- 4 months ago
You may have seen reports that Erin Pizzey died a few days ago. This is not the case but currently Erin Pizzey is unwell and in end-of-life care. Her family request prayers as they go through this time.
Please join me in celebrating her life's work of fighting domestic violence against women AND men in my remastered 2014 interview with Ms. Pizzey, "Feminist Death Threats."
Stefan Molyneux interviews Erin Pizzey, founder of the first domestic violence shelter, as she discusses her challenging upbringing and the societal ignorance of domestic violence. They challenge victim narratives, critique radical feminism’s impact, and advocate for addressing family dynamics through therapy. Their conversation highlights the need for open dialogue and shared accountability to foster meaningful change in domestic violence discussions.
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https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2025
Please join me in celebrating her life's work of fighting domestic violence against women AND men in my remastered 2014 interview with Ms. Pizzey, "Feminist Death Threats."
Stefan Molyneux interviews Erin Pizzey, founder of the first domestic violence shelter, as she discusses her challenging upbringing and the societal ignorance of domestic violence. They challenge victim narratives, critique radical feminism’s impact, and advocate for addressing family dynamics through therapy. Their conversation highlights the need for open dialogue and shared accountability to foster meaningful change in domestic violence discussions.
SUBSCRIBE TO ME ON X! https://x.com/StefanMolyneux
Follow me on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@freedomain1
GET MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING', THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI, AND THE FULL AUDIOBOOK!
https://peacefulparenting.com/
Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!
Subscribers get 12 HOURS on the "Truth About the French Revolution," multiple interactive multi-lingual philosophy AIs trained on thousands of hours of my material - as well as AIs for Real-Time Relationships, Bitcoin, Peaceful Parenting, and Call-In Shows!
You also receive private livestreams, HUNDREDS of exclusive premium shows, early release podcasts, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!
See you soon!
https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2025
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Hi, everybody.
00:00It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
00:02I am here with Aaron Pizzi.
00:04We are going to be speaking together at two conferences,
00:07which I wanted to mention just before we start,
00:09the Toronto Domestic Violence Symposium, June 6th to 7th,
00:13which is at the University of Toronto, torontodv.com,
00:16International Conference on Men's Issues, June 26th to 28th, 2014,
00:21Detroit, Michigan, a voice for men.com.
00:25Thank you so much for taking the time today, Aaron.
00:27Oh, it's a real pleasure because most people don't realize my mother was a Canadian.
00:32She went to Toronto University.
00:34I lived in Toronto as a child.
00:36I went to Moulton College.
00:38Is that right?
00:39I guess I would be one of those people who didn't know that.
00:42So thank you for letting me know.
00:45Now, you were actually born in China.
00:49Is that correct?
00:51That's correct, yes.
00:51I was born in Tsingtao with my twin sister, and then we moved to Shanghai.
00:56And that would have been, I was born in 39, so about 1940.
01:01Now, the bombs were already falling then.
01:03The Japanese had taken over.
01:06But at that point, Germany hadn't, they hadn't joined up with Germany.
01:09So we were just living that old colonial life.
01:12My mother did only two things in her life, lose her temper and play bridge.
01:16So she was at her best there.
01:19And she wouldn't leave.
01:20Other mothers left with their children, but she wouldn't stop partying.
01:23So what happened is we were suddenly, when the whole thing changed, under house arrest.
01:28And all our friends and our little friends went into the concentration camps.
01:32And we were on the last boat out of China because my father was a diplomat.
01:37And we were exchanged for hostages.
01:40That's really how I ended up.
01:42We ended up in Beirut with my mother because she had a Canadian passport.
01:46And we'd briefly joined my father in Beirut.
01:49And then she came to Toronto.
01:51But it was a very unhappy time for me because she was very violent, and particularly to me.
01:57And I remember going to Moulton College to school.
02:00She'd whipped me with an ironing cord.
02:02And I was standing in front of the teacher.
02:04And she could see my legs were covered in welts with dried blood.
02:08And I said to her, this is what my mother did to me.
02:11Will you help me?
02:12And she said, well, no wonder you're such a dreadful child.
02:15Oh, my goodness.
02:16But that, you see, that was the problem in those days.
02:19Nobody ever admitted anything to do with domestic violence.
02:22Well, I think it was in the 50s when doctors began to first suspect that children who came in with concussions and contusions and lacerations and broken bones,
02:34that it might not actually be the endless series of fake accidents that the parents pretended were occurring.
