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Sept. 30, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
45:43
Why Men And Women Are Unhappy | Ep. 1584
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We bring you the latest on Hurricane Ian as the New York Times unleashes a hit piece on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
We analyze why both men and women seem increasingly unhappy in the post-sexual revolution era, and Vladimir Putin may be on the verge of unprecedented aggression.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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How did you hear about us, Fox?
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Well, the latest news from Hurricane Ian continues to be devastating.
Obviously, the strike by Hurricane Ian on the west coast of Florida has had some dire consequences.
Some hundreds of people apparently missing.
The Florida government is doing an excellent job of ensuring that the resources have been brought to bear.
You have emergency teams that are on the ground essentially right away looking for people trying to help out any survivors.
The state itself is mobilizing not just in terms of state resources but also in terms of private charities.
Pretty much every private institution in Florida has been mobilizing trying to gather food and resources for people who are out of power on the west coast of Florida.
The storm, Hurricane Ian, continues to actually swirl around off now the east coast of the United States.
It's going to make landfall again in South Carolina.
It may in fact be a hurricane at that point.
According to the Washington Post, Ian is a hurricane once again.
A storm system that re-intensified Thursday evening as it churns toward South Carolina with 85 mph winds and what the National Hurricane Center called life-threatening flooding and storm surge.
It's set for yet another U.S.
landfall this time near Charleston around midday on Friday.
In its wake, Ian left a path of devastation in Florida, though much of the state is still making sense of the exact toll after rescue missions began on Thursday.
In an evening briefing, Governor Ron DeSantis said that he expected to have mortality from the hurricane.
There had been more than 700 confirmed rescues thus far.
He also spoke of the indescribable damage, including buildings picked up off their foundations by the intense wind.
More than 2.1 million customers remain without power in Florida.
In Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, governors declared states of emergency ahead of Ian's expected shift in their direction.
There's going to be a lot of people that need help, and I know you guys have been on the front lines of doing that.
So I just want to say thank you.
We'll be back.
We'll be back tomorrow.
We'll probably be back, you know, every day for a while.
And so we're here to help, and when you guys need anything, he knows the call.
All these other people know.
Just give us a call, and I'll make sure Kevin gets it done.
So thanks, everybody.
Appreciate it.
As we say, there is now an attempt being made to rescue people who are stuck in places like Fort Myers, people who stayed in their homes because either they couldn't leave or because they made a bad decision to stay in their homes.
There's also an attempt to get the power back on because, again, a couple million people do not have power at this point.
Governor DeSantis said they absolutely expect to have mortality again.
Nobody knows the death toll at this point from this storm.
For his part, President Biden did a good thing yesterday.
He was asked about Florida and Governor DeSantis and his relationship with DeSantis.
He was visiting FEMA, and he said that it's not worth politicizing all of this, that he and Governor DeSantis are working together, which is exactly what the president is supposed to say.
How would you describe your relationship and your conversation with Governor DeSantis?
It's totally irrelevant, but I'll answer it, okay?
In fact, very fine.
He complimented me, he thanked me for the immediate response we had, he told me how much he appreciated it, said he was extremely happy with what was going on.
This is not about whether anything having to do with our disagreements politically.
This is about saving people's lives, homes, and businesses.
That's what this is about.
And so I've been, I've talked to him Four or five times already.
And it's not a matter of my disagreement to them on other items.
That is absolutely correct from the president and good for him.
He couldn't resist a little bit of jab about climate change because no one on the left can resist a jab about climate change, despite the fact that, once again, there is no evidence that hurricanes have become either more common or more intense around Florida, thanks to climate change.
That is not according to me. That is according to the head of the National Oceanographic Institute for the United States, the head of the Hurricane Center.
Anyway, here is Joe Biden.
Our commitment to tackling the climate crisis, which threatens all of us, we're seeing the consequences of climate change around the world very vividly, including in the United States right now.
now.
And I know your nations feel it acutely.
And for you all, it's an existential threat.
Some members of the media can't help but go after Ron DeSantis.
The New York Times had a piece on the front page of their website going after the governor of Florida.
Why?
Because he voted against a boondoggle hurricane relief bill that was not a hurricane relief bill during Hurricane Sandy.
So the New York Times is now just trying to retcon what happened during Hurricane Sandy.
If you recall, there was a bill that was put forward by the House and Senate Republicans that was just aid for Hurricane Sandy that was voted for by all the Republicans.
And then there was this enormous bill that included an extraordinary amount of pork that the Democrats put forward and many Republicans voted against that.
So the New York Times now claims that when Ron DeSantis was in Congress, he voted against aid for Sandy.
That is not true.
He voted in favor of aid for Sandy.
He voted against a bill that included a bunch of other crap in it.
But the New York Times headline quote DeSantis wants a no on storm aid petitions a president he's bashed.
So let me just get this straight.
The President of the United States is somebody that you politically oppose.
