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Sept. 9, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
57:06
Christina Hoff Sommers | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 18
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Time Text
I just can't view American women as subordinate.
I think it's a complicated mix for men and women of benefits and burdens.
I don't think women are oppressed as women.
Well, here we are on this week's Sunday special with Christina Hoff Summers.
You know her from the FemSplainers, and also she is the Factual Feminist.
She's over at American Enterprise Institute.
We're going to get into all matters various and sundry.
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Well, Christina Hoff Summers, thanks so much for stopping by, really appreciate it.
Oh, I'm so happy to be here.
It infuses me with happiness, because you're a happy person.
So let's talk a little bit about your background.
So for folks who don't know, Christina Hoff Summer, she's the feminist that feminists love to hate, because you actually say factual things about males and females, and sex differences, and the hot topics today.
We'll get to all those hot topics, but first let's talk about how you got where you are politically, because you weren't always conservative.
In fact, in some areas you still don't consider yourself a conservative.
So how did you go from being kind of just an academic professor to being One of the most well-known foes of the modern feminist movement.
Well, first of all, I was brought up in L.A., not far from here.
I went to university high school in Brentwood.
And I was very left-wing, especially in high school.
I read the Communist Manifesto, and it all made sense.
It seemed so right, of course, to each according to his need, from each according to his ability.
It was just kindness.
And so I was quite carried away with that for a while.
And then, I don't know, in college, I remained not a Marxist, but just my default mode was always liberal.
My parents, very, very liberal, bordering on Communist, but then in 1988 I was a professor, a college professor, and I was invited to go on semester at sea.
It's a ship that goes around the world and it's a university at sea and so somehow I got on this thing and I was teaching and I guess I was I'd been teaching maybe for 10 years or something, but I had never sat in my fellow professors courses before and so this ship was about 500 Undergrads, mostly conservatives as far as I could tell from USC, SMU, pretty wealthy.
You know, mom and dad could afford to send junior on a trip around the world.
And the professors were socialist to Marxist.
And so I started to bicker with them in this course we had called Core.
And then suddenly at the end of the trip this older professor who was very left wing warned me, you better be careful.
You're going to end up being just like Jean Kirkpatrick.
And I didn't know who she was.
I looked her up and thought, I think I like her.
Maybe I am her.
And she was at AEI, and I ended up at AEI.
But anyway, it was kind of accidental.
I think if I hadn't got on that ship, I might not have known what was going on in other people's courses.
Okay, so what happened to academia?
So you've been in academia for a long time.
Have you seen active changes in the way that academia has operated?
Since the 80s or do you think that it's been pretty consistent, it's just more well known because of social media now in terms of the sort of radical leftist dominance even in some of the hard sciences in terms of shutting down debate and investigation into knowledge?
It's gotten worse and worse and here's why.
It used to be that universities always, you know, tend to be liberal.
However, there are a lot of radicals that came out of the late 60s, 70s, for various reasons, went into the universities.
It was the one institution that you could take your radical politics and find a home there.
And they did.
They were more radical than the liberal professors who hired them.
The liberal professors who hired them might have believed in intellectual diversity, so maybe they would have allowed some conservatives and moderates and then some radicals.
The radicals didn't think the same way.
So as the older scholars retired and the young radicals gained a foothold in many departments, I mean certainly women's studies, they were always there.
and the various ethnic studies, but even in political science departments, history departments, certainly English departments, they would start hiring their own and just not invite anyone else to come to the campus.
So you had certain departments become like-minded people, like-minded thinkers, and they did not present the other side respectfully, and they didn't want to have candidates come in.
If you came in and appeared to be conservative or even moderate, you wouldn't get hired.
So the professors have become more radical.
And I also think if you look at the schools of ed, people don't think about schools of ed, what's the curriculum there.
It's very left wing.
And so we have a lot of teachers who are trained in liberal or left orthodoxy going into our junior high schools and high schools.
So you have had a transformation of the educational system.
So you call yourself a factual feminist.
How do you define feminism?
Because obviously a lot of feminists would accuse you of not being a feminist because you don't agree with sort of prevailing left-wing trends inside feminism.
So what do you think true feminism is?
And then how is it being abused?
How has the term been expanded and abused by some of the folks on the left?
Well I think a true feminist is an equity feminist and that's just someone who wants for women what she wants for everyone.
I mean dignity, equality, opportunity, liberty and equity feminism has been a great American success story.
I mean if you look at the progress women have made in Just open, you know, doors have opened.
And women, wherever women wanted to go, they've gone.
There are now more women than men in college.
And in certain disciplines, in psychology, veterinary medicine, these used to be overwhelmingly male.
And now women are taking over in many of the social sciences.
Where women want to go, they went.
They've achieved parity with men or approaching parity in law school and medical school.
So there's been enormous change.
To which, and I credit equity feminism, just equality feminism, where you just don't have arbitrary barriers against women.
But there's another school of feminism entirely that is not part of this kind of classical liberal tradition of greater opportunities for people.
This is what I've called gender feminism because they believe in what they call the sex gender system.
And that women are not merely held back by old-fashioned laws or customs.
It's not enough to change the society.
The entire system must be taken down.
And so it's a much more radical approach.
