Farrell speak, but he was subject to a bunch of screaming herodens with nose rings telling him that, you know, he was fascist because he wanted to hear Warren Farrell. So I saw that and I was of course, you know, appalled and I'm not really surprised. And I contacted that group, the Canadian Association for Equality and said, look, if you've got a chapter in Ottawa, I'd be really happy to be involved in any way, even just as a like a mentor to young man. If they want to come and talk to me about some of the feminist ideology that they're being presented with in their classes, I'd be happy to be a sounding board or just, you know, just give emotional support, really. I already knew there was nothing much that could be done about it institutionally.

You know, the force of feminist ideology on campuses was already so dominant. But anyway, so that's what I said. And they invited me to speak the following spring. And so I did. I went down there and spoke. And, you know, Toronto was about a a six-hour drive from Ottawa for anybody who doesn't know. And it was protested, the fire alarm. Yeah, you know, for the first three or four years of my life, I never gave a talk that wasn't protested. And yeah, you know, they pulled the fire alarm and, you know, all of that. And I gave other talks after that that were also. There's a famous one, a University of Ottawa Library that I heard about. Maybe you talk about that for a second. Yeah, yeah. Well, there was,

one at the University of Ottawa itself that was prevented by the banging of drums and the singing of the communist international. That one was really, that was really crazy. And yeah, I gave one in Kingston. That talk at Queen's University and Kingston did eventually go forward with a lot of objection and heckling and all of that. I get, yeah, I tried to give one at the Ottawa Public Library where Antifa and, you know, affiliated groups came out and chanted fuck Fiamengo and, you know, held up banners saying no platform for hate speech and all, you know, all those sorts of things. So, so yeah, I got a firsthand glimpse of the maniacal ideological intransigence of the sorts of students who are being nurtured on university campuses. So yeah, that was that was when I first heard

about this, I remember it surprised me because your mannerism is anything but aggressive or or in your face. It's by by nature, you know, if you if just listening to you for two minutes, it's clear that you're not you're not a strident, you know, and it's so it's ideologue and and and it's amazes me that that people can in any way listen to you for two minutes and talk about hate speech. That's what I just found, find incredible. But in any case, it happens. I think I've already mentioned once on this podcast, but I know back when we lived in Oregon, and the first time we saw it was my wife attended talk at a small liberal arts college, was very woke, and I guess was Christina Hoffs Summers, I think was speaking, but the students wouldn't, it was a lot,

at the law school, which it surprised me. And the students wouldn't let her speak. And the the law faculty were there and no one, everyone just sort of sat there. And you think in a law school that there'd be some semblance of the notion of free speech, at the very least. And such radical things as saying that there were intrinsic biological differences between men and women, like for example, men on average taller than women, were shouted down. No, that's not true. I mean, and in any case, I have to, before we I'm going to we'll get we'll get to a hopefully a lot of thing you there's so much here to unpack with you but um i have to ask you 20 percent you say 20 percent of the students in the in the in the in the um

phd program and literature or whatever are art were male when you were about that yeah just before i left the university of ottawa we had to do one of those program reviews where you know you might write a huge hundred page report on every aspect of the department's programming and i and i remember then we did have a gender breakdown of our students and at that point it you know changed slightly from year to year but it was around 84 to 16 female to male has there ever been a large movement or the government suggesting that somehow that we have to do something about the male um a policy of males in literature has there any been what do you think there's never a movement to do anything And, you know, English literature is not even the worst, I don't think, although it's probably one of the worst.

But, you know, in education, like the entire faculty of education, the social sciences, they've been, like, they are completely dominated by women. And there is never any expressed concern about that. Yeah, well, I mean, and something you talk about, and I've talked about too, but it's, you know, generally now in most universities, it's, it's now well over 60% of the undergraduate population. It's female, about 40% male. But in many disciplines, including it's, you know, I'm a physicist and I hear about the policy women in STEM, but in a huge number of STEM disciplines,

they're by far the majority in biology, for example. And, but one only hears about the disciplines where they, for some reason, the demographics is such that they're not in the majority. Now, the, you, you, what was that, Well, actually, before we get to the details, you, you, your talks are protested. How do your, how did your colleagues respond at all in literature in the university or elsewhere?

If you want to talk about it, you don't have to. Yeah, I don't know. By that point, I was already, you know, I think I'd made it clear. And it only takes, you know, one comment said in a department meeting and everybody knows, oh, she's not one of us. Okay. So by that point, I think it was already pretty clear that I was, uh, you know, a non-believer. Okay.

And so, um, and, uh, my colleagues were very nice to me. They're very civil people. And I did have a few friends, but, um, I think I would have to say that I was essentially very nicely frozen out. they must have known. I didn't, you know, tell anybody. I didn't send around a mass email saying, hey, look, I did this talk at the U of T.

Yeah. But, you know, obviously they would have seen it and been appalled. But they were nice enough not to say anything. And, you know, nobody came to my department. There were no conversations about the intellectual content of that or the whole issue. Or were there no seminars or? Oh, well,

What do you mean? I mean, on the issues you're raised. I mean, on the issues raised in your public talk and the history of feminism and, and, and, and the claim, and the treatment of man, but there were no, no, no. No. No. I mean, in that last year, when I told you, we did the, the program review and I was responsible for writing, writing up part of the, our self-report document. and I did actually comment on the paucity of male students.

And I said, because we were always concerned with keeping student enrollment up. And I said, you know, one really quick and easy way we could increase our enrollment would be to make our classes more attractive to men. And maybe we should have a conversation about how that might be done and whether that, you know, could be done partly by changing the ideological approach of most English literature. courses but that just gets frosted out just it is never it's never picked up do it was it made did it make it into the final report at least yes yeah it's there okay i think so yeah but but yeah it would never be actually flagged or or focused on when i when i i i quit can help but

asking when i heard that you had taken early retirement uh i wondered what um it why other than perhaps it was financially attracted because of the university, but did you, were you, were you, did you leave academia for the same reason a lot of people or leave academia lately, which is that it's just becoming impossible to be involved in open scholarship and discussion? Yeah, exactly for that reason. I started to feel nervous while I was teaching. I did think that it was only a matter of time before there would be a student complaint and, you know, what happens after that, then you get forced out and it's very, very humiliating and horrible. So, yeah, I was, I was always nervous, even just, you know, giving basic information about the authors we were studying.

Yeah. So it just became so uncomfortable. And so from the time I was in my early 50s, I started thinking, if I can go at 55, I will. And so I did. And, you know, the fact that my mother, It was here in Vancouver where we've moved to after my dad died, I thought I would like to live in the same city as my mother. So my husband and I were kind of thinking along those lines too. That's nice. It's nice that you're both able to do that, and I'm both able to move. Did you think, you didn't feel protected by the fact that you were a woman? I mean, I assume if you've been a man, you would have been already farced out well.

Oh, yes. Yeah, I would have been gone probably after that first talk, you know, or shortly after. Definitely. I had my female privilege and it allowed me to say a lot of things that no man would have been able to say. And it was a lot more difficult to make problems for me because you can't. It's not as easy for a female student to say that she was sexually harassed or that I had created a toxic environment or whatever. Yes, I was definitely lucky in that way. Yeah, no, I think that's one of the important reasons. You know, one of the reasons actually interesting enough in the program, we were going to have and we may still have an Orgence Foundation was an all-female panel about this issues. Yeah. I assume there would have been no protests that there were no men on it, but what, but in any case. But I think it's important to see that because people are automatically, you are allowed to say things that that men couldn't, but it's important

that they be said and it's important we all have the discussion. And I want to, what I'm going to do, even though I like history and I know you like history is I'm going to be very a historical. want to I want to start by talking about a recent piece of yours. Actually came out August 10th now and then go back in time back to to the early times. But actually, I wonder whether I want to put it. Yeah. Before I get there, you pointed out you started to do the videos, the videos from which actually I first learned about you, the Fiamengo files. Beautiful set of videos. When you look up now, you see that the original videos aren't there. You want to explain to me what happened? Yeah. Well, eventually, I think it was last.

summer around this time, the entire channel, which was called Studio Brule, that's my collaborator, Steve Brulay, who did all the production of the videos. It was permanently banned. And we'd been, you know, obviously on YouTube's not approved list for some time. All of the videos were eventually demonetized. And then there were individual bans on certain videos, you know, for very, they never tell you exactly why they just say that you contravene their community standards and things like that and then eventually it was just the complete ban so they are now on odyssey although i find them kind of hard to to find and and all all of the view numbers of course and all of the comments too are gone and that that latter thing is so i i just i you know it's so sad because they the comment section

especially on some of them. It was a sight of a hold. There were hundreds and hundreds, in some cases, thousands of really interesting conversations, often very civil debates and exchanges of views. And it's really sad that that's all gone. But yeah, that's what happened. But Steve and I have started up again. Now we're starting over again with a very small channel called Studio B on YouTube again. And people have said that's a very bad idea to go back to YouTube, which, yes, I can see why it is, but YouTube is still, it's still kind of the place to be. And so we're there. At Studio B, I would encourage anybody who wants to see what's going on in my new project to take a look there.