You are no longer allowed to access the resources available from FEMA.
So just to get this straight, if you were a Democratic governor during Donald Trump, you were not allowed to petition the federal government.
In fact, I remember during COVID, every blue governor begging the federal government for resources.
And the idea was that if Trump didn't give them the resources, it was because it was political and bad.
But now if DeSantis even asks for the resources, according to the New York Times, this means that he is political and a hypocrite.
You see how this dumb game works.
For the New York Times, Matt Flegenheimer reporting, As a freshman congressman in 2013, Ron DeSantis was unambiguous.
A federal bailout for the New York region after Hurricane Sandy was an irresponsible boondoggle, a symbol of the put-it-on-the-credit-card mentality he'd come to Washington to oppose.
He said he sympathized with the victims, but his answer was no.
Nearly a decade later, as his state confronts the devastation and costly destruction wrought by Hurricane Ian, Mr. DeSantis is appealing to the nation's better angels and betting on its short memory.
Well, no, he's not betting on his short memory.
He literally voted in favor of a certain amount of aid for Hurricane Sandy, but Barack Obama and the Democrats crammed through a bill that was way more aid than was necessary for Hurricane Sandy.
This is a very open debate at the time.
But again, the goal of the New York Times here is to suggest that Ron DeSantis is suddenly a socialist.
That Ron DeSantis is suddenly a fan of big government.
It's the stupidest form of politics here.
Because FEMA exists.
FEMA is funded.
FEMA was created specifically for this thing.
And now FEMA is bringing its resources to bear.
The debate over whether the federal government should be involved in solving state-level issues like this.
That debate, I think, should be open theoretically, but it has not been open on a practical level since, as I said yesterday, about 1895.
For a very, very long time in the United States, there's been an understanding the federal government is going to bring its resources to bear when there's a major natural disaster in the United States.
This has been true for well over a hundred years.
And so this notion that Ron DeSantis is doing something unprecedented, Or evil.
Or violative of his principles.
As the governor of the state saying to FEMA, an institution created just for this.
We need your help on this one.
Is absurd.
It's also absurd because again, they're retconning this thing because the notion that Hurricane Sandy was the breaking point for DeSantis and DeSantis didn't vote for it.
He did vote for aid, he just didn't vote for all of the pork.
In a local interview that year, DeSantis said the bill contained extraneous stuff that could not be classified as emergency spending.
He said I never made the point of saying we shouldn't do anything.
He did support, in favor of a relief package that was like $17 billion for Hurricane Sandy.
Governor DeSantis supported an aid package in 2017, after Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, as places like Florida, Texas, and Puerto Rico strained to recover.
So again, this is a very stupid article by the New York Times, but this is perfectly typical of the New York Times and the media looking for some sort of excuse to go after Governor DeSantis.
And of course, you have Joy Reid, the dumbest form of left-wing commentator on the air over on MSNBC doing the same thing.
Ron DeSantis had the opportunity to make that decision and say, well, should the people of New York and New Jersey, who were hit by a catastrophic hurricane, they weren't even used to, they're not even in Florida, they don't use hurricanes.
He said, no, that shouldn't happen.
He, Marco Rubio and other Tea Party members, Senate and House, said they shouldn't have that money.
It's too expensive.
And now, as you said, he's now got to go hat in hand to Joe Biden for aid.
It's something he didn't even believe in as a Tea Partier.
Okay, I'm sorry, that's just a lie.
But they continue to lie because after all, Ron DeSantis is a very, very bad man.
And so they have to continue to promulgate the idea that Ron DeSantis is a very, very bad man.
Again, we're not going to know the extent to which the Florida government has done a good job on this hurricane until probably a week or two out.
But as I said at the very beginning of this, the media is going to be looking for any indicator, any indicator at all, that Ron DeSantis is impersonally repelling from helicopters in order to save dogs in Fort Myers.
In order to demonstrate that he is not fit to run for the presidency in 2024 because they are scared of the governor of Florida and so they're just making things up at this point.
Well, meanwhile, controversy has broken out over my friend and colleague here, Jordan Peterson.
He went on Piers Morgan's show and he was asked specifically about Olivia Wilde's brand new movie, Don't Worry Darling, which is getting just excoriated by the critics, which is a shocker because she is one of the protected people, Olivia Wilde.
She's a feminist hero.
And it doesn't matter that this feminist hero made the actual star of that film, Florence Pugh, apparently extraordinarily uncomfortable on set because she was banging Florence Pugh's co-star, Harry Styles.
None of that matters because Olivia Wilde is a feminist hero for making a movie that basically suggests that men want to put women back in the kitchen, like it's the 1950s, etc.
Well, the movie, Don't Worry Darling, apparently, one of the stars, Chris Pine, According to Olivia Wilde is basically playing Jordan Peterson.
