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March 13, 2021 - Epoch Times
54:46
Dr. Warren Farrell: Why Biden’s New Gender Policy Council Is Sexist | American Thought Leaders
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President Joe Biden recently established a new Gender Policy Council to advance, quote, equal rights and opportunity for women and girls.
I just was shocked that a man who talks about division and unity and diversity and inclusion and equity would leave out boys and men.
Boys today are falling behind girls.
They're significantly more likely to drop out of school, to fall into homelessness, and to end up in prison, says Dr.
Warren Farrell.
Between the ages of 15 and 19, they committed suicide four times as often as girls.
Dr.
Farrell has been researching and writing about gender issues since the 1960s.
A longtime feminist, he is the only man to be elected three times to the board of directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City.
But he believes the new Gender Policy Council is grossly misguided and leaves out the most vulnerable, including black men, the majority of whom grew up without a father.
The single biggest predictor of suicide was being raised without a dad.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Warren Farrell, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
I loved our last interview, so I'm really looking very forward to this one.
No, it was a great interview.
I remember it well.
It's almost two years ago that we did that.
It's quite incredible how time passes.
You know, I saw this new op-ed.
Well, it's not that new now.
It's perhaps, you know, three weeks old.
And it just struck me that you are a very unlikely critic of a Gender Policy Council.
How did this all come about?
Yes, well, unlikely critic, because I was on the board of directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City.
And so one would think that, you know, therefore, anything that was focused on women and girls, I would be a very strong supporter of.
But the White House Gender Policy Council, which was signed into an executive order this week, The theoretical stated goal by virtue of it being called a White House Gender Policy Council would be presumably to help both genders in areas where they're having problems.
But the Gender Policy Council's mission is to focus only on women and girls.
Its second mission is for racial justice.
So for me, if you were to ask your children, five-year-olds, if you said, are there boys?
Yes, of course, mommy, there's boys.
Are there girls?
Yes, of course, mommy, there's girls.
So what are there?
Just girls or just boys?
There's both, mommy.
What's the matter with you?
You know, your five, six-year-old would know this, yet President Biden apparently doesn't.
He does, of course, but he feels that the only people that have issues that are worth paying attention to on a policy level are women and girls, as opposed to understanding.
This leaves out the entire black male population.
If you go to any city and you look at the homeless population, a very high percentage will be black males.
The prison population, a very high percentage will be black males.
And what we've known since 1965, the year of the Moynihan Report, is that the black male population is not a problem in the inner city doing crime because of Being black, but rather it was only that 25% of the black male population that was raised in fatherless families that were what I call dad deprived.
That was the portion of the black population that was created, committing the crimes and selling the drugs and joining the gangs.
And now, in the Caucasian population, The percentage of children who are raised without dad involvement is higher, 32% now, than it was in 1965 when the Moynihan Report came out and it was 25%.
The black population's fatherlessness is now double what it was then, 25% to 50%.
So you can get some idea of what President Biden is leaving out if he doesn't attend to the importance of fathers and the importance of families He is basically helping to create the crimes that he will then be cleaning up, the mental health problems that will then be cleaning up.
And the fastest way to a big government is to eliminate dad and make the government into a substitute husband.
And so I just was shocked that a man who talks about division and unity and diversity and inclusion and equity would leave out boys and men Both in the black community and the white community, the Hispanic community, and in the LGBTQ community.
You're not protected by the Gender Policy Council if you're an LGBTQ male, just female.
You're not protected if you're a black person if you're male, just if you're female.
And that is such a travesty.
This is not...
What I joined the National Organization for Women for.
I joined it for genuine equality to free both sexes from the rigid roles of the past to more flexible roles for their future.
And so I feel, I really feel deeply sad.
It's like helping to raise a child, which is, you know, this was everybody I loved and cared for was a feminist.
And seeing that child turn toxic and then say that they're a victim, even as they are blaming other people and neglecting other people.
So when we interviewed last time, we were talking about your book, The Boy Crisis.
And so maybe you can actually explain, again, for the benefit of our audiences, it's not necessarily obvious, based on, you know, the readily available information or the information that's, you know, say broadcast through our media and society, that there is a boy crisis.
So what is that exactly?
And why is it black men that are disproportionately affected?
Yes.
Well, first, when I first started the research for the boy crisis, I assumed it was mostly in the United States.
I eventually found out from United Nations studies that it is in all 53 of the largest developed nations, boys are falling behind girls in every academic subject, but especially in reading and writing.
