Feminism
Interview with Janice Fiamengo
The elevation of one half of the population to holy status with the other half scorned is a sin. It’s theft.
Thank you, Janice, I’m very grateful that you did this interview with me.
I highly recommend Janice Fiamengo’s work and substack.
1. Janice, can you please share a bit about your background and journey that led you to become a critic of feminism, and what sparked your initial interest in researching and challenging mainstream feminist narratives?
I had a fairly typical upbringing in a middle-class suburb of Vancouver in the 1970s, during which my parents worked very hard to make it possible for me to be and do whatever I chose. My father was the son of Croatian immigrants who had fished the Adriatic; my mother’s parents had been turkey farmers from Moose Jaw who moved west. Both had grown up in poverty during the Depression. As their only child, I was extremely fortunate in every way, even in my struggles and disappointments. I was unattractive enough and bookish enough to feel myself set apart and reliant on my own resources, but not so much set apart as to have been psychologically damaged. I was not a genius, but I had a deep intellectual curiosity, love of reading, and enormous drive. My parents instilled in me a commitment to knowing the truth and standing on principle; they demonstrated that, unostentatiously but with satisfaction, in every facet of their lives. Above all, I was loved in a way that gave me confidence in myself without excess self-preoccupation.
I studied English literature at university, eventually obtaining a PhD. Feminism was all the rage in the academic milieu I joined as a graduate student and then university lecturer. At first, I accepted it as true, impressed by the many seemingly-capable minds that proclaimed it. Over time, however, it began to seem partial, exaggerated, and ultimately ridiculous. Reading literature of the past, even a feminist partisan could see huge holes in the feminist story: women had for centuries written books, earned money and acclaim from them, taught school, owned property, run businesses, chosen whether to marry or be single, led social movements, and shaped history. 140 years ago in North America, as my study of journalist Sara Jeannette Duncan revealed, women were already doctors, lawyers, journalists, academics, historians, and religious leaders. How could that have been the case in a world that allegedly doubted they were even fully human? I began to look into feminist narratives, and what I discovered has never ceased to astound me.
2. In your personal story, you mention living off the "outrage-rush" for years before becoming disillusioned with feminism. Can you elaborate on that experience and what ultimately led to your change in perspective?
Outrage can be fun and psychologically useful, offering a powerful blend of exhilarating anger and moral (self) righteousness that are especially appealing to women. Women seem to have evolved to complain more than men and to expect men to respond sympathetically to their complaints (and most men do).
Many factors led to my falling away from feminist conviction, not the least of which was the evidence before my eyes daily (including in my husband) of male patience, kindness, courage, brilliance, and generosity.
Talking with other feminists was another factor. Many were bigots. They didn’t even try to hide their mean-spirited condemnation of men or their indifference to male suffering. Some, in fact, expressed glee about such suffering. Like all zealots, they divided the world into us and them; oppressor and oppressed; the guilty and the innocent. I found that aspect of their thinking deeply unappealing.
There may be individual men—psychopaths, mostly—who hate women, but it’s nothing like the casual, unapologetic anti-male contempt that many feminists express in one way or another. For me, the crowning glory was a 2013 Munk Debate in Toronto (part of a prestigious series of public discussions) in which four leading women addressed the question, “Are Men Obsolete?” The Yes side, full of snide, fact-free giggling, won handily.
3. You describe the feminist fantasy of moral purity as "near-irresistible." Why do you think this fantasy is so alluring, and how did you eventually break free from its grip?
Secularism has largely done away with religious ideas of sin and redemption, but the longing for purity and the need for scapegoats has remained alive. Feminism offers these abundantly in its positing of the patriarchy as the source of all cruelty and injustice. Many feminisms imagine an ancient matriarchy that pre-dated the patriarchy and was egalitarian and non-exploitative. Humankind fell from grace, according to this myth, because of the male lust for power: men imposed artificial gender roles and prohibited women from exercising their (divine) talents as healers and inventors. The patriarchy restricted women to the domestic realm, forcing them to serve men’s sexual, emotional, and material needs.
In feminist thinking, most or indeed everything that is wrong with our societies today can be traced to patriarchal systems. Women, as innocent victims of that, are largely blameless (except for women like me, of course). And that is why feminism is a revolutionary rather than a reformist ideology: it imagines a perfectly just world in the (ever-receding) future when all bondage and hierarchy will be vanquished, and all women, regardless of background or condition, will love and value one another and the earth.