And they think of American women as an oppressed class of people.
And so after I was on that ship and there were some radical feminists there too, I wrote a piece about what I experienced on that ship called Professor at Sea and I sent it to The Atlantic.
And I'd written about the feminists on ship who were very colorful and extreme and we were seeing the whole world.
And we'd come into ports, and the students could go and see some of the glories of civilization, the Alhambra, you know, they could go to Seville, and they would take them to wedding stores to see how the wedding industry oppressed Spanish women and things like that.
So I just wrote about this, and Michael Curtis, this editor at The Atlantic, said, I can't really use the piece that you wrote, but the way you talked about the feminists is so different, so interesting, and you're doing it as a feminist.
And he said, I'd like you to write about that.
And that later became my book, Who Stole Feminism?
So in the book, Who Stole Feminism?
I pointed out that there are these two traditions and that one of them is everyone should be every contemporary American should be an equity feminist and we have pretty good data which shows they are.
Most people believe in equal pay for equal work and they want their daughters and sons to have the same opportunities.
So equity feminism, I believe that we owe most of women's progress to that classical liberal tradition that came originally from the European Enlightenment.
Gender feminism does not come out of the European Enlightenment as such.
It's more of a Marxist tradition.
Conflict theory, class struggle, but in this case gender struggle, or now intersectional struggles.
So I just can't view American women as subordinate.
I think it's a complicated mix for men and women of benefits and burdens.
I don't think women are oppressed as women.
Why do you think gender feminism has gained so much credence and credibility?
American women are living the best lives of the women who have ever lived in the history of the world by a pretty large margin.
Why is it that this sort of toxic feminism, to hijack a term, why is it that that has gained so much ground in the public discourse?
Well, as I said, it gained a foothold in the academy, and particularly in women's studies.
So it's sort of a one-party system.
And if you are a dissident feminist, and you could be a feminist, you could be a scholar, you can be a Laura Kipnis or a Katie Roife, Christina Somers, Camille Polly, but all of us have been critical of aspects of radical feminism, then you become persona non grata.
You become part of the problem, part of the systemic oppression of women.
You've become an agent of the patriarchy.
And they just call you names.
So you don't get hired.
Your materials aren't taught.
So students are, we have now, you know, going back 20 years, graduates in the more elite school, the more likely that in their gender studies, you know, they're very adamantly teaching these, these rather extreme theories about women's oppression.
And they use propaganda, phony statistics.
And so we have lots of young people coming out, becoming bloggers, becoming, you know, activists who've never heard the other side.
They've read it in their textbooks, they've heard it, and that whole worldview was reinforced.
Now, it's truth, they looked at the real world, it doesn't seem to match, but it's not majority.
Majority of students don't become angry feminists, but enough do, and now they're moving into society.
What do you think of the idea that this is part and parcel of the hunger for a sense of victimology that seems to be kind of crossing all political boundaries.
It now applies to a lot of people on all sides of the political alley of folks who think that they are victims of foreign trade, people stealing their jobs.
You have people who think that they're victims of an overarching racist American system.
And now you have women who, again, are living in an extraordinarily privileged time by any dimension.
By any measure.
I mean, it was opportunity-rich women in history.
Right.
But they've had to come up with some framework in which they are victims.
How much of this do you think is actually prosperity eating itself?
It's just a prosperous group of people who have decided that they have to maintain some sense of victimhood in order to give them a sense of purpose in the world.
It could be that it's, you know, I don't want to speculate too much about their psychology because I'm just not sure.
And I even worry about that.
Sometimes I worry, like, why aren't there more dissident scholars like me?
And it fills me with doubt.
I think maybe there's something wrong with me.
Maybe I am an agent of the patriarchy and I'm not seeing it.
And so then I try to go back and read it and think, OK, I've missed something.
And maybe women really are oppressed in some hidden way that I can't appreciate.
Now, I've looked pretty carefully, along with a lot of other people, at things like the wage gap and the glass ceiling, and I just can't help but see there are just other reasonable explanations that have nothing to do with discrimination.
But I honestly try, because it worries me that so many of them are carried away with it.
And, you know, why wouldn't there be more people protesting and more scholars?
There are not that many women scholars that join me.
They're starting to change now.
I think they've gotten so extreme that maybe I will have more company.
But anyway, why do they believe it?
I mean, it's a conspiracy theory for smart people.
And, you know, and the more intelligent you are, this is there's been good, you know, psychological documentation that just the more you can talk yourself into a belief system.
And maybe they, you know, Had a bad experience in their projecting?
I don't know.
I know, you know, Catherine McKinnon, who was sort of the leader of the gender feminist movement, and she thought that the patriarchal oppressive system was so good, it was almost perfect, so perfect that people couldn't even see it.
It was invisible.
That's one of the things, you know.
Now, that could be a profound observation, and some people found it so, not me.
I found it to be A paranoid conspiracy theory about reality that can't be falsified, you can't test it.
As soon as you question it, that just shows you're part of the problem, you know?
But Katherine McKinnon, she did not win in the beginning.
When she first came on the scene and the New York Times was covering Academia, New York Magazine, LA Times.
My side was winning.
We won in the court of public opinion.