He's supposed to be a cult leader who's trying to create a mental... I don't want to give any spoilers for this dumb movie, but apparently he's trying to create some sort of mental system that people live in a kind of virtual reality whereby Young men can essentially train women to be put back into the kitchen.
And that's what Jordan Peterson wants.
And so she says that that character, that Chris Pine cult leader character is based on Jordan Peterson.
So Jordan was asked about this by Piers Morgan over on Sky News.
And he got rather emotional about the idea that he should not be attempting to reach out and help disaffected young men.
Here's what Jordan had to say.
The film director Olivia Wilde has a new movie out which she says is based on you, this insane man, this pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community.
Incel being these weirdo loner men who are despicable in many ways.
Is that you?
Are you the intellectual hero to these people?
Sure.
Why not?
You know, people have been after me for a long time because I've been speaking to disaffected young men.
You know, what a terrible thing to do that is.
I thought the marginalized were supposed to have a voice.
It's making you emotional.
Talk about it.
Well, God, you know.
It's very difficult to understand how demoralized people are.
And certainly, many young men are in that category.
And you get these casual insults, these incels.
What do they mean?
It's like, well, these men, they don't know how to make themselves attractive to women who are very picky.
And good for them.
Women, like, be picky.
That's your gift, man.
Demand high standards from your men.
Fair enough.
But all these men who are alienated, it's like they're lonesome and they don't know what to do.
And everyone piles abuse on them.
To the fact that Jordan gets emotional in favor of these young men, that he's attempting to give a sense of purpose.
This is what the media and the left have jumped on.
So there's a great hypocrisy here, right?
The media and the left, they suggest that masculinity, traditional masculinity is bad because traditional masculinity doesn't allow you to show your feelings.
Then here's Jordan Peterson, a hero to a lot of young men because he stands in favor of traditional masculinity and masculine roles.
And he's getting openly emotional, right?
He's tearing up while talking about these people who are disaffected.
So he's demonstrating to them that emotionality in public is actually not the end of the world and the left is angry at him for that.
But this goes to a broader point that is really dangerous in American life right now.
And that is that a huge swath of elite opinion makers in the United States, a huge swath of our media, Many members of the political left, they have decided that there's an entirely dispensable portion of the population, and this is young, disaffected men.
And that is having a radical impact on how people live.
I'm not just talking about men here.
I'm talking about women too.
It turns out that women are generally not in favor of androgynous, feminized men.
They do not like it.
The statistics on female happiness over the course of the last half century have not demonstrated increased female happiness with the androgynization of gender.
They have not created extraordinary levels of female happiness with later marriage and less childbearing and rearing.
It's not good for women.
It's particularly not good for men.
The stats on men right now are devastating in the United States.
David Brooks has a piece today in the New York Times titled, The Crisis of Men and Boys.
He says, if you've been paying attention to the social trends, you probably have some inkling that boys and men are struggling in the United States and across the globe.
They're struggling in the classroom.
American girls are 14 percentage points more likely to be school ready than boys at age five, controlling for parental characteristics.
By high school, two-thirds of the students in the top 10% of the class ranked by GPA are girls.
Roughly two-thirds of the students at the lowest decile are boys.
In 2020, at the 16 top American law schools, not a single one of the flagship law reviews had a man as editor-in-chief.
Men are struggling in the workplace.
Between three American men with only a high school diploma, 10 million men is now out of the labor force.
The biggest drop in employment is among young men aged 25 to 34.
Men who entered the workforce in 1983 will earn about 10% less in real terms in their lifetimes than those who started one generation earlier.
Over the same period, women's lifetime earnings have increased 33%.
Pretty much all of the income gains middle class American families have enjoyed since 1970 are because of increases in women's earnings.
Now, all of that would be perfectly well and good if the net happiness here were up.
It is not.
Men are also struggling physically.
Men account for close to three out of every four deaths of despair, suicide, and drug overdoses.
For every 100 middle-aged women who die of COVID up to mid-September 2021, there are 184 middle-aged men who died.
Richard Reeves' new book, Of Boys and Men, is a landmark, one of the most important books of the year, not only because it's a comprehensive look at the male crisis, but also because it searches for the roots of that crisis and offers solutions.
Policies and programs designed to promote social mobility often work for women, but not men.
Reeves, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, that's a liberal think tank, visited Kalamazoo, Michigan, where, thanks to a donor, high school graduates get to go to colleges in the state for free.
The program increased the number of women getting college degrees by 45%.
The men's graduation rates remained flat.
Reeves lists a whole series of programs from early childhood education to college support efforts that produced impressive gains for women, but did not boost men.
There are many reasons men are struggling.
According to David Brooks, for example, the decline in manufacturing jobs that put a high value on physical strength, the rise of service sector jobs.
But I was struck by the theme of demoralization that wafts through the book.
Reeves talked to men in Kalamazoo about why women were leaping ahead.
They said women are more motivated, work harder, plan ahead better.
But this isn't a matter of individual responsibility.
