By Sinead Kelly
WHAT’S the deal with Nobel prizewinning men and a faction of modern feminists? It seems that practically every time the former try to make a joke, they run the risk of being accused of sexism.
I won’t get into the eerily similar 2015 Sir Tim Hunt persecution yet again, but Cypriot Nobel laureate Sir Christopher Pissarides has found himself in the dog house over a joke he made about Apple’s AI Siri’s male voice.
His comment was branded ‘shameful’ and ‘disgusting’ in a tweetstorm because he had said: “I chose a man because you trust the voice of a man more, I was told.”
The BBC, which carried an apology from Pissarides, who tried to explain that it was a joke, cited studies of both men and women supposedly revealing that most preferred a male voice when it came to things like technical advice and a female voice when it came to more social issues.
Pissarides was probably alluding to something along those lines when he added the caveat, “I was told”, and in fact, what he said could also be argued that he was poking fun at the very notion that a man’s voice was deemed more trustworthy according to some so-called studies.
Of course that would then leave it open to ask why he picked a male voice for his Siri app in the first place, and wasn’t that sexist in itself? Yes, tweeted one women. “Chris Pissarides prefers the creepy voice of Hal”, in reference to the male-designated AI run amok in the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey.
However it was not all that long ago when some feminists became apoplectic about Siri’s female voice being abused by men asking it all sort of rude things. It was suggested at the time that female AI voices implied that women were yet again being used “to serve the patriarchy” by having to ‘fetch’ data for men. But wait. If there were no female AI voices, wouldn’t that be gender discrimination as well? Clearly the message is, use female Siri, don’t be sexist to it and don’t force it to make your tea.
Pissarides’ apologised of course but radical feminists – not all – rarely accept an apology with good grace and instead see it as a weapon to beat you down some more or, having successfully cowed you, use it to do the same to the next person who tells a bad joke.
And speaking of jokes, here are some that feminists just love.
1. What’s the fastest way to a man’s heart?
Through his chest with a sharp knife.
3. How are men like parking spaces?
All the good ones are taken, and the ones leftover are disabled.
5. What’s the best way to find a truly committed man?
Visit the closest mental hospital.
The Pissarides incident came near the end of week that started with a call from some US feminists to abolish Father’s Day because it celebrates ‘the patriarchy’. Some even tried to make it all about women, stating that without mothers there would be no fathers while conveniently ignoring the reverse.
For radical feminists, the battle of the sexes as it used to be known, is now a zero-sum game. The very fact there’s a Father’s Day, in a form of twisted logic, can be seen a slight to women. How many people even know or care that there’s an International Men’s Day on November 19? Do a couple of days a year assigned the other half of the population really need to be denigrated?
The answer is yes. For if it was widely accepted that men have issues too, this could diminish the scale of women’s issues, because men, and on a more global scale, the patriarchy – read rich white men – are seen as the main cause of women’s oppression. Therefore, women must quash any notion that men are human beings or else they might have to accept that some men’s issues just might track back to relationships with the women in their lives, This would be an untenable proposition for hard-line feminists because “men’s problems are brought on themselves and women’s are brought on by men”.
In the US 66 per cent of all divorces are initiated by women and the risk of suicide among divorced men is over twice that of married men, whereas in women, there is no statistical difference for married and divorced women in suicide rates, according to the CDC. Many male suicides are a result of imbalanced treatment by the courts in custody cases, and there are also women who use the children as a weapon to control post-divorce relationships. This is a fact of life. Also, acknowledging the existence of such provable phenomenon as false paternity claims and false rape reports through DNA would mean that women were not above a bit of manipulation. Surely not. Us women know deep down that we’ve never ever told a lie or a sexist joke about men right?
To be very, very clear, none of this means that men are not the root cause of a great many injustices perpetrated on women and have been since the beginning of time, and yes, that includes the patriarchal societies of the past. The swinging of the pendulum the other way has been a long time coming. The question is, has it now swung too far the other way? Why is it blasphemy to acknowledge that good men are sometimes badly treated by women? Why is it not recognised that men in the West have come a long way in terms of eliminating overt sexism compared with the rest of the world? Why do all men have to be tarred with the same brush by modern feminism and crushed en masse?
And to be clear again, I am speaking about radical third-wave feminism and not the many millions of women who identify as feminists who are not ‘man haters’, who do unbelievably great work saving women’s lives when it comes to domestic abuse and human trafficking especially, and who probably believe in actual equality for both sexes.