Camille Paglia, you know, she was on covers and things and we won the argument.
They won the assistant professorships and that mattered more.
So let's go through some of the myths that have been pervaded by the modern feminist movement because you spend an awful lot of time doing that.
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Okay, so let's go back to these myths.
So, myth number one, the wage gap, which you mentioned.
This is used by virtually every feminist scholar to suggest that America has some sort of superstructure of patriarchy.
What are the real facts about the wage gap?
Does it exist?
And if so, to what extent?
There is a gap of about 20 cents.
If you look at all men and all women working full-time, you will find this gap.
However, it doesn't take into account relevant factors that justify different wages.
What did you major in in college?
What profession are you in?
How many hours do you work per week?
When you do these controls, the wage gap begins to narrow, and in some studies, it vanishes.
So, if you look at majors, college majors, you will make more money, on average, if you go into, I don't know, petroleum engineering, or naval architecture, or metallurgy, apparently you make money, a PhD in metallurgy.
But if you go into early childhood education, social work or women's studies, not as much.
So that counts.
And then we look, well, who majors in petroleum engineering?
It's mostly men.
And who majors in early childhood education?
Mostly women.
So that is not, you have to take into account these relevant factors.
And what I see in study after study is they either don't do it or they play a little game like the American Association of University Women.
They will say, oh yes, it's true.
When you take relevant, you know, factors into control, it narrows.
But there's still a gap, and then they insist of, you know, they'll say 12 cents or...
Fifteen cents.
But they don't take all of the relevant factors, because there are probably 20 or 25 things.
I mean, look at things like the danger of a job.
If you look at the death gap, it's almost all men.
I think it's 94% of fatalities in the workplace are men.
Labor Department data.
And every year, you know, we've got about 5,000 people who die in the workplace.
Almost all men.
So that's another thing.
They never look at the workplace as a totality.
What jobs are people doing?
And most of the gritty, dangerous jobs.
Have you seen a woman as a roofer?
Or if you're in a high-rise building and there's some guy out there, it's always a guy rushing the windows.
So you do get a pay premium for danger.
You do get a pay premium for Working odd hours or strange hours?
Now, when I debate them, they'll say, yes, okay, fine, you're right.
But it's still discrimination, because why is it that men take those jobs and women take their jobs?
And why are women's jobs degraded and so forth?
Well, that's an interesting question, but they've now changed the focus of the argument, because we're not talking about equal pay for equal work.
We're now talking about they sort of want comparable pay for similar work, or they want The main reason women earn less is that when women have kids they tend to work less and when men have kids they work more.
So they'll say, well why is that?
That's sexism.
Well, again, we're no longer talking about employers, and we're no longer talking about a wage gap that's because some evil employers are deliberately paying men more.
They change the ground.
But even when you go there and ask why do people do what they do, and is it a sex role sort of thing, that's a different set of arguments.
But even there, their arguments are not persuasive because if I look at patriarchy and say, okay, that's my hypothesis, that we do what we do because we've all been conditioned under patriarchy.
And, And then I see the United States is less patriarchal than it's ever been.
Women are constantly encouraged to do all sorts of things.
In schools, little kids are encouraged to play with all sorts of toys, but the kids insist.
The kids are the ones that, you know, they stereotype themselves.
And you even see the kinds of play, little girls with dolls.
Feminists have been very upset by that because they think that that conditions them to be mothers and we should bond little boys with dolls.
Well, they've tried that.
And then the little boys will, you know, turn them.
I've been to conferences where they'll cry to say, well, yes, I tried to use bubbles and dolls and get the boys to play.
And then they turn them into torpedoes, you know.
And by the way, the gender feminists don't like it when I bring up, you know, any of us bring up those examples because they still think it's conditioning.
Well, maybe it was conditioning that made them gender feminists.
Then we get into an argument about free will and determinism, and we've changed the ground again.
It's an interesting argument about ultimate freedom, self-determination, but I think that we have to, at this point, credit women with agency when they choose what they're going to major in, when they choose the field, if they want to stay home with kids.
Then I think that it's matronizing to suggest that they aren't responsible for their own lives.
And this is one of the funniest things about these particular statistics.
You look at nations like Norway, which have tried to forcibly disabuse people of the patriarchy.
And in some of those nations, there's a much larger pay gap than there is in some of the developing nations where women are actually forced to work jobs that they don't want to.
It turns out that when women are prosperous, they would very often less like to work those jobs where they're dealing with heavy equipment and not being able to be home with their kids.
Well you just, yeah, and people have done surveys on preferences, like what would you like, what would be your ideal situation?
And over and over again you find the following, and this was Catherine Hakim, formerly at the London School of Economics, the Pew Research Centre has found that if you ask women In the United States, about 20% want to work full-time.
They want to be high-powered careerists.
That's a number one priority.
20% would like to be full-time stay-at-home mothers.
They do not wish to be in the workplace and they will not be there unless some, you know, misfortune and they have to.
And then 60% are called adaptives.
They are women who want to work part-time when they have little kids and then, you know, go back and forth.
60%, actually the 60% behave a little more like the stay-at-home moms in their preferences and choices.
So you have 20% of women who do want what, you know, the AAUW and the Ms.