There's something in modern culture that is producing an aspiration gap.
Many men just seem less ambitious.
More men are leading haphazard and lonely lives.
Roughly 15% of men say they have no close friends, up from 3% in 1990.
One in five fathers doesn't live with his children.
In 2014, more young men were living with their parents than with a wife or partner.
Apparently, even many who are married are not ideal mates.
Wives are now twice as likely to initiate divorces as their husband.
So David Brooks says, ambition doesn't just happen, it has to be fired.
What?
The culture is still searching for a modern masculine ideal.
It is not instilling in many boys the nurturing and emotional skills that are so desperately important today.
A system that labels more than a fifth of all boys developmentally disabled is not instilling in them a sense of confidence and competence.
Masculinity has gone haywire.
And then of course he adds the obligatory because he's David Brooks, rip on Republicans.
Reverting to pseudo-macho cartoons like Donald Trump and Josh Hawley doesn't help.
What?
I was completely unaware that the alternatives here were the complete feminization of men.
And Donald Trump.
I love that.
He's unwilling to acknowledge the obvious.
What has happened here is the sexual revolution has castrated men in terms of their ambition, in terms of their mobility.
That is what the sexual revolution did, and it did not make women happier.
That is the dirty little secret here.
The second wave, third wave feminist movement did not make women happier, and it made men a lot unhappier.
And what we are seeing here is the impact of that.
David Brooks is afraid to say it, because if you say that sort of thing, people get very angry at you.
You violated the rules.
Now, I'm not making the case that women shouldn't be in the workplace, that they shouldn't be able to get the jobs that they want.
I'm making the case that traditional social roles, traditional gender roles absolutely matter.
Again, I will set my wife as a perfect example of this.
My wife is a doctor.
She's a primary care physician.
I took care of the kids while she was in medical school.
I remember at 7 o'clock every night I would drive our two very young children at the time, my daughter was all of about two and a half years old and my son was a newborn, and I would drive them to the hospital where she was in residency so she could see them for like 25 minutes while she ate her dinner and then she would head back inside to the residency program.
So I'm very much in favor of the idea that women should be able to work the jobs that they want to work.
Also, life is a balance and my wife does that beautifully.
My wife took off time to take care of both of our kids when they were babies.
And now, because she has the ability to, she wants to work part-time so she can spend more time with the kids.
This is not a rare coincidence.
This is kind of the ideal life as women seek to live it.
But the feminist movement has told women that all of that is very bad.
Having a husband is bad.
It's a sign that you are weak as a woman.
Having children is really bad.
The height of being a woman is to have an abortion.
I'm not just saying that, understand.
I'm talking about the height of female aspiration, according to many members of the left, is abortion.
For example, the Women's March, literally yesterday, tweeted out, this is a direct quote, quote, we are not just pro-choice, we are proudly, unapologetically pro-abortion.
There's a difference there.
They're not even saying women should be able to make the decisions.
Whatever you think of the pro-life versus pro-choice position, they're not even saying that.
They're saying abortion is an absolute good.
Women are doing something better for themselves if they decide not to engage in these roles.
That's nothing new.
And that was something that was said by Simone Duvalier going all the way back to like the 1960s, talking about the idea that women should be prohibited.
from childbearing and childrearing because too many women, if allowed to make that decision, would make that decision.
And that would re-instill all of these social roles and values that actually make life worth living and make life quite beautiful.
In order to achieve complete equality and flattening, what you really need to do is prevent women from getting involved in marriage, getting involved in having kids.
What you have to do is deprive men of their social role and deprive women of their social role and turn everybody into an interchangeable widget.
And this has dramatic effects.
The most obvious effects are on men.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
First, let's talk about the fact that people are feeling increasingly unsafe these days, not just because of political polarization, but also because crime rates are actually up pretty significantly in a lot of major urban areas around the United States.
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Owning a gun under the Second Amendment is not enough.
You have to know how to use it, and you have to know when to use it, and you have to have the legal protection if, God forbid, you actually have to use it.
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The sexual revolution's effect on men has been extraordinarily bad.
Now, there are a lot of men out there who took advantage of the sexual revolution.
It turns out that sexual liberation, really good for horny men.
The availability of people to have sex with, who you are not married to, skyrocketed.
So for guys who wanted to have sex with lots and lots of partners, which is many, many men, This was just a boon.
It was wonderful for them.
But it also robbed men of their soul because the entire idea of traditional masculinity is that men have aggressive instincts.
Men have aggressive, physical, sexual, work instincts.
Men are more aggressive.
They have testosterone.
This is evolutionary biology.
This is not stereotyping.
It's true among primates.
It's true among human beings.
And because of that, we have evolved, as a species, many institutions that are designed to channel that traditional masculine aggressive energy toward good purposes.
Toward defending hearth and home.
I said this about the military, got ripped earlier this week.
Well, it's perfectly obvious that this is the case.