And reading and writing among academic subjects are the two biggest predictors of success or failure.
And so I saw this, which surprised me, and I said, why is it in the developed nations?
And I'll come back to that in a moment as to why.
But then I started looking about, you know, if boys are doing badly in school, this has more implications than just at school.
So I then saw that boys were far more likely to drop out of school, and that the boys who dropped out of school were more than 20% likely to be unemployed in their 20s, which is five times the unemployment rate pre-COVID, That is normal.
And so I started looking at one factor after the other, then started looking at suicide rates and saw that suicide rates were much higher among boys and girls.
So, for example, when boys and girls are nine, they commit suicide very rarely and equally to each other.
Between the ages of 10 and 14, I saw that they committed suicide twice as often as girls.
Between the ages of 15 and 19, they committed suicide four times as often as girls.
And between the ages of 20 and 25, they committed suicide five times as often as girls.
I would eventually find out that suicide was very much the single biggest cause predictor of suicide was being raised without a dad.
And so I then started looking at other issues like crime and prisons.
I had run for governor some years ago and I was speaking to prison populations and I started, one of the questions I would ask the prison populations is how many of you were raised with an actively involved father?
Usually about three or four percent of the hands of the prisoners went up.
How many of you were raised with minimal or no father involvement?
The hands flooded.
Then I would talk with the prisoners about, you know, what is it that fathers bring to the parenting process that is so important?
And I would explain things like boundary enforcement that leads to postponed gratification.
And after I gave these explanations as to, you know, what is the value, the positive value, I would explain to the prisoners of roughhousing.
How does roughhousing produce intimacy?
And empathy, rather, and the ability to make a decision between being assertive and aggressive.
And I had prisoners with tattoos, with rings in their ears, muscles that I'll never have, come up to me afterwards and say, Dr.
Farrell, can I talk to you for a moment?
And they'd pull me aside and their tears would start coming out of their eyes.
Saying, you know, I thought I was always a waste.
I thought I just deserved to spend my life in prison.
For the first time in my life, I'm feeling needed.
I'm feeling like I need to get out of prison, get back to my children, and help them have the skill sets to not make the mistakes that I had made.
And so, you know, I began to see that when you tell men that they are needed through every world war, you know, men were willing to go and fight so we wouldn't all be under Nazi rule.
And be willing to die, and be willing to be disposable as part of their male obligation.
And when you tell men they're needed, they come forward.
But we are not telling men today that they're needed.
We're telling men that they're full of male privilege, that they're the oppressors, that they're part of the patriarchy, and that the future is female.
And you send a 14, 15-year-old boy to school and you tell him the future is female, this doesn't make him feel inspired.
To be involved in the world and if you tell him that there's no need for him as a father that all fathers are jerks this does not inspire him to be engaged as a dad and Absolutely fascinating.
We talked a little bit about this a couple of years back.
It's incredible to hear this again.
And so one would expect, and I'm kind of beginning to see your concern about this new council, given that this critical issue doesn't seem to be addressed by society.
So are there places in the country or are there programs in the country that are actually dealing with this, in your view, that Perhaps the administration could learn from.
Yes, a lot of faith-based communities are seeing how when there's a lack of dad involvement, there are problems.
I remember speaking to a faith-based community in Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York, and it was a 100% black community.
And as I'm walking out, You know, I turn around and I see a huge black image of Jesus.
And then the minister got together with me and 28 boys that had been involved in four different men's groups, boys groups.
And as I talked to the boys, almost all of them had been in prison.
And almost all of them told me that They would still be doing the things that led to them being in prison if it wasn't for their belief in God and if it wasn't for the ministry and the way that the minister took each of them aside and paid attention to them each individually in a sense helped them become that not only was God a father figure but the minister was a father figure and of those boys only one of them out of the 28 had a significant amount of father involvement
And I just sort of saw how important those faith-based communities were to these boys.
I then have looked at so many other dimensions of help.
There are fathers groups in the country, and there's a group called Boys to Men, a group called the Mankind Project, a group called Young Men's Ultimate Weekend.
These are groups that are really helping boys through Rituals to help them make the transition to manhood.
But the others, boys to men in particular, are doing very good work with mentoring.
And now I've been working with them not just to help boys have a mentor, but the research shows that the best way to have a boy developed responsibly is for to find a boy who's younger than he is to mentor.
That once a boy starts mentoring another boy, he has a reason to not take drugs, to not drink, to not be irresponsible, to do his homework because he wants the boy he's mentoring to be proud of him.