There are a number of Studio B's, so it's sort of hard to find. but if you put Studio B Fiamengo into Google search, you should be able to find it. Or even the Fiamengo file, which is, I think, how I found it. Yeah. Okay. Great. Yeah. Yeah. It's the Fiamengo file 2.0 now. And yeah, so we're doing a series on the history of feminism. Which is what I want to get back to that history, and that's how we'll end. We'll get there eventually. Actually, the good news, I'm not, you must be aware. The good news is that there's Fiamengo file too. But somehow three Fiamengophile originals are still on.

Episode 1, Episode 6, and Episode 3 somehow survived, and they're still on YouTube. Oh, interesting. Maybe they're on somebody else's YouTube channel. No, at Studio B. One of the channels is the original Fiamengal file. And maybe I should announce it because maybe it'll give information remove it. But they're there. Oh, that's true.

Yes. Steve did remount some of the originals. He was thinking, I think originally he was thinking that he would put up the ones that we thought were the most important, but then we ended up just getting into the 2.0. But yes, there are still some of those very old ones from way back in 2015 there. The first episode, which is very important,

which is why I'm an anti-feminist, which I wanted some stuff to get to, is up, is still up, and it's very important. But it's always a shame. And not only when YouTube does it, but I know universities, including my own university, just take down videos where there's, which are, for which there's lots of public comments,

but there's resources and, and, and, and, uh, and references and learning tools and teaching tools. And they take it down as, and pretend they're interested in teaching. It was really, it's really, yeah, it's really, it's really, it's so, it's so incredible. I remember when, um, remember when Alessandro Strumia, yeah, did his, uh, lecture at CERN. which, of course, was immediately taken down from the CERN website so that people couldn't even go. They just had to read about how what he had said was absolutely indefensible and unacceptable,

but you couldn't even go and find out what he'd said in order to test his hypothesis. Yeah, decide for yourself or look at the evidence that he had provided or anything. I mean, I just find it just extraordinary that these people can claim to be in any way interested in education, public knowledge, research, when, you know, debate, certainly not, you know, when they do these kinds of things. Yeah, it is. And you can imagine certain emotional groups, but when it, when, when academic groups start doing it, you know, it seems like, and the, and, and we're going ahead again, but the whole, the whole rationale is that somehow the facts. hurt. If the facts hurt, the facts should never be discussed. Yeah. And incredible. Yeah, that yeah, it is incredible. That facts or arguments are a form of violence. Now that started to be the dominant claim. I don't know how long ago, 15 years ago, perhaps, became really popular about 10 years ago to shut down anything that these groups didn't like. And it's just,

Yeah, it's incredible. It's so ridiculous, so facile on its face. And yet it has enormous power, both within and outside of academia, to prevent people from exploring all sorts of subjects that have great public import. I wonder if you'd be allowed in an English department now to talk about the childhood nursery rhyme that we used to say when I was in the playground, when I was a young boy and young girls said it as well, which was sticks and stones. will break my bones, but names will never hurt me. Yeah. And now names will definitely earn. Yeah, it's absolutely opposite. And so anything, you know, I mean, it isn't like I don't think they really believe those things.

I don't think the people claiming to be hurt are really hurt. I mean, it's just a very convenient piece of rhetoric. It's a pure power play. It's about who gets to decide what's acceptable and what's not. It's about whose feelings matter. It's about which victim grew. you know, can excoriate which other so-called privileged group, although obviously they're demonstrating that they're not really a disempowered group at all if they have that kind of power,

but, you know, those contradictions don't stop them. And so yeah, it's just a way of demonstrating that certain groups of people have got to face the facts that they are no longer able to speak honestly about a whole range of subjects in any kind of public form anymore. And the people who are who are not. able to do that are the people who are supposedly been we've been told have the power and you know that i and to date this and as you know i recently wrote a piece saying that that part of the problem is that is if you let i don't think i don't know if i use the word spoiled children in the piece but people behave like spoiled children and academia is and yeah and academia is allowing that to happen

without with with impunity um then that's going to continue and until someone said says stands up and some institution leader. And you can understand, I've seen it happen. I've seen it happen to me when I've talked about this. You get barraged immediately. It's very difficult. You can understand it's not as if people are cowards. It's awful when people speak up and then are just attacked.

Speaking up. So you can see why academics have become afraid, but somehow we'll talk at the end about what we can do. But let's go, let's, this is your chance and not mine. So as some people are immediately going to write. in the comments section of this, you know, let her speak. But so this piece that I just picked up most recently, men have been psychologically abused by feminist ideology for decades.

In some sense, it's a review of some of the history from your discussion. But it came in the context of a, I can't believe it. I could believe of a TV program, I guess, when in the UK in the election, And one of the, Liz Truss, I guess, has said that she's going to make cat calling illegal and cat calling wolf whistles and down blousing, which I'd never heard of, which is apparently photographing a woman's cleavage, which that would be illegal. Of course, you know, you wouldn't want to, I guess the whole Grammy Awards would not be impossible. Yeah, right. Yeah. But if you suggest that maybe women shouldn't bear their cleavage in the way they do, oh, that's a terrible sex. this thing to say. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Any case, but in the context of that, you talked about the debate that happened.

And I want to just quote some of the numbers because it's the UK numbers, but basically you're saying, look, it not only is the legislation, of course, divisive and insulting to men, as you point out, it's also state overreach, but that people, you're, one of the points you've raised often is that they ignore and feminism, particularly ignores the difficulties of young men and males who are supposedly so privileged. And you talk about in the context of history. But here are the statistics in the UK. 75% of suicides in the United Kingdom are committed by men.

Men are 95% of the prison population, 85% of the homeless rough sleepers, and 77% of alcoholics. Workplace deaths in the United Kingdom are 94% male. Boys are performing far worse than going. girls in the UK and primary systems. At the tertiary level, young men are numbered by women at close to two to one. And as you point out, wouldn't you think feminists might spend a few days at least pretending to care about men's issues?

Not in your life. They continue to hammer away at male entitlement. So those are some of the statistics that, but I'll let you elaborate because it's a nice article on sort of where to go from there. Yeah, well, I mean, it's, and the statistics, by the way, are for North America, of course, are pretty much identical or even worse. I think men are 80% of suicides in the United States and they're 97% of workplace deaths.

And yeah, 96% perhaps of the prison population, yet we still have these programs for how to keep women out of prison. Nothing about how to keep men out of prison. You know, we just, yeah, it's just like the glaring contradictions don't seem to phase feminist ideologues or even the general public. And I think that's the thing that I find so frustrating at times is that wherever you are on the political spectrum, I know there are leftist men who don't consider themselves feminists. There are certainly many conservative men who don't consider themselves feminist.

And yet most of them, to say, some degree or other, often to a large degree, except the feminist claims and feel compelled to express concern, you know, about the paucity of women in STEM or concern about the problem of sexual harassment or concern, you know, or their, you know, how, how horrific it is that women have to walk down the street and face cat calling and wolf whistling. And yet are either don't know about the reality of how boys and men are falling behind or struggling or even don't care. I mean, and that is the problem is that feminist ideology has, has ridden high on a deep, well, we use the term gynocentrism in men's issues circles, but just a deep. preference for women, both men and women, find it hard to care as much about the struggles that men face.