That military service, for example, was a traditionally male pursuit.
And that was not a bad thing.
Because men are the ones who are going to charge hills and kill each other on behalf of hearth and home.
As a general rule throughout human history, there are exceptions because every rule has exceptions, but that does not mean the rule does not exist.
So we created all of these institutions ranging from military service to fatherhood and the man staying in the home and monogamy and taking care of the kids.
And we gave men roles.
That did not mean that we were supposed to let men get away with toxic masculinity.
Toxic masculinity would be, you know, actual violence against women or being promiscuous or abandoning your children.
We see a lot more toxic masculinity, by the way, in the aftermath of the sexual revolution than we saw before.
Because I consider it toxic masculinity to knock up a woman and then leave your child and abandon them.
That's like the worst thing that you can do to a woman and to the child.
And we see a lot of that these days.
And we're told that that is liberation.
It's not liberation for the woman.
Who's now taking care of the kid by herself?
It ain't liberation for the child who doesn't have a father.
And it's not liberation for the man either.
Because it turns out that all it does is it frees him to be a perennial adolescent who is unhappy and useless.
What Jordan Peterson says is the same thing that I say.
The burdens that you take on in life, the obligations you take on in life with regard to roles and family and children, these are what liberate you.
They are what give you fulfillment.
We are a liberation-centered society in which the only thing that matters is your interior feeling at any given point in time.
Fulfillment does not come from that interior sense of happiness at any given point in time.
The man who eats tons of ice cream and dies at age 35 of a heart attack because of morbid obesity did not live a happy life.
Even though every time he ate the ice cream he felt really good about himself.
Human beings have always understood for literally all the time that there is a difference between the immediate joy of doing a thing that brings you happiness and the lifelong joy of taking on obligations that are very difficult and that make your life worse in many ways, but in the end make your life a hell of a lot better.
That's what it's like to be married.
That's what it's like to have kids.
You give up something and what you get in return is something far greater.
And then we blew up those institutions in the name of this liberal utopian ideal of atomistic individualism in which the sexual identity that you take on is the most important thing in life.
That is the only thing that matters in life.
And again, the results have been dire.
They've been disastrous for Western civilization as a whole.
Nicholas Eberstadt has a good book out called Men Without Work.
He works at American Enterprise Institute, and that book is based on an essay he wrote in January of 2018, talking about how American men are simply falling apart.
He says the catastrophe is the collapse of work for men.
In the half century between 1965 and 2015, work rates for the American male spiraled relentlessly downward.
An ominous migration commenced, a flight from work In which ever greater numbers of working age men exited the labor force altogether.
America is now home to an ever-growing army of jobless men no longer even looking for work.
Over 7 million between ages 25 and 55, the traditional prime of working life.
Now, there are some people who are blaming offshoring of jobs to China, right?
It's an easy, convenient excuse.
But the reality is, we have far more open jobs in this country than we have people who are willing to seek those open jobs.
That's been true for years in the United States.
The labor force participation rate in this country is in the mid 60s.
We're talking for working age people in the United States.
We have literally millions and millions, maybe tens of millions of men who are on disability who are not in fact disabled.
We have tons of men who are on unemployment who don't need to be on unemployment.
How big is our men without work problem today?
Consider a single fact.
In 2015, the work rate for American males aged 25 to 54 was slightly lower than it had been in 1940 at the tail end of the Great Depression.
We're talking when the overall unemployment rate in 1940 was like 11% in the United States.
Now, in 2015, you have an overall unemployment rate of like 5%.
And you still have a work rate that is lower for men than in 1940.
According to the latest official jobs report data available in 2018, the work rate for prime age men in November 2017 was still below the 1940 level.
The progressive detachment of ever larger numbers of adult men from the reality and routines of regular paid labor poses a self-evident threat to our nation's future prosperity.
It can only result in lower living standards, greater economic disparities, and slower economic growth than we might otherwise expect.
The troubles posed by the male flight from work, says Nick Dieberstadt, are by no means solely economic.
It's also a social crisis and a moral crisis.
The growing incapability of grown men to function as breadwinners cannot help but undermine the American family.
By the way, you know what creates the capacity for men to act as breadwinners?
Marriage.
Family.
Obligations.
People who lean on you.
And so the idea of radical independence, where people don't lean on each other, I lean on my wife, she leans on me, that is the nature of the marriage.
In Hebrew, the word for love is ahava.
The root of that word is hav, which means to give.
The root of love is giving.
And one thing that you can give your spouse is your vulnerability.
One thing that you can give your spouse is a sense that you need your spouse.
The notion that spouses are people who actually don't need each other.
They just sort of get together for a contractual arrangement.
It's not true.
It has never been true.
And modern society, once you do that, then actually you get far less out of a marriage than you are putting into the marriage.
There's no reason to get married at all.
You're basically roommates who have sex with one another.