So he becomes like a mini parent.
We all know how once we have children, we go from being boys to men in many ways because we really start saying, I have responsibilities now.
I can't just think of myself.
And so I'm working with boys to men to develop more, to have each boy have somebody that he can be of help to.
By the way, if you're a single mom listening to this, the most important single way that you can help your son and daughter is to get the biological father involved.
And the easiest way to get the biological father involved is to understand what he contributes.
That balances out what you contribute.
You're much more likely, if things are on average, you're more likely to be protective and nurturing and facilitative of your children's gifts and talents.
The dad is much more likely to be tough love, to enforce boundaries, to do things like the roughhousing that I was talking about before.
Both of these have positive purposes and the children I found that when I did the research for the boy crisis, the children that I found that did the best have what I call checks and balance parenting and where there's the mother's contributions are paid attention to and respected and the dad's contributions are paid attention to and respected and the parents negotiate the difference.
Mom wants the children not to climb too high on the tree in the backyard.
Dad says climbing the tree will be good for the child.
It turns out that climbing the tree will be good for the child.
However, if the child falls out of the tree at a high level and there's nobody there to cushion the fall, that may be the end of the child.
And so the balancing, the balance between yes, The child can climb the tree faster at a younger age than the mother is comfortable with, but maybe the dad needs to be under the tree and maybe there's certain parts of the tree that should be out of bounds and maybe the dad shouldn't have his cell phone with him while he's looking at protecting the child.
Then the child gets what the benefits are both are.
But if you can't get the biological dad involved, then make sure you get your children involved in sports.
Not just team sports that are organized.
That helps prepare them to be effective in a corporation.
But also pick up team sports where they have to create their own rules, decide which friends they're going to trust, which friends they're not going to trust.
And also single sports where it takes just largely your effort like tennis or gymnastics to To succeed at that sport.
You have a team, but you're contributing to the team largely through your own efforts.
That's what I call the liberal arts of sports.
Get your children involved in all of those sports.
They are very good for child development.
Get them involved in Boy Scouts.
Get them involved in boys clubs.
Get them involved in things where they're helping other people.
Make sure Thanksgiving isn't about them and the family only.
But make sure Thanksgiving and other days are days where they go out to the communities of poorer people and see how they're living and help them out, give them food, have them contribute.
The more you have your children contribute to others, the less self-centered they become.
No, that's absolutely fascinating.
And of course, these don't need to be faith-based groups, right?
Correct.
Oh, absolutely not.
But faith-based groups are often helpful because when people don't have a father...
The belief in a father and a guiding force combined with a minister that isn't just good at giving sermons, but is good at after he or she gives a sermon, comes down and sees the gifts that your son has and spends time with him as an individual.
And yes, it should be a male minister if it's a son that is the person who That is having some of the issues of the boy crisis.
That's really fascinating.
I may have to play a bit devil's advocate here, but the other thing that struck me as you were speaking is that you describe the gender roles in a very traditional way.
In your mind, is that how it needs to be?
Definitely not.
Historically speaking, we had traditional gender roles.
Raised children.
Men raised money.
Neither sex had freedom to be whoever they wanted to be.
That was when we needed a very high percentage of males to be soldiers and to go off into either risk being killed or killing and being killed.
And so males had to sort of forget about what they felt and what they wanted to be and who they were.
They had to be willing to be disposable.
The essence of masculinity was to prepare yourself to be disposable, which is why feminist perspectives on that, like men have male privilege, well being disposable is not quite male privilege.
But that was when we had a very strong demand for large numbers of men to be willing to die in war or to be the sole breadwinners.
Now women are sharing much more of that breadwinning burden, so men can be freer to do things that they love to do, As well as just things that they need to do.
So the ideal is that a father and a mother look at their children and discover what their natural personalities are, and then help them have the discipline to fulfill those natural personalities.
Most of the time, men will be more likely to be certain things and women more likely others.
But there's a lot of fantastic potential for female engineers.
There's a lot of fantastic potential for men being full-time dads.
And so a woman, for example, who wants to be what is called a have-it-all woman, and she wants to break through glass ceilings.
She's talented, and she's strong, and she's persevering.
She needs to look for a man as a husband who is...
Who is a caring, nurturing man, but usually women who are successful look for men who are even more successful.
And the problem is that there's two parents who are away from home becoming very successful, and no one is really giving children the nurturance that they need.
So reversing roles is something that we have the freedom to do for the first time in history, and it can be very enhancing to both sexes.
Not a need for a women's movement blaming men and not a need for a men's movement blaming women.