Foundation and Now, what they're pushing.
They do a good job pushing for the interests of that 20% of careerists, but what if most women aren't like that?
And shouldn't that count?
And they will never say it counts, because they will think that their preferences were shaped by patriarchy.
Right.
I mean, if they're honest about it, they're like Betty Friedan and they actually look for compulsion.
That in and of itself is reinstituting the patriarchy.
That was Simone de Beauvoir.
Sorry, you're right.
Of course.
Betty Friedan was not consistent, but I've reviewed both of their books recently and found a lot that I liked.
Although Simone de Beauvoir was kind of, she was actually on amphetamines and not sleeping, chain smoking, and she just went into the Bibliothèque Nationale and wrote everything, everything.
You know, it's a manic thing.
Anyway, but she did very harsh things to say about motherhood, but she certainly did not have harsh things to say about love affairs.
She frustrated the feminists by saying the most important thing in her life was Jean-Paul Sartre.
Well, why do you think it is that the feminist movement has decided to obliterate sex differences?
Because it seems like that's what it comes down to, is that a lot of this is preference-based.
I mean, if you go back to biology itself, I mean, there are studies of rhesus monkeys that show that female rhesus monkeys prefer dolls and male rhesus monkeys prefer weapons.
Right.
This is deeply embedded in evolutionary biology because it was the job of females, typically, to have babies and then raise them, and it was the job of men to go out and protect the mothers so that they could raise the babies because otherwise everybody would die.
So this is pretty deeply embedded.
When did it become the mission of the feminist movement to say that there is something fundamentally wrong if women and men have separate preferences?
Because it seems like this has infused so much of our conversation now about men and women.
Well, I think they did it for a few reasons.
One is there was a time where any woman who defied the stereotypes of femininity—let's go back in the 30s and 40s, 50s—for her, it was a stultifying conformity that was enforced.
you know, feminists just wanted to break down these stereotypes because maybe as many as 20% of women did not embody them.
Now, I think that's fine.
And that's what equity feminism is.
But equity feminism is also about freedom, that you take down the barriers, but then women should be allowed to be who they are.
And those of us who embody traditional stereotypes, and that's just who we are, and We would prefer to work less when we have kids, or we prefer to go into, you know, my field in philosophy.
I studied, I got my PhD, and my dissertation was in the area of ethics.
And that's a field you will find more women in philosophy doing aesthetics and ethics than, say, philosophy of mathematics.
It's more men.
So those were the choices that I made.
And why is that problematized?
You take down the barriers and then you see what people do.
And you do the best you can in your educational system and parenting.
And I think we do.
I think a lot of us, if our child, I mean, I have two boys who majored in English.
I tried to talk them out of it.
But they were defying the stereotype of, you know, I told them they should major in engineering.
They didn't listen to me.
Yeah, and my wife obviously is famously a doctor, so she's in the STEM field.
And my daughter is totally into it.
She walks around the house saying that her brother is going to be a radio host like Daddy, and she is going to be in the sciences like Mommy.
So I obviously agree with the basic idea that in America pretty much everybody is raising their kids, or at least a huge majority of people are raising their kids to basically do what they want to do.
And if your daughter wants to be a scientist, I don't see a lot of fathers who are standing in the doorway like John Lithgow in Footloose, saying you're not allowed not allowed to go study chemistry now.
Oh, I know.
Like, just get back into the kitchen.
I've made some tactful feminists on that.
They had these phony ads.
I think they ran them in the Super Bowl one year when it went kind of feminist.
And, you know, they'd have a dad saying, oh, put that away, you know, and give her a doll.
And she wanted to play with her microscope or something.
You know, as if that happens very often.
But anyway, that was one reason.
One is that I think that they wanted to liberate people that were forced into the role and then they didn't realize that that might not be liberating for everybody.
You want to liberate the people that don't like it, not human nature as we experience it.
There was a second reason is that historically there have been a lot of Disparaging and false things said about women that held women back.
So women, you know, my field of philosophy is among the worst.
If you read Nietzsche or Kant and it's endless.
Just all sorts of, you know, generalizations about the females, the fair sex and how, you know, we couldn't, didn't have the stamina for a court of law and, you know, all sorts of things.
So I think feminism, a lot of women just developed tremendous intolerance for generalizations.
But again, what they should have done is allowed that people define themselves, and that you will find that there is a tendency for women to behave in certain ways and to have certain preferences.
People made a lot of money making television shows and magazines for that market.
If you look at, they don't say in most stores now, men's magazines, women, but you kind of know if you go and the women's, you know, typically there'll be children or, you know, faces and men, there's a lot of stuff.
You know, there'll be a race car and cars.
And it's just, you know, again, that's that what we see in the vervet monkeys and the rhesus monkeys, the little the male will go for the gadget and the female for the doll.
Now, it's not 100 percent.
There are little girls that are going to go for the gadget, probably even with the monkeys.
But there's also the norm.
And I think it's the thing is, yes, it is intolerant to force a kid who defies the stereotype of his or her sex, force them to conform.
But it's also intolerant to to take a gender conforming kid and force them to do what they don't want to do and to force a boy to play with a doll if he doesn't want to.
And one of the things that's been really fascinating to watch is how the transgender movement has turned all of this on its head.