02:39That's quite right.
02:39But the fact is that all stayed within the medical field.
02:43It never got out to the general public.
02:45So in a way, everybody knew, all the agencies knew, but nobody did anything about it until in 1971.
02:53I had opened a little community center for mothers and kids.
02:57The first woman came in and took off her jersey, and she was black and blue to the waist.
03:02And I took her home that night because I did know what she was talking about.
03:06And then, from then on, that was the first in the world of its kind.
03:10And from then on, women and children poured in.
03:14But I knew, and I was the only person, because there was no literature you could find about adult domestic violence.
03:21But, of course, I was very open-minded because both my parents were violent.
03:25Both were equally dysfunctional.
03:27So as far as I was concerned, it was a family issue.
03:30It was a human issue.
03:32And so almost immediately after I opened the home for the mothers and kids, I opened one for men in North London,
03:38which I couldn't keep going because the millionaires who'd give me money for children and my mothers wouldn't give me a penny for men.
03:47And, of course, that's true of 43 or so years later.
03:51It's still the same.
03:52There's virtually nothing in terms of refuge for men.
03:54And this is something I've talked about in this show quite a bit, which is it's remarkable how little feedback occurs in the shows that I do where I talk about women's role in the cycle of violence.
04:10And it shocks me, and it still does deeply shock me, that society is unwilling to even discuss women's role in the cycle of violence.
04:22Somehow it's like if you say, well, women are part of the cycle of violence, somehow people believe you're demonizing women and excusing men and so on, which I don't find to be the case at all.
04:33But it is remarkable the degree to which it's simply something which you can't talk about.
04:39And it seems to me that that's very much against the idea of equality for women, right?
04:42I mean, I was always sort of raised to say, well, treat women as equal to men.
04:45It's like, okay, well, then if they're committing crimes against children, which they are on a regular basis, not all, of course, then we should hold them accountable and work to find ways to deal with and remediate that issue.
04:57But, boy, it's like this whole white knight phalanx comes up around blackened women's hearts to defend them from any moral responsibility, which I find is treating women like children.
05:09Well, you have to go back to the beginning.
05:11And recently I wrote a book called This Way to the Revolution.
05:14It's the story of the setting up of the first shelter in the world and then what happened subsequently.
05:21Now, for the first few years, I built a therapeutic community because I realized that where a parent can't parent because they, too, have been brought up in violence, there needs to be a therapeutic intervention.
05:35When you have a child that's come in, as an example, his father was a murderer.
05:41He murdered another child when he was 13.
05:43He strangled the child.
05:45And everybody was terrified of Peter except for me.
05:48And I talked to Peter.
05:49He'd been let out of prison.
05:51He'd been in prison since he was little.
05:53But when you know that his mother was a prostitute and beat him, she then abandoned him and his father sodomized him regularly, which is why at 13 he was in the children's home.
06:04Who do we put in the dock?
06:06Where does it stop?
06:07That generational violence has probably gone on for four or five generations.
06:13I've always said what we need is family therapy.
06:16And, indeed, I changed the name from women's aid to family rescue.
06:21And this is what we haven't done.
06:22A few years later, the emerging feminist movement was called liberation, women's liberation in those days.
06:30Well, they had a meeting in Washington after they'd all come back from fighting in the south against segregation.
06:38And the women there decided to turn on the men in their lives, the left-wing men.
06:43They created, they said, we will no longer fight global capitalism.
06:49We will now rename this the patriarchy.
06:52This is how this was born.
06:53And with that, that meant that they had access to all women everywhere.
06:58Men were the enemy.
06:59And all of a sudden, those of us who were following desperately this idea of a new movement, which we understood was equality for women, was actually a sham.
07:10And that we were all paying our money into joining the women's liberation movement.
07:14Then we were told to have groups in our houses.
07:17And then we were told that we would have consciousness-raising sessions.
07:20Now, I know exactly where we're going because my father and mother were captured in Tinsin in 49 under a house arrest by the communists.
07:30So my father was an expert on how it worked.
07:32And it was interesting because, as far as I was concerned, when the first meeting in my house called the Gold Walk Road Group, this head honcho came down and told me that my isolation with children and the wish to do something, to join with other women, was not my problem.
07:49My problem was my husband.
07:50And he was my oppressor.
