Oy-ya-yoi, enough with old white men and their ridiculous angry grandpa arguments. Member of European Parliament (MEP) Janusz Korwin-Mikke’s bow tie and mustache are two giant red flags that should have kept him out of office, but here he is wasting everyone’s time with his blatant misogyny.
The BBC reports that the MEP represents Silesia at the European Parliament. He is currently being investigated for breaking Rule 11 of the body’s Rules of Procedure that states representatives “shall not resort to defamatory, racist or xenophobic language or behavior in parliamentary debates” following a particularly offensive attack on women.
According to the Independent, Korwin-Mikke took the floor on Wednesday to speak on the gender wage gap, saying, “Of course women must earn less than men because they are weaker, they are smaller, they are less intelligent, they must earn less, that’s all.” Express.co.uk says that the MEP backed up his claims with a series of seemingly unrelated statistics, like that there are no women in the “in the first hundred of chess players.”
While described as “right wing,” Korwin-Mikke actually belongs to an independent party—one he made up. He’s been censured by the European Parliament before, once for giving a Nazi salute and once for comparing European immigrants to “excrement.” Can you believe this guy attacked women too?!
Of course you can, and this isn’t the first time. In 2014, he also told the Observer that women are less intelligent than men, and that lady opinions are generally formed by their fellas...in a very unexpected way. “Semen probably is not wasted, because nature usually makes use of the material it has, and there is a hypothesis that the attitudes of men are passed to women by way of the semen which penetrates the tissue,” he said.
This would all be funnier if the women of the European parliament didn’t have to deal with him. Spanish socialist MEP Iratxe Garcia Perez reportedly stood up to say, “According to what you’re saying and your theory I wouldn’t have the right to be here as a member of parliament. I know you’re very upset and very concerned about the fact we women can represent citizens on an equal footing with you. I think I need to defend European women against men like you.”