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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@Shadowplay
Bang on.
I grew up in a clergy family, and other PKs know what that means. For the non-PK contingent: Clergy families are public. You’re supposed to set a good example, or at least not do anything that could lead to your clergy parent losing their position. Kinda like being in a political family, except your ultimate boss is God. Everybody at church always knows who you are and who your parents are.
In good situations, it’s wonderful. I still have very fond memories of a church where my sisters and I were not just accepted but supported in very healthy ways. But even then, the worst thing you could’ve called me was “selfish.” That was the ultimate mortal sin. Just ask my mother
And then as an adult, I began a career in healthcare. Again, an environment where you are encouraged to sacrifice your own well-being for the sake of others. All of this ultimately led to the night where I was working at 10:30 PM trying to get Important Stuff done when my hand stopped working and I couldn’t speak. And at first I hid it because I didn’t want Mr. Parasol to worry. I hoped it would resolve on its own. Except of course it didn’t, and hours later I was admitted to the ICU. Most of the regulars here know the rest of the story from there.
I’m trying to let myself feel how I feel without guilt or shame. It would be SO much easier if the universe would cooperate. *wry grin*
Jesus, you can smell her desperation through the internet. I have to imagine being a male student of hers is just a terrifying full semester of awkwardly pretending not to recognize she’s trying to flirt with you. Is there a word in English that encapsulates both fear and pity?
Oh Vicky, it’s so horrible that you’re having to go through this. I really wish that there was some practical way I could help, or just take some of the pain from you.
I know ‘just world’ is a fallacy; but this is just so unfair. You’re too nice a person for this to be happening to. You’re always there for everone else; you deserve to be happy.
Hugs and best wishes. Grrr! That just sounds like thoughts and prayers. Oh I wish wish wish I could make this go away for you.
Holy laminated, bifurcated Mother of PEARL!?!?!?! How much angst and mental anguish can the trumpling right-wing drag out of simply asking white men to stop acting like the world revolves around them???
The igno-right seriously contends that white men are being exterminated. Yeah, we’re (full disclosure, I’m really a white man disguised as an ordinary people) going to lose our position as the sole purveyor of gods will, but we shouldn’t have had that anyway.
So what the fuck is this flamenco afraid of?? That nothing will ever get invented again? Wake up and smell the progress, such as it is.
Thank you, Alan.
And thank you, contrapangloss. All gestures of support accepted.
@Ariblester:
Thank you, “scabbard” is much more correct. I was thinking of the verb (what one does with a scabbard), not the noun.
True, it was anachronistic of me to suggest the Romans themselves used it. We can blame Renaissance anatomists for that.
Yeah, there’s that (in)famous poem by Catullus. Finest lyrical poet in the Latin language? With that mouth? ?
I don’t know if it matters much but the fact that English has to employ a compound whereas Latin had a special verb for the act; either way it doesn’t say much for the Ancient Romans’ sexual mores…
@Cat Mara
Heh. Catullus reference.
Reminds me of the people who think Shakespeare was always so noble and high-minded … and then they see a non-bowdlerized performance of A Comedy of Errors.
It was originally just Stephen Yaxley. The “Lennon” is his stepfather’s name, but I don’t know whether he adopted it of his own accord (hyphenated names are generally perceived as “posh” in Britain). The pseudonym “Tommy Robinson” was taken from a long-time football hooligan who wrote an autobiography. Robinson/Yaxley-Lennon was at one time a member of the neo-Nazi British National Party, but claims not to be a Nazi, fascist, racist or antisemite (well he would, wouldn’t he?*). He has convictions for violence and fraud.
*h/t Mandy Rice-Davies
@Victorious Parasol:
Reminds me of the people who think Shakespeare was always so noble and high-minded … and then they see a non-bowdlerized performance of A Comedy of Errors.
To say nothing of Titus Andronicus, which would lend itself splendidly to a Quentin Tarantino splatterfest.
archy the cockroach weighs in, by way of his Literary Agent Don Marquis:
As for the fraying of your emotional safety net: I don’t claim to be particularly good at reassuring gestures, but here’s a male mouse affectionately tending his adopted daughter:
(The YouTube channel is Creek Valley Critters, where Aud Fischer of the Yukon posts the lives of her rescue mice. I’m not ASMR myself, but I’m told–and am unsurprised–that she has a following among that demographic.)