This has been amply, psychological, documented by experts in psychology. There's a woman named Alice Eagley, who's done a lot of research on this, and Antonio Mladnik and various others, Roy Baumeister as well. And they just keep finding over and over again that women have, an in-group bias. Women tend to care more about other women. They have a strong sense of their belonging to that group, womanhood, and men have a strong bias towards women. And so when women say that something is hurting them or something needs to be done to support women, men tend to be willing to jump and do it. Whereas when men complain or raise issues that are affecting

boys in our society, everybody gives the collective yawn. And that's how feminist ideologues have been able to get away with decades upon decades of programs to advantage women, which have disadvantaged men. And it's why we're not very interested now in doing anything about the asymmetry that has resulted. Yeah, no, in fact, the, when I first began to sort of think and question this, I was a chairman of a physics department. You know, when I was told that that people were incensive to women's issues, I looked all around and it was quite the opposite. Because most of us, when I first heard, you know, I looked at the policy of women in physics

and we tried to do something about it. It's a natural thing to want to do to help and we institute programs. And, you know, when I was chair, we hired the first women in physics and we even got a first all female class to matriculate in the first. at least of offers in graduate school. And I didn't think twice about that because it is true that it seems natural to try and assist in those things when you've grown up and heard about the problems.

But then you look around and say, well, but there are all these programs that are working. Why are we systemic? Where are the systemic inequities? There are, where are the, and, and, and one of the things that you broke me up when I was reading is you talk about the, that we need to do,

this would be a wonderful speech to begin with, which might get you in the door, but then kicked out very quickly afterwards. But we need to do something about the systemic inequities in universities and get applaud, the systemic inequities against men. And that would really, which is what you said. Do you want to comment on that?

I mean, I was pleased. I was amazed, actually. I guess I've given away that I was pleased, but I was to see you use those terms because it's so unusual. I'd never seen anyone talk about systemic inequities. You hear the President of the United States, you hear the head of the National Academy of Sciences,

the head of the National Institute of Health, the heads of all the major scientific organizations talk about systemic inequities against women and minorities. Yeah, but never the other way run. Not against men, certainly not against white men. And, you know, I've spent years now, like putting things up on Twitter about yet another round of women-only appointments. at, you know, some various universities.

And I always get comments by both men and women, but certainly by men saying, oh, big deal, you know, oh, so what? So there's, you know, for one year, some men are going to be discriminated against. Boo-hoo. And I try to tell them, well, actually this has been going on. And, you know, you can read about it. There's a book called, it's by Martin Loney. It's called In Pursuit of Division, Race, Gender, and Equity Hiring in Canada.

He wrote it in the 90s and it documents the beginning of all of this in the late 1970s and 1980s. He was writing as a not exactly a socialist, but certainly a left-leaning person interested in social justice and all this. And he was saying, you know, this is not the way to go. And he had all the statistics showing that, in fact, like you just, you can't break down issues in these very binary simplistic terms because it simply isn't the case. If you're looking at income level, you know, you'll find immigrants from Greece and Portugal right in there with immigrants from Jamaica in terms of their income level. So you can't say that all whites have privilege and all blacks don't, you know,

all those kinds of things. And, you know, he really gets into it and he provides the same kind of very meticulous analysis of the position of women, you know, over those decades. And so this is something that has been entrenched in academia and elsewhere in the society for decades. I mean, I find it breathtaking that this is what men have had to endure and yet still feel ashamed for their alleged privilege that at least two generations of men have been discriminated against in hiring overtly, legally, that there have been positions either held only for women or at least where, yeah, men could apply, but they weren't going to be even given a serious look at if there were any women who were even close to similarly qualified. I saw that myself with my own eyes at the

University of Saskatchewan year after year starting in 1999. So I've seen it personally for over 20 years. I mean, I just, if I were a man, I would, I mean, I would feel really angry about it. And, and I think we, you know, but yeah, they don't. And I mean, I think we should be men and, and non-feminist women should be marching in the streets and saying no more, no more discrimination. Let's live in a culture. let's live in in societies where people have equal opportunities to bring their gifts to the world and to pursue their ambitions and their talents. And that's an end of it. Let's stop this.

I mean, I just find it outrageous. And if you talk about this and, you know, the source of male anger, most men aren't angry. And the vast, vast, vast majority of men just want to say, okay, let's just, let's call it quits now. let's start over again. The vast majority of men just want to live in harmony with women and they want to to form partnerships and they want to work together and build a good society together. And there's so many women who are still angry about their issues and not at all interested in listening to what men have to say. I've given talks where at the end of the talk after I went

through all of the statistics, some of which you read, a woman will stand up at the end and say I mean, I'm thinking of a particular example and give an anecdote about something that happened to her in 1988, where some man made a sexist comment and everybody will applaud. And the clear implication of her comment is, this happened to me 35 years ago. I'm still angry about it. And I'm not interested in hearing about 80% of suicides being male. I don't give a damn about men dropping out of, you know, the school system. I don't give a damn about any of those things because I'm holding on to my grievance.

My victimology matters more than anything else. And people will applaud that. And I said to this woman, I'm not interested in collective vengeance seeking. I don't think, even if it were true that men up until 30 years ago had, exercised absolute dominance and subjugation of women. Why should the younger generation of men have to pay for that in their own lives? I don't believe in that. That's the way to guarantee deep social dysfunction. And it isn't even true. And that's what I've discovered in my research. It is not true that that's what men did to women 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 150 years ago. Feminism was always

built on lies and it was always built on the social preference that we have for women and the great concern and compassion that men have for women. And so I think I got off topic there, but it's all right. I'm enjoying listening to it. But that, you know, that's the difficulty. It is, it is that people forget that the kinds of ameliorative policies that various universities are putting forward now that they've already been tried. They've been in place for for decades. For decades. I mean, you know, I want to come back actually. You actually, again, as usual, I anticipated where we're going, which is the history of feminism and we'll get there. But yeah, when I talked about my experience as chair, I'm talking about the 1990s. Yeah. Talking with the fact

that whenever we hired anyone, and that was in early 1990s, if we didn't hire a woman, we had to write a special letter to the administration explaining why we didn't hire women. That was 1990s. That's 30 years ago. So that was, I know, well, and when I was at the University of Saskatchewan, starting in the late 90s and at the University of Ottawa, it was the same thing. If you didn't hire a woman or somebody else in another equity group, you know, there were the various groups, the indigenous and people of color and the disabled. You had to write, if you hired a white man, you had to write and explain why. And so that it's been going on all these years. And yeah, it's, it's really extraordinary.

Now, you, it's, it is extraordinary. And it's a little more, as you as listeners will know, I, or viewers, I've moved back to Canada. And I was kind of amazed, discover that actually this discrimination can be explicit in Canada. It's implicit in the United States. I mean, where you, in the United States, you're not allowed to have an ad at a university saying only available for women faculty positions men you know or women or minorities are disabled in Canada you can do that and there and and I just wrote about one or two you know major positions physics for example that were only open and and

and worse than that the the the advertisement said not only that it was only open to women some version of this women minorities and and and other disadvantaged groups but in the in the application you had to show how you have worked to empower groups that deserve equity. Oh, yeah. Equity deserving. And I thought, how can, is anyone equity not deserving? I mean, is anyone, that shocked me. It was allowed by the law to write that. I know, it's just horrible, isn't it? It used to be equity seeking groups for a long time. And then they changed it to equity deserving groups. Only certain groups deserve equity. I mean, it's right there. The big of is so blatant in everything that they write.

And yet it is somewhat startling to know that that is part of Canadian law. It's right there in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that you have, everyone has the right to be treated equally except if what you're trying to do is correct for so-called historic, you know, marginalization and inequalities in that, Once you can make that claim, all bets are off. And nobody has a right. No man has a right to be treated equally anymore. Just out of a point of information, is there a discussion anywhere of what equity

deserving means? It was the first time I'd seen it. Do people write specifically what that implies? I mean, is there a legal or any? I'm sure there is. I don't know. I don't know. I never looked, but I'm sure it's defined.

