Tag Archives: Janice Fiamengo

Culture, Feminism, Law, Men

A Pseudo-Religion

Feminism is a Dangerous Pseudo-Religion

Some reflections, for International Women’s Day, on the irrational and destructive nature of feminist belief

Janice Fiamengo, Mar 08, 2025

God Has Been a Woman Since the Beginning of Time

“I often joke with people that feminism has been like a born-again religion for me – that once I found it and let it into my life, my entire perspective shifted in such a way that suddenly, everything made sense – and that I feel compelled to spread that gospel.”

The author of this passage from Everyday Feminism claims to be joking about her “born-again” faith. However, feminism is accurately understood not as a social science but as a perverse secular religion, steeped in mythology and faith-based claims, and exerting a malign influence on adherents’ minds.

We see its results every day: the rage, the apocalyptic anxiety, the rankling discontent and festering bitterness. A recent American Family survey showed “liberal” (i.e. feminist) women to be markedly lonelier and less satisfied with their lives than “conservative” (less feminist) women, at least in part due, as the study’s authors theorized, to liberal women’s alienation from positive sources of meaning. No one should be surprised by such findings, for the so-called gospel of feminism is anything but good news.

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In what ways is feminism like a religion?

The following serves as a working definition:

A religion is a belief system that explains the origin and purpose of life on earth, posits a spiritual or supernatural dimension to human existence, involves faith in what cannot be definitively known, and results in the radically changed understanding and behavior of the adherent.

All of these are true for feminism, but they lead not to gratitude and peace but to grievance and pique.

15 Ways to Unlock Your Sacred Feminine: Intuition & Power

Feminism offers an origin story: the patriarchy, an unjust social system in which elite white men oppress all other groups. Some, though not all, feminist theories also posit an ancient matriarchy, a nurturing, egalitarian, and non-exploitative society that predated patriarchy, in which human beings lived in harmony with one another and with nature. This is a feminist version of the Garden of Eden, protected not by a deity but by a reigning “ethics of care.” Here women held power and exercised it for the good of all. Some Indigenous cultures are of particular interest to feminists because they offer evidence of such matriarchal structures.

At some point in all feminist origin stories, humankind fell from grace because of male sin. Men invented and imposed a male-led structure of social relations that severed women from their power. Men also introduced other forms of hierarchical control based on race, sexual identity, and physical ability. Specific feminist theories have been developed to address these related forms of oppression. But all feminisms, regardless of their particular emphases and approaches, reject the notion that the male-led social order had any purpose other than exploitation.

Read the rest here . . .

Culture, Feminism, Media, Men, Radicalism

Women’s uncontainable fury

I remember some years ago an elderly priest commenting on sin. As an aside, he said, as a priest hearing confessions year in, year out, in general men commit sins of lust and women sins of anger.

At the time, it was rather a surprise. Weren’t women kind, nurturing, sympathetic, patient, etc. etc.?

The priest’s words came back to me when the feminist-instigated conflict between men and women moved to centre stage. Not only could women fly into tempestuous fury but the way they expressed that fury was not in physical violence but in reputation destruction – total destruction. This was the theme of many of Jordan Peterson’s comments on the differences between men and women.

Since then others, particularly women, have commented on the uncontainable anger that often grips women. Janice Fiamengo made the comment below on the irrational fury that consumed many women following Donald Trump’s victory at the recent presidential election.

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All This Fury—Is It Really About Trump?

Thoughts on women and rage

Janice Fiamengo, Dec 15, 2024

br/>OPINION: Women's anger and the art of the feminist manifesto — The New Political

Feminist uproar over Trump’s election was easy to predict, and not long in coming. Within ten days of the election, Clara Jeffery wrote in Mother Jones that “Women are furious—in a Greek mythology sort of way.” Taking examples from TikTok, Jeffery chronicled abundant “sorrow and disbelief and terror, but also incandescent rage,” which many women vowed to exorcise on men: “‘If his ballot was red, his balls stay blue,’” she quoted one.

In The New York Times, a 16-year-old girl, Naomi Beinart, charted her tumultuous emotions, which included a sense of betrayal because her male classmates had carried on with their lives on the day after the election, seemingly immune to the girls’ all-pervasive gloom and outrage. “Many of them didn’t seem to share our rage, our fear, our despair. We don’t even share the same future,” Beinart opined melodramatically.