It’s an attractive idea, I suppose, but there is no evidence that any of it is true, as anyone would conclude who has ever seriously studied history or seen how women interact in groups. My interest in feminist fantasy wore off as its falseness became more apparent.
4. You argue that feminism, from its beginnings, has promoted hatred of men, social dysfunction, and victimhood ideology. Can you provide some historical examples that support this claim?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the most important leader of the American women’s movement in the 19th century, exhibited all the symptoms of a classic victim mentality disorder, and shaped a movement out of her warped beliefs and resentments. She was the primary author of the first significant feminist document in the United States, which emerged from the women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. It is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the origins of feminist vengefulness and false claims. Modeling itself on the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Sentiments is a declaration of war against men, which alleges that the history of mankind has been “a history of repeated injuries and usurpation on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”
Its various articles in support of this allegation compile a multitude of falsehoods, including that “all colleges [were] closed against her” (not true, look up Oberlin College, for example) and that “He [man] has endeavored in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.” The self-confident, well-educated women who convened the conference with the support of their menfolk were in themselves vivid illustrations of the falsity of the allegation. Yet 32 men present signed the Declaration, accepting that their sex was responsible for nothing but tyranny and oppression throughout history. My video about Stanton is here.
Another example can be found in the actions and ideology of the British suffragettes who campaigned for the right to vote in the decade prior to the First World War. Putting into practice the radical doctrine of ends justifying means, thousands of women carried out a mass campaign of bombing and arson that endangered the working classes of England, including many working men who themselves did not yet have the right to vote. These radicals are remembered primarily for their hunger strikes and self-sacrifice. In reality, they caused reckless damage and danger, firebombing country houses when servants were asleep on the premises, putting phosphorous and sulfuric acid into letter boxes so that letters exploded in flames when the boxes were opened, and attempting to assassinate politicians. Their years-long campaign was designed to terrorize their own countrymen and to inflame the sex war. They saw themselves as glorious martyrs for an unimpeachable cause, and are still (unjustly) lionized (or lion-essed) for their useless violence and lawbreaking, which likely delayed rather than promoted the granting of the right to vote, and proved anti-feminist contentions that women had a tendency to irrational rage. My video about the suffragettes is here.
5. In your view, how has the notion of female innocence and male guilt shaped feminist discourse over time?
It means that there is a blatant double standard in all discussions of gender issues. Is infidelity wrong? Is sex tourism unethical? Should we impose harsh prison terms on those who murder family members? Is psychological abuse a serious form of domestic violence? The feminist cannot answer any of these questions until she or he knows the sex of the person involved. That’s all that is needed. If it’s a man, then his action is to be harshly condemned as an abuse of power. If it’s a woman, we are to empathize with and excuse her.
Women comprise about 5% of the Anglophone world’s prison population, yet feminists insist that we need more programs to keep female offenders, even those who murder, out of prison. The men deserve to rot there.
Women are the vast majority of child killers (as I show here), but that fact is assiduously hidden from view, and no one devises theories about toxic femininity or declaims against women’s free pass to kill.
6. You mention that even the so-called “good feminists” were often female supremacists. Can you talk more about this idea and how it challenges common perceptions of early feminists?
I have yet to find a prominent early feminist who did not advocate female moral superiority: it is foundational. Even conservative temperance advocates in America (those who sought to curb the manufacture, distribution, and consumption of alcohol) depicted women as uniquely capable, where men had allegedly failed, to set their societies on a moral foundation. Frances Willard, the leader for many years of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, argued in her book Woman and Temperance (1883) that women cared more than men did, worked together more effectively, and brought greater sincerity and passion to campaigns for social betterment (see my video here).
Required reading in this regard should be British suffragette Christabel Pankhurst’s pamphlet “The Great Scourge and How to End it” (1913), which exaggerated the prevalence of venereal disease in Britain and used it as the occasion to excoriate male sexuality, in which Pankhurst found nothing natural and certainly nothing benign. She recommended the medical castration of men both in prison and outside it if men could not exercise the self-control she believed was innate to women. “Votes for women, chastity for men,” was a popular suffragette slogan.
