Anti-Feminist Professor | Janice Fiamengo | WOMEN’S ISSUES | Rubin Report

There is something happening in Higher Education that not all Educators agree with. Here is an intriguing conversation of policy and culture within the halls of academia. These issues are bringing in the questions of Free Speech and Due Process and Rationality.

Dr. Jordan Peterson's phenomenon proves that there is an incredible hunger out there amongst young people for something that's really genuine. Hard-hitting and real in terms of discussing what matters in the world today. What is not in public conversations at all.

Dr. Rick Mehta is a classic liberal that (at Acadia) was an award-winning teacher that started speaking out. He was a tenured professor before he was fired.
Many professors are speaking privately and wish they could speak out as well.
Some professors are speaking out to protect the ability to think about these issues.

Rick Mehta objected to his Universities Indigenization Program which is the move to replace European based knowledge as exclusionary and inadequate and subjective and to replace it in some cases with Indigenous Knowledge. Even in something called Indigenous Science, which many scientists would say is actually not Science. Indigenous Science has to do with Indigenous ways of knowing elder's knowledge. What some might say is superstition or magical beliefs of sort of anecdotal kinds of observations. There's an attempt of universities in some ways to bring in Indigenous Peoples who've been excluded from the university experience for many years. Yet the idea that Indigenous Knowledge is not to be questioned that it has a value equal to supposedly Europeans Science is a really incredibly worrisome and strange idea. So Rick Mehta objected to that and raised a whole bunch of other questions not even saying that he wanted to. Rick Mehta said that identity politics is divisive and causes resentment.

Prof Janice Fiamengo is a self-declared Anti-Feminist the defender of dissent. She learned how incredibly pleasurable it is to be a radical. It was a combination of euphoric rage and self-righteous indignation. Yet Janice just couldn’t hold on to the sense of conviction. Until 911,,, That was really the point when she noticed the mood of barely contained vaunting pleasure. She just couldn’t believe it. One of her friends came into the mailroom and said “Well they’ve got what they deserved”, this was within an hour of the news. One of her fellow Professors talked about how she was going to teach about the event. And talk about how this was going to be used by Reactionary Forces in the United States and how it’d be very interesting to watch over the next few days. Who they would blame and how they would begin to manipulate.

Janice was surprised how her colleague never stopped to think if there were students in the class that might be affected directly or might just know somebody that was affected. The lack of human empathy and the hatred, the satisfied hatred. That was the moment that really turned Janice off completely from the left, progressivism, the anti-Americanism, and the anti-Western Culture. The other thing that was happening at the same time was the equity hiring (affirmative action hiring). It struck Janice as the most unjust ridiculous thing. Because no men, no white men were even considered for any of the positions that were offered. She could not see how that was a good thing in any way at all.

A friend of Janice left Australia working as an Astrophysicist and went to China because he realized that there was no future at all. He couldn’t possibly get a tenure-track position, because they were so set on hiring women or other identity categories in Australia.

A Ph.D. student was being brought in to talk to his old Department. She was going to be talking about how there are not enough women represented in astronomy because even the laws are all named after men. Like Newton’s law. The idea was to start renaming some of these laws, should actually be named after somebody else even though they’re named after the men because the men obviously were the ones that discovered the laws. That to Janice Fiamengo was ludicrous.
Then Janice became especially upset about what she came to see as the negative environment for young men at university. Because she began thinking about what it must feel like to sit there day after day after day. Hearing about how all the good things in the world are the contribution of women and all the bad things are the contributions of men. What young men have to do today is basically just take a step back.

As Susana Walters said in that Washington Post piece. Why can’t we hate men? You know that’s what you have to do as a man. You have to bear the weight of centuries of male privilege and oppressive behavior and so you just have to step back. Don’t run for office, don’t do anything. Be object, apologize for your so-called privilege and let your sisters come forward and make the world a better place. That is so crude and ridiculous, but she doesn’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that is the message that most young men are getting at university today. That the only way to be a good man is to focus all of your energy and attention on someone else whether it’s women or helping indigenous or whatever it happens to be that you can’t have your own concerns. You can’t have your own needs, you certainly can’t have your own problems or issues. That’s the only way you can be a good person. That seemed to Janice so outrageous and she kept waiting for other people to say something about it.
Finally, Janice got to the point where she thought she should do it and speak out.