No one with even a minimal acquaintance with social media can have missed the many similar, raging reactions: the heads being shaved, the death threats, the promised sex strikes, the fantasies of revenge against Trump-voting husbands. We are to understand that the re-election of a man rumored to lack sufficient pro-abortion commitment justifies thousands of self-recorded screams, imprecations, and poisoning plots.

At least one group of women gathered physically in Wisconsin to shout their angst and anger at Lake Michigan, and there have already been tentative (though apparently less enthusiastic than formerly) plans for a revival of the anti-Trump Women’s March protests, in which women with vulgar placards and pink hats exhibited their “collective rage.”

Women’s rage is all the rage.

Read the rest here . . .

Culture, Feminism, Media, Men, Radicalism

Negotiating the tangle of feminist irrationality

Many men – probably most men – simply can’t follow the ‘reasoning’ behind much feminist activism. It takes the keen analytical mind of Janice Fiamengo to sort through the irrationality for them. The article below is a brilliant example of her comprehensively tearing apart feminist discourse and activism.

I’m at the point in my life where I just wish that women would get dressed and stay dressed in public. I’ve seen enough bare breasts and big bums to last more than a lifetime.

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The Curious Case of the Self-Objectifying Feminist

If the male gaze demeans and dehumanizes, why do so many women court it?

Janice Fiamengo Sep 14, 2024

Not long ago, a British campaign for affirmative consent legislation featured images of women paired with the slogan “I’m asking for it.” The whole point, of course, is that they’re not asking for “it”. The phrase is meant to evoke men who justify their sexual assaults of women by claiming that the victim wanted to be raped. What the women are asking for is legislation to make it a criminal offence for a man to have a sexual encounter with a woman without eliciting an explicit “Yes” from her at every stage (how far we have moved from the relatively simple “No means no”).

Continue reading Negotiating the tangle of feminist irrationality →
Australia, Culture, Feminism, Law, Media, Men, Radicalism

5 billion dollars to persecute men

The Albanese leftist government has allocated almost 5 billion dollars to feminists to persecute men and lock them up wherever possible. It is an irony that Janice Fiamengo’s latest comment has just appeared.

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The Victim is Always Female

The real (male) victims of false allegations are often quickly passed over

Janice Fiamengo, Sep 05, 2024

“Better ten innocent men go to jail than one potential female victim hesitate to come forward.”

At least, that seemed to be the consensus in 2017, when I first made this video. I’m not sure it’s still entirely true, though I do often hear the ‘Ultimately, this will hurt women …’ argument when the subject is male disadvantage or blatant anti-male injustice.

This video was originally part of the No Joke Janice video series, designed by my friend and producer Steve Brule as short audio commentary on current events. (Over time, many of the videos became indistinguishable from the main Fiamengo File videos, longer and more detailed—before they were all taken down by YouTube’s censors in one fell swoop. Steve is now re-posting many of them at Studio B.)

Read the rest here . . .

Feminism, Law, Men, The Left

The (unfair) power of women’s tears

Calling a Moratorium on Women’s Tears: How Women Use the Accountability Gap to Manipulate Men and Why Men Must Resist It

By Janice Fiamengo

My subject is the problem of women’s tears. I argue that the exploitation of female tears creates an accountability gap in our societies; I’ve decided to use that phrase, accountability gap, rather than my original damseling, which describes something more specific.

My contention is that most feminist laws, policies, and social movements—whether MeToo, rape shield laws, the biased family court system, sexual harassment policies in the workplace, or the feminization of the professions—all these and more find their roots to some extent or other in women’s tears and our difficulty in resisting them. So, this is a call to resistance.

Continue reading The (unfair) power of women’s tears →
Culture, Feminism, Media, Radicalism

Janice Fiamengo: her feminist story

Below is Janice Fiamengo’s fascinating and instructive story of how she was mesmerized by the feminist siren and later escaped its delusionary grip. She is perhaps the most articulate of those writing against the torrent of man-hatred that infects the western world.

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The Making and Un-Making of a Feminist Radical: My Story

Though I lived off the outrage-rush for years, I was, in the end, thoroughly sickened by feminism’s hypocrisy and hatefulness

JANICE FIAMENGO MAY 09, 2024

New York Radical Women Feminist Collective: An Oral History

I’ve told this personal story in bits, but here it is for the first time in one go.

Born in Vancouver in 1964, I grew up at the height of the feminist movement. In the Second Grade (’71-’72), I was taught by a feminist zealot who had her students color pictures of women wearing hardhats or driving fire trucks to make the point that girls could be and do anything. Even then, it seemed like overkill: nobody had ever indicated otherwise. The culture was overtly pro-female, and I rode the girl power wave without a thought.

