By David Futrelle
Janice Fiamengo, an English professor at the University of Ottawa, is one of Canada’s most famous, or perhaps infamous, Men’s Rights Activists, getting her (terrible) message out in innumerable YouTube videos, speeches on college campuses and at conferences organized by A Voice for Men, and at one point as a guest on a white nationalist podcast called Radio 3Fourteen, on which she suggested that white men are “living under … a feminist version of sharia law.”
She also likes to tweet. And some of her tweets are pretty strange, even by Twitter standards. Lately she’s been getting positively horny on main over … male inventions:
Damn. I would tell her to take a cold shower, except she’d just start getting horny over indoor plumbing.
Fiamengo also wants the men of today to know how very grateful she is that that other men in the past built a lot of things.
She rarely misses an opportunity to bring up how totally unappreciated she thinks (cis) men really are. Even when her argument makes no damn sense at all.
She’s especially exercised over the allegedly unfair treatment of white men in particular, including the dead ones:
Ironically, given her desire to paint men as pure-hearted angels, the specific men she chooses to champion are often quite shit. She is, for example, a big fan of the violence-loving western supremacist street gang called the Proud Boys, whom she inexplicably believes are non-violent.
She has also declared herself quite “proud” of Tommy Robinson, the darling of Britain’s racist far-right.
As a man who thinks Tommy Robinson and the Proud Boys are a huge embarrassment to my gender, and who feels a bit weird about accepting “thank yous” for inventions I didn’t invent and train tracks I didn’t lay, all I can say is that I’m glad men don’t have many “defenders” quite like Janice Fiamengo.
H/T — @TakedownMRAs, who you should all follow on Twitter
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I don’t want to be “that guy”, but this woman strikes me as someone desperate for male attention
I can’t imagine the willful ignorance required to think the way she does. She basically ignores so many facts about history, anthropology, and archaeology, it’s embarrassing that she even has a job on at college campus at all, let alone a position as a professor.
I like men too Janice but this is borderline creepy .
No wait it’s freaking creepy
Just no Janice
*sigh* all this talk about make accomplishments reminds me of an old Russian folk tale:
A farmer had geese, and he wanted to cook ’em for dinner. “Don’t kill us” – said the geese – “don’t you know our ancestors saved the Rome once?”. “Ok, fine” – answered farmer – “but what you did for yourself, then?”. “Well… nothing, really” – said geese
“Then shut up, and off to the pot you go”
And that’s what I see every time some MRAs try too claim achievements of the great men in history
@ David
Just as an aside, we like to always put “Tommy Robinson” in quotes.
It’s just a fake name he adopted for his ‘man of the people’ schtick.
His real name is the rather less proletarian Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.
(Normally I don’t give a toss about what people call themselves; but apparently pointing that out annoys him.)
@Ed- It’s not just you. Honestly, it seems to me the majority of female MRA’s have very little dignity and seem like they would walk through broken glass for that approval and eat dogshit hot off the sidewalk if they could be convinced them it made them a special, cool girl who isn’t like all the others. They believe feminists are jealous of all the attention they’re getting, but it’s just cringy and sad.
Ok, that’s just creepy. I mean… seriously? This woman is the embodiment of Fremdschämen.
And if her revising of history and fetishization of stuff she makes up wasn’t bad enough, she also endorses terrorists and serial criminals. I think we found that mystical woman that the Incels keep yammering on about, that one who always goes for the bad-boys and scoundrels.
I threw up a little in my mouth. 🙁
Maam this is a Tim Horton’s, also didn’t Gavin brandish a godamn sword and try and murder someone?
Also I fucking love that photo of those most likely poor lower class men working on a rail road in the middle of the desert for what would most likely be pennies and somehow that proves that men are great and have done nothing wrong
Technology is only inherently masculine if you arbitrarily redefine a hell of a lot of technology as something else. The bulk of the most essential technology used and developed throughout human history falls into the sphere of women’s work: food preservation and processing, textiles, agriculture (especially in its earliest stages), sanitation, etc.
Does this silly fucker get weak-kneed when she puts some soy sauce on a steaming bowl of rice? Does she gurgle with gratitude when she pulls on a sweater or washes behind her ears with soap? I doubt she has a clue about the level of development behind any of those things or their importance to human survival throughout history.
To use a Star Trek analogy, this woman sounds one dilithium crystal short of a warp drive, if you get my drift.