We have a need for a gender liberation movement freeing both sexes from the rigid roles of the past for more flexible roles for our future.
Dr.
Farrell, as you were speaking earlier, I was also reminded of something we discussed offline, which was, you know, in the previous administration, you had visited the White House to provide some guidance.
You described a meeting to me, which you had with someone from the Attorney General's office discussing the realities in women's shelters.
And I'm wondering if you could actually speak to that.
I thought it was very fascinating.
Thank you.
The White House invited me under the Trump administration to brief them on the findings from the boy crisis.
And the first thing I found is that there was no need to convince them of the importance of fathers or the importance of families.
But they were very fascinated by the data as to how, you know, what was creating the boy crisis and what were the causes, what were the solutions, what was the evidence for it.
And so one of the things that I was talking about when it came to solutions I've been spending the last 30 years doing a lot of work developing a method that couples could hear criticism from their partner without becoming defensive.
Currently, what the women's shelters are doing is saying to the women, You need to not go back to that man because once a man is violent, he will always be violent.
And I said, this is the wrong message.
The message should be you and your husband or boyfriend have had a conflict.
How did that conflict arise?
Usually it arises because somebody says something that the other person feels is a criticism.
The other person becomes defensive and sidesteps and counterattacks, and the other person counterattacks to the counterattack.
And before you know it, somebody, either the woman or the man, and it's equally as likely to be the woman as the man, reaches out and hits the other person, and then the hitting starts to escalate.
Is that what your findings are?
And the people who had backgrounds in that area said yes, that is.
And so Katie Sullivan, who was at that time the principal deputy assistant attorney general, said her previous role was to be supervising all the domestic violence facilities in the country.
And she said, I 100% agree with you, Warren, that that is the best approach.
I suggested that type of approach to these women's shelters.
But Warren, they were so ingrained with the feminist ideology that any man who ever hits, he's the problem.
If a woman hits a man, she had a reason for it.
If he hits her, he's violent forever.
I could not break through.
Here I was, the leading authority in the country, the person with the most Legislative power, the most organizational power, and I could not break through this tightly woven ideology of feminists who took care of these women's shelters,
whose belief system was there is no solution except to stay away from that man, or to get an order, a restraining order from him, that type of approach.
And that is such an An exploitation of their victimhood and it's helping those women feel like victims as opposed to having a method of communication with both their partner and also ultimately therefore their children that would serve them well for their life.
And so what I was feeling and what we were all understanding there at the White House was we are not helping women.
We are hurting women by doing this.
Dr.
Farrell, presumably this sort of policy is to, you know, prevent women from going back into abusive relationships.
Isn't there a danger in the situation you're describing that you could be sending women back into abusive relationships?
The woman does not have to go back into a relationship until she feels ready to do so.
You have to remember two things.
Women acknowledge nationwide that they are more likely to be the first ones to hit the man than the man is to hit her.
But most abusive relationships are back and forth abusive.
That is, both sexes say that they hit each other.
But again, even the women acknowledge that they are the first ones to do the hitting.
So not all the time, but about 52 to 55 to 60% of the time, depending on which study you look at.
These are studies done almost completely by women.
Most of those women, to the feminist credits, are feminists who expected to find that the men were always the ones hitting the women.
They were questioning the studies findings, the 150 studies findings that That said that women were more likely to hit, but they ended up finding that even when they interviewed the women with leading questions, the women said, well, no, actually, I was the first one to hit him, but he provoked me because of this or that.
And so there's really this enormous opportunity we have for both women and for men to learn what is the dynamic that leads to that violence.
No one marries somebody with the desire to beat them up and to be violent toward them.
But the more they love somebody, the more vulnerable they are to being criticized by them.
And anger is vulnerability's mask.
If somebody insults me on a plane, and I don't know that person, I don't get angry.
I just listen or tune into a book.
But if Liz, my wife, insults me and criticizes me, I feel deeply hurt because I love her so much.
And so I know to not get angry, but to create a safe space for her.
The work I do in couples communications, I've taught myself as well as others how to be able to create a safe space for things that she's concerned about and meditate into an altered state.
Where I can fully support her to have a safe environment for doing that.
That is what we need to be teaching women and men.
And this doesn't make any difference whether that couple is straight or gay.
It doesn't make any difference whether that couple is a father and child or mother and a child or the child and the mother.
Two people who have a history together that tend to develop tension around issues That don't get resolved very easily, that they could resolve by learning how to listen together.