Because the transgender movement has basically now suggested that men and women being, as feminists claimed, exactly the same.
A man can actually be a woman so long as he claims that he's a woman.
And this has led to a bizarre backlash from people like Germaine Greer who have said, wait, hold on a second.
There is something special about being a woman after all.
And we're not just going to admit biological men into our category because they say they ought to be admitted to that category.
Well, I have yet to hear a coherent explanation.
I mean, I'm more tolerant trans than you are, mainly because, for one reason, at AEI, one of the first trans people that I met was Deirdre McCloskey.
Who's my favorite economist, philosopher.
I haven't seen her lately, but she, it was just so impressive.
And I just read her book and her story, and I think there is a legitimate human rights issue there.
However, and I think she would agree with that, it's all been politicized.
And you have people that may not even be trans, but who are wannabes or pretend.
I mean, there's some.
And who, you know, won't allow anything to be debated or discussed.
And you're constantly getting into fights.
People used to attack me by saying Christina Hoff Sommers and Margaret Thatcher, those two female impersonators.
Someone criticized me as a female impersonator.
And it happened on Tumblr a few months ago and they got called out for using the phrase female impersonator and acting as though that was a criticism.
I felt vindicated by that.
So in just a second, I want to ask you about some more of the myths that have been pervaded by sort of the feminist culture.
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Back to some of the myths that are being purveyed.
So, one of the big ones that you've taken on is the myth that America has a deep-seated rape culture.
And I've always been sort of bewildered as to what exactly people mean when they say rape culture.
Like, is there some vast group of men out there who are very pro-rape that I've been missing somehow?
And is there, in fact, some sort of rape culture that's happening on campuses?
What are the actual facts with regard to the idea that America is in the midst of a rape culture right now?
Well, first of all, for them, a rape culture is a society that is supportive and encouraging of, you know, male predation.
And they would say that it's just ubiquitous in films, in songs, and they will point to a song like, remember, Blurred Lines, I Know You Want It?
And so they take that line, I know you want it, I know you want it.
And that's rape culture.
That's a man intimating that, you know, no matter what she says.
But then, you know, other people would point out that there were a lot of songs, even songs, I think even Beyonce had a song that said that.
And so it's never quite, it doesn't, you know, I try to find this culture because to me, it looks like we're a culture, properly so, that is, that despises rapists.
I mean, they're with murderers and child molesters, rapists, the lowest cycle of hell.
And that's why it's very important to have due process, because it's such a serious allegation, because we have little tolerance.
And then look at American society, and you look at the data, and you see that all violent crime has gone down, No one knows quite why, but lots of theories.
But rape and sexual assault, it's down, except on the campus when they do these studies that are flawed.
So they have, it's called advocacy research.
You can prove anything if you rig the study.
And how do you get one in four?
I'll tell you how.
You go to a college campus, And you administer, maybe online, you have a survey with some vaguely worded questions, and you ask them to a non-representative group of people, and then you can project into the whole school or the whole town or the whole world.
A rape epidemic.
Now, fortunately, we have very good statisticians in the Justice Department, the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
They don't have an agenda.
They just want to do good research.
And they do an annual crime survey.
And for one time, I think it was 2010, they actually pulled out the data on campus.
And they found nothing like one in four.
They found more like, I think, one in 53.
Now that is still high.
It's still a problem.
We've got a binge drinking culture.
We've got, you know, a lot of things going on that could be improved.
And sexual harassment and assault is a problem.
But it's not an epidemic.
It's not like the worst crisis.
I mean, who would send a child?
Who would send a girl to Stanford or Berkeley?
You know, Harvard, you know, and people are lining up to get in there.
Who would send a child there if there was a one in four chance that she was going to be a victim of this serious sexual crime?
So I don't know.
People don't really believe it.
But yet it's taught.
And it's I think it's almost now a contagion of hysteria.
And so you're getting more and more young women are just so frightened.
And I look at like Swarthmore.
You know, the girls are frightened of these Swarthmore, these At these elite schools, I mean, now I'm not saying there can't be boorish behavior and that boys should be gentlemen and the girls should be ladies, all of that, but there's no, you can't find it.
It was manufactured through a combination of twisted theories about the patriarchy and propaganda.
I mean, they are in a gender war, and in every war, the first casualty is truth.
This one is no different.
It seems like the boards have been completely removed.
I mean, the studies that I've seen where they're suggesting numbers like one and four, basically they're conflating anything from an unwanted touch to a full-on rape and then saying that that is all part of a rape epidemic happening on campus.
And that's led to these essentially Stalin-esque show trials that are happening on campuses across the country with no due process of law.
That seems to me a lot more dangerous as an institution for a college than the notion that the college is somehow winking and nodding at actual rape happening on its campus.
Absolutely.
And the sad thing is that you're absolutely right now.
Now they have these show trials, and they say, oh, well, women never make up accusations.
You have to believe women.
Women do make up accusations, and women do lie, not because they are women, because they are human, and human beings will sometimes lie, especially about sex.
We just had a case at Sacred Heart.
Did you read about that?
No, I missed this one.
Oh, my goodness.
