By : As AVFM News announced,
I led a small non-feminist team attending the event called “Debate:
Gender Equality and Women’s Rights” that took place at a hotel in Cluj
Napoca in the context of the European elections that are due to take
place on May 25th.
Let’s start with the positive things.
Contrary to what non-feminists would
have expected, the presence of cameras (there were multiple cameras
rolling) and AVFM Logo on my press identification did not seem to bother
anyone.
Even though some of the points made
during the debate were at the very least questionable and misandric and
some of them downright horrific, the individuals assumed their positions
and, for the most part, they welcomed (or at the very least allowed)
criticism and feedback.
With the notable exception of a
self-described “sociologist and leftist activist,” who called me a
“troll,” individuals both from the panel and from the public listened to
what I had to say and some of them even agreed and were surprised to
find out that there still are voices who dare to question the
predominant gender narrative aggressively promoted by the EU without
appealing to religion or tradition. This was highly impressive for me
given that a while ago in another country I was booed for arguing in
favor of a non-EU-friendly opinion even though we were at a debate
competition (so it didn’t even necessarily mean that the respective
opinion was my own).
Most of the individuals who disagreed
with me were more than civil and some of them even asked me for more
information about the topic and ways to contact me in the future.
Whether they will contact me in the future or will change their minds on
certain topics is of little importance at this point. What’s more
important now is that I was able to have a civilized disagreement in a
mutually respectful discussion on issues that are usually treated with
way too much emotion. That’s something to cheer given the hostility
with which the non-feminist message is usually met with.
Barring the moment when she refused
to publicly agree that the premise is wrong, even though she agreed
with the facts I presented, the moderator, Elena-Alis Costescu from the
Rațiu Center for Democracy, behaved exactly like a moderator of a debate
should behave – i.e. not take sides. She upheld Ion Rațiu’s principle
of fighting tooth and nail for one’s right to disagree so at least in
that respect the organizers were inspired to pick her as the moderator
of the event.
Even though there weren’t too many
people attending, virtually all positions were present, from the boring
and snorting speech of the establishment libertarian, from
traditionalist to statist utopians and from non-feminism to downright
communism. The communism part was quite disturbing to me. It felt like
1989 never happened. There were even some shocking points that even the
feminists in the chamber considered strange. So, if the organizers’
intent was to have every opinion present, they definitely succeeded in
that regard.
The not-so-positive things
First of all, the organizers failed to mention that they are a far-left organization even after they distributed their “Citizens Manifesto”
to the participants. They insisted that they are an “apolitical”
organization and that their manifesto was created following
“consultations” with the citizens of Europe.
The fact that they’re on the far-left
was not even by far my biggest problem with them. The fact that they
insisted they were not was disturbing. Dishonesty is something that I
find far more loathsome than disagreement over politics. You can’t claim
you’re “apolitical” when your manifesto virtually coincides with the
agenda of the Nordic Green Left and your website openly promotes class
struggle, anti-capitalism and everything that one would expect to find
in a communist publication. Their manifesto could be a separate story in
itself for another time in another place.
Second of all, the organizers’ premise
of the event was mostly misleading and in some cases downright wrong.
You can’t have a fruitful debate about gender equality when you’re only
willing to talk about women and you can’t even have a fruitful debate
about women’s rights when you’re starting with misleading premises.
Thirdly, the lack of microphones. Except
for myself and the female attorney, all the other people who spoke at
the event have done so in such a low voice that it’s a tough job for the
people processing the videos in order to make them audible for the
larger public. And it’s not that the equipment we used was broken or
underperforming. Even there, as I was listening to the talks, it was
sometimes difficult to hear what some people were saying simply because
they were speaking with very very low voices. A few microphones and an
amplifier would have helped a lot both the press and the participants.
Some of the participants were saying at the cocktail party after the
event that they couldn’t hear some of the points being made and so they
renounced the idea of signing up to speak and ask questions.
The “context” of the event and the points made in the debate
There were quite a lot of points made
during the debate but most of them were made using misleading data at
best and downright wrong data worst.
On the facebook page of the event
there were two major facts – or, better said, a fact and a “fact” –
named as the “context” in which the debate is taking place. The first
one goes like this:
Romania occupies the 65th spot in the international table from the “State of the World’s Mothers report 2014” published by Save the Children, which makes this country the last in the EU at a considerable distance from Hungary (55th in the table) and Bulgaria (44th).