And, you know, it would be defined in exactly the way that it's always been defined. It would be women and people of color, et cetera. Yeah. Now, again, you know, not only am I going here historically in terms of history of feminism, I'm going a historically in what I plan to talk to you about, but you brought up so many interesting points in the last discussion. In particular, you point out how the how men who are, not only have bought in, you know, are particularly sympathetic to these issues because they've been.

told their whole lives. But you talk, interestingly enough, about even people who point out the problems with that, the fallacies of some of those arguments, inevitably implicitly buy into them. You wrote an article saying accused men on campus are up against decades of feminist myth-making. But you, but what fascinated me was that you quoted Stuart Taylor Jr., junior give a warning to parents about how difficult it is for their sons. And it's one of those things you read on the surface, you go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But then you parse it, which is a wonderful thing for a professor of literature to do. So let me give the quote and then let me let I'll let you parse each. I don't know if I can remember what I said. Well, okay, I'm going to give you the quote

and then you, well, okay, we'll see. This be a good test. It said, so the quote from him is, you should of course treat women with respect. Avoid making. Okay, okay, hold on. We'll go through each of those words because I think you'll remember once I give you the sense. Okay, you should of course treat women with respect. Avoid making unwanted sexual overtures and be quick to help the victim of an apparent result sexual otherwise. What may be less obvious is that just as women in college face grave dangers from rapists and other sexual predators, men like you face grave dangers from false accusers. And you go on, but but what amazes me, you say, okay, you read that and you go, good. he's pointing his out. But then you point out each of those claims is itself not true. So let's go. Why should you treat women with respect? I mean, I agree that we should approach every individual

we meet with, you know, the intent of being civil. I don't know about respectful exactly, but certainly civil and polite. Why should men respect women? Are women ever hectored to respect men? No, of course not. And if women were, like if we want to make that our cultural bedrock, that each sex treats the other with respect, okay, that's fine. But of course, that's not true. Women do not respect men and men shouldn't have to respect women if the women aren't behaving with respect. And the implication there, of course, is that a special standard is required for women. And there's also a kind of female moral supremacism built into that, which is that somehow women are more worthy of respect than those disgusting, dirty, horrible men. So yeah, I reject that right from the outset.

It's all part of that. We should believe women. You know, we have to protect women. Well, why? If they're liars, if they act dishonestly, aggressively, shamefully, then I don't respect them. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I guess I'd give him a little leeway. I think you don't need to respect people. Some people aren't deserve respect, but treat people respect. I think it just means mean means courteously, civilly, and that I'm all in favor of. Absolutely. The people are idiots, you might as well treat them at least courteously and civilly with and with kindness because there's. I agree. Yeah. I agree. But it's the implication that men don't treat women with respect to begin with and that women are uniquely deserving of respect while men aren't. That really bugs me.

Okay, second sentence. Poor guy. He was trying so hard and you just destroy him. Anyway, not really destroying, but the language. The parsing is really interesting. The second claim, which sounds reasonable, but then, of course, you argue against, avoid making unwanted sexual overtures. Your turn. Yeah, what does that mean? Unwanted? I mean, come on. How is the guy to know? We still live in human communities where men make the vast majority of romantic and sexual advances. That's just, I think that's human nature. If you want to argue, that's just learned. Okay, fine. It still is. Most women do not make the first move. So how is the man to know whether the sexual overture is wanted or not? I mean, this is the whole problem with sexual harassment legislation.

It says that anything that's unwanted falls into the category of sexual harassment. So if a man asks a woman out for a date and she says, oh, gee, I'm busy that night. And then he asks her again, not realizing that, oh, I'm busy. actually meant, you know, bug off, but she couldn't say it because that's how women often are. Then he's now guilty of an unwanted advance. So, you know, that's just... You see, I'm a scientist, and it seems to me maybe a quaint notion that to find that, that you base your presumptions on empirical evidence. So it's hard, in this case, it would be hard to know what was unwanted unless, without any empirical evidence.

Exactly. And one of the ways would be to ask someone out or something like that, and then you might get some evidence. But, okay. And this is a, this whole idea of the unwanted advance, it has built into it a privileging of a certain type of man who is very, very attractive to women. His advance is not going to tend to be unwanted. But the nerdy guy who has spent all of his life, let's say, you know, reading about astronomy. and doesn't have that much experience with women, but, you know, still really likes women. And the only women he's ever going to meet are the women either in his classes that he's taking at university or if he goes on later, maybe women in his lab or, you know, whatever it happens to be. So what is he, is he supposed to live as a monk? Is he not even allowed now to make an advance without that being somehow considered unacceptable, even. by a guy who has spent his life writing about the injustices to accuse men on university campuses.

Even he's bought into the rhetoric. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And another issue, which I guess I credit my wife with teaching me about because she's a woman and attractive women, as I think she is, She said, you learn how to kindly and gently say no, but it's not a, it's not traumatic. It's, I mean, it's something mothers or fathers teach young girls is how to women are going to be, you're going to be, you're going to be, you're going to be, someone's going to ask you out and you may not want to do that and how to do on how to, how to, how to do it kindly or if the, if the, if the proposition. is rude and how to say buzz off and just go away and not feel like you've been traumatized for the rest of your life. It's just a it's just part of becoming an adult. And similarly for men. It is very difficult, you know, quite frankly, it's quite difficult.

It's difficult for the woman to say no often. She doesn't want to have the guy's feelings. Exactly. It's very difficult. It's very difficult to say, I just don't find you attractive at all and I never could, you know. That's awful. And so lots of women don't want to say that. And so, and the guy, I mean, what have guys been taught? Even now, in our feminist-approved culture, the idea of the masculine hero, the most chivalric hero, he tries, he wins the woman. You know, that's what he does. And maybe he does great exploits. He defeats the, you know, evil in his town, or he does something wonderful. And he does those things for the girl he loves, who maybe wasn't interested in him at first. But now she is because she sees what a wonderful man he is. I mean, I think that's still.

an admirable romantic paradigm, but what that means is that the guy is often primed not to take no for an answer, at least not the first time, and who can blame him? Like lots of guys have said to me, you know, if I had taken no for an answer, I would never have married the woman that I love. Well, it's actually the basis speaking in literature, someone pointing out this out to me. It's the, it's the basis of essentially every romantic comedy. Boy ass grows out. She says, no boy ass girls out. She says no, you know, finally boy ass girls out. She said yes. You know, I mean, that's the basic, basic. And the other part of this, and you know, I wasn't going to talk about this because I'm a man, I'm maybe I'm not supposed to. But again, my wife has pointed

this out. It's not, of course, it's difficult for a woman to turn someone down gracefully. It's a hard thing to do. And it, and you can damage people by, you know, you can imagine how bad you feel if you say, no, you're not attracted to me. I'd never go out with you. But if you're a man, it's also put you it's very difficult to ask a woman out it I mean I certainly was afraid the two in high school because you know you get rejected it's really difficult it really is deflating and it's it's a this whole on both sides it's a whole this interpersonal relationship but is difficult and complex and to boil it down to such a facile statement of of avoiding making unwanted sexual overtures is is to is to demean both men and women yeah I

absolutely agree. And the fact that, you know, when I said it's hard for the woman to say no, I think it's much harder to be the man who has to keep asking and being turned down all the time. Wow. I mean, that's incredible. That's really hard. And the fact that the feminist movement has cast all of that into the realm of, you know, male predation on women. And that's supposedly the only thing we're supposed to care about is women's alleged feelings of fear and apprehension when they're having these unwanted advances. Again, it's just so so lacking in compassion and humanity. Well, you know, but we're going to keep going. We're going to keep parsing, but now you've reminded me of something else I want to get you later, so I might as well get you now. Two things you

said when you talk about being an anti-feminist and we'll eventually get to the definition of anti-feminism in a second, but I told you we're working backwards, is you say two things that are really quite provocative. or at least would seem like provocative in our current world. One of them is you talk about seeking equality for women, and you say men and women aren't equal. So you want to expand upon that? Well, they aren't, and it's really interesting to see feminists now talking about that, the turfs, you know, the gender-critical feminists,

as they call themselves, who split from the social constructionist feminists. For many, many years, we were told that everything was a social construction, every behavior, even physical strength. I have read articles and I've written about them that claimed that physical strength itself was socially constructed from everything from what women are expected to do and allowed to do physically to the amount of food, you know, the amount of protein that parents tend to give girls as opposed to boys, you know, all that crazy stuff. But, you know, now it's coming out.