There was a trial and these two young men, athletes, they were accused, thrown off the team, lost scholarships.
It went on and on.
Finally, in court, she admitted she made it up.
I think it was sort of like the Jackie case at University of Virginia, the Rolling Stone case.
She made it up because she wanted her boyfriend, wannabe, to feel sorry for Ida.
She had some reason.
And they allowed these young men, or at least one of them I saw, making a statement about what it had done to his life.
And it was horrifying.
And as you just said, it's ruinous.
It's just psychologically ruining, a false accusation.
And there's a reason we have due process.
And we developed this truth-finding apparatus.
It's the best we've got.
It's not perfect, but what's much worse is not to have it.
And now on campuses, they've dispensed with it in many cases.
And you have people accused and found guilty of very serious crimes that, you know, there's no jury would have found them guilty.
They're not guilty of it.
There wasn't evidence.
In some cases, no evidence.
In some cases, there was evidence that proved it didn't happen, and in these tribunals, they wouldn't accept it.
But I also feel sorry for girls who have been victims, because now this crime has been exaggerated in all proportions.
At some schools, if a boy walks by and says, nice legs, you know, a girl called that in the feminist center, that's a mini rape.
You know, they're appropriating the language of predation and violence for, you know, everyday things that go on.
And so I think they're trivializing a terrible thing that can happen because we do know that this can happen on campus.
And then they have procedures that nobody knows what's going on or where it leads.
So it's not helping anybody.
Fortunately, I think the current Department of Education just announced they're going to change the requirements for college and undo some of the new rules that were put in by the last administration.
As someone who's been accused of catcalling for asking a woman to debate me publicly, I definitely understand the kind of broadening of the terminology.
What do you think is sort of A solution for this because it seems like if you wanted to create a recipe for a bunch of false statistics and false positives in cases of rape, what you would first do is suggest to men and women that there are no differences between men and women.
Then you would tell them that to explore their best selves, that they should have as much sex with as many partners as possible.
And then you'd put them alone as much as possible.
And then you would set no standards for what actually rape constitutes.
And finally, you would say no evidence is necessary in order for us to convict you.
And you would say you can do it all with infinite amount of alcohol.
We're not going to check.
Right.
So it's always, you know, it's alcohol-saturated.
So it seems like they've removed all the traditional standards and then they've decided to become prudes about the results of a lot of this stuff.
It's crazy.
Now, there is an interesting case that just happened at NYU.
Avital Ranel is a professor of German literature.
She's a deconstructionist feminist.
A performance artist.
So she goes into the class and she has costumes and she tells the students, this will not be a class, this is performance.
And you know, some of them love it and a lot of them are probably bored or horrified or whatever, but it doesn't matter.
Anyway, she's a very, very colorful celebrity scholar within this little niche world of performance scholarship.
She's, and she's apparently gay.
Well, now a gay guy, Nimrod Reitman, young, he's about, well, I don't know what he is now, but he was maybe in his 20s when this happened, this was a few years ago.
He's now accused her of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and he's gay, she's a lesbian, and she's a leading figure, you know, in sort of postmodern Deconstructionism.
So 50 leading feminist scholars gathered around her, you know, and wrote a letter excusing her.
And the letter looked like the kind of excuse people would give for Ray Moore or something, you know, like, oh, well, it was a different time and we really don't know what was happening.
And then it turns out she had an affair.
So she's a great interpreter of the philosopher Derrida.
Now it turns out she had an affair with his son when the son was 16.
She sounds like a very bad lesbian.
She's not even, who knows?
So anyway, what it tells me is that sex, you know, it's complicated.
And who knows what went on between these two people?
Was it appropriate?
Not really.
She wrote a lot of texts and things.
But I can understand the people that love her, that are on her side.
You know, I've seen this with young men, their families, you know, they see it differently because they're looking at it from his point of view.
And then she's now has her, you know, she has got her side and the grad student has his side and the whole academy is now all in a dither over this.
But to me, the only way we could find out would be in a court of law.
And he is suing, so maybe, interesting, we will see if she really wrote these things or said these things.
But it proved to the whole academy the need for due process.
What bothers me about it is I wish these 50 scholars had noticed that this was happening.
Not just to their friend, Avital, Ronell, Professor Avital, but it's been happening to young men on their campuses.
It's happened to a lot of male professors where you're just run out of town and assumed guilty because accused.
I mean, Laura Kipnis basically got shellacked at Northwestern for simply suggesting there'd be some sort of form of due process for a male professor who was accused of basically similar activity.
And she was investigated, this professor was investigated for an article that she wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
So it's out of control.
But, you know, what do we do about it?
I'm just hoping, you know, that's a good question.
I mean, I'm not I'm not sure I was going to ask you, what's the importance of the Me Too movement?
Because obviously there's been a lot of focus on hashtag Me Too and people telling their stories.
And again, it seems like there's a lot of conflation here where people say hashtag Me Too about I was once cat called on the subway versus Me Too, as in I was raped by A male relative or something, and it's all supposed to be in the same category, and then anybody who suggests differently is ripped up and down.
I'm trying to remember which actor suggested recently that there were gradations to severity of... Matt Damon.
Matt Damon, right.