Women across the English-speaking world had different notions of what constituted female superiority, but perhaps the most expansive was that held by Frances Swiney, a prolific British feminist author who published The Awakening of Women; Or, Women’s Part in Evolution in 1899. Here she repeatedly argued that women, not men, were the primary source of civilizational “stability,” “moral worth,” “justice,” and “equality” (p. 300); they were not only biologically superiority, but had far greater psychological and spiritual qualities. Asserting that men had contributed little to civilization other than war, oppression, and depravity, Swiney asserted that “Man recalls the past, woman represents the Future” (p. 49) and that “Women’s Era is dawning” (p. 296).
Canadian suffrage leader Nellie McClung was adamant in her book In Times Like These (1915) that women were “the more spiritual half” of humanity and that when women had the right to vote, war would be no more. War existed, she asserted, because “They [men] like it!” (15). One of her most pithy slogans about men and women was, “The woman’s outlook on life is to save, to care for, to help. Men make wounds, and women bind them up.”
All of these statements, and many more, were written not by marginalized or disgruntled fanatics but by the acknowledged leaders of the women’s movement in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. These women are still admired as early feminist foremothers, and their anti-male bigotry has never been acknowledged, and certainly not disavowed, by feminists today.
All of them were typically feminist in being incapable of a rational assessment of women’s flawed humanity or of any appropriate recognition of men’s indispensable role in flourishing societies.
7. In your article “When Feminism is Child Abuse,” you describe how some feminist mothers undermine and guilt-trip their sons. What long-term psychological effects do you think this kind of parenting can have on boys?
The effects are profoundly debilitating, including self-hatred, depression, anger, loss of faith in female goodness, and inability or unwillingness to form partnerships with women. Many men today are withdrawing from society, removing their services and their loyalty from a system that offers little recognition of their contributions. Why should young men today put enormous time and effort into a society that tells them the “Future is Female” and that non-compliant men are “toxic”?
8. How do you think the lack of positive male representation in feminist parenting affects boys’ self-esteem and identity formation?
I am no psychologist, but it stands to reason that lack of a positive male role model, particularly a father able to teach through example, will harm boys’ development in every way possible (added to this the dominance of female teachers in schools, and many boys grow up in an almost entirely female, and often feminist, environment). Study upon study affirms that father absence has a discernibly negative impact on children, especially boys, leading to behavior problems, aggression, juvenile delinquency, poor academic achievement, truancy, dropping out, violence, gang-involvement, emotional problems, drug and alcohol addiction, and poverty (see here for a compilation of relevant research).
9. You argue that the feminist movement has not been good for anyone, including women. Can you explain why you believe feminism has failed even its supposed beneficiaries?
I argue that because women themselves say it’s true. The more feminist the woman, the more unhappy she tends to be. Memoirs of feminist activism such as Phyllis Chesler’s A Politically Incorrect Feminist chronicle the mental illness, rancor, and suicidal despair that were rampant amongst the Second Wave contingent—and things haven’t improved since then. A 2022 American Family Survey found that women who identify as “liberal” report much lower rates of life satisfaction. In general, women’s self-reported happiness has been dropping since the 1970s, as is discussed at length in a meta-study called “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness” by University of Pennsylvania researchers Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolvers. Feminism has attained many of its stated goals (such as sexual emancipation, abortion rights, higher education, economic advantages and professionalization), but it has not managed to make women happier.
10. Studies have shown a decline in women’s happiness since the rise of feminism. Why do you think this paradox exists, and how does it relate to your critique of the movement?
Feminists themselves have many excuses for why women are unhappy: these include that we haven’t had enough feminism (!!); that feminism has mainly benefited men (!!); and that women feel stress more than men, and so on. Most of these claims are conveniently unmeasurable.
But it’s not at all surprising that women are becoming less happy in the feminist era. Feminism brings out the worst qualities in women: anger, hatred, resentment, self-pity, and lack of accountability. Don’t take my word for it: Egyptian-American feminist Mona Eltahawy put it right in the title of her book, The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (which she enumerated as anger, ambition, profanity, violence, attention, power, and lust). Feminists openly flaunt their hatred, envy, promiscuity, pettiness, and self-pity. The belief that one is a victim will do that every time: it creates what researchers have called a “tendency for interpersonal victimhood,” which involves self-absorption and paranoia, difficulty in empathizing with others, and a belief that revenge-taking is justified. These do not bode well for any life.
I wrote extensively about this issue here.
11. In your opinion, what are some of the most damaging hypocrisies and double standards perpetuated by modern feminism?
There are far too many to name.