@Full Metal Ox
You helped by quoting archy – I’ve loved archy and Mehitabel since I was in high school. Thank you.
@magnesium:
Jesus, you can smell her desperation through the internet. I have to imagine being a male student of hers is just a terrifying full semester of awkwardly pretending not to recognize she’s trying to flirt with you. Is there a word in English that encapsulates both fear and pity?
…And what must it be like to be a female student of hers? (And forget options beyond Pink and Blue, because I’m absolutely confident Flamengo does.)
There’s so much weird shit here. Getting turned on by random objects just because a man probably invented them is just the top of the iceberg.
Like, how she seems unaware that women have historically also invented stuff.
Or the implication that men deserve credit for things other men did just cause they share a gender.
I get that this is intended as a counterpoint to feminists being angry at men because of the patriarchy but no feminist i know of thinks every man is to blame for everything every other man has done. We’re just pointing out how they tend to profit from and perpetuate a system that disadvantages women. It’s not the same thing.
And anyway when’s the last time any of those Professionally Angry At Feminists people had anything worthwile to share with the world other than unintentional comedy
Wow. Just how badly “rooster-pecked” was the family she grew up in? :\ Really sounds like the sort who was raised to be this way.
I get the impression that Shakespeare was the Stephen King of his time. Actually fairly lowbrow, bestselling, with a tendency to include supernatural elements and tragicomic events in his stories.
@Vicky:
I’m so sorry you’re going through this. That’s really hard 🙁
@Surplus to Requirements
Pretty much. I’d have to review the canon, but I seem to recall that the supernatural elements picked up more when James I took the throne – MacBeth being an obvious example, picking up on the succession concerns that took up a good deal of the Elizabethan era (see also Hamlet) and capitalizing on the witchcraft fears.
It’s important (IMO, anyway) to remember that Shakespeare was very much a working artist. Patronage is nice, but it’s the witless groundlings who keep buying tickets that will help sustain you through the vagaries of your patron’s support.
@Yutolia
Thank you. I really appreciate all the support I’ve gotten from the Mammotheers today.
I’d never heard of her until now.
Putting the “dick” back in “dictionary”!
Okay, seriously, it probably comes from the word “phallogocentrism,” the idea that the word and the penis are seen as central to meaning-making in some philosophies – more generally, the assumption that men are the centre of the world because they have all the generative potential (see also the English word “seminal”*). Jacques Derrida accused Lacan (also a Jacques) of having this view** – not surprising since Lacan took a lot of ideas from Freud. And note that this was a criticism, not a compliment.
*Okay, so both uses come from the word for seed. It’s still kind of funny that it means both sperm and creativity/originality, though.
**This isn’t all off the top of my head. My source is the Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. Someone better at this stuff may point out things I’m missing.
My reading disorder brain read this as Janice Flamingo. I’ve had a professor like this woman. She didn’t last long on campus because everything the male students did were perfect and everything the female students were wrong.
It was like if you ever watched Drake and Josh with the teacher that hated Drake so much that even when she asked his opinion on his favorite Greek mythology he was wrong.
Hey, that sounds like how trump stays in office!!
For @VP and @Contrapangloss
@Sheila
SQUISHY TIGGY TOESIES.
awh, @Vicky, that’s so rough. I wish there was some sort of easy way to resolve that for you, if there was, I’d do it in a heartbeat. It’s so painful when we grow apart from someone we care about, even moreso when it’s for no good reason like that. I hope he finds some understanding, and that this is a temporary thing that you’re both laughing about together in the years to come <3
@Scildfreja
Thank you. 🙂 I’m working on the self-care stuff – made up a music list of songs to listen to this week, indulging in hobbies that cheer me up, baking diabetic-friendly cookies, etc. Plus I’m working on a letter to him, which I will e-mail at some point this week, and the advice I’ve gotten from Mammotheers and other friends is being incorporated.
How many shrimps do you have to eat
before you make your skin turn pink?
Eat too much, and you’ll get sick —
shrimps are pretty rich.
– Kero Kero Bonito, “Flamingo”