Matt Damon said that he was being interviewed, I think, on ABC News, and he said he was, he just seemed very nice, and he said he cared about the movement, and he, like a lot of good men, liberal and conservative, they are as horrified by the Harvey Weinstein stories as anyone.
And he was like, he says, I care about that.
I want the movement to succeed.
However, there are degrees of guilt and some proportion in terms of punishment that's appropriate.
He said, you know, patting someone on the ass isn't the same as rape.
And immediately, his former co-star, Minnie Driver, in this new, this angry woman thing, you know, angry woman on Twitter, she starts screeching, you know, you, you know, there is, what are you saying?
It's all bad.
He didn't say that it was good.
He just said there, I mean, this is fundamental to our legal and moral system that we make, you know, judgments of serious and less serious.
She ruled it out of order and then she said Matt Damon should just, you know, basically told him to, shh, I can't say much.
S-T-F-U.
And, you know, he should shut up.
And to me, this is gonna undo the movement because I do think that we have to bring relations between men and women up to 21st century standards in the workplace.
There was, you know, too much going on and making people unhappy.
But it's something men and women should do together.
Not make men the enemy.
It's good women and bad men.
No, it's human beings improving the world together.
And that's what Matt Damon was trying to do.
And then he came out and said, you know, I'm just, I'm not going to say anything.
Now it's just time for me to listen.
And you know, if Matt Damon, and he had to do that, I think, because there was a petition and 30,000 me tours were trying to get him erased from his next film.
Yeah, and I mean, the same thing happened, or something similar happened to Henry Cavill, who just suggested, look, in my personal life, I'm a famous guy, and when I go out for a date, I have to worry about the fact that the person sitting across from me knows I'm rich and famous, and so any false accusation could ruin my career and cost me millions of dollars, so I'm more likely to go out with an ex-girlfriend who I at least know and trust than to date a new woman.
And he just got destroyed for it, because how dare he suggest something so logical as that.
Right.
Yeah, you can't.
Men are just, you know, they have to keep quiet.
Well, that's not going to help.
And it's actually going to ruin the movement.
And now we have, what's her name, Asia Argento, you know, who's got a complicated story.
One of the things you learn when you study this is, and I actually found it in this NYU case, I read his, he's suing, and I read his complaint against Avital Rannell, and I thought, oh, she's a monster, this poor boy, and I felt so angry at her and protective of him.
And then someone published a letter that she wrote explaining her side.
And then I read it and thought, hmm, gee, maybe he's really out of control and he's the crazy one.
And you could see both sides.
Oh yeah, that's why we have trials.
If you're accused of something serious, And so I've learned that you can't just believe people.
Courts of law show that people may misrepresent reality.
And so we have to sort it out.
So let's talk a little bit about some of the problems that women do face in interviews.
The idea of the wage gap being largely false.
The idea that there's a giant rape culture being largely false.
The kind of overblowing of the Me Too movement.
Not that women shouldn't come out.
Everyone agrees.
A woman who is abused in some way should come forward and speak about we should all be on her side when there's evidence that this has happened.
By the same token, the way that it's being approached right now is deeply flawed and undermining the foundations of the movement.
What problems do you see women generally facing in the West or in the United States that you think people aren't talking about enough, if any?
Well, the thing is that women's problems are talked about a lot because, for good reason, we had a women's movement.
We have lots of organizations.
Everywhere.
And I actually see more problems for men right now.
And men don't have a lobby.
Especially little boys.
And I wrote a book, The War Against Boys, what's happening with little boys in school.
So right now I'm mainly concerned about the men in, you know, the vast numbers of men in prison.
The boys that are dropping out of school.
The men that have not just dropped, that aren't just unemployed.
They're not looking for work.
We've got, you know, able bodied men in their prime earning years who are not in the workforce.
And we have an educational system that is not meeting the needs of men as well as women.
And when I look at women's problems, because women do have serious problems, especially the feminization of poverty.
If you are alone with children, it's very hard for women.
And given the jobs women do, they need men.
We need each other.
So I don't really see it as separate at this point.
I think we need kind of an egalitarian movement that looks at areas where we could help men.
Because when you help men, you help women.
At this point in the United States.
And if you help women, you help men.
We need to, we're in this together.
So the problem of poverty, the problem of single motherhood and all that, you've got to, they've got to be marriageable men.
They've got to be guys.
And it's not enough just to, it used to be you could graduate from high school and work hard.
You could make it into the middle class.
Now you, you Almost required to have college beyond high school.
Some specialization.
And far more women are getting that than men.
So we may end up closing the wage gap just by having better educated women.
But socially, the projections are not good for a stable society.
It's not good for the workforce.
And other countries are addressing that problem.
So, anyway, I do see the financial problem with women, but I think it's connected to men.
The most serious problems for women, though, as you said, they're not in the West.
I think there are many parts of the world where they have not had two major waves of feminism.
They haven't had so much as a trickle.
And I go to international women's conferences and I meet women coming from Somalia and Egypt.
Iran, which is a kind of, you know, talk about a handmaid's tale.
I mean, that's like 1984 for women in many ways, although it's terrible for men, too.
But I meet the women that are sort of the freedom fighters, the Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth of those countries, and it's very exciting.