That's not a basis on which to build a happy life.
Among those who should be most capable of shouldering the burdens of civic responsibilities, all of this, says Nicky Burstad, encourages sloth, idleness, and vice is perhaps more insidious.
Whether we choose to recognize it or not, this feature of the American condition, the new men without work normal, is inimical to our tradition.
It is subversive of our national ethos, arguably even of our civilization.
You want to know why you have seen vast increases in pornography use among young men in the United States?
It is not mere availability.
It is also because they are not involved in institutions like family, like church, that actually give them something to do.
You want to know why men are increasingly abusing drugs?
This would be the reason.
You want to know why suicidal ideation is up among men?
This would be the reason.
Going all the way back to Emile Durkheim, there's been a widespread sociological understanding that societal institutions hem in and provide a rationale for existence.
When you blow up all of those rules, which is what the sexual revolution was about, it wasn't about establishing anything good or new.
It was about the idea that you have to blow up all these things because all rules and rules are inhibitions that are placed upon your true self.
But what if your true self, that aimless, formless, chaotic sexual impulse, what if that doesn't make you happy?
And what if a society that pushes that is not geared toward human happiness?
What if it's offering you the sugar high, but then you die of morbid obesity at age 35?
Because that's exactly what's going on in our society right now.
And you can see it pretty much everywhere.
You can see it in the way that companies now market.
And so, for example, Virgin Airlines put out an ad talking about how they are the queerest airline.
This is the thing they are very, very proud of.
Because your identity is in, apparently, the clothes that you wear, your sexual activity, your gender identity.
It is not in Actually like a social role and reinstilling that social role because remember there are children on these flights who are now going to be asking mommy and daddy why it is that men are wearing women's clothing and pretending to be women.
No, it's all about the idea that you, all human beings, are basically fully formed adults who are allowed to, and should, act as children with regard to their sexual impulse.
That is the thing that matters most of all.
The world is supposed to reflect you.
Social roles are an inhibition.
The world is supposed to reflect your innermost identity, and that's the case over at Virgin Airlines.
It says, your identity, your choice, because they're now allowing all of the members of their staff to dress in whatever they want.
And so now you've got women who are dressing as men and men who are dressing as women.
Our new uniform code, says Virgin Airlines.
Virgin Atlantic, see the world.
Oh, well, isn't that great?
And then you have a man who is dressed in women's clothing at the end of that.
Again, when you completely obliterate the distinction between the sexes, you lose the rationale for there being different sexes.
You lose the social institutions that have evolved over the course of literally hundreds of thousands of years.
When you have the Planned Parenthood Director of Trans Care out there saying, in a well-accepted viewpoint on the left now, that men get pregnant, if there's no distinction between men and women, then what exactly is the role of men, and what exactly is the role of women, and why should men take on additional obligation?
Here's the testimony of Planned Parenthood's Director of Trans Care, Dr. Bhavik Kumar.
Dr. Kumar, can biological men become pregnant and give birth?
So, men can have pregnancies, especially trans men?
Okay, so the question was, can a biological man give birth?
And the noted doctor here just ignores the question entirely and pretends that men can have babies and give birth.
Rules matter.
Rules matter.
Because these are things that give us purpose in life.
A man on a desert island by himself has no rules.
He has no roles.
He is also going to be a deeply unhappy human being.
Without those roles, without any sort of purpose or meaning, people fall apart.
And this is why what we're seeing now is an upswing, a sort of return to the idea that maybe some more traditional forms of, for example, courtship might be a good thing.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Alright, so I'm going to speak to a segment of my audience I've never directly addressed before.
Frat guys.
Sup bros.
I may not be one of you, but in some ways, we're not so different.
You and I, we're both unfairly portrayed by the media, and we're both among the men most hated by woke razor companies and leftist ideologies, which is unfortunate when you consider that frats raise millions of bucks every year for charity.
One Virginia Tech frat alone raised $255,000 for St.
Jude's Children's Hospital last year.
With that influence in mind, I thought I'd share an idea I had.
You know, Jeremy Razor's contest to win the car.
You know, the one where you can win Jeremy's McLaren?
Well, we get you don't want to shuttle everyone around in a two-seater sports car.
That's why if you win, you can take the $250,000 cash prize instead.
Wow.
I'm sure your imagination will paint a picture of all the fun and good a quarter million bucks could do for you and your friends.
Listen, most of the top players in the contest still have not hit the 10 referral mark.
So there's plenty of opportunity for you to jump into the race and take all that cash.
Just go to jeremysrazors.com slash play to get your referral link.
Come November 1st, 2022, we will see which of you is the most woke-free frat in America.
Terms and conditions do apply.
So, you know, it turns out that blowing up rolls isn't always the most wonderful thing for humanity.
The media have been attempting to sort of bury the lead in this particular story, but apparently the U.S.