Growing up, I received kind and respectful treatment from every man I encountered in school and elsewhere. My father thought it a matter of course that I would make something of myself. I was not sexually harassed or demeaned, and never witnessed or heard of such from female friends. My parents expected me to take responsibility for my life. I didn’t always follow their advice—in fact, I was a foolish pot-smoking, fast-car-riding teenager fascinated by the romance of danger—but I was never given cause to see myself as a victim.

I always had a passion for reading. With my parents’ encouragement, I completed a Bachelor’s degree, a Master’s, and a PhD in English literature at the University of British Columbia. After two years as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University, I landed my first full-time teaching position at the University of Saskatchewan, where I taught for four years. After that, I became a professor at the University of Ottawa, where I remained until my retirement in 2019.

When I interviewed at both Saskatchewan and Ottawa, there was not a single man on either four-person shortlist. So-called equity hiring—which usually amounted to the outright (or near-outright) exclusion of men from job competitions—was in full swing; it had been going on for about a decade and is still going on now, 25 years later (see the research of Martin Loney on the history of such hiring in Canada). How many generations of young men will have to be sacrificed to the great god of equity before feminists say enough?

The feminist mantra of heroic female victimhood had been the air I breathed as a university student, and it offered a near-irresistible fantasy of moral purity. I was a woman and therefore good. Men had to prove themselves good by allying with women against other men. I came to like the heady rush of sisterhood and the exhilarating fury of feeling oneself part of a wronged group. I particularly enjoyed the vision of myself as a bold heroine speaking against oppression (and being applauded and rewarded for it).

Teaching Feminism in High School: Moving from Theory to Action | Feminist Teacher

Everything on campus was about women. Vigils for the Montreal Massacre were a yearly opportunity for ideologues to decry the supposedly widespread misogyny that made women’s lives, even at the most progressive institutions on earth, a hell of assault, put-downs, and discrimination. The university women’s center, where no man could tread (well, actually …), offered women a “safe space” to learn about patriarchy and to plot its downfall.

Read the rest here . . .

Culture, Feminism, Law, Media, Radicalism

DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION – BLOWING OFF MEN

Who Will Rid Us of DEI?

Despite recent enthusiasm, the era of DEI is well-entrenched and will not easily be dismantled

JANICE FIAMENGO, 28 JAN 2024

Virtual event explores unearned privilege

I was a diversity hire. My department hired diversity hires.  

DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) was all the rage in university humanities and social sciences departments when I was a graduate student in the 1990s: everything was about gender, race, class, and empire; oppressor and oppressed; white privilege, the male gaze. Over time, the category of class was edged out as gender and sexual identity muscled in.    

On the job market in 1999, I was shortlisted at two universities, both shortlists of all-female candidates. Job advertisements “strongly encouraged” applications from women and visible minorities.

Over the next four years, the department that had hired me hired into four more positions, all heavily influenced by sex and skin color.

“Is it true that there are people in this department who are against equity?” one of the diversity hires asked, scandalized, at a small welcoming party. The clear implication was that anyone who believed in merit-based hiring must be a bigot.

This was already the unchallenged academic mindset.

Our department practiced what was then called equity hiring (a Canadian euphemism for affirmative action). I was told that equity hiring meant that whenever two or more job candidates were equally qualified, the candidate should be chosen whose hiring would make the department more diverse.

The idea is nonsense: no two candidates are ever truly equal.

Once the decision is made to prioritize diversity, that quickly becomes the only urgent criterion. White men’s applications—hundreds of them—simply went into the reject pile; most were barely even read.

Read the rest here . . .

Culture, Feminism, Media

OH NO! GIRLS BEHAVING BADLY

Janice Fiamengo shoots more holes in the feminist fantasy about females as innocent victims who can do no wrong. I recommend following some of the links. There is some amazing footage.

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Bad Girls Caught on Camera

Drunk, disorderly, and potty-mouthed—but still, to some, victims

JANICE FIAMENGO, 1 MAR 2024

There’s been moral outrage lately over a popular YouTube channel called Drive Thru Tours. Launched in 2020, the channel started out by posting videos of tours through parts of New Jersey and New York. It hit paydirt last year when it began showing videos of police arrests, with titles such as “Rude 19-year-old Girl Arrested for DUI in Pullman, WA” (recommended if you want to get a flavor of the site) and “Belligerent Woman Arrested for DWI after Police Pursuit and Taken to Jail (not recommended—very disturbing). The channel owner obtained the content—which until recently has focused exclusively on female offenders—from police bodycam recordings, now publicly available through freedom of information requests.