Now, I provided the source for you so
you can read it yourselves and analyze it. The organizers didn’t bother
to direct the potential participants to the source of the claims.
The problem with that report is that it’s not really reliable. The same report claims that British mums have as tough a job as Belarusian mums and that American women face the same risk of maternal death as those in Romania and Iran.
Is anyone sane really believing that
British mums who have a life expectancy of 80 years have as tough a job
as their counterparts in Belarus, a communist dictatorship with Europe’s
lowest life expectancies? You don’t have to be sociologist to
understand that those numbers aren’t giving the whole story.
As for the other comparison
(US-Iran-Romania), the lifetime risk of maternal death is defined as the
probability of a 15 year old girl to die of a pregnancy-related issue, under the assumption
that the current levels of fertility and mortality will not change in
the future. And herein lays the problem. This indicator was last time
measured in Romania in 2010[1] and was on a descending trend compared to
2008. And since the fertility and mortality levels have changed
drastically in the last 4 years, the results of this Save the Children
report are simply irrelevant to the current climate. And these kinds of
misleading numbers are being used throughout the report – thus rendering
it unreliable for the current situation.
One should also note that the report is
taking into consideration the child mortality rate (defined as the death
of under 5-year-old children per 1,000 births) – which in theory is a
good thing to consider. In practice however, countries like Poland or
Romania record as actual people the children who are born and die in the
incubator days or even hours later. In countries like Belgium, for
instance, these kinds of births aren’t recorded as “children born alive”
– so from a statistical point of view, Belgium is advantaged even
though in practice it may very well have the same child mortality rate
that Poland and Romania have.
Further on the facebook page of the event it reads:
Also, in Romania, approximately 11,000 cases of domestic violence against women are officially reported each ear
At first I was thinking that in a
population of almost 20 million people, the number could be plausible.
But I made the fatal mistake of actually looking for the source of the
claim. And I found this[2]:
In the year 2010, 11,232 cases of family violence were reported in which the physical and emotional abuse were the most common (in over 1,200 situations). Over 3,300 allegations were made using the national hotline, and from those, 2,419 were referring to negligence situations and 543 related to physical abuse, according to the data provided by the Ministry of Labor, Family and Social Security
Ooops! It seems like we have a classical case of taking all the victims of all forms of domestic violence and call them all… women.
When I pointed this out to the panel,
the moderator tried to equivocate, claiming that the number is anyway
unreliable since most DV goes unreported (a claim which is anyway
improvable and unfalsifiable). I insisted that family violence and domestic violence exclusively against women
are, plain and simple, two different things and that the whole premise
of the “context” is simply a lie. The moderator refused to admit the
mistake and instead focusing on the fact that they didn’t say
“exclusively” as if that made things better.
I
kept insisting and brought up the results of Erin Pizzey’s over 40
years of experience in the field and the hundreds of scholarly
investigations that exist on the topic[3] which make it more than clear
that domestic violence is not and never has been a gender issue. To my
surprise, the panel acknowledged that male victims of domestic violence
exist, and in a higher proportion than many would think, but they
refused to even consider that domestic violence is closer to 50-50
divided by sex in Romania, claiming that my data might be true for other
countries – as if Romania is somehow located on Pluto where disturbed
individuals exist in radically different proportions than in Europe.
To nobody’s surprise, the panel dodged
my question of whether it’s fair or honest to focus solely on women and
considered my analogy with the firefighter throwing water only on the
front and left wall of a burning building to be “exaggerated”. But if we
can’t talk about this on a debate on “gender equality,” then where
should we?
Things went from bad to worse when the
topic of gender pay gap arose. First, the two candidates for the
European Parliament were happy to learn that the gender pay gap in
Romania is “only” 9% favoring men and then Adela Mîrza from the New
Republic went on to say that if it were for her, she would have a law or
a structure in which women are paid significantly better than men
solely because they’re women and they have another job at home as well.
Time-use surveys across Europe[4] show
that both men and women do around eight hours of paid and unpaid work a
day – so her claim of women’s “second job” at home is baloney at best
and outright crap at worst. Even some of the feminist-leaning people in
the chamber asked her if she means it and acknowledged that such thing
is blatantly discriminatory towards men. And she made it perfectly clear
that she wasn’t joking. Gabriela Rădoiu Leș from the Civic Force Party
however distanced herself from such positions and even said that the
State should not have the power to tell private companies how they
should pay their employees.