But American women right now, especially on the campus, Who have so much to give and who are so gifted and, you know, there you are at Wellesley and you're at Swamp and they're turned in on their own oppression and not making common cause with these women around the world that need help and they come to these conferences they want.
Help from American women because we did liberate ourselves and they want to do the same.
And I don't understand why our women's movement wouldn't be so focused on making those connections.
And, you know, you go back in the 80s on the college campus with apartheid in South Africa and, you know, the students were very focused on the social justice in South Africa.
Where are they today on gender apartheid in, you know, Saudi Arabia or something?
They're mostly talking about apartheid, gender apartheid in the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts or, you know, that we have separate, you know, that the language is all about, you know, of crisis for our society, which is not a patriarchy.
Now, to come back to the United States for a second, it seems to me one of the big problems that I've seen, particularly among men, since we're going to talk about men, is this feeling of lack of purpose.
And that seems like that's been exacerbated a lot by the false perceptions regarding gender and sex.
That my contention has always been that young men particularly either create or destroy, and there's not a lot in between.
And I can see it with my two-and-a-half-year-old boy.
He's either building blocks or he's knocking them down.
Those are the only two things that he's doing at any given time, and usually he's knocking them down.
Usually he's just a suicide machine.
He's trying to kill himself full-time, and it's my job to stop him from doing that.
And a society that fails to recognize that men actually have to be thrust into positions of responsibility, including the responsibility to protect women, shouldn't be all that surprised when it turns out that men are destructive in the absence of those responsibilities.
Well, all societies who want to thrive and survive, have to spend, and have spent a lot of time civilizing their young males.
Because if you don't do that, they have some very unpleasant ways of making themselves noticed.
And if you have a lot of sort of under-socialized young men, they can develop, and there is a, I don't like to use the term anymore, but they say toxic masculinity, I'll call it protest masculinity.
And a young man that's in that mode will show his masculinity by destroying, by tearing down, by preying on vulnerable people.
And in fact, it's just the opposite of healthy masculinity.
Healthy men who invent a healthy masculinity, they don't destroy, they build.
They create, they invent, and they protect.
And, you know, society is everywhere.
Men have largely been the protectors and the warriors and defend from attack.
And there are a small number of men who are the predators and they defend the society from them.
We put effort into that.
How do you get these young men to develop a healthy masculinity?
Well, it helps to have a father.
We don't hear that much about fathers.
In fact, you often hear that denigrated.
Oh, that's just an old-fashioned idea that children need fathers.
Well, they do, and little boys especially.
It seems to take an extra toll.
They've looked at single-family homes, and the girls overall fare better.
First of all, they have this heroic mother who's working so hard, and the boy finds his identity elsewhere.
So you need the father.
And then there are ways through sports and through athletics and so forth with the coach, and there are ways to focus that energy and that, you know, creative into healthy masculinity.
Now, overall, we've done a pretty good job.
We don't like to admit it, but most people are not out committing crimes, and, you know, it's all gone down.
We're doing something right.
But what we're really failing, where I see we're failing most seriously, is engaging young men academically, And I see a lot of evidence that our schools are increasingly, they favor kids who are happy to be sedentary and talk about their feelings.
There's a lot of writing and reading is about shared feelings.
So a kid that comes in that likes rough and tumble play and can't sit still, it's almost as if girls are the gold standard and boys are being measured.
So their first experience with school is frustration and sometimes failure.
Much higher rates of boys getting suspended and thrown out, even in preschool.
People say, I mean, we don't, as I said before, we don't have these groups.
We don't have activist groups for boys.
We have a lot for women and girls.
And they've done good.
They've done a lot of good.
I mean, girls were faltering in math and science, and boy, have we improved the quality of math and science education for girls.
Where were the programs for boys?
who are behind in reading, all the scores show.
I mean, the boys score slightly better in math, but girls score higher in reading around the world.
You need to put extra effort into engaging a boy in the world of the written word.
Where is that?
In these schools of education, where they're still teaching, I don't know, radical theories about women's oppression?
No, they're not learning it.
So there's a whole field.
There's a lot of work to be done.
I tell it when I go to schools.
There's a lot of work, like male pedagogy, how to teach boys.
And they're already starting in Australia and Canada because they're worried about their workforce.
They don't want to have, you know, 20 or 25% of...
No, it's not.
I don't want to speak that language anymore.
I don't think it's helpful.
in an information economy.
So we could look at what the Australians and the British are doing.
But I don't know, if you tried to do it, they'd say, "That's backlash, that's the patriarchy." No, it's not.
I don't want to speak that language anymore.
I don't think it's helpful.
What's helpful is to recognize one another, men and women, as I said, just working together, and mutual civility, and respect, and even love.
It's been known to happen.
So I have one final question for Christina Hough Summers, and this question is a doozy, I promise.
We're gonna ask relationship advice from Christina Hough Summers.
But first, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
Subscribe, just go to dailywire.com, click subscribe, and you can hear the end of our conversation over there.
Alright, so check out the FemSplainers podcast, also go and check out the Factual Feminist over at American Enterprise Institute.
Christina, thanks so much for stopping by, I really appreciate it.
it.
Thank you.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
A Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.
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Edited by Alex Zingaro.
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