07:51And I remember laughing and saying, well, I'm living enormously comfortably.
07:56He's paying the mortgage, so I have the luxury to stay at home.
07:59She said, well, yes, but what you don't realize is that you have a mink-lined cage.
08:04And I looked at it and I thought, I know, I just thought, here are the most of the, I was there in the very early days.
08:11And I knew quite a lot of the people who were the leading lights in this.
08:15I would say the majority of them, that mantra that we were given, the personal is the political.
08:21If your father is a bastard and is violent, then all men are bastards and violence.
08:26That's really what went behind it.
08:28And they used to pick at me regularly when I spoke anywhere.
08:31And the bannisters would actually say, all men are rapists, all men are bastards.
08:38And I had to have a police escort for a book I wrote called Prone to Violence, which is a study of my therapeutic program.
08:45But in 1974, there was a small conference given by us to help other groups.
08:52But unbeknown to us, they had all been organizing, and a lot of them were American.
08:57And they voted themselves into a national organization that would be feminist.
09:02And that men would not be able to work in any of the refuges.
09:06And boys over the age of 9 to 12 would not be admitted.
09:10And that's the situation now, 43 years later.
09:13Well, then, you faced significant danger in this.
09:18But before we get to that, your book that came out in the 70s, which I think sparked a lot of the controversy,
09:25which was the degree to which, in conversations with women, you found that women were not always the sort of stereotypical Victorian victims of non-reciprocal male violence.
09:37I said from the beginning, of the first hundred women that came into the refuge,
09:41and we all did questionnaires together going back three generations,
09:45I said 62 of those hundred women were as violent, or in some cases more violent, than the men they left.
09:53And that most domestic violence is consensual.
09:56Both couples are violence prone.
09:58And I said the real victims, like me, we had no choice.
10:03At least my mother and father chose each other for whatever their bad needs.
10:06But children have no choice.
10:08You're born and marinated in violence.
10:10And a high percentage of you will continue the pattern.
10:14And if the power imbalance is considered to be the most egregious element to add to domestic abuse,
10:23then even if we accept that there's a power imbalance between the male and the female, like the husband and the wife,
10:28the power imbalance between parent and child is infinitely greater.
10:33And so, to me, at least, when either parent, but again, I focus on women because that's not part of the conversation as yet,
10:38but when parents abuse children, they are exercising in human relations the greatest power disparity that is possible
10:45because children have no economic independence, no legal independence, they have no particular place to go,
10:52whereas women who are abused have all of those things.
10:56And talking about power imbalance with regards to mothers and children in particular, again,
11:00is one of these absolutely taboo topics still within society, which, again, I sort of wandered into it thinking,
11:07well, this can't be that controversial, it's so obvious, but my naivety made me a bit more outspoken than I might have otherwise been.
11:15I've since learned better.
11:17Well, it's sad because it can't silence us.
11:19I mean, that's my big argument.
11:21And the argument also is, for me, the majority of people who are violent in interpersonal relationships
11:28mostly have some form of personality disorder.
11:32Somebody like my mother, who is a classic narcissistic exhibitionist, shouldn't have been left anywhere near children.
11:40She had a hair-trigger temper.
11:43And unless she was the center of attention, she was very dangerous, particularly to me, because I looked like my father.
11:50Now, one of the things, my argument along all these years has been, don't take away children from mothers.
11:57Take the mothers in and mother the mothers so they can mother the children, learn to mother the children.
12:03And that's what I did.
12:04I had long-term accommodation, shared accommodation, and women stayed with me for two or three years
12:11until it was time for them to be rehoused.
12:14By that time, they had learned all the things they needed to do to be able to enjoy their children
12:20and to have a future with their children.
12:21And, of course, nobody would listen.
12:24And now what happens, if a woman gets involved in a violent relationship,
12:28the social workers say to her, if you don't give this man up, we're taking the children into care.
12:32Or if she's what they call an unfit mother, they take the children into care.
12:37Care, in many cases, is even worse than the family.
12:40And also, the mothers replace the children.
12:42So you double and treble the problem as the years go on.
12:45It's a madness.
12:47The main point of all this is, at some point, we have to offer family rescue, family therapy
12:54as an antidote to violent childhoods.
12:57Not this idea that you simply take women into refuges, you tell them they're victims,
13:02they're not responsible for their choices, and you let them loose,
13:06and they just re-addict themselves to some other violent relationship.