Before rushing in to praise Gabriela
Rădoiu Leș, one should also know that she expressed her “hope” that
Romania would ratify the Istanbul Convention by the end of 2015. The
same Istanbul Convention that institutes classes of “compulsory
feminism” being taught to 10 year old children (Article 12.4) or makes
feminist organizations to be both prosecutors and judges in allegations
of violence made by females against males – and the State would just
rubber stamp their “discoveries.”
But perhaps the most bizarre points that
were made in the whole event belonged to Adela Mîrza (the New Republic
Party) and a female attorney from the audience, whose name is inaudible
on the recording.
Adela Mîrza said that she would want the
media to be censored in order to counteract the objectification and
denigration of women in the media. When I asked her who should have this
power she unequivocally said that the State should do it. When I
reminded her that the free market of ideas has changed a lot of things
in the Romanian media in the last 10 years, she dismissed the idea that
the free market of ideas is enough. And then a few minutes later she
referred to herself as ”a libertarian with a moral anchor.” But where
exactly is the morality when you want the State to censor TV shows that
you don’t like?
The female attorney proposed that the
State should fund courses aimed at women to teach them how to manipulate
men. And no, she wasn’t joking. And no, none of the candidates
disagreed vehemently – although they did question whether it is
appropriate for the State to fund such an endeavor.
In all fairness, the panel agreed with
me that, at the very least, the gender pay gap numbers don’t tell the
whole story and that such differences in remuneration are natural due to
the inherent differences between men’s and women’s interests in career
and also due to the inherent biological differences which simply make
women highly unlikely to do certain jobs at a comparative level with
men. Also, both of the candidates admitted that they have never been
discriminated against on wages and that they’re also unsure whether the
gender pay gap numbers are really that relevant. I don’t know, however,
how is this view compatible in Mîrza’s mind with her willing to create a
structure that pays women more because they’re women. But I digress.There
were some other non-feminist points that got across to the panel – such
as the fact that it’s absolutely normal and logical for a policewoman
to be prevented from advancing while she’s on maternal leave or the fact
that some managers who decide to stop employing women are not
necessarily misogynystic but are simply trying to prevent their business
from going bankrupt or work understaffed due to the sometimes lengthy
parental leave policies that some European countries have in place.
The latter point was made by the same
female attorney who proposed State-funding for female-oriented
manipulation courses. And she gave an example from a German hospital
where 6 or 7 women in the already thin staff got pregnant and went home
in just one year and, consequently, the (female) manager decided to stop
employing women for a while in order to avoid paying more people to
stay at home than people actually working in the hospital. I don’t know
whether she intended or not, but she basically explained eloquently how
the feminist-inspired and State-enforced policies for women turn out to
be more misogynistic than the alleged misogyny that the business
managers supposedly have.
Conclusions
There were more things that were said
during the event but you’ll get to see them once the English subtitles
for the video we have of the event are done.
All in all, the event went better than I
would have expected. The participants were friendly and polite with me
and my team after the event and the moderator specifically looked for me
to gather feedback being particularly interested in knowing what I
thought was wrong in her performance as a moderator so she could improve
her debate-moderator skills for future events. This surprised me in a
pleasant way although, in all fairness, this is what a moderator should
do because that’s a moderator for. But after dealing with hostile
moderators so many times, seeing a glimpse of professionalism is
refreshing.
One of the organizers (after asking to
see my press identification) promised they’ll look to check the
reporting of the event on avoiceformen.com. I extended an invitation to
do an interview with a member of the organizing team but so far have
gotten no response (to be fair, there was a week-end in the middle so
that could explain their lack of response).
Although I’ve been harsh with their way
of framing the debate and the omission of their politics, I congratulate
them for the outcome of the event. The fact that nobody was shouted
down, recording was allowed freely and their inspiration in picking the
moderator are things for which I honestly congratulate European
Alternatives Cluj Napoca.
If every debate about gender equality in
Europe would be like the one in Cluj Napoca, the entire climate would
be far less misandric and being a non-feminist would have long become
the norm.
Check out the European Alternatives NGO
(particularly the Citizens Pact project) and see if they’re coming into
your area. They are organizing events like this one across the European
Union until May 25th and if one takes place close to you, by
all means, attend to it and contribute. No-one can guarantee that things
will go like in Cluj Napoca, but it’s an indisputable opportunity to
get non-feminist points across directly to future MEPs.
In the upcoming elections, don’t forget to avoid voting for proven feminist MEPs. Check the list of feminist MEPs for that purpose.
References:
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