"The hysteria that has developed about the abuse of women . . . has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder."
----Noam Chomsky, e-mail to Jeffrey Epstein, February 23, 2019
The
critique of feminist hysteria below was written by Janice Fiamengo, a
retired professor of literature who worked at the University of Ottawa
until cancel culture made the career she had eagerly sought and long
loved no longer enjoyable. Before she entered academia she was a radical
feminist (1990s) and animal rights crusader who dreamed of heroic
"resistance" actions to set tortured animals free. She had a sea change
after 911, deeply troubled by the complete lack of sympathy for the
American victims she witnessed among her colleagues, many of whom could
think only of how to immediately use the tragedy to promote favored
political ideologies in the classroom. Since then, Fiamengo has become a
full-blown anti-feminist crusader. For over ten years now she has
published The Fiamengo File (with Steve Brule), a prolonged but very
dispassionate debunking of feminist actions and ideology going back to
the very founding of modern feminism in Seneca Falls (1848).
The piece that follows is from 2016, a year after Noam Chomsky became friends with Jeffrey Epstein, so it offers good background for Chomsky's comment (quoted above) about hysteria and sexual abuse. One could certainly quibble with the claim of Clarence Thomas's alleged brilliance or the "generosity" of men in general, but the general thrust of the piece shows considerable insight.
Feminist Mass Hysteria, The Fiamengo File, Episode 42, September 8, 2016
by Janice Fiamengo
Reading news stories about our culture of rape, misogyny, objectification and sexual harassment I often feel that either I am crazy or some significant portion of our society is. Is it possible that feminism is actually a form of mass hysteria? That's my subject on today's Fiamengo File.
I'm Janice Fiamengo of the University of Ottawa, and welcome to Season 3 of the Fiamengo File, where we'll continue to explore our current bizarre and often horrifying cultural moment, in which the very foundations of our civilization are in peril. This is a time when the National Organization For Women, which bills itself as the largest grassroots women's organization in America can give its woman of courage award to Emma Sulcowicz, a messed-up young woman who has made rape claims, rape falsehoods, and rape fantasies her life's work. This is a time when thousands of women and men in Canada can claim to know that media personality Jian Ghomeshi, accused of sexual assault, deserved to rot in prison despite irrefutable evidence that his three accusers had lied repeatedly in court and to the police. It's a time when over a million people in the United States signed a petition to recall the supposedly too lenient Stanford rape trial judge in a case about which most commentators knew nothing beside a few inaccurate headlines. It's a time when a wealthy British actress (Souad Faress) can accuse a commuter of sexually assaulting her in a busy London underground station in the split second in which he walked past, not even breaking stride, a literally unimaginable crime, but the police and prosecutors pursued the case to the bitter end. Thank God Mark Pearson was at last acquitted.
Meanwhile, sexual harassment, now a major concern of university and workplace policy has been defined so broadly by the American Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that it can literally include anything a man says or does if the woman claims it made her feel uncomfortable. Surely this is far more than a rational political movement that is occasionally taken too far, as some say. Surely this movement is irrational to its core. Such will be our subject over the next episodes with a special focus on university campuses, because we know that what happens at the university doesn't stay at the university.
Recently, I was re-reading Jessica Valenti's New York Times article titled, "What Does A Lifetime of Leers Do To Us?" And I was trying to figure out, "What is wrong with a woman as successful and influential as Valenti that she views her entire life through a lens of undeserved sexualized suffering? Valenti acknowledges in the article that feminism has made many gains for women, but she rejects the possibility or even the desirability of moving past what sexism has, as she says, done to us. In her opinion, feminists need to dwell a lot longer on the misery of being female.
Valenti claims to be speaking for all women, not just herself, in a characterization that's not at all unusual in contemporary feminism. To be female is to be dehumanized, she asserts. She describes how she used to take the subway to school in Queens, New York, when she was growing up, and was frequently groped and saw men exposing themselves. But it didn't end then, she assures us. It goes on and on, and it's never just one incident or one threatening man, it's a continuous panorama of full-on misogyny, decades of what she calls, "gendered trauma," constantly chipping away at her "sense of safety and sense of self."