Bodycam footage was originally made accessible to the public so that American citizens can hold police accountable for their actions. Scrutiny of police behavior is widely considered a public good. Scrutiny of female behavior, however, is quite a different story—as responses to the channel demonstrate.

According to a small flurry of recent news reports, New Jersey police are warning that Drive Thru Tours is harming “vulnerable” young women by posting the evidence of their arrests. The bodycam footage was never intended, they protest, for such a purpose. In consequence, the Association of Chiefs of Police of New Jersey is calling for legislation against what they are describing as “online sexual predators,” and lawmakers in that state are considering a bill that would prohibit publishing the footage except within narrow parameters, including with the written consent of the subject. 

Quite apart from whether such a bill is a good idea or not (I favor public access but have not given the matter serious thought), the language used in the articles is remarkable for its gynocentric sentimentality and misplaced sympathy.  

One of the most vocal on the subject is Montville, New Jersey Police Chief Andrew Caggiano, who is quoted as stating that “It was never the intent of OPRA [the Open Public Records Act] to create such a platform that preys on young women and takes advantage of them at a time when they are vulnerable.” He also expressed a personal repugnance: “As a law enforcement professional and the father of three daughters, I am sickened by the fact that people are abusing OPRA to post these types of videos on social media sites.”

Given that it is not (yet) illegal to use bodycam material in the manner described, Chief Caggiano’s dramatic reaction seems overstated. One wonders in what sense the reckless and self-absorbed young people shown in these videos are “vulnerable.” Wouldn’t such language be better suited to their victims? Perhaps Caggiano knows something about his daughters that we don’t know (there is a video in which a “Cop’s Daughter Gets Arrested for DWI after Fleeing Accident Scene”): one would not normally expect a chief of police to so quickly substitute in imagination his own daughters for the inebriated and flagrantly dishonest women shown on Drive Thru Tours.

Caggiano’s bluster is, of course, all too familiar in a culture that cannot bear to hold women fully responsible for their bad actions—no matter how anti-social or potentially lethal—and must habitually frame them as innocent victims. It’s impossible to imagine such outraged sympathy being expressed for any male offenders in similar situations.

Read the rest here . . .

Culture, Feminism, Media, Radicalism

WOMEN ARE INCLINED TO RADICALISM

It’s there practically every day on news reports – women, especially young women, in the frontline of radical causes, daring to try security and established authority far more openly than men. Men know they will be swiftly dealt with if they showed the same hysterical audacity. Society naturally tolerates women behaving badly, especially young nubile women. Janice Fiamengo makes the point below together with the range of man-hating actions feminists unblushingly indulge in.

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Women like J.K. Rowling Will Not Free Us from Gender Ideology

Only men of courage can do it, and it’s not clear they will

JANICE FIAMENGO APR 18, 2024

The fruits of gender ideology are plain for all to see: an assault on masculinity and marriage; fathers cut off from their children; a growing rift between the sexes; the denial of biological reality; children indoctrinated to seek hormone treatments and surgeries; and the perversion of language and law. A recent study shows women, but not men, favoring radical social policies and gender ideology. Yet it is still socially unacceptable to criticize the core dogma—feminism—that started us on this path or to observe that men are generally better suited to lead our societies than women.

We’ve heard a lot lately about the courage of children’s book author J.K. Rowling, who has taken on the hate speech law of her homeland, Scotland, and pushed the government to admit it to be unenforceable—at least against a woman of her stature. Rowling deserves the applause she is currently receiving for her boldness.

But Rowling is not the leader we need in current battles over free speech and sex realism. Like many prominent women, she is an enormously resentful feminist ideologue who trades in female privilege while pretending that women are everywhere in chains. While she rightly objects to the possibility that a woman could be charged with a hate crime for stating biological fact, she is preoccupied with so-called hatred against women, claiming bizarrely of gender-neutral phrasing such as “persons who menstruate” that “for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, [such language is] not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.” This is poor-me emotionalism and anti-male grandstanding pretending to argumentative coherence.