After Janice gave her first couple of talks she received a lot of emails, an incredible number of emails from young men and men not that young. Talking about their experiences which blew her away, that the amount of pain that there is out there. The number of young men who just want to, they love women in most cases. They want to have a happy relationship. They’ve never intended to hurt or oppress anyone and yet they’re told that even without intending to they do. Just by looking at a young woman. Asking her out on a date they’re doing some sort of violence and the pain that has caused and the uncertainty and the confusion and resentment as well. Some of these young men have themselves been abused, sometimes their mothers have been abusive or girlfriends. Yet they have to hear over and over again about how it’s only men who are ever abusive and it’s amazing to Janice that once you go down the rabbit hole and see our culture from the other side.
So now Janice feels her role is to at least say to young men that you’re not crazy. Our culture is actually crazy.

Janice mentions that some of these men are beginning to feel like their society just doesn’t even like them. It’s not even that they’re expendable, which most men who have studied the situation of men throughout history would say that’s always been the case. Men are the ones that go to war. Why? To protect the women, so this idea that all of human history is about male power and privilege and men abusing women. You know these men say it’s actually the exact opposite. Women have always been the ones who are precious in societies particularly in Western Society with chivalry and everything else. So that was always the situation but expendability is one thing. But to be actually despised by your society and told that there’s nothing good about you. That even your sacrifices aren’t good enough and yet you’re still supposed to make the sacrifices. But they’ll never get any kind of public acknowledgment, it’s bowing forever.

The problem is too, now that all of history has been sort of rewritten. So it’s actually very difficult to find out the reality of history because we have it filtered through our popular culture. For instance, women winning the right to vote and the fact that there are a whole bunch of men certainly in Canada and Great Britain. Who couldn’t vote at the same time women were campaigning for the right to vote. Almost nobody knows that all these were poor men. There were property and wage qualifications at the time. Yes, there were certain restrictions. Many of the men who went and fought in the First World War for instance. The young men couldn’t vote either. But we have this idea that for centuries men could vote and basically ran society and that women couldn’t. But in fact, that’s not true. There is just a very narrow window when most men could vote and women couldn’t.

Janice has heard a number of high-profile female commentators say “just up until the recent past nobody believed a woman if she said she’d been raped. So now we’re going to believe them”. Now even if that were true, it wouldn’t make sense and it wouldn’t be just, obviously. To suddenly now just believe every time a woman says that a man has done something to her and we’re going to destroy that man’s career, we’re going to put him in jail. The most pervasive part of this now, that there is a growing feeling amongst this group (class of blue check Twitter users) that to make an omelet you’re going to have to break some eggs and it’s okay if a couple of innocent people get taken down. These groups say over and over again that yeah, it’s perfectly okay, because of the centuries and centuries of abuse. This is a crazy idea of retributive justice punishing people as a class. Yet a lot of people, both women, and men who buy that narrative. That are so whipped up in outrage over woman’s supposed suffering over the centuries that they’re quite willing to see some men suffer now.

That’s certainly been the attitude about the tribunals that have been put in place in American Universities. People have mentioned that there’s no standards of justice. There’s no opportunity to cross-examine witnesses, you’re not allowed to have a lawyer. Sometimes the men weren’t even allowed to know what the charges against them were and they’d always come out and say “well they’re not going to be put in prison, they’re just going to be expelled from University”.

Janice believes everyone should be treated equally, at least the laws of a nation to treat everyone equally.

This is connected to the loss of Due Process now. Yes, people will be jailed, others will be fired (losing their jobs).

Janice mentions that Gender Studies is the ground zero of the new movements. All sorts of articles by law students saying “we know what rape trails look like when there is the presumption of innocence is the default or is the standard. What would they look like if we started by believing women as the fundamental legal standard?”

Janice wants to know what is it about this mass movement? So angry, this movement of vengeance that is starting to make these completely irrational claims about how we should proceed, who we should believe. Why it doesn’t matter that we suspend basic principles of presumption of innocence and due process. Janice questions how can it be this is actually being taken seriously in our public culture?


Who is Dr. Jordan B. Peterson:
https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/about/
https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/


Who is Dr. Rick Mehta:
https://youtu.be/W2N4LUSVVUw