Army's first transgender officer and his wife, a Maryland doctor, were indicted on conspiracy charges Wednesday for allegedly attempting to transfer confidential military medical information to Russia.
The eight-count indictment was unsealed Thursday upon the arrest of the defendants, Major Jamie Lee Henry and anesthesiologist Anna Gabrielin.
According to a Department of Justice press release, the Army granted Henry's request to officially change his name in accordance with his gender preference in 2015 prior to Henry's case, identifying as a sex different than the one on one's birth certificate made a soldier unfit for military service warranting discharge.
Gabrielian worked at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, referred to as Medical Institution 1 in the indictment, located in Baltimore, Maryland.
Henry, who is also a doctor, worked as a staff internist stationed at Fort Bragg.
The pair are accused of stealing patient health files from Johns Hopkins in Fort Bragg and giving them to an individual they believe to be working for the Russian government.
So, so much historicness happening in the U.S.
Army.
That is just, that is excellent stuff.
Okay, so, here's the thing.
As we blow up all of these traditional gender roles, as we blow all this up, and as people become more unhappy, as men drop out of the workforce and lose their purpose, as women They become essentially working widgets.
They become the inputs for capitalist growth without actually fulfilling many of the things that drive women in life.
And they were lied to by the feminist movement, by the way.
They were told they could have it all.
It turns out you cannot.
Because the one thing on planet Earth that is finite is time.
You can always make more resources.
You can always make more money.
You cannot make more time.
And so you actually have to balance your life.
Well, it turns out people are really unhappy.
And so there's now a newfound embrace.
You can't call it this.
You can't say that it's traditional Judeo-Christian values.
You can't say that because it alienates too many people.
But there is a newfound embrace of that happening because, again, those values are rooted in institutions that have been evolved over the course of hundreds of thousands of years to be good for human beings.
Really good essay today by a person named Michal Liebowitz, an editorial assistant over at the New York Times op-ed section, called Dating is Broken, Going Retro Could Fix It.
Quote, Among the traditional rights of an all-American high school experience is the taking and judging of yearbook photos.
And in this, my all-girls Orthodox Jewish school is no exception.
Our dialogue as we swap prints was more fiddler on the roof than sweet valley high.
Are you going to use that for your shidduch resume?
Shadok resume is how people basically date in the Orthodox Jewish community.
So you put together an actual resume with a picture on it and you submit it to what's called a Shadokon, which is like a third party person who then thinks of all the people they know who are your age and they fix them up because they're fixing you up not to have sex with one another.
They're fixing you up for the possibility of shared values, marriage, and children.
In other words, dating with a purpose.
It turns out that doing everything with a purpose is significantly better for human fulfillment than doing things without a purpose.
All of Western life seems to be predicated now on the opposite.
Purpose hems you in.
No purpose makes you free.
No purpose also makes you depressed and suicidal as a general rule.
It was a joke, mostly.
Though many of my peers, she says, would go on to make the dating profiles favored by orthodox matchmakers, most wouldn't do so for more than a few years.
By then, our 17-year-old acne-studied punim would be poor likenesses.
But the joke reflected something that was true.
Even as high schoolers, many of us knew how we planned to meet our spouses.
And it wasn't going to be the loosey-goosey way the secular world did it.
Well, there's also something else there.
In orthodox Jewish high school, you think about getting married.
You're 17, you're already thinking about marriage when you go to an Orthodox Jewish high school.
This is true in Catholic high schools as well.
This is true in religious Protestant high schools.
Basically religious, it's true in madrasas, religious institutions in the United States.
By the time you hit close to marriageable age, which is 18 and up, you're already thinking about marriage, which means that you're already thinking about the values, not just the looks, but the values of the person who you want to be with.
And this means that you are already channeling your life toward a particular purpose.
You know, the highest purpose that we were put on God's green earth to do, which is to have children and raise them correctly.
It's been odd the past several years watching the ways the secular mainstream has latched, tentatively, faddishly, onto traditional dating practices.
There's the slew of matchmaking companies sorting out the love lives of the rich and famous, the articles declaring matchmaking is hot again, the Netflix carousel filled with shows casting back to an older, if partly imagined, vision of romance.
Indian matchmaking married at first sight, Bridgerton.
A reacquaintance with more traditional forms of meeting and falling in love makes me hopeful.
I see signs of a culture grasping for things it rightly needs.
In today's largely online world, burnout, opacity, and callousness define dating, reflecting the values of a society that prizes individualism, privacy, and choice in nearly all things, including matters of the heart.
Well, dating is more convenient than it has ever been.
People find dates while sitting on the toilet.
It is clearly falling short.
There are elements of traditional dating culture that can provide solutions, not just to the way we find people to date, but also to the way we navigate relationships.
Here's the thing.
What traditional dating does, because you're literally asking yourself, is this a person I wish to have children with?
Because of that, this actually incentivizes men to be better.