13:11Well, and I think one of the things that has happened is that with private charity,
13:18the private donors tend to look for long-term results because they can put their money anywhere.
13:23When the public money begins to flow in, in a sense, there's less incentive to solve the problem
13:29in the long term because if the problem is solved, then the public money dries up.
13:33And so I think that there's, and again, it's not that the people doing it are in any way malevolent
13:37or conscious of this, but I think there is this issue where, with the public money flowing,
13:43the revolution, in a sense, can never end because then the money dries up
13:47and people have to find something else to do with their time or other ways to earn their money.
13:50Partly that, but of course, it's also a billion-dollar enterprise now.
13:55And the problem, and I've always said this, and it does bother me,
14:00is that for many of the shelters in America and across the Western world,
14:04these are the bunkers where you can actually brainwash fragile women
14:11into whatever you want to brainwash them into.
14:14And the reason why there has never been any research done on any of these refuges
14:19in any part of the Western world, there are no outcomes, there's nothing.
14:23It's just a fenced-off discussion where if anybody tries to have this honest discussion,
14:29as you've already experienced, they're screamed at and picketed and threatened.
14:34And my feeling is that it's conferences like this, which is going to be about the family
14:41and domestic violence.
14:42It's not one way or the other.
14:45But we do have to look at radical feminism because in my time, I'm 75 now,
14:50I was there in those great big meetings where we were told the family was a dangerous place
14:57for women and children, and our women's minister only in 1990 said in a policy paper,
15:03the new family unit will be women and children.
15:05And this is exactly what's happening.
15:09It is one of the great tragedies of the 20th century, the degree to which when leftism,
15:15and look, I'm not a rightist, so I'm another species completely,
15:19completely. But when leftism tends to infiltrate civil movements or social movements,
15:25they almost inevitably bring with them the demonization of some particular group,
15:29whether it's class or bourgeoisie or Jews or men or something.
15:34There is this demonization aspect and this sort of feral hatred that emerges,
15:39which I think really impedes any long-term productive problem solving.
15:43Well, I think that's absolutely right. And I suppose the genius of those early women
15:49was working out that if they condemned the other half of the human race,
15:54they would have access to unlimited sums of money, which is actually what's happened.
15:59And they can't be questioned. And the thing that interests me is majority of people in power
16:05across the Western world don't argue because they know it's women who vote.
16:10And this is behind an awful lot of why nobody speaks up. It's not as though I'm saying something
16:16that people in the street don't understand. They do. People in the street know it's family violence.
16:22They know that mothers and fathers can be violent. But the fact is that the people in power,
16:28it's more important to stay in power than it is to come out and tell the truth.
16:32So some of the dangers that you faced in the 70s, and I also know that you recently won a libel case
16:40against a British publisher, which is good for you. But talk a little bit, if you don't mind,
16:45about some of the threats that you faced in the 70s that did cause you, I think,
16:50quite wisely as well to flee the country.
16:52Well, it got to where I couldn't go anywhere without being picketed and screamed at and
16:58threatening phone calls because I was standing with this new movement and trying to bar them
17:05from recruiting vast sums of money and also misinforming the public. To me, it was fraud
17:11because I could see, and the work that I was doing proved beyond all shadow of doubt that it was a
17:17family issue and it's a generational issue. And suddenly up comes this new concept, which it is
17:23all men. The idea of the patriarchy being responsible for violence across the board by all
17:30men doesn't make any actual rational sense. But then you have to remember this isn't a rational
17:35movement. It's a movement to empower women to actually essentially become as grossly aggressive
17:44as they like against men in general. And from the very beginning, I was a totally lone voice.
17:51I think the final thing that broke it for me was after a lot of threats, the police said to me,
18:00if any parcel or letter parcel comes into your home and it doesn't have a proper stamp on it,
18:08I don't mean a postage stamp, a post office stamp, please call us. And actually it was my daughter
18:13who was living, who was there. And she called me at the refuge and said, look, a parcel's coming,
18:19it's a little parcel. And it hasn't got the right stamps on it. So I've put it out on the back of
18:23the garden. So I rang the police and then drove home to my house. By the time, shortly after I
18:31arrived, in came the bomb squad. And they're a terrifying sight because they're all dressed up
18:37and covered with huge gloves. And so I had two little grandchildren who was looking there,
18:44absolutely terrified. And we watched him go out to the back of the garden and retrieve the package.