Everybody needs this model.
We should be teaching this from first, second, third grade on as part of emotional skill development in every school.
That's what we should be working with women's centers about around the country, in addition to the fact that women's centers really discriminate against women.
Because they're saying to a woman, you're in a fight with a man.
It's you that has to go out of the house and leave.
Why not the man having to go out of the house and leave?
And so there should be equal numbers of women and men centers for temporary respites and to teach the children to teach the parents or the mother and the woman and man to be able to communicate better until they again feel safe.
So I'm very curious, you know, if you were able to offer a prescription for how such a Gender Equality Council would operate or what kind of policy it would have, how would that look like?
Yes, and I have talked to Jen Klein, the co-chair of the Gender Policy Council, about this, and she's sort of been very, let's say, receptive and dismissive.
Meaning that she said, oh, President Biden cares about men as much as women, and he's been a great father.
And I said, yes, and it also needs to be, there needs to be policies that help boys and men that avert the boy crisis.
But she's expressed no interest in those policies.
But here's what those policies, some of them would look like.
First would be to have this, what I would call a father Warrior program where we are talking about the importance of young men becoming fathers and inspire and make them into our new heroes and that this requires the emotional intelligent development in males rather than just repressing feelings that they should be able to express feelings and know how to facilitate feelings and they should have communication
skills that they can Bring to their peer relationships and eventually to their romantic relationships and eventually to their children.
Then second, there needs to be a teacher core, a male teacher core, to train young men to go into teaching in elementary schools.
And the purpose of that is so many children are brought up in today.
We have 53% of women under 30 who have children without being married.
And for the most part, those children either have no exposure to a father or average father exposure, even among those that where the parents live together is only three years.
And so the children ultimately end up being dad deprived.
And so we need to have a program of a male teacher core so that boys don't go from a female only home to a female only school system.
And then we wonder why they're vulnerable to being seduced by a gang into a gang as a form of family, or into selling drugs as a quick source of income, or being vulnerable to sexual abuse.
We saw among the, if you watched the movie Spotlight, you saw how they talked about how the priests Found boys that didn't have fathers.
Those were boys that had such need for love that they were vulnerable to being victim.
Hitler Youth sought out boys without fathers as ways of getting them on board.
And so boys without father involvement don't know how to channel their testosterone into being constructive.
And so they tend to channel their testosterone into being destructive.
So that type of male teacher core would be another policy.
We need to make sure we deal with the school system.
Schools are very good at teaching and helping girls and women and boys to memorize certain things and to think about certain things but to sit.
But we know that boys develop best and are most receptive to learning by having a lot of physical activity being mixed into it.
We've been cutting back on physical activity, on recess, for multiple reasons.
We need to reinstall recess.
We need to make sure that the school system is not focused only on kids going to college.
Vocational school, vocational education needs to return because many boys feel that they don't have, that they aren't natural academics, and they need to be able to have Training in something that they are doing.
We need to develop mentoring programs for boys, but also, as I was mentioning before, programs where boys can be mentors.
And so the school system can help work with boys on being mentors and finding mentors for them.
We need to make sure that family dinner nights, that every family knows how to construct a family dinner night so that the family dinner night does not become a family dinner nightmare.
The family has to be seen as creating e pluribus unum, one from many.
And the way that we create one from many is for us to be working with families to know how to facilitate everybody's perspectives on various topics.
If a boy feels like he wants to sell drugs and this is really going to be great and have a fast way of earning money, He should be able to safely talk about that to his parents and his peers without being interrupted.
And for the parents and peers and his sisters and brothers to be able to say, so Jimmy, we understand you want to be able to sell drugs because you make a lot of money quickly and then you don't have to worry about going to school and possibly failing.
Is that right?
And Jimmy needs to know he feels heard before he gets his parents' perspective And his brother's and sister's perspective on why selling drugs might be not the best way to make money.
But the reason that children talk so much on the phone to their peers but don't talk to their parents, especially during adolescence, is because they don't feel that they'll be heard by their parents without being interrupted and lectured to them first.
So they close down.
They withdraw into video games.
Are video games good?
Yes, video games are good up to a point, but boys are far more likely to be addicted to video games than girls are.
And it's the addiction to video games and the addiction to porn and the addiction to alcohol and drugs that are signs that our boys are not having fulfillment from what they're doing.
And we need to be able to have postponed gratification training, training to help men and women understand what our What do dads contribute?
Why is boundary enforcement so important for children?
Why is it that tough love is important?
But why is it also that the type of contributions that women make are important?
