Once we were feminists

Professor Janice Fiamengo said, that she didn't become interested in feminist ideology until she started graduate school to do her Masters degree:

It did attract me, it tells you that there is a massive injustice that you are not responsible. Heady stuff, for young people. It was so dam attractive it was exhilarating.

I believed it because it must be so and every one else believed it.

I had been taught to read everything from through a feminist or at least gynocentric lens so it's always about you look at the women characters

Female characters were interpreted as having limited options, that they were struggling as they were hemmed. The struggling female character was seen as being heroic as she worked to overcome the various limitations that denied her life possibilities?

In contrast she was taught to view the male characters through a feminist stereotypical lens as to one of being privileged and patriarchial

...how is this man privileged?

Authors of literature were viewed as either fighting against the patriarchal narrative or in someway as being complicit in strengthening and promulgating the patriarchal narrative.

...how is this male character and his assumptions about women inform his attitudes and his actions andhow is the author either resisting (you) know,patriarchal narratives or in some way complicit with them and strengthening them and and promulgating them maybe. That was the whole way that literature was viewed and taught……

Professor Fiamengo gives an example of how basic facts were kept hidden for her;

...feminism and who the women's movement in the 19th century struggle for the vote was a big part of it the strategies that various women writers used to articulate the the right of women to have the vote and to be more involved in their society nobody ever said to me you know men did not all have the right to vote at the period you're talking about this is a basic fact of history never encountered

There were basic facts that were hidden from me.

Professor Fiamengo gradually begins to have an epiphany, that she describes to be like a shimmering, where it started to feel wrong.

It wasn't until I started teaching, that was when everything started shimmering like a mirage. It just started to feel wrong to stand up there in a class Taught to read everything through this gynocentric lens.

Her teaching experiences started to alter her perceptions and that she became aware of the paradoxes;

It started to feel wrong and I could start to see that the young men in my classes were not privileged and I could see all the ways that women were being privileged

It is not only false, but It is shockingly cruel and unjust Even if it was true about the past, it is not true about the present.

Cassie Jaye has won a number of awards for documentaries for covering issues that affect women such "Daddy I do" that examines sex education and abstinence as well as teenage pregnancy, abortion and single motherhood.

Cassie who described herself as a proud feminist and in her desire to fight for women's rights realised that nobody had ever documented the Men's Rights movement in film before and that all she knew about the mens rights movement is what she had read online and that she would expose the dark underbelly of this group who she was told were fighting against women's rights. So as a proud feminist, she decided to meet her enemy.

I saw it as an opportunity to continue fighting for women's equality by exposing those preventing it

In her TED presentation titled "Meeting the Enemy" she says;

There is an important rule in Documentary film making as an interviewer you do not interrupt. So I am asking questions and I am getting their full life story and in the moment I didn't realise it, but now looking back I can see that while I was conducting my interviews I wasn't actually listening. [emphasis added]

I was hearing them speak and I knew the camera was recording but in those moments sitting across from my enemy I wasn't listening

What was I doing?

I was anticipating I was waiting to hear a sentence or just even a couple of words in succession that proved what I want to believe that I had found the misogynist the ground zero of the war on women.

Well, after years of researching and fact-checking, what the men's rights activists were telling me, there is no denying that there are many human rights issues that disproportionately or uniquely affect men.

Before making The Red Pill movie, I was a feminist of about ten years, and I thought I was well-versed on gender equality issues.But it wasn't until I met men's rights activists that I finally started to consider the other side of the gender equality equation. It doesn't mean I agree with all that they've said.

But I saw the immense value in listening to them and trying to see the world through their eyes.

Dr Warren Farrell wrote;

Then one day ( in one of those rare moments of internal security) I asked myself whether the impact I was having was a positive one,; I wondered if the reason so many more women than men listened to me was because I had been listening to women but not listening to men. [emphasis added]

Cassie Jaye then went onto say;

And that's when I experienced how engaged the media is in group think around gender politics. And I learned a difficult lesson. When you start to humanize your enemy, you, in turn, may be dehumanized by your community.And that's what happened to me.Rather than debating the merit of the issues addressed in the film.

I became the target of a smear campaign, and people who had never seen the movie protested outside the theatre doors, chanting that it was harmful to women.

Professor Janice Fiamengo also encountered similar types of protest and when she gave her first public presentation, in order to close down her presentation the fire alarm was pulled and the building had to be evacuated.

Research into the bullying behaviour of Nurses otherwise known as Horizontal Violence, typifies the style of bullying tactics that they use. Eeva Sodhi, wrote that as women get older their bullying becomes much more sophisticated and research by Barbara Leckie into the bullying behaviour of school girls shows a remarkable similarity with the Horizontal Violence found in the female dominated field of Nursing.(The mean girls of ER; Marie Claire)

Janice Fiamengo and Cassie Jaye are just two of a number of women, who transitioned from seeing themselves as a feminist to becoming more supportive of a gender that is regarded by feminists as the enemy: "men". Women who show that they feel empathy towards men and are supportive of men meet huge resistance. They are accused of being misogynistic, hating their own gender and as collaborators they suffering from the Stockholm syndrome or Uncle Tom's syndrome where women use passivity and submissiveness as a coping mechanism.

Such claims are attempts to try and invalidate their experiences, views and opinions of these women.

Cassie's reference to the group think mentality of the media is starkly demonstrated in a book written by Myrna Blythe Spin Sisters; How the Women of the Media sell Liberalism and unhappiness makes a very poignant point, in that women of the media strongly believe that all women should believe in the same things as they do and vote the same way. They cannot comprehend the possibility that other members of their own gender may have different ideas, beliefs, wants and experiences.

This is further demonstrated in the belief that only university trained feminist researchers are capable of interpreting women's experiences.

They then turn around and say that, after all, that is not what they meant. What they really meant is that women research subjects need to be educated to realize that feminist researchers, with their superior intellect and training, are in the best position to interpret what women's experiences are. Eeva Sodhi Manufacturing Research.

The British philosopher Roger Scruton has pointed out several prominent features that distinguish indoctrination from normal education. In a competent well designed course, students learn methods for weighing the evidence and critical methods for evaluating arguments for soundness. They learn to arrive at reasoned conclusions from the best evidence at hand. By contrast in cases of indoctrination, the conclusions are assumed before hand. According to Scruton, the adoption of a foregone conclusion is the most salient feature of indoctrination. In the case of gender feminism, the foregone conclusion is that American men strive to keep women subjugated. Christina Hoff Sommers; Who Stole Feminism?

Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters. Camille Paglia