Merely to exist as a full human being in such a hateful culture is a perilous struggle. It's typical that none of the experiences that Valenti names, even the explicit ones, can ever be verified. We are simply to accept her word that she was groped at least a dozen times, that her high school teacher tried to date her, that an ex-boyfriend wrote "whore" on her dorm room door, that she is daily threatened with rape on Twitter, and so on. And we are to accept that such are other women's experiences, too. If this is a con job, it's a successful one, for these stories of victimhood leave most critics speechless with discomfort. How dare we question a woman's experience.
Every time I've given a talk at a university, I've been assailed afterwards by university-age girls telling me of the intolerable reality of their trauma, how they can't walk from their front door to the bus stop without being catcalled, their constant exposure to male sexual attention.
Such stories are as predictable as they are, frankly, completely unbelievable. I've looked for it, believe me, and I can't find it. I have never witnessed the behavior described on anything like the scale asserted. I've never had a friend who had to run a gauntlet of male leers. And the account bears no relation to my own experience from the time I was a young girl until now. Walking down the street, riding public transit, attending school, working at various secretarial jobs, I knew there was no generalized sexual threat. If I felt someone looking at me, it didn't feel like a violation. If I was complimented it didn't feel demeaning. Yeah, I was sometimes embarrassed or irritated by certain comments, but I didn't feel diminished in my very soul.
And I hasten to say that I didn't lead a particularly sheltered life. I went to an ordinary public school in a working class area. I hung out for years at a roller skating rink frequented by rebellious kids, and I got into more than my share of trouble and took way too many risks, so I had some bad experiences, as most people do, but none of them determined who I am, in a society where women have never been so free or so protected. So why do so many girls and women feel compelled to tell sad stories like Valenti's and to make that the definitive reality of their lives?
There are a few possible explanations. One, perhaps my experience was unusual. Maybe it just happened that men exempted me and all my friends from their catcalling and their harassment. They took out their sexual aggression on others and always when I was out of range. This is a possibility, but it seems highly unlikely.
Two, perhaps the women who tell their victim stories are simply exaggerating, overplaying a few minor incidents in order to reap the rewards that come to victims in our culture, all that sympathy. This may account for some of the victim obsession that I've encountered, but it doesn't seem to account for it all. So many of these women, Valenti included, don't seem to be enjoying themselves, despite living lives that, by any measure, are incredibly safe and prosperous, thanks largely to the brilliance and generosity of men, of course. But these women's pain and their anger, especially their anger, they seem too genuine to be a mere conscious exaggeraton.
Which brings me to the third explanation. Which is the possibility that a significant portion of these women, especially those who obsess over their injuries so unrelentingly, are actually experiencing a form of low level hysteria spread across the Western world through social media. I'm not a psychologist, obviously, but it seems that our current preoccupation with all manner of sexual abuse shares some characteristics with other episodes of mass hysteria.
Except that feminist hysteria is longer-lasting and much more diffuse in its effects. Historically, in mass hysteria we see a relatively short-lived collective delusion characterized by anxiety, irrational behavior and beliefs, and by baseless symptoms of illness, as in, for example, Le Roy, New York, where fourteen teenage girls and one boy suddenly began exhibiting Tourette-like symptoms in 2012. Or a 1994 case in a small Illinois town, in which female residents thought they were being poisoned by a gas that caused their throat and lips to burn, though no gas was ever found, and their symptoms went away when they talked to police. Or a case in Martensville, Saskatchewan, in which dozens of children claimed to have been abused in satanic rituals at a day care center, resulting in over a hundred charges made against more than a dozen people, including a number of police officers, all of it ultimately found to be groundless.
Any google search will turn up many fascinating historical examples. Medical doctor Andrew Wilner has put together an overview of episodes of hysteria on a website called Medscape. He makes clear that although much remains unknown about the causes, mass hysteria is a phenomenon in which the power of suggestion is key. Witnessing others, even a single other, can cause the behavior to spread. Now think of Anita Hill's accusations.