What does checks and balance parenting look like?
All of this can be part of the policies of the Gender Policy Council.
The result of that Will be that women will find boys who are worthy of their love.
I don't know.
Right now, boys are dropping out of high school at a much higher rate.
They're unemployed at a much higher rate.
They're much more likely, 66% more likely to be living in their parents' basement.
I don't know a lot of women who are looking for future fathers who are searching unemployment lines or the basement of parents for boys that have dropped out of high school.
This is not the type of So one thing that struck me as you were speaking is that this warrior program that you were describing earlier I mean,
I imagine it might be susceptible to criticism that it would foster something called toxic masculinity, for example.
What would you say to that?
Yes, to be a father warrior is the opposite of what creates toxic masculinity.
To be a father warrior means that your job is to have emotional skills, social skills, Ability to communicate that you can both use with your peers and also use in your romantic relationship and also use as parents.
There is such a thing as toxic masculinity, but it comes about for the exact opposite reasons of what feminists talk about.
So, for example, historically speaking, every generation had its war and we trained boys to be disposable in those wars.
Now, if you're going to be disposable in those wars, you get trained to be disposable by not being in touch with your feelings.
So, for example, a sergeant says, let's say you're Jewish, and a sergeant makes some really gross anti-Semitic comment, and you are a boy in boot camp, and you say, excuse me, sir, but I learned that that's a very anti-Semitic comment.
The job of the sergeant is to say 10 push-ups.
You repeat that, 20 push-ups.
You soon learn that the job of boot camp, the job of being in the army, is for you to be a voiceless cog in the war machine.
That people who speak up and express their feelings and say, I feel offended by that.
Could you maybe change your language?
Are stopping the war machine from working effectively.
And so boys are trained to not be human beings.
They're trained to be human doings.
They're trained not to value their lives, but to be willing to prepare themselves to be disposable in order to save the lives of women, children, and other males.
And so, yes, men developed from that toxicities of having to repress their feelings, but those toxicities did not come from male privilege.
They came from the expectation that our men are here to protect us.
Part of protecting us is to be disposable.
And we see this around us all the time, that firefighters are far more likely to be males willing to die at a fire to save your life, even the life of a stranger.
But in order to do that, you have to repress thinking about yourself.
Men who are successful, by and large, learn to repress their feelings, not to express their feelings.
And now we need to say we're in a new era where there has to be a balance between keeping your feelings to yourself and being able to express who you are.
The Japanese millennials really understand this well.
They have a game called Kuroshi.
Kuroshi translates in Japanese to death at the desk or death from overwork.
The game of Kuroshi, you each get a Kuroshi figure.
And the job of the game is to climb the corporate ladder or the ladder of political success as fast as possible and get to the top before any of the other people with Kuroshi figures get to the top.
And the person at the top commits suicide.
Not in real life, but in the game.
And of course, the message that millennials in Japan are getting is that the traditional masculinity Of just focusing on getting to the top no matter what is leaving out something.
It is teaching you how to become a human doing, but in the process you sacrifice being a human being.
And their understanding of that says basically I'm committing suicide as a human being.
And I've created that by not paying attention to the things I really love.
We have had many generations of what I call the Father's Catch-22.
And the Father's Catch-22 is learning to love your family by being away from the love of your family.
And so many men do things that disconnect them from love in order to serve the people that they love.
And so what feminists have done is say, oh, you men earn more money than women do for the same work.
When in fact it is not men who earn more money than women until men and women become dads and moms and have children.
And then dads tend to give up the things that they love to do that pay less, like being an artist, a musician, or an elementary school teacher, to do things that they feel obligated to do.
That will earn more money, that will give their children privileges and opportunities that they didn't have themselves.
And for men to do that is okay.
Many men feel just fine about doing that, but the only thing they ask for Is some acknowledgement and some appreciation, not when they do that to be told, aha, see that?
You're more likely to be a corporate executive.
You're more likely to be a superintendent of schools.
That proves you have male privilege.
That's what you're in it for.
So you mentioned this idea of male privilege.
You've mentioned that several times.
So, you know, what is the connection between the boy crisis and I guess we call it critical social justice ideology or woke ideology or identity politics in your mind?
Yes, what's been happening in the last 10-15 years is that especially in college campuses, there are There's such sensitivity to nothing being said that could offend everybody.
That woke culture, cancel culture has been saying that white men, especially older white men, they've controlled the world.
This is part of the patriarchy.
The world has been dominated by a patriarchy.