#KillAllMen is a common (allegedly ironic) feminist meme. No respected men’s advocate would ever use #KillAllWomen—not even the allegedly worst-ever Andrew Tate. Second Wave feminists from Valerie Solanas in 1967 to the present have advocated killing men or reducing the male portion of humanity to bring about world peace, as both Sally Miller Gearhart and Mary Daly, two feminist university professors, have done. No recognized men’s leader, and certainly no male university professor, has ever called for the elimination of women. Yet feminists claim that feminists don’t hate men. When I point out these clear instances of anti-male hysteria, modern feminists couldn’t care less. It doesn’t even embarrass them. My video on feminist anti-male extermination advocacy is here.
Feminist sleights of hand regarding violence are disturbing. North American men are about 1/3 of all victims of intimate partner homicide, but no one in power will say so; for decades, the American government has poured millions into a piece of legislation (the Violence Against Women Act) to fund feminist indoctrination of police, social workers, lawmakers, etc. so that they see only female victims and male perpetrators. You can witness male victims being made invisible everywhere (for example, in this article).
A friend sent me a feminist pro-violence meme just the other day. In it, a woman, smiling, asks “If you cut off my reproductive choice, can I cut off yours?” It’s a joke about the sexual mutilation of men, about which feminists (and women in general) have not stopped laughing since Lorena Bobbitt sliced off her sleeping husband’s penis and then claimed that SHE was the victim in the relationship (and was exonerated for it). The meme draws a false equivalence between anti-abortion law and violence, though it is not clear how preventing women from killing the unborn is anything like cutting off a man’s penis.
Feminist double standards about the violence of abortion are interesting. Feminists oppose sex-selective abortion when girl babies are being targeted. Yet they are adamantly pro-abortion overall. So, according to feminist logic, it is a bad thing if an unborn baby is murdered because she’s female; but it’s not a bad thing if an unborn female baby is murdered because she’s unborn. Riddle me that one.
12. How do you think the feminist emphasis on female victimhood has influenced the development of gender ideology and the trans movement?
Many feminists see trans as separate from feminism, part of a patriarchal plot against women, but I see the two as closely linked through the feminist insistence that gender—and even sex itself, according to some such as the radical theorist Judith Butler—is socially rather than biologically determined. Feminists from Simone De Beauvoir on, and relentlessly with Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, and others who were heartened by the sexology experiments of John Money, insisted on decoupling feminine identity from biological sex. Of course that opened the door to trans, and it’s somewhat incoherent to try to close the door now because some women don’t like the idea of Olympics competition with men or sharing bathrooms and change rooms. I suspect that intersectional feminism’s valorizing of trans as a victim identity may play some role in its attraction for both young men and women. I’ve written on this subject here and here.
13. In your view, what steps can be taken to restore public respect for men’s contributions and sacrifices in society?
We could talk about them with the same sustained passion that we give to women’s contributions and sacrifices. For example, why not discuss men’s sacrifices on the Titanic every year on April 15? Father’s Day could be celebrated far more intentionally than it now is, with parades, celebrity endorsements, and news reports about, for example, the highly beneficial impact of fathers on children’s well-being. International Women’s Day should be cancelled, to be replaced by a celebration of inter-sexual cooperation and love. I made the latter proposal here.
14. Given the deep-rooted influence of feminist ideology in academia, media, and politics, what strategies do you think are most effective for challenging its dominance?
It’s difficult to dislodge a deep-rooted idea, especially one that is grounded in human nature (contrary to what feminists claim, most men love women and have a profound desire to protect them; and most women expect and demand men’s protection). I hope that some combination of rational argument, mockery, and refusal will eventually weaken feminist dominance. There is some evidence that younger people, especially boys, are sick of feminism and don’t believe feminist claims. As these boys grow into men, they will increasingly withdraw their labor and their love from societies that tell them they’re toxic. Western societies will either reform or die. I hope reform can involve a decisive defeat of feminist ideology without any actual violence, but the longer feminists hold on to power, the more dangerous it becomes. At the present time, far more men kill themselves every year than kill women. But not all men are going to be willing to die or see their sons suffer without a fight.
15. What projects or initiatives are you currently focused on, and how can interested readers stay connected with your work?
I am writing a book on the history of feminist thought, the outline of which can be found in a core video series I wrote, published by my friend Steve Brule here:
I also have a Substack newsletter with a great comments section:
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