18:51And he came back in and actually it wasn't a bomb at all. It was just something that hadn't
18:57been stamped, which you got through. But I just remember at that point in thinking, this is enough.
19:01I can't put my family through any more of this. And then I packed up, sold everything. And we went
19:08to Santa Fe, New Mexico.
19:11Right. So at least there was a little less rain. I guess that's the only upside from fleeing
19:16for social activism.
19:17Yeah. But you know, funny that that was because we were living on a big, because I had the
19:20grandchildren, we had to be near a school. So I was living on this estate of about probably a
19:24thousand houses with an acre each. And it didn't take long. And it's interesting,
19:30this is where I really began to work with men. Because so many men on that estate were actually
19:36victims of very violent women. And that didn't take long to make me very, very unpopular.
19:43I think the dog shooting incident, I don't think was feminist. I think it was because I was,
19:50along with all the other things that people were coming to me, it was a lot to do with pedophiles
19:56and pedophile rings in Santa Fe. Because at that point, there were only two DAs and Santa Fe was a
20:01real wild west town. And that's where I think that came in.
20:06And for those who don't know, and again, it's terrifying stuff. What was the incident with the
20:11dog?
20:13Well, what happened is it was Christmas Eve. And Nunu, who was the sort of, he was slightly
20:17brain damaged. He was a big, lovely, smiley dog. And suddenly, he came, he must have been shot
20:23on my property. Because he came running in. And I could, and he was, his claw, his paw was curled
20:30under. And he was just shaking and crying. And then I found him and held him and realized that
20:36he had been shot in the paw. And we took him to the vet. And that's where I began to feel the time
20:44was running out. And we needed to move somewhere safer. This, one of the problems with all this
20:50is standing up and being a lone voice and fighting huge vested interests. It's a very dangerous
20:59business. And you've got to know what you're doing. I mean, even as recently as it probably
21:03been 1998, I was with Senator Ann Cools. And we were in Vancouver to speak. And police were all over
21:14the place when we arrived there. Because we'd been threatened with a bomb by a local radical
21:19lesbian group. So, but it's been much, much less violent now than it used to be. Possibly because
21:28the money that there was required to build this huge empire is rolling in. And they have no interest
21:34in actually asking anybody to ask any questions.
21:40Right. Well, look, I wanted to say, it's not on behalf of anyone, but just, you know, human being
21:47to human being. I'm incredibly sorry for the amount of aggression. Obviously, as a child that you
21:52experienced, it's absolutely horrifying. But it is very difficult when you see the cure for some of the
22:03greatest human evils. And I've made the case, and others have made the case, that if we can deal
22:08with violence against children, the number of human evils that will fall away are incalculable. And it
22:14will be a life and planet-saving movement. And we cannot deal with aggression against children
22:22without dealing with women's capacity for violence. To some degree, we've dealt with males' capacity for
22:27violence. And this is well understood within society. I think it's a bit exaggerated at times.
22:31But it's part of the public discourse, even though it's obviously distorted at times.
22:37And I mean, your heroism is astonishing. Your commitment to a more peaceful world,
22:43your commitment to establishing moral responsibility for all adults, and your compassion, of course,
22:49for those who've even initiated violence against children and others is incredible. I just really
22:54wanted to give you my sympathy and my intense admiration for strength. I know this is an
23:01uncomfortable thing, because you're British and I'm British and, or at least grew up in England,
23:05so compliments are like, oh, yes, well, yo, I don't know.
23:07No, I don't feel it. No, I actually don't feel it. I feel if, and this is what happened when the
23:14children were older in the refuge and could understand, and we'd have sessions with the
23:18children and the mother, if anybody could have sat me down and said, did you know that your mother was
23:24viciously beaten by her stepmother? No, I didn't, not till it was much too late.
23:30No, I didn't, because families don't talk about family violence. It's all very secret.
23:35But, I mean, once I understood, and I suppose part of what I did in working specifically with
23:42violent women and finding refuges that would take non-violent women was because I knew the kind of
23:51work that needed to be done with the women who were already violent, had been prostituted, had been
23:56sexually abused. I knew what needed to be done, and those were the women that were closest to my heart,
24:02because, in a way, I endlessly rehabilitate my mother.