But the world, in fact, has not been dominated by a patriarchy.
been dominated by the need to survive.
And to survive, both sexes had rigid roles in their past.
And what we now have the freedom to do is to have more flexible roles for our future.
And so this is the belief of woke culture is that in universities, for example, we should not have to listen to anything that might offend us.
Those are called microaggressions and microaggressions include even body language or ways of tones of voice that might offend somebody else.
I would like to say that the university should be exactly the opposite of that.
Universities should be about free speech and if that free speech offends you You should be able to have the permission to speak up about why it offends you and somebody else should have the permission to say and an encouragement to say why they said what they said and why they feel that that is accurate.
The very essence of the university should be a free speech, b curiosity, followed by curiosity, followed by curiosity.
When you hear something that upsets you, ask the person who's saying it, tell me more about that.
Don't interrupt them.
Don't distort what they say and argue with the distorted version of it.
But ask them to tell you more about, like I was talking about before, you know, a boy around the table who says, I want to sell drugs.
The job of the parent, the job of a good communicator is tell me more and find out what the motivations are.
And what the hurt is, what the pain is.
When someone is angry, we need to understand that almost always behind that anger is hurt, is vulnerability.
And we need to access the vulnerability.
When we hear people's vulnerability, when people write me angry letters about something in the boy crisis book or something in the myth of male power, I write back and say, yes, you must have experienced this this way.
Tell me more about that.
Their second letter has almost no anger in it.
It's like, what?
I'm being invited to elaborate?
Now an enormous softening occurs.
I have literally never had a second letter that had anger in it, but only like, I am so honored to be able to be heard.
Thank you so much for that.
And then there's a softer explanation of what they feel and fear.
And this is the atmosphere we need to be creating in our universities, one where curiosity and free speech is encouraged no matter what it says, and we need to be supportive of it at virtually every cost unless it's directly an incitement to organize being violent.
That's where the boundary occurs.
Dr.
Farrell, as we finish up, I wanted to talk a little bit about some of these different styles of parenting that you've been mentioning.
For example, this idea of rough housing, which I think is not necessarily obvious or maybe counterintuitive in some cases, or certainly against some common orthodoxies, father-style parenting, mother-style parenting.
Can you please elucidate this a bit for me?
Yes.
First of all, I want to make it clear that the children that do the best have what I call checks and balance parenting.
But the male style of parenting is usually not respected because no one knows anything about it.
And women can't hear what dads don't say, and dads can't hear what isn't in the literature.
Even if they read parenting magazines, there are no parenting magazines that talk about the value of roughhousing, the value of teasing, the value of letting kids get lost.
These are all things that dads intuitively do, but they don't explain to anybody why they do it or what the positive functions are.
So, for example, a dad might say, let's start roughhousing with the kids.
And let's say he has three kids and he throws the three kids on the couch and say, okay, the game is you three kids jump off the couch onto my back.
And you try to pin me down before I can pin all three of you down and put together.
Okay, Dad, that's really great!
And mom is looking on and going, oh my God, I know what this is going to end in.
It's going to end in disaster.
Somebody's going to get hurt.
I swear somebody's going to get hurt.
But I don't want to be a controlling mom.
So I'll just let the kids seem to be having fun.
So okay, I'll just sort of close my eyes and bear with it.
And so they do that.
And then eventually the mom is only about 99% likely to be right.
Sooner or later somebody gets hurt and somebody starts crying and then mom starts feeling guilty like, oh my god, I should have interfered sooner.
But at least now he's seeing that the kids are going to get hurt if they roughhouse and so now he'll stop.
But instead, dad doesn't stop and he continues the roughhousing but he says before he continues, If you do that again, I'm going to stop the roughhousing.
That is, you know, Jimmy, if you stick your elbow in your sister's eye, that's not an okay way of winning at roughhousing.
You've got to not do that, and you can't push your sister roughly out of the way just like you just did.
Okay, Dad, I got it, I got it.
And so then Dad goes back to doing the roughhousing with the kids, and Mom is going, oh my God, he didn't learn his lesson.
And then once again, Somebody ends up crying or getting hurt.
And so then dad, instead of, quote, learning his lesson and stopping the roughhousing, says, okay, no more roughhousing tonight.
You did something that I asked you not to do.
I gave you a clear explanation of it.
No more roughhousing until tomorrow night.
Mom is going, what?
You're going to have roughhousing again tomorrow night?
You haven't learned your lesson?