When it turns out that dating is just about the sexual pleasure to be obtained from a new partner at any given point, the most attractive of both sexes will tend to do the best, obviously.
When it comes to marriage, now you can actually better yourself in certain ways.
It's funny, I was watching a Bill Burr comedy special last night.
And he was talking about how women tear each other down, how they how women are very nasty to each other privately.
And then they will say to somebody that they'll say that they are fat positive, their body positive.
But meanwhile, behind their back, they'll talk about how she just looks terrible.
I would never look like that.
But what Bill Burr says, he says, women look at models very often like, you know, that's setting up unrealistic expectations for men.
And he says, yeah, like every time I look at Brad Pitt on screen, he takes off his shirt.
I'm not like, man, they're setting up unrealistic expectations for me.
He's like, I know I'm overweight.
I'm bald.
I'm orange.
And so I had to get really good at comedy in order to get chicks.
Hey, this is actually the way.
Put aside the kind of comedic job description there.
This is the way that men typically have bettered themselves to make yourself more attractive to the opposite sex.
This means get an education.
Get a job.
Demonstrate that you are responsible.
Do the things that would demonstrate that you are capable and worthy of having children with a particular woman.
By the way, exactly what Jordan Peterson says.
He says women should be picky.
In fact, one of the bigger problems right now is that women are not particularly picky about the men that they date because they're not dating for marriage.
They're not dating for kids.
So what does that mean?
It means no one is actually dating with an eye toward upping their social value as an aspect of getting married.
As an aspect of having kids.
Purpose is not part of the equation.
This columnist for the New York Times, Michal Iwicz, says it's worth asking, is it time to court again?
In October 2019, Pew conducted a survey to understand Americans' attitudes toward romantic relationships.
Most daters told Pew their romantic lives weren't going well.
Three quarters of respondents said it was difficult to find people to date.
When asked why finding a date was so difficult, reasons varied by gender.
Women tended to say it's challenging to find someone who meets their expectations or is looking for the same type of relationship.
Men mostly said they have trouble approaching people.
These complaints seem counterintuitive.
Internet dating promises an abundance of choice to meet any standard, a profusion of filters to suit any relationship, low barriers to reaching out to relieve any anxiety.
But now, as I found when I talked to people about what it's like to date, the theoretical abundance of options, filters, low barriers to engagement doesn't translate to high-quality interactions.
Instead, daters find themselves caught in a cycle of unanswered messages and dead-end interactions contributing to a ubiquitous feeling of dating app burnout.
Again, this is because men and women are typically looking for different things when they are dating unless you have institutions that incentivize men to look for the correct things when they are dating.
Yes, that institution of marriage.
It turns out that the general societal standard that applied for most of human history, which was you are supposed to You're supposed to put off your sex life until you get married.
That this was a really good disincentive to men simply looking to get laid.
That they were actually going to have to sacrifice something and demonstrate that they were worthwhile.
It's an amazing thing.
McCall Liebowitz says one of the ironies of modern dating is that while it's not uncommon to date for months or even years without broaching the big questions about marriage and children, other forms of intimacy tend to be embraced more quickly.
Almost all Americans have sex before getting married.
That's been true for decades.
But the normalization of casual sex is newer.
It's not clear newer norms around having sex casually or very soon after meeting are really helping those who ultimately want lasting, committed relationships.
I remember noting this while watching Friends back in the 1990s.
In the religious community, here's how it goes.
You fall in love, you get married, you have sex.
That is the order of events in traditional communities.
Fall in love, get married, have sex.
And in the most traditional communities, sometimes it is get married, fall in love, have sex.
But sex is the last thing you do.
In the modern community, the way that it works is have sex, Maybe fall in love and maybe, maybe you may get married.
So you'll have the most intimate relationship that you can have with a person.
And then you'll be like, man, I'm really nervous about saying I love you.
You wonder why things are failing?
You wonder why women are unhappy and men are purposeless?
I can't imagine why.
I can't imagine why.
The sexual revolution has crippled men and women.
It has made men and women both unhappier.
And so no matter how pissed the left is at Jordan Peterson, the reason they're really pissed at Jordan Peterson is he's reminding them of a simple fact.
The social standards that they have said was the bargain You're supposed to blow up all these institutions?
You're supposed to completely reshape society around a promise?
Jordan is noting that the cost of that promise is really high.
And it's not just to quote-unquote incels.
It's to everyone.
And that's why people are pissed at Jordan.
That's why people are angry at Jordan.
That's why people are angry at me for saying stuff like this.
But reality always wins.
Reality always wins.
And the utopian stupidity of atomistic individualism when it comes to sexual liberation is crippling societies.
Those societies are falling apart.
That shouldn't be a shock.
When you run directly into the teeth of reality, reality tends to bite.
Alrighty, guys, the rest of the show is continuing.
Now you're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be getting into Vladimir Putin ramping up the aggression.
Plus, Berkeley apparently now has a Jew-free zone.
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