In 1991, against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, in which a brilliant lawyer, Thomas, was nearly denied a place on the Supreme Court because a single woman alleged that he had – many years before – spoken of an interest in pornography to her, and said, famously now: “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?” This alleged harassment was flat-out difficult to believe, not least because Hill kept in close contact with Thomas for years after the incidents were supposed to have taken place.
But even if true, they were remarkably trivial issues, entirely unworthy to have held the attention of the whole nation during the confirmation hearings. Yet they did, and the impact of that scandal on North American culture is, I believe, incalculable.
According to a university website reporting on this incident, in the five years that followed Hill's accusation against Thomas sexual harassment cases more than doubled in the United States, from 6,127 in 1991 to 15,342 in 1996. And over that same period awards to victims under federal law nearly quadrupled, from $7.7 million to $27.8 million. Now, feminists would say, of course, that Anita Hill's courage inspired other women, who were previously suffering in silence. Another explanation, of course, would be that the affair inspired women to see what had formerly been understood as innocuous banter, or normal expressions of sexual interest, as intolerable harassment. And this is how it goes. One case leads to many others, all manifesting the same irrational symptoms, the tearful accusations – he touched me, he propositioned me, he said things, I couldn't sleep, I was never comfortable in that office again. I could feel him watching me. He made me so afraid.
As the National Organization of Women knows in giving its award to Emma Sulcowicz, the more alleged victims are celebrated for their supposed courage in dwelling on the alleged abuse, the more other women will be inclined to view their experiences through that lens of sexual trauma, for which they will require a long, long, perhaps lifelong period of healing.
It is surely significant that girls and women are especially vulnerable to mass hysteria. Historical episodes have often included only, or predominantly, female hysterics. Like most hysterics, of course, feminist hysterics are true believers. No matter what evidence is presented to contradict their irrational fear the evidence can't shake their bedrock belief and they experience depressive or anxious behavior such as weeping, trouble getting out of bed, fear of public spaces, and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.
I've noticed this in news reports of harassment cases, in which the woman reports being unable to get out of bed for months in response to what to any reasonable person would be only the most minor of incidents, such as a university teacher allegedly expressing some kind of sexual or romantic interest. The utter lack of resiliency, the prolonged indulgence in the probing of imagined wounds; it betrays a severely disordered mindset, yet in our time feminist hysteria has gained so many adherents that attempts to point out its irrationality are considered further evidence of the so-called threat. Denial of rape culture is proof of rape culture, and so on.
Just recently, Ms. Magazine, a mainstream women's magazine with millions of readers, tweeted out a claim about the moral equivalence between the actions of ISIS and those of American college administrations. It said, “While ISIS endorses rape, American college administrators similarly facilitate the rape of women on campuses.” That word - “similarly” - is a breathtaking admission of insanity. The suggestion that there is any kind of moral, or any other parallel between a U.S. college administration and a barbaric death cult that uses sexual torture to terrorize whole populations, is crazy, especially given the extent to which college administrations are actually under the thumb of government-mandated feminist policy. But Ms. can make the allegation with no appreciable blowback, and many women will believe that there is an essential truth to the comparison. Even as those women are living lives of unprecedented security.
One of the great unknowns about hysteria is how it is cured. I'm not aware that there has ever been a case where the cure involved validating the delusion. You don't tell a person who's worried about gremlins releasing poisonous gas into their home that the government is going to outlaw such gremlin activity. That just confirms the hysteric in her delusion.
Wilner suggests that the most effective treatment involves separating hysterics from others who have the same symptoms and rationally persuading them out of their delusion. But we're now in a situation where that form of cure is nearly impossible because entire media organizations and government bodies exist to support and affirm feminist delusions about rape culture, patriarchy, and women's oppression. And naysayer voices, no matter how evidence-based, are either drowned-out or completely silenced. Feminist hysterics actually want to change the law, so that it's easier to convict men of sexual assault on a woman's word. They want every school and workplace to have a vast punitive machinery to punish men for anything a woman doesn't like. And generally authorities are inclined to give in to their insane demands. So this is where we are. Don't expect the hysteria to go away any time soon. But don't stay silent while it spreads.