Yes, okay. I mean, if that were true, then we would just open all sports. competitions to everybody. Why I have women sports teams and men sports teams. Now with the trans issue, of course, a lot of angry women are coming forward and saying, hey, this isn't fair. Now women are being prevented from competing with other women and women aren't as strong as men. So there's that. And, you know, there's so many other differences. There's so many psychological differences. Women and men have different interests. They have different aptitudes. And we simply have to recognize that. And although there are individual differences, I mean, there are individual

exceptions, I should say, some women are taller than some men, you know, that kind of thing. But in general, men are taller than women. So, and, you know, and let's, you know, like there's so many, when a man and woman are lying in bed at night and all of a sudden there's a loud noise right around the front door. Okay, I admit that maybe in one or two percent of households, it's the woman who goes down to investigate, but I think in the vast majority of households, it's the man who goes down to investigate. And it's the man who kills a spider in the bathtub and, you know, all these kinds of things. So, so, so this idea that equality is our new God and we're going to have to rearrange everything and force people into boxes because we believe in equality, I just think,

that's a very bad postulate to begin. And the point is that what people don't realize is saying that people aren't equal is not a judgment call. It's not it's not a pejorative statement. It's not it's not a value judgment because you know they're in there in inequalities but they're going, you know, it's not to say one is better than the other. It's men are taller in women. Maybe men are strong women, but it's also true that women are socially more adept than men on the whole, socially more aware, which is allows them in fact to sometimes manipulate situations and maybe gives them an advantage even when you think the power advantage is somewhere else. So it's just the recognition that their

differences, but it's not to say that the fact that their differences makes one better than or worse than another. It's really it's. And I've, I've not met very many men who are interested in talking about the general inferiority of women. Again, I keep coming back to this, but I've talked to so many men since I started doing this anti-feminist stuff. stuff who just, although they are very angry at feminist ideology, they still really love women. They love women's bodies. They love women's minds. They love the way women are.

Like they, you know, this notion of objectification. Oh, this is a terrible thing. You know, men objectify women. What that really means is that men love, many men love women's bodies so much that they will actually allow themselves to be killed. in order to protect those bodies, that they fantasize about those bodies, not just sexually per se, but they're obsessed with women. And this goes back, I'm sure, to the experience of the baby boy at his mother's breast or even before that.

His sense of her body is of this nurturing, enveloping, safe space. A girl has a very different relationship to her father. It is not the same thing. And so, you know, there just are all of these differences. And it has very little to do with men wanting to oppress women. I have met a lot of women who don't like men very much, I'm sorry to say, who have contempt for men at best are indifferent to their needs or concerns or even have a vengeful kind of satisfaction that they take in the thought of a man's suffering.

I've had conversations with women where they talk about, how I had one conversation with a woman who talked about how men suffering kidney stones was a kind of revenge for the fact that men don't give birth and so therefore don't experience that pain that women experience. And she laughed at the idea. Ha ha, ha. Finally, men were having to experience pain. I really, I've never met a man who took pleasure in the thought of a woman's pain during childbirth. And in fact, the history of medicine has been the history of men trying to, medical men trying to cut down on the pain that women suffered during childbirth. So, you know, there are all of these inequities. And I don't think male superiority over women is a problem that we face in our,

in our society. I just, I do not see it. Okay. Well, I think we've gone over the men, not equal women thing. Although I will say, just, you know, again, for full disclosure, that And we lived in Australia and these big spiders. And it would be my wife who'd take care of them. Anyway. Okay, there we go. But at least at the beginning. But the other thing you say, which, of course, permeates a lot of this,

but I want to get it out now is you say that one of the big problems that the feelings become more important than reality. And it's related to the, I want to relate it since I'm still going at that parsing that second unwanted section. overtures. But the feeling of infringement on your personal space when someone may ask you out, it may lead to a feeling of, you know, you feel badly and you may feel in person infringed. But then that feeling becomes more important than the reality of someone having just asked you out in the office. But that's just one example. Do you want to go into it more?

Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's a huge topic, really. And it's difficult for me because I don't ever remember really having that, that feeling. I don't remember ever feeling threatened by men. And, you know, it could be, I wasn't a particularly beautiful young women. So maybe the experience of really beautiful young women who are constantly, you know, they can't walk down the street without men turning their heads. And maybe that's different. I've heard theories that, that especially women in certain ages, that they're kind of programmed

almost to be very aware of that threat. And that this has a kind of evolutionary mechanism. But since I didn't, like all the men I knew, and as I said, I grew up in a lower middle class, working class neighborhood. My friends and I used to go roller skating for fun, like from age 14 to 1617. We hung out with kind of rough boys. And yet my experience of young men was in general, they were very gentlemanly overall. definitely not interested at all in forcing a woman to do anything she didn't want to do or,

you know, anything like that. So, um, so I have trouble believing the claims of, uh, you know, the damsel and distress kind of cries that we hear so often. Again, I see them as power moves. But even if they are true, that is certainly no reason why. I mean, we have now a situation where men are being fired from their jobs or disciplined for alleged sexual harassment for the most minor of missteps. You know, you can make a joke. You can stand too close. You can be accused as a man of having a gaze that is too intense. You know, there are all sorts of very, very minor. I mean, now hugging, patting on the shoulder. Let's get there. Hold off because you want to talk about your monster gaze thing, which I enjoyed listening to.

I mean, those are all cases where even if I accept that the woman really did feel threatened by the man standing too close to her or giving her a pat on the shoulder, whatever it happens to be, to start making law and policy based on

those exaggerated feelings or those hysterical, dare I say, feelings, is, well, it's just a recipe for injustice. Well, let me, for your sake, and mine, but let me just clarify one thing, that your experience has been a good one, but neither you nor I, but in particular you, since you made the statement, do not deny

there are cases of men enforcing themselves on women. It's not that it's not that you deny that doesn't happen. It's just the question. No, of course not. I want to make that clear to the, to the, I might, I mean, of course not, but I must say that, you know, I, I, I know, I, I read pretty well every, well, people send me all sorts of articles about this, this complaint of sexual harassment, this complaint of sexual assault. It's very difficult to find one where you say, ah, yeah, that there, you know, the guy was obviously guilty. In so many cases, they are murky at best. So let's distinguish. I know that. We're going to get there. No, no, we're going to get there, I'm not talking about the sort of the alleged claims of places like workplace or campus.

I mean, they're illegal, there are people, people go to court because some people have raped people and people. In the legal system, this happens. It's not as if it doesn't. What you're referring to is the far vaguer area in campuses and workplaces, which I want to get to. But before we get there, I want you to parse this last sentence, which will get us there, which is, you say, whereas what may be less obvious is that just as women in college, face grave dangers from rapists and other sexual predators. That statement, you point out, as other people have, is complete false. He knows it.

I don't even know why he said that. He's the one that brings out the statistics that every reputable study has found that the danger that women face in society at large is certainly higher. Like women are safer on college campuses in North America than anywhere else. I mean, there were cases where universities didn't receive a single report of sexual assault, you know, in a year or two years. So these are places where, yeah, women are very safe. So I don't understand why it's always necessary to, because as soon as you concede that ground, then you're already in a place where you're not, for one, you're not talking about reality anymore, and you're already backfooted because you're going to

have to agree that if college campuses are really such a dangerous place for women, then, you know, we're going to have to have all of these various policies to try to protect them or to try to expel men who did all these bad things that aren't happening on those college campuses. You know, Heather McDonald, who I've talked to and has different politics, I think, in probably both you and I, But we agree on some things. It's pointed out something very true. If that were really true, universities wouldn't be able to recruit students and parents. If they were to say, you know what, 40% of the girls in our campus are raped, it wouldn't be the selling point of trying to get in.

What kind of father would pay for his daughter's education? It's because they're not. It's because it really happens that they're able to. And, you know, and also to be frank about it, things happen on college campuses, but they are not that. They are not the man jumping out of a dark. corner forcing the woman, you know, and raping her. They are women, you know, going out and getting drunk and men going to getting drunk too. And men getting drunk too. And then they go back to his dorm room and they have some fumbled sexual encounter of some sort. And the next morning she wakes up and she feels

bad about it or she feels angry or she feels embarrassed. And then you end up with some kind of complaint, not every time, of course, but sometimes. And, you know, I used to walk home from the University of Ottawa. I lived in the student area in the first few years when I taught there, and the bars would just be crammed and, you know, all night. And I mean, for one thing, I always thought, wow, these things are different students from the type I was. They're not home doing their homework. They're always telling me they don't have time to do their reading, but, you know, they're on the bars every night. But, but also, like, if it were true that camp, was such a dangerous place for women, then they would not be putting themselves in these vulnerable

positions. They would not be drinking themselves into a stupor with guys they hardly know. And let's make it, but let's even be clearer. Men wouldn't put themselves in that vulnerable position either because right now they can, I mean, most young men, I'm assuming in a campus, realize that if they end up, if they're drunk and they end up in a sexual encounter, they're at risk now of being expelled as much as anyone else. I think men, you know, and, you know, and Heather, Heather's argument is you shouldn't allow kids to drink, and maybe that's a little bit different.

