Erin Pizzey: The Story of the Feminist Who Was Threatened for Acknowledging Male Victims
Imagine that you are an advocate for women’s rights living in England in the 1970s, amid second-wave feminism. You recently created a refuge in London for women who have had to bear the horrors of abuse at the hands of their significant others. You have been confronted countless times by police for your work as they try to shut down operations. However, knowing the public good that it will do for these women, who, apart from the place that houses their abuser, have nowhere to live, you double down and build more shelters across the city. While you face opposition from the local authorities, politicians praise you for your efforts, and you are even able to speak to members of Parliament concerning the establishment of more centers for victims.
As you talk to these women victims, you notice a disturbing trend. Many of them when discussing their problems note that the violence wasn’t in fact one-way. Some of them actually were more violent to their partners! You look deep into this issue, discovering more and more that women are not only victims; rather, they themselves are capable of violence.
The more you look into this, the further you stray from your fellow feminists.
It is now the 1990s. Feminism is in its third wave, and the charity organization that you helped that made those places of refuge create recently rebranded itself. In discussing its history, however, you are nowhere to be found. They seemed to have done some Stalinist un-personing of your contributions to the group. All this while you are without a refuge yourself. You have been sent bomb threats over the past 15–20 years and had to move to various places for safety, including New Mexico and the Cayman Islands. You are now homeless in London, the very town where you made your mark for feminism, now in remarkable debt and suffering from constant health issues. You would not be recognized for your efforts for nearly 20 years.
That was the story of Erin Pizzey. A feminist who by the convictions of her fellow friends, was silenced for her opinions, and became a men’s rights activist (MRA).
In my last blog post, I explored three contentious conflicts that feminism had with minoritized groups. Blacks who were pursuing the right to vote, working-class women who desired better wages and conditions, and transgender women who wanted the same privileges as cis women without transphobic dog-whistling. However, the biggest conflict that I did not mention in that piece was feminism’s endeavor to crush the rights of men in various issues, especially when it comes to domestic abuse and sexual assault.
I wish to explore that more in a future blog post, as I have a lot to say on that front. However, this piece will serve as an introduction to that article by showing how much feminists tried to silence the oppression that men can face through the silencing of Erin Pizzey.
Pizzey, birth name Erin Carney, was born to an Irish family with a diplomat patriarch in Qingdao, China. She was once captured alongside her family by the Japanese during their occupation of China in World War II. After their release, they traveled around the world, including Iran, Lebanon, South Africa, Canada, and Senegal, where Erin would attend college at Cheikh Anta Diop University. In her childhood, Pizzey faced abuse at the hands of her parents, ultimately inspiring her future to aid victims of all backgrounds so they would not go through the same pain she did. (Interestingly, Pizzey noted that the abuse by her mother was worse than her father.)
Moving to England, Pizzey joined the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) in 1959. She immediately got herself into hot water when she took odds with how some people, including the organizer of the group, mocked poor people as they donated to the WLM. (Such caddy behavior is now to be expected by certain feminists, as it ties to their anti-working class sentiments that I mentioned in my last blog post.) She also noticed some… terrorist tendencies of the group, including a plan to bomb a store in London. This got the police to investigate and monitor the group, which made certain members of the WLM view Pizzey as a troublemaker for daring to go against their views and opinions.
While she was facing tension from the group, Pizzey would accomplish all that was stated at the beginning of this blog. Her refuges were praised by Jack Ashley, a member of Parliament, and she was allowed to speak to the House of Lords of the UK.
This was when Pizzey noticed that disturbing trend from earlier.
Pizzey was compelled to note down her observations in a 1982 book called Prone to Violence alongside her then-husband Jeff Shapiro. She explores if there are any roots to violent behavior, and she hypothesized that there are links to neurochemical imbalances and childhood trauma. As she noted in her interview in the 2016 film The Red Pill with the director Cassie Jaye:
“Battered children grow up to batter. That’s what I learned. Whether it be a man or a woman. I now know that if a woman comes in with a history of violence in her own childhood, the chances are she will be probably violent to her children and she will want to live on this knife edge of crisis and danger.”
In both this interview and in Prone to Violence, Pizzey remarks that women are capable of the violence that men do. This statement was deemed controversial, and she and Shapiro faced enormous backlash at the hands of feminists, including those she worked with. It escalated to the point that the couple needed protection from the police.
Pizzey in particular received slanderous comments, death threats, and even threats of a bombing from hardcore militant feminists. The lead domestic abuse organization in Scotland, the Scottish Women’s Aid, shared letters that defamed Pizzey as saying that women provoked violence themselves. However, Pizzey would not back down, because as she put it:
“I write to tell the truth, however unpalatable, of women’s lives.”
And that she continued to do.
Pizzey created more places of refuge in New Mexico after leaving England due to the harassment. She also dealt with sexual abusers and pedophiles, and she was astonished to learn that there were as many women pedophiles as there were men. As she put it, they just “go unnoticed.”
Later on in her life, Pizzey transitioned into working with men’s rights activists, working for the organization A Voice for Men and posting an interview on the subreddit MensRights. She continued to face criticism for her views from organizations such as the White Ribbon Campaign (which, if you should know, has been accused of being a sort of astroturfed group of men’s activists spouting pro-feminist talking points). However, she never strayed from her initial focus in life, continuing to create refuges in places such as Bahrain and donating to charities such as the ManKind Initiative and Compassion in Care, which focuses specifically on elder abuse.
Earlier today, I had a conversation with a reader of my previous blog post. (Thank you, by the way, for sharing your experience!) He explained the hell he went through with a vicious ex-wife who abused him and tried to cover up her crimes by falsely accusing him of the things she did to him. She tried to prevent him from seeing his daughter by sending the justice system after him, which nearly failed him by assuming that he was the culprit all along.
His story is the story of many men who have been victims.
Because of the way our society has changed, women are seen more and more as victims by law than men. It is the reason why many police agencies incorporate the Duluth model into their investigations of domestic abuse, a model that instantly assumes guilt on the part of the man and innocence on the side of the woman. It is the reason why colleges and universities today are compelled by the Office of Civil Rights to try sexual assault cases on campus in accordance with the infamous “Dear Colleague” letter, which strips away any due process on the side of the respondent of the claims and can lead to their expulsion from school. It is the reason why in his infamous defamation case, Johnny Depp had to fight tooth and nail to demonstrate that he was as abused, if not more, as Amber Heard was. (And even then, certain people still believe that he was entirely in the wrong.)
As this shift has occurred in society, women are still prone to committing violence. Pizzey herself has noted this. In her research A Comparative Study Of Battered Women And Violence-Prone Women, she discovered that of the women she involved as subjects, only 38% could be classified as genuinely “battered women,” those who faced violence from their partner without reciprocation. The other 62% were considered violence-prone and had a higher likelihood of coming from violent backgrounds themselves.
In all this, Erin Pizzey has shown that the notion that women are innocent dainties who could never commit such an atrocity as domestic abuse is false. It is not only false, but it is also harmful, as noted by how it permeates our society that it silences male victims. Because of her discovery, feminists tried to obscure her, showing that in their fight for women’s rights, they wish to never acknowledge that they are capable of evil as well.
Note: I credit sources such as Wikipedia and encyclopedia.com for offering me information on Pizzey’s backstory, as well as her own memoir, This Way to a Revolution.