24:08Do you think that there's anything in particular, and, you know, I always ask these questions,
24:14and I sound like I'm some sort of determinist, which I'm not, but it always fascinates me,
24:20and I think it's a huge, huge question. Do you think there's anything in particular that helped you to
24:27overcome this repetition of violence that helped you to be able to handle the insights about
24:34female violence that you had, which so many other people simply don't seem to have the capacity to
24:39do? Do you think there's some extra third eye that can observe the world in yourself? Do you think
24:44there's additional intelligence? I think it's very simple. I think when I was four and a half,
24:49I had a vision, and it was a strange experience, but about that time, I realized my mother couldn't
24:56stand me. She really couldn't bear me anywhere near her, but this vision came with such a comfort.
25:02I knew I was loved beyond all human reason, and then when I was nine, and we went to a holiday home
25:09because my parents were then in China, Miss Williams came into my life, and this is where I believe so
25:16totally in mentors. I took one look at this huge woman, she lost about 25 stone, and she was six
25:23foot seven. She'd driven ambulances in the war. She was a golf champion. She was the local magistrate,
25:30and she was the most powerful person with a huge compassion and ability to love all 40 of us,
25:38and she was my mentor. In my refuge, immediately, the first bit of money I had,
25:43I hired a man to come and work with us, and thereafter, good, gentle men as volunteers and
25:50staff came and worked with us for years and years and years, and I love it because the memories of the
25:57children are very largely of the men who played with them, who were part of the play staff,
26:02who nurtured them, and that's why we desperately need men in shelters, but they're not allowed
26:08because they're the enemy, which is to me tragic. Well, and of course, in any other sphere, if a
26:15woman was married to a black man who beat her, and then there was a group who said, well, now we're not
26:21going to allow any black men near any women, that would be considered horribly racist and would be
26:26condemned from every conceivable sphere, but sexism against men is like physics. You don't even really
26:34question if it just is. Well, I find it amazing because in 1982, when Prone to Violence was published,
26:40and I had to have a police escort, outside the Savoy, where I was at a luncheon, the pickets all
26:48arrived, many, many women with these big banners saying all men are rapists and bastards, and I went
26:54down to the police, and I just said to them, exactly what you said, if that was Jews or black men,
27:00you'd arrest them all, but because it's all men. And he just looked at me, and he said,
27:06and he laughed, and he said, we're frightened of them. No, you're not. You just think it's funny.
27:11And men, I'm afraid, it's only just recently that men across the border waking up. For a long time,
27:18they're intimidated.
27:21Well, and what are your views, I guess, after a lifetime of activism? I know this is tough to
27:27compress into a relatively short conversation, but where do you think that the movement to heal
27:35families, the movement to bring more moral responsibility to women, the movement to
27:41really work with the facts of domestic violence, how do you think that's going, or where do you
27:47think it is since when you began?
27:49It's pretty much nowhere. There are individuals in the field, but my hope is that I come back to
27:58Canada, which is half of who I am, and I'm going to this conference on the 6th and the 7th of June,
28:08and I don't know the details yet exactly, but I will be there, and I hope this is the beginning,
28:13because then again, as you said, we will both be at the conference in Detroit, and this has to be
28:20the beginning of a dialogue. And I've said this so many times, that men and women working together
28:26can protect the next generation of children. If we can protect the next generation of children,
28:32then we can empty prisons, and we can empty mental hospitals, because everybody knows
28:37that it's in prison where you see those children when they've grown up. Huge percentage are children
28:44from exactly my sort of background. And it says, Williams hadn't, I was an incredibly dangerous
28:50child. That's why I wrote Infernal Child. It's a story of what it's like to be completely out of
28:58control. They couldn't school me. They couldn't do anything with me. I was just dangerous till I met
29:03Miss Williams. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, and it doesn't actually take an enormous amount of mentoring
29:10to help a child to turn around. It's not like you have to invest 10 years of your life.
29:15No. For certain children, at least, if you have the example, in other words, if you have an example of
29:20a more peaceful approach to human relations, some children will really just grab at that, like a
29:26drowning man at a barrel, and will say, wow, I had no idea even that this way of being was possible,
29:32and they'll just drive that way forward. It's not true for all children, but it certainly sounds
29:37like it was the case for you. Yeah. And I think that I used to say to the mothers,
29:42you only have one strategy for survival, and that's the boot and the fist, because that is
29:47how you were programmed. But I'm going to teach you other strategies for survival.