Maybe, maybe you should it. Maybe instead, I think you and I would say, maybe you should expect kids to begin to behave like adults and accept responsibility for their behaviors, but both men and women. But so both sets, if it were so dangerous, it wouldn't continue to occur. on campuses. Well, I don't know. I mean, I think that for the men, I do think that young men are

unwise to to involve themselves in these kinds of drunken encounters. I agree. You know, I would certainly counsel them not to. I would counsel them to have a girlfriend, to know her very well, to romance her, you know, do all the traditional things and, you know, go that route. Even then, unfortunately, you're still not safe. Yeah. there are many cases I've read about where they dated for years. Yeah, me too. And in the end, she claimed that he had done something terrible to her. She had forced her in some way.

So it is very difficult for the men. But again, I mean, I have, I guess, a little bit more sympathy for those guys because I think a lot of those young men, they just want it so much. I mean, not just sex in a crude sense. They really want the intimacy. They want to have a girlfriend. And so this is the way they. see that they can can have that and they're just hoping that it's not going to happen to them and

unfortunately often it does but um yeah for for and i do i feel for girls who because those girls too have been duped i think in in various ways they've been told by the whole culture influenced by feminist ideology that they are you know that that's part of their liberation that girls should be just like guys their attitude to sex should be a casual one you see that in the movies all the time. Girls, they take off their clothes. It's no big deal. It's an enjoyable thing. They're very cool. They go off the next day. Usually the guy then thinks, wow, and he pursues her or whatever. In reality, it is that you wake up the next morning feeling bad about yourself. Maybe the guys do too, but I know for sure the girls often, they feel slutty. And that's the really interesting

thing, too, that feminists have always claimed that that's a social construction. That has to do with societal attitudes. I think it's deeper than that. And the fact that girls still feel that says, tells us that all the social constructionist talk and all the discourse about empowerment and, you know, sexual liberation and everything that is not actually true doesn't help girls to act like that. Well, yeah. And okay, so let's talk about campuses a bit and then I want to get off. But we're on it now and I was going to talk about it. And you've talked about, The, what I want to, you've talked about what you view are of various inequities and we can talk about that. But the response now, just to give a sense and you talk about Ohio State, I think it's in the context of maybe the monstrous gaze thing.

But, but, you know, universities are enacting regulations that define harassment in a way that's so difficult to say is harassment. And hold on, my dog is harassing. God wants to be picked up. So I just have to do a kiss. There we go. So anyway, so you want to talk about Ohio State? Well, I just remember it was one, just one amongst many. Oh, no, it's no different.

Yeah, it has this crazy harassment policy that defines staring as well as hugging and patting on the back as forms of harassment. And so once you're there, there's almost nothing that therefore wouldn't fall under that category. and it would be almost impossible then for how, you know, how could a young man defend himself against the charge of sexual harassment? Yeah, it's, it's, you know, and even if we get to the more serious, the idea that any kind of sexual encounter,

if the woman has been drinking now that can be sexual harassment. That's automatically no consent. Yeah, she can't consent. I mean, wow, given that, many young women use alcohol precisely to give themselves permission to be sexual and to loosen their inhibitions or nervousness or whatever. Men too, of course. But for the man, it's never an excuse.

No matter how drunk he is, that doesn't absolve him of responsibility. But as soon as she's had a single glass of wine or whatever, she now no longer has to take responsibility for what she did. she by definition cannot consent. Now, of course, again, everybody would agree that a woman who is completely passed out is not capable of consenting. But this is not what we're usually talking about. We're usually talking about a young man and a young woman, both quite drunk or a little bit drunk, who maybe do things that they wouldn't have done if they were sober. Hard to say. But suddenly, she is not responsible and he's a villain.

I just, I find it outrageous. Again, what about equality then? What about women's moral agency? Feminism always claims that feminism is about the radical idea that women are human, as if men never imagined that women were human in the past. Well, anti-feminism is the radical idea that women are adults and therefore they make their own decisions and are responsible for what they decide. Absolutely. Okay, we're almost on anti-feminism, by the way, but I can't, I can't, I can't, I don't want to leave this completely because the

staring thing really, it really is. I knew a man who was disciplined at his university because two girls had complained that he had stared at them. They were in an office waiting to see, you know, the dean of something. And he didn't even know what they were talking about. Maybe he was staring at them, you know. Maybe he was thinking about something and his gaze just happened to go over in their direction. Maybe he was trying to remember whether he'd known one of them in high school. You know, I mean, it's just ridiculous.

I don't know. I mean, yeah, I've been made uncomfortable by somebody staring at me. So I get up and move or I say something to them. Yeah, you respond like an adult. But what I want to point out is that now it's. gone from campus. I was informed by a TV producer when we were talking about doing a show that Netflix, I think it is, has new rules on the set. You're not allowed to stare at a one for more than four seconds on the set. So how you can have a conversation is you have to, is amazing to me.

But that's one of the rules. The other one is that you're not allowed to exchange phone numbers, which is amazing because I do think most people, many people end up with their spouses based on people they met at work at some level. It's where do you where you meet people. And so this this kind of notion that normal adult intercourse and by intercourse, I mean social intercourse is forbidden. You know, if you're interested in somebody, you know, when you're having conversation with them, you're actually looking at them and how you can tell the difference in that kind of stare in another stare is a it. So that kind of notion that humans can't interact. That interaction itself is dangerous, that normal interaction is dangerous is such a sad idea.

It's more than anything, I find it tragic. It is. It's tragic. It's toxic, of course. To good human relationships. And it's what makes me think that at some level, whether consciously or unconsciously, this whole project is intended to destroy human community. It's intended to destroy everything that is good between men and women.

It's intended to break the pair bond between men and women. between men and women, which is the foundation of a flourishing society. And obviously it's intended to make men extremely uncomfortable in their own skins, their attack for the way they sit. Remember there was a big campaign about man spreading some time ago. You're not allowed to sit with your knees apart. You know, everything, the way men look at women, a nice comment that a man might make. you know, hey, honey, you're looking beautiful.

Well, maybe that's inappropriate. But a lot of women enjoy it. It might make their day. Everything a man says or does is now potentially, if not criminal, at least, somehow disreputable. And it's also, I think it ruins women, too, because it teaches them to second guess everything that they experience. It gives some perhaps women who are disordered in their thinking.

a very dangerous kind of narcissistic pleasure in accusing and berating men. And it's just a, it's a recipe for social dysfunction. Which you've argued that feminism is. But as we about to get there, you basically say that that feeling of, before we leave campuses, that young boys go in and they're told at the very beginning, they experience classes generally are forced to have some classes where they, they're told that they're responsible for the inequity and rape in society and pedophilia and that they're ultimately, as you've written, second-class citizens in both rights,

financial aid, special programs, and support systems. So in some sense, they're already made to feel like they're they have an original sin just for being male. Yeah, for being born male. And that's why I've argued that feminism is a kind of religion. but it's a religion that has no notion of an all-forgiving God. It has no idea of redemption. You can confess your sins all you want.

You can declare yourself guilty, but you can't have your sins washed away because you just have to keep apologizing for being male. That original sin will stay there forever. It is really a gruesome inverted version of Christianity, I think. Yeah, no, I've agreed that. regarding all the secular wokeness is that the difference between secular religion and regular religion is there's no there's no redemption yeah i mean i'm not religious as you know i'm a local atheist but at least at least the conventional religions most of them not all them have this notion of

redemption yeah well christianity has has very strongly the idea that god loves people that and that all have fallen short of the glory of god everyone is a sinner everyone you know needs to seek forgiveness redemption, but feminism doesn't have that. Women, which by the way, which by the way, I should point out that also bothers me just as much, by the way. But anyway, the Christian. At least, at least it believes that, you know, each, the line between good and evil goes through every human heart. Feminism does not believe that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And no, I agree. And anyway, let's get there finally. Why are you, so your first video, why, you said, why am I an anti-feminist? We've sort of alluded it in many ways. But I,

I want you to, basically you argue what, several things that you claim feminism was never all about, equality, et cetera. So maybe you could talk about a little bit. And then I want to talk about this new series of videos on the history of feminism, which, which confront conventional wisdom. But first, why are you an anti-feminist? I should just mention, Larry, that I just got to notice saying my internet connection is unstable, which is a very bad sign. So if I blank out, you'll know what's something going on here on my end. As long as your internet connection doesn't later on sue you for abuse.