Women today owe the rights they now enjoy to the struggles of the feminists of yore. However, a number of those coming from what is called second-wave feminism – those who joined the women’s movement in the seventies and eighties – are now finding themselves being marginalised, de-platformed and called misogynists and strangely enough, racists, by the lunatic fringe. People such as Professors Janice Fiamengo and Christina Hoff Sommers, and veteran feminist Erin Pizzy, who believe in real equality and call it out when they see men being unfairly treated, face rampant misogyny from younger third-wave feminists.
Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys, explains time and again on college campuses – when she is allowed to speak – that there is a difference between ‘equality of opportunity’ and ‘equality of outcome’. In any liberal society only the former can be guaranteed. If young women are not choosing science or tech, it’s not because the opportunity is not there but somehow “the patriarchy” is holding them back from taking the opportunity. Radical feminists seem to want a 50:50 split by default in everything at the expense of meritocracy. Yet they never seem to clamour for equality when it comes to military conscription, garbage collection or coal mining, or the sectors where women already dominate such as teaching or healthcare. 
Women now make up the majority of university students in the US and the UK so why are so many taking ‘gender studies’ instead of science. All they seem to ‘learn’ from these courses is how ‘oppressed’ they are… in the West of all places. These gender studies must be teaching them nothing about equality as they spend much of their time scuppering all attempts by male students trying to form discussion groups to talk about men’s issues “because that’s patriarchal”. Well done girls, you’re literally creating a new generation of resentful misogynists and turning women back into victims who need “safe spaces” from men’s microaggressions.
Three years ago, Cassie Jaye, a young American filmmaker and committed feminist set out to expose the growing men’s rights activists movement (MRA), for the misogynists she believed they were and she made a two-hour documentary called The Red Pill which was released some months ago.
Her documentary was pulled from some theatres in Australia where she was last week treated in a disgusting and hostile manner by some Australian TV channels. And, the showing of the film, where it was allowed, was met with violent protests by male and female feminists who had not even seen it. Yet they thought nothing of denigrating an empowered woman capable of forming her own views based on what she experienced on both sides of the fence because it goes against the narrative.
Jaye is no longer the kind of feminist she once was, though women’s issues are still a priority for her. Her awakening did not come about only because of what she discovered through her conversations with these men but also because of the reaction of her ‘sisters in arms’ to the fact that she has allowed men’s voices to be heard at all. It was, in the end, the hostile reactions from feminism itself that prompted her to leave the movement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5y-BZyOxDg&t=335s&ab_channel=NewsBiteGlobal
Popular YouTuber Laci Green, also a committed feminist, who was even on the fringe once upon a time not so long ago, recently decided “to take the red pill” and talk to the other side as well. While she still claims to be a feminist, she’s been shunned and vilified by feminism, and has received death threats and threats of rape from her own side, the side that supposedly stands up for a woman’s right not to be raped or killed. Irony is lost on the great brainwashed.
Maybe some of these lost souls should take some advice from Judge Judy. The 75-year-old was being interviewed by a female journalist who assumed she was a feminist having been a family court judge for 30 years and a TV star for another 20. But the judge was having none of the sisterhood. She had never felt held back because she was a woman, and never felt she needed a women’s organisation behind her to accomplish what she had over five decades much of which spanned a time when women really were oppressed. “I’m not a woman judge. I’m a judge who just happens to be a woman,” she said.
Also, if you happen to be a woman in her courtroom accusing a man of hitting you, the first question she’ll ask is: “Did you hit him first?” If the answer is yes, she’ll shrug as if to say “so, what do you want me to do about it?”
Speaking of violence between the sexes of which some 40 per cent of men are said to be victims, in an article recently on a rabid feminist website the staff did a straw poll among themselves on domestic violence against men ‘just for laughs’. A good number of the female staff admitted to having initiated some kind of physical attack against their partners or boyfriends. One even joked: “He was asking for it”. Imagine that in reverse, even in jest.
Maybe it’s long past time to acknowledge that there are good and bad men, and good and bad women in the world and treat them all accordingly, unless there is some kind of revenge thing going on for millennia of unequal rights that I’m missing and that is now being perpetrated on young men who had nothing to do with any of it.
Less than 10 per cent of women in the UK identify as feminists and less than 20 per cent in the US, which indicates that the radical faction within the larger group must be quite small, including those men who also identify as feminists. So how is that this tiny minority seem to be the ones dictating to everyone else what’s right and wrong… from their perspective? The weaponisation of social media is one reason. The other is the age-old axiom that empty vessels really do seem to make the most noise.