29:53And that's what we did, and with the children. And it's lovely now, because many of the children
29:58contact me on Facebook, and I know so many of them. And it's very obvious, the ones that came
30:03in younger have the best chance. When they were much older, it was much harder. And the other thing
30:09I say, which is the saddest thing to say, the girls were so much more resilient than the boys.
30:15I would expect when proper research is done into all these families, you will find that boys,
30:21particularly when their mothers are violent, are far more damaged. That's why you see so many more
30:27men in prisons than you do women.
30:31I think that the fragility of boys is one of the great unspoken realities of society. Because,
30:39of course, girls are these tender flowers that need to be protected and nurtured,
30:42but boys are considered to be sort of wild animals that will domesticate themselves. And this doesn't,
30:47in my experience, at least, is not the case at all. Boys are very fragile.
30:51I think you find, I agree with that. And I also think that for a boy, it's interesting how the
31:00girls would come into the refuge, and yes, they were damaged, and yes, they had strategies that
31:06were going to do them no good long term, including finding the violent repercussions in the family
31:12drama exciting, and finding it very hard to deal with normal everyday life. But I think for the boys,
31:21where the mothers rejected them, and of course, as you know, boys under one of them was likely to
31:25be murdered, not girls, and the figures go on up. And that's why, I suppose, I didn't only have
31:34children in the refuge. I brought up a lot of children in my own home with my children. And
31:40I just could feel the fragility of them. And in a sense, I suppose, I grew up with more boys than
31:50girls, you see, because the holiday home, most of the girls were abroad with the parents, and they
31:55sent their sons to boarding schools. So I grew up with a lot of boys. I had a deep understanding
32:00of what male is, which has been airbrushed out now. Because essentially, the whole feminist ideology
32:08is that you feminize men, because once you've turned them into women, they will no longer be
32:12these ravening brutes. Actually, that's not true at all. All you do is complete, create completely
32:19confused males, which is what we have, and an inability to make relationships.
32:25Well, and if someone were to suggest that you take a homosexual man and consciousness raise him
32:32into being straight, this would rightly be considered homophobic and wrong. But you can
32:37take a man and try and turn him into like men are considered or boys are considered broken girls.
32:41And therefore, you just need to fix them by feminizing them. But that, of course, is because
32:45the gold standard of human interaction for a lot of people is girls, because female violence is
32:51obscured from society. And therefore, if women and girls are considered nonviolent, then if you make
32:56men, blah, blah, blah, right? I mean, it's madness. And it's absolutely anti-empirical. And one of the
33:02things I think is tragic, but in particular about some of the more extreme feminists, when they're
33:06talking about men as a whole, anybody with any knowledge of human psychology knows that they're
33:10really talking about their own fathers or the males in their lives, which they're then extrapolating to
33:17men as a whole. Because if you have a loving relationship with a man, you simply can't hold
33:21a sign saying that men are bastards and rapists and so on.
33:25No. And in fact, those aren't the women that are the radical feminists. The radical feminists
33:30are largely very deeply damaged women. I remember going to Ms. Magazine when the first time I'd come
33:36across to the Eastern Seaboard. And I was helping to set up refuges before I realized how political
33:44it was there. And I just remember looking at all these women. And there was this great,
33:48you know, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, which was Gloria Steinem's logo,
33:55apparently. And thinking there's something seriously wrong with all you women.
34:00And there was an atmosphere of, I was wearing makeup. That was a crime in those days.
34:07And I always remember the early days when we were told that anything, even to wear makeup or to use
34:15deodorant, that was anti-feminism. And I used to say, do you mean to tell me that you think it's
34:22political to smell? That's when you learn they have no sense of humor.
34:26Right. Well, I'm certainly looking forward to meeting you face to face. And I'm certainly
34:34looking forward to hearing you talk at the conference. I really do want to thank you for
34:38the conversation this morning. I wish we could talk longer, but...
34:42Well, we will.
34:43Yeah, we will. And we will, of course, for the video and for the audio, we'll include links to
34:49websites and books. And you're an elegant and witty and compassionate writer. And, you know,
34:55just from a, you know, technical skill standpoint, even aside from the content, it's a real delight
34:59to read your work. So strongly recommend that you go out and read Ms. Pizzi's books. And thank you
35:05again for your time today.
35:08It's a pleasure, Stefan.
35:09All right. Take care.
35:10Bye-bye.
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