Right, exactly. Didn't consent to this long interview. Yeah, so why am I an anti-feminist? Well, just because feminism, I think, you know, we have already alluded to it, I see feminism as the ultimate hypocrisy. I believe it is based on dishonesty and it is based on hate. I really honestly believe that feminism is a hate movement. Its object is to stir up hatred against men and it is fueled by irrational hatred, especially stoked by a belief in lies about the

past, about the universal oppression of women by men. So that's that's really my sense. And a lot of people would counter and say, but hold on, feminism was just trying to counter the fact that, you know, women couldn't vote, couldn't work, etc. It was really trying to write wrongs and what would your response be? My response is, unfortunately, that isn't the case. And this is now my big hobby horse, and it's why I would encourage anybody who has doubts about what I've said, what I am saying now, to take a look at Studio B.

I knew this before because I had read feminist history, but I didn't realize it as extensively as I know it now, having done this dedicated research over the last six to eight months, and I'm continuing to do more. But it was never a movement that was at all interested in equality. It was always angry. It always had the worst things to say about men. It castigated all men. It never acknowledged any area where men had. made improvements to benefit women, where men had sacrificed for women, where men had built societies

that cherished women and made their lives better, where men had expressed concern for women. It denied all of that. And the texts that prove this are the foundational documents of what's called now first wave feminism. If you go back to Seneca Falls, which is kind of the first women's rights Convention in New York State in 1848, they were already peddling anti-male hatred. The thesis of that document that was signed there, which is called the Declaration of Sentiments, which was modeled on the Declaration of Independence, and it was, in a sense, women's declaration of independence. The thesis of that document is that the entire history of mankind is the history of repeated injuries and user patient on the part of men toward women, the object of which was to

establish an absolute tyranny by man over woman. And then they have all these points underneath where they attempt to prove this, including objectively false claims, such as that all colleges were closed to women. Not true. There were colleges specifically dedicated to giving women a very good education equivalent to men from very early in the 19th century. So, and there are many other, and we won't go into all of the life. We can go in your history, I'll just give some of the titles of some of the, we won't have time to go into them, but people agree with them. First of all, never about equality. Feminism was never about equality. Feminism was about destroying the family.

You have it, and maybe I'd like to go into this one, but the vote, because it's another, it's another sort of misperception. The women were not allowed to vote and feminism was about getting the vote. It was about the infantilization of men. The victimhood craze in early feminism. So victimhood isn't a new thing you'd argue. It goes back all.

Pathological male sexuality in feminism. How the future was female goes way back in the history of women. How 19th century women got away with murder. sexual insanity in the feminist movement. So there's a lot of provocative titles there. They seem provocative until you actually read the texts that I'm basing all those on. And it is startling. And for anybody who is interested in a primary document that actually makes some of the same arguments I'm making,

there was a man, a journalist and a barrister and a socialist, fascinating man, named Ernest Belfort Bax. He wrote many articles in the 1880s, and then right up until the early 20th century, he published a number of books. One was called the legal subjection of men. It was in response to John Stuart Mills' long essay, the subjection of women. And another one called the fraud of feminism. And he talks about how even in the 19th century,

when we imagine that women labored under all sorts of legal disabilities, that actually women had exemptions from certain crimes. They couldn't be prosecuted for certain crimes. They often were not prosecuted, for example, the crime of infanticide because of the overwhelming sympathy of male jurors for women who killed their own children. A woman who murdered her husband, he said almost was never charged with murder, would be charged with a lesser charge of manslaughter. if possible or even exonerated if she made the plea that her husband had been abusive of her,

very similar to our current state. A man who murdered his wife could never claim that he had killed her because she was abusive towards him, although he recorded many instances of horrific abuse that women had done to their husbands. And, you know, he at that time said that feminism had swept through British society, he was a Brit, swept through to such an extent that two contradictory and competing claims were both accepted as true. And this is so similar to the present time. One, any endeavor, any area of society where women were not equally represented with men, it was always a case of sexism, it's always because of sexism, because women were just as good as men at everything or better. That was one brand of feminism. But on the other hand,

women required special consideration. Women were different from men. They were specially victimized. They required special privileges, special perquisites, special protections. And if they weren't given those, that was an example of injustice to women. Of course, the two can't both be true. But we, you know, in our own society today, it is the same kind of thing. The insistence on equality is always coupled with the insistence that women deserve special perks and special policies, etc. So it was already going on. He saw it and he defended it with some pretty compelling examples and from his position as a barrister of the legal cases that he had looked at.

So, yeah, I mean, I've just been struck by the consistent representation on the part of these early feminists who are allegedly, you know, humane and just wanted equality and just wanted to take up their responsibilities in society. I've been really struck by the deep anti-male animus of all of their pronouncements, the consistent pathologization of male sexuality, the denigration of the family as a fundamentally corrupt institution and institution in which women were essentially prostituted to men. Many feminists made the claim that there was no difference between prostitution and the position of married women within the family,

that both were equally subject to male sexual tyranny. The disregard for the position of children and for the well-being of children is consistent throughout all of feminist rhetoric. they advocated free love with absolutely no consideration for children. They wanted divorce to be made much, you know, made much more accessible. Of course, they still wanted women to be supported by men. They wanted to make divorce easier for women and more difficult for men. They wanted the laws change to protect women.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was the major proponent of American feminism. She was the acknowledged leader of the feminist movement along with Susan B. Anthony in the second half of the 19th century. She wanted women to be able to divorce their husbands for drunkenness and for a whole host of reasons, but still wanted women to be able to be, you know, supported by men's money. And yeah, it's just really startling to see that the hatred and the unwillingness to admit that men in any way had their own. issues or made sacrifices even during war there was you know women wanted the right to vote well that's i was going to let's i was going to let that you came right to where i was waiting because i i mean i think you know obviously you can talk about this and you do with with eloquence and

depth and uh in your in your many videos and we're not going to we're not going to go over them there but but just to give a sense no no but just to give a sense that one of the things is the misperception um and that there we have perceptions of what purpose was being asked for. And one of the things I've always felt, yeah, the vote is a clear example. Women were asking for the right to vote. And then you point out even that is a misconception that the right to vote, I think in Africa, US Academy of 1918 or something like that. But at that time, many men couldn't vote. And moreover, it was interesting that at the same time, of course, men were being conscripted to go to the World War I. So why don't you talk about that?

Because I found that discussion kind of fascinating. Yeah, I mean, that one is, it's a glaring example of feminist hypocrisy. And the fact that no feminist today ever talks about that and that we all believe, I certainly did even when I was doing my PhD, we all believe that all men had the right to vote, you know, sort of from the beginning of time and no women ever did. And it was never that simple. There were always property and financial considerations. There were poll taxes and things that limited, even in the United States, men's access to the ballot. And especially in the United States, the privilege of the vote, always brought with it the responsibility to defend one's country, even to the point of sacrificing one's life at a time of war. That was always

understood. And yet that's never acknowledged by feminists. The other thing that's really shocking in a British and Canadian cases is that even at the point of World War I, 40% of British and Canadian men, working class men, didn't have the right to vote because of these property and income qualifications. And the thing about all of this romanticization, of the suffragettes and their struggle. Throughout the 19th century, there was a move to expand democracy incrementally. In the early 19th century,

very, very few, a tiny percentage of men could vote in federal elections, national elections. In 1832, it was expanded to about one in six adult men. In 1867, I believe, no, 1864, the Second Reform Act expanded the vote to a some percentage of urban working class men. In 1884, it was expanded again to some percentage of rural working class men. Always there were these property and income considerations. So the fact that that was never mentioned by the suffragettes and that they were willing to watch

these young men who did not themselves have a vote, go off and die or be maimed in the trenches of Europe and say nothing and still continue to insist that women were uniquely oppressed because they didn't have the rights they imagined men have. I mean, I just find that stunning. And at the same time, the very same women who in Britain, they were extremely violent, they set homes on fire. They firebombed post offices. They had arson campaigns. I mean, there were fires burning for years across Britain in a mass terrorist campaign by suffragettes who are now lionized as these heroines of equality. Once the war started, they suspended their agitation for the vote.