Performative horniness: she’s not really turned on by a light switch, but all her talking about getting turned on eventually turns her on.
Otherwise you’d see a lot of flickering lights in her apartment and no tweets from her phone.
Her subjective options are not rare or off base. Not only do men’s inventions tend to turn women on, THAT IS (probably) WHY MEN INVENTED THOSE THINGS TO BEGIN WITH.
So, congrats (white?) men for your resounding positive impact on vaginas worldwide, but that doesn’t mean you should harass us/interrupt us/invade our space (for rude men), or just ignore when some other guy does (for men who think they’re “nice”… a.k.a, blameless).
Nevertheless, what the fuck is her point? What is she trying to prove?
That white men are capable of greatness?
That isn’t news to anyone, in fact, it’s constantly summarized throughout our entire formal education.
Perhaps she is saying that white men, being so capable of greatness, are above all reproach?
That’s kinda not true for literally any other group, though.
I really do not get her point, and I wish she would make it already. If she bothered to define it out loud, I’m sure she would realize how obtuse it is.
Ok, I’m not sure. But, I hope.
Perhaps she is doing the alt-right version of gratitude journaling via social media. Maybe manospherians believe that if only we focused exclusively on white men’s positives, we’d feel more grateful. And in feeling so grateful…..what????
What? What would change? What do they want aside from complete submission by those they deem inferior?
I feel grateful for individual men in my life, but why should I give credit to all white men for the contributions made by a small percentage of them?
They don’t all want to take credit for the horrific tyranny and suffering perpetrated by a few white guys, so why do they feel entitled to take credit for anything done by anyone else?
There is so much so wrong about how they think.
…Who gave Vivian James a professorial position?
(Is it just me, or does Flamengo come across sounding like a phone sex operator specifically catering to the Big Bang Theory gang? “Unngh…talk geeky to me! BLIND ME WITH SCIENCE!”)
The light switch thing is unparodyable. It’s already indistinguishable from parody, so any parody you could write would be too feasible.
As an aside, we have no way to accurately gauge women’s contributions to infrastructure and innovation (especially) in the past, because it is a well-known common practice for a white guy (since he has the capital) to steal and implement her ideas while TAKING ALL THE CREDIT.
Not only true for women, of course, but for all historically oppressed groups of people.
Just because your name is on it, doesn’t make it yours. Context.
As long as we’re on the topic of female cheerleaders for Men Behaving Badly, Ann Coulter has had this to say–repeatedly–about Timothy Mc Veigh: http://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ann-coulter-timothy-mcveigh-quote/
When does this woman find time to teach English?
Horny for penicillin? That’s a new one.
Personally, I’d rather get horny for beer. That’s a women’s invention.
Oh, Christ, there’s a female Jordan Peterson.
Re: her thing about trans men.
Uh, i’m married to a trans man. When we got together he was (as far as we knew at the time) a straight woman and I was at the time, an in the closet bi man.
The reason trans men don’t get as much hate is because “of course a woman would want to become a man, men are best!” Whereas a man becoming a woman is the worst thing imaginable because being a woman is a terrible thing to be because women are subhuman objects.
The reason cis-het men assault trans women like me is because we dare to express “weakness” (femininity is synonymous with weakness) and we must be beaten down for daring to have emotions other than rage.
If she wants to talk about universities, the oldest university in the world, the University of Al Quaraouiyine in Fez, Morocco, was founded by a woman. Space exploration? Much of the maths for actually getting into space was done by women – they were even called computers. NASA’s first chief astronomer was a woman.
All of that aside, though, whether men did lots of inventing and building in the past doesn’t mean shit about anyone else. No man now can claim superiority because of some building from the 16th century, or a medicine from the 1920s, or anything else you care to name.
Looks like it’s another Canadian professor trying to hop on the Peterson gravy train and milk the alt-right for all they’ve got. I hope she fucks right off. My country’s got a ton of awful, problematic shit to try to deal with, I don’t need these morally corrupt shitweasels further encouraging the worst of us.
We don’t know who invented architecture, steel, carpentry, logging or ships, and the space program was a collaborative effort by tons of people, many of whom were women.
also, I’d like to point out that the Shakespeare lexicon wasn’t invented by “men”, it was invented by Shakespeare. I don’t get to pretend I’m a playwright just because I also happen to have a penis.