But the next night, the dad is, when the dad says, you can't be aggressive like this, you can't You have to think of your sister's feelings, that is, you have to have some empathy, and not, you know, push her out of the circle of our wrestling, so you can be the pinner downer, or the kingpinner, or the pinner downers, if you will.
And so, this time, when Dad says it, they know from the last night's experience that if they don't pay attention to their sister's and brother's needs, If they don't pick up the distinction between being assertive versus aggressive, they're going to lose what they want most, which is to continue the roughhousing and the playing and the laughter with their dad.
That's when the dad has created an incentive for not just empathy and assertiveness versus aggressiveness, but also for postponed gratification.
Immediate gratification is wanting to push the sister and younger brother out of the circle immediately to win.
But postpone gratification is realizing that if I restrain from being insensitive, I'm then going to get more of what I want, the fun of roughhousing, and all of the kids can have this together.
And so I have to pay attention to certain rules.
But dads don't explain this to moms.
And as I said, dads can't read this anywhere.
And so I found that when I was doing the The research for the boy crisis, I had to really be explicit about these types of examples so that mothers could realize, yes, there's value to your input, and there's also value to what dads bring, but no one in the culture teaches the value to what dads bring.
One other example, teasing.
The commerce of masculinity is the trading of wit-covered put-downs.
As you and I get to know each other better and better, I would be comfortable trading a wit covered put down of you.
You would be comfortable doing that with me.
If we didn't like each other, we would be very cautious.
We wouldn't trust each other with something like that.
In hazardous professions, a firefighter, as soon as a new firefighter joins the force, they will find a sort of weakness, a difference.
Maybe he's too tall, maybe he's too short, maybe he's too heavy.
Maybe he has a funny background.
Maybe he's related to somebody else that gives him some type of privilege.
And they constantly tease each other to see if they can have a good-natured laugh about being mocked and put down.
And then the other men know that if they can handle the teasing, that they have somebody who's a team player, not a prima donna.
But the problem with that is that in the workplace today, men can do that with other men, and men sense from other men that once other men start to do that to them, that they're beginning to trust them, that they're beginning to admit them to their club of being able to tease each other.
If a man does that at work to a woman and says, oh, your dress looks beautiful today, or it looks like you ironed that in the middle of the night, and the woman will feel like that's a hostile environment that he's creating.
And so there's this enormous gap between what men do when they respect somebody, and then they start feeling comfortable playing with them and teasing them, But women who haven't been taught that this is what men do when they respect somebody,
they end up feeling offended by that, and they report it to HR, which is no longer HR, it's now H-E-R, and they hear only her perspective on things, and they begin to demote him or let him go.
As a result of doing that, what we need to be doing in HR and for parents...
Is to communicate with each other.
What's the best intent of men doing that teasing?
Why do fathers tease their children?
If they're sensitive to their children, they tease their children because teasing helps the children pick up nuances of what tone of voice is being critical, what tone of voice isn't being critical.
Why would they tease them though and just not give the criticism?
Because teasing has a lot of fun attached to it.
And playfulness attached to it oftentimes if it's done well.
And then the child can absorb the criticism like you'd absorb wheatgrass in a fruit smoothie.
It's easier to take if it comes with humor and laughter.
And so these nuances of knowing what is teasing, what isn't, what's jokes, what isn't, these are all part of dad's gifts to children.
But if dads feel like they're being criticized as being insensitive, By teasing.
Then they back off from doing that and they say, the only thing I'm appreciated for is for earning more money.
I'll back off from being involved with the children.
I'm never appreciated for that.
And so to bring both parents equally into the family, both parents have to understand the best intent of the other's parenting style and negotiate compromise that works for that particular child's personality.
And both parents need to be heard about what does and doesn't work.
Tough love is very helpful for most children, but it can be not helpful for some children.
And none of this is helpful if it goes too far.
All of this has the ability to be a virtue, and every virtue taken to its extreme becomes a vice.
And so that's the communication process that needs to be happening in every family.
And this is just two of the nine Differences in parenting styles between dads and moms that need to be part of a gender policy council would be helping and training parents to understand these differences and how to negotiate them and how to negotiate them in front of the children so that children can be able to see that tension,
properly processed, properly communicated, can lead to deeper solutions for the children and does not have to lead Absolutely fascinating, Dr.
Farrell.
Any final thoughts?
No, just that it's a pleasure to be asked and to be drawn out by you.
You just ask great questions.
You listen so well.
And I can feel that you care so deeply, and so for me this has just been a very enjoyable experience.
Well, it's such a pleasure to have you on.
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