Oh, they also attacked police officers and parliamentarians. They tried to assassinate Sir Herbert Asquith when he was riding in an open motor carriage. I mean, it was just like they were terrorists. And yet we're now supposed to imagine that they were somehow justified in their incendiary rage, as I titled the video on them. And then once the war started, they suspended their agitation for the vote. And they started the white feather campaign, many of the same women who went around pinning white feathers in the lapels of any man not in military uniform that they saw. in order to shame those men into signing up for the war effort. And they succeeded.

Many men afterwards recounted their experience. Some of these were men who were home from their war. Yeah, from the war. Or at one medals or had one medals for bravery. One man had had his hand blown off. He showed the woman his stump while she was putting the white feather in his lapel. Some were underage and they were so shamed by being. repeatedly given the white feather that they went and signed up and were then, you know, killed or

hurt or just experienced the hell of the First World War. And this is the attitude of those women that we now lionize as courageous defenders of equality, this utter inability to see the humanity of men, of their own fathers and brothers and sons, and the willingness, even then, of many people to turn a blind eye to their violence and their hypocrisy. So, you know, that's the kind of thing that I want to highlight, really, in the series. And that's what I wanted to give you a chance to give a highlight of that. And one of the reasons I wanted to focus on the vote issue is because, you know, there will be a lot of people. I mean, of course, most of them will complain about this without ever having listened to you on this podcast.

but those who listen, there'll be some people who vehemently disagree, which is allowed. But one of the things I want to point out is that episodes like the vote point out things that are surprising, that basically cause you to sit back and think, what I always thought might be wrong. And that's one of the reasons why people like you and others and maybe me and others shouldn't be silenced in the sense that you could actually listen, even if you disagree, listen to that episode of the vote and say, wow, I didn't know. those facts about men and not being able to vote or about other things. And so that's what's so important about the freedom of speech as my wife again was putting it to me the other day, freedom of speech

is really freedom to listen. If you don't have that opportunity to listen, you'll never learn that you're wrong. And that's what my old late friend Christopher Hitchens argued was the most important part of keeping freedom of speech. And so I wanted to give a chance to talk about that. And I'm sure, as I was going to say near the end, as I'm sure my bet is that I'll be castigated more for my allowing you to be on than what you have to say. But in any case, we'll have to see about that. But I want to close because we've gone for two hours,

and I've loved the discussion. I really appreciate you're being both so eloquent and honest about these things, which is I always have appreciated about you. You point out that basically we're stuck already. We're not doomed, but we're stuck. That feminist theory is already sort of accepted. It's the accepted part of universities and university departments, not just English departments where it used to be,

but now science departments and now institutions and science, that women are inherently oppressed, and we have to do something about it. We're now seeing a similar in the last five years critical race. theory has become the accepted adopted orthodoxy. Yeah. And and and with a very similar thing where facts don't necessarily if you if you question the empirical basis, you're you're immediately condemned for this. Yeah. And that comes out of feminism too. I mean that it was there in the 1980s very strongly in intersectional feminist theory already. It's just become mainstreamed more recently. So you think the critical race theory is really, really a derivative of the

intersectional feminist theory, do you think? Oh, yes, definitely. Yeah, yeah. It was it was there, this idea that there were all these different axes of oppression, all operating on that binary model of the privileged oppressor and the victimized, you know, innocent without agency, etc. That began in feminist theory probably by the late 70s, but really took hold. There was that woman Peggy McIntosh who talked about white privilege and she was primarily a feminist initially and then she moved into that area and that's really I mean she that was in the 1980s it's very much the precursor to things like Robin DeAngelo's white fragility where you know you you are you are racist whether you admitted or not if you admit it then you're admitting it but if you deny it that

just shows that you are even worse you know all that kind of thing and yeah that was there, it's deeply part of the whole ideological machinery of feminism. That argument, by the way, it's what amuses me about it. It's when the moments when I'm amused and not outraged is, it's just so exactly the same as the argument against witches, which is you used to be if you, if you admitted you're a witch, then you're a witch. And if you clearly, if you did admit you're a witch, you know, you were also a witch. That was your, you know, and if you threw in, if you drowned, then, you know, then you weren't a witch. But if you didn't. drowned you were witch and feet i mean there was no way out it's the and and but so having having said

all that um and pointed out these problems what can we do yeah that's always the big question isn't it if we had the answer you know uh obviously we would be we would be working on it the only thing is that um you know and and you said you know if people can just stand up and it is very difficult but they don't you know it's like the the movie that we all watch where there's some force of evil and or there's a horrible bigotry that is is causing all sorts of injustice. And finally, you know, one person refuses to go along and they stand and say, no, I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to persecute my neighbor. And then everybody else stands at the same time and the evil is defeated. And everybody thinks, yeah, that's what I would do. You know, I would

be one of those ones who would stand. But in fact, the reality is that most people don't. And the few people who do stand, they get rolled over by the social justice tank. And as Mao said, you know, you kill one to warn 100. Everybody else sees that's what happens when you stand up. Nobody defends you. And your life is destroyed and you're humiliated. And, you know, it's awful. It's rare. It's not, it's not one person. I was going to say one man. It's not, it's almost, it's, it, it takes a lot more than one person. I mean, again, I've looked and obviously, there's no magic bullet here, but I've talked to people and I look at the history of sort of McCarthyism and how that eventually overcame. And eventually, sure, it was a few people in powerful positions like Edmira R. Murrow, I guess, and others who were able to speak out journalists. But more importantly, I think it's when, when ultimately the abuses are so common.

that everyone sees that they, not just that they can be next, but that, that somehow something needs to be done. It's somehow there's a phase transition where people suddenly say, this is outrageous. And that unfortunately means, as a number of people who are close to me have said, it's going to get worse before it gets better. Yes. And there's a grim satisfaction to be taken in that, unfortunately, especially for people like us who have now left academia, is that we will see that some of those, who have been the head of the mobs who have gone for good people on trivial grounds that they themselves will be attacked and they themselves will be persecuted and it will go on and as you say,

until it finally stops or until the whole system kind of collapses. I mean, I'm all in favor of trying to start new institutions, building new universities from the ground up based on merit. We long ago abandoned merit. We allowed there to be a competing good and that competing good was justice or, you know, social justice, not justice, equality, all of that sort of thing. And we have to get back to saying that merit can be the only good. Truth can be the only good, not these other inclusion, equity, et cetera. You know, and that is possible. I don't see it happening very much yet, although there certainly are organizations that are

attempting to resist and to bring sanity back to these institutions, but hopefully they will grow. And, yeah, I, I, I, I used to think, look, we agree that, that sanity has to come back. I'm less more sang when I, I'm all in favor of new institutions. I've been part of new institutions. I think it's a great example, but I don't think that's a solution. I think though, I mean, there are lots of people and the majority of my ex-colleys, and, colleagues in institutions who still believe in all of those principles and are working towards them. And, you know, in physics, I, you know, they're working together to understand the nature of reality. It's not as if it's true that there's a sickness in a bunch of academic institutions,

but it's not as if those institutions are irredeemable. And I think ultimately the solution is going to happen within them and it's not going to happen because one or two other institutions get created. That's my own view in any case. Good well, I do agree with you. it'll probably take a lot of time. A thousand points of light, as someone used to say. And, and, and, but I also think it requires people being courageous enough to talk about this,

which is why I was so happy to be able to have you on and why I enjoy listening to you and talking to you. And I recommend again, whether you agree or disagree, for people to listen to some of the videos to get some of the, the, the information. And, and then decide and based on an informed decision and informed decision and informed consent. and informed consent about whether they'll, whether they agree or disagree. So thank you so much, Janice. Well, thank you very much. That was lovely. Really enjoyed this conversation.

I enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I did too. I kind of knew I would with you or I hoped I'd rise to the occasion of talking to you. So I so thank you for that. Well, thank you. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation,

a nonprofit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place. in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world. To learn more, please visit Originsproject Foundation.org.