Rowling’s reflex hostility to men has led her to lash out at even obvious allies. She publicly disparaged Matt Walsh, conservative political activist and star of the documentary What Is a Woman, alleging that “He’s no more on my side than the ‘shut up or we’ll bomb you’ charmers who cloak their misogyny in a pretty pink and blue flag.” This absurd exaggeration, which fails to distinguish between a man who makes sense and one who makes deranged threats, showcases the feminist muddle of Rowling’s thinking.

She objects to trans ideology, it turns out, not primarily because it is false to biological reality—despite evoking the truth of biological sex when useful—but because it involves men accessing women’s spaces and identities. For her, the transgender phenomenon is not about gender dysphoria or sexual fetish—nor 50 years of bigotry and discrimination against men—but about misogyny, her go-to explanation. Walsh too, she implies, is a misogynist despite his desire to protect women.

Read the rest here . . .

Culture, Feminism, Law, Radicalism

Feminism has been a disaster for women

APRIL 23, 2024 

More and more women are saying it. Despite the great promises and despite the real freedom and advancement in opportunities women have achieved, they are not happy. Some are even admitting that most men aren’t all that bad and are turning to youtubers, like The happy housewife, for advice on how to make their husbands or boyfriends happy.

Nobody puts the case against feminism better than Janice Fiamengo.

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The Goddess That Failed

On International Women’s Day, we should admit that the feminist movement has not been good for anyone—even its alleged beneficiaries.

JANICE FIAMENGO, 8 MAR 2024

Feminist magazine Nasty Women's Press launches at Glad Day Bookshop - NOW Magazine

A recent poll has shown that a majority of young people think feminist laws and policies have gone too far and now discriminate against men. It’s good to see reaction against anti-male discrimination.

For International Women’s Day, let’s also consider feminism’s impact on women, and recognize that it’s been very bad there too.

Not just radical feminism. Not just the hateful or fringe variety. The whole thing, with its sob stories and sentimental celebrations, its exaggerations and cover-ups, its relentless focus on the demands and alleged needs of one half of humanity at the expense of the other, has been a monumental disaster.

For over 50 years, the movement has been mired in fraudulent claims, myopia, special pleading, double standards, abandonment of principles, manifold hypocrisies, and emotional incontinence.

It has continually misrepresented the situation of women and men, and has induced in its female adherents an unhealthy mix of wounded self-regard, festering resentment, and self-righteous indignation, often overlaid with an unfounded conviction of moral superiority and contempt for the unenlightened.

And despite its energetic stroking of the feminine ego and repeated assurances that women are innocent of wrongdoing; despite also the various perks and exemptions, the fawning media representations, and the outsized public sympathy; despite steady exhortations of “You go, girl!” and promises of all that must still be done to protect, promote, succor, and bless the female of the species, the movement has not managed to make women happier or more satisfied than when it first took hold in the 1970s.

In fact, the opposite has occurred. Women are significantly less happy than previously.

An article in Neuroscience News for September, 2023 sounded the alarm, calling it “The Paradox of Progress: Why More Freedom Isn’t Making Women Happier.” In the same year, CNN reported that the Population Reference Bureau was identifying a marked decline in well-being among millennial women. In 2022, David G. Blanchflower and Alex Bryson declared that across time and space, “women are unhappier than men […] and have more days with bad mental health and more restless sleep.” Oft cited is a large meta-study from 2009 called “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” which demonstrated the persistence of women’s decreasing happiness across the decades.

What these feminist academics and journalists call a paradox may seem fairly straightforward to the rest of us: movements based on assertions of angry victimhood are not likely to produce happy customers. But before fleshing out that conclusion, let’s take a look at the pundits’ attempts to deny the obvious.

“The Paradox of Progress” in Neuroscience News outlines the problem thus: “Despite having more freedom and employment opportunities than ever before, women have higher levels of anxiety and more mental health challenges, such as depression, anger, loneliness and more restless sleep.” The article is typically feminist in its teeter-totter balancing act between two conflicting priorities: to assure readers that women are superior to men—in this case, “more emotionally resilient,” with “more intimate” friendships, greater “capacity for personal growth,” and commitment to “more altruistic endeavors”—while also stressing that women have it worse than men—in this case, are more depressed, lonelier, and more anxious.

It would seem that both cannot be true—capacity for intimacy, for example, ought to decrease loneliness—but the article attempts to resolve the contradiction by falling back on a third feminist chestnut: that women are (justly, of course) “unhappy at how society treats them.” All the emotional resilience in the world, it seems, cannot make up for that.